The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (12 page)

3
. Homer:
Iliad
xix. 407.

4
.
Ibid
.: i. 547; xvi. 458; viii. 407–8; xv. 17; viii. 397–404; xiv. 197–223; xv. 166.

5
. Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
xxi. 444; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
34; Homer:
Iliad
i. 399 ff. and xv. 18–22.

1
. The marital relations of Zeus and Hera reflect those of the barbarous Dorian Age, when women had been deprived of all their magical power, except that of prophecy, and come to be regarded as chattels. It is possible that the occasion on which the power of Zeus was saved only by Thetis and Briareus, after the other Olympians had conspired against him, was a palace revolution by vassal princes of the Hellenic High King, who nearly succeeded in dethroning him; and that help came from a company of loyal non-Hellenic household troops, recruited in Macedonia, Briareus’s home, and from a detachment of Magnesians, Thetis’s people. If so, the conspiracy will have been instigated by the High-priestess of Hera, whom the High King subsequently humiliated, as the myth describes.

2
. Zeus’s violation of the Earth-goddess Rhea implies that the Zeus-worshipping Hellenes took over all agricultural and funerary ceremonies. She had forbidden him to marry, in the sense that hitherto monogamy had been unknown; women took whatever lovers they pleased. His fatherhood of the Seasons, on Themis, means that the Hellenes also assumed control of the calendar: Themis (‘order’) was the Great Goddess who ordered the year of thirteen months, divided by the summer and winter solstices into two seasons. At Athens these seasons were personified
as Thallo and Carpo (originally ‘Carpho’), which mean respectively ‘sprouting’ and ‘withering’, and their temple contained an altar to the phallic Dionysus (see
27.
5
). They appear in a rock-carving at Hattusas, or Pteria, where they are twin aspects of the Lion-goddess Hepta, borne on the wings of a double-headed Sun-eagle.

3
. Charis (‘grace’) had been the Goddess in the disarming aspect she presented when the High-priestess chose the sacred king as her lover. Homer mentions two Charites – Pasithea and Cale, which seems to be a forced separation of three words:
Pasi thea cale
, ‘the Goddess who is beautiful to all men’. The two Charites, Auxo (‘increase’) and Hegemone (‘mastery’), whom the Athenians honoured, corresponded with the two Seasons. Later, the Charites were worshipped as a triad, to match the Three Fates – the Triple-goddess in her most unbending mood (see 106.
3
). That they were Zeus’s children, born to Eurynome the Creatrix, implies that the Hellenic overlord had power to dispose of all marriageable young women.

4
. The Muses (‘mountain goddesses’), originally a triad (Pausanias: ix. 19. 2), are the Triple-goddess in her orgiastic aspect. Zeus’s claim to be their father is a late one; Hesiod calls them daughters of Mother Earth and Air.

14

BIRTHS OF HERMES, APOLLO, ARTEMIS, AND DIONYSUS

A
MOROUS
Zeus lay with numerous nymphs descended from the Titans or the gods and, after the creation of man, with mortal women too; no less than four great Olympian deities were born to him out of wedlock. First, he begat Hermes on Maia, daughter of Atlas, who bore him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Next, he begat Apollo and Artemis on Leto, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, transforming himself and her into quails when they coupled;
¹
but jealous Hera sent the serpent Python to pursue Leto all over the world, and decreed that she should not be delivered in any place where the sun shone. Carried on the wings of the South Wind, Leto at last came to Ortygia, close to Delos, where she bore Artemis, who was no sooner born than she helped her mother across the narrow straits, and there, between an olive-tree and a date-palm growing on the north side of Delian Mount
Cynthus, delivered her of Apollo on the ninth day of labour. Delos, hitherto a floating island, became immovably fixed in the sea and, by decree, no one is now allowed either to be born or to die there: sick folk and pregnant women are ferried over to Ortygia instead.
²

b
. The mother of Zeus’s son Dionysus is variously named: some say that she was Demeter, or Io;
³
some name her Dione; some, Persephone, with whom Zeus coupled in the likeness of a serpent; and some, Lethe.
⁴

c
. But the common story runs as follows. Zeus, disguised as a mortal, had a secret love affair with Semele (‘moon’), daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes, and jealous Hera, disguising herself as an old neighbour, advised Semele, then already six months with child, to make her mysterious lover a request: that he would no longer deceive her, but reveal himself in his true nature and form. How, otherwise, could she know that he was not a monster? Semele followed this advice and, when Zeus refused her plea, denied him further access to her bed. Then, in anger, he appeared as thunder and lightning, and she was consumed. But Hermes saved her six-months son; sewed him up inside Zeus’s thigh, to mature there for three months longer; and, in due course of time, delivered him. Thus Dionysus is called ‘twice-born’, or ‘the child of the double door’.
⁵

1
. Hesiod:
Theogony
918; Apollodorus: i. 4. 1; Aristophanes:
Birds
870; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
iii. 72.

