The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (26 page)

Orpheus, because he was the principal in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god.

and Apollodorus (i. 3. 2) credits him with having invented the Mysteries of Dionysus.

3
. The novel worship of the Sun as All-father seems to have been brought to the Northern Aegean by the fugitive priesthood of the monotheistic Akhenaton, in the fourteenth century
B
.
C
., and grafted upon the local cults; hence Orpheus’s alleged visit to Egypt. Records of this faith are found in Sophocles (
Fragments
523 and 1017), where the sun is referred to as ‘the eldest flame, dear to the Thracian horsemen’, and as ‘the sire of the gods, and father of all things.’ It seems to have been forcefully resisted by the more conservative Thracians, and bloodily suppressed in some parts of the country. But later Orphic priests, who wore Egyptian costume, called the demi-god whose raw bull’s flesh they ate ‘Dionysus’, and reserved the name Apollo for the immortal Sun: distinguishing Dionysus, the god of the senses, from Apollo, the god of the intellect. This explains why the head of Orpheus was laid up in Dionysus’s sanctuary, but the lyre in Apollo’s. Head and lyre are both said to have drifted to Lesbos, which was the chief seat of lyric music; Terpander, the earliest
historical musician, came from Antissa. The serpent’s attack on Orpheus’s head represents either the protest of an earlier oracular hero against Orpheus’s intrusion at Antissa, or that of Pythian Apollo which Philostratus recorded in more direct language.

4
. Eurydice’s death by snake-bite and Orpheus’s subsequent failure to bring her back into the sunlight, figure only in late myth. They seem to be mistakenly deduced from pictures which show Orpheus’s welcome in Tartarus, where his music has charmed the Snake goddess Hecate, or Agriope (‘savage face’), into giving special privileges to all ghosts initiated into the Orphic Mysteries, and from other pictures showing Dionysus, whose priest Orpheus was, descending to Tartarus in search of his mother Semele (see
27.
k
). Eurydice’s victims died of snake-bite, not herself (see
33.
1
).

5
. The alder-month is the fourth of the sacral tree-sequence, and it precedes the willow-month, associated with the water magic of the goddess Helice (‘willow’ – see
44.
1
); willows also gave their name to the river Helicon, which curves around Parnassus and is sacred to the Muses – the Triple Mountain-goddess of inspiration. Hence Orpheus was shown in a temple-painting at Delphi (Pausanias: x. 30. 3) leaning against a willow-tree and touching its branches. The Greek alder cult was suppressed in very early times, yet vestiges of it remain in Classical literature: alders enclose the death-island of the witch-goddess Circe (Homer:
Odyssey
v. 64 and 239) – she also had a willow-grove cemetery at Colchis (Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 220 – see 152.
b
) and, according to Virgil the sisters of Phaëthon were metamorphosed into an alder thicket (see
42.
3
).

6
. This is not to suggest that Orpheus’s decapitation was never more than a metaphor applied to the lopped alder-bough. A sacred king necessarily suffered dismemberment, and the Thracians may well have had the same custom as the Iban Dayaks of modern Sarawak. When the men come home from a successful head-hunting expedition the Iban women use the trophy as a means of fertilizing the rice crop by invocation. The head is made to sing, mourn, and answer questions and nursed tenderly in every lap until it finally consents to enter an oracular shrine, where it gives advice on all important occasions and, like the heads of Eurystheus, Bran, and Adam, repels invasions (see 146.
2
).

29

GANYMEDES

G
ANYMEDES
, the son of King Tros who gave his name to Troy, was the most beautiful youth alive and therefore chosen by the gods to be
Zeus’s cup-bearer. It is said that Zeus, desiring Ganymedes also as his bedfellow, disguised himself in eagle’s feathers and abducted him from the Trojan plain.
¹

b
. Afterwards, on Zeus’s behalf, Hermes presented Tros with a golden vine, the work of Hephaestus, and two fine horses, in compensation for his loss, assuring him at the same time that Ganymedes had become immortal, exempt from the miseries of old age, and was now smiling, golden bowl in hand, as he dispensed bright nectar to the Father of Heaven.
²

c
. Some say that Eos had first abducted Ganymedes to be her paramour, and that Zeus took him from her. Be that as it may, Hera certainly deplored the insult to herself, and to her daughter Hebe, until then the cup-bearer of the gods; but she succeeded only in vexing Zeus, who set Ganymedes’s image among the stars as Aquarius, the water-carrier.
³

1
. Homer:
Iliad
xx. 231–5; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2; Virgil:
Aeneid
v. 252 ff.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
x. 155 ff.

2
. Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
1391; Homer:
Iliad
v. 266;
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite
202–17; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 9; Pausanias: v. 24. 1.

3
. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 115; Virgil:
Aeneid
i. 32, with scholiast; Hyginus:
Fabula
224; Virgil:
Georgics
iii. 304.

