PLATE LIII
The Death of Aktaion

Artemis, carrying a quiver on her back and wearing
a fawn-skin over her shoulders and breast, braces her-
self to draw her bow as she places an arrow on the
string. Before her Aktaion is falling to the ground
overpowered by his four maddened dogs, which leap
upon him and tear his flesh. From a red-figured
krater of the fifth century B.C. (Furtwangler-Reichhold,
Griecbiscbe Fasenmalirei^ No. 115). See p. 252.



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — STARS 249

a swarm of wood doves, and, indeed, many scholars seriously
entertain the belief that their name was derived from the word
irdkeuu (" doves *')• Th^ ancients themselves ranged widely in
their attempts to find the source of the name of the Hyades.
To some the peculiar resemblance of the form of the stellar
group to a capital T supplied at once an initial impulse and an
initial letter for the formation of 'Tcf&9, although, because of
the Hyades' relations to fertility, others discovered a connexion
between their name and that fertile animal, the pig (89).
The most popular derivation, however, was apparently that
which linked the appellation with the verb veiv ("to rain'*),
for the seasons of their early rising and their early setting were
notoriously rainy. A certain type of vase-picture shows the
influence of this traditional association, since it depicts Al-
kmene as being saved from a burning pyre by the arrival of
two Hyades, who extinguish the flames with water. The
rising and the setting of both Hyades and Pleiades divided the
year into two parts, the portion between May and November
marking the period of safe navigation.

Orion. — In treating of Orion one must bear in mind that
the name stands both for a constellation and for a mythical
personage, and although the frequent confusion of the two
makes it impossible to say with certainty which was the
original, it can scarcely be doubted that some of the sagas of
Orion developed without reference to the stellar group. Homer,
for instance, knows the two forms as distinct, although he does
not always treat them as such. Were we to rely solely upon
him, we should incline to the conclusion that the Orion of
myth came first in point of time and was afterwards imported
into the realm of the stars; but, on the other hand, late Greek
and Roman writers allude only to the constellation.

This stellar group is situated near Taurus and, therefore,
near the Pleiades and Hyades, and owing to its peculiar shape
it was also called the Cock's Foot, or the Double Axe. The
period of the early rising of Orion and Sirius, the dog-star



 



 



2SO GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

(i. e. June), marks the end of the rainy season and ushers in
the heat of summer, while the Pleiades and Hyades at the time
of their early setting (November) disappear from the western
sky ahead of Orion and Sirius, as if driven away by them. In
these astronomical facts one can read without further com-
mentary the meaning of some of the myths which concern
these constellations.

In the Homeric epic Orion, the meaning of whose name is
unknown, was a hunter of remarkable beauty and of a stature
that exceeded even that of the giants Otos and Ephialtes.
Eos cast looks of love upon him and carried him away to her
dwelling, but her inordinate happiness over her good fortune
aroused the anger of the gods, and Artemis, deceived by a trick
of Apollo, with her noiseless shafts gave Orion an early death
in the island of Ortygia (Delos). Together with Leto she set
him among the stars, while in Hades his shade, armed with a
brazen club, continued to pursue and kill the wild beasts which
he had hunted in life.

In the legends of Boiotia, Orion was a hero bom of the soil
in Tanagra or Thebes. Once, when Pleione and her large
family of daughters were passing through Boiotia, he accosted
them, and although they immediately turned and fled, for five
continuous years he relentlessly pursued them until, moved
by the unhappy plight of the women, Zeus exalted them
all to the heavens, where the pursuit still goes on. Side, the
wife of Orion, dared to vie in beauty with Hera, and for her
boldness was consigned to Hades.

In other cycles of myth Orion was the son of Poseidon and
Euryale, the daughter of Minos, and his father endowed him
with the gift of moving swiftly over the sea, either by striding
across it, or by walking through it with his head high and
dry above the waves, or, again, by using the islands as gigantic
stepping-stones. From Boiotia he made his way to Chios,
where he married the daughter of King Oinopion, but, par-
taking too liberally of the vintage of his father-in-law, he



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — HEAT 251

became intoxicated and attempted a serious crime against
hospitality, whereupon Oinopion put out his eyes and drove
him out of his home. As Orion wandered about, he chanced
to reach Lemnos and there he found Hephaistos, one of whose
servants guided him to the sunrise, where the light of the solar
rays made his eyes whole again. He then gave himself over to
searching for Oinopion that he might punish him for his cruel
deed, but failing to find him, he at last joined Artemis in the
chase in Crete and there was killed by the sting of a scorpion.
Ursa Major J or Great Bear; Bootes. — The peculiar arrange-
ment of the stars in the constellation known as Ursa Major
has always attracted the attention of the peoples of the north-
em hemisphere. Homer knew it both as the Bear and as the
Chariot, and the suggestion of its appearance as a vehicle is
perpetuated in a couple of its English names — Charles's
Wain, or the Great Wain — whereas the utilitarian American
eye sees it as the Great Dipper. The Greeks explained its desig-
nation as the Bear by the story of the Arkadian Kallisto,
near whom in the heavens was placed her son Arkas in the
form of the stellar group sometimes known to the ancients
as Arktophylax ("Guardian of the Bear")j but generally as
Bootes ("Ox-Driver").*

OF MIDSUMMER HEAT

Aristaiosj Sirius (Greek Seirios), Aktaion. — As the legends
which follow more than hint, Aristaios was an agricultural
god of the primitive inhabitants of Greece, and in spite of
his frequent confusion with Apollo, he seems to have been
originally not a sun-god, but a personification of the period of
cooling Etesian winds which gave relief to man and beast
and crop during the burning dog-days.

Apollo is said to have espied the beautiful nymph Kyrene
hunting amid the foothills of Mount Pelion, and overcome
by his passion, he bore her away in his golden car to Libya,



 



 



252 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

where he wedded her. In process of time she became the mother
of Aristaios, and Hermes took the child to his great-grand-
mother Gaia, who in her turn entrusted him to the Hours.
These maidens nurtured him on nectar and ambrosia, thereby-
making him an immortal, and later he was trained by Cheiron
in the arts of manhood, while the Muses instructed him in
healing and prophecy, and from certain nymphs he learned the
culture of the olive, dairying, and bee-keeping, fable declaring
that he visited almost every land in the Mediterranean basin
in his successful efforts to establish these rural industries
among men. On one occasion he went to the island of Keos
when the heat of Sinus was causing a plague to spread among
the Aegean islands, and raising an altar to Zeus Ikmaios, a
divinity of moisture, he put an end to the plague by the reg-
ular offering of sacrifices to him and to Sirius. Zeus sent the
Etesian winds to blow for forty days and cool the atmosphere,
thereby acquiring for himself the title Aristaios ("Best")j
and by following the example of Aristaios in offering sacrifices
the people of the island were thenceforth able each year to
mitigate the extreme heat of midsummer. Aristaios married
Autonoe, a daughter of Kadmos, and by her became the father
of Aktaion, of whose unhappy fate we have read in the stories
of Thebes. Aktaion personified the strong plant growth of
spring withered by the parching heat of the sunmier weeks,
and the madness of his dogs is a graphic representation of the
supposed result of the heat upon these animals, an effect which
is still popularly recorded in the expression "dog-days."

Linos. — The story of Linos affords an excellent illustration
of the manner in which a myth and a personality could be
evolved from religious rites. The name seems to have been
derived from the sad refrain ai lenu ("woe to us"), occurring
in Semitic ritual songs in which the parching of vegetation
under the summer sun was lamented, while the ceremonies
rested on the wide-spread belief that daemons of heat and
drought run about like ravening dogs.



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — HEAT 253

The parentage of Linos varied according to the localization
of his story. In Argos he was the son of Apollo and the prin-
cess Psamathe, and, exposed by his mother for fear of her
father, he was found by the king's hounds and torn to pieces.
In anger at his child's death, Apollo dispatched a monster
called Poine ("Punishment") to tear children from the wombs
of the Argive women, but when the people rose up and slew
the creature, they only brought on themselves a plague from
which they suffered until they gave Apollo a temple in their
city. Another version, however, relates that the plague was
sent because the king killed Psamathe, and that it was ended
only when the women of Argos appeased the souls of Linos and
his mother with ceremonial prayers and dirges. Elsewhere in
Hellas Linos was the son of Apollo and the Muse Kalliope, or
again, of Amphiaraos and Ourania. As the son of the latter
pair he was killed by Apollo because in a song he rashly likened
his gifts to those of the god, and was buried on the slopes of
Mount Helikon nearest to Thebes. From the song developed
the singer and lyre-player, and in this capacity Linos became
the music-teacher of Herakles, although, as we have recorded
among the deeds of that mighty hero, he met a violent death
at the hands of his choleric pupil. To the musical gifts of Linos
myth gratuitously added others of an allied nature, crediting
him with having been the first to use in the writing of Greek
the letters brought from Phoinikia by Kadmos, and also
declaring that he was a grammarian, and, like Orpheus, the
author of philosophical works.

Lityerses. — The personality of Lityerses ("Prayer for
Dew"), who was, according to the legends, a son of Midas,
also grew, in part, out of a midsummer song. Under the pre-
tence of hospitality, he made a practice of luring passers-by
into his palace, but once they were in his power, he would take
them to the harvest fields, wrap them in sheaves, and cut off
their heads, until at length Herakles came on the scene and,
killing him, threw his body into the Maeander River. Another



 



 



254 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

form of the story represents Lityerses as engaging in mowing
contests in the fields. On achieving victory in each contest
he would cruelly scourge his defeated competitor, but in the
end he was himself defeated by a stronger mower. In these
stories a combination of several features may be observed.
The scourging is an allusion to the primitive practice of whip-
ping up laggard mowers, and the treatment accorded to the
last mower reflects an ancient custom which was designed to
insure successful reaping on the following day, while the dis-
posal of the prince's body in the river seems to be a fanciful
portrayal of a magic rite to produce dew.



 



 



 



 



PLATE LIV
Linos Slain by Hbraklbs

Linos, the kneeling figure, has been knocked down
by Herakles with a fragment of a chair, which can be
partly seen lying on the floor in the background, and,
as he attempts to defend himself with hb lyre, is in
danger of being struck again by another piece of the
chair brandished in the hand of his pupil. The
youthfiil comrades of Herakles, some thoroughly
terror-stricken, others manifesting a desire to help
their master, stand helplessly looking on. High
in the background to the left is a writing-tablet.
From a red-figured kylix of the style of Douris (early
fifth century B.C.), in Munich (Furtwangler-Reich-
hold, Griechische Vasenmaleni^ No. 105). See pp. 79,

252-53-



 



 




 



 



 



 



CHAPTER XII

THE LESSER GODS — OF WATER, WIND,
AND WILD

" And hark, below, the many-voiced earth,
The chanting of the old religious trees.
Rustic of far-ofiF waters, woven sounds
Of small and multitudinous lives awake,
Peopling the grasses and the pools with joy,
Uttering their meaning to the mystic night."

THESE words of Pyrrha in Moody's Fire-Bringer interpret
for us the peculiar appeal of terrestrial nature to the
Greek far better than a multitude of well-turned periods of the
most logical prose, and, moreover, through suggestion they
subtly reveal that the sources of the appeal are as numerous
as are the departments of nature. It is hopeless for us to think
of obtaining for this presentation a just and adequate classifi-
cation of these departments; if only we obtain a convenient
one, we must be content.

OF THE WATER

Okeanos and the Okeanides. — When Pausanias * makes the
statement that Okeanos "is not a river, but the farthest sea
that is navigated by men," he is assuming the role of the en-
lightened teacher and is consciously correcting an ignorant
public, for from the age of Homer, and doubtless before, men
had no other thought than that it was a deep refluent stream
of fresh water. Homer distinguishes clearly between it and
the salt sea, the Mediterranean, and deems it the father of



 



 



2s6 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

all being, human and divine, and the source of all mundane
waters. Hesiod accounts Okeanos as the son of Ouranos and
Gaia, and the husband of his natural counterpart, Tethys, by
whom he begat the rivers, brooks, and springs of earth — three
thousand divine daughters, the Okeanides, and three thousand
divine sons. Nine parts of the water of Okeanos, says Hesiod,
flow about earth and sea, while the tenth part becomes the
Styx and flows underneath the earth, bursting out again
through a rocky opening.

As to the location of Okeanos, we are told that it is the outer
boundary of the upper world and also the border between the
nether world and the heavens. The Kimmerians dwelt on its
northern shore, the Aithiopians on the eastern and the west-
em, and the dwarflike Pygmies on the southern; but nowhere
in Greek literature is it even hinted that people believed in the
existence of a further and outer shore.

In art Okeanos is shown reclining like the river-gods, but he
can be distinguished from them by his p)Ossession of a steering
oar or by the presence of sea animals near him.

Rivers. — The belief in the divinity of rivers was general
among the Greeks, this doubtless arising from the speed and
strength of their currents down the steep mountain valleys
as well as from their stimulating influence upon vegetation.
They usually passed as the sons of Okeanos, but sometimes as
the sons of 2feus; their relations to Poseidon are not clear.
They were conceived as being now of human form, now of
animal shape, now of a combination of the two. The Acheloos,
for example, appeared to men with the body of a bull and the
head of a man bearded and horned, while in human shape the
Skamandros talked and fought with Achilles, and was in turn
attacked by Hephaistos. In Homer the river-gods are found
in the great council of 2^us.

The chief function of the rivers was the bestowal of fertility,
and so important was this to the growth and even to the exist-
ence of many conmiunities that rivers were often worshipped



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — OF WATER 257

as the founders both of the local stocks and of the local culture.
The Asopos occupied this high place in Phlious and Sikyon,
the Inachos in Argos, the Peneios in Thessaly, the Eurotas in
Sparta, and the Kephisos in Boiotia, while the role of the
Acheloos is obvious in his gift of the Horn of Plenty to Hera-
kles, and such rivers as the Kaikos of Mysia and the Himeros
of Sicily were thought to p)Ossess p)Owers of healing disease and
of averting harm. The many early stories which tell of the
union of human maidens with river-gods apparently go back
to rites, partly religious, partly magical, in which young women
just prior to marriage were made fertile by bathing in the
waters of a river.

