The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (58 page)

p
. They preside at the Spartan Games, and because they invented the war-dance and war-like music are the patrons of all bards who sing of ancient battles. In Hilaeira and Phoebe’s sanctuary at Sparta, the two priestesses are still called Leucippides, and the egg from which Leda’s twins were hatched is suspended from the roof.
²¹
The Spartans represent the Dioscuri by two parallel wooden beams, joined by two transverse ones. Their co-kings always take these into battle and when, for the first time, a Spartan army was led by one king alone, it was decreed that one beam should also remain at Sparta. According to those who have seen the Dioscuri, the only noticeable difference between them is that Polydeuces’s face bears the scars of boxing. They dress alike: each has his half egg-shell surmounted by a star, each his spear and white horse. Some say that Poseidon gave them their horses; others, that Polydeuces’s Thessalian charger was a gift from Hermes.
²²

1
. Pausanias: iv. 2. 2 and iii. I. 4; Apollodorus: i. 9. 5.

2
.
Cypria
, quoted by Pausanias: iv. 2. 5; Pausanias: iii. I. 4.

3
. Apollodorus: i. 9. 5; Pausanias:
loc. cit.

4
. Pausanias:
loc. cit.
; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 5–7.

5
. Panyasis, quoted by Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3; Pausanias: iii. 17. 4.

6
. Pausanias: iii. 26. 3 and iv. 2. 3; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3.

7
. Apollodorus: iii. 11. 2; Hyginus:
Fabula
80.

8
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
. and iii. 10. 3; Homer:
Odyssey
xi. 300; Pausanias: iv. 2. 4; Hyginus:
Fabula
14; Palaephatus:
Incredible Stories
x.

9
. Hyginus:
Fabula
242; Apollodorus: i. 7. 8; Plutarch:
Parallel Stories
40; Scholiast and Eustathius on Homer’s
Iliad
ix. 557.

10
. Plutarch:
loc. cit
.; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.

11
. Apollodorus: i. 7. 9.

12
. Apollodorus: i. 8. 2; i. 9. 16 and iii. 11. 2; Theocritus:
Idylls
xxii. 137 ff.; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
x. 55 ff.

13
. Hyginus:
Fabula
80.

14
. Ovid:
Fasti
v. 699 ff.; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 22; Theocritus:
loc. cit
.; Scholiast on Homer’s
Odyssey
xi. 300.

15
. Pausanias: iii. 14. 7; Apollodorus: iii. 11. 2; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
x. 55 ff.; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
26; Hyginus:
loc. cit
.

16
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: iv. 3. 1.

17
. Pausanias: iii. 16. 3.

18
. Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 22; Euripides:
Helen
1503;
Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri
7 ff.

19
. Cicero:
On Divination
i. 34. 75 and ii. 32. 68.

20
. Pausanias: iv. 27. 1; iv. 16. 2 and v. 27. 3.

21
. Pindar:
Nemean Odes
x. 49; Cicero:
On Oratory
ii. 8. 86; Theocritus:
Idylls
xxii. 215–20; Pausanias: iii. 16. 1–2.

22
. Plutarch:
On Brotherly Love
i; Herodotus: v. 75; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
26; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 22; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: viii. quoted by Photius: p. 409.

1
. In order to allow the sacred king precedence over his tanist, he was usually described as the son of a god, by a mother on whom her husband subsequently fathered a mortal twin. Thus Heracles is Zeus’s son by Alcmene, but his twin Iphicles is the son of her husband Amphitryon: a similar story is told about the Dioscuri of Laconia, and about their rivals, Idas and Lynceus of Messenia. The perfect harmony existing between the twins themselves marks a new stage in the development of kingship, when the tanist acts as vizier and chief-of-staff (see
94.
1
), being nominally less powerful than the sacred king. Castor therefore, not Polydeuces, is the authority on war – he even instructs Heracles in military arts, thus identifying himself with Iphicles – and Lynceus, not Idas, is gifted with acute vision. But until the double-kingdom system had been evolved, the tanist was not regarded as immortal, nor granted the same posthumous status as his twin.

2
. The Spartans were frequently at war with the Messenians and, in Classical times, had sufficient military power, and influence over the Delphic Oracle, to impose their twin heroes on the rest of Greece, as
enjoying greater favour with Father Zeus than any other pair; and the Spartan kingdom did indeed outlast all its rivals. Had this not been so, the constellation of the Twins might have commemorated Heracles and Iphicles, or Idas and Lynceus, or Acrisius and Proetus – instead of merely Castor and Polydeuces, who were not even the only heroes privileged to ride white horses: every hero worthy of a hero-feast was a horseman. It is these sunset feasts, at which a whole ox was eaten by the hero’s descendants, that account for the gluttony attributed to Lepreus (see 138.
h
) and Heracles (see 143.
a
); and here to Idas, Lynceus and their rivals.

