The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  b. One day Hermes fell in love with Apemosyne, who rejected his advances and fled from him. That evening he surprised her near a spring. Again she turned to flee, but he had spread slippery hides on the one path of escape, so that she fell flat on her face and he succeeded in ravishing her. When Apemosyne returned to the palace, and ruefully told Althaemenes of this misadventure, he cried out ‘Liar and harlot!’ and kicked her to death.

  c. Meanwhile Catreus, mistrusting Aerope and Clymene, the other two, banished them from Crete, of which he was now king. Aerope, after having been seduced by Thyestes the Pelopid, married Pleisthenes and became by him the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus; and Clymene married Nauplius, the celebrated navigator. At last, in lonely old age and, so far as he knew, without an heir to his throne, Catreus went in search of Althaemenes, whom he loved dearly. Landing one night on Rhodes, he and his companions were mistaken for pirates, and attacked by the Cameiran cowherds. Catreus tried to explain who he was and why he had come, but the barking of dogs drowned his voice. Althaemenes rushed from the palace to beat off the supposed raid and, not recognizing his father, killed him with a spear. When he learned that the oracle had been fulfilled after all, despite his long, self-imposed exile, he prayed to be swallowed up by the earth. A chasm accordingly opened, and he disappeared, but is paid heroic honours to this day.3

  1. Apollodorus: iii. 2. 1.

  2. Diodorus Siculus: v. 78; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Strabo: xiv. 2. 2; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes vii. 159.

  3. Apollodorus: iii. 2. 1–2; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.

  1. This artificial myth, which records a Mycenaeo-Minoan occupation of Rhodes in the fifteenth century B.C., is intended also to account for libations poured down a chasm to a Rhodian hero, as well as for erotic sports in the course of which women danced on the newly-flayed hides of sacrificial beasts. The termination byrios, or buriash, occurs in the royal title of the Third Babylonian Dynasty, founded in 1750 B.C.; and the deity of Atabyrius in Crete, like that of Atabyrium (Mount Tabor) in Palestine, famous for its golden calf worship, was the Hittite Tesup, a cattle-owning Sun-god (see 67. 1). Rhodes first belonged to the Sumerian Moon-goddess Dam-Kina, or Danaë (see 60. 3), but passed into the possession of Tesup (see 42. 4); and, on the breakdown of the Hittite Empire, was colonized by Greek-speaking Cretans who retained the bull-cult, but made Atabyrius a son of Proteus (‘first man’) and Eurynome the Creatrix (see 1. a). In Dorian times Zeus Atabyrius usurped Tesup’s Rhodian cult. The roar of bulls will have been produced by the whirling of rhomboi, or bull-roarers (see 30. 1), used to frighten away evil spirits.

  2. Apemosyne’s death at Cameira may refer to a brutal repression, by the Hittite rather than the Cretan invaders, of a college of Oracular priestesses at Cameirus. The three daughters of Catreus, like the Danaids, are the familiar Moon-triad: Apemosyne being the third person, Cameira’s counterpart. Catreus accidentally murdered by Althaemenes, like Laius accidently murdered by his son Oedipus (see 105. d), and Odysseus by his son Telegonus (see 170. k), will have been a predecessor in the sacred kingship rather than a father; but the story has been mistold – the son, not the father, should land from the sea and hurl the sting-ray spear.

  94

  THE SONS OF PANDION

  WHEN Erechtheus, King of Athens, was killed by Poseidon, his sons Cecrops, Pandorus, Metion, and Orneus quarrelled over the succession; and Xuthus, by whose verdict Cecrops, the eldest, became king, had to leave Attica in haste.1

  b. Cecrops, whom Metion and Orneus threatened to kill, fled first to Megara and then to Euboea, where Pandorus joined him and founded a colony. The throne of Athens fell to Cecrops’s son Pandion, whose mother was Metiadusa, daughter of Eupalamus.2 But he did not long enjoy his power, for though Metion died, his sons by Alcippe, of Iphinoë, proved to be as jealous as himself. These sons were named Daedalus, whom some, however, call his grandson; Eupalamus, whom others call his father; and Sicyon. Sicyon is also variously called the son of Erechtheus, Pelops, or Marathon, these genealogies being in great confusion.3

