The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (48 page)

62

LEDA

S
OME
say that when Zeus fell in love with Nemesis, she fled from him into the water and became a fish; he pursued her as a beaver [?], ploughing up the waves. She leaped ashore, and transformed herself into this wild beast or that, but could not shake Zeus off, because he borrowed the form of even fiercer and swifter beasts. At last she took to the air as a wild goose; he became a swan, and trod her triumphantly at Rhamnus in Attica. Nemesis shook her feathers resignedly, and came to Sparta, where Leda, wife of King Tyndareus, presently found a hyacinth-coloured egg lying in a marsh, which she brought home and hid in a chest: from it Helen of Troy was hatched.
¹
But some say that this egg dropped from the moon, like the egg that, in ancient times, plunged into the river Euphrates and, being towed ashore by fishes and hatched by doves, broke open to reveal the Syrian Goddess of Love.
²

b
. Others say that Zeus, pretending to be a swan pursued by an eagle, took refuge in Nemesis’s bosom, where he ravished her and that, in due process of time, she laid an egg, which Hermes threw between Leda’s thighs, as she sat on a stool with her legs apart. Thus Leda gave birth to Helen, and Zeus placed the images of Swan and Eagle in the Heavens, to commemorate this ruse.
³

c
. The most usual account, however, is that it was Leda herself with whom Zeus companied in the form of a swan beside the river Eurotas; that she laid an egg from which were hatched Helen, Castor, and Polydeuces; and that she was consequently deified as the goddess
Nemesis.
⁴
Now, Leda’s husband Tyndareus had also lain with her the same night and, though some hold that all these three were Zeus’s children – and Clytaemnestra too, who had been hatched, with Helen, from a second egg – others record that Helen alone was a daughter of Zeus, and that Castor and Polydeuces were Tyndareus’s sons;
⁵
others again, that Castor and Clytaemnestra were children of Tyndareus, while Helen and Polydeuces were children of Zeus.
⁶

1
. Athenaeus, quoting Homer’s
Cypria
p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 7; Sappho:
Fragment
105; Pausanias: i. 33. 7; Eratosthenes:
Catasterismoi
25.

2
. Athenaeus: 57 f.; Plutarch:
Symposiacs
ii. 3. 3; Hyginus:
Fabula
197.

3
. Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 8.

4
. Lactantius: i. 21; Hyginus:
Fabula
77; First Vatican Mythographer: 78 and 204.

5
. Homer:
Odyssey
xi. 299;
Iliad
iii. 426; Euripides:
Helena
254, 1497 and 1680.

6
. Pindar:
Nemean Odes
x. 80; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 6–7.

1
. Nemesis was the Moon-goddess as Nymph (see
32.
2
) and, in the earliest form of the love-chase myth, she pursued the sacred king through his seasonal changes of hare, fish, bee, and mouse – or hare, fish, bird, and grain of wheat – and finally devoured him. With the victory of the patriarchal system, the chase was reversed: the goddess now fled from Zeus, as in the English ballad of the Coal-black Smith (see
89.
2
). She had changed into an otter or beaver to pursue the fish, and Castor’s name (‘beaver’) is clearly a survival of this myth, whereas that of Polydeuces (‘much sweet wine’) records the character of the festivities during which the chase took place.

2
.
Lada
is said to be the Lycian (i.e. Cretan) word for ‘woman’, and Leda was the goddess Latona, or Leto, or Lat, who bore Apollo and Artemis at Delos (see
14.
2
). The hyacinth-coloured egg recalls the blood-red Easter egg of the Druids, called the
glain
, for which they searched every year by the seashore; in Celtic myth it was laid by the goddess as sea-serpent. The story of its being thrown between Leda’s thighs may have been deduced from a picture of the goddess seated on the birth-stool, with Apollo’s head protruding from her womb.

3
. Helen [a] and Helle, or Selene, are local variants of the Moon-goddess (see
43.
1
;
70.
8
; and 159. 1), whose identity with Lucian’s Syrian goddess is emphasized by Hyginus. But Hyginus’s account is confused: it was the goddess herself who laid the world-egg after coupling with the serpent
Ophion, and who hatched it on the waters, adopting the form of a dove. She herself rose from the Void (see
1.
a
). Helen had two temples near Sparta: one at Therapnae, built on a Mycenaean site; another at Dendra, connected with a tree cult, as her Rhodian shrine also was (see
88.
10
). Pollux (x. 191) mentions a Spartan festival called the Helenephoria, closely resembling Athene’s Thesmophoria at Athens (see
48.
b
), during which certain unmentionable objects were carried in a special basket called a
helene
; such a basket Helen herself carries in reliefs showing her accompanied by the Dioscuri. The objects may have been phallic emblems; she was an orgiastic goddess.