A pretty story is told of the river Alpheios of Elis. At first
Alpheios was a huntsman who fell in love with Arethousa, a
huntress maiden, but she refused his advances and crossed
over the sea to the little island of Ortygia before the harbour of
Syracuse, where she was transformed into a fountain of fresh
water. In despair Alpheios became a river, but since his love
remained unchanged, he made his way beneath the sea until
he came to Ortygia and there mingled with the outflow of the
spring.

Springs (Nymphs). — The first nymphs were the Naiads,

who dwelt

"By deep wells and water-floods,
Streams of ancient hills, and where
All the wan green places bear
Blossoms cleaving to the sod." *

That is to say, they were spirits of the springs, and from them
developed, by very natural processes, the marks and func-
tions of the nymphs of hill and forest. In the life-giving ele-
ment of the springs the Greeks fancied that they saw a kind of
female fruitfulness, whence the fundamental meaning of the
name vvfMfyrf ("bride") embodies the idea of pregnancy, al-
though by long usage the word became less and less strict in
its application until at last it could be appropriately used to



 



 



2S8 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTH0LCX5Y

designate also the Nereids and Okeanids, who essentially be-
longed to the larger waters; the Oreads, or mountain-spirits;
and even the Dryads and Hamadryads. In their proper sphere,
which included all places, like caves and marshes, where
moisture gathered, the nymphs were as p)Otent as was Posei-
don over the sea or Demeter over the earth, and from their
conception as feminine p)Owers in the bloom of youth they ac-
quired all sorts of maidenly characteristics. They danced and
sang, and ceaselessly made merry in their woodland retire-
ment; they were the nurses of the infants Dionysos and 2^us;
and, again, they were the chaste attendants of Artemis;
while through their fresh charms they won many lovers from
among both gods and men.

Ganymedes. — The story of Ganymedes, the beautiful son
of Tros of Ilion, is found in its most attractive form in the per-
suasive words of Aphrodite addressed to Anchises in the
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.* "Indeed counselling Zeus
snatched away golden-haired Ganymedes for his beauty's
sake that he might dwell with the inmiortals and in the home
of Zeus be a cup-bearer to the gods, a marvel to look upon,
held in high honour as he pours the ruddy nectar from a
golden bowl. And inexorable grief possessed the soul of Tros,
nor did he know whither the divine whirlwind had hurried his
dear son. Then indeed did he mourn him unceasingly day after
day. And Zeus had pity on him and gave him as a recompense
for his son swift steeds, such as draw the inmiortals. These
he gave him as a gift, and Hermes at the behest of Zeus told
him clearly that, like the gods, he should never die nor know
old age." In the most widely known form of the story Gany-
medes was borne aloft by an eagle, or by Zeus in the guise of
an eagle. He seems to stand for the healthy beauty and joy of
youth, and is a male counterpart of Hebe in her later aspects.

Hebe. — In origin Hebe ("Youth**) seems to have been
more than the mere personification of the charms of youth or



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — LUMINARIES 241

of the well-preserved beauty of her mother, Hera, for she was,
rather, a spring divinity of flowers akin to the Horai and
Charites, or perhaps she was the earth goddess herself, re-
garded as in the prime of maidenhood. The legend which
makes her the child of Zeus is undoubtedly not so old as that
in which she is bom of a strange union between Hera and a
leaf of lettuce, and the not improbable suggestion has been
advanced that Hebe was in a very early period the equivalent
of Dione, the spouse of Zeus at Dodona, and that with the amal-
gamation of the two stocks whose chief deities were Zeus and
Hera, Hebe was thrust from her place and a myth was created
to give her legitimate standing as a daughter in the new family.
Like the other children of Zeus and Hera, she never enjoyed any
great distinction; her roU was always that of an attendant.
In the Iliad she is the maiden cup-bearer to the Olympians,
and on one occasion she helps Hera get her chariot and
horses ready for a journey, while at another time she per-
forms the rather menial task of preparing the bath for the dust-
begrimed Ares on his return from a battle.

Iris. — Iris is no more than a personification of the rainbow.
Like the rainbow, she comes and goes without warning, while
her speed of movement and her pathway across the heavens
fit her for the post of messenger of the gods. She is clothed in
the bright colours becoming to youth, and on golden wings she
flits from place to place, performing the errands of her greater
companions, notably Zeus and Hera. In her representations
in art she is scarcely to be distinguished from other winged
figures, except when she is shown as bearing a herald's wand.

OF THE GREATER LUMINARIES

Helios ("Sttn")' — From a remote time many phases of
the sun's power had been observed by the Greeks with an atten-
tion which was akin to adoration, but only in a few places did
this develop into genuine worship; for the sun was altogether



 



 



242 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

too corporeal an object to appeal strongly to the religious
fancy. Yet it must have aroused in the mind some feeling of
divinity, inasmuch as it was the daily practice of the Greek to
rise at dawn and greet the sun with a kiss of the hand; and very
early this luminary became a frequent theme in myths, although
little by little these legends lost their distinctive solar char-
acteristics in the popular consciousness.

In myth, Helios is the son of Hyperion and Euryphaessa
("Far-Shining**), both of them Titan children of Ouranos
and Gaia, and Hyperion ("High-Going") being transparently
another name for Helios himself. Helios took as his wife
Perse ("Gleaming"), the daughter of Okeanos, their children
being Kirke, the sorceress of the West, and Aietes, the father of
Medeia, the sorceress of the East. Pindar relates the story of
another marriage which is of prime importance in our study,
having to do, as it does, with the chief centre of the sun-cult
among the Greeks. When the jurisdiction of the various
departments of the world was apportioned, it happened
that Helios, being absent, was forgotten, but although, on
discovery of the error, Zeus wished to make a new division,
Helios dissuaded him from so doing, stating that he was willing
to receive as his share an island which he beheld rising from
the sea. This Zeus granted him, and wedding the nymph
Rhodos (or Rhode), the daughter of Amphitrite, Helios gave
her name to the island and named the three cities of Rhodes
after three of their sons. Helios is also said to have had as wives
Leukothoe, KJytia, and Neaira, the last of whom, according
to Homer, bore him two daughters, Lampetie, who tended her
father's cattle, and Phaethousa, who shepherded his sheep.
There were seven herds of cattle and seven of sheep, each
comprising fifty animals; that is, there were three hundred
and fifty of each kind; and Aristotle is probably right in seeing
in these a reference to the days and nights of a lunar year.
The herds were generally located either in Sicily or Crete.

The appearance of the sun in the heavens reminded the



 



 



 



 



PLATE LII
Ganymedes and the Eagle

^ Though the copy is but an inadequate rendering
of the original, it serves to show the originality and
power of the composition, which almost transcends
the bounds of sculpture in its addition of surround-
ings and accessions to enhance the efFect. A high
tree-trunk forms the background and support for the
whole, which is most skilfully constructed, so that the
feet of the boy do not touch the ground, and the
wonderful upward sweep of the whole composition is
enhanced by the contrast with the dog, who sits on
the ground and looks upward after bis master. The
outspread wings of the eagle form a broad summit to
the group from which it gradually narrows down to
the feet of Ganymede, and thus the effect is further
increased. Eagle and boy alike strain upward in an
aspiration like that which Goethe expresses in his
poem of Ganymede. There is no hint of sensual
meaning in the treatment of Leochares ; the eagle is
merely the messenger of Zeus; and we can see in his
grip of the boy the care which Pliny mentions''
(E. A. Gardner, A Handbook of Greek Sculpture^
p. 376). From a Roman marble copy, now in the
Vatican, of a founh century original by Leochares
(Brunn-Bruckmann, Denkmaler grtecbiscber und rom^
iscber Sculptur^ No. 158). See p. 240.



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — LUMINARIES 243

Greeks of a variety of objects — a ball of fire, a head with
streaming golden hair, an eye, a bow bristling with arrows, or
a spoked wheel — but the most commanding and persistent
likeness which they saw was that of a chariot and horses.
Poets gave the four steeds names suggestive of the sun's out-
standing properties and had them feed on the same ambrosial
herb which made Glaukos inrniortal. Homer follows Helios's
course across the heavens from his ascent out of the stream of
Okeanos in the east to his descent in the western reaches of
the same stream, describing each stage with a wealth of epi-
thet. The puzzle of the sun's nightly return from the west to the
east the Greeks lightly dismissed with legendary explana-
tions. Some said that there was a land of light whose bound-
aries embraced both east and west, and whose inhabitants —
a good and kindly folk — stabled Helios's steeds each even-
ing and led them out each morning. Others declared that
Helios, chariot and all, was conveyed eastward every night
in a golden goblet, although one poet, more appropriately,
understands that the conveyance was a bed instead of a drink-
ing-vessel.

Helios had genuinely ethical functions, and as one who took
in the whole world at a glance he was invoked in oaths.
After the murder of Klytaimestra, Orestes appealed to him
as a witness of his mother's establishment of a precedent in
crime, and together with Hekate he was a witness of the
seizure of Persephone. Not only did he make clear the path
of goodness and purity to those who sought to walk in it, but
he was pure himself, as he showed when he shrank from the
slaughter of the house of Atreus.

On Rhodian coins Helios is shown as in the full bloom of
youth, from whose head, covered with a thick growth of hair,
radiate streams of light.

Phaethon. — In Phaethon ("Gleaming One") we cannot fail

to recognize once more the person of Helios, but he has no

standard genealogy, being in one myth the youthful son
I — 20



 



 



244 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

of Eos and Kephalos whom Aphrodite seized and set to
guard her temple by night, while elsewhere he is the son of
Helios, either by the sea-nymph Klymene or by Rhode. The
most famous legend which grew up about his name recounts
that he coaxed his father until he obtained permission to
drive the fiery chariot of the sun for a single day, but since he
lacked his parent's skill in handling the reins, the swift horses
soon got beyond his control. In their mad career they
descended too low, and the flame of the car caused such
great heat and so terrible a drought upon earth that Libya
became forever a desert, the people of Aithiopia took on a
black hue, and the channels of mighty rivers were dried;
but at length Zeus smote Phaethon with a thunderbolt and
he fell from his car into the river Eridanos. His seven sisters,
weeping over his body, were turned into poplars (or poppies)
and their tears became beads of amber (or rubies), while the
Eridanos was given a place among the constellations. One
version states that, in order to put an end to the drought and
the conflagrations raging upon earth, Zeus filled the channels
of the rivers to overflowing and the Great Flood of Deukalion
came to pass. The story of Phaethon probably had its roots
in an ancient festival in which the death of vegetation in the
heat of midsummer was celebrated by mourning. •

Selene. — Selene ("Moon") was too transparently a defi-
nite material body to become invested with the many and
varied traits which go to make up a great personality. She
was, in consequence, generally conceived merely as a planet
with feminine characteristics, for the softness of her light ap-
pealed to the Greeks, as it does to us, as very feminine in com-
parison with the more virile light of the sun. Homer never
fully deified her, and even in the later period, when her divin-
ity was somewhat enlarged, she yielded up all her moral at-
tributes to Artemis and Hekate. The regularity of her phases
was altogether too mechanical to give to the Greek religious
imagination that freedom of action which could create an



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — PHASES OF LIGHT 245

entire circle of gods out of phenomena only vaguely com-
prehended or out of pure illusion. The family relationships
of Selene are confused. In one passage she is the daughter
of Zeus, but, again, she is the sister, or daughter, or wife of
Helios, and as his wife she bore to him Pandia, " a daughter of
surpassing beauty among the immortal gods." From her as-
sociation with Helios she was conceived as riding across the
heavens in a car drawn by horses or bulls, but very often
poetical allusions to her car are patently metaphors.

The classic legend of Selene is that which tells of her love
for Endymion, the son of Aethlios. One night she looked down
from the clear heavens upon this youth as he was sleeping near
his flocks on the slopes of Mount Latmos in Karia, and at the
sight of his beauty a tide of affection rose in her heart which
her will was unable to stem. Coming down from heaven, she
stooped and kissed him and then lingered near him till dawn
as he slept on, repeating these visits night after night until
her absences excited suspicion among her divine companions.
When at length the cause of them became known, Zeus gave
Endymion the choice between death and an endless sleep,
and, choosing the latter, he may still be found asleep on the
mountain-side, visited each night by his pale lover, who
keeps a careful watch over his flocks.

OF PHASES OF LIGHT

Eos. — Eos ("Dawn*0> the Roman Aurora, was very early
considered the equal of the great luminaries, this being clear
evidence of the importance of the return of the day to a
primitive people lacking the means of producing strong and
steady artificial light. Eos not only brought the dawn, but she
was the dawn. She slept in her home among the Aithiopians,
and, wakening when her hour came, rose from the stream of
Okeanos; or, again, she was thought to keep watch at the fron-
tiers of Day and Night, driving Night to the underworld and



 



 



246 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

letting Day go forth after the morning star had heralded the
return of the light. According to Homer, the sun spent the
hours of darkness near her so that at his appointed time she
could call forth his gleaming chariot. It was she who roused
the breeze of morning and sprayed the grass with refreshing
dew. Sometimes, like the sun, she was conceived as riding in a
car drawn by two or by four horses, but often she was thought
to move by running, or by flying with wings growing from her
shoulders and feet. She is conmionly represented in art as
winged and with her hair streaming behind her as she speeds
forward.

Eos was uniformly the daughter of Hyperion, and, there-
fore, the sister of Helios and Selene. She had a notorious
penchant for beautiful young hunters, for example, Kephalos
and Orion, and another of her lovers was Tithonos, a brother
of Priam of Troy. Enamoured of his beauty, she carried him
off in her chariot to the land of the Aithiopians, and, inasmuch
as he was a mere mortal, she besought Zeus to grant him endless
life. Zeus granted her request, but she had forgotten to ask
also for the boon of eternal youth, so that, after many years,
Tithonos wasted away with the steady advance of old age,
and became only a burden to himself and to Eos. To get him
out of the way she enclosed him in a room from which only
the faint cry of his voice could emerge, and finally, to end his
misery, she changed him into a cicada. Their children were
Menmon, who fell at Troy, Emathion, and Hemera. It is
customary to account for Tithonos as the regular return, the
waxing, and the waning of the day, and to explain Memnon,
the dusky Aithiopian, as the darkness between evening twi-
light and the dawn, while Emathion (cf. ^fjuipy "day") and
Hemera are masculine and feminine conceptions of the day.