  c. When the sons of Metion expelled Pandion from Athens he fled to the court of Pylas, Pylus, or Pylon, a Lelegian king of Megara,4 whose daughter Pylia he married. Later, Pylas killed his uncle Bias and, leaving Pandion to rule Megara, took refuge in Messenia, where he founded the city of Pylus. Driven thence by Neleus and the Pelasgians of Iolcus, he entered Elis, and there founded a second Pylus. Pylia bore Pandion four sons at Megara: Aegeus, Pallas, Nisus, and Lycus, though Aegeus’s jealous brothers spread the rumour that he was the bastard son of one Scyrius.5 Pandion never returned to Athens. He enjoys a hero shrine in Megara, where his tomb is still shown on the Bluff of Athene the Diver-bird, in proof that this territory once belonged to Athens; it was disguised as this bird that Athene hid his father Cecrops under her wings, and carried him in safety to Megara.6

  d. After Pandion’s death his sons marched against Athens, drove out the sons of Metion, and divided Attica into four parts, as their father had instructed them to do. Aegeus, being the eldest, was awarded the sovereignty of Athens, while his brothers drew lots for the remainder of the kingdom: Nisus won Megara and the surrounding country as far west as Corinth; Lycus won Euboea; and Pallas Southern Attica, where he bred a rugged race of giants.7

  e. Pylas’s son Sciron, who married one of Pandion’s daughters, disputed Nisus’s claim to Megara, and Aeacus, called in to judge the dispute, awarded the kingship to Nisus and his descendants, but the command of its armies to Sciron. In those days Megara was called Nisa, and Nisus also gave his name to the port of Nisaea, which he founded. When Minos killed Nisus he was buried in Athens, where his tomb is still shown behind the Lyceum. The Megareans, however, who do not admit that their city was ever captured by the Cretans, claim that Megareus married Nisus’s daughter Iphinoë and succeeded him.8

  f. Aegeus, like Cecrops and Pandion, found his life constantly threatened by the plots of his kinsmen, among them Lycus, whom he is said to have exiled from Euboea. Lycus took refuge with Sarpedon, and gave his name to Lycia, after first visiting Aphareus at Arene, and initiating the royal household into the Mysteries the Great Goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and also into those of Atthis, at the ancient Messenian capital of Andania. This Atthis, who gave Attica its name, was one of the three daughters of Cranaus, the autochthonous king of Athens reigning at the time of the Deucalonian Flood. The oak-coppice at Andania, where Lycus purified the initiates, still bears his name.9 He had been granted the power of prophecy, and it was his oracle which later declared that if the Messenians kept a certain secret thing safely they would one day recover their partrimony, but if not, they would forfeit it for ever. Lycus was referring to an account of the Mysteries of the Great Goddess engraved on a sheet of tin, which the Messenians thereupon buried in a brazen urn between a yew and a myrtle, on the summit of Mount Ithone; Epaminondas the Theban eventually disinterred it when he restored the Messenians to their former glory.10

  g. The Athenian Lyceum is also named in honour of Lycus; from the very earliest times it has been sacred to Apollo who there first received the surname ‘Lycaean’, and expelled wolves from Athens by the smell of his sacrifices.11

  1. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 1 and 5; Plutarch: Theseus 32; Pausanias: vii. 1. 2.

  2. Ibid.: i. 5. 3; Eustathius on Homer p. 281; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 5.

  3. Pherecydes, quoted by Scholiast on Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus 472; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 8; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 76. 1; Pausanias: ii. 6. 3.

  4. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 5; Pausanias: iv. 36. 1 and i. 29. 5.

  5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: iv. 36. 1.

  6. Pausanias: i. 41. 6; i. 5. 3; and i. 39. 4; Hesychius sub Aethyia.

  7. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 6; Sophocles, quoted by Strabo: i. 6; Pausanias: i. 5. 4 and i. 39. 4.

