The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  2. The goddess Car, who gave her name to Caria, became the Italian divinatory goddess Carmenta, ‘Car the Wise’ (see 52. 5; 82. 6; 95. 5 and 132. 0), and the Caryatids are her nut-nymphs – as the Meliae are ash-nymphs; the Mēliae, apple-nymphs; and the Dryads, oak-nymphs. Pliny has preserved the tradition that Car invented augury (Natural History viii. 57). Phyllis (‘leafy’) may be a humble Greek version of the Palestinian and Mesopotamian Great Goddess Belili; in the Demophon myth she is associated with Rhea (see 169. j).

  87

  ARION

  ARION of Lesbos, a son of Poseidon and the Nymph Oneaea, was a master of the lyre, and invented the dithyramb in Dionysus’s honour. One day his patron Periander, tyrant of Corinth, reluctantly gave him permission to visit Taenarus in Sicily, where he had been invited to compete in a musical festival. Arion won the prize, and his admirers showered on him so many rich gifts that these excited the greed of the sailors engaged to bring him back to Corinth.

  ‘We much regret, Arion, that you will have to die,’ remarked the captain of the ship.

  ‘What crime have I committed?’ asked Arion.

  ‘You are too rich,’ replied the captain.

  ‘Spare my life, and I will give you all my prizes,’ Arion pleaded.

  ‘You would only retract your promise on reaching Corinth,’ said the captain, ‘and so would I, in your place. A forced gift is no gift.’

  ‘Very well,’ cried Arion resignedly. ‘But pray allow me to sing a last song.’

  When the captain gave his permission, Arion, dressed in his finest robe, mounted on the prow, where he invoked the gods with impassioned strains, and then leaped overboard. The ship sailed on.

  b. However, his song had attracted a school of music-loving dolphins, one of which took Arion on his back, and that evening he overtook the ship and reached the port of Corinth several days before it cast anchor there. Periander was overjoyed at his miraculous escape, and the dolphin, loth to part from Arion, insisted on accompanying him to court, where it soon succumbed to a life of luxury. Arion gave it a splendid funeral.

  When the ship docked, Periander sent for the captain and crew, whom he asked with pretended anxiety for news of Arion.

  ‘He has been delayed at Taenarus,’ the captain answered, ‘by the lavish hospitality of the inhabitants.’

  Periander made them all swear at the dolphin’s tomb that this was the truth, and then suddenly confronted them with Arion. Unable to deny their guilt, they were executed on the spot. Apollo later set the images of Arion and his lyre among the stars.1

  c. Nor was Arion the first man to have been saved by a dolphin. A dolphin rescued Enalus when he leaped overboard to join his sweetheart Phineis who, in accordance with an oracle, had been chosen by lot and thrown into the sea to appease Amphitrite – for this was the expedition which the sons of Penthilus were leading to Lesbos as the island’s first colonists – and the dolphin’s mate rescued Phineis. Another dolphin saved Phalanthus from drowning in the Crisaean Sea on his way to Italy. Likewise Icadius, the Cretan brother of Iapys, when shipwrecked on a voyage to Italy, was guided by a dolphin to Delphi and gave the place its name; for the dolphin was Apollo in disguise.2

  1. Herodotus: i. 24; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes xiii. 25; Hyginus: Fabula 194; Pausanias: iii. 25. 5.

  2. Plutarch: Banquet of the Seven Wise Men 20; Pausanias: x. 13. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 332.

  1. Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh century B.C., and a fragment of Arion’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arion’s songs attracted a school of dolphins and thus dissuaded some sailors from murdering him for his money – dolphins and seals are notoriously susceptible to music – partly on a misinterpretation of a statue which showed the god Palaemon, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back (see 70. 5). Mythic colour is lent to the story by making Arion a son of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse Arion (see 16. f), and by giving his name to the Lyre constellation. Pausanias, a level-headed and truthful writer, doubts Herodotus’s hearsay story about Arion; but reports that he has seen with his own eyes the dolphin at Poroselene, which was mauled by fishermen, but had its wounds dressed by a boy, coming in answer to the boy’s call and gratefully allowing him to ride on its back (iii. 25. 5). This suggests that the ritual advent of the New Year Child was dramatically presented at Corinth with the aid of a tame dolphin trained by the Sun-priests.