Helen and the Dioskouroi. — Helen, in myth the wife of
Menelaos and Paris, has been considered by a number of
scholars as originally a divinity of light, being identified now
with the moon, now with the red of dawn, and now with the



 



 



THE LESSER GODS — STARS 247

phenomenon of a single orb of St. Elmo's fire. This last was
held to be fraught with evil, while the appearance of the twin
globes, represented by Helen's brothers, the Dioskouroi, was
regarded as favourable. Some scholars believe that the Dios-
kouroi were at first daemons of the morning and evening
twilight.^

OF SINGLE STARS AND CONSTELLATIONS

AstraioSy PhosphoroSj Eosphoros. — Astraios (" Starry-
Heaven") was accounted the son of the Titan Krios and
Eurybia, but any lustre that attached to his name was a
reflection of that of the children whom Eos bore him —
Eosphoros, or Phosphoros, and the winds Argestes, Zephyros,
Boreas, and Notos. The allegorical character of this parentage
is clear at a glance.

Eosphoros ("Dawn-Bearer") and Phosphoros ("Light-
Bearer") are two names for the morning star, the planet Venus,
whose Latin name, Lucifier, is a translation of Phosphoros.
In the myths, Eosphoros was united in marriage with Philonis
(or KJeoboia), by whom he became the father of Philam-
mon, a son, and Stilbe ("Flash"), a daughter whose name is
a manner of recording the fact of the unusual brilliancy of the
morning star.* He was conceived as the forerunner of the sun
and the dawn, speeding forward on a white horse, or a chariot.
Like Phaethon, he was taken away by the love-smitten Aphro-
dite to be night-watcher in her temple — an aetiological ex-
planation of the absence of his star from the heavens until
just before daybreak — and he was considered to have the power
of fructifying the crops. Art portrayed him in the company of
other divinities of light as a youthful rider bearing a torch.

Hesperos. — Not until a comparatively late day was Hes-
peros (Latin Vesper), the evening star, identified by the an-
cients with the morning star. In the field of myth he was
called the son, and again the brother, of Atlas, and he had a



 



 



248 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

daughter Hesperis, who as the wife of Atlas bore the seven
Atlantides (or Hesperides). For an obvious reason he was al-
ways associated with the west, but when he scaled the lofty
peak of Atlas to gaze at the stars, a storm-wind suddenly
snatched him away, and he was seen no more. Nevertheless,
he was honoured as divine, and the brightest stellar body in
the western heaven was given his name, while the memory of
his piety and loving nature lived after him among men, so
that his orb was known as the star of love, that is, of Aphro-
dite, or Venus, its religious importance lying in the ease with
which the dates of festivals could be determined from its
periodic movements.

Pleiades and Hyades. — Owing to their conspicuous char-
acter, constellations received much more attention among the
ancients than did single stars, and two groups, one of seven
stars and the other of five, which appear in the constellation
of Taurus, were known to the Greeks — in fact, are still
known to us — by the names of Pleiades and Hyades respec-
tively, these belonging among the earliest attested star names.
In Homer, Hephaistos depicts the Pleiades on the shield of
Achilles, and by them Odysseus holds his course for Scheria.
They and the Hyades were said to have been originally the
daughters of Atlas through a union with Pleione or Aithra,
but when their brother Hyas was killed by some creature of
the wild, all twelve died of grief, and Zeus accorded them
places among the stars. One ancient author, however, mothered
them on the queen of the Amazons. As for the Hyades as a
separate group, a well-known legend identifies them with the
attendants of Dionysos who were pursued by Lykourgos, but
who, after they had safely delivered their ward to Ino, fled to
their grandmother Tethys and were appointed a constella-
tion by Zeus. The names of the individual Pleiades and Hyades
vary to such an extent that no purpose would be served by
their recital here.

Very early the Greeks fancied that they saw in the Pleiades



 



 

The relation between Dionysos and the Muses goes back to
the Thracian period of his worship. From the earliest times in
Hellas his special rituals consisted of songs and dances de-
signed magically to stimulate the growth of useful plant life
and to avert such influences as threatened it. At first these



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — DIONYSOS 221

performances were merely crude, spontaneous outbursts of
religious emotion, but in time the orderly mind and the crea-
tive fancy of the Greek moulded them, as it were, out of the
dust of the earth into those sublime figures of literary and
musical art, the dithyramb (or independent choral song),
tragedy, and comedy. The divine mission of Dionysos "to
mingle the music of the flute and to bring surcease to care" •
is transparent through the text of any of the works of the great
dramatists.

Space allows us to draw attention only to the more important
festivals of Dionysos. In Sikyon, Corinth, and Attike these
were made special occasions for musical performances, but only
in the last of these three places did they attain to monu-
mental distinction. Here they were four in number, begin-
ning, if we follow the order of our months, in January with
the Lenaia, the feast of wild women (Aijpcu). The Anthesteria,
combining ceremonies attendant on the opening of the new
wine with a primitive "all souls'" festival, came next in Feb-
ruary, and in connexion with this there took place a symbolic
marriage of the wife of the king Archon to Dionysos. In
March followed the Greater, or City, Dionysia, at the begin-
ning of which the introduction of Dionysos into Attike by way
of Eleutherai was processionally represented; and finally, in
December, the people of the country districts celebrated lo-
cally the uncouth and unrestrained Rural Dionysia. The con-
nexions established between Dionysos and professional actors
and musicians in the organized festivals led to his adoption
as the patron deity of the brotherhoods or the guilds of these
performers, societies which continued to thrive until a late
date.

Sufficient remark has already been made on the general
significance of the Dionysiac rituals, but it remains to speak of
the ecstasy of the votaries. This was not induced wholly by
the use of wine, as is almost universally supposed, for it arose
in the first place through the potent suggestiveness of the mere



 



 



222 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

idea that it was possible for the individual mortal, by the ob-
servance of certain forms, to become spiritually one with the
inmiortal god, the potency of the concept being inmieasurably
increased when it possessed a company of people of like mind,
even though they remained static. With the aid of dancing,
music, drinking, shouting, and participation in the raw flesh
and blood of victims in which the god was thought to dwell, the
idea threw the votaries into an uncontrollable frenzy akin to
madness in its external demonstration, whence the madness of
the daughters of Proitos and Minyas, and of Dionysos him-
self.

To the field of morals Dionysos made no new contribu-
tions, nor, contrary to the common belief, with all the seem-
ing licence of his rites did he add to general inunorality. His
gift was mainly religious, although it had a salutary social re-
action. To countless thousands whose individualities had been
submerged in the primacy of state interests he brought a stim-
ulating hope and a buoyant faith in the possibility of attaining
to an immortal existence, as free from worldly care as was
the divine ecstasy of his ritual.

Dionysos in Art. — After Dionysos came to be represented
in fully iconic form, two distinct types were developed. In
the first, seen on Attic vases of the sixth century, he is gen-
erally shown as a bearded man becomingly clothed, and to dis-
tinguish him from a similar type of Hermes, a branch of vine
or of ivy is put into his hand. In the second aspect, doubt-
less given vogue through Pheidias, he appears as a youthful
god of inspiration. The kantharos, a kind of drinking vessel,
the thyrsos, sl ceremonial wand, and a fawn-skin are his most
common emblems. He is sometimes surrounded by Maenads,
and his whole bearing is one of ecstasy, so that occasionally he
is even shown as intoxicated; it is not, however, until after the
fourth century B.C. that excessive sensuality and effeminacy
were attributed to him so frequently as to be regarded as
essential features.



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — DIONYSOS 223

Myths of Alexander the Great. — Alexander the Great was
variously said to have been a direct descendant of Dionysos,
a reincarnation of Herakles, and a son of Ammon. After his
victorious march to the Orient the story of the wanderings
of Dionysos acquired many new features and a new meaning,
although the best known myths of Alexander relate him to
Ammon. It is said that the last of the native kings of Egypt,
Nektanebos, fled in disguise from Egypt to Pella and there
became an astrologer in the court of Philip. As it hap-
pened, Olympias, the queen, came to him for a reading of
her future, and he told her that by the god Ammon she
would conceive a son who would rule the world and avenge
her on the king for his cruelty. Just as he said, the god ap-
proached her in the form of a serpent, and in due time she
became the mother of a son whose birth was accompanied
by earthquake, lightning, and thunder — signs which proved
him to be divine. Moreover, his very appearance and manner
marked him as one not of the common order of kings, for his
right eye was as black as night, and his left was as blue as
the heavens, while his hair and teeth, and likewise his spirit,
resembled those of a lion. Although he bore no resemblance
to Philip, yet the latter accepted him as his son and was pleased
to account for his divinity by tracing his own descent back to
Okeanos and Thetis and that of Olympias to Kronos and
Poseidon.

On the death of Philip, Alexander marshalled a great army
and at its head marched through many lands. Through
Thrace he went, through Italy and Sicily, Carthage and Libya,
until he came to the shrine of the great Ammon, where he
oflFered due homage and left a votive inscription bearing the
words: "Alexander to his father, the god Anmion." Thence
he passed on through Egypt, Syria, Persia, and the lands
about the Euxine, and at last reached Greece. At the shrine of
Delphoi he demanded an oracle concerning his destiny, but
the priestess refused him, whereupon, burning with anger.



 



 



224 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

like Herakles before him, Alexander seized the sacred tripod
and threatened to carry it away. The priestess then made
haste to speak, calling him Herakles Alexander and prophesy-
ing that he would be greater than all mortals. Emboldened by
these words, Alexander marched to the conquest of the golden
East, where, one after another, the great kings and kingdoms
fell before him — Persia, Media, Baktria, India — until there
were no more lands to conquer. On his homeward march he
fell ill and died, and took his rightful place in heaven among
the gods.



 



 



 



 



PLATE XLIX



DiONYSOS IN THE ShIP

Dionysos, crowned with ivy, leans back at his ease
in the middle of his ship. Springing from beside him,
two stout vine-stalks clamber up the mast, at the
peak of which they send out spreading branches bden
with grapes and leaves. The dolphins indicate that
the ship is afloat in the sea, but the painter gives no
hint whether they represent the transformed pirates
of the literary myth. From a black-figured kyUx by
Exekias (latter part of the sixth century B.C.), in
Munich (Furtwangler-Reichhold, Griecbiscbe Fasiti"
malerei^ No. 42). See p. 219.



Kastor and Polydeukes at Home

The figures in this composition can be identified
by means of the inscriptions. They represent all the
family of Tyndareos, excepting Helen, in their Spartan
home; proceeding from right to left they are Tyn-
dareos himself, a boy slave, Kastor, Leda, and Poly-
deukes. The whole scene is eloquent of a domestic
harmony which includes even the animals of the
household. From a black-figured ampbcra by Exekias
(latter part of the sixth century B.C.), in the Vat-
ican (Furtwangler-Reichhold, Griecbiscbe VasenmaUreiy
No. 132). See pp. 24 fF.



 



 




 



 



 



 



CHAPTER X

THE GREATER GODS — DEMETER,
KORE, HADES

DEMETER AND KORE (PERSEPHONE)

CJTTIE Origin and the Name of Demeter. — The goddess Deme-
-^ ter, the daughter of Rhea and Kronos, is an exceedingly-
important figure in the history of religions on account of the
numerous phases of her character in cult and myth, and also
because of the powerful influence which she exerted on the
whole Greek world after a certain period. It is impossible
to say more in reference to her origin than that, when we
go back as far as we can, she still seems to be a Hellenic
divinity. Parallels to her cult found among barbarians re-
main parallels and nothing more, and the fact that she was
acknowledged as the chief divinity of the northern Amphik-
tyony is proof positive of her very ancient establishment as
a goddess common to many Hellenic tribes. While she is
obviously a form of Gaia (Ge), she was in function the soil
goddess rather than the broadly generalized earth goddess.
In the light of her character it is very attractive to interpret
her name AfjfMjrrfp as a dialectic variant of ytf-f^iiTrfpy but the
suggestion will not stand etymologically. A more novel way,
and one which conforms to known caprices of folk-speech, is
to explain the name as an alliterative form, invented half de-
liberately, half unconsciously, to correspond to the antithetical
Aieif^ iranipy thus giving the co-operating divine pair. Mother
Earth and Father Sky; and still another interpretation which
is worth considering makes the name signify "Barley Mother,"
a meaning quite consonant with the scope of her operations.



 



 



226 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

Demeter in Homer. — Demeter is more of a symbol in Homer
than a personality. She is the divinity of the corn, and Thes-
salian Pyrasos is known as her sacred field, owing, no doubt,
to its productivity. She has no place as yet in the group of
the Olympians, nor has she any part to play in the action of
either Iliad or Odyssey. Homer is not acquainted with her
as the mother of Persephone, and the story of her amour with
lasion as related in the epic will be referred to under the next
heading.