1
. Ganymedes’s task as wine-pourer to all the gods – not merely Zeus in early accounts – and the two horses, given to King Tros as compensation for his death, suggest the misreading of an icon which showed the new king preparing for his sacred marriage. Ganymedes’s bowl will have contained a libation, poured to the ghost of his royal predecessor; and the officiating priest in the picture, to whom he is making a token resistance, has apparently been misread as amorous Zeus. Similarly, the waiting bride has been misread as Eos by a mythographer who recalled Eos’s abduction of Tithonus, son of Laomedon – because Laomedon is also said, by Euripides (
Trojan Women
822), to have been Ganymedes’s father. This icon would equally illustrate Peleus’s marriage to Thetis, which the gods viewed from their twelve thrones; the two horses were ritual instruments of his rebirth as king, after a mock-death (see
81.
4
). The eagle’s alleged abduction of Ganymedes is explained by a Caeretan black-figured vase: an eagle darting at the thighs of a newly enthroned king named Zeus typifies the divine power conferred upon him – his
ka
, or other self-just as a solar hawk descended on the Pharoahs at their coronation. Yet the tradition of Ganymedes’s youth suggests that the
king shown in the icon was the royal surrogate, or
interrex
, ruling only for a single day: like the Phaëthon (see
42.
2
), Zagreus (see
30.
1
), Chrysippus (see 105.
2
), and the rest. Zeus’s eagle may therefore be said not only to have enroyalled him, but to have snatched him up to Olympus.

2
. A royal ascent to Heaven on eagle-back, or in the form of an eagle, is a widespread religious fancy. Aristophanes caricatures it in
Peace
(1 ff.) by sending his hero up on the back of a dung-beetle. The soul of the Celtic hero Lugh – Llew Llaw in the
Mabinogion
– flew up to Heaven as an eagle when the tanist killed him at midsummer. Etana, the Babylonian hero, after his sacred marriage at Kish, rode on eagle-back towards Ishtar’s heavenly courts, but fell into the sea and was drowned. Etana’s death, by the way, was not the usual end-of-the-year sacrifice, as in the case of Icarus (see
92.
3
), but a punishment for the bad crops which had characterized his reign – he was flying to discover a magical herb of fertility. His story is woven into an account of the continuous struggle between Eagle and Serpent – waxing and waning year, King and Tanist – and as in the myth of Llew Llaw, the Eagle, reduced to his last gasp at the winter solstice, has its life and strength magically renewed. Thus we find in
Psalm
ciii. 5 : ‘Thy youth is renewed, as the eagle’s.’

3
. The Zeus-Ganymedes myth gained immense popularity in Greece and Rome because it afforded religious justification for grown man’s passionate love of a boy. Hitherto, sodomy had been tolerated only as an extreme form of goddess-worship: Cybele’s male devotees tried to achieve ecstatic unity with her by emasculating themselves and dressing like women. Thus a sodomistic priesthood was a recognized institution in the Great Goddess’s temples at Tyre, Joppa, Hierapolis, and at Jerusalem (1
Kings
xv. 12 and 2
Kings
xxiii. 7) until just before the Exile. But this new passion, for the introduction of which Thamyris (see
21.
m
) has been given the credit by Apollodorus, emphasized the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. It turned Greek philosophy into an intellectual game that men could play without the assistance of women, now that they had found a new field of homosexual romance. Plato exploited this to the full, and used the myth of Ganymedes to justify his own sentimental feelings towards his pupils (
Phaedrus
79); though elsewhere (
Laws
i. 8) he denounced sodomy as against nature, and called the myth of Zeus’s indulgence in it ‘a wicked Cretan invention’. (Here he has the support of Stephanus of Byzantium [
sub
Harpagia], who says that King Minos of Crete carried off Ganymedes to be his bedfellow, ‘having received the laws from Zeus’.) With the spread of Platonic philosophy the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degenerated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus and Apollo were the ruling gods.

4
. Ganymedes’s name refers, properly, to the joyful stirring of his own
desire at the prospect of marriage, not to that of Zeus when refreshed by nectar from his bedfellow’s hand; but, becoming
catamitus
in Latin, it has given English the word ‘catamite’, meaning the passive object of male homosexual lust.

5
. The constellation Aquarius, identified with Ganymedes, was originally the Egyptian god, presiding over the source of the Nile, who poured water, not wine, from a flagon (Pindar:
Fragment
110); but the Greeks took little interest in the Nile.

6
. Zeus’s nectar, which the later mythographers described as a supernatural red wine, was, in fact, a primitive brown mead (see
27.
2
); and ambrosia, the delectable food of the gods, seems to have been a porridge of barley, oil, and chopped fruit (see
98.
7
), with which kings were pampered when their poorer subjects still subsisted on asphodel (see
31.
2
), mallow, and acorns.

30

ZAGREUS

Z
EUS
secretly begot his son Zagreus on Persephone, before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. He set Rhea’s sons, the Cretan Curetes or, some say, the Corybantes, to guard his cradle in the Idaean Cave, where they leaped about him, clashing their weapons, as they had leaped about Zeus himself at Dicte. But the Titans, Zeus’s enemies, whitening themselves with gypsum until they were unrecognizable, waited until the Curetes slept. At midnight they lured Zagreus away, by offering him such childish toys as a cone, a bull-roarer, golden apples, a mirror, a knuckle-bone, and a tuft of wool. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and went through several transformations in an attempt to delude them: he became successively Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.