3
. Marriage to the Leucippides enroyalled the Spartan co-kings. They were described as priestesses of Athene and Artemis, and given moon-names, being, in fact, the Moon-goddess’s representatives; thus, in vase-paintings, the chariot of Selene is frequently attended by the Dioscuri. As the Spirit of the Waxing Year, the sacred king would naturally mate with Artemis, a Moon-goddess of spring and summer; and his tanist, as Spirit of the Waning Year, with Athene, who had become a Moon-goddess of autumn and winter. The mythographer is suggesting that the Spartans defeated the Messenians, and that their leaders forcibly married the heiresses of Arene, a principal city of Messenia, where the Mare-headed Mother was worshipped; thus establishing a claim to the surrounding region.

4
. Similarly with Marpessa: apparently the Messenians made a raid on the Aetolians in the Evenus valley, where the Sow-mother was worshipped, and carried off the heiress, Marpessa (‘snatcher’ or ‘gobbler’). They were opposed by the Spartans, worshippers of Apollo, who grudged them their success; the dispute was then referred to the central authority at Mycenae, which supported the Messenians. But Evenus’s chariot-race with Idas recalls the Pelops-Oenomaus (see 109.
j
) and the Heracles-Cycnus (see 143.
e-g
) myths. In each case the skulls of the king’s rivals are mentioned. The icon from which all these stories are deduced must have shown the old king heading for his destined chariot crash (see
71.
1
) after having offered seven annual surrogates to the goddess (see
42.
2
). His horses are sacrificed as a preliminary to the installation of the new king (see
29.
1
and
81.
4
). The drowning of Evenus is probably misread: it shows Idas being purified before marriage and then riding off triumphantly in the Queen’s chariot. Yet these Pelasgian marriage rites have been combined in the story with the Hellenic custom of marriage by capture. The fatal cattle-raid may record a historical incident: a quarrel between the Messenians and Spartans about the sharing of spoil in a joint expedition against Arcadia (see
17.
1
).

5
. Castor and Polydeuces’s visit to Phormio’s house is disingenuously described: the author is relating another trick played on the stupid Spartans by an impersonation of their national heroes. Cyrene, where the
Dioscuri were worshipped, supplied herb-benjamin, a kind of asafoetida, the strong smell and taste of which made it valued as a condiment. The two Cyrenian merchants were obviously what they professed themselves to be, and when they went off with Phormio’s daughter, left their wares behind in payment: Phormio decided to call it a miracle.

6
. Wild pear-trees were sacred to the Moon because of their white blossom, and the most ancient image of the Death-goddess Hera, in the Heraeum at Mycenae, was made of pear-wood. Plutarch (
Greek Questions
51) and Aelian (
Varia Historia
iii. 39) mention the pear as a fruit peculiarly venerated at Argos and Tiryns; hence the Peloponnese was called Apia, ‘of the pear-tree’ (see
64.
4
). Athene, also a Death-goddess, had the surname Oncë (‘pear-tree’) at her pear-sanctuary in Boeotia. The Dioscuri chose this tree for their perch in order to show that they were genuine heroes; moreover, the pear-tree forms fruit towards the end of May (see
72.
2
), when the sun is in the house of the Twins; and when the sailing season begins in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sparrows that follow the Dioscuri, when they appear in answer to sailors’ prayers, belong to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; Xuthus (‘sparrow’), the father of Aeolus (see
43.
1
), was an ancestor of the Dioscuri, who worshipped her.

7
. In the
Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri
(7 ff.), it is not made clear whether Castor and Polydeuces are followed by sparrows or whether they come darting on ‘sparrowy wings’ through the upper air, to help distressed sailors; but on Etruscan mirrors they are sometimes pictured as winged. Their symbol at Sparta, the
docana
, represented the two supporting pillars of a shrine; another symbol consisted of two amphoras, each entwined by a serpent – the serpents being the incarnate Dioscuri who came to eat food placed in the amphoras.

8
. Gorgophone defied the Indo-European convention of suttee by marrying again (see
69.
2
;
74.
a
and 106.
l
).

75

BELLEROPHON

B
ELLEROPHON
, son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, left Corinth under a cloud, having first killed one Bellerus – which earned him his nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon – and then his own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades.
¹
He fled as a suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but (so ill luck would have it) Anteia, Proetus’s wife whom some call Stheneboea, fell in love with
him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he dared not risk the Furies’ vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia’s father Iobates, King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: ‘Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.’