Demeter as the Goddess of the Soil. — The nature of Demeter
is brought out by an admittedly ancient myth found both in
Homer and in Hesiod, the latter's account ^ being richer in
details. "Demeter, divine one of goddesses, mingling in love
with the hero lasion in a thrice-ploughed fallow field in the
fat land of Crete, bore Ploutos, a goodly son who goeth every-
where upon earth and upon the broad ridges of the sea. What-
soever man he meeteth and into whose hands he cometh doth
he make rich, and to him doth he vouchsafe abundant happi-
ness." Homer adds that when 2Ieus learned of the deed of
lasion, he smote him dead with a thunderbolt. This myth,
although not cast in the form of an explanation, seems to be
in reality an attempt to solve the origin of, and to supply a
divine sanction for, the performance of rites involving the ac-
tual or symbolic cohabitation of a man and a woman in a field
about to be sown, these ceremonies fertilizing the earth so
that she would bring forth her increase and confer wealth and
happiness upon mankind.* Though the bounty of Demeter
comprehended every product of the soil which was of use to
men, the cereal fruits came to be regarded as the special ob-
jects of her care. All operations on the farm, all parts of the
farm, such as barn and field and so forth, which had to do with
the cultivation of the grain, the crops in all stages of their
growth, the cut grain in the sheaf and on the threshing-floor,
all these things too came under her surveillance. The first
loaf of the newly harvested crop was dedicated to her, and all



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — DEMETER, KORE 227

of her festivals, no matter at what time of the year they
occurred, were cereal celebrations suitable for the season.

It has been very happily suggested that from Demeter's
role as producer of wealth was directly evolved her peculiar
character as Sea-fMxfHipo^y the maintainer of political and social
stability. If this be so, Demeter is here simply the personified
recognition of the fact, so strongly emphasized by modem
economists, that the real prosperity of a country varies di-
rectly with its agricultural conditions. If Demeter was propi-
tious, social relations were not disturbed, but if unpropitious,
the altered ability to sell, purchase, or barter eflFected a
general upheaval. Under this same appellative Oecr/io^Jpo?,
Demeter had also an intimate relation to the institution of
marriage and thereby to the family, this being a consequence
of the natural evolution of the central idea contained in the
field-rites. Children were therefore just as much her gifts as
were the fruits of agriculture, and on the assurance of a steady
birth-rate depended proportionately the continuity of the social
order.*

Demeter and Kore (Persephone). — It will be easier to under-
stand the mystic meaning of the bond between Demeter and
Persephone when we have reviewed in its entirety the legend
which constitutes the theme of the so-called Homeric Hymn
to Demeter. This Eleusinian story,* doubtless through its
superior artistic presentation, ultimately overshadowed every
other local tradition of the two divinities and came to be the
canonical version for all the Greeks. Persephone, the daughter
of Demeter by 2^us, was playing in the meadows of Mysia with
nymphs of the sea and plucking the wild flowers of the spring-
time — roses, crocuses, irises, violets, and hyacinths — when
she spied an especially beautiful and fragrant stalk of nar-
cissus and hastened to pick it. Alas! this was a snare devised
by 2Ieus and Earth to entrap her, for just as her fingers closed
on the stem, the ground opened beneath her, and Hades, leaping

forth in his golden chariot, seized her and bore her swiftly
1—19



 



 



228 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

away. Only the Sun and Hekate, the moon-goddess, saw her
capture, but her mother heard her cries and instantly rushed
forth to seek her, going about the earth for nine days and nine
nights, without tasting food or drink, and bearing in her
hands blazing torches to light up the darkest recesses. During
this time neither the gods who had been witnesses of Per-
sephone's seizure nor any omen came to the mother's aid with
a word of information, but on the tenth day Hekate led her
to the Sun, who told her where the maiden was. Again the
distracted mother betook herself to wandering, and having
passed unrecognized through many lands in the guise of an
old woman, she came at last to Eleusis in Attike, where she
sat down by the public well, known as the Fountain of Maiden-
hood. Hither came the four daughters of Keleos, the king of
the country, to draw water. Won by their gracious willingness
to listen to her, Demeter told them a fictitious tale of her
escape from pirates who had enslaved her, and then asked
them to obtain for her a place as nurse in some family, where-
upon they took her to their own home, putting their infant
brother Demophon in her care. By day Demeter anointed the
child with ambrosia and by night bathed him in fire, as Thetis
did with Achilles, and he was like to become immortal when his
mother Metaneira discovered the performance of the magic
rites and snatched him away. Instantly the goddess threw aside
her disguise and, revealing herself in all her divine freshness and
beauty, she announced her name and bade the people of Eleu-
sis build her a temple in which she would teach them the cere-
monial of her worship. Keleos did as she had conmianded, and
in the temple she took up her abode; but so great was her
grief for her daughter that she withheld her blessings from the
soil, so that men began to die for need of food, and the altars of
the gods lacked sacrifices. At length Zeus sent Iris and the
other gods one after another to plead with her to relent, but
she would not hear of it until her daughter should be given
back to her, wherefore Zeus dispatched Hermes to the under-



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — DEMETER, KORE 229

world to bid Hades release Persephone. Unable to resist the
command of his elder brother, Hades yielded, but before letting
Persephone go shrewdly gave her a pomegranate seed to eat,



BlBipiolololBlpiialtalialfalialr^




Fig. 8. Triptolemos



Triptolemos is setting forth on his mission to bring the cereal fruits and the knowl-
edge of agriculture to mankind. In the version followed by the painter the car is not
drawn by dragons, but flies through space on winged wheels. Perhaps the wheel was
originally the sun's disk. From a red-figured lekythos of the fifth century B.C., found at
Gela {MonunufUi AtUichi, xvii, Plate XIX).

and by tasting of it she magically bound herself to return to
Hades after a time spent above. In the golden chariot she was
conveyed to Eleusis, where her mother welcomed her with
an outburst of joy, and when a message from 2Ieus came to
Demeter announcing that Persephone could thenceforth re-



 



 



230 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

main with her during two parts of the year, spending only
the third part below, she forgot her sorrow and consented to
rejoin the gods on Olympos. Moreover, summoning the rulers
of the land, Triptolemos, Eumolpos, Diokles, and Keleos, she
made them the ministers of her worship and revealed to them
the manner of performing her secret holy rites, rites which
would confer upon initiates a peculiar blessedness in the after-
life beneath the earth.

Demeter and Triptolemos. — The story explaining the signifi-
cance of Demeter in agricultural pursuits may be reconstructed
by combining several sources. Triptolemos was the son, accord-
ing to the variant versions, now of Okeanos and Ge, now of
Eleusis, and now of Keleos, ranking, as son of this last named,
either as the oldest, or as the youngest whom Demeter nursed
on her coming to Eleusis. In her affection for him she taught
him to yoke oxen and to till the soil, and gave him the first
com to sow. In the rich plains about Eleusis he reaped the
first harvest of grain ever grown, and there, too, he built the
earliest threshing-floor. In a car given him by Demeter and
drawn by winged dragons, he flew from land to land, scattering
seed for the use of men, and for this Keleos ordered his death,
but Demeter, hearing of the intention, removed the king and
gave the throne to Triptolemos. It is said that when he found
that a pig had rooted up his first sowing, he took the animal
to the altar of his benefactress, and, placing grains of com on
its head, slew it as an offering, whence, ever afterward, the pig
was sacrificed in this same manner in the worship of Demeter.

202 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

closely connected with religious thought; yet it deserves con-
sideration here by reason of its implied association with
Aphrodite and its fame in literature. In Sestos, on the Helles-
pont, lived a beautiful maiden called Hero, who used to tend
the sacred birds in Aphrodite's shrine; and in Abydos, on the
opposite shore of the strait, dwelt a handsome youth named
Leandros. When the time came for celebrating the festival
of the goddess of love, Leandros crossed to Sestos to take part
in it. In the midst of the rites it chanced that he and Hero
came face to face, and at the first glance each became enam-
oured of the other; but the modest maiden would allow no
more than words to pass between them, for she had vowed to
go through life unwedded. Love, however, is always stronger
than discretion, and Hero's resolution at last weakened so
far that she allowed her lover to meet her regularly at an ap-
pointed place. By night she would stand on an eminence and
hold a torch aloft to guide Leandros as he swam across the
Hellespont. But one evening a tempest arose, and though
the youth plunged into the water as usual, undaunted by the
high seas, his strength gave out before he could reach the
other side and he was drowned. His body was flung by the
waves upon the shore before the eyes of Hero, who in the frenzy
of her sorrow threw herself upon his lifeless frame and died of
a broken heart.

Two of the cult-epithets of Aphrodite in Athens were Ourania
and Pandemos, the first apparently marking a transplantation
of the worship of the Semitic Queen of the Heavens, while the
second was probably a manner of recording the worship of
Aphrodite by the united townships of Attike, although as
early as Solon it was understood to designate the goddess as
the one who presided over popular love.^

Aphrodite in Art. — Through three or four centuries the
Greeks were slowly evolving an ideal type of Aphrodite.
In archaic art she appears fully clothed, generally with a veil
and head-cloth, and with one hand either outstretched or



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — EROS 203

pressed on her bosom and holding some attribute — the apple,
pomegranate, flower, or dove — while the other hand either
falls at her side or grasps a fold of her garment. Up to the
middle of the fourth century the full clothing of her figure pre-
dominates, although even as soon as the later half of the fiftl\
century parts of her body were bared. At this period she is
depicted as without passion, though capable of it; but it was
only in the hands of the Hellenistic sculptors that she lost her
dignity of pure womanhood and became sensuous and con-
scious of her charms.

EROS

Eros, the frequent companion of Aphrodite, and known to
the Romans as Cupido (Cupid), does not appear at all in
Homer. This, however, is not to be taken as an indication that
he was a later creation, for his prominence in the theogonic
literature, notably that of Hesiod, points to his existence in
the old daemonic stratum of religious thought. His parentage is
variously given: he is the issue of Chaos, or is hatched from the
egg of Night; he is the son, now of Ouranos and Gaia, now of
Hermes and Artemis, now of Iris and Zephyros; again, he was
begotten by Kronos, or bom of Aphrodite. As far back as
Hesiod he was the intimate associate of the goddess of love,
and he is said to have been the lover of the ocean-nymph
Rhodope.

Both in worship and in the popular mind Eros, whose oppo-
site was Anteros, was the god of sexual love, and in several
places his nature became coarsened through the influence of
the cult of Priapos. He was attributed, especially in the later
period, with the power of firing men with the passion of love
by means of his sharp shafts and stinging tongues of flame,
but his personality remained practically unchanged for many
centuries, except in the field of philosophy, where he was held
to be the cosmic force of attraction. Although Apuleius^s story
of Cupid and Psyche was based on a developed form of an



 



 



204 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

old Greek folk-tale possessing a religious significance, its ex-
cessive literary elaboration excludes it from our pages.

Eros is generally shown by the artists as a winged boy bear-
ing bow and quiver; and among his conmionest attributes
are the dolphin, the swan, the lyre, and the mussel-shell.



 



 



CHAPTER VII

THE GREATER GODS — HEPH AISTOS
AND HESTIA

HEPHAISTOS

cr*HE Origin and the Name of Hephaistos. — Whatever may
-^ have been the precise initial conception of Hephaistos, he
was certainly held by the Greeks at the period of which we have
clear records to be the god of fire, and as such we purpose to
classify him here, his connexion with the manual arts being
apparently derived from the many uses which they made of
fire. Whether he was Hellenic or not in origin, we cannot ven-
ture to say, but the most plausible explanation of his name
tentatively links it with the bases fo^ and ai0y which would
yield the meaning "quivering flame."

Hephaistos in Homer. — Homer knows Hephaistos only as
the son of Zeus and Hera, and iti the epics he is unequivocally
the god of fire, and at times, by a figure of speech, is fire itself,
while partly as an instrument in the hands of Achilles and
partly as a free agent he consumes the waters of the raging
Skamandros. In one passage he is married to one of the
Graces, but in another he is the husband of the amorous
Aphrodite, who openly manifests her preference for the more
human Ares. Two of his characteristics stand out above all
the others — his physical appearance and his trade. He is
everywhere the lame god, and his limp is a constant source of
laughter among his fellows on Olympos. Homer is aware of
two accounts concerning the cause of this disability, one of
which he puts into the mouth of Hephaistos himself. "Once,"
he says wamingly to Hera, "he [i. e. Zeus] caught me by the



 



 



2o6 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

foot and hurled me from the heavenly threshold; all day I
flew, and at the set of sun I fell in Lemnos, and little life was in
me. There did the Sintian folk tend me for my fall/* ^ The
other version is that which will be given under the next heading.
Hephaistos has the distinction of being the only craftsman on
Olympos, and the works of his hands are many and wonderful.
The greatest of these was, perhaps, the aegis of Zeus, although
he also built the houses of the gods and wrought in his forges
the sceptre of Agamemnon, the armour of Diomedes and of
Achilles, and the golden tripods, which, unguided and unsup-
ported, could enter and depart from the hall of Zeus. Through
a combination of disposition and disability he takes but little
part in the strife of the Greek and the Trojan.

The Character and Functions of Hephaistos. — Mythology
makes a much larger contribution to our mosaic portrait of
Hephaistos than does cult, for the bold outlines of his physical
appearance and the concrete nature of his activities made him
a ready theme for the myth-maker and myth-monger, although
these same characteristics debarred him from those phases of
worship which demanded some measure of abstract thought,
so that he was, in fact, the least abstract and the most con-
crete of all the gods.

In a myth which seems to belong to a very old stratum
Hephaistos had no blood-relationship at all to Zeus; instead,
like Typhon, he was merely the son of the unpaired Hera, but
after she had borne him, she observed that he was a weakling
and cast him down from Olympos, the fall making him lame
ever after. Below he took refuge with Thetis and Eurynome
in their sea-home and spent his time in training his hand in
the cunning of the crafts. Harbouring a grudge against his
mother for her cruelty, he fashioned and sent to her a golden
chair fitted with invisible snares, so that when she sat in it she
was held so fast that not even the strength of the gods could
release her. Ares went to Hephaistos to beg him to come and
loosen the snares, but Hephaistos drove him back home with



 



 



ash
h

ira

Till

i
p

of

f

J

1



 



 



PLATE XLVI

The Return of Hefhaistos to Olympos

Hephaistos, crowned with the festive ivy and hold-
ing a pair of smithes tongs, rides unsteadily on a
spirited mule. In front of him walks Dionysos
carrying his special emblems, the thyrsos and the kan-
tharos. The short and merry procession is led by a
Satyr with a horse's tail and pointed ears, who as he
goes along seems to be dancing to the accompaniment
of his own lyre. From a red-figured krater of about
440 B.C., in Munich (Furtwangler-Reichhold, Griech-
ische Vasinmalereiy No. 7). See pp. 206-07.