4
. Zeus tricked Nemesis, the goddess of the Peloponnesian swan cult, by appealing to her pity, exactly as he had tricked Hera of the Cretan cuckoo cult (see
12.
a
). This myth refers, it seems, to the arrival at Cretan or Pelasgian cities of Hellenic warriors who, to begin with, paid homage to the Great Goddess and provided her priestesses with obedient consorts, but eventually wrested the supreme sovereignty from her.

63

IXION

I
XION
, a son of Phlegyas, the Lapith king, agreed to marry Dia, daughter of Eioneus, promising rich bridal gifts and inviting Eioneus to a banquet; but had laid a pitfall in front of the palace, with a great charcoal fire underneath, into which the unsuspecting Eioneus fell and was burned.

b
. Though the lesser gods thought this a heinous deed, and refused to purify Ixion, Zeus, having behaved equally ill himself when in love, not only purified him but brought him to eat at his table.

c
. Ixion was ungrateful, and planned to seduce Hera who, he guessed, would be glad of a chance to revenge herself on Zeus for his frequent unfaithfulness. Zeus, however, reading Ixion’s intentions, shaped a cloud into a false Hera with whom Ixion, being too far gone in drink to notice the deception, duly took his pleasure. He was surprised in the act by Zeus, who ordered Hermes to scourge him mercilessly until he repeated the words: ‘Benefactors deserve honour’, and then bind him to a fiery wheel which rolled without cease through the sky.

d
. The false Hera, afterwards called Nephele, bore Ixion the outcast
child Centaurus who, when he grew to manhood, is said to have sired horse-centaurs on Magnesian mares, of whom the most celebrated was the learned Cheiron.
¹

1
. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 62; Hyginus:
Fabulae
33 and 62; Pindar:
Pythian Odes
ii. 33–89, with scholiast; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
6; Scholiast on Euripides’s
Phoenician Women
1185.

1
. Ixion’s name, formed from
ischys
(‘strength’) and
io
(‘moon’) (see
52.
2
), also suggests
ixias
(‘mistletoe’). As an oak-king with mistletoe genitals (see
50.
2
), representing the thunder-god, he ritually married the rain-making Moon-goddess; and was then scourged, so that his blood and sperm would fructify the earth (see 116.
4
), beheaded with an axe, emasculated, spread-eagled to a tree, and roasted; after which his kinsmen ate him sacramentally.
Eion
is the Homeric epithet for a river; but Dia’s father is called Deioneus, meaning ‘ravager’, as well as Eioneus.

2
. The Moon-goddess of the oak-cult was known as Dia (‘of the sky’), a title of the Dodonan Oak-goddess (see
51.
1
) and therefore of Zeus’s wife Hera. That old-fashioned kings called themselves Zeus (see
45.
2
;
68.
1
; and 156.
4
) and married Dia of the Rain Clouds, naturally displeased the Olympian priests, who misinterpreted the ritual picture of the spread-eagled Lapith king as recording his punishment for impiety, and invented the anecdote of the cloud. On an Etruscan mirror, Ixion is shown spread-eagled to a fire-wheel, with mushroom tinder at his feet; elsewhere, he is bound in the same ‘fivefold bond’ with which the Irish hero Curoi tied Cuchulain – bent backwards into a hoop (Philostratus:
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vii. 12), with his ankles, wrists, and neck tied together, like Osiris in the
Book of the Dead
. This attitude recalls the burning wheels rolled downhill at European midsummer festivities, as a sign that the sun has reached its zenith and must now decline again until the winter solstice. Ixion’s pitfall is unmetaphorical: surrogate victims were needed for the sacred king, such as prisoners taken in battle or, failing these, travellers caught in traps. The myth seems to record a treaty made by Zeus’s Hellenes with the Lapiths, Phlegyans, and Centaurs, which was broken by the ritual murder of Hellenic travellers and the seizure of their womenfolk; the Hellenes demanded, and were given, an official apology.

3
. Horses were sacred to the moon, and hobby-horse dances, designed to make rain fall, have apparently given rise to the legend that the Centaurs were half horse, half man. The earliest Greek representation of Centaurs – two men joined at the waist to horses’ bodies – is found on a Mycenaean gem from the Heraeum at Argos; they face each other and
are dancing. A similar pair appear on a Cretan bead-seal; but, since there was no native horse cult in Crete, the motif has evidently been imported from the mainland. In archaic art, the satyrs were also pictured as hobby-horse men, but later goats. Centaurus will have been an oracular hero with a serpent’s tail, and the story of Boreas’s mating with mares is therefore attached to him (see
48.
e
).