The Greek Myths, Volume2
Page 23
l. Having burned Troy and left its highways desolate, Heracles set Priam on the throne, and put to sea. Hesione accompanied Telamon to Salamis, where she bore him Teucer; whether in wedlock or in bastardy is not agreed.16 Later she deserted Telamon, escaped to Asia Minor, and swam across to Miletus, where King Arion found her hidden in a wood. There she bore Telamon a second son, Trambelus, whom Arion reared as his own, and appointed king of Telamon’s Asiatic kinsmen the Lelegians or, some say, of the Lesbians. When, in the course of the Trojan War, Achilles raided Miletus, he killed Trambelus, learning too late that he was Telamon’s son, which caused him great grief.17
m. Some say that Oicles did not fall at Troy, but was still alive when the Erinnyes drove his grandson Alcmaeon mad. His tomb is shown in Arcadia, near the Megalopolitan precinct of Boreas.18
n. Heracles now sailed from the Troad, taking with him Glaucia, a daughter of the river Scamander. During the siege, she had been Deimachus’s mistress, and when he fell in battle, had applied to Heracles for protection. Heracles led her aboard his ship, overjoyed that the stock of so gallant a friend should survive: for Glaucia was pregnant, and later gave birth to a son named Scamander.19
o. Now, while Sleep lulled Zeus into drowsiness, Hera summoned Boreas to raise a storm, which drove Heracles off his course to the island of Cos. Zeus awoke in a rage and threatened to cast Sleep down from the upper air into the gulf of Erebus; but she fled as a suppliant to Night, whom even Zeus dared not displease. In his frustration he began tossing the gods about Olympus. Some say that it was on this occasion that he chained Hera by her wrists to the rafters, tying anvils to her ankles; and hurled Hephaestus down to earth. Having thus vented his ill-temper to the full, he rescued Heracles from Cos and led him back to Argos, where his adventures are variously described.20
p. Some say that the Coans mistook him for a pirate and tried to prevent his approach by pelting his ship with stones. But he forced a landing, took the city of Astypalaea in a night assault, and killed the king, Eurypylus, a son of Poseidon and Astypalaea. He was himself wounded by Chalcodon, but rescued by Zeus when on the point of being despatched.21 Others say that he attacked Cos because he had fallen in love with Chalciope, Eurypylus’s daughter.22
q. According to still another account, five of Heracles’s six ships foundered in the storm. The surviving one ran aground at Laceta on the island of Cos, he and his shipmates saving only their weapons from the wreck. As they stood wringing the sea water out of their clothes, a flock of sheep passed by, and Heracles asked the Meropian shepherd, one Antagoras, for the gift of a ram; whereupon Antagoras, who was of powerful build, challenged Heracles to wrestle with him, offering the ram as a prize. Heracles accepted the challenge but, when the two champions came to grips, Antagoras’s Meropian friends ran to his assistance, and the Greeks did the same for Heracles, so that a general rough-and-tumble ensued. Exhausted by the storm and by the number of his enemies, Heracles broke off the fight and fled to the house of a stout Thracian matron, in whose clothes he disguised himself, thus contriving to escape.
r. Later in the day, refreshed by food and sleep, he fought the Meropians again and worsted them; after which he was purified of their blood and, still dressed in women’s clothes, married Chalciope, by whom he became the father of Thessalus.23 Annual Sacrifices are now offered to Heracles on the field where this battle was fought; and Coan bridegrooms wear women’s clothes when they welcome their brides home – as the priest of Heracles at Antimacheia also does before he begins a sacrifice.24
s. The women of Astypalaea were offended at Heracles, and abused him, whereupon Hera honoured them with horns like cows; but some say that this was a punishment inflicted on them by Aphrodite for daring to extol their beauty above hers.25
t. Having laid waste Cos, and all but annihilated the Meropians, Heracles was guided by Athene to Phlegra, where he helped the gods to win their battle against the giants.26 Thence he came to Boeotia where, at his insistence, Scamander was elected king. Scamander renamed the river Inachus after himself, and a near-by stream after his mother Glaucia; he also named the spring Acidusa after his wife, by whom he had three daughters, still honoured locally under the name of ‘Máidens’.27
1. Apollodorus: ii. 4.6.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Hyginus: Fabula 89; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 42; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 34.
3. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Lucian: On Sacrifices 4; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 3.
4. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 30 and i. 554; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 472; Hyginus: Fabula 89.
5. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 42; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 34; Valerius Flaccus: ii. 487; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Hellanicus, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xx. 146.
6. Homer: Iliad xx. 145–8; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Hellanicus: loc. cit.
7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 42 and 49; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 623.
8. Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Hellanicus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Fragment 140a, ed. Schroeder, and Isthmian Odes vi. 26 ff.
9. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 472 and 953; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 554 and v. 30.
10. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 472, 953, and 965; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 554; v. 30 and 73.
11. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32; Apollodorus: ii. 6.4; Homer: Iliad v. 638 ff.
12. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iii. 61 and Isthmian Odes i. 21–3; Apollodorus: loc. cit. and i. 8.2; Homer: Odyssey xv. 243; Plutarch: Greek Questions 41.
13. Apollodorus: iii. 12.7; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vi. 35 ff; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 455; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Ajax 833; Scholiast On Homer’s Iliad xxiii. 821.
14. Apollodorus: ii. 6. 4; Hellanicus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 469.
15. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 337; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 89; Homer: Iliad v. 638 ff.
16. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 7; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 3; Homer: Iliad viii. 283 ff., and scholiast on 284.
17. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 467; Athenaeus: ii. 43; Parthenius: Love Stories 26.
18. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 5; Pausanias: viii. 36.4.
19. Plutarch: Greek Questions 41.
20. Homer: Iliad xiv. 250 ff. and xv. 18 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 3. 5 and ii. 7. 1.
21. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 1.
22. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iv. 40.
23. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 8; Homer: Iliad ii. 678–9.
24. Plutarch: Greek Questions 58.
25. Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 363–4; Lactantius: Stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses vii. 10.
26. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 1; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vi. 31 ff.
27. Plutarch: Greek Questions 41.
1. This legend concerns the sack of the fifth, or pre-Homeric, city of Troy: probably by Minyans, that is to say Aeolian Greeks, supported by Lelegians, when a timely earthquake overthrew its massive walls (see 158. 8). From the legend of the Golden Fleece we gather that Laomedon had opposed Lelegian as well as Minyan mercantile ventures in the Black Sea (see 148. 10), and that the only way to bring him to reason was to destroy his city, which commanded the Hellespont and the Scamander plain where the East-West fair was annually held. The Ninth Labour refers to Black Sea enterprises of the same sort (see 131. 11). Heracles’s task was assisted by an earthquake, dated about 1260 B.C.
2. Heracles’s rescue of Hesione, paralleled by Perseus’s rescue of Andromeda (see 73. 7), is dearly derived from an icon common in Syria and Asia Minor: Marduk’s conquest of the Sea-monster Tiamat, an emanation of the goddess Ishtar, whose power he annulled by chaining her to a rock. Heracles is swallowed by Tiamat, and disappears for three days before fighting his way out. So also, according to a Hebrew moral tale apparently based on the same icon, Jonah spent three days in the Whale’s belly; and so Marduk’s representative, the King of Babylon, spent a period in demise every year, during which he was supposedly fighting Tiamat (see 71. 1; 73. 7 and 103. 1). Marduk’s or Perseu
s’s white solar horse here becomes the reward for Hesione’s rescue. Heracles’s loss of hair emphasizes his solar character: a shearing of the sacred king’s locks when the year came to an end, typified the reduction of his magical strength, as in the story of Samson (see 91. 1). When he reappeared, he had no more hair than an infant. Hesione’s ransom of Podarces may represent the Queen-mother of Seha’s (Scamander?) intervention with the Hittite King Mursilis on behalf of her scapegrace son Manapadattas.
3. Phoenodamas’s three daughters represent the Moon-goddess in triad, ruling the three-cornered island of Sicily. The dog was sacred to her as Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hecate. Greek-speaking Sicilians were addicted to the Homeric epics, like the Romans, and equally anxious to claim Trojan ancestry on however insecure grounds. Scamander’s three daughters represent the same goddess in Boeotia. Glaucia’s bearing of a child to Scamander was not unusual. According to the pseudo-Aeschines (Dialogues 10. 3), Trojan brides used to bathe in the river, and cry: ‘Scamander, take my virginity!’; which points to an archaic period when it was thought that river water would quicken their wombs (see 68. 2).
