The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (28 page)

9
. Homer:
Iliad
ix. 158–9; xx. 61.

10
. Homer:
Iliad
ix. 567 ff.; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 10; Scholiast on Pindar’s
Isthmian Odes
vi. 32.

11
. Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 529; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xiv. 405; Scholiast on Theocritus’s
Idylls
ii. 12.

12
. Hesiod:
Theogony
411–52.

13
. Apollodorus: i. 1. 4; Homer:
Iliad
ix. 453–7; xv. 204; xix. 259;
Odyssey
ii. 135 and xvii. 475; Aeschylus:
Eumenides
835 and
Libation Bearers
290 and 924; Euripides:
Orestes
317 ff.;
Orphic Hymn
lxviii. 5.

1
. The mythographers made a bold effort to reconcile the conflicting views of the afterworld held by the primitive inhabitants of Greece. One view was that ghosts lived in their tombs, or underground caverns or fissures, where they might take the form of serpents, mice, or bats, but never be reincarnate as human beings. Another was that the souls of sacred kings walked visibly on the sepulchral islands where their bodies had been buried. A third was that ghosts could become men again by entering beans, nuts, or fish, and being eaten by their prospective mothers. A fourth was that they went to the Far North, where the sun never shines, and returned, if at all, only as fertilizing winds. A fifth was that they went to the Far West, where the sun sets in the ocean, and a spirit world much like the present. A sixth was that a ghost received punishment according to the life he had led. To this the Orphics finally added the theory of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls: a process which could be to some degree controlled by the use of magical formulas.

2
. Persephone and Hecate stood for the pre-Hellenic hope of regeneration; but Hades, a Hellenic concept for the ineluctability of death. Cronus, despite his bloody record, continued to enjoy the pleasures of Elysium, since that had always been the privilege of a sacred king, and Menelaus (
Odyssey
iv. 561) was promised the same enjoyment, not because he had been particularly virtuous or courageous but because he had married Helen, the priestess of the Spartan Moon-goddess (see 159.
1
). The Homeric adjective
asphodelos
, applied only to
leimönes
(‘meadows’), probably means ‘in the valley of that which is not reduced to ashes’ (from
a
= not,
spodos
= ash,
elos
= valley) – namely the hero’s ghost after his body has been burned; and, except in acorn-eating Arcadia, asphodel roots and seeds, offered to such ghosts, made the staple Greek diet before the introduction of corn. Asphodel grows freely even on waterless islands and ghosts, like gods, are conservative in their diet. Elysium seems to mean ‘apple-land’ –
alisier
is a pre-Gallic word for
sorb-apple – as do the Arthurian ‘Avalon’ and the Latin ‘Avernus’, or ‘Avolnus’, both formed from the Indo-European root
abol
, meaning apple.

3
. Cerberus was the Greek counterpart of Anubis, the dog-headed son of the Libyan Death-goddess Nephthys, who conducted souls to the Underworld. In European folklore, which is partly of Libyan origin, the souls of the damned were hunted to the Northern Hell by a yelling pack of hounds – the hounds of Annwm, Herne, Arthur, or Gabriel – a myth derived from the noisy summer migration of wild geese to their breeding places in the Arctic circle. Cerberus was, at first, fifty-headed, like the spectral pack that destroyed Actaeon (see
22.
1
); but afterwards three-headed, like his mistress Hecate (see 134.
1
).

4
. Styx (‘hated’), a small stream in Arcadia, the waters of which were supposed to be deadly poison, was located in Tartarus only by late mythographers. Acheron (‘stream of woe’) and Cocytus (‘wailing’) are fanciful names to describe the misery of death. Aornis (‘birdless’) is a Greek mistranslation of the Italic ‘Avernus’. Lethe means ‘forgetfulness’; and Erebus ‘covered’. Phlegethon (‘burning’) refers to the custom of cremation but also, perhaps, to the theory that sinners were burned in streams of lava. Tartarus seems to be a reduplication of the pre-Hellenic word
tar
, which occurs in the names of places lying to the West; its sense of infernality comes late.

5
. Black poplars were sacred to the Death-goddess (see
51.
7
and 170.
l
); and white poplars, or aspens, either to Persephone as Goddess of Regeneration, or to Heracles because he harrowed Hell (see 134.
f
) – golden head-dresses of aspen leaves have been found in Mesopotamian burials of the fourth millennium
B
.
C
. The Orphic tablets do not name the tree by the pool of Memory; it is probably the white poplar into which Leuce was transformed, but possibly a nut-tree, the emblem of Wisdom (see
86.
1
). White-cypress wood, regarded as an anti-corruptive, was used for household chests and coffins.