2
.
Homeric Hymn to Apollo
14 ff.; Hyginus:
Fabula
140; Aelian:
Varia Historia
v. 4; Thucydides: iii. 104; Strabo: x. 5.5.

3
. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 67 and 74; iv. 4.

4
. Scholiast on Pindar’s
Pythian Odes
iii. 177;
Orphic Fragment
59; Plutarch:
Symposiacs
vii. 5.

5
. Apollodorus: iii. 4. 3; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1137.

1
. Zeus’s rapes apparently refer to Hellenic conquests of the goddess’s ancient shrines, such as that on Mount Cyllene; his marriages, to an ancient custom of giving the title ‘Zeus’ to the sacred king of the oak cult. Hermes, his son by the rape of Maia – a title of the Earth-goddess as Crone – was originally not a god, but the totemistic virtue of a phallic pillar, or cairn. Such pillars were the centre of an orgiastic dance in the goddess’s honour.

2
. One component in Apollo’s godhead seems to have been an oracular mouse – Apollo Smintheus (‘Mouse-Apollo’) is among his earliest titles (see 158.
2
) – consulted in a shrine of the Great Goddess, which perhaps
explains why he was born where the sun never shone, namely underground. Mice were associated with disease and its cure, and the Hellenes therefore worshipped Apollo as a god of medicine and prophecy; afterwards saying that he was born under an olive-tree and a date-palm on the north side of a mountain. They called him a twin-brother of Artemis Goddess of Childbirth, and made his mother Leto – the daughter of the Titans Phoebe (‘moon’) and Coeus (‘intelligence’) – who was known in Egypt and Palestine as Lat, fertility-goddess of the date-palm and olive: hence her conveyance to Greece by a South Wind. In Italy she became Latona (‘Queen Lat’). Her quarrel with Hera suggests a conflict between early immigrants from Palestine and native tribes who worshipped a different Earth-goddess; the mouse cult, which she seems to have brought with her, was well established in Palestine (i
Samuel
vi. 4 and
Isaiah
lxvi. 17). Python’s pursuit of Apollo recalls the use of snakes in Greek and Roman houses to keep down mice. But Apollo was also the ghost of the sacred king who had eaten the apple – the word
Apollo
may be derived from the root
abol
, ‘apple’, rather than from
apollunai
, ‘destroy’, which is the usual view.

3
. Artemis, originally an orgiastic goddess, had the lascivious quail as her sacred bird. Flocks of quail will have made Ortygia a resting-place on their way north during the spring migration. The story that Delos, Apollo’s birthplace, had hitherto been a floating island (see
43.
4
) may be a misunderstanding of a record that his birthplace was now officially fixed: since in Homer (
Iliad
iv. 101) he is called Lycegenes, ‘born in Lycia’; and the Ephesians boasted that he was born at Ortygia near Ephesus (Tacitus:
Annals
iii. 61). Both the Boeotian Tegyrans and the Attic Zosterans also claimed him as a native son (Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Tegyra).

4
. Dionysus began, probably, as a type of sacred king whom the goddess ritually killed with a thunderbolt in the seventh month from the winter solstice, and whom her priestesses devoured (see
27.
3
). This explains his mothers: Dione, the Oak-goddess; Io and Demeter, Corn-goddesses; and Persephone, Death-goddess. Plutarch, when calling him ‘Dionysus, a son of Lethe (“forgetfulness”)’, refers to his later aspect as God of the Vine.

5
. The story of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, seems to record the summary action taken by Hellenese of Boeotia in ending the tradition of royal sacrifice: Olympian Zeus asserts his power, takes the doomed king under his own protection, and destroys the goddess with her own thunderbolt. Dionysus thus becomes an immortal, after rebirth from his immortal father. Semele was worshipped at Athens during the
Lenaea
, the Festival of the Wild Women, when a yearly bull, representing Dionysus, was cut into nine pieces and sacrificed to her: one piece being burned, the
remainder eaten raw by the worshippers.
Semele
is usually explained as a form of Selene (‘moon’), and nine was the traditional number of orgiastic moon-priestesses who took part in such feasts – nine such are shown dancing around the sacred king in a cave painting at Cogul, and nine more killed and devoured St Samson of Dol’s acolyte in medieval times.

15

THE BIRTH OF EROS

S
OME
argue that Eros, hatched from the world-egg, was the first of the gods since, without him, none of the rest could have been born; they make him coeval with Mother Earth and Tartarus, and deny that he had any father or mother, unless it were Eileithyia, Goddess of Childbirth.
¹

b
. Others hold that he was Aphrodite’s son by Hermes, or by Ares, or by her own father, Zeus; or the son of Iris by the West Wind. He was a wild boy, who showed no respect for age or station but flew about on golden wings, shooting barbed arrows at random or wantonly setting hearts on fire with his dreadful torches.
²