4. To what Hellenic conquest of the Helladic island of Cos Heracles’s visit refers is uncertain, but the subsequent wearing of women’s dress by the bridegroom, when he welcomed his bride home, seems to be a concession to the former matrilocal custom by which she welcomed him to her house, not contrariwise (see 160.3). A cow-dance will have been performed on Cos, similar to the Argive rite honouring the Moon-goddess Io (see 56. 1). At Antimacheia, the sacred king was still at the primitive stage of being the Queen’s deputy, and obliged therefore to wear female dress (see 18. 8 and 136. 4).
5. Laomedon’s mares were of the same breed as those sired at Troy by Boreas (see 29. e).
6. The Inachus was an Argive river; Plutarch seems to be the sole authority for a Boeotian Inachus, or Scamander.
138
THE CONQUEST OF ELIS
NOT long after his return, Heracles collected a force of Tirynthians and Arcadians and, joined by volunteers from the noblest Greek families, marched against Augeias, King of Elis, whom he owed a grudge on account of the Fifth Labour.1 Augeias, however, foreseeing this attack, had prepared to resist it by appointing as his generals Eurytus and Cteatus, the sons of his brother Actor and Molione, or Moline, a daughter of Molus; and by giving a share in the Elean government to the valiant Amarynceus, who is usually described as a son of the Thessalian immigrant Pyttius.2
b. The sons of Actor are called Moliones, or Molionides, after their mother, to distinguish them from those of the other Actor, who married Aegina. They were twins, born from a silver egg, and surpassed all their contemporaries in strength; but, unlike the Dioscuri, had been joined together at the waist from birth.3 The Moliones married the twin daughters of Dexamenus the Centaur and, one generation later, their sons reigned in Elis jointly with Augeias’s grandson and Amarynceus’s son. Each of these four commanded ten ships in the expedition to Troy. Actor already possessed a share of the kingdom through his mother Hyrmine, a daughter of Neleus, whose name he gave to the now vanished city of Hyrmine.4
c. Heracles did not cover himself with glory in this Elean War. He fell sick, and when the Moliones routed his army, which was encamped in the heart of Elis, the Corinthians intervened by proclaiming the Isthmian Truce. Among those wounded by the Moliones was Heracles’s twin brother Iphicles; his friends carried him fainting to Pheneus in Arcadia, where he eventually died and became a hero. Three hundred and sixty Cleonensians also died bravely, fighting at Heracles’s side; to them he ceded the honours awarded him by the Nemeans after he had killed the lion.5 He now retired to Olenus, the home of his friend Dexamenus, father-in-law of the Moliones, whose youngest daughter Deianeira he deflowered, after promising to marry her. When Heracles had passed on, the Centaur Eurytion asked for her hand, which Dexamenus feared to refuse him; but on the wedding day Heracles reappeared without warning, shot down Eurytion and his brothers, and took Deianeira away with him. Some say, however, that Heracles’s bride was named Mnesimache, or Hippolyte; on the ground that Deianeira is more usually described as the daughter of Oeneus. Dexamenus had been born at Bura, famous for its dice-oracle of Heracles.6
d. When Heracles returned to Tiryns, Eurystheus accused him of designs on the high kingship in which he had himself been confirmed by Zeus, and banished him from Argolis. With his mother Alcmene, and his nephew Iolaus, Heracles then rejoined Iphicles at Pheneus, where he took Laonome, daughter of Guneus, as his mistress. Through the middle of the Pheneatian Plain, he dug a channel for the river Aroanius, some fifty furlongs long and as much as thirty feet deep; but the river soon deserted this channel, which has caved in here and there, and returned to its former course. He also dug deep chasms at the foot of the Phenean Mountains to carry off flood water; these have served their purpose well, except that on one occasion, after a cloud-burst, the Aroanius rose and inundated the ancient city of Pheneus – the high-water marks of this flood are still shown on the mountainside.7
e. Afterwards, hearing that the Eleans were sending a procession to honour Poseidon at the Third Isthmian Festival, and that the Moliones would witness the games and take part in the sacrifices, Heracles ambushed them from a roadside thicket below Cleonae, and shot both dead; and killed their cousin, the other Eurytus, as well, a son of King Augeias.8
