The Twelve Olympians

by Dr Charles T. Seltman

  Athene’s girlhood friendship with the nymph Chariklo and the fate that came to Teiresias, who saw them bathing, has already been told. But now another strange story must be mentioned concerning an attempt to get Hephaistos as a husband for Athene. The proposition of a marriage between his wife’s parthenogenetic son and his own ‘phrenetictic’ daughter seemed to Zeus a sensible way of stabilising the family; therefore, when Hephaistos asked the ‘Father of gods and men’ for the hand of his daughter, Zeus gave a ready consent. Yet the plan miscarried either because of the reluctance of Athene or because of the clumsiness of Hephaistos. She had been given leave by her father to “repulse his attentions”. They struggled together, and his seed fell on the earth, which thus became fertile and in due season produced a boy. Athene took charge of the infant, hid him in a chest guarded by serpents and gave it to the daughters of Kekrops, King of Athens, to keep, with instructions not to open it. They disobeyed, and at the sight of the serpents they were so terrified that they leapt off the Acropolis and so perished. The child was called Erichthonios and remained a favourite of Athene.{32}

  Another episode in the myth concerns the Judgment of Paris, when Athene was a competitor against Hera{33} and Aphrodite for the prize of beauty. Her failure to win it was held in some measure responsible for her hostility to Trojans and her partiality for Greek heroes in the Trojan War. At any rate, of all the Greek kings and princes of that day, Odysseus was evidently her favourite. The tendency among gods to oppose one another was not displeasing to mortals, who were flattered by the belief that a god could think of a mortal man as having some importance. Thus the final story, the contest of Athene and Poseidon, proved to be a myth which could gratify the inhabitants of Athens. The deities strove for the ownership of the land, performing miracles with the ancient Heroes of Attica present as judges. Poseidon, striking the Acropolis rock with his trident, created a salt spring of water, whence there sprang a horse. Athene smote the rock with her spear and created the olive-tree, which was adjudged the more valuable gift.

  The first episode in the myth of Athene—her birth from the brain of Zeus in the presence of a brave company of gods—filled the whole gable at the east end of the Athenian Parthenon. The last episode—the contest, in the presence of the Heroes of the land, between Athene and Poseidon for the ownership of Attica—filled the whole gable at the west end. The great frieze of the Parthenon depicted that famous quadrennial event founded in the goddess’s honour, the Panathenaic Procession; and in the centre of the east end of the frieze on the temple there were carved the Twelve Olympian Gods, so arranged that the central places of honour were given to two pairs of gods: on the one hand Zeus and Hera, and on the other hand their children, Athene and Hephaistos. All this may be seen in the British Museum when a visit is paid to the Elgin Marbles.

  On the whole these are satisfactory myths, for not only do they hold a gay tale full of symbolism and psychology, but they also contain the three essentials of mythological form.

  (i) There is more than one strand of symbolism in the story. Firstly, that Athene came forth from the mind of Zeus does make her the divine embodiment of God’s Wisdom. Her real successor in Christian mythology is not the ‘Virgin Mother of God, Terrible, Hearkening-to-prayer’, who succeeded to her temple on the Acropolis; but Saint Sophia, or Hagia Sophia, or ‘the Holy Wisdom’ of God. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that the two most sublime, most perfect creations that man as an architect has ever made are the Parthenon upon the Athenian rock and the Church of Saint Sophia beside the Golden Horn of Constantinople. And both are consecrated to the Holy Wisdom of God.

  But sophia, the Greek word, is a word which calls for further examination. What precisely did it mean?

  Until about 400 B.C. sophia meant adroitness of hand and brain; therefore ‘skill’. The person who possesses sophia is sophos, and is accordingly an expert. It means ‘knowingness’ before it begins to mean ‘wisdom’. After 400 B.C. it begins to apply especially to the expert in thinking—the philosopher, the ‘liker of thinking’. And from then on sophia tends to become specialised as ‘wisdom But the sense of ‘knowingness’ is never quite absent from the word. “What a knowing fellow you are!” has more than one meaning.

