The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (23 page)

2
.
Homeric Hymn to Pan
:
loc. cit
.; Servius on Virgil’s
Georgics
i. 16; Duris, quoted by Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
772; Apollodorus: 1.4.1; Scholiast on Aeschylus’s
Rhesus
30.

3
. Theocritus:
Idylls
i. 16; Euripides:
Rhesus
36; Hesychius
sub
Agreus Theocritus:
Idylls
vii. 107.

4
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iii. 356–401; Hyginus:
Fabula
224;
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 27.

5
. Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
xxii. 4; Ovid:
Metamorphoses i
. 694–712; Philargyrius on Virgil’s
Georgics
iii. 392.

6
. Plutarch:
Why Oracles Are Silent
17.

1
. Pan, whose name is usually derived from
paein
, ‘to pasture’, stands for the ‘devil’, or ‘upright man’, of the Arcadian fertility cult, which closely resembled the witch cult of North-western Europe. This man, dressed in a goat-skin, was the chosen lover of the Maenads during their drunken orgies on the high mountains, and sooner or later paid for his privilege with death.

2
. The accounts of Pan’s birth vary greatly. Since Hermes was the power resident in a phallic stone which formed the centre of these orgies (see
14.
1
), the shepherds described their god Pan as his son by a woodpecker, a bird whose tapping is held to portend the welcome summer rain. The myth that he fathered Pan on Oeneis is self-explanatory, though the original Maenads used other intoxicants than wine (see
27.
2
); and
the name of his reputed mother, Penelope (‘with a web over her face’), suggests that the Maenads wore some form of war paint for their orgies, recalling the stripes of the
penelope
, a variety of duck. Plutarch says (
On the Delays of Divine Punishment
12) that the Maenads who killed Orpheus were tattooed by their husbands as a punishment (see
28.
f
); and a Maenad whose legs and arms are tattooed with a webbed pattern appears on a vase at the British Museum (Catalogue E. 301). Hermes’s visit to Penelope in the form of a ram – the ram devil is as common in the North-western witch cult as the goat – her impregnation by all the suitors (see 171.
l
), and the claim that Pan had coupled with every one of the Maenads refers to the promiscuous nature of the revels in honour of the Fir-goddess Pitys or Elate (see
78.
1
). The Arcadian mountaineers were the most primitive in Greece (see
1.
5
), and their more civilized neighbours professed to despise them.

3
. Pan’s son, the wryneck; or snake-bird, was a spring migrant employed in erotic charms (see
56.
1
and 152.
2
). Squills contain an irritant poison – valuable against mice and rats – and were used as a purge and diuretic before taking part in a ritual act; thus squill came to symbolize the removal of evil influences (Pliny:
Natural History
xx. 39), and Pan’s image was scourged with squill if game were scarce (see 108.
10
).

4
. His seduction of Selene must refer to a moonlight May Eve orgy, in which the young Queen of the May rode upon her upright man’s back before celebrating a greenwood marriage with him. By this time the ram cult had superseded the goat cult in Arcadia (see
27.
2
).

5
. The Egyptian Thamus apparently misheard the ceremonial lament
Thamus Pan-megas Tethnēce
(‘the all-great Tammuz is dead!’) for the message: ‘Thamus, Great Pan is dead!’ At any rate, Plutarch, a priest at Delphi in the latter half of the first century
A
.
D
., believed and published it; yet when Pausanias made his tour of Greece, about a century later, he found Pan’s shrines, altars, sacred caves, and sacred mountains still much frequented.

27

DIONYSUS’S NATURE AND DEEDS

A
T
Hera’s orders the Titans seized Zeus’s newly-born son Dionysus, a horned child crowned with serpents and, despite his transformations, tore him into shreds. These they boiled in a cauldron, while a pomegranate-tree sprouted from the soil where his blood had fallen; but,
rescued and reconstituted by his grandmother Rhea, he came to life again. Persephone, now entrusted with his charge by Zeus, brought him to King Athamas of Orchomenus and his wife Ino, whom she persuaded to rear the child in the women’s quarters, disguised as a girl. But Hera could not be deceived, and punished the royal pair with madness, so that Athamas killed their son Learches, mistaking him for a stag.
¹

b
. Then, on Zeus’s instructions, Hermes temporarily transformed Dionysus into a kid or a ram, and presented him to the nymphs Macris, Nysa, Erato, Bromie, and Bacche, of Heliconian Mount Nysa. They tended Dionysus in a cave, cosseted him, and fed him on honey, for which service Zeus subsequently placed their images among the stars, naming them the Hyades. It was on Mount Nysa that Dionysus invented wine, for which he is chiefly celebrated.
²

