The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (9 page)

2
. In Crete a kid was early substituted for a human victim; in Thrace, a bull-calf; among the Aeolian worshippers of Poseidon, a foal; but in backward districts of Arcadia boys were still sacrificially eaten even in the Christian era. It is not clear whether the Elean ritual was cannibalistic or whether, Cronus being a Crow-Titan, sacred crows fed on the slaughtered victim.

3
. Amaltheia’s name, ‘tender’, shows her to have been a maiden-goddess; Io was an orgiastic nymph-goddess (see
56.
1
); Adrasteia means ‘the Inescapable One’, the oracular Crone of autumn. Together they formed the usual Moon-triad. The later Greeks identified Adrasteia with the pastoral goddess Nemesis, of the rain-making ash-tree, who had become a goddess of vengeance (see
32.
2
). Io was pictured at Argos as a white cow in heat – some Cretan coins from Praesus show Zeus suckled by her – but Amaltheia, who lived on ‘Goat Hill’, was always a she-goat; and Melisseus (‘honey-man’), Adrasteia and Io’s reputed father, is really their mother – Melissa, the goddess as Queen-bee, who annually killed her male consort. Diodorus Siculus (v. 70) and Callimachus (
Hymn to Zeus
49) both make bees feed the infant Zeus. But his foster-mother is sometimes also pictured as a sow, because that was one of the Crone-goddesses’s, emblems (see
74.
4
and
96.
2
); and on Cydonian coins she is a bitch, like the one that suckled Neleus (see
68.
d
). The she-bears are Artemis’s beasts (see
22.
4
and
80.
c
) – the Curetes attended her holocausts – and Zeus as serpent is Zeus Ctesius, protector of store-houses, because snakes got rid of mice.

4
. The Curetes were the sacred king’s armed companions, whose weapon-clashing was intended to drive off evil spirits during ritual performances (see
30.
a
). Their name, understood by the later Greeks as ‘young men who have shaved their hair’, probably meant ‘devotees of Ker, or Car’, a widespread title of the Triple-goddess (see
57.
2
). Heracles won his cornucopia from the Achelous bull (see 142.
d
), and the enormous size of the Cretan wild-goat’s horns have led mythographers unacquainted with Crete to give Amaltheia an anomalous cow’s horn.

5
. Invading Hellenes seem to have offered friendship to the pre-Hellenic people of the Titan-cult, but gradually detached their subjectallies from them, and overrun the Peloponnese. Zeus’s victory in alliance with the Hundred-handed Ones over the Titans of Thessaly is said by Thallus, the first-century historian, quoted by Tatian in his
Address to the Greeks
, to have taken place ‘322 years before the seige of Troy’: that is to say 1505
B
.
C
., a plausible date for an extension of Hellenic power in Thessaly.
The bestowal of sovereignty on Zeus recalls a similar event in the Babylonian Creation Epic, when Marduk was empowered to fight Tiamat by his elders Lahmu and Lahamu.

6
. The brotherhood of Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus recalls that of the Vedic male trinity – Mitra, Varuna, and Indra – (see
3.
1
and 132.
5
) who appear in a Hittite treaty dated to about 1380
B
.
C
. – but in this myth they seem to represent three successive Hellenic invasions, commonly known as Ionian, Aeolian, and Achaean. The pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Mother-goddess assimilated the Ionians, who became children of Io; tamed the Aeolians; but were overwhelmed by the Achaeans. Early Hellenic chieftains who became sacred kings of the oak and ash cults took the titles ‘Zeus’ and ‘Poseidon’, and were obliged to die at the end of their set reigns (see
45.
2
). Both these trees tend to attract lightning, and therefore figure in popular rain-making and fire-making ceremonies throughout Europe.

7
. The victory of the Achaeans ended the tradition of royal sacrifices. They ranked Zeus and Poseidon as immortals; picturing both as armed with the thunderbolt – a flint double-axe, once wielded by Rhea, and in the Minoan and Mycenaean religions withheld from male use (see 131.
6
). Later, Poseidon’s thunderbolt was converted into a three-pronged fish-spear, his chief devotees having turned seafarers; whereas Zeus retained his as a symbol of supreme sovereignty. Poseidon’s name, which was sometimes spelt
Potidan
, may have been borrowed from that of his goddess-mother, after whom the city Potidaea was called: ‘the water-goddess of Ida’ – Ida meaning any wooded mountain. That the Hundred-handed Ones guarded the Titans in the Far West may mean that the Pelasgians, among whose remnants were the Centaurs of Magnesia –
centaur
is perhaps cognate with the Latin
centuria
, ‘a war-band of one hundred’ – did not abandon their Titan cult, and continued to believe in a Far Western Paradise, and in Atlas’s support of the firmament.

8
. Rhea’s name is probably a variant of
Era
, ‘earth’; her chief bird was the dove, her chief beast the mountain-lion. Demeter’s name means ‘Barley-mother’; Hestia (see
20.
c
) is the goddess of the domestic hearth. The stone at Delphi, used in rain-making ceremonies, seems to have been a large meteorite.

