May Jupiter save me from the guides at Olympia, and Minerva from those at Athens! (Varro Menippean Satires 35).
The guides were going through their usual patter, ignoring us when we begged them to cut their stories short and not to read out every single inscription (Plutarch On the Pythian Oracle 395a). Some guides at Delphi are still like this.
Herodotus seems to have suffered more than most tourists from such expositions. He claims to have been shown statues of 341 high priests in a temple of Hephaestus in Egypt, covering a period of more than eleven thousand years, and to have endured listening to the priests reciting to him a catalog of all their names (Histories 2.142).
There is a record on the pyramid in Egyptian writing of how much was spent on radishes, leeks, and garlic for the workmen. If I remember rightly, the guide who read the inscription to me said that this amounted to 1,600 talents of silver (Herodotus Histories 2.125). Because Greek tourists could not read hieroglyphs, the guides were free to say whatever they liked.
An early 4th-century B.C. drachma minted at Cnossus on Crete. As represented here, the Labyrinth is not complex, lacking the blind turns and bifurcations attributed to it in some of the literary sources.
I really must mention one of the strange things I saw at the pyramids. There are heaps of stone-chippings lying near them. Among these can be found chippings that are the size and shape of beans, along with what are apparently half-peeled ears of grain. The guides say that these are the petrified leftovers from the meals eaten by the workmen who built the pyramids, and this is not improbable (Strabo Geography 17.1.34).
When Himilcar took the Sicilian city of Acragas, he sent the most valuable items of plunder to Carthage. This booty included the Bull of Phalaris. In his Histories, Timaeus maintained that this bull did not exist, but chance proved him wrong: nearly 260 years later, when Scipio sacked Carthage [in 146 B.C.], he restored the bull to the people of Acragas along with everything else of theirs that the Carthaginians still held. It is in Acragas even now as I write this history (Diodorus Siculus The Library 13.90). For the Bull of Phalaris, see also p. 187.
On display in the temple of Athena of the City in Athens are a folding chair made by Daedalus [who constructed Minos’s Labyrinth] and the breastplate of Masistius [the Persian cavalry commander who was killed just before the Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C.] (Pausanias Guide to Greece 1.27.1). This breastplate must have been a very special piece of work, for Masistius’s armor was so comprehensive that the Athenians, when they unseated him from his horse, were unable to kill him until it occurred to someone to stab him in the eye (Herodotus Histories 9.22).
XXI
RELIGION, SUPERSTITION, AND MAGIC
I am unable to know whether the gods exist or do not exist. There are many obstacles to knowing about this—the obscurity of the question and the brevity of human life
(Protagoras frg. 4).
At Sparta there are temples to Death, Laughter, and Fear (Plutarch Life of Cleomenes 9).
When Phoebus Apollo raised up in his arms the infant Hermes, [who would grow up to be] the mighty slayer of Argus, the baby sent forth an omen, a wretched slave of the belly, an insolent messenger [i.e., he passed gas], and directly afterward he sneezed. Hearing this, Apollo dropped glorious Hermes on the ground (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 293ff.).
Sitting on her father’s knee when she was still just a little child, Artemis spoke like this to Zeus: “Let me keep my virginity for ever, Daddy, and give me many names [i.e., cult titles], so that Phoebus [Apollo, her twin brother] can’t match me” (Callimachus Hymn to Artemis 4ff.).
Some odd cult-titles for pagan deities, collected for ridicule by St. Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus 2.37):
Aphrodite the Gravedigger
Aphrodite the Lovely Rumped
Aphrodite the Prostitute
Apollo the Glutton
Apollo the Mouse God
Apollo the Yawner
Artemis the Choked
Artemis the Cougher
Artemis the Gouty
Zeus the Averter of Flies
Zeus the Bald
Dionysus the Pig-Plucker (χοιροψάλας; χοῖρος [choiros, “pig”] is a slang term for the female genitalia, and ψάλλειν [psallein] means to make the string of a musical instrument or of a bow resound [a psalm being a song sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument]; the scholion to Aeschylus Persae 1063 explains the phrase as “Dionysus the Depilator”)
The box tree (πύξος [pyxos]) is sacred to Aphrodite, in honor of her buttocks (πυγαί [pygae]) (Cornutus On the Nature of the Gods 46, recalling the goddess’s epithet καλλίπυγος [callipygos, “the Lovely Rumped”]).