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — HEPHAISTOS 207

fire-brands, although after a time Dionysos put Hephaistos
under the spell of wine, and bringing him to Olympos had
him free his mother, frorii whom, in the end, he received full
forgiveness. His lameness (humorously contrary to the modern
theories of heredity) was inherited by his sons Periphetes and
Talos, and is observable in his doubles, Typhon and Anchises.
Some students see the origin of the lameness in the unsteady
movements of flame, although it has recently been suggested
that a brotherhood of warriors who needed a smith-god as
patron accepted Hephaistos in this capacity and made him
lame to prevent him from running away.*

To such an extent was Hephaistos the chief god of fire that
when the hearth-fire crackled, men said, "Hephaistos laughs,*^
just as they said of a shower, "Zeus rains." He was concerned
principally with terrestrial fire, the lightning being outside his
province and the conception of him as the god of the sun's
heat, who rides on a glowing car by day and falls to earth at
evening, was by no means general. He manifested his power
in volcanoes, burning gases, and hot springs. In his relation to
artificial fire he is associated with Prometheus, and the torch-race
at Athens was dedicated to these two gods in conjunction with
Athene. His chief volcanic centre was the island of Lemnos.

In his almost primeval role as worker in metal Hephaistos,
along with Athene, was the instructor of the Kyklopes in their
trade. He himself was the maker of the golden maidens en-
dowed with life and human faculties, the brazen giant Talos,
Europe's brazen dog, the brazen-footed bulls with which lason
ploughed, and the gold and silver dogs that guarded the house
of Alkinoos, while of inanimate objects he wrought the arms
of Memnon, the sickle of Demeter, the arrows of Apollo and
Artemis, the curved sword of Perseus, the cup of Helios, and
many other things. It may be that Hephaistos was very early
identified with the demon of magical powers supposed by most
primitive peoples to reside in metals both before and after
forging.



 



 



2o8 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

Apparently from the idea made current by certain physical
philosophers that fire was the substance out of which life was
produced, Hephaistos came to be conceived as the creator of
men. Pandora, we remember, was moulded by his hand out of
clay, and a hint of this function may also be read in the ac-
count of his strange fathering of Erichthonios in union with
Athene. Invocations supported by magical rites were often
addressed to him to bring fertility to barren women,

Hephaistos in Art. — The artists consistently represented
Hephaistos as a smith holding a hanmier. Many statues of
the sixth century grossly caricatured his lameness, but others
merely hinted at it or almost entirely suppressed it. In the
late period he became a rare theme of art, and where he was
represented at all it was as the serious artisan.

HESTIA

The Origin and the Name of Hestia. — Hestia undoubtedly
belonged to an old stratum of Greek life, and unlike most of
the other gods she was herself the object for which her name
stood — the hearth — for that she was not the fire, nor the
spirit of the fire burning on the hearth, is clear from the lack
of daemonic characteristics in her person. As the hearth itself
she was originally a product of the preanimistic stage of
thought, and from this stage she never advanced far, a circum-
stance which was due to her static nature. The other gods could
exercise their activities over broad ranges of territory and
peoples, but her virtue would have vanished with movement,
and, like home-keeping youths, she had homely wits. Her im-
portance rested on the imperative need of fire in the primitive
home and in the immense difficulty of procuring it in event of
sudden demand.

The Genealogy and Functions of Hestia. — The earliest state-
ment of Hestia^s parentage is to be found in Hesiod, where she
is the eldest daughter of Kronos and Rhea, although not a word



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — HESTIA 209

is said of her duties as a goddess. In a Homeric Hymn * ad-
dressed to her we find merely the remark that she dwells in
Apollo's sacred house at Delphoi, and it is to the Homeric
Hymn to Aphrodite^ that we must look for the fullest delinea-
tion. There her inviolate purity is enhanced by contrast with
the easy abandon of the goddess of love, for the works of
Aphrodite, says the hymn in substance, are displeasing to
Hestia, the modest daughter of Kronos whom both Poseidon
and Apollo wooed in vain. With a mighty oath sworn on the
head of Zeus she declared that she would remain a virgin all
her days, wherefore her father granted her a gift instead of
marriage, and she took her place in the midst of the dwelling
and was accorded high honour in the temples of the gods, and
from mortals received the greatest homage. Pindar sings of
her as the divine guardian of the integrity of the state.

These few myths are transparent views of the functions of
Hestia, who was the divine symbol of the purity of the home.
As the hearth-fire burned unceasingly, so was she the protect-
ress of the continuity of the family life; but while Hera stood
for the government of the household, Hestia typified rather
the intimate daily relations of its members. Oaths sworn upon
the hearth and suppliants beside the hearth were sacred to her,
and all liturgical acts in both public and private life were pref-
aced by a special recognition of her, while there are some rea-
sons for thinking that they were also thus closed. Nevertheless,
despite her formal importance, Hestia never showed a strong
directing hand in the moulding of the social organization.

In art Hestia appears as a sedate matron without distin-
guishing attributes, the flowers and fruit with which she was
sometimes shown having apparently been added solely as
ornaments.



 



 



CHAPTER VIII

THE GREATER GODS — POSEIDON
AND AMPHITRITE

POSEIDON

cr^HE Origin and the Name of Poseidon. — If we consult only
^ the geographical register of the distribution of Poseidon's
cult, we shall incline to classify him as a god of northern
origin introduced into Hellas by immigrating Greeks. If, on
the contrary, we have regard principally for his chief cult-
centres, such as Corinth and Boiotia, and accept a recent dem-
onstration that his inseparable emblem, the trident, was in
origin the lightningbolt of a Mesopotamian divinity, we cannot
well help believing that he, too, came from the east,^ in which
event his cult would first have reached Crete and thence have
been spread by sailors to Hellenic ports on the Aegean and
Mediterranean. Whatever his initial functions may have been,
he became among the Greeks the supreme master of the sea;
and to explain his name as connected with wdo-w ("lord'*)
and "Iravo^ or "Irai/o?, a name of Crete, makes the suggestion
as to his Eastern origin very plausible.

Poseidon in Homer. — Homer knows Poseidon as the son
of Kronos and Rhea. When the new kingdom was divided,
the dominion of the sea was put into his hands, while earth
and Olympos were set aside as common territory for all the
gods. His home is understood to be in the sea somewhere
near Aigai. In the war at Ilion he displays no great partisan-
ship, although his sympathies incline toward the cause of the
Greeks, yet he saves Aineias from Achilles because the hour of



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — POSEIDON 211

the formers doom has not yet struck. He was the father of
Polyphemos, for whose death he viciously harassed Odysseus
by raising storm-winds and billows in his ship's path; and be-
cause the lesser Aias boasted of his power to escape the perils
of the sea, he brought him to a watery grave. He is the an-
cestor of Alkinoos, king of the Phaiakians, and turns one of
his ships to stone in midsea. He is the mighty supporter of the
earth, which he causes to quake by rocking the waters which
bear it up; and the trident, apparently by this time conceived
as a fish-spear, is uniformly the emblem of his power. In ap-
pearance he is grim, and his head is covered with heavy locks
of sea-green hair; in disposition he is moody and imperious,
and resents those commands of his elder brother, Zeus, which
seem to encroach on his sphere of authority. The horse and
horsemanship come under his special patronage.

Tfu Family Relationships of Poseidon. — Poseidon is every-
where accorded the honour of being the son of Kronos, and he
fought with Zeus against his kinsfolk, the Titans, wielding the
trident which the Kyklopes had forged for him. His wedded
wife was Amphitrite, but he had scant regard for the moral
obligations of marriage, for his intrigues with women both
divine and mortal almost defy counting, among them being
those with Tyro, Amymone, Chione, and Libye. His offspring
were still more numerous, and practically all of them were
in some way associated with the sea, Aiolos, Nereus, Pelias,
Glaukos of Potniai, Sinis, Bousiris, Antaios, Boiotos, Poly-
phemos, and, if we may credit one account, Theseus, all being
his sons by many mothers. Not a few of his offspring were
of a monstrous nature, for instance, the terrible creatures
which he raised up from the sea to harass Aithiopia and
Troy, the dragon of Thebes, the ram of the Golden Fleece,
the bull of Marathon, and the bull which maddened the
horses of Hippolytos.

The Functions of Poseidon. — In myth and cult alike Posei-
don was pre-eminently the god of the sea, though all significant
I— 18



 



 

THE GREATER GODS — ARTEMIS 183

a capacity for destruction. At any rate, her cult must be very
old, exhibiting, as it does, remnants -of totemism in the ritual
eating of the goddess in the flesh of a quail or of a bear, as well
as traces of human sacrifice in the slaughter of strangers in
the land of the Taurians. Although Artemis enjoyed a pan-
Hellenic cult, the oldest Hellenic conception of her was Boio-
tian; yet her matured personality is not purely Hellenic, for
her alien characteristics are many. The Artemis of Ephesos,
for instance, is a hybrid of the Great Mother, the maternal
principle of nature, and the original Greek goddess; and she
not only acquired traits from the Cretan Rhea, but was
identified with the barbarian Diktynna, Britomartis, Bendis,
Anaitis, Astarte, and Atargatis. The source of her association
with Apollo is unknown, though some accidental local con-
tact may be suspected. Her appellation appears to be con-
nected with the root of the name Arkadia, but we are fn the
dark as to its meaning.

Artemis in Homer. — Artemis takes next to no part in the
action of the Homeric poems, most mentions of her being
merely allusions to her activities in the various localities in
Hellas prior to the Trojan War. Her personality is marked by
three outstanding features: she is a huntress and the mistress of
wild life, a bringer of sudden death, and the virgin sister of
Apollo. Through instruction received from her the Trojan
Skamandros learned to hunt the beasts of hill and woodland,
and she herself was said to roam the ranges of Taygetos and
Erymanthos "delighting in the wild boars and swift hinds."
She was the slayer of Orion, of a daughter of Bellerophon,
and of the daughters of Niobe; and when women died a sudden
but peaceful death, people said that they were the victims of her
swift arrows.

The Functions of Artemis. — The traits which have just
been mentioned, with others added, still cling to Artemis in
the field of myth beyond Homer, while her relation to the vast
tracts beyond the settlements of men can be observed in her



 



 



i84 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

almost certain identity with Kallisto, Atalante, the mountain-
nymph Taygete, and Kyrene, under whose name she became
the mother of Aristaios by Apollo. The Keryneian doe, which
Herakles captured alive, was sacred to her, and for killing
another of her sacred hinds Agamemnon was sorely punished
and his fleet was detained at Aulis by head winds, while it
was she who placed a hind on the Aulid altar in lieu of the in-
nocent Iphigeneia. Kallisto in the form of a bear fell before
her bow, and the unerring spear and dog were given to Prokris
through her good will, if we follow a particular version of the
legend. One of her shrines, we are told, was surrounded by a
veritable zoological garden, and in her capacity as protectress
of such collections may perhaps be found the origin of her
common epithet "Lady of the Beasts." Of the birds the quail,
the partridge, the guinea-fowl, and the swallow were intimately
related to her cult, but only rarely did domestic animals, like
the horse, the ox, and the sheep, come within the scope of
her supervision, although in this connexion we may call to
mind the failure of Atreus to keep his promise to sacrifice to
her the golden lamb. With all beasts her protecting func-
tions come first and the destroying second. As a huntress and
in her general oversight of wild nature she contracted aflilia-
tions with Dionysos and the Maenads and was thought to be
the same as the Cretan Diktynna, while in the old Boiotian
culture she was held to be the hunting partner of Orion,
together with whom she shot her sharp arrows at man and
beast alike. Not unnaturally she was a goddess of plant life,
primarily that of the untilled lands, the trees of the forest, for
instance, being sacred to her; yet she must also have had an
interest in the plants of tillage, else the stories of her pique at
the harvest-home sacrifices of Oineus and Admetos have no
point.

As the goddess-physician, Artemis had broad functions, and
no hard and fast line can be drawn about the kinds of ailments
under her control. Malarial chills, leprosy, rabies, gout, epi-



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — ARTEMIS 185

lepsy, phthisis, and mental diseases are all mentioned as com-
ing within the range of her activities, and she even undertook
to heal snake bites. Her methods of treatment savour strangely
of magic, particularly of that branch known as homoeopathic,
a circumstance which may be counted as good proof of her
antiquity as a healer. The quail, partridge, guinea-fowl, goat,
swine, and the fabulous hippocamp were included in her materia
medica; and, among plants, the juniper, and the white and
the black hellebore, the healing property in all these being
Artemis herself, who, counteracting the power of Artemis
the cause of the disease, effected a cure by virtue of the
famous principle (here to be interpreted, of course, in a
magical sense) of similia similibus curantur ("like is cured by
like"). Bathing in certain lakes and streams near her shrines,
as in the Alpheios of Elis, was supposed to remove some dis-
eases, the process to be understood obviously being that of
magical ablution. It was apparently through her contact with
magic that she entered into connexion with Hekate.

One of the oldest powers of Artemis was that of expediting
the delivery of women in child-birth, and by a contradictory
manner of reasoning no longer strange to us, she was also
regarded as both bringing and healing puerperal fever. In
her exercise of these functions one can see why she was so
closely bound to Leto.

The icy chastity of Artemis has long been proverbial, yet
it is a fact that only in myth was she endowed with this trait,
for no traces of it are to be found in her public cults. The
myths which record her puritanical rejection of the almost
innocently unchaste Prokris, her inordinate punishment of the
peeping Aktaion, and her well-nigh Pharisaic patronage of the
precocious Hippolytos have the air of being comparatively
late attempts to cloak an originally unmoral character with
moral attributes — to make a virtue out of an accident; but
her chastity is inconsistent with her great interest in maternity
and with her impersonation by Atalante and others.



