The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (18 page)

4
. The Moon-goddess Brizo (‘soother’) of Delos, indistinguishable from Leto, may be identified with the Hyperborean Triple-goddess Brigit, who became Christianized as St Brigit, or St Bride. Brigit was patroness of all the arts, and Apollo followed her example. The attempt
on Leto by the giant Tityus suggests an abortive rising by the mountaineers of Phocis against the invaders.

5
. Apollo’s victories over Marsyas and Pan commemorate the Hellenic conquests of Phrygia and Arcadia, and the consequent supersession in those regions of wind instruments by stringed ones, except among the peasantry. Masyas’s punishment may refer to the ritual flaying of a sacred king – as Athene stripped Pallas of his magical aegis (see
9.
a
) – or the removal of the entire bark from an alder-shoot, to make a shepherd’s pipe, the alder being personified as a god or demi-god (see
28.
1
and
57.
1
). Apollo was claimed as an ancestor of the Dorian Greeks, and of the Milesians, who paid him especial honours. The Corybantes, dancers at the Winter Solstice festival, were called his children by Thalia the Muse, because he was god of Music.

6
. His pursuit of Daphne the Mountain-nymph, daughter of the river Peneius, and priestess of Mother Earth, refers apparently to the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene (‘bloody one’) was worshipped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads (see
46.
2
and
51.
2
). After suppressing the college – Plutarch’s account suggests that the priestesses fled to Crete, where the Moon-goddess was called Pasiphaë (see
88.
e
) – Apollo took over the laurel which, afterwards, only the Pythoness might chew. Daphoene will have been mare-headed at Tempe, as at Phigalia (see
16.
5
); Leucippus (‘white horse’) was the sacred king of the local horse cult, annually torn in pieces by the wild women, who bathed after his murder to purify themselves, not before (see
22.
1
and 150.
1
).

7
. Apollo’s seduction of Dryope on Oeta perhaps records the local supersession of an oak cult by a cult of Apollo, to whom the poplar was sacred (see
42.
d
); as does his seduction of Aria. His tortoise disguise is a reference to the lyre he had bought from Hermes (see
17.
d
). Phthia’s name suggests that she was an autumnal aspect of the goddess. The unsuccessful attempt on Marpessa (‘snatcher’), seems to record Apollo’s failure to seize a Messenian shrine : that of the Grain-goddess as Sow (see
74.
4
). Apollo’s servitude to Admetus of Pherae may recall a historical event: the humiliation of the Apollonian priesthood in punishment for their massacre of a pre-Hellenic smith-guild which had enjoyed Zeus’s protection.

8
. The myth of Hyacinthus, which seems at first sight no more than a sentimental fable told to explain the mark on the Greek hyacinth (see 165.
j
and
2
) concerns the Cretan Flower-hero Hyacinthus (see 159.
4
), also apparently called Narcissus (see
85.
2
), whose worship was introduced into Mycenaean Greece, and who named the later summer month of Hyacinthius in Crete, Rhodes, Cos, Thera, and at Sparta. Dorian Apollo usurped Hyacinthus’s name at Tarentum, where he had a hero
tomb (Polybius: viii. 30); and at Amyclae, a Mycenaean city, another ‘tomb of Hyacinthus’ became the foundation of Apollo’s throne. Apollo was an immortal by this time, Hyacinthus reigned only for a season: his death by a discus recalls that of his nephew Acrisius (see
73.
3
).

9
. Coronis (‘crow’), mother of Asclepius by Apollo, was probably a title of Athene’s (see
25.
5
); but the Athenians always denied that she had children, and disguised the myth (see
50.
b
).

10
. In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lute were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet (see
52.
8
), given mystical significance, and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, whose Corinthian cult had been taken over by Solar Zeus; and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.

11
. Cicero, in his essay
On the Nature of the Gods
(iii. 23), makes Apollo son of Leto only the fourth of an ancient series: he distinguishes Apollo son of Hephaestus, Apollo the father of the Cretan Corybantes, and the Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws.

12
. Apollo’s killing of the Python is not, however, so simple a myth as at first appears, because the stone
omphalos
on which the Pythoness sat was traditionally the tomb of the hero incarnate in the serpent, whose oracles she delivered (Hesychius
sub
Archus’s Mound; Varro:
On the Latin Languages
vii. 17). The Hellenic priest of Apollo usurped the functions of the sacred king who, legitimately and ceremonially, had always killed his predecessor, the hero. This is proved by the Stepteria rite recorded in Plutarch’s
Why Oracles Are Silent
(15). Every ninth year a hut representing a king’s dwelling was built on the threshing floor at Delphi and a night attack suddenly made on it by… [
here there is a gap in the account
]… The table of first-fruits was overturned, the hut set on fire, and the torch-men fled from the sanctuary without looking behind them. Afterwards the youth who had taken part in the deed went to Tempe for purification, whence he returned in triumph, crowned and carrying a laurel branch.

