The Greek Myths, Volume2

by Robert Graves

  1. Apollodorus: ii. 5.3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Euripides: Heracles 375 ff.; Virgil: Aeneid vi. 802; Hyginus: Fabula 30.

  2. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 103 and Hymn to Artemis 100 ff.; Euripides: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 25. 3.

  3. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 26–7; Hyginus: Fabula 30.

  4. Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 29 ff.; Apollodorus: ii. 10. 1; Plutarch: On Rivers 17.

  5. Pausanias: iii. 1.2–3 and 20.2; Plutarch: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3.

  1. This Third Labour is of a different order from most of the others. Historically it may record the Achaean capture of a shrine where Artemis was worshipped as Elaphios (‘hind-like’); her four chariot-stags represent the years of the Olympiad, and at the close of each a victim dressed in deer-skins was hunted to death (see 22. 1). Elaphios, at any rate, is said to have been Artemis’s nurse, which means Artemis herself (Pausanias: vi. 22. 11). Mythically, however, the Labour seems to concern Heracles the Dactyl (see 52. 3), identified by the Gauls with Ogmius (Lucian: Heracles i), who invented the Ogham alphabet and all bardic lore (see 132. 3). The chase of the hind, or roe, symbolized the pursuit of Wisdom, and she is found, according to the Irish mystical tradition, harboured under a wild-apple tree (White Goddess p. 217). This would explain why Heracles is not said by anyone, except the ill-informed Euripides, to have done the roe any harm: instead he pursued her indefatigably without cease, for an entire year, to the Land of the Hyperboreans, experts in these very mysteries. According to Pollux, Heracles was called Melon (‘of apples’), because apples were offered to him, presumably in recognition of his wisdom; but such wisdom came only with death, and his pursuit of the hind, like his visit to the Garden of the Hesperides, was really a journey to the Celtic Paradise. Zeus had similarly chased Taygete, who was a daughter of Atlas and therefore a non-Hellenic character.

  2. In Europe, only reindeer does have horns, and reports of these may have come down from the Baltic by the Amber Route; reindeer, unlike other deer, can of course be harnessed.

  3. The drowning of Taygete’s son Himerus, and of her father-in-law Eurotas, suggests that early kings of Sparta were habitually sacrificed to the Eurotas water-monster, by being thrown, wrapped in branches, into a deep pool. So, it seems, was Tantalus (see 108. 3), another son of Taygete (Hyginus: Fabula 82). Lacedaemon means ‘lake demon’ (see 124. 2), and Laconia is the domain of Lacone (‘lady of the lake’), whose image was rescued from the Dorian invaders by one Preugenes and brought to Patrae in Achaea (Pausanias: vii. 20. 4). The story behind Taygete’s metamorphosis seems to be that the Achaean conquerors of Sparta called themselves Zeus, and their wives Hera. When Hera came to be worshipped as a cow, the Lelegian cult of Artemis the Hind was suppressed. A ritual marriage between Zeus as bull and Hera as cow may have been celebrated, as in Crete (see 90. 7).

  4. Nights of promiscuous revel were held in various Greek states (see 44. a), and during the Alban Holiday at Rome: a concession to archaic sexual customs which preceded monogamy.

  126

  THE FOURTH LABOUR: THE ERYMANTHIAN BOAR

  THE Fourth Labour imposed on Heracles was to capture alive the Erymanthian Boar: a fierce, enormous beast which haunted the cypress-covered slopes of Mount Erymanthus, and the thickets of Arcadian Mount Lampeia; and ravaged the country around Psophis.1 Mount Erymanthus takes its name from a son of Apollo, whom Aphrodite blinded because he had seen her bathing; Apollo in revenge turned himself into a boar and killed her lover Adonis. Yet the mountain is sacred to Artemis.2