  8. Pausanias: i. 39. 4–5 and 19. 5; Strabo: ix. 1. 6.

  9. Herodotus: i. 173; Pausanias: i. 2. 5 and iv. 1. 4–5.

  10. Pausanias: x. 12. 5; iv. 20. 2 a
nd 26. 6.

  11. Ibid.: i. 19. 4; Scholiast on Demosthenes: xxiv. 114.

  1. Mythical genealogies such as these were quoted whenever the sovereignty of states or hereditary privileges came into dispute. The division of Megara between the sacred king, who performed necessary sacrifices, and his tanist, who commanded the army, is paralleled at Sparta (see 74. 1). Aegeus’s name records the goat cult in Athens (see 8. 1), and Lycus’s the wolf cult; any Athenian who killed a wolf was obliged to bury it by public subscription (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 124). The diver-bird was sacred to Athene as protectress of ships and, since the Bluff of Athene overhung the sea, this may have been another of the cliffs from which her priestess launched the feathered pharmacos (see 70. 7; 89. 6; etc.). Atthis (actes thea, ‘goddess of the rugged coast’) seems to have been a title of the Attic Triple-goddess; her sisters were named Cranaë (‘stony’) and Cranaechme (‘rocky point – Apollodorus: iii. 14. 5); and, since Procne and Philomela, when turned into birds, were jointly called Atthis (Martial: i. 54. 9 and v. 67. 2), she is likely to have been connected with the same cliff-top ritual. Atthis, as Athene, has several other bird epiphanies in Homer (see 97. 4). The Mysteries of the Great Goddesses, which concerned resurrection, had been buried between yew and myrtle because these stood, respectively, for the last vowel and the last consonant of the tree alphabet (see 52. 3), and were sacred to the Death-goddess.

  95

  THE BIRTH OF THESEUS

  AEGEUS’S first wife was Melite, daughter of Hoples: and his second, Chalciope, daughter of Rhexenor; but neither bore him any children. Ascribing this, and the misfortunes of his sisters Procne and Philomela, to Aphrodite’s anger, he introduced her worship into Athens, and then went to consult the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle warned him not to untie the mouth of his bulging wine-skin until he reached the highest point of Athens, lest he die one day of grief, a response which Aegeus could not interpret.1

  b. On his way home he called at Corinth; and here Medea made him swear a solemn oath that he would shelter her from all enemies if she ever sought refuge at Athens, and undertook in return to procure him a son by magic. Next, he visited Troezen, where his old comrades Pittheus and Troezen, sons of Pelops, had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Aetius. Aetius was the successor of his father Anthas, son of Poseidon and Alcyone who, having founded the cities Anthaea and Hyperea, had lately sailed off to found Halicarnassus in Caria. But Aetius seems to have enjoyed little power, because Pittheus, after Troezen’s death, united Anthaea and Hyperea into a single city, which he dedicated jointly to Athene and Poseidon, calling it Troezen.2

  c. Pittheus was the most learned man of his age, and one of his moral apothegms, on friendship, is often quoted: ‘Blast not the hope that friendship hath conceived; but fill its measure high!’ He founded a sanctuary of Oracular Apollo at Troezen, which is the oldest surviving shrine in Greece; and also dedicated an altar to the Triple-goddess Themis. Three white marble thrones, now placed above his tomb behind the temple of Artemis the Saviour, used to serve him and two others as judgement seats. He also taught the art of oratory in the Muses’ sanctuary at Troezen – which was founded by Hephaestus’s son Ardalus, the reputed inventor of the flute – and a treatise on rhetoric by his hand is extant.3

  d. Now, while Pittheus was still living at Pisa, Bellerophon had asked to marry his daughter Aethra, but had been sent away to Caria in disgrace before the marriage could be celebrated; though still contracted to Bellerophon, she had little hope of his return. Pittheus, therefore, grieving at her enforced virginity, and influenced by the spell which Medea was casting on all of them from afar, made Aegeus drunk, and sent him to bed with Aethra. Later in the same night, Poseidon also enjoyed her. For, in obedience to a dream sent by Athene, she left the drunken Aegeus, and waded across to the island of Sphaeria, which lies close to the mainland of Troezen, carrying libations to pour at the tomb of Sphaerus, Pelops’s charioteer. There, with Athene’s connivance, Poseidon overpowered her, and Aethra subsequently changed the name of the island from Sphaeria to Hiera, and founded on it a temple of Apaturian Athene, establishing a rule that every Troezenian girl should henceforth dedicate her girdle to the goddess before marriage. Poseidon, however, generously conceded to Aegeus the paternity of any child born to Aethra in the course of the next four months.4

  e. Aegeus, when he awoke and found himself in Aethra’s bed, told her that if a son were born to them he must not be exposed or sent away, but secretly reared in Troezen. Then he sailed back to Athens, to celebrate the All-Athenian Festival, after hiding his sword and his sandals under a hollow rock, known as the Altar of Strong Zeus, which stood on the road from Troezen to Hermium. If, when the boy grew up, he could move this rock and recover the tokens, he was to be sent with them to Athens. Meanwhile, Aethra must keep silence, lest Aegeus’s nephews, the fifty children of Pallas, plotted against her life. The sword was an heirloom from Cecrops.5