Hunting is a noble sport, but there is nothing glorious about fishing. None of the gods has deigned to be called “Conger Eel Slayer,” as Apollo is called “Wolf Slayer,” or “Mullet Shooter,” as Artemis is called “Deer Shooter” (Plutarch On the Cleverness of Animals 965f).
We address as “Olympian” those deities who are responsible for the good things that happen to us, and both private individuals and whole communities build temples and altars in their honor. But we give less appealing names to those other deities who are responsible for disasters and punishments that befall us, and we do not honor them in our prayers or in sacrifices; instead, we perform rites intended to drive them away (Isocrates Philippus 117).
There was actually someone who wanted to set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. His purpose in destroying such a beautiful building was to make his name famous throughout the whole world—he revealed this mad plan when he was being tortured on the rack. The Ephesians were quite right to decree that all record of this appalling person should be wiped out (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 8.14 ext. 5). His name is, in fact, known from several sources, but will not be repeated here.
A cliff on the island of Leucadia is called the “Lovers’ Leap.” It is reputed to put an end to the pangs of love, and Sappho is said to have been the first to jump off it. There was a tradition among the Leucadians that, at the festival of Apollo every year, a criminal should be thrown off the cliff as a way of averting evil from the community. He had feathers and birds of all sorts attached to him, to break his fall with their flapping, and there were numerous people waiting in a circle down below in small fishing boats, and they did their best to rescue him and take him away from Leucadia (Strabo Geography 10.2).
In olden times, the scapegoat was a means of purification. The ritual worked like this. If a city was struck by some disaster caused by divine wrath, whether famine, or plague, or some other harmful event, they selected the ugliest man in the city and led him off to be sacrificed, as a way of purifying and restoring the city. They set their victim in the appropriate place, with cheese, barley, and dried figs in his hand. Then they struck him seven times on the penis with squills, with branches of a wild fig tree, and with other such plants. Finally they burned him to death on a fire made from timber from wild trees and scattered his ashes on the sea and for the wind to carry off, in order to purify the ailing city, as I said (Tzetzes Chiliads 5.728).
The thing that most amazed me at Methana was the ritual to counter the wind called Lips, that blows from the Saronic Gulf and blights the vine-buds. When the wind blows, a rooster with completely white feathers is chopped in two, and two men run round the vines, each holding half of the fowl. When they arrive back at their starting point, they bury it there (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.34).
Take a tortoise of the sort found in marshes and turn it upside down in your right hand, and carry it all around your vineyard. After going around, go to the middle of the vineyard and place it on the ground, upside down but still alive, with a little bit of dirt heaped up round it so that it cannot turn itself over and go away. It will not be able to, so long as the earth under its feet is hollowed out, for without something to press against, it is stuck in the same place. If you follow this procedure, your farmland and all your property will be
free from hail. Some people say that it is necessary to carry the tortoise around the farm and set it down at the sixth hour of either the day or the night (Farm Work 1.14).
Dogs were not considered entirely pure in olden times, for they were not sacrificed to any of the Olympian deities. When a dog is left at a crossroads as a meal for the earth goddess Hecate, it serves to avert and expiate evil. Puppies are sacrificed at Sparta to the war god Enyalius, the bloodiest of all deities. In Boeotia, there is a public ceremony of purification in which the populace files out of the city between the halves of a dog that has been split in two (Plutarch Roman Questions 290d).