  b. Heracles, passing through Pholoë on his way to Erymanthus – where he killed one Saurus, a cruel bandit – was entertained by the Centaur Pholus, whom one of the ash-nymphs bore to Silenus. Pholus set roast meat before Heracles, but himself preferred the raw, and dared not open the Centaurs’ communal wine jar until Heracles reminded him that it was the very jar which, four generations earlier, Dionysus had left in the cave against this very occasion.3 The Centaurs grew angry when they smelt the strong wine. Armed with great rocks, up-rooted fir-trees, firebrands, and butchers’ axes, they made a rush at Pholus’s cave. While Pholus hid in terror, Heracles boldly repelled Ancius and Agrius, his first two assailants, with a volley of firebrands.4 Nephele, the Centaurs’ cloudy grandmother, then poured down a smart shower of rain, which loosened Heracles’s bow-string and made the ground slippery. However, he showed himself worthy of his former achievements, and killed several Centaurs, among them Oreus and Hylaeus. The rest fled as far as Malea, where they took refuge with Cheiron, their king, who had been driven from Mount Pelion by the Lapiths.5

  c. A parting arrow from Heracles’s bow passed through Elatus’s arm, and stuck quivering in Cheiron’s knee. Distressed at the accident to his old friend, Heracles drew out the arrow and though Cheiron himself supplied the vulneraries for dressing the wound, they were of no avail and he retired howling in agony to his cave; yet could not die, because he was immortal. Prometheus later offered to accept immortality in his stead, and Zeus approved this arrangement; but some say that Cheiron chose death not so much because of the pain he suffered as because he had grown weary of his long life.6

  d. The Centaurs now fled in various directions: some with Eurytion to Pholoë; some with Nessus to the river Evenus; some to Mount Malea; others to Sicily, where the Sirens destroyed them. Poseidon received the remainder at Eleusis, and hid them in a mountain. Among those whom Heracles later killed was Homadus the Arcadian, who had tried to rape Eurystheus’s sister Alcyone; by thus nobly avenging an insult offered to an enemy, Heracles won great fame.7

  e. Pholus, in the meantime, while burying his dead kinsmen, drew out one of Heracles’s arrows and examined it. ‘How can so robust a creature have succumbed to a mere scratch?’ he wondered. But the arrow slipped from his fingers and, piercing his foot, killed him there and then. Heracles broke off the pursuit and returned to Pholoë, where he buried Pholus with unusual honours at the foot of the mountain which has taken his name. It was on this occasion that the river Anigrus acquired the foul smell which now clings to it from its very source on Mount Lapithus: because a Centaur named Pylenor, whom Heracles had winged with an arrow, fled and washed his wound there. Some, however, hold that Melampus had caused the stench some years before, by throwing into the Anigrus the foul objects used for purifying the daughters of Proetus.8

  f. Heracles now set off to chase the boar by the river Erymanthus. To take so savage a beast alive was a task of unusual difficulty; but he dislodged it from a thicket with loud halloos, drove it into a deep snow drift, and sprang upon its back. He bound it with chains, and carried it alive on his shoulders to Mycenae; but when he heard that the Argonauts were gathering for their voyage to Colchis, dropped the boar outside the market place and, instead of waiting for further orders from Eurystheus, who was hiding in his bronze jar, went off with Hylas to join the expedition. It is not known who dispatched the captured boar, but its tusks are preserved in the temple of Apollo at Cumae.9

  g. According to some accounts, Cheiron was accidentally wounded by an arrow that pierced his left foot, while he and Pholus and the young Achilles were entertaining Heracles on Mount Pelion. After nine days, Zeus set Cheiron’s image among the stars as the Centaur. But others hold that the Centaur is Pholus, who was honoured by Zeus in this way because he excelled all men in the art of prophesying from entrails. The Bowman in the Zodiac is likewise a Centaur: one Crotus, who lived on Mount Helicon, greaty beloved by his foster-sisters, the Muses.10

  1. Ovid: Heroides ix. 87; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 127; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 12.

  2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i. 306; Homer: Odyssey vi. 105.

  3. Pausanias: vi. 21. 5; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.

  4. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 670; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.

  5. Pausanias: iii. 18. 9; Virgil: Aeneid viii. 293–4; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc
. cit.

  6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead 26.

  7. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 670; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.

  8. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: v. 5. 6.

  9. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: viii. 24. 2; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 122 ff.

  10. Theocritus: Idyll vii; Ovid: Fasti v. 380 ff.; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 38 and 27; Fabula 224.