When he grew to manhood Hera recognized him as Zeus’s son, despite the effeminacy to which his education had reduced him, and drove him mad also. He went wandering all over the world, accompanied by his tutor Silenus and a wild army of Satyrs and Maenads, whose weapons were the ivy-twined staff tipped with a pine-cone, called the
thyrsus
, and swords and serpents and fear-imposing bull-roarers. He sailed to Egypt, bringing the vine with him; and at Pharos King Proteus received him hospitably. Among the Libyans of the Nile Delta, opposite Pharos, were certain Amazon queens whom Dionysus invited to march with him against the Titans and restore King Ammon to the kingdom from which he had been expelled. Dionysus’s defeat of the Titans and restoration of King Ammon was the earliest of his many military successes.
³

c
. He then turned east and made for India. Coming to the Euphrates, he was opposed by the King of Damascus, whom he flayed alive, but built a bridge across the river with ivy and vine; after which a tiger, sent by his father Zeus, helped him across the river Tigris. He reached India, having met with much opposition by the way, and conquered the whole country, which he taught the art of viniculture, also giving it laws and founding great cities.
⁴

d
. On his return he was opposed by the Amazons, a horde of whom he chased as far as Ephesus. A few took sanctury in the Temple of Artemis, where their descendants are still living; others fled to Samos and Dionysus followed them in boats, killing so many that the battlefield is called Panhaema. Near Phloeum some of the elephants which
he had brought from India died, and their bones are still pointed out.
⁵

e
. Next, Dionysus returned to Europe by way of Phrygia, where his grandmother Rhea purified him of the many murders he had committed during his madness, and initiated him into her Mysteries. He then invaded Thrace; but no sooner had his people landed at the mouth of the river Strymon than Lycurgus, King of the Edonians, opposed them savagely with an ox-goad, and captured the entire army, except Dionysus himself, who plunged into the sea and took refuge in Thetis’s grotto. Rhea, vexed by this reverse, helped the prisoners to escape, and drove Lycurgus mad: he struck his own son Dryas dead with an axe, in the belief that he was cutting down a vine. Before recovering his senses he had begun to prune the corpse of its nose and ears, fingers and toes; and the whole land of Thrace grew barren in horror of his crime. When Dionysus, returning from the sea, announced that this barrenness would continue unless Lycurgus were put to death, the Edonians led him to Mount Pangaeum, where wild horses pulled his body apart.
⁶

f
. Dionysus met with no further opposition in Thrace, but travelled on to his well-beloved Boeotia, where he visited Thebes, and invited the women to join his revels on Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus, King of Thebes, disliking Dionysus’s dissolute appearance, arrested him, together with all his Maenads, but went mad and, instead of shackling Dionysus, shackled a bull. The Maenads escaped again, and went raging out upon the mountains, where they tore calves in pieces. Pentheus attempted to stop them; but, inflamed by wine and religious ecstasy, they rent him limb from limb. His mother Agave led the riot, and it was she who wrenched off his head.
⁷

g
. At Orchomenus the three daughters of Minyas, by name Alcithoë, Leucippe, and Arsippe, or Aristippe, or Arsinoë, refused to join in the revels, though Dionysus himself invited them, appearing in the form of a girl. He then changed his shape, becoming successively a lion, a bull, and a panther, and drove them insane. Leucippe offered her own son Hippasus as a sacrifice – he had been chosen by lot – and the three sisters, having torn him to pieces and devoured him, skimmed the mountains in a frenzy until at last Hermes changed them into birds, though some say that Dionysus changed them into bats.
⁸
The murder of Hippasus is annually atoned at Orchomenus, in a feast called Agrionia (‘provocation to savagery’), when the women devotees pretend to seek Dionysus and then, having agreed that he must be away with the Muses, sit in a circle and ask riddles, until the priest of Dionysus
rushes from his temple, with a sword, and kills the one whom he first catches.
⁹

h
. When all Boeotia had acknowledged Dionysus’s divinity, he made a tour of the Aegean Islands, spreading joy and terror wherever he went. Arriving at Icaria, he found that his ship was unseaworthy, and hired another from certain Tyrrhenian sailors who claimed to be bound for Naxos. But they proved to be pirates and, unaware of his godhead, steered for Asia, intending to sell him there as a slave. Dionysus made a vine grow from the deck and enfold the mast, while ivy twined about the rigging; he also turned the oars into serpents, and became a lion himself, filling the vessel with phantom beasts and the sound of flutes, so that the terrified pirates leaped overboard and became dolphins.
¹⁰

i
. It was at Naxos that Dionysus met the lovely Ariadne whom Theseus had deserted, and married her without delay. She bore him Oenopion, Thoas, Staphylus, Latromis, Euanthes, and Tauropolus. Later, he placed her bridal chaplet among the stars.
¹¹

j
. From Naxos he came to Argos and punished Perseus, who at first opposed him and killed many of his followers, by inflicting a madness on the Argive women: they began devouring their own infants raw. Perseus hastily admitted his error, and appeased Dionysus by building a temple in his honour.

k
. Finally, having established his worship throughout the world, Dionysus ascended to Heaven, and now sits at the right hand of Zeus as one of the Twelve Great Ones. The self-effacing goddess Hestia resigned her seat at the high table in his favour; glad of any excuse to escape the jealous wranglings of her family, and knowing that she could always count on a quiet welcome in any Greek city which it might please her to visit. Dionysus then descended, by way of Lerna, to Tartarus where he bribed Persephone with a gift of myrtle to release his dead mother, Semele. She ascended with him into Artemis’s temple at Troezen; but, lest other ghosts should be jealous and aggrieved, he changed her name and introduced her to his fellow-Olympians as Thyone. Zeus placed an apartment at her disposal, and Hera preserved an angry but resigned silence.
¹²