13
. The sudden concerted assault on the inmate of the hut recalls the mysterious murder of Romulus by his companions. It also recalls the yearly Buphonia sacrifice at Athens when the priests who had killed the Zeus-ox with a double-axe, fled without looking behind them; then ate the flesh at a communal feast (see
53.
7
), staged a mimic resurrection of the ox, and brought up the axe for trial on a charge of sacrilege.

14
. At Delphi, as at Cnossus, the sacred king must have reigned until the ninth year (see
88.
6
). The boy went to Tempe doubtless because the Apollo cult had originated there.

22

ARTEMIS’S NATURE AND DEEDS

A
RTEMIS
, Apollo’s sister, goes armed with bow and arrows and, like him, has the power both to send plagues or sudden death among mortals, and to heal them. She is the protectress of little children, and of all sucking animals, but she also loves the chase, especially that of stags.

b
. One day, while she was still a three-year-old child, her father Zeus, on whose knees she was sitting, asked her what presents she would like. Artemis answered at once: ‘Pray give me eternal virginity; as many names as my brother Apollo; a bow and arrows like his; the office of bringing light; a saffron hunting tunic with a red hem reaching to my knees; sixty young ocean nymphs, all of the same age, as my maids of honour; twenty river nymphs from Amnisus in Crete, to take care of my buskins and feed my hounds when I am not out shooting; all the mountains in the world; and, lastly, any city you care to choose for me, but one will be enough, because I intend to live on mountains most of the time. Unfortunately, women in labour will often be invoking me, since my mother Leto carried and bore me without pains, and the Fates have therefore made me patroness of childbirth.’
¹

c
. She stretched up for Zeus’s beard, and he smiled proudly, saying: ‘With children like you, I need not fear Hera’s jealous anger! You shall have all this, and more besides: not one, but thirty cities, and a share in many others, both on the mainland and in the archipelago; and I appoint you guardian of their roads and harbours.’
²

d
. Artemis thanked him, sprang from his knee, and went first to Mount Leucus in Crete, and next to the Ocean stream, where she chose numerous nine-year-old nymphs for her attendants; their mothers were delighted to let them go.
³
On Hephaestus’s invitation, she then visited the Cyclopes on the Island of Lipara, and found them hammering away at a horse-trough for Poseidon. Brontes, who had been instructed to make whatever she wanted, took her on his knee; but, disliking his endearments, she tore a handful of hair from his chest, where a bald patch remained to the day of his death; anyone might have supposed that he had the mange. The nymphs were terrified at the wild
appearance of the Cyclopes, and at the din of their smithy – well they might be, for whenever a little girl is disobedient her mother threatens her with Brontes, Arges, or Steropes. But Artemis boldly told them to abandon Poseidon’s trough for a while, and make her a silver bow, with a quiverful of arrows, in return for which they should eat the first prey she brought down.
⁴
With these weapons she went to Arcadia, where Pan was engaged in cutting up a lynx to feed his bitches and their whelps. He gave her three lop-eared hounds, two parti-coloured and one spotted, together capable of dragging live lions back to their kennels; and seven swift hounds from Sparta.
⁵

e
. Having captured alive two couple of horned hinds, she harnessed them to a golden chariot with golden bits, and drove north over Thracian Mount Haemus. She cut her first pine torch on Mysian Olympus, and lit it at the cinders of a lightning-struck tree. She tried her silver bow four times: her first two targets were trees; her third, a wild beast; her fourth, a city of unjust men.
⁶

f
. Then she returned to Greece, where the Amnisian nymphs unyoked her hinds, rubbed them down, fed them on the same quick-growing trefoil, from Hera’s pasture, which the steeds of Zeus eat, and watered them from golden troughs.
⁷

g
. Once the River-god Alpheius, son of Thetis, dared fall in love with Artemis and pursue her across Greece; but she came to Letrini in Elis (or, some say, as far as the island of Ortygia near Syracuse), where she daubed her face, and those of all her nymphs, with white mud, so that she became indistinguishable from the rest of the company. Alpheius was forced to retire, pursued by mocking laughter.
⁸

h
. Artemis requires the same perfect chastity from her companions as she practises herself. When Zeus had seduced one of them, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis noticed that she was with child. Changing her into a bear, she shouted to the pack, and Callisto would have been hunted to death had she not been caught up to Heaven by Zeus who, later, set her image among the stars. But some say that Zeus himself changed Callisto into a bear, and that jealous Hera arranged for Artemis to chase her in error. Callisto’s child, Arcas, was saved, and became the ancestor of the Arcadians.
⁹

i
. On another occasion, Actaeon, son of Aristaeus, stood leaning against a rock near Orchomenus when he happened to see Artemis bathing in a stream not far off, and stayed to watch. Lest he should afterwards dare boast to his companions that she had displayed herself
naked in his presence, she changed him into a stag and, with his own pack of fifty hounds, tore him to pieces.
¹⁰

1
. Callimachus:
Hymn to Artemis
1 ff.

2
.
Ibid
.: 26 ff.

3
.
Ibid
.: 40 ff.

4
.
Ibid
.: 47 ff.

5
.
Ibid
.: 69 ff.