 



 



i86 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

Artemis had a number of miscellaneous attributes which
we can only mention here. On rare occasions she appears as a
water-goddess, being invoked, for instance, in the search for
springs, while as a protectress of travellers and emigrants
she seems to have absorbed some of the duties of Apollo.
In the story of Iphigeneia at Aulis she exercised control over
the conditions of the weather, and although she was not equated
with the moon until a comparatively late period, this identi-
fication has become one of her ineradicable marks in poetry.
The links binding her to the higher intellectual and social life
are slender, yet they exist.*

Artemis in Art. — One of the two oldest types of Artemis
delineates her with spreading wings and as holding a lion in her
hand, while the other shows her between two lions, both of
these forms exhibiting Asiatic influence. The fully developed
Artemis of art is a huntress, just emerging from maiden-
hood into womanhood, equipped with bow and quiver, and
followed by one or more dogs.

HEKATE

The greater prevalence of the cults of Hekate in the northern
districts of Greece, her resemblance to the goddess Bendis of
Thrace, and certain other features point convergently toward
some northern land as her first home. If she were actually of
Hellenic origin, her cult must have died out and after a long
period have been revived at the very threshold of the histor-
ical era. Her name may be a Greek equivalent of some title
borne by her in her native habitat; it appears to be connected
with €K(k ("far'*) and may be a short form of heart) fidxiai^
designating her as the "Far-Shooter" or as "the one who comes
from afar."

Hekate was grudged free entry into the domain of myth
and was denied an established pedigree — facts which cast
suspicion on her alleged Greek nativity. In Hesiod she was the



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — HEKATE 187

daughter of the Titan Perses and Asteria, and in Mousaios,
the daughter of Zeus and Asteria. A Thessalian myth speaks
of Admetos and a woman of Pherai as her parents, although
elsewhere her mother was said to be Night or Leto. Strangely,
no stock looks back to her as its divine foremother, and Homer
seems to have been ignorant of her, for otherwise her strong
connexion with the underworld would have necessitated a men-
tion of her in the description of the descent of Odysseus to
Hades. In one account of the war of the gods and giants,
however, Hekate kills the giant Klytios with burning brands.

In the Theogony of Hesiod Hekate is already a fully formed
and fully endowed divinity exercising control equally over
heaven, earth, and sea; but the very extravagance of the attri-
butions brands the passage as almost certainly an interpola-
tion, composed by a defender of her cult when it was yet new
in Boiotia. Her most conspicuous, and, perhaps, her original,
function was chthonic. Among the goddesses she stands in
substantially the same relation to sorcery and necromancy as
does Hermes among the gods, and in myth Medeia is one of
her priestesses.''

To modern readers Hekate is best known as the original
"Diana of the Crossways," and she was supposed to drive evil
influences away from crossways, doors, and gates. To retain
her favour, or to placate her anger and that of the hordes of
revenants which trooped after her, people used to make offer-
ings to her (conmionly known as "Hekate's suppers") at the
forks of roads, her special haunts, these being given at night
under a new moon, and consisting of foods prepared according
to a ritual bill of fare. .

Not until the middle of the fifth century B.C. was Hekate
established as the moon-goddess, an identity which she doubt-
less acquired and maintained through the insecure position of
Selene (the lunar divinity proper) in popular belief. This fea-
ture and her connexion with child-birth she held in common
with Artemis.



 



 



i88 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

The most widely disseminated type of Hekate in art is one
that goes back to the image made for her shrine at the entrance
to the Athenian Acropolis, over which she had surveillance.
This portrays her as having three bodies, all back to back,
one facing forward and the other two to the left and right
respectively. In the outer hands of the side figures are held a
pitcher and a deep sacrificial saucer, while each of the remain-
ing four hands grasps a torch. It was probably in this form,
capable of looking three ways at once, that she was popularly
conceived as the divine protectress of cross-roads.



 



 



 



 



PLATE XLIII
An Attic Hekataion

The central feature of this attractive group is the
tall plain column, a primitive symbol of Artemis-
Hekate. With their backs to this as at the three
points of an equilateral triangle stand three similar
figures, stiffly architectural in character, of Hekate
Phosphoros. Each is crowned with a lofty poUs and
holds two torches bolt upright at her sides. Around
this group, in marked contrast in style as well as in
stature, is a ring of three Charites, all alike, dancing
lightly and gracefully hand in hand. From a small
marble of the late fifth or early fourth century b.c.,
in the collection of Heinrich Graf Lemberg of Austria-
Hungary {JHAIxm, Plate IV).



 



 




 



 



 



 



CHAPTER IV

THE GREATER GODS — ARES

CT^E Origin and the Name of Ares. — So obscure is the origin
-^ of Ares that we are scarcely in a position even to entertain
a suspicion as to whether he came from within or from without
Hellas. Certainly his cult was most deeply rooted in Boiotia
and farther north, yet this cannot be taken as an indication of
origin, since we cannot prove that he had been established here
longer than elsewhere. His name has a Hellenic cast, but it
cannot be satisfactorily derived, although it appeals strongly
to the imagination to connect it with hpdy "a curse." By
that token war, the province of Ares, would be the curse par
excellence.

Ares in Homer. — Throughout Homer Ares is the only god
whose one thought and task it is to wage war, yet it is not
the strategic element for which he stands, but rather, as one
writer aptly puts it, the blind berserker-rage of battle. Beat-
ing wildly about him with his blade, he achieves but little glory
before Troy, although, unlike any other god, he does succeed
in slaying some mortals with his own hand. He is sorely
wounded by the hero Diomedes, and in his great pain bellows
like an army ten thousand strong, while Homer says that Otos
and Ephialtes, the stalwart sons of Aloeus, once bound him in
a bronze vessel for thirteen months,^ and in a conflict among
the gods he is overthrown by Athene. He is as fickle as he is
blustering, one moment favouring the Greeks and the next in-
stant lending aid to the Trojans. He is the son of Zeus and
Hera, and his father takes pains, perhaps facetiously, to let
it be known that his love of brawling is purely a maternal
inheritance. His brother is Eris ("Strife"), and Deimos



 



 



I90 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

("Panic") and Phobos ("Fear") are his steeds. Soldiers ^are
known as his servants and the bolder heroes as his sons;. and
by metonymy his name often stands for war or the spirit of
strife in arms. Homer records that he was detected in an in-
trigue with Aphrodite.

Ares outside of Homer. — Although Ares generally passed as
the son of Zeus and Hera, one account, apparently of ancient
origin, made him the unfathered offspring of Hera alone after
she had become impregnated by plucking a certain flower
(the parallel instance of the conception of Hebe will naturally
occur to us here). We have already seen how, in the Attic cycle
of myths. Ares became associated with Areopagos through
Alkippe, his daughter by Aglauros, and through the group of
his professionally belligerent daughters, the Amazons. All of
his children reflect his character in some way: Enyeus, the
king of Skyros, was his son by Ariadne; Lykourgos, who drove
the votaries of Dionysos into the sea, Kyknos the wrestler,
and the Bistonian Diomedes were other offspring; Harmonia,
the unhappy mother of a strife-rent family, was borne to him
by Aphrodite; and the Theban dragon slain by Kadmos was
also his issue. Prior to the great assault against the city of
Thebes, the Seven Generals of the Argive host took the oath
binding them to a united cause by dipping their hands in bull's
blood caught in the hollow of a shield as they pronounced the
names of Ares, Enyo, and Phobos. The ethical influence of
Ares was negative and therefore slight, and depended entirely
on the inference that his scant popularity must indicate general
disapproval of his works and character.

Ares in Art. — An ideal type of Ares in art was apparently
never definitely established. In the earlier period he is generally
shown on vases as a fully armed and bearded warrior; there
are several types in extant statuary bearing the influence of
the later period, the best known being the so-called Borghese
Ares of the Louvre, where he is a nude youth wearing a helmet
and gazing dreamingly before him.



 



 



CHAPTER V

THE GREATER GODS — HERMES

CTTIE Origin and the Name of Hermes. — Hermes was found
-^ in all Hellenic communities, but the part which he played
was relatively inferior. Only in two or three localities had his
cult any deep foundation in the history and thought of the
people, and in Arkadia alone was he accounted a divine an-
cestor. Although his name seems. to be Greek in eictemal
form, it has not yielded to investigators any radical connexion
with the Greek language, and, a fortiori, any meaning consistent
with the character of Hermes. Scholars are practically unani-
mous in their belief that the deity is not Hellenic, and most of
the theories which they venture to make point to the east, a
very recent theory,^ supported, as it is, by the tangible evi-
dence of the monuments, making it almost certain that Hermes
and his distinctive attribute, the caduceus, came to Hellas, ap-
parently by a circuitous path, from the Mesopotamian valley.

Hermes in Homer. — Homer alludes to Hermes as the son
of Maia, but fails to state the name of his father. The god is
already endowed with the individuality that marks him in
later centuries. He is the herald and messenger of the god's;
it is he who communicates to Kalypso the command of Zeus
to free Odysseus and who bears the sceptre from Zeus to Pelops;
and by him Priam is safely escorted to the encampment of the
Greeks. His conduct of the slain suitors to the halls of Hades
is the only instance in Homer of his function as the marshal
of departed souls. The converse of this aspect is seen in the
assistance which he gives to Herakles to return from the lower
to the upper world. As the patron of thieves he confers on



 



 



192 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

Autolykos, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, the allied
gifts of thievery and falsehood, and he is, moreover, the special
divinity of servants and the giver of wealth.

Myths of the Birth and Boyhood of Hermes. — A summary of
the Homeric Hymn to Hermes will give us the best conspectus
of the later Greek ideas of Hermes. After dalliance with Zeus
"in love not quite legitimate,'* the nymph Maia bore Hermes
in a cavern on Mount Kyllene in Arkadia. Even for a god the
child was eictraordinarily precocious, for, during the morning
of the very day of his birth, he walked unaided out of the grotto,
inquisitive to see what the world was like. Immediately he
espied a tortoise, and, with divine intuition, perceiving in it
possibilities as yet undreamed of, he killed the creature, re-
moved its shell, and fitted it with a bridge and seven taut
strings of sheep-gut. Thus he created the lyre.

"When he had wrought the lovely instrument,
He tried the chords, and made diversion meet
Preluding with the plectrum, and there went
Up from beneath his hand a tumult sweet
Of mighty sounds, as from his lips he sent
A strain of unpremeditated wit
Joyous and wild and wanton — such you may
Hear among revellers on a holiday." *

PLATE XXXIX
Hera

This statuesque and majestic figure represents Hera
as the queen of the immortals. On her head she wears
a chastely ornamented golden diadem, from beneath
which her hair falls over her breast and shoulders in
long full tresses. Her chitm^ of a delicately patterned,
gauzy linen, drops to her ankles which are faintly
visible through it, and over this hangs a cloak of some
heavy, closely woven fabric with a middle band and
borders of purple. Her right hand is concealed, but in
her exposed left she holds upright a long sceptre studded
with gold from top to bottom. From a kylix with a
white ground (about 475 B.C.), in Munich (Furt-
wangler-Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmaleni^ No. 65).



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — HERA 165

Hera as the Wife oj Zeus. — The *€/509 7a/tM)9, or holy union,
of Zeus and Hera, which we have described in our chapter
on Beginnings, was to all the Greeks the ideal of married
existence, and although the Homeric character of Hera as
wife persisted in mythology down to a late period, yet her mar-
riage was always popularly held to have been a happy one.
This savours, however, more of courtesy than of truth, inas-
much as the Greeks must have felt that with a faulty model
before them the stability of their social life was imperilled.
The union itself is variously explained. Some are tempted to
see in it an affiliation of natural forces, so that where meteoro-
logical elements are concerned, the domestic strife of Zeus
and Hera would be interpreted as an allegorical representation
of the conflicts of air-currents. Yet this cannot hold if Hera
derived her few celestial functions from her long and intimate
contact with Zeus. One extremely ingenious theory " outiines
a very different origin of the union. It points out that as the
&/509 7£f/tM)9 was most celebrated in the chief Pelasgic centres
like Euboia, Boiotia, Argolis, and Samos, it was probably
generally accepted in Pelasgic times. In Dodona, however,
the oldest Pelasgic centre of the cult of Zeus, the wife of
Zeus was not Hera but Dione, whence his marriage with Hera
must have originated in the same Pelasgic period. But how
was it brought about without a fatal wrench of religious senti-
ment? The myth-makers had a way. If, by means of a myth,
Dionysos could be foisted on Zeus as a son, it was surely just
as easy to explain away one wife and give him another. The
necessity for so doing arose, this theory holds, with the inter-
mingling of two racial stocks one of which was matrilinear and
worshipped Hera as its chief divinity, and the other of which
was patrilinear and followed the cult of Zeus. To unite the
two divinities in a sacred wedlock would be to secure a religious
sanction for the connubial and political fusion of the two
strains of blood, and, accordingly, Hera was torn from the
embrace of her lawful husband, Herakles, and thrown into



 



 



i66 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

the arms of a divorced Zeus, the separation being so carefully
hushed up, however, that only scanty traces of it are left.

The children of Hera and Zeus were Hephaistos, Ares, Hebe,
and the Eileithyiai, but they exhibit few traits which reveal
their maternity. Hephaistos takes his mother's part when
Zeus punishes her for her interference, and Zeus himself apolo-
gizes for Ares' warlike disposition in that he inherits it from
his mother. Hebe is a sort of personification of the well-pre-
served beauty of her mother, and in one legend she has no
relationship at all with Zeus, Hera bearing her after a most
mysterious impregnation by a leaf of lettuce. The Eileithyiai
reflect their mother's care for women in childbed.

The Functions of Hera. — Whether or not Hera was origi-
nally a goddess of the weather and fertility, she occasionally
appears as such in the myths, and, less often, in her cults.
The gale which bore Agamemnon to his home shores after the
fall of Ilion was of Hera's making, and she it was, too, who
caused the mist to enshroud the Trojans. The cuckoo, often
regarded as a rain-bird, was sacred to her, and Polykleitos
represented it perched on her sceptre, while in one brief legend
Zeus assumed the form of the cuckoo to win her love. In
times of drought processions of her worshippers would march
to the mountain-tops and there invoke her aid, and the luxu-
riant growth of bloom which appeared after a dry period had
been broken sprang, people said, from Hera's bridal bed. She
was, moreover, protectress of such staple plants as the pome-
granate and the vine, the full development of which depends
so directly upon the volume of rainfall.

