The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (50 page)

j
. Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthys were the three of Zeus’s sons whom he would have most liked to spare the burden of old age. The Fates, however, would not permit this, and Zeus, by graciously accepting their ban, provided the other Olympians with a good example.
¹⁰

k
. When Aeacus died, he became one of the three Judges in Tartarus, where he gives laws to the shades, and is even called upon to arbitrate quarrels that may arise between the gods. Some add that he keeps the keys of Tartarus, imposes a toll and checks the ghosts brought down by Hermes against Atropos’s invoice.
¹¹

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72.

2
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Pindar:
Isthmian Odes
viii. 17 ff.; Callimachus:
Hymn to Delos
78; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Lactantius on Statius’s
Thebaid
vii. 215.

3
. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar:
loc. cit
.; Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
i. 7; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
viii. 6; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vi. 113.

4
. Hyginus:
Fabula
52; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vii. 520 ff.

5
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vii. 614 ff.; Hyginus:
loc cit
.; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: ii. 29. 2; Strabo: viii. 6. 19 and ix. 5. 9.

6
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
ii. 7 and iv. 402; Clement of Alexandria:
Address to the Gentiles
ii. 39. 6.

7
. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
viii. 8 ff; Pausanias: ii. 29. 5.

8
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 61. 1; Clement of Alexandria:
Stromateis
vi. 3. 28; Pausanias: ii. 30. 4; Theophrastus:
Weather Signs
i. 24.

9
. Pindar:
Olympian Odes
viii. 30 ff., with scholiast.

10
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
ix. 426 ff.

11
.
Ibid
.: xiii. 25; Pindar:
Isthmian Odes
viii. 24; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Dead
xx. 1;
Charon
2; and
Voyage Below
iv.

1
. Asopus’s daughters ravished by Apollo and Poseidon will have been colleges of Moon-priestesses in the Asopus valley of the North-eastern Peloponnese, whose fertile lands were seized by the Aeolians. Aegina’s rape seems to record a subsequent Achaean conquest of Phlius, a city at the headwaters of the Asopus; and an unsuccessful appeal made by their neighbours for military aid from Corinth. Eurynome and Tethys (see
1.
a
and
d
), the names of Asopus’s mother, were ancient titles of the Moon-goddess, and ‘Pero’ points to
pera
, a leather bag (see
36.
1
), and thus to Athene’s goat-skin aegis – as ‘Aegina’ also does.

2
. The Aeacus myth concerns the conquest of Aegina by Phthiotian Myrmidons, whose tribal emblem was an ant. Previously, the island was, it seems, held by goat-cult Pelasgians, and their hostility towards the invaders is recorded in Hera’s poisoning of the streams. According to Strabo, who always looked for reasonable explanations of myths, but seldom looked far enough, the soil of Aegina was covered by a layer of stones, and the Aeginetans called themselves Myrmidons because, like ants, they had to excavate before they could till their fields, and because they were troglodytes (Strabo: viii. 6. 16). But the Thessalian legend of Myrmex is a simple myth of origin: the Phthiotian Myrmidons claimed to be autochthonous, as ants are, and showed such loyalty to the laws of their priestess, the Queen Ant, that Zeus’s Hellenic representative who married her had to become an honorary ant himself. If Myrmex was, in
fact, a title of the Mother-goddess of Northern Greece, she might well claim to have invented the plough, because agriculture had been established by immigrants from Asia Minor before the Hellenes reached Athens.

3
. The Phthiotian colonists of Aegina later merged their myths with those of Achaean invaders from Phlius on the river Asopus; and, since these Phlians had retained their allegiance to the oak-oracle of Dodona (see
51.
a
), the ants are described as falling from a tree, instead of emerging from the ground.

4
. In the original myth, Aeacus will have induced the rain-storm not by an appeal to Zeus, but by some such magic as Salmoneus used (see
68.
1
). His law-giving in Tartarus, like that of Minos and Rhadamanthys, suggests that an Aeginetan legal code was adopted in other parts of Greece. It probably applied to commercial, rather than criminal law, judging from the general acceptance, in Classical times, of the Aeginetan talent as the standard weight of precious metal. It was of Cretan origin and turned the scales at 100 lb.
avoirdupois
.