  So Athene sprung from the brain of Zeus is the symbol and the patroness of sophia, which means ‘skill-plus-wisdom’, and therefore is the protectress of every man and woman who is definitely keen on and good at his or her job. That means the potter and the spinner, the goldsmith and the weaver, the cobbler and the sempstress, the mason and the miller, the carpenter and the cook; but also the soldier, the strategist, the statesman, the schoolmaster, and finally the philosopher. In fact, for Man the city-dweller, Man the member of the prosperous proletariat, Man whom Aristotle called “a political animal”, Athene is the perfect divine patroness. Therefore she attained her fullest development in the best organised of all Greek city-states—Athens. There she had, besides the other titles already set down, the epithets ergane and promachos—that is, ‘Athene the Worker’ and ‘Frontline Athene’—the former unarmed, the latter in the panoply of battle.

  (ii) The psychology behind the myth of the goddess is pleasantly expressed, illustrating as it does several subtleties of human response or reaction to a number of situations. There is Zeus, mightily jealous and upset because his queen has produced a child really and truly all by herself. There is Athene, growing up and aware of herself mirrored in the unruffled pool, aware of her good looks and of the fearful mistake of playing the flutes. Then again there is the problem story of her and Hephaistos: two people united by a common interest, united by their work and their pride in exquisite craftsmanship, utterly suited to one another but for a fortuitous and unfortunate sexual incompatibility. That is what one would be saying if they were mortals instead of gods; and one would have deplored the boorish clumsiness of the artisan ‘god of the smithy’. But as the myth stands, since Athene and Hephaistos still remained partners in Athens, you are left guessing whether they were just work-mates or more closely linked. Lastly, there is the well-understood psychology of the woman of independence with a job of her own, who nevertheless intensely desires to have a child—but without trouble! And there are to be nurses! Pallas Athene achieved this in the most satisfactory manner by the adoption of Erichthonios, who, in the given circumstances, might be considered her child.

  (iii) Like the Zeus myth, this one also contains the three essentials of mythological form, which are birth, mating, and death; but they are all presented in strange and unusual fashion, the death part being supplied by the suicide of the daughters of Kekrops—the nurses of the infant Erichthonios.

  If the story of Athene is, like several other myths, in its simplicity rather earthy, bluff, and odd, one must remember that it had scarcely any relation to the dignified cult of the goddess, or to the emotional love which men could give to her divinity.

  V—HERMES

  “THE non-criminal classes have always been apt,” as The Times once declared,{34} “to take a rather romantic view of the malefactors who prey upon them.” Robin Hood and Dick Turpin are not quite ‘saints’, but they surely are heroes. Today in Greece it is a fine breadth of a letter that distinguishes between kleptēs, the thief or pickpocket, and klephtēs, the brigand or guerrilla, and this still encourages among non-criminal urban classes an almost tolerant attitude towards the romantic mountain ‘Kleft’. But what is too easily overlooked is that both the pickpocket and the brigand sometimes say their prayers and often feel the need of supernatural aid in their enterprises against people whom they regard as anti-social plutocrats.

  It would, indeed, be unwise to regard divine patronage of thieving as something peculiar to the ancient Greek world, because there is adequate evidence of a similar phenomenon in much later times. A legend was told in Winchester concerning a certain thief who was about to be hanged for his crimes; but, owing to his great devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, she appeared and held him up by his feet so that he escaped hanging
. In the Lady Chapel at the east end of Winchester Cathedral there was painted between 1486 and 1498 a series of pictures showing miracles of the Virgin, and this episode of the thief, her devoted worshipper, is among them.

  Whosoever retains a memory of some lesson learnt in school about ancient Greek beliefs is apt to recall the fact that there was a ‘god of thieves’ called Hermes and to reflect in consequence upon the ‘immoral’ nature of Greek religion. A readiness to aid thieves and brigands was unquestionably one of that god’s functions; but it was only one of many, and it promptly raises the point that he was once a god of an earlier, conquered, and suppressed body of people who felt every justification in taking what they could—like Taffy the Welshman—from their oppressors. Nevertheless, in the classical age Hermes is discovered to be a full Olympian, a son of Zeus, and a younger brother of Apollo. His great variety of functions and his double origin make him a most genial and fascinating deity.