f. Molione soon learned who had murdered her sons, and made the Eleans demand satisfaction from Eurystheus, on the ground that Heracles was a native of Tiryns. When Eurystheus disclaimed responsibility for the misdeeds of Heracles, whom he had banished, Molione asked the Corinthians to exclude all Argives from the Isthmian Games until satisfaction had been given for the murder. This they declined to do, whereupon Molione laid a curse on every Elean who might take part in the festival. Her curse is still respected: no Elean athlete will ever enter for the Isthmian Games.9
g. Heracles now borrowed the black-maned horse Arion from Oncus, mastered him, raised a new army in Argos, Thebes, and Arcadia, and sacked the city of Elis. Some say that he killed Augeias and his sons, restored Phyleus, the rightful king, and set him on the Elean throne; others, that he spared Augeias’s life at least. When Heracles decided to repeople Elis by ordering the widows of the dead Eleans to lie with his soldiers, the widows offered a common prayer to Athene that they might conceive at the first embrace. This prayer was heard and, in gratitude, they founded a sanctuary of Athene the Mother. So widespread was the joy at this fortunate event that the place where they had met their new husbands, and the stream flowing by it, was called Bady, which is the Elean word for ‘sweet’. Heracles then gave the horse Arion to Adrastus, saying that, after all, he preferred to fight on foot.10
h. About this time, Heracles won his title of Buphagus, or ‘Ox-eater’. It happened as follows. Lepreus, the son of Caucon and Astydameia, who founded the city of Lepreus in Arcadia (the district derived its name from the leprosy which had attacked the earliest settlers), had foolishly advised King Augeias to fetter Heracles when he asked to be paid for having cleansed the cattle-yards. Hearing that Heracles was on his way to the city, Astydameia persuaded Lepreus to receive him courteously and plead for forgiveness. This Heracles granted, but challenged Lepreus to a triple contest: of throwing the discus, drinking bucket after bucket of water, and eating an ox. Then, though Heracles won the discus-throw and the drinking-match, Lepreus ate the ox in less time than he. Flushed with success, he challenged Heracles to a duel, and was at once clubbed to death; his tomb is shown at Phigalia. The Lepreans, who worship Demeter and Zeus of the White Poplar, have always been subjects of Elis; and if one of them ever wins a prize at Olympia, the herald proclaims him an Elean from Lepreus. King Augeias is still honoured as a hero by the Eleans, and it was only during the reign of Lycurgus the Spartan that they were persuaded to forget their enmity of Heracles and sacrifice to him also; by which means they averted a pestilence.11
i. After the conquest of Elis, Heracles assembled his army at Pisa, and used
the spoil to establish the famous four-yearly Olympic Festival and Games in honour of his father Zeus, which some claim was only the eighth athletic contest ever held.12 Having measured a precinct for Zeus, and fenced off the Sacred Grove, he stepped out the stadium, named a neighbouring hillock ‘The Hill of Cronus’, and raised six altars to the Olympian gods: one for every pair of them. In sacrificing to Zeus, he burnt the victims’ thighs upon a fire of white poplar wood cut from trees growing by the Thesprotian river Acheron; he also founded a sacrificial hearth in honour of his great-grandfather Pelops, and assigned him a shrine. Being much plagued by flies on this occasion, he offered a second sacrifice to Zeus the Averter of Flies: who sent them buzzing across the river Alpheius. The Eleans still sacrifice to this Zeus, when they expel the flies from Olympia.13
j. Now, at the first full moon after the summer solstice all was ready for the Festival, except that the valley lacked trees to shade it from the sun. Heracles therefore returned to the Land of the Hyperborean, where he had admired the wild olives growing at the source of the Danube, and persuaded Apollo’s priests to give him one for planting in Zeus’s precinct. Returning to Olympia, he ordained that the Aetolian umpire should crown the victors with its leaves: which were to be their only reward, because he himself had performed his Labours without payment from Eurystheus. This tree, called ‘The Olive of the Fair Crown’, still grows in the Sacred Grove behind Zeus’s temple. The branches for the wreaths are lopped with a golden sickle by a nobly-born boy, both of whose parents must be alive.14
k. Some say that Heracles won all the events by default, because none dared compete against him; but the truth is that every one was hotly disputed. No other entrants could, however, be found for the wrestling match, until Zeus, in disguise, condescended to enter the ring. The match was drawn, Zeus revealed himself to his son Heracles, all the spectators cheered, and the full moon shone as bright as day.15