  2. The myth of Enalus and Phineis is probably deduced from an icon which showed Amphitrite and Triton riding on dolphins. Enalus is also associated by Plutarch with an octopus cult, and his name recalls that of Oedipus the Corinthian New Year Child (see 105.1), whose counterpart he will have been at Mytilene, as Phalanthus was in Italy. Taras, a son of Poseidon by Minos’s daughter Satyraea (‘of the satyrs’), was the dolphin-riding New Year Child of Tarentum, which he is said to have founded, and where he had a hero shrine (Pausanias: x. 10. 4 and 13. 5; Strabo: vi. 3. 2); Phalanthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 B.C., took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicels whom he found there.

  3. Icadius’s name, which means ‘twentieth’, is connected perhaps with the date of the month on which his advent was celebrated.

  88

  MINOS AND HIS BROTHERS

  WHEN Zeus left Europe, after having fathered Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon on her in Crete, she married Asterius, the reigning king, whose father Tectamus son of Dorus had brought a mixed colony of Aeolian and Pelasgian settlers to the island and there married a daughter of Cretheus the Aeolian.1

  b. This marriage proving childless, Asterius adopted Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon, and made them his heirs. But when the brothers grew to manhood, they quarrelled for the love of a beautiful boy named Miletus, begotten by Apollo on the Nymph Areia, whom some call Deione, and others, Theia.2 Miletus having decided that he liked Sarpedon best, was driven from Crete by Minos, and sailed with a large fleet to Caria in Asia Minor, where he founded the city and kingdom of Miletus. For the previous two generations, this country, then called Anactoria, had been ruled by the giant Anax, a son of Uranus and Mother Earth, and by his equally gigantic son Asterius. The skeleton of Asterius, whom Miletus killed and afterwards buried on an islet lying off Lade, has lately been disinterred; it is at least ten cubits long. Some, however, say that Minos suspected Miletus of plotting to overthrow him and seize the kingdom; but that he feared Apollo, and therefore refrained from doing more than warn Miletus, who fled to Caria of his own accord.3 Others say that the boy who occasioned the quarrel was not Miletus but one Atymnius, a son of Zeus and Cassiopeia, or of Phoenix.4

  c. After Asterius’s death, Minos claimed the Cretan throne and, in proof of his right to reign, boasted that the gods would answer whatever prayer he offered them. First dedicating an altar to Poseidon, and making all preparations for a sacrifice, he then prayed that a bull might emerge from the sea. At once, a dazzlingly white bull swam ashore, but Minos was so struck by its beauty that he sent it to join his own herds, and slaughtered another instead. Minos’s claim to the throne was accepted by every Cretan, except Sarpedon who, still grieving for Miletus, declared that it had been Asterius’s intention to divide the kingdom equally between his three heirs; and, indeed, Minos himself had already divided the island into three parts, and chosen a capital for each.5

  d. Expelled from Crete by Minos, Sarpedon fled to Cilicia in Asia Minor, where he allied himself with Cilix against the Milyans, conquered them, and became their king. Zeus granted him the privilege of living for three generations; and when he finally died, the Milyan kingdom was called Lycia, after his successor Lycus, who had taken refuge with him upon being banished from Athens by Aegeus.6

  e. Meanwhile, Minos had married Pasiphaë, a daughter of Helius and the nymph Crete, otherwise known as Perseis. But Poseidon, to avenge the affront offered him by Minos, made Pasiphaë fall in love with the white bull which had been withheld from sacrifi
ce. She confided her unnatural passion to Daedalus, the famous Athenian craftsman, who now lived in exile at Cnossus, delighting Minos and his family with the animated wooden dolls he carved for them. Daedalus promised to help her, and built a hollow wooden cow, which he upholstered with a cow’s hide, set on wheels concealed in its hooves, and pushed into the meadow near Gortys, where Poseidon’s bull was grazing under the oaks among Minos’s cows. Then, having shown Pasiphaë how to open the folding doors in the cow’s back, and slip inside with her legs thrust down into its hindquarters, he discreetly retired. Soon the white bull ambled up and mounted the cow, so that Pasiphaë had all her desire, and later gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’s head and a human body.7

  f. But some say that Minos, having annually sacrificed to Poseidon the best bull in his possession, withheld his gift one year, and sacrificed merely the next best; hence Poseidon’s wrath; others say that it was Zeus whom he offended; others again, that Pasiphaë had failed for several years to propitiate Aphrodite, who now punished her with this monstrous lust. Afterwards, the bull grew savage and devastated the whole of Crete, until Heracles captured and brought it to Greece where it was eventually killed by Theseus.8

