The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (22 page)

1
. Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
520; Hesychius
sub
Hippia; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
iv. 402; Pindar:
Olympian Odes
xiii. 79; Livy: vii. 3; Pausanias: i. 24. 3, etc.; Homer:
Iliad
i. 199 ff.; v. 736; v. 840–863; xxi. 391–422; Aeschylus:
Eumenides
753.

2
. Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 13; Apollodorus: iii. 14.6; Hyginus:
Fabula
166.

3
. Pausanias: i. 5. 3; viii. 2. 1; Apollodorus: iii. 14. 1; Strabo: ix. 1. 20; Aristophanes:
Plutus
773; Athenaeus: p. 555c; Eustathius:
On Homer
p. 1156; Parian Marble: lines 2–4.

4
. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 3 and 6;
Inscriptiones Graecae
xiv. 1389; Hyginus:
Fabula
166.

5
. Antigonus Carystius: 12; Callimachus:
Hecale
i. 2. 3; Philostratus:
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vii. 24; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 13;
Fabula
274; Apollodorus: iii. 14. 1.

6
. Suidas and Hesychius
sub
Agraulos; Plutarch:
Alcibiades
15.

7
. Callimachus:
The Bathing of Pallas
.

8
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vi. 1–145; Virgil:
Georgics
iv. 246.

1
. The Athenians made their goddess’s maidenhood symbolic of the city’s invincibility; and therefore disguised early myths of her outrage by Poseidon (see
19.
2
), and Boreas (see
48.
1
); and denied that Erichthonius, Apollo, and Lychnus (‘lamp’) were her sons by Hephaestus. They derived ‘Erichthonius’ from either
erion
, ‘wool’, or
eris
, ‘strife’, and
chthonos
, ‘earth’, and invented the myth of his birth to explain the presence, in archaic pictures, of a serpent-child peeping from the goddess’s aegis. Poseidon’s part in the birth of Erichthonius may originally have been a simpler and more direct one; why else should Erichthonius introduce the Poseidonian four-horse chariot into Athens?

2
. Athene had been the Triple-goddess, and when the central person, the Goddess as Nymph, was suppressed and myths relating to her transferred to Aphrodite, Oreithyia (see
48.
b
), or Alcippe (see
19.
b
), there remained the Maiden clad in goat-skins, who specialized in war (see
8.
1
), and the Crone, who inspired oracles and presided over all the arts.
Erichthonius
is perhaps an expanded form of
Erechtheus
(see
47.
1
), meaning ‘from the land of heather’ (see
18.
1
) rather than ‘much earth’, as is usually said; the Athenians represented him as a serpent with a human head, because he was the hero, or ghost, of the sacrificed king who made the Crone’s wishes known. In this Crone-aspect, Athene was attended by an owl and a crow. The ancient royal family of Athens claimed descent from Erichthonius and Erechtheus, and called themselves Erechtheids; they used to wear golden serpents as amulets and kept a sacred serpent in the Erechtheum. But Erichthonius was also a procreative wind from the heather-clad mountains, and Athene’s aegis (or a replica) was taken to all newly married couples at Athens, to ensure their fertility (Suidas
sub
Aegis).

3
. Some of the finest Cretan pots are known to have been made by women, and so originally, no doubt, were all the useful instruments invented by Athene; but in Classical Greece an artisan had to be a man. Silver was at first a more valuable metal than gold, since harder to refine, and sacred to the moon; Periclean Athens owed her pre-eminence largely to the rich silver mines at Laureium first worked by the Cretans, which allowed her to import food and buy allies.

4
. The occasion on which Cecrops’s daughters leaped from the Acropolis may have been a Hellenic capture of Athens, after which an attempt was made to force monogamy on Athene’s priestesses, as in the myth of Halirrhothius (see
19.
b
). They preferred death to dishonour – hence the oath taken by the Athenian youths at Agraulos’s shrine. The other story of Agraulos’s death is merely a moral anecdote: a warning against
the violation of Athene’s mysteries. ‘Agraulos’ was one more title of the Moon-goddess;
agraulos
and its transliteration
aglauros
mean much the same thing,
agraulos
being a Homeric epithet for shepherds, and
aglauros
(like
herse
and
pandrosos
) referring to the moon as the reputed source of the dew which refreshed the pastures. At Athens girls went out under the full moon at midsummer to gather dew – the same custom survived in England until the last century – for sacred purposes. The festival was called the Hersephoria, or ‘dew-gathering’; Agraulos or Agraule was, in fact, a title of Athene herself, and Agraule is said to have been worshipped in Cyprus until late times (Porphyry:
On Vegetarianism
30) with human sacrifices. A gold ring from Mycenae shows three priestesses advancing towards a temple; the two leaders scatter dew, the third (presumably Agraulos) has a branch tied to her elbow. The ceremony perhaps originated in Crete. Hermes’s seduction of Herse, for which he paid Aglauros in gold, must refer to the ritual prostitution of priestesses before an image of the goddess – Aglauros turned to stone. The sacred baskets carried on such occasions will have contained phallic snakes and similar orgiastic objects. Ritual prostitution by devotees of the Moon-goddess was practised in Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Asia Minor, and Palestine.

