The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (39 page)

6
. Scholiast on Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus
100.

1
. The myth of Erechtheus and Eumolpus concerns the subjugation of Eleusis by Athens, and the Thraco-Libyan origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries. An Athenian cult of the orgiastic Bee-nymph of Midsummer also enters into the story, since Butes is associated in Greek myth with a bee cult on Mount Eryx (see 154.
d
); and his twin brother Erechtheus (‘he who hastens over the heather’, rather than ‘shatterer’) is the husband of the ‘Active Goddess’, the Queen-bee. The name of King Tegyrius of Thrace, whose kingdom Erechtheus’s great-grandson inherited, makes a further association with bees: it means ‘beehive coverer’. Athens was famous for its honey.

2
. Erechtheus’s three noble daughters, like the three daughters of his ancestor Cecrops, are the Pelasgian Triple-goddess, to whom libations were poured on solemn occasions: Otiona (‘with the ear-flaps’), who is said to have been chosen as a sacrifice to Athene, being evidently the Owl-goddess Athene herself; Protogonia, the Creatrix Eurynome (see
1.
1
); and Pandora, the Earth-goddess Rhea (see
39.
8
). At the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy some of Athene’s priestesses may have been sacrificed to Poseidon (see 121.
3
).

3
. Poseidon’s trident and Zeus’s thunderbolt were originally the same weapon, the sacred
labrys
, or double-axe, but distinguished from each other when Poseidon became god of the sea, and Zeus claimed the sole right to the thunderbolt (see
7.
7
).

4
. Butes, who was enrolled among the Argonauts (see 148.
1
), did not really belong to the Erechtheid family; but his descendants, the Buteids of Athens, forced their way into Athenian society and, by the sixth century, held the priesthoods of Athene Polias and of Poseidon Erechtheus – but was a fusion of the Hellenic Poseidon with the old Pelasgian hero – as a family inheritance (Pausanias: i. 26. 6), and seem to have altered the myth accordingly, as they also altered the Theseus myth (see
95.
3
). They combined the Attic Butes with their ancestor, the Thracian son of Boreas, who had colonized Naxos and in a raid on Thessaly violated Coronis (see
50.
5
), the Lapith princess (Diodorus Siculus: v. 50).

48

BOREAS

O
REITHYIA
, daughter of Erechtheus, King of Athens, and his wife Praxithea, was one day whirling in a dance beside the river Ilissus, when Boreas, son of Astraeus and Eos, and brother of the South and West Winds, carried her off to a rock near the river Ergines where, wrapped in a mantle of dark clouds, he ravished her.
¹

b
. Boreas had long loved Oreithyia and repeatedly sued for her hand, but Erechtheus put him off with vain promises until at length, complaining that he had wasted too much time in words, he resorted to his natural violence. Some, however, say that Oreithyia was carrying a basket in the annual Thesmophorian procession that winds up the
slope of the Acropolis to the temple of Athene Polias, when Boreas tucked her beneath his tawny wings and whirled her away, unseen by the surrounding crowd.

c
. He took her to the city of the Thracian Cicones, where she became his wife, and bore him twin sons, Calais and Zetes, who grew wings when they reached manhood; also two daughters, namely Chione, who bore Eumolpus to Poseidon, and Cleopatra, who married King Phineus, the victim of the Harpies.
²

d
. Boreas has serpent-tails for feet, and inhabits a cave on Mount Haemus, in the seven recesses of which Ares stables his horses; but he is also at home beside the river Strymon.
³

e
. Once, disguising himself as a dark-maned stallion, he covered twelve of the three thousand mares belonging to Erichthonius, son of Dardanus, which used to graze in the water-meadows beside the river Scamander. Twelve fillies were born from this union; they could race over ripe ears of standing corn without bending them, or over the crests of waves.
⁴

f
. The Athenians regard Boreas as their brother-in-law and, having once successfully invoked him to destroy King Xerxes’s fleet, they built him a fine temple on the banks of the river Ilissus.
⁵

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 1–2; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 212 ff.

2
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vi. 677 ff.; Scholiast on Homer’s
Odyssey
xiv. 533; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 3.