  1. Boars were sacred to the Moon because of their crescent-shaped tusks, and it seems that the tanist who killed and emasculated his twin, the sacred king, wore boar-disguise when he did so (see 18. 7 and 151. 2). The snowdrift in which the Erymanthian Boar was overcome indicates that this Labour took place at midwinter. Here Heracles is the Child Horus and avenges the death of his father Osiris on his uncle Set who comes disguised as a boar; the Egyptian taboo on boar’s flesh was lifted only at midwinter. The boar’s head Yuletide ceremony has its origin in this same triumph of the new sacred king over his rival. Adonis is murdered to avenge the death of Erymanthus, the previous year’s tanist, whose name, ‘divining by lots’, suggests that he was chosen by lot to kill the sacred king. Mount Erymanthus being sacred to Artemis, not Aphrodite, Artemis must have been the goddess who took her bath, and the sacred king, not his tanist, must have seen her doing so (see 22. i).

  2. It is probable that Heracles’s battle with the Centaurs, like the similar battle at Peirithous’s wedding (see 102. 2), originally represented the ritual combat between a newly installed king and opponents in beast-disguise. His traditional weapons were arrows, one of which, to establish his sovereignty, he shot to each of the four quarters of the sky, and a fifth straight up into the air. Frontier wars between the Hellenes and the pre-Hellenic mountaineers ©f Northern Greece are also perhaps recorded in this myth.

  3. Poisoned arrows dropped upon, or shot into, a knee or foot, caused the death not only of Pholus and Cheiron, but also of Achilles, Cheiron’s pupil (see 92. 10 and 164. j) : all of them Magnesian sacred kings, whose souls the Sirens naturally received. The presence of Centaurs at Malea derives from a local tradition that Pholus’s father Silenus was born there (Pausanias: iii. 25.2); Centaurs were often represented as half goat, rather than half horse. Their presence at Eleusis, where Poseidon hid them in a mountain, suggests that when the initiate into the Mysteries celebrated a sacred marriage with the goddess, hobby-horse dancers took part in the proceedings.

  127

  THE FIFTH LABOUR: THE STABLES OF AUGEIAS

  HERACLES’S Fifth Labour was to cleanse King Augeias’s filthy cattle yard in one day. Eurystheus gleefully pictured Heracles’s disgust at having to load the dung into baskets and carry these away on his shoulders. Augeias, King of Elis, was the son of Helius, or Eleius, by Naupiadame, a daughter of Amphidamas; or, some say, by Iphiboë. Others call him the son of Poseidon. In flocks and herds he was the wealthiest man on earth: for, by a divine dispensation, his were immune against disease and inimitably fertile, nor did they ever miscarry. Although in almost every case they produced female offspring, he nevertheless had three hundred white-legged black bulls and two hundred red stud-bulls; besides twelve outstanding silvery-white bulls, sacred to his father Helius. These twelve defended his herds against marauding wild beasts from the wooded hills.1

  b. Now, the dung in Augeias’s cattle yard and sheepfolds had not been cleared away for many years, and though its noisome stench did not affect the beasts themselves, it spread a pestilence across the whole Peloponnese. Moreover, the valley pastures were so deep in dung that they could no longer be ploughed for grain.2

  c. Heracles hailed Augeias from afar, and undertook to cleanse the yard before nightfall in return for a tithe of the cattle. Augeias laughed incredulously, and called Phyleus, his eldest son, to witness Heracles’s offer. ‘Swear to accomplish the task before nightfall’, Phyleus demanded. The oath which Heracles now took by his father’s name was the first and last one he ever swore. Augeias likewise took an oath to keep his side of the bargain. At this point, Phaethon, the leader of the twelve white bulls, charged at Heracles, mistaking him for a lion; whereupon he seized the bull’s left horn, forced its neck downwards, and floored it by main strength.3

  d. On the advice of Menedemus the Elean, and aided by Iolaus, Heracles first breached the wall of the yard in two places, and next diverted the neighbouring rivers Alpheus and Peneius, or Menius, so that their streams rushed through the yard, swept it clean and then went on to cleanse the sheepfolds and the valley pastures. Thus Heracles accomplished this Labour in one day, restoring the land to health, and not soiling so much as his little finger. But Augeias, on being informed by Copreus that Heracles had already been under orders from Eurystheus to cleanse the cattle yards, refused to pay the reward and even dared deny that he and Heracles had struck a bargain.

  e. Heracles suggested that the case be submitted to arbitration; yet when the judges were seated, and Phyleus, subpoenaed by Heracles, testified to the truth, Augeias sprang up in a rage and banished them both from Elis, asserting that he had been tricked by Heracles, since the River-gods, not he, had done the work. To make matters even worse, Eurystheus refused to count this Labour as one of the ten, because Heracles had been in Augeias’s hire.

  f. Phyleus then went to Dulichium; and Heracles to the court of Dexamenus, King of Olenus, whose daughter Mnesimache he later rescued from the Centaur Eurytion.4

  1. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 5 and 7.2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Pausanias: v. 1.7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 41; Hyginus: Fabula 14.