  It is now becoming apparent that, just as in Christian theology there are always two distinct influences, one Jewish, the other Greek, so in Pagan theology—that is to say, the lore about Pagan gods—there are for all the most important Olympian deities two distinct influences, one pre-Hellenic, the other Hellenic. This is certainly true of Hermes, whose name is Greek, but whose nature and functions are mainly derived from the beliefs of earlier folk. He appears to emerge as a pastoral god and a guide to travellers{35} for the reason that in remote antiquity he is the spirit immanent in stone-heaps—such a spirit of the cairn as is still an occasional feature of Northern European belief. The stone-heaps are put up gradually by shepherds as landmarks, and in unexplored country are of the greatest help to wayfarers. Mountain country may abound in wild animals, which such a spirit may be able to control. When the Greek-speaking peoples came down into the peninsula and observed these friendly heaps, they referred to each one as herma, meaning ‘stone-heap’ in their language, or as hermaios lophos, meaning ‘stone-heap mound’. They did not know the name which the pre-Hellenic inhabitants gave to their god; and the name—as often in similar cases elsewhere—was doubtless withheld from them, therefore they could only refer to the god as ‘Hermes’, or, in the Laconian dialect which some of them spoke, as ‘Hermanos’, which being translated must mean ‘He of the stone-heap’, or familiarly, ‘Old Heapy’. A large grey stone embedded in a stone-heap was discovered on a hill-side in Laconia, and it bears in letters of the sixth century B.C. the god’s name ‘Hermanos’.{36}

  As an alternative name the Greeks constantly referred to the god simply as Diaktoros, which means ‘the Guide’, and coupled with this another epithet Argeiphontes, or ‘Argos-killer’. Now Argos is a name constantly given to dogs; and, since Hermes also bears as variants similar epithets meaning ‘dog-throttler’, this points to his function as a spirit protecting the lonely wayfarer from the savage dogs which are still a bane to travellers in Greece today. But he who can protect a man from dogs can also save him from more terrible animals: wild boar, wolves, and lions. Now the incoming Greeks also encountered another somewhat different god who was worshipped in Minoan Crete and who was also associated with stone-heaps, and especially with domination over wild creatures. This ‘Master of Animals’ was in some way associated—either as lover, son, brother, or all three—with the Great Goddess whose worship prevailed in Asia and in Crete, and one of her most important aspects was that of ‘Mistress of Wild Beasts’, concerning whom more must later be told. The Greeks appear to have made a synthesis of this Minoan ‘Master of Animals’ with the mainland pastoral god, the guide to travellers whom they named Hermes. Presently other interesting traits purely Greek in origin began to accumulate, adding to the subtlety and variety of a most friendly divine personality.

  Hermes in the Iliad, is a divine guide to the living; by the time the end of the Odyssey is reached he has begun to conduct souls on their last journey, and that function of guide to the dead became, in classical times, a most important one. Again, he never appears as a messenger in the Iliad, because it was Iris who, as servant of Zeus, filled that role. But in the Odyssey the change takes place, and he is presently a messenger frequently despatched by Zeus to men. From this notion there grew the concept of Hermes as the divine herald, and he is represented in art as carrying the herald’s staff, the caduceus, made of a rod with forked twigs that are twisted into a shape like a figure ‘8’ left open at the top. Himself, as the divine herald, becomes the god of heralds, and therefore of those who set a pause to war, bringing armistice and then peace. Peace revives or leads to trade, restoring prosperity to the marketplace, and he is now chief deity of the market and of business. Yet it is in this very market—where not only customers but also commercial rivals soon start to impute to certain traders thievish proclivities—that thievishly inclined persons (alternatively described as ‘really live business men’) need a god to pray to and to give them protection. Hermes is the only answer; especially because, long before urban life developed, he had already been the god of the older race of peasantry in Arcadia and adjoining places, where the down-trodden ‘natives’ sought his help in such raids as they could make on the cattle and chattels of their oppressors. After all, it depends in these cases entirely upon which side we are taking whether we call a man a thief or a social benefactor. This makes a long catalogue of Hermes’ functions and of matters for his divine concern, and it is surely appropriate that as god of business he should be the busiest of deities. But there is more to come.