9
. Dicte and Mount Lycaeum were ancient seats of Zeus worship. A fire sacrifice was probably offered on Mount Lycaeum, when no creature cast a shadow – that is to say, at noon on midsummer day; but Pausanias adds that though in Ethiopia while the sun is in Cancer men do not throw shadows, this is invariably the case on Mount Lycaeum. He may be quibbling: nobody who trespassed in this precinct was allowed to live (Aratus:
Phenomena
91), and it was well known that the dead cast no shadows (Plutarch:
Greek Questions
39). The cave of Psychro, usually
regarded as the Dictaean Cave, is wrongly sited to be the real one, which has not yet been discovered. Omphalion (‘little navel’) suggests the site of an oracle (see
20.
2
).

10
. Pan’s sudden shout which terrified the Titans became proverbial and has given the word ‘panic’ to the English language (see
26.
c
).

8

THE BIRTH OF ATHENE

A
CCORDING
to the Pelasgians, the goddess Athene was born beside Lake Tritonis in Libya, where she was found and nurtured by the three nymphs of Libya, who dress in goat-skins.
¹
As a girl she killed her playmate, Pallas, by accident, while they were engaged in friendly combat with spear and shield and, in token of grief, set Pallas’s name before her own. Coming to Greece by way of Crete, she lived first in the city of Athenae by the Boeotian River Triton.
²

1
. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1310.

2
. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 3; Pausanias: ix. 33. 5.

1
. Plato identified Athene, patroness of Athens, with the Libyan goddess Neith, who belonged to an epoch when fatherhood was not recognized (see
1.
1
). Neith had a temple at Saïs, where Solon was treated well merely because he was an Athenian (Plato:
Timaeus
5). Virgin-priestesses of Neith engaged annually in armed combat (Herodotus: iv. 180), apparently for the position of High-priestess. Apollodorus’s account (iii. 12. 3) of the fight between Athene and Pallas is a late patriarchal version: he says that Athene, born of Zeus and brought up by the River-god Triton, accidentally killed her foster-sister Pallas, the River Triton’s daughter, because Zeus interposed his aegis when Pallas was about to strike Athene, and so distracted her attention. The aegis, however, a magical goat-skin bag containing a serpent and protected by a Gorgon mask, was Athene’s long before Zeus claimed to be her father (see
9.
d
). Goat-skin aprons were the habitual costume of Libyan girls, and
Pallas
merely means ‘maiden’, or ‘youth’. Herodotus writes (iv. 189): ‘Athene’s garments and aegis were borrowed by the Greeks from the Libyan women, who are dressed in exactly the same way, except that their leather garments are fringed with thongs, not serpents.’ Ethiopian girls still wear this costume, which
is sometimes ornamented with cowries, a yonic symbol. Herodotus adds here that the loud cries of triumph,
olulu, ololu
, uttered in honour of Athene above (
Iliad
vi. 297–301) were of Libyan origin.
Tritone
means ‘the third queen’: that is, the eldest member of the triad – mother of the maiden who fought Pallas, and of the nymph into which she grew – just as Core-Persephone was Demeter’s daughter (see
24.
3
).

2
. Pottery finds suggest a Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4000
B
.
C
.; and a large number of goddess-worshipping Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about the year 3000
B
.
C
. The First Minoan Age began soon afterwards, and Cretan culture spread to Thrace and Early Helladic Greece.

3
. Among other mythological personages named Pallas was the Titan who married the River Styx and fathered on her Zelus (‘zeal’), Cratus (‘strength’), Bia (‘force’), and Nice (‘victory’) (Hesiod:
Theogony
376 and 383; Pausanias: vii. 26.
5
; Apollodorus; 2. 2–4); he was perhaps an allegory of the Pelopian dolphin sacred to the Moon-goddess (see 108.
5
). Homer calls another Pallas ‘the father of the moon’ (
Homeric Hymn to Hermes
100). A third begot the fifty Pallantids, Theseus’s enemies (see
97.
g
and
99.
a
), who seem to have been originally fighting priestesses of Athene. A fourth was described as Athene’s father (see
9.
a
).

9

ZEUS AND METIS

S
OME
Hellenes say that Athene had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of his skin to make the aegis, and of his wings for her own shoulders;
¹
if, indeed, the aegis was not the skin of Medusa the Gorgon, whom she flayed after Perseus had decapitated her.
²

b
. Others say that her father was one Itonus, a king of Iton in Phthiotis, whose daughter Iodama she killed by accidentally letting her see the Gorgon’s head,
³
and so changing her into a block of stone, when she trespassed in the precinct at night.

c
. Still others say that Poseidon was her father, but that she disowned him and begged to be adopted by Zeus, which he was glad to do.
⁴

d
. But Athene’s own priests tell the following story of her birth. Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught at last and got with child. An oracle of Mother Earth then declared that this would be a girl-child and that, if Metis conceived again, she would bear a son who was fated to depose Zeus, just as Zeus had deposed Cronus, and Cronus had deposed Uranus. Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterwards that she gave him counsel from inside his belly. In due process of time, he was seized by a raging headache as he walked by the shores of Lake Triton, so that his skull seemed about to burst, and he howled for rage until the whole firmament echoed. Up ran Hermes, who at once divined the cause of Zeus’s discomfort. He persuaded Hephaestus, or some say Prometheus, to fetch his wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus’s skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout.
⁵