  2. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: loc. cit.

  3. Pausanias: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Plutarch: Roman Questions 28; Theocritus: Idyll xxv. 115 ff.

  4. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: v, quoted by Photius p. 486; Hyginus: Fabula 30; Pausanias: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Servius: loc. cit.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 102.

  1. This confused myth seems to be founded on the legend that Heracles, like Jason, was ordered to tame two bulls, yoke them, clean an overgrown hill, then plough, sow, and reap it in a single day – the usual tasks set a candidate for kingship (see 152. 3). Here, the hill had to be cleared not of trees and stones, as in the Celtic versions of the myth, but of dung – probably because the name of Eurystheus’s herald, who delivered the order, was Copreus (‘dung man’). Sir James Frazer, commenting on Pausanias (v. 10. 9), quotes a Norse tale, ‘The Mastermaid’, in which a prince who wishes to win a giant’s daughter must first clean three stables. For each pitch-fork of dung which he tosses out, ten return. The princess then advises him to turn the pitchfork upside-down and use the handle. He does so, and the stable is soon cleansed. Frazer suggests that, in the original version, Athene may have given Heracles the same advice; more likely, however, the Norse tale is a variant of this Labour. Augeias’s cattle are irrelevant to the story, except to account for the great mass of dung to be removed. Cattle manure, as the myth shows, was not valued by Greek farmers. Hesiod, in his Works and Days, does not mention it; and H. Mitchell (Economics of Ancient Greece) shows that the grazing of cattle on fallow land is prohibited in several ancient leases. Odysseus’s dog Argus did, indeed, lie on a midden used for dunging the estate (Odyssey xvii. 299), but wherever the Odyssey may have been written – and it certainly was not on the Greek mainland – the references to agriculture and arboriculture suggest a survival of Cretan practice. According to some mythographers, Augeias was the son of Eleius, which means no more than ‘King of Elis’; according to others, a son of Poseidon, which suggests that he was an Aeolian. But Eleius has here been confused with Helius, the Corinthian Sun-god; and Augeias is therefore credited with a herd of sacred cattle, like that owned by Sisyphus (see 67. 1). The number of heads in such herds was 350, representing twelve complete lunations less the sacred five-day holiday of the Egyptian year (see 42. 1); that they were lunar cattle was pr
oved by their red, white, and black colours (see 90. 3); and the white bulls represent these twelve lunations. Such sacred cattle were often stolen – as by Heracles himself in his Tenth Labour – and the sequel to his quarrel with Augeias was that he won these twelve bulls as well.

  2. The Fifth Labour, which properly concerns only ploughing, sowing, and reaping tasks has, in fact, been confused with two others: the Tenth, namely the lifting of Geryon’s cattle; and the Seventh, namely the capture of Poseidon’s white Cretan bull – which was not, however, used for ploughing. In the cult of Poseidon – who is also described as Augeias’s father – young men wrestled with bulls, and Heracles’s struggle against Phaethon, like Theseus’s against the Minotaur, is best understood as a coronation rite: by magical contact with the bull’s horn, he became capable of fertilizing the land, and earned the title of Potidan, or Poseidon, given to the Moon-goddess’s chosen lover. Similarly, in a love-contest Heracles fought the river Achelous, represented as a bull-headed man, and broke off his cornucopia (see 141. d). The deflection of the Alpheius suggests that the icon from which this incident is deduced showed Heracles twisting the Cretan Bull around by the horns, beside the banks of a river, where numerous cattle were grazing. This bull was mistaken for a river-god, and the scene read as meaning that he had deflected the river in order to cleanse the fields for ploughing.

  128

  THE SIXTH LABOUR: THE STYMPHALIAN BIRDS