Hera's power to cause insanity was notorious. Herakles
and Athamas and Ino she impelled in their madness to take
the lives of their own offspring; lo she drove mad with a gad-
fly; and she made the daughters of Proitos roam wildly over
the Peloponnesos. Nor did the gods entirely escape, for she
cast a spell of frenzy on Dionysos for his introduction of the
vine, and under its influence he wandered hither and thither



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — HERA 167

in both the nearer and the farther east. There is a wide-spread
primitive belief that lightning brings madness, and perhaps
this, in conjunction with Hera's association with the phenomena
of the weather, may have given rise to her special power over
lunacy.

Throughout the Hellenic peoples Hera was the chief pro-
tectress of women, having surveillance over their part of the
conjugal relationships and acting as their helper in the hour of
travail, while, by a logical projection of these functions, she
was thought to have especial care for the well-being of chil-
dren. She encouraged matrimony and discouraged celibacy.
The great crime of the forty-nine daughters of Danaos lay not
in the murder of their husbands but in their stubborn will to
remain single, and the punishment meted out to them in Hades
was that imposed on celibates after death, according to certain
of the mysteries. Hypermnestra, who spared her husband,
seems to have been in origin a priestess of the Argive Heraion.

Hera's contact with the higher interests of corporate society
was slight. Nowhere outside of Argos, and perhaps Samos,
were her political functions conspicuous, and nowhere, ex-
cept in Argos, did she have much to do with the arts of civi-
lized existence. Hephaistos, the artisan-god, was her son, to
be sure, but his gifts defied the laws of heredity. Though the
queen of all Olympian goddesses, she possessed much less
ethical force than Athene, and contrary to our expectation
it was not she but the Erinyes who punished violations of the
marriage vow. All this tends to convince one that her person-
ality was not the ideal of the Greek wife, but was a reflection
of the restricted conditions of life surrounding the Hellenic
matron.

Herodotos's story of the death of Kleobis and Biton Is not
only effectively told, but shows the Argive faith in Hera as
the final judge of what constitutes the summum bonunij that
is, as an ethical deity. The "father of history'' tells how a
certain woman of the city of Argos planned to ride in her ox-



 



 



i68 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

cart to the Heraion, some forty furlongs distant, and when the
oxen did not appear, her sons Kleobis and Biton put the yoke
across their necks and drew her to the temple. Filled with
pride at the many felicitations which she received on having
such sons, the mother stood before the image of Hera and
prayed that she would bestow upon Kleobis and Biton the
greatest boon that men could have. After sacrificing and feast-
ing, the young men lay down and slept in the precinct of the
goddess, and never woke.

It is not a pleasantry based on her matrimonial quarrels
when we state that there are some evidences that Hera was
regarded as a goddess of war. Traditions to that effect seem to
underlie some of the cults, although the only tangible hint of
this in myth is found in the story of Herakles, since Alkmene's
name indicates that she was primitively a divinity of war, and
her close association with Hera through her son may mean
that she was actually Hera herself.

Hera in Art. — The Hera of art lacks the clear-cut attri-
butes of personality belonging to the Hera of myth and cult.
She has no sure tag of identification about her representations,
such as Artemis has in her bow and Athene in her aegis, al-
though at a late period she occasionally had a peacock beside
her. In her great statue in the Argive Heraion, the work of
Polykleitos, she was shown holding a pomegranate in one hand,
and on the top of her staff, held in the other hand, perched a
cuckoo. She generally appeared as a beautiful mature woman,
with or without a veil, seated on a throne.



 



 



CHAPTER II
THE GREATER GODS — ATHENE

r'HE Origin and the Name of Athene. — The most that one
can say of the origin of Athene is that she belonged to the
so-called Achaian period and was worshipped by Dorian and
Ionian alike, while her cult was diffused uniformly over the
entire Greek world. No observable traces of a Pelasgic descent
cling to her person, although she may have been Pelasgic.
Equally lacking are marks of her importation from the Orient;
this we confidently assert in the face of apparently well-sup-
ported statements that she, along with Hera, was an offshoot
of the Philistine goddess 'Assah of Gaza; and her identification
at Corinth with the Syro-Arabian goddess Allat was a mere
accident. The main lines of her character and the forms of
her worship observed, for instance, in Tegea, Sparta, Kyrene,
Rhodes, and Athens were all developed primarily in Argos,
but of all these places Athens alone added new traits and
stimulated the logical unfolding of old ones, so that, for this
reason, it is in Athens that we can study Athene to the greatest
advantage. As for the meaning of her name, here again we
must confess to ignorance, although one suggested etymology
is at least worth consideration. This derives her appellation
from iirdriviov ("without mother's milk") and interprets it either
passively or actively, the reference in the former sense being
to Athene's unmothered birth from Zeus and in the latter to her
sexless character, which is much like that of the Amazons.^

Athene in Homer. — Homer constantly depicts Athene as
the beloved daughter of Zeus, but nowhere does he allude to
her birth from his head. She is more like the chief Olympian



 



 



I70 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

than is any one of the other divinities, male or female, not
only resembling him in the wide range and directness of her
activities as well as in the high type of her mentality, but also
possessing a large measure of her father's spontaneous re-
sourcefulness in crises. By reason of her ready wit she has a
natural affinity for Odysseus, and, on the principle that "God
helps those who help themselves," stands ready at all times to
assist him. She is the patroness and model worker of all those
arts of life which demand ingenuity and dexterity; she is
skilled in the smithing of gold, in weaving and other domestic
accomplishments. She. endowed Penelope and the daughters of
Pandareos with their skill in all handiwork, and she it was,
too, who gave deftness to the thought and hand of Epeios in
fashioning the wooden horse, the instrument of Troy's fall.
While she frequently takes sides in the actual strife before
Troy, she does so rather as a great strategist than as one who
delights in carnage and havoc.

The Birth of Athene. — In the Theogony of Hesiod we are
told that Ouranos and Gaia warned Zeus that his wife, Metis,
then pregnant with Pallas, would bear a son who would be-
come the king of gods and men. Keeping his counsel to him-
self, Zeus approached Metis and craftily persuaded her to
assume the form of some very small animal (a late legend says
that she became a fly), whereupon he promptly swallowed her,
and, after a time, Pallas Athene leaped forth from his head in a
panoply of gold. "And mighty Olympos shook dreadfully
beneath the fearful bright-eyed goddess, and round about
earth loudly re-echoed; the sea was moved, being stirred with
purple waves; suddenly the spray was thrown aloft and the
glorious son of Hyperion halted his swift steeds till such time
as the maiden Pallas Athene had removed her divine armour
from her immortal shoulders. And all-counselling Zeus re-
joiced." * In a variant form of this myth Brontes, one of the
Kyklopes, begat Athene by Metis, who was swallowed by
Zeus before she could bring her offspring into the world; and



 



 



 



 



PLATE XL
Athene

To understand this statue fully one must restore to
the right of it the remainder of the group to which it
seems to have belonged ; i. e. Marsyas drawing back
from a pair of flutes lying on the ground before him.
The goddess, a self-possessed and thoroughly maidenly
figure, glancing indifferently toward the instruments,
is about to turn away to the left as though instinctively
aware of her native superiority to the half-bestial
creature near her. The Corinthian helmet, the crest
of which is lost, here serves only as a means of iden-
tification. This statue is apparently a replica of the
first century B.C. or a.d. of a bronze original by
Myron (latter part of the fifth century B.C.), and is
now in Frankfort {JHAI x\\^ Plate II).



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — ATHENE 171

in other stories she is the daughter of Pallas, or of a sea-
nymph, Koryphe, by either Zeus or Poseidon. The canonical
myth of her birth seems to have been invented very early to
account for her already established traits of wisdom and moral
sense, while the legend in which Koryphe mothers her is ap-
parently an outgrowth of a cult-title, such as Kopv<f>a{ay which
commemorated her birth from the head of Zeus. It is not
impossible that in the first place Metis was Athene herself.

The Functions of Athene. — The Athene of myth and worship
alike was a goddess of practical and not of speculative life.
None but a utilitarian philosophy could spring from contem-
plation of her being, and there was very little symbolism in
her rites. She neither personified nor controlled any special
department of nature, although, as occasion required, she
could work in a number of them. In her mature develop-
ment she was the social deity par excellence^ unmarred by many
of the primitive crudities which still clung to the distinctively
nature-gods.

Athene was the inventress and craftswoman among the
Olympians, and in that capacity was associated with Hephai-
stos and Prometheus. It was she who contributed the soul to
the fashioning of Pandora, and she invented the plough, and
first contrived spinning, weaving, and working in metal. To
artisans she gave speciar thought. Phereklos, the builder of
the ships of Paris, she loved above all men, and she herself
assisted in the building of the Argo. It was said that she in-
vented the flute and with it imitated the wails of the two sur-
viving Gorgons as they lamented over the body of their
sister Medousa; and although this story seems to be a fiction
to account for only a certain motif on the flute, yet elsewhere
Athene was credited with the invention of flute music in gen-
eral. The honours of having contrived the Pyrrhic dance were
indefinitely divided between Athene and the Kouretes; some
claimed that she originated it to celebrate the victory over the
Titans. She was the first to subdue horses to human use,



 



 



172 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTH0LCX5Y

and for their control devised the bit and bridle, while from
her hands Bellerophon received the bridle with which he guided
Pegasos. It was as a divinity of skill rather than of the sea
that she exercised a patronage over seamanship and gave
success to the Athenian marine, and she it was who safely
steered the Argo past the perilous Symplegades.

In Attike, Athene was active in another practical field —
that of agriculture. She was especially associated with the
olive, and it was in Salamis

"... where first from the earth
The grey-gleaming fruit of the maiden
Athena had birth." «

After creating the olive, she revealed its uses to mankind.
She and Poseidon contested the ownership of Attike, and a
decision was promised by arbiters to that one of the two who
would confer the greatest benefit upon the citizens, whereupon
Poseidon, with a stroke of his trident, produced the salt spring
and Athene planted the olive-tree, both on the Acropolis.
The land was awarded to Athene, and from her gift were grown
the olive orchards of the Attic plain. Her associations with
agriculture, in general, seem not to have been original, but, as
it were, a legacy of an earlier agricultural divinity whom she
displaced. The serpent in the Erechtheion and the obscene
fertility rites hinted at in the story of Erichthonios's birth
from Athene apparently go back to such a divinity.

As a war-goddess Athene was much the same outside of
Homer as within, and her attitude was that of a defender
rather than that of a provoker of war. She took her part in
the just defence of Zeus from the attack of the Titans, her
special antagonist in this conflict being Enkelados; and she
directed particular attention to the development of efficiency
in the cavalry and to difficult siege operations. A branch of her
olive was an emblem of peace won by arms.

Although Athene provoked the storm that scattered the



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — ATHENE 173

Achaians departing from Ilion, although she shattered the
ship of Aias with a lightning-bolt and aided Odysseus time
and again with favourable changes of wind and weather,
she cannot be regarded as decidedly a weather-goddess, her
activities in this sphere doubtless coming from her intimate
relationship to Zeus.

Most of Athene's social aspects have been brought out in-
cidentally in the foregoing discussion of her attributes. Oc-
casionally, however, she appeared as the patroness of the de-
liberative and executive branches of the state, and as Athene
Polias in Athens she was the divine mainstay of the entire
body politic. Her outstanding moral characteristic is her un-
impeachable chastity, so that on Tegea she brought a plague
because Augers babe, born out of wedlock, had been concealed
in her precinct, while her anger against the son of Oileus was
aroused more by his offence against a general moral law pro-
tecting suppliants than by the desecration of her shrine in
particular.

Athene in Art. — There are two outstanding types of repre-
sentations of Athene. In the first, which is the more common,
she is shown standing with lance and shield, wearing a helmet,
and carrying the aegis with the Gorgoneion, or Gorgon's head;
in the other type she is seated and unarmed; in both the owl
and the snake sometimes appear as distinctive attributes.



 



 

THE AFTERWORLD 145

Herakles descended by Tainaron and came back by Trolzen,
bringing Kerbcros with him, and Theseus accompanied Pei-
rithoos below in his foolhardy mission to rob Hades of Per-
sephone, although his safe return was due only to the superior
strength of Herakles. The most famous descents were those
of Odysseus and Orpheus, that of the former furnishing in-
spiration to Vergil and Dante in their treatment of similar
themes, and to those modem poets who have depicted Christ
in Hades.