  g. Minos consulted an oracle to know how he might best avoid scandal and conceal Pasiphaë’s disgrace. The response was: ‘Instruct Daedalus to build you a retreat at Cnossus!’ This Daedalus did, and Minos spent the remainder of his life in the inextricable maze called the Labyrinth, at the very heart of which he concealed Pasiphaë and the Minotaur.9

  h. Rhadamanthys, wiser than Sarpedon, remained in Crete; he lived at peace with Minos, and was awarded a third part of Asterius’s dominions. Renowned as a just and upright law-giver, inexorable in his punishment of evildoers, he legislated both for the Cretans and for the islanders of Asia Minor, many of whom voluntarily adopted his judicial code. Every ninth year, he would visit Zeus’s cave and bring back a new set of laws, a custom afterwards followed by his brother Minos.10 But some deny that Rhadamanthys was Minos’s brother, and call him a son of Hephaestus; as others deny that Minos was Zeus’s son, making him the son of Lycastus and the nymph of Ida. He bequeathed land in Crete to his son Gortys, after whom the Cretan city is named, although the Tegeans insist that Gortys was an Arcadian, the son of Tegeates.11 Rhadamanthys also bequeathed land in Asia Minor to his son Erythrus; and the island of Chios to Oenopion, the son of Ariadne, whom Dionysus first taught how to make wine; and Lemnos to Thoas, another of Ariadne’s sons: and Cournos to Enyues; and Peparethos to Staphylus; and Maroneia to Euanthes; and Paros to Alcaeus; and Delos to Anius; and Andros to Andrus.12

  i. Rhadamanthys eventually fled to Boeotia because he had killed a kinsman, and lived there in exile at Ocaleae, where he married Alcmene, Heracles’s mother, after the death of Amphitryon. His tomb, and that of Alcmene, are shown at Haliartus, close to a plantation of the tough canes brought from Crete, from which javelins and flutes are cut. But some say that Alcmene was married to Rhadamanthys in the Elysian Fields, after her death.13 For Zeus had appointed him one of the three Judges of the Dead; his colleagues were Minos and Aeacus, and he resided in the Elysian Fields.14

  1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 80.

  2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Apollodorus: iii. 1. 2; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 442; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 30.

  3. Pausanias: vii. 2. 3 and i. 35. 5; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 436 ff.

  4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 178.

  5. Strabo: x. 4. 8.

  6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Herodotus: i. 173.

  7. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: vii. 4. 5; Virgil: Eclogues vi. 5 ff.; Apollodorus: loc. cit. and iii. 1. 3–4.

  8. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 77.2 and 13.4; First Vatican Mythographer: 47; Hyginus: Fabula 40 [but the text is corrupt].

  9. Ovid: Metamorphoses viii. 155 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 1. 4.

  10. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 79; Apollodorus: iii. 1.2; Strabo; loc. cit.

  11. Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: viii. 53. 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Pausanias: viii. 53. 2.

  12. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 997; Diodorus Siculus: v. 79. 1–2.

  13. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 50; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 11; Plutarch: Lysander 28; Strabo: ix. 11. 30; Pherecydes, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 33.

  14. Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Homer: Odyssey iv. 564.

  1. Sir Arthur Evans’s classification of successive periods of pre-Classical Cretan Culture as Minoan I, II, and III suggests that the ruler of Crete was already called Minos in the early third millennium B.C.; but this is misleading. Minos seems to have been the royal title of an Hellenic dynasty which ruled Crete early in the second millennium, each king ritually marrying the Moon-priestess of Cnossus and taking his title of ‘Moon-being’ from her. Minos is anachronistically made the successor of Asterius the grandson of Dorus, whereas the Dorians did not invade Crete until the close of the second millennium. It is more likely that the Aeolians and Pelasgians (perhaps including ‘Ionians from Attica’) brought in by Tectamus (‘craftsman’) – a name which identifies him with Daedalus, and with Hephaestus, Rhadamanthys’s alleged father – were Minos’s original companions; and that Asterius (‘starry’) is a masculinization of Asterië, the goddess as Queen of Heaven and creatrix of the planetary powers (see 1. d). Crete itself is a Greek word, a form of crateia, ‘strong, or ruling, goddess’ – hence Creteus, and Cretheus. Messrs M. Ventris and J. Chadwick’s recent researches into the hitherto undeciphered Linear Script B, examples of which have been found at Pylus, Thebes, and Mycenae, as well as among the ruins of the Cnossian palace sacked in 1400 B.C., show that the official language at Cnossus in the middle of the second millennium was an early form of Aeolic Greek. The script seems to have been originally invented for use with a non-Aryan language and adapted to Greek with some difficulty. (Whether inscriptions in Linear Script A are written in Greek or Cretan has not yet been established.) A great number of names from Greek mythology occur in both Cretan and mainland tablets, among them: Achilles, Idomeneus, Theseus, Cretheus, Nestor, Ephialtes, Xuthus, Ajax, Glaucus, and Aeolus – which suggests that many of these myths date back beyond the Fall of Troy.