Porphyry notes that all animals are worshipped somewhere in Egypt, and that it fits this pattern that, in the village of Anabis, a human being is worshipped and has sacrifices offered to him (On Abstinence from Killing Animals 4.9).
Some Egyptians have a tradition of worshipping a bull, the so-called Apis, while others worship goats, cats, snakes, onions, the breathings of the belly [i.e., farts, which St. Jerome specifies as being venerated at Pelusium (Commentary on Isiah 13.46)], sewers, the limbs of irrational animals, and countless other very weird things (Ps.-Clement Recognitions 5.20). This sentiment, attributed to St. Peter, is said to have made his hearers laugh, but he goes straight on to point out that the Egyptians find Greek religious practices just as absurd.
St. Clement of Alexandria himself (Protrepticus 2.39) also argues that the Greeks are no better than the Egyptians in their bizarre worship of animals. He notes, for example, the veneration of
• storks and ants in Thessaly
• weasels in Thebes
• mice in the Troad
• flies at Actium
• sheep on Samos
In the region of Daulis called Tronis, there is a shrine to the Founding Hero. The Phocians worship him with sacrifices every day. They pour the blood through a hole into the grave, but it is customary for the people themselves to eat the meat there (Pausanias Guide to Greece 10.4). Early Christians mocked this custom, but they themselves left holes in grave-slabs into which perfumes were poured.
At least in Athens, by the 5th century B.C. it was a common practice to carry small coins in one’s mouth. The placing of coins in the mouth of a dead person to pay Charon for transport across the River Styx to the Underworld was therefore presumably regarded as the continuation of an everyday custom. Even in the 4th century, silver coins were minted worth as little as an eighth of an obol (= one forty-eighth of a drachma, which was the charge for admission to the theater in Athens). Such coins, so small that they were often thrown out unnoticed in archaeological digs, were replaced by bulkier bronze equivalents.
In Elysium, the fortunate dead enjoy horse riding, gymnastics, checkers, and playing the lyre (Pindar frg. 129).
Before the Battle of Marathon, the Athenians swore that they would sacrifice a goat to Artemis for every one of the enemy that they killed. After the battle, however, they could not find enough goats, so they decided to offer her an annual sacrifice of five hundred goats, a ritual that they still observe (Xenophon Anabasis 3.2.11). Herodotus says that about 6,400 barbarians were killed, as opposed to 192 Athenians (Histories 6.117).
It is often observed during a sacrifice that even when their hearts are already lying on the altar, animals not only continue breathing and bellowing loudly, but may actually run away, dying eventually through loss of blood (Galen On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 2.4.45).
SUPERSTITION
Superstition is a dreadful thing; like water, it always seeks the lowest level (Plutarch Life of Alexander 75).
The atheist thinks there are no gods; the superstitious man wishes there were none, but believes in them against his will, for he is afraid not to believe (Plutarch On Superstition 170f).
When people see wax images at their door, or at a crossroads, or at their parents’ tomb, it is pointless trying to persuade them to make light of all such things, because they have no clear understanding of them (Plato Laws 933b).
Those who committed premeditated murder averted reprisals by cutting off parts of the victim’s body and hanging them on a string around his neck. They passed the string through under his armpits, and hence the process is called “armpitting” (Aristophanes of Byzantium frg. 78). When Hesychius repeats this information, he helpfully specifies body parts as being “for example, ears and noses.”
If a woman looks at a highly polished mirror during her menstrual period, a blood-colored cloudiness covers the surface of the mirror. It is particularly difficult to remove such stains from new mirrors (Aristotle On Dreams 459b).
On Cyprus, people cut copper into small pieces, which they then sow. When the rains come, the copper sprouts and shoots up, and they harvest it (Ps.-Aristotle On Amazing Things Heard 833a).