67

SISYPHUS

S
ISYPHUS
, son of Aeolus, married Atlas’s daughter Merope, the Pleiad, who bore him Glaucus, Ornytion, and Sinon, and owned a fine herd of cattle on the Isthmus of Corinth.
¹

b
. Near him lived Autolycus, son of Chione, whose twin-brother Philammon was begotten by Apollo, though Autolycus himself claimed Hermes as his father.
²

c
. Now, Autolycus was a past master in theft, Hermes having given him the power of metamorphosing whatever beasts he stole, from horned to unhorned, or from black to white, and contrariwise. Thus, although Sisyphus noticed that his own herds grew steadily smaller, while those of Autolycus increased, he was unable at first to convict him of theft; and therefore, one day, engraved the inside of all his cattle’s hooves with the monogram SS or, some say, with the words ‘Stolen by Autolycus’. That night Autolycus helped himself as usual, and at dawn hoof-prints along the road provided Sisyphus with sufficient evidence to summon neighbours in witness of the theft. He visited Autolycus’s stable, recognized his stolen beasts by their marked hooves
and, leaving his witnesses to remonstrate with the thief, hurried around the house, entered by the portal, and while the argument was in progress outside seduced Autolycus’s daughter Anticleia, wife to Laertes the Argive. She bore him Odysseus, the manner of whose conception is enough to account for the cunning he habitually showed, and for his nickname ‘Hypsipylon’.
³

d
. Sisyphus founded Ephyra, afterwards known as Corinth, and peopled it with men sprung from mushrooms, unless it be true that Medea gave him the kingdom as a present. His contemporaries knew him as the worst knave on earth, granting only that he promoted Corinthian commerce and navigation.
⁴

e
. When, on the death of Aeolus, Salmoneus usurped the Thessalian throne, Sisyphus, who was the rightful heir, consulted the Delphic Oracle and was told: ‘Sire children on your niece; they will avenge you!’ He therefore seduced Tyro, Salmoneus’s daughter, who, happening to discover that his motive was not love for her, but hatred of her father, killed the two sons she had borne him. Sisyphus entered then the market place of Larissa [? produced the dead bodies, falsely accused Salmoneus of incest and murder] and had him expelled from Thessaly.
⁵

f
. After Zeus’s abduction of Aegina, her father the River-god Asopus came to Corinth in search of her. Sisyphus knew well what had happened to Aegina but would not reveal anything unless Asopus undertook to supply the citadel of Corinth with a perennial spring. Asopus accordingly made the spring Peirene rise behind Aphrodite’s temple, where there are now images of the goddess, armed; of the Sun; and of Eros the Archer. Then Sisyphus told him all he knew.
⁶

g
. Zeus, who had narrowly escaped Asopus’s vengeance, ordered his brother Hades to fetch Sisyphus down to Tartarus and punish him everlastingly for his betrayal of divine secrets. Yet Sisyphus would not be daunted: he cunningly put Hades himself in handcuffs by persuading him to demonstrate their use, and then quickly locking them. Thus Hades was kept a prisoner in Sisyphus’s house for some days – an impossible situation, because nobody could die, even men who had been beheaded or cut in pieces; until at last Ares, whose interests were threatened, came hurrying up, set him free, and delivered Sisyphus into his clutches.

h
. Sisyphus, however, kept another trick in reserve. Before descending to Tartarus, he instructed his wife Merope not to bury him; and, on reaching the Palace of Hades went straight to Persephone, and told
her that, as an unburied person, he had no right to be there but should have been left on the far side of the river Styx. ‘Let me return to the upper world,’ he pleaded, ‘arrange for my burial, and avenge the neglect shown me. My presence here is most irregular. I will be back within three days.’ Persephone was deceived and granted his request; but as soon as Sisyphus found himself once again under the light of the sun, he repudiated his promise to Persephone. Finally, Hermes was called upon to hale him back by force.
⁷

i
. It may have been because he had injured Salmoneus, or because he had betrayed Zeus’s secret, or because he had always lived by robbery and often murdered unsuspecting travellers – some say that it was Theseus who put an end to Sisyphus’s career, though this is not generally mentioned among Theseus’s feats – at any rate, Sisyphus was given an exemplary punishment.
⁸
The Judges of the Dead showed him a huge block of stone – identical in size with that into which Zeus had turned himself when fleeing from Asopus – and ordered him to roll it up the brow of a hill and topple it down the farther slope. He has never yet succeeded in doing so. As soon as he has almost reached the summit, he is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounces to the very bottom once more; where he wearily retrieves it and must begin all over again, though sweat bathes his limbs, and a cloud of dust rises above his head.
⁹

j
. Merope, ashamed to find herself the only Pleiad with a husband in the Underworld – and a criminal too – deserted her six starry sisters in the night sky and has never been seen since. And as the whereabouts of Neleus’s tomb on the Corinthian Isthmus was a secret which Sisyphus refused to divulge even to Nestor, so the Corinthians are now equally reticent when asked for the whereabouts of Sisyphus’s own burial place.
¹⁰

1
. Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Pausanias: ii. 4. 3; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
ii. 79.