  2. Since Miletus is a masculine name, the familiar myth of two brothers who quarrel for the favours of a woman was given a homosexual turn. The truth seems to be that, during a period of disorder following the Achaean sack of Cnossus in about 1400 B.C., numerous Greek-speaking Cretan aristocrats of Aeolo-Pelasgian or Ionian stock, for whom the Moon-goddess was the supreme deity, migrated with their native dependants to Asia Minor, especially to Caria, Lycia, and Lydia; for, disregarding the tradition of Sarpedon’s dynasty in Lycia, Herodotus records that the Lycians of his time still reckoned by matrilinear descent (Herodotus: i. 173; Strabo: xii. 8. 5), like the Carians (see 75. 5). Miletos may be a native Cretan word, or a transliteration of milteios, ‘the colour of red ochre, or red lead’; and therefore a synonym for Erythrus, or Phoenix, both of which mean ‘red’. Cretan complexions were redder than Hellenic ones, and the Lycians and Carians came of partly Cretan stock; as did the Puresati (Philistines), whose name also means ‘red men’ (see 38. 3).

  3. The gigantic rulers of Anactoria recall the Anakim of Genesis, giants (Joshua xiv. 13) ousted by Caleb from the oracular shrine which had once belonged to Ephron the son of Heth (Tethys?). Ephron gave his name to Hebron (Genesis xxiii. 16), and may be identified with Phoroneus. These Anakim seem to have come from Greece, as members of the Sea-people’s confederation which caused the Egyptians so much trouble in the fourteenth century B.C. Lade, the burial place of Anax’s son Asterius, was probably so called in honour of the goddess Lat, Leto, or Latona (see 14. 2), and that this Asterius bears the same name as Minos’s father suggests that the Milesians brought it with them from the Cretan Miletus (see 25. 6). According to a plausible tradition in the Irish Book of Invasions, the Irish Milesians originated in Crete, fled to Syria by way of Asia Minor, and then
ce sailed west in the thirteenth century B.C. to Gaetulia in North Africa, and finally reached Ireland by way of Brigantium (Compostela, in North-western Spain).

  4. Miletus’s claim to be Apollo’s son suggests that the Milesian kings were given solar attributes, like those of Corinth (see 67. 2).

  5. The triumph of Minos, son of Zeus, over his brothers refers to the Dorian’s eventual mastery of Crete, but it was Poseidon to whom Minos sacrificed the bull, which again suggests that the earlier holders of the title ‘Minos’ were Aeolians. Crete had for centuries been a very rich country and, in the late eighth century B.C., was shared between the Achaeans, Dorians, Pelasgians, Cydonians (Aeolians), and in the far west of the island, ‘true Cretans’ (Odyssey xix. 171–5). Diodorus Siculus tries to distinguish Minos son of Zeus from his grandson, Minos son of Lycastus; but two or three Minos dynasties may have successively reigned in Cnossus.

  6. Sarpedon’s name (‘rejoicing in a wooden ark’) suggests that he brought with him to Lycia (see 162. n) the ritual of the Sun-hero who, at New Year, makes his annual reappearance as a child floating in an ark –like Moses, Perseus (see 73. c), Anius (see 160. t), and others. A Cretan connexion with the Perseus myth is provided by Pasiphaë’s mother Perseis. Zeus’s concession to Sarpedon, that he should live for three generations, means perhaps that instead of the usual eight years – a Great Year – which was the length of Minos’s reign, he was allowed to keep his throne until the nineteenth year, when a closer synchronization of solar and lunar time occurred than at the end of eight; and thus broke into the third Great Year (see 67. 2).