5
. Athene’s expulsion of the crow is a mythic variant of Cronus’s banishment –
Cronus
means ‘crow’ (see
6.
2
) – the triumph, in fact, of Olympianism, with the introduction of which Cecrops, who is really Ophion-Boreas the Pelasgian demiurge (see
1.
1
), has here been wrongly credited. The crow’s change of colour recalls the name of Athene’s Welsh counterpart: Branwen, ‘white crow’, sister to Bran (see
57.
1
). Athene was, it seems, titled ‘Coronis’.

6
. Her vengeance on Arachne may be more than just a pretty fable, if it records an early commercial rivalry between the Athenians and the. Lydio-Carian thalassocrats, or sea-rulers, who were of Cretan origin. Numerous seals with a spider emblem which have been found at Cretan Miletus – the mother city of Carian Miletus and the largest exporter of dyed woollens in the ancient world – suggest a public textile industry operated there at the beginning of the second millennium
B
.
C
. For a while the Milesians controlled the profitable Black Sea trade, and had an
entrepôt
at Naucratis in Egypt. Athene had good reason to be jealous of the spider.

7
. An apparent contradiction occurs in Homer. According to the
Catalogue of the Ships
(
Iliad
ii. 547 ff.), Athene set Erechtheus down in her rich temple at Athens; but, according to the
Odyssey
(vii. 80), she goes to Athens and enters his strong house. The fact was that the sacred king had his own quarters in the Queen’s palace where the goddess’s image was kept. There were no temples in Crete or Mycenaean Greece, only domestic shrines or oracular caves.

26

PAN’S NATURE AND DEEDS

S
EVERAL
powerful gods and goddesses of Greece have never been enrolled among the Olympian Twelve. Pan, for instance, a humble fellow, now dead, was content to live on earth in rural Arcadia; and Hades, Persephone, and Hecate know that their presence is unwelcome on Olympus; and Mother Earth is far too old and set in her ways to accommodate herself to the family life of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

b
. Some say that Hermes fathered Pan on Dryope, daughter of Dryops; or on the nymph Oeneis; or on Penelope, wife of Odysseus, whom he visited in the form of a ram; or on Amaltheia the Goat.
¹
He is said to have been so ugly at birth, with horns, beard, tail, and goat-legs, that his mother ran away from him in fear, and Hermes carried him up to Olympus for the gods’ amusement. But Pan was Zeus’s foster-brother, and therefore far older than Hermes, or than Penelope, on whom (others say) he was fathered by all the suitors who wooed her during Odysseus’s absence. Still others make him the son of Cronus and Rhea; or of Zeus by Hybris, which is the least improbable account.
²

c
. He lived in Arcadia, where he guarded flocks, herds, and bee-hives, took part in the revels of the mountain-nymphs, and helped hunters to find their quarry. He was, on the whole, easy-going and lazy, loving nothing better than his afternoon sleep, and revenged himself on those who disturbed him with a sudden loud shout from a grove, or grotto, which made the hair bristle on their heads. Yet the Arcadians paid him so little respect that, if ever they returned empty-handed after a long day’s hunting, they dared scourge him with squills.
³

d
. Pan seduced several nymphs, such as Echo, who bore him lynx and came to an unlucky end for love of Narcissus; and Eupheme, nurse of the Muses, who bore him Crotus, the Bowman in the Zodiac. He also boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus’s drunken Maenads.
⁴

e
. Once he tried to violate the chaste Pitys, who escaped him only by being metamorphosed into a fir-tree, a branch of which he afterwards wore as a chaplet. On another occasion he pursued the chaste Syrinx from Mount Lycaeum to the River Ladon, where she became a reed; there, since he could not distinguish her from among all the rest, he cut
several reeds at random, and made them into a Pan-pipe. His greatest success in love was the seduction of Selene, which he accomplished by disguising his hairy black goatishness with well-washed white fleeces. Not realizing who he was, Selene consented to ride on his back, and let him do as he pleased with her.
⁵

f
. The Olympian gods, while despising Pan for his simplicity and love of riot, exploited his powers. Apollo wheedled the art of prophecy from him, and Hermes copied a pipe which he had let fall, claimed it as his own invention, and sold it to Apollo.

g
. Pan is the only god who has died in our time. The news of his death came to one Thamus, a sailor in a ship bound for Italy by way of the island of Paxi. A divine voice shouted across the sea: ‘Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead!’, which Thamus did; and the news was greeted from the shore with groans and laments.
⁶

1
.
Homeric Hymn to Pan
34 ff.; Scholiast on Theocritus’s
Idylls
i. 3; Herodotus: ii. 145; Eratosthenes:
Catasterismoi
27.