  f. At a place now called Genethlium, on the way from the city to the harbour of Troezen, Aethra gave birth to a boy. Some say that she at once named him Theseus, because the tokens had been deposited for him; others, that he afterwards won this name at Athens. He was brought up in Troezen, where his guardian Pittheus discreetly spread the rumour that Poseidon had been his father; and one Connidas, to whom the Athenians still sacrifice a ram on the day before the Thesean Feasts, acted as his pedagogue. But some say that Theseus grew up at Marathon.6

  g. One day Heracles, dining at Troezen with Pittheus, removed his lion-skin and threw it over a stool. When the palace children came in, they screamed and fled, all except seven-year-old Theseus, who ran to snatch an axe from the woodpile, and returned boldly, prepared to attack a real lion.7

  h. At the age of sixteen years he visited Delphi, and offered his first manly hair-clippings to Apollo. He shaved, however, only the forepart of his head, like the Arabians and Mysians, or like the war-like Abantes of Euboea, who thereby deny their enemies any advantage in close combat. This kind of tonsure, and the precinct where he performed the ceremony, are both still called Thesean. He was now a strong, intelligent and prudent youth; and Aethra, leading him to the rock underneath which Aegeus had hidden the sword and sandals, told him the story of his birth. He had no difficulty in moving the rock, since called the ‘Rock of Theseus’, and recovered the tokens. Yet, despite Pittheus’s warnings and his mother’s entreaties, he would not visit Athens by the safe sea route, but insisted on travelling overland; impelled by a desire to emulate the feats of his cousin-german Heracles, whom he greatly admired.8

  1. Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 668; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 6; Pausanias: i. 14. 6.

  2. Euripides: Medea 660 ff.; Strabo: viii. 6. 14; Plutarch: Theseus 2.

  3. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 31. 3–4 and 8–9.

  4. Pausanias: ii. 31. 12 and 33. 1; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 7; Plutarch: Theseus 3; Hyginus: Fabula 37.

  5. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 32. 7.

  6. Pausanias: ii. 32. 8; Plutarch: Theseus 4 and 6; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebaid xii. 194.

  7. Pausanias: i. 27. 8.

  8. Homer: Iliad ii. 542; Pausanias: loc. cit. and ü. 32. 7; Plutarch: Theseus 5 and 7.

  1. Pittheus is a masculine form of Pitthea. The names of the towns which he united to form Troezen suggests a matriarchal calendar-triad (see 75. 2), consisting of Anthea (‘flowery’), the Goddess of Spring; Hyperea (‘being overhead’), the Goddess of Summer, when the sun is at its zenith; and Pitthea (‘pine-goddess’), worshipped in autumn when Attis-Adonis (see 79. 1) was sacrificed on his pine. They may be identified with the Triple-goddess Themis, to whom Pittheus raised an altar since the name Troezen is apparently a worn-down form of trion hezomenon, ‘[the city] of the three sitters’, which refers to the three white thrones which served ‘Pittheus and two others’ as seats of justice.

  2. Theseus must originally have had a twin, since his mother lay with both a god and a mortal on the same
night; the myths of Idas and Lynceus Castor and Polydeuces (see 74. 1), Heracles and Iphicles (see 118.3), make this certain. Moreover, he wore the lion-skin, like Heracles, and will therefore have been the sacred king, not the tanist. But when, after the Persian Wars, Theseus became the chief national hero of Athens, his paternity at least had to be Athenian, because his mother came from Troezen. The mythographers then decided to have it both ways: he was an Athenian, the son of Aegeus, a mortal; but whenever he needed to claim Poseidon as his father, he could do so (see 98. j and 101. f). In either case, his mother remained a Troezenian; Athens had important interests there. He was also allowed a honorary twin, Peirithous who, being mortal, could not escape from Tartarus – as Heracles, Polydeuces, and Theseus himself did (see 74. j; 103. d; and 134. d). No efforts were spared to connect Theseus with Heracles, but the Athenians never grew powerful enough to make him into an Olympian god.

  3. There seem, however, to have been at least three mythological characters called Theseus: one from Troezen, one from Marathon in Attica, and the third from Lapith territory. These were not unified into a single character until the sixth century B.C., when (as Professor George Thomson suggests) the Butads, a Lapith clan who had become leading aristocrats at Athens and even usurped the native Pelasgian priesthood of Erechtheus, put forward the Athenian Theseus as a rival to Dorian Heracles (see 47. 4). Again, Pittheus was clearly both an Elean and a Troezenian title – also borne by the eponymous hero of an Attic deme belonging to the Cecropian tribe.