Since the olive tree is pure, it wants anyone who picks its fruit to be pure also and to swear that he has come from his own wife’s bed, not from someone else’s. If such conditions are met, it will bear more fruit the next season also. They say that innocent children tend the olive trees at Anazarbus in Cilicia, and that that is why olive production is so successful there (Farm Work 9.2).
How to make a barren tree produce fruit. Tighten your belt, tuck in your tunic, take up an axe or a hatchet, and rush up to the tree looking angry, as if you were going to chop it down. Someone should beg you not to chop it down, assuring you that it will produce fruit. Make a show of being persuaded to spare the tree. It will be very fruitful from then on. Empty bean pods scattered around the trunk also ensure that a tree bears fruit (Farm Work 10.83).
We should not credit the notion that Sirens exist in India that lull people to sleep and then shred them to pieces. Anyone who believes this would not hesitate to believe that, by licking his ears, snakes gave the prophet Melampus the power to understand the speech of birds. Such a person will also accept the story handed down by Democritus, that there are birds from the mixing of whose blood a snake is born, and that whoever eats the snake will understand conversations between birds (Pliny Natural History 10.137).
We avoid, especially in the morning, people who are lame in the right leg. And if anyone sees a eunuch or a monkey just as he is leaving home, he turns back, convinced that this means that everything is going to go badly for him that day (Lucian Pseudologistes 17).
It is said that a human being changes into a wolf during the festival in honor of Lycaean Zeus (i.e., Zeus the wolf-god). The change is not necessarily permanent; they say that, if he abstains from human flesh while he is a wolf, he becomes a human being again in the tenth year, but, if he has tasted human flesh, he remains a beast for ever (Pausanias Guide to Greece 8.2).
Odysseus and the Sirens.
Gello was a young girl who died prematurely. The people of Lesbos say that her ghost comes to visit children, and they blame her for their untimely deaths (Zenobius Proverbs 3.3).
Some people think that the bogey-woman Empousa is Hecate, others that she is a shape-shifting phantasm sent by Hecate. She often appears at midday, when sacrifices are being offered to the dead. Some say she has just one foot and derives her name from this [i.e., from ες (heis, “one”) and πούς (pous, “foot”). Others say that she has a donkey’s leg [deriving her variant name ’Oνοσκελίς (Onoscelis) from ὄνος (onos, “donkey”) and σκέλος (scelos, “leg”)] (Scholion to Aristophanes Frogs 293).
There is nothing remarkable if a mouse gnaws through a bag when it can’t find anything to eat; it really would be remarkable if the bag were to swallow the mouse (Bion of Borysthenes frg. 31, mocking the superstition that it is ominous if mice gnaw at man-made objects).
The astrologer Vettius Valens does not share his modern colleagues’ tendency to accentuate the positive. His outlook for the other signs of the zodiac is no sunnier than in these examples:
• People born under Capricorn are wicked and inconsistent, though they pretend to be good and sincere. They are oppressive, anxious, insomniac, partial to joking, full of b
ig schemes, prone to making mistakes, fickle, criminal, dishonest, censorious, and disgusting.
• Taurus is a thieving and shameful sign. It causes fits, excision of the uvula, carbuncles, swollen glands, choking, pain in the nostrils through injury and disease, falls from a height or from animals, broken limbs, throat tumors, mutilation, sciatica, abscesses.
• People born under Scorpio die from sword wounds to the genitals or buttocks, retention of the urine, putrefaction, choking, snakes, violence, battle, attacks by robbers or pirates, political activity, fire, impaling, creeping creatures.
(The Astrological Anthologies 11, 110, 127)
MAGIC
Practitioners of the magic arts enhanced the mystery of their profession by claiming to use rather intimidating or exotic ingredients in their potions and other charms. A papyrus (Greek Magical Papyri 12.401) reveals the quite ordinary substances that are actually meant. For example:
baboon’s tears
dill juice
blood of Hephaestus
wormwood
blood of Hestia
chamomile
blood of an eagle
wild garlic
blood of a Titan
wild lettuce
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 19