  Nowadays one of the first things which a good man of business contemplates is insurance, that is to say an effort to give to family life some sort of security and to the home itself some kind of protection. Anything like ‘policies’ financially arranged was far away indeed, for the civilised Greek world really held a more slender sense of security than does ours, and there was nothing for it but to put your faith in some god—the kindlier the better—and hope for his benevolence. But the civilised world was much less inhibited, and therefore much more courageous, than ours of today. The importance of fertility for crops and herds and for humanity was something which must so obviously be emphasised with complete frankness that no Greek could think of it as a matter for unseemly sniggers. When we come to examine, in a later chapter, the history of the incoming worship of Dionysos, youngest of the Twelve Olympians, we shall find that his most serious impact made itself felt upon the larger urban communities of the Greeks early in the sixth century B.C. That powerful and alarming god, imported from more simple Northern neighbours of the Greeks, being essentially a god of fertility, was sometimes represented as a squared wooden stump with a mask on top for a face and a phallus attached half-way down it. In Athens and in a number of other cities this crude but honest image appears to have been taken over from Dionysos by the more sophisticated Hermes. One may venture a guess that, while the conspicuous symbol of human fertility was highly respected, men inclined to associate it with a god who, in their view, possessed far greater stability, reliability, and familiarity with the economics of town life than did the wild new god from beyond the Hellenic regions. Be that as it may, we find that a custom dating from before the mid-sixth century soon spread, and that at the entrance to each public building and beside the front-door of each private house there was set up a stone pilaster, square in section with rough stumps for arms, a phallus in the centre, and a formal bearded head, meant to present Hermes, on top of it, and that this object was called a ‘Herm’. Symbolically it meant the best of good luck. Hermes, who in the countryside could give increase of flocks and herds, could assuredly enhance the fertility of the household. As god of thieves, was he not the best of all deities to keep the thieves away—provided, of course, you wooed him with prayers and gifts? As god of the marketplace and trade, his benevolence to your household was much to be desired, and his image stood almost as a token of insurance against all harm that threatened your family and your residence. Meanwhile, out on your country estate, large or small, to which you all moved in the hot weather, othe
r Herms of the very same type were there as tokens of a god’s goodwill. And it is to be observed that when a death occurred in the family it was this same Hermes on whom you relied to conduct the loved soul on an untroubled journey. He is constantly shown on Athenian painted funeral vases as the soul’s guide to the other world.

  Two more activities became his concern during the classical age. Hermes was thought of as the god of orators and the general patron of men of letters, this being perhaps a natural development from the herald, to whom the fine voice and persuasive tongue were assets, as, of course, they also were to the successful trader and man of affairs. Lastly, Hermes became a patron of athletic games and exercises. The line of thought here was perhaps as follows: the god of fertility is a deity of good luck, which is needed by athletes who compete against one another; and, as these are the young men whose training is an essential part of Greek education, Hermes, too, is commonly represented from the mid-fifth century onward as a young athletic type. But for more than a century before this it was customary to represent him as somewhat older and bearded, as he appears on a superb bronze statuette (Plate III) from Peloponnesus made about 500 B.C. and now in Boston. Hermes the Guide is dressed as a traveller; his long hair protects the back of his neck, and he wears a hat of felt and a short garment buttoned on the shoulders and belted at the waist, while his high, buttoned shoes have wings attached to show him as the divine messenger. Tucked under the left arm of the god of flocks and herds is a contented ram, whose fore-legs are held in his left hand. In his right, now empty, he held the caduceus—the herald’s staff.