At the word of Kirke Odysseus approached the underworld
by way of the land of the Kimmerians, a people who dwelt
amid clouds and gloom and never looked upon the face of the
sun. Here he dug a trench and poured into it the blood of
black victims, and soon the gibbering ghosts began to gather
about the trench, clamouring for the blood, which, for a time,
Odysseus would not permit them to touch. First there appeared
to him the restless shade of his former shipmate Elpenor, beg-
ging him to accomplish the due rites over his unburied body,
and at length there came the ghost of Teiresias, the blind seer
of Thebes. When Odysseus allowed him and the other shades to
taste of the .blood, memories of the upper world and the power
of speech returned to them, and from Teiresias he learned
the vicissitudes that were to mark the remainder of his life
down to the day of his death. Then he saw his mother Anti-
kleia, who, though now merely a phantom, had not lost the
tenderness of a mother for him, recounting to him what had
happened in Ithake during his long absence, just those things
that only a mother thinks of telling, the little happenings about
the home that make or mar the life within it. After her he
saw a host of the famous wives and mothers of the gods and
heroes, both the chaste and the unchaste, and when the
shades of the women folk were scattered by Persephone, the
ghosts of the men crowded about, and drinking of the blood
told Odysseus, one by one, the sorry tales of their last days,
and with grief or delight listened to the tidings which he had



 



 



146



GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY



brought them of the kinsfolk whom they had left behind.
First came Agamemnon, surrounded by the shades of those
who had died with him at Aigisthos's fatal banquet; and then

Achilles, proud to learn of the
glory of Neoptolemos among
the living; Aias, still brooding
over his imagined dishonour;
Minos, wielding his golden
sceptre and dealing out dooms
to the dead; and Orion, hunt-
ing across the asphodel mead-
ows the ghosts of the animals
which he had slain in life. Last
of all Odysseus beheld the great
sufferers of Hades, — Tantalos,
Tityos, Sisyphos, Ixion,* and
the rest, and would have seen
more of the renowned heroes
had not the increasing throng
and clamour of the shades filled
his breast with fear and caused
him to fly to his ship and sail
away down the stream of Oke-
anos. From the account of this
visit of Odysseus to Hades, as




Fig. 6. The Death of A1A8 (Ajax)

This design depicts an unusual variant
of the story that tells of the death of Aias,
the son of Telamon. Aias, brooding over
his defeat by Odysseus in the contest for
the arms of Achilles, has tried in vain to



kill himself. Athene now appears before it Stands in the OdySSey itself,
him and points out to him a vulnerable



spot in which to plunge his sword. From
an mcised design on an Etruscan bronze
mirror of the third century B.C., now in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.



more can be learned of the pre-
vailing Greek conception of
the state of the dead than from
any other single source.
The story of the descent of Orpheus is of a very different
character. Eurydike, the young wife of Orpheus, the sweet
singer of Thrace/ was bitten by a serpent, and, dying, her
soul passed within the pale of Hades' realm. Orpheus resolved
to win her back, and as he entered the abode of the shades with



 



 



 



 



PLATE XXXVI

IxioN ON THE Wheel

Ixion is bound by several thongs to an eight-spoked
wheel. His ^^ running" attitude and the wings on
the wheel, after the manner of archaic art denote
rapid revolution. The flower beside Ixion's right foot
serves only to fill up the space between the spokes.
From an Etruscan bronze mirror of the fourth or third
century B.C., in the British Museum (A. B. Cook,
Zeus, i, Plate XVII). See p. 144.



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE AFTERWORLD 147

a song on his lips, 'Hhe pallid souls burst into weeping, Tanta-
los ceased to pursue the retreating water, Ixion and his wheel
stood still, the vultures abandoned their torment of Tityos,
the daughters of Danaos deserted their jars, and Sisyphos sat
down upon the rock. Down the cheeks of the Erinyes flowed
moist tears, and the king and queen of Tartaros yielded to his
plea" * that they set his dear wife free. One condition, how-
ever, was imposed, that as Eurydike followed her husband on
the way out, he was on no account to turn around and look
upon her; but, in the ecstasy of his joy at his recovery of her,
he violated the condition, and Eurydike was recalled to Hades,
never more to return to earth.

Elysiofiy The Islands of the Blest. — The domain of Hades
was not, however, the only abode of those who had come
to the end of this life, for there was, besides this, a land of
eternal happiness with broad flowery fields known now as
Elysion, and now as the Islands of the Blest. The Greeks
naturally thought of this land as lying in the distant west,
some even identifying it with the island of the Phaiakians,
or again with Leuke ("White Isle") at the western end of
the Euxine. According to Pindar, only those mortals were
translated thither who had come through a triple test in life
and had remained good and brave and true, although from
other literary sources one gathers that the common belief
was that the land was reserved for those in whose veins
flowed the blood of the gods. It was indeed for this reason
alone, and not for any special piety, that Menelaos and
Helen were admitted into its bliss, though Peleus, Achilles,
Kadmos, and many others of the heroes were there who by
virtue of passing either test could have entered this land,
whose charm can be best conveyed by the words of Proteus
to Menelaos: "But thou, Menelaus, son of Zeus, art not
ordained to die and meet thy fate in Argos, the pasture-
land of horses, but the deathless gods will convey thee to the
Elysian plain and the world's end, where is Rhadamanthys
I— 14



 



 



148 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

of the fair hair, where life is easiest for men. No snow is
there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always Ocean
sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill west to blow cool on
men: yea, for thou hast Helen to wife, and thereby they deem
thee to be the son of Zeus." •



 



 



PART II
THE GREEK GODS



 



 



 



 



CHAPTER I
THE GREATER GODS — ZEUS AND HERA

ALMOST all the gods who are considered in this and the
next few chapters are universally regarded as the greater
personages of the Greek pantheon, although a few who are
confessedly not of this rank have been given a place here
because of the difliculty and impropriety of dealing with
them apart from their more distinguished fellows with whom
they are inseparably associated. For instance, Hekate is the
natural companion of Artemis, Eros of Aphrodite, and Per-
sephone and Hades of Demeter. We have obtained our list
of greater gods by combining the Homeric, Athenian, and
Olympian systems, though from the last named we have
omitted Kronos, Rhea, Alpheios, and the Charites.

ZEUS

Between the Zeus of the historical period and the Zeus of
the primitive Greeks there is a great gulf fixed. ^ It is not, how-
ever, entirely unspanned, for the diligent research of many
years has succeeded in throwing over it bridges of inference
and deduction, which, while slender, afford the hope that they
may serve as the foundations for stronger structures in the
future. Any statements that we may make, therefore, in
reference to this void we give with reserve, even though we
may not preface each individual statement with a specific
word of caution. It must be remembered that our present
endeavour is to trace the transformation of the Zeus, not of
a single locality, but of all Hellenic localities, to sketch the



 



 



152 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

lineaments, as it were, of a great composite Zeus who would be
recognized at first glance by all Hellenes as the chief god of
their cults and myths.

The Original Significance of Zeus. — Zeus was the great
aboriginal god not only of all the Hellenic stocks, but of the
so-called Indo-European race, nor does the predominating im-
portance of his celestial functions in ritual, myth, and epithet
permit of any other inference than that he was a personifica-
tion of the bright sky.* The coincidence of these activities
with those of the great sky-god of cognate name of other Indo-
European peoples points in the same direction, and, more-
over, his name alone is a proof of his origin, for it is a develop-
ment of the base deya^ "to shine,'* probably passing through
the stages of pronunciation — if not of orthography —
*At?j/r9, *AAi;i59, *At€V9, Zev?, while in the invocation ZeS irdrep
("Father Zeus") we can readily perceive a parallel to the
Latin luppiter (Diespiter), and in the Indian Rig Veda the
phrase dyau pitar ("Father Sky") occurs in several pas-
sages. In most instances the non-celestial functions of Zeus
can be shown to be more or less natural efflorescences, so to
speak, of his celestial activities, although sometimes they may
be suspected of being the results of contamination with the
worship of other divinities.*

In dealing with the personality of Zeus OT^e must avoid being
misled by his mere name, which was occasionally applied to
other beings than the chief Olympian. Thus Hades, or Plou-
ton, was sometimes spoken of as Zeus, but it was through
metaphor, for was not Hades the Zeus of the underworld?
Rain-making fetishes in various districts were at times ad-
dressed as Zeus by local votaries; and through haste and
ignorance Hellenic travellers would often designate as Zeus
the leading male divinity of a strange community, this iden-
tity being presumed most frequently of all when they were
journeying in distinctly barbarian countries. It is the genuine
Zeus, the sky-god, with whom we are concerned.



 



 



 



 



PLATE XXXVII

Zeus

This beautiful statuette (only 4^ inches high) of
the seated Zeus, although of Roman execution, is re^
markable for its fidelity to the Greek type. In his
right hand, which rests on his knee, the god grasps a
thunderbolt, while bis left hand, raised to the height
of his head, is supported by, rather than supports, a
sceptre. The treatment of the face, beard, and hair
is similar to that of the Zeus of Otricoli. The slight
forward thrust of the head, and the much less formal
grasp of the sceptre, together with certain other feat-
ures, differentiate this type from that of the Olympian
Zeus of Pheidias. From a Roman bronze copy of a
fourth century Greek type, in the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, New York (photograph).



 



 




 



 



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — ZEUS 153

The Zeus of Homer. — In the Iliad and the Odyssey Zeus
no longer appears as the sole divine arbiter of the sky and the
supreme lord of the weather, for both Hera and Poseidon
stir up wind and wave against those who have incurred their
anger, apparently with only little less freedom of initiative
than has Zeus himself.'* Yet when the Greeks set sail home-
ward from Troy, we learn in the Odyssey, it was Zeus who
scattered the ships; and after Odysseus's companions perfidi-
ously slew the Cattle of the Sun in Thrinakia, it was Zeus who
brought the disaster of shipwreck upon them. Despite the
encroachments upon his power, he still remained the undis-
puted master of the thunder and the lightning, so that when,
on the morning before the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus
heard the roar of thunder, he knew it to be a sign from Zeus
that he would not thwart his plans. This sort of omen could,
however, be interpreted as unfavourable or even as doubtful,
as when, on one occasion, thunder which lasted all night long
set both the Greek and Trojan armies to wondering what
Zeus had in store for them, and made all the warriors turn
pale with fear.

Although in Homer the original character of 2^us had be-
come dim, whether in reality or by contrast, one side of his
nature was very clearly illumined: he was potentially the ruler
of the universe. The other gods had their departmental
functions in nature, but 2^us could usurp them if only he chose
to do so, and in the last analysis his will was supreme, being
limited by nothing, for it was itself Fate. He was not merely
an Olympian; he was the Olympian; * nor was he the petty god
of a tribe or nation, for all the peoples of whom Homer had
cognizance acknowledged his supremacy as "Father of gods
and men," although the title "Father" conveyed not so much
the idea that he was of necessity a physical father or the
creator of men and things (on the contrary, Okeanos was the
great creative source of all things in Homer) as that he exer-
cised over the great family of beings, human and divine.



 



 



154 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

that kind of rule which we call paternalistic. To men he dis-
pensed joys or ills, as he pleased; he determined for them the
issues of their battles in arms until they became mere puppets;
and according to his whim he warned or deluded by omens.
Unlike the other gods, he observed a strict neutrality in
the Trojan War, save when it suited his purposes to lean
toward this side or toward that, and he became gravely
ethical on occasion, as when he rebuked Ares as a lover of
contention, or when he ordered concord among the Ithakans;
though at other times, open-eyed, he flung ethics to the winds,
as he did when he devised means for breaking the solemn
truce between the Trojans and the Achaians. He wielded,
Roman-like, a patria poUstas over the universe, for he weighed
the Fates of Hektor and Achilles in the scales and assented
to Hektor's death. This paternalistic attitude showed most
clearly in the circle of the gods, whom he convened in the dic-
tatorial manner of a feudal chieftain, and who espoused one or
the other cause before Troy simply because he said they
might. His ipse dixit, conveyed by Hermes, forced Kalypso
to release Odysseus against her heart and will; he bestowed
boons upon the other gods, but only as he was convinced of the
real need for them in each instance, or as he was forced through
guile. At times he stepped down from his throne to mingle with
his fellows on the conunon floor of Olympos, but he never lost
consciousness of his superiority. In all this we are to see not
the absolute political ideal of the Homeric period, but, rather,
the refined portrayal of the conditions of state to which the
Greeks of that time had advanced.

The Birth and Death of Zeus. — When Pausanias frankly
admits that he found it hard to enumerate all the Greek
localities which claimed to be the birthplace of Zeus, the dif-
ficulty and folly of our attempting at this late date to draw up
anything like a complete catalogue of them is very apparent.
In Messenia and Arkadia alone he records no less than five
such places, among them Mount Ithome, the acropolis of the



 



 



THE GREATER GODS — ZEUS 155

city of Messene. The account makes no mention of the parent-
age of Zeus, which leads one to think that the traditional legend
of the Hesiodic story is to be assumed. Born, then, of Kronos
and Rhea, Zeus was hurried away by the Kouretes, an order of
priests, to Mount Ithome for fear of the evil designs of his
father, and there was placed in the care of two local nymphs,
Neda and Ithome, who washed him in the waters of a spring
on the slopes of the mountain, Neda giving her name to the
near-by river and Ithome hers to the mountain, while in a most
childish fashion the theft of the child and his bath in the
water of the fountain were combined to attach to the spring
the name Klepsydra, "Stolen Water," The god was also said
to have been bom on Mount Aigaion in Arkadia, where he was
suckled by a goat, although Mount Lykaion of the same dis-
trict and a mountain near Lydian Sardeis were likewise claimed
for this honour. The most famous of all the birthplaces, how-
ever, was the island of Crete, the legends variously pointing to
Mounts Dikte, Ida, and Lyktos as the exact locality of the
birth. In the most widely prevailing version Rhea succeeded
in escaping from Kronos just in time to bear Zeus in a cave in
one of these mountains, and in answer to the rapacious de-
mands of the new father gave him a wrapped stone to swallow
instead of the child. The infant was cared for by Amaltheia,
a goat, or by local nymphs, who, one story runs, hung him in
a cradle on a tree to elude the keen searches of Kronos, while,
in order to add to the deception, the Kouretes were appointed
to take up their post close by and to make a great din by
clashing their arms and brazen shields together, thus drowning
the child's cries. Other legends say that it was a cow or a
sow which nursed the infant. On the death of Kronos Zeus
assumed the dominion over the world.

While the fully developed pan-Hellenic Zeus was truly one
of the immortal gods who feasted on ambrosia and nectar, yet
several local forms of Zeus were said to die, and an epigram
attributed to Pythagoras* marked a spot in Crete where re-



 



 



156 GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

posed the remains of Zeus: "Here lieth in death Zan, whom
men call Zeus/* This conflict between immortality and death
is easily explained if the fact is borne in mind that in some
districts of Crete he was, like Hyakinthos in Lakonia, a god
of vegetation who alternately lived and died; while in Phrygia
his descriptive title of "Summer-God" carried substantially
the same significance.

The Marriages of Zeus. — Zeus is represented as the most
uxorious of all the gods. Of his almost countless unions with
goddesses and women many were accepted by the Greeks with
that absence of conunent which, as. a rule, is the sanction of
legitimacy, but they looked askance at a number of others in a
way which made them, to say the least, the objects of social
suspicion.^