3
. Pausanias: v. 19. 1; Callimachus:
Hymn to Artemis
114 and
Hymn to Delos
26 and 63–5.

4
. Homer:
Iliad
xx. 219 ff.

5
. Herodotus: vii. 189.

1
. Serpent-tailed Boreas, the North Wind, was another name for the demiurge Ophion who danced with Eurynome, or Oreithyia, Goddess of Creation (see
1.
a
), and impregnated her. But, as Ophion was to Eurynome, or Boreas to Oreithyia, so was Erechtheus to the original Athene; and Athene Pōlias (‘of the city’), for whom Oreithyia danced, may have been Athene Polias – Athene the Filly, goddess of the local horse cult, and beloved by Boreas-Erechtheus, who thus became the Athenians’ brother-in-law. The Boreas cult seems to have originated in Libya. It should be remembered that Hermes, falling in love with Oreithyia’s predecessor Herse while she was carrying a sacred basket in a similar procession, to the Acropolis, had ravished her without incurring Athene’s displeasure. The Thesmophoria seems to have once been an orgiastic
festival in which priestesses publicly prostituted themselves as a means of fertilizing the cornfields (see
24.
1
). These baskets contained phallic objects (see
25.
4
).

2
. A primitive theory that children were the reincarnations of dead ancestors, who entered into women’s wombs as sudden gusts of wind, lingered in the erotic cult of the Mare-goddess; and Homer’s authority was weighty enough to make educated Romans still believe, with Pliny, that Spanish mares could conceive by turning their hindquarters to the wind (Pliny:
Natural History
iv. 35 and viii. 67). Varro and Columella mention the same phenomenon, and Lactantius, in the late third century
A
.
D
., makes it an analogy of the Virgin’s impregnation by the
Sanctus Spiritus
.

3
. Boreas blows in winter from the Haemus range and the Strymon and, when Spring comes with its flowers, seems to have impregnated the whole land of Attica; but, since he cannot blow backwards, the myth of Oreithyia’s rape apparently also records the spread of the North Wind cult from Athens to Thrace. From Thrace, or directly from Athens, it reached the Troad, where the owner of the three thousand mares was Erichthonius, a synonym of Erechtheus (see 158.
g
). The twelve fillies will have served to draw three four-horse chariots, one for each of the annual triad: Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Mount Haemus was a haunt of the monster Typhon (see
36.
e
).

4
. Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia’s rape: he suggests that a princess of that name, playing on the cliffs near the Ilissus, or on the Hill of Ares, was accidentally blown over the edge and killed (Plato:
Phaedrus
vi. 229b). The cult of Boreas had recently been revived at Athens to commemorate his destruction of the Persian fleet (Herodotus: vii. 189). He also helped the Megalopolitans against the Spartans and earned annual sacrifices (Pausanias: viii. 36. 3).

49

ALOPE

T
HE
Arcadian King Cercyon, son of Hephaestus, had a beautiful daughter, Alope, who was seduced by Poseidon and, without her father’s knowledge, bore a son whom she ordered a nurse to expose on a mountain. A shepherd found him being suckled by a mare, and took him to the sheep-cotes, where his rich robe attracted great interest. A fellow-shepherd volunteered to rear the boy, but insisted on taking the robe too, in proof of his noble birth. The two shepherds began to
quarrel, and murder would have been done, had their companions not led them before King Cercyon. Cercyon called for the disputed robe and, when it was brought, recognized it as having been cut from a garment belonging to his daughter. The nurse now took fright, and confessed her part in the affair; whereupon Cercyon ordered Alope to be immured, and the child to be exposed again. He was once more suckled by the mare and, this time, found by the second shepherd who, now satisfied as to his royal parentage, carried him to his own cabin and called him Hippothous.
¹

b
. When Theseus killed Cercyon, he set Hippothous on the throne of Arcadia; Alope had meanwhile died in prison, and was buried beside the road leading from Eleusis to Megara, near Cercyon’s wrestling ground. But Poseidon transformed her body into a spring, named Alope.
²

1
. Hyginus:
Fabulae
38 and 187.

2
. Pausanias: i. 39. 3; Aristophanes:
Birds
533; Hyginus:
Fabula
187.