6
. Hades had a temple at the foot of Mount Menthe in Elis, and his rape of Minthe (‘mint’) is probably deduced from the use of mint in funerary rites, together with rosemary and myrtle, to offset the smell of decay. Demeter’s barley-water drink at Eleusis was flavoured with mint (see
24.
e
). Though awarded the sun-cattle of Erytheia (‘red land’), because that was where the Sun met his nightly death, Hades is more usually called Cronus, or Geryon, in this context (see 132.
4
).

7
. Hesiod’s account of Hecate shows her to have been the original Triple-goddess, supreme in Heaven, on earth, and in Tartarus; but the Hellenes emphasized her destructive powers at the expense of her creative ones until, at last, she was invoked only in clandestine rites of black magic, especially at places where three roads met. That Zeus did not deny her
the ancient power of granting every mortal his heart’s desire is a tribute to the Thessalian witches, of whom everyone stood in dread. Lion, dog, and horse, her heads, evidently refer to the ancient tripartite year, the dog being the Dog-star Sirius; as do also Cerberus’s heads.

8
. Hecate’s companions, the Erinnyes, were personified pangs of conscience after the breaking of a taboo – at first only the taboo of insult, disobedience, or violence to a mother (see 105.
k
and 114.
1
). Suppliants and guests came under the protection of Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth (see
20.
c
), and to ill-treat them would be to disobey and insult her.

9
. Leuce, the largest island in the Black Sea, but very small at that, is now a treeless Rumanian penal colony (see 164.
3
).

32

TYCHE AND NEMESIS

T
YCHE
is a daughter of Zeus, to whom he has given power to decide what the fortune of this or that mortal shall be. On some she heaps gifts from a horn of plenty, others she deprives of all that they have. Tyche is altogether irresponsible in her awards, and runs about juggling with a ball to exemplify the uncertainty of chance: sometimes up, sometimes down. But if it ever happens that a man, whom she has favoured, boasts of his abundant riches and neither sacrifices a part of them to the gods, nor alleviates the poverty of his fellow-citizens, then the ancient goddess Nemesis steps in to humiliate him.
¹
Nemesis, whose home is at Attic Rhamnus, carries an apple-bough in one hand, and a wheel in the other, and wears a silver crown adorned with stags; the scourge hangs at her girdle. She is a daughter of Oceanus and has something of Aprodite’s beauty.

b
. Some say that Zeus once fell in love with Nemesis, and pursued her over the earth and through the sea. Though she constantly changed her shape, he violated her at last by adopting the form of a swan, and from the egg she laid came Helen, the cause of the Trojan War.
²

1
. Pindar:
Olympian Odes
xii. 1–2; Herodotus: i. 34 and iii. 40; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1042–3; Sophocles:
Philoctetes
518.

2
. Pausanias: i. 33. 3; Homer’s
Cypria,
quoted by Athenaeus p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 7.

1
. Tyche (‘fortune’), like Dice and Aedos (personifications of Natural Law, or Justice, and Shame), was an artificial deity invented by the early
philosophers; whereas Nemesis (‘due enactment’) had been the Nymph-goddess of Death-in-Life (see
18.
3
) whom they now redefined as a moral control on Tyche. That Nemesis’s wheel was originally the solar year is suggested by the name of her Latin counterpart, Fortuna (from
vortumna
, ‘she who turns the year about’). When the wheel had turned half circle, the sacred king, raised to the summit of his fortune, was fated to die – the Actaeon stags on her crown (see
22.
i
) announce this – but when it came full circle, he revenged himself on the rival who had supplanted him. Her scourge was formerly used for ritual flogging, to fructify the trees and crops, and the apple-bough was the king’s passport to Elysium (see
53.
5
;
80.
4
; and 133.
4
).

2
. The Nemesis whom Zeus chased (see
62.
b
), is not the philosophical concept of divine vengeance on overweening mortals, but the original Nymph-goddess, whose usual name was Leda. In pre-Hellenic myth, the goddess chases the sacred king and, although he goes through his seasonal transformations (see
30.
1
), counters each of them in turn with her own, and devours him at the summer solstice. In Hellenic myth the parts are reversed: the goddess flees, changing shape, but the king pursues and finally violates her, as in the story of Zeus and Metis (see
9.
d
), or Peleus and Thetis (see
81.
k
). The required seasonal transformations will have been indicated on the spokes of Nemesis’s wheel; but in Homer’s
Cypria
only a fish and ‘various beasts’ are mentioned (see
89.
2
). ‘Leda’ is another form of Leto, or Latona, whom the Python, not Zeus, chased (see
14.
a
). Swans were sacred to the goddess (Euripides:
Iphigeneia Among the Taurians
1095 ff.), because of their white plumage, also because the V-formation of their flight was a female symbol, and because, at midsummer, they flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king’s soul with them (see
33.
5
and 142.
2
).