The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (64 page)

5
. Peleus’s embarrassment when he looked at the apple thrown down by Eris suggests a picture of the Moon-goddess, in triad, presenting the apple of immortality to the sacred king (see
32.
4
;
53.
5
; and 159.
3
). Acastus’s murder, and Peleus’s march into the city between the dismembered pieces of Cretheis’s body, may be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed a new king about to ride through the streets of his capital after having ritually hacked his predecessor in pieces with an axe.

6
. The frequent murders, accidental or intentional, which caused princes to leave home and be purified by foreign kings, whose daughters they then married, are an invention of later mythographers. There is no reason to suppose that Peleus left Aegina, or Phthia, under a cloud; at a time when kingship went by matrilineal succession, candidates for the throne always came from abroad, and the new king was reborn into the royal house after ritually murdering his predecessor. He then changed his name and tribe, which was expected to throw the vengeful ghost of the murdered man off his scent. Similarly, Telamon of Aegina went to Salamis, was chosen as the new king, killed the old king – who became an oracular hero – and married the chief-priestess of an owl college. It was found convenient, in more civilized times, when much the same ritual was used to purify ordinary criminals, to forget that kingship implied murder, and to suggest that Peleus, Telamon, and the rest had been involved in crimes or scandals unconnected with their accession to the throne. The scandal is frequently a false accusation of having attempted a queen’s virtue (see
75.
a
and
101.
e
). Cychreus’s connexion with the Eleusinian Mysteries and Telamon’s marriage to an Athenian princess became important when, in 620
B
.
C
., Athens and Megara disputed the possession of Salamis. The Spartans judged the case, and the Athenian ambassadors successfully based their claim on Telamon’s connexion with Attica (Plutarch:
Solon
8 and 9).

7
. Phocus’s death by the discus, like that of Acrisius (see 72.
p
), seems to be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed the end of the seal-king’s reign – the flying discus being a sun-disk; as the myth makes plain, the sacrificial weapon was an axe. Several heroes besides Achilles were
killed by a heel wound, and not only in Greek but in Egyptian, Celtic, Lydian, Indian, and Norse mythology (see
90.
8
and
92.
10
).

8
. The burning of Thetis’s sons was common practice: the yearly sacrifice of boy surrogates for the sacred king (see
24.
10
and 156.
2
). At the close of the eighth year the king himself died (see
91.
4
and 109.
3
). A parallel in the Indian
Mahabharata
is the drowning by the Ganges-goddess of her seven sons by the God Krishna. He saves the last, Bhishma; then she deserts him. Actor’s division of his kingdom into three parts is paralleled in the myth of Proetus (see
72.
h
) : the sacred king, instead of letting himself be sacrificed when his reign was due to end, retained one part of his kingdom, and bequeathed the remainder to his successors. Subsequent kings insisted on a lifetime tenure of sovereignty.

9
. Peleus’s death at Cos suggests that his name was a royal title there as well as at Phthia, Iolcus, and Salamis. He became king of the Myrmidons because the Phthians worshipped their goddess as Myrmex (‘ant’ – see
66.
2
). Antoninus Liberalis’s story of Thetis and the wolf seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed a priestess of Wolfish Aphrodite (Pausanias: ii. 31.
6
) wearing a Gorgon mask as she sacrifices cattle.

82

ARISTAEUS

H
YPSEUS
, a high-king of the Lapiths, whom the Naiad Creusa bore to the River-god Peneius, married Chlidanope, another Naiad, and had by her a daughter, Cyrene. Cyrene despised spinning, weaving, and similar household tasks; instead, she would hunt wild beasts on Mount Pelion all day and half the night, explaining that her father’s flocks and herds needed protection. Apollo once watched her wrestling with a powerful lion; he summoned King Cheiron the Centaur to witness the combat (from which Cyrene, as usual, emerged triumphant), asking her name, and whether she would make him a suitable bride. Cheiron laughed. He was aware that Apollo not only knew her name, but had already made up his mind to carry her off, either when he saw her guarding Hypseus’s flocks by the river Peneius, or when she received two hunting dogs from his hands as a prize for winning the foot race at Pelias’s funeral games.
¹

b
. Cheiron further prophesied that Apollo would convey Cyrene overseas to the richest garden of Zeus, and make her the queen of a great city, having first gathered an island people about a hill rising from
a plain. Welcomed by Libya to a golden palace, she would win a queendom equally beneficent to hunters and farmers, and there bear him a son. Hermes would act as man-midwife and carry the child, called Aristeus, or Aristaeus, to the enthroned Hours and Mother Earth, bidding them feed him on nectar and ambrosia. When Aristaeus grew to manhood, he would win the titles of ‘Immortal Zeus’, ‘Pure Apollo’, and ‘Guardian of the Flocks’.
²

c
. Apollo duly took Cyrene away in his golden chariot, to the site of what is now the city of Cyrene; Aphrodite was waiting to greet their arrival, and bedded them without delay in Libya’s golden chamber. That evening Apollo promised Cyrene a long life in which to indulge her passion for hunting and reign to over a fertile country. He then left her to the care of certain Myrtle-nymphs, children of Hermes, on the near by-hills, where she bore Aristaeus and, after a second visit from Apollo, Idmon the seer. But she also lay with Ares one night, and bore him the Thracian Diomedes, owner of the man-eating mares.
³

d
. The Myrtle-nymphs, nicknaming Aristaeus ‘Agreus’ and ‘Nomius’, taught him how to curdle milk for cheese, build bee-hives, and make the oleastet yield the cultivated olive. These useful arts he passed on to others, who gratefully paid him divine honours. From Libya he sailed to Boeotia, after which Apollo led him to Cheiron’s cave for instruction in certain Mysteries.

e
. When Aristaeus had grown to manhood, the Muses married him to Autonoë, by whom he became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, and of Macris, nurse to Dionysus. They also taught him the art of healing and prophecy, and set him to watch over their sheep which grazed across the Athamantian Plain of Phthia, and about Mount Othrys, and in the valley of the river Apidanus. It was here that Aristaeus perfected the art of hunting, taught him by Cyrene.
⁴

f
. One day he went to consult the Delphic Oracle, and was told to visit the island of Ceos, where he would be greatly honoured. Setting sail at once, Aristaeus found that the scorching Dog-star had caused a plague among the islanders, in vengeance of Icarius whose secret murderers were sheltering among them. Aristaeus summoned the people, raised a great altar in the mountains, and offered sacrifices on it to Zeus, at the same time propitiating the Dog-star by putting the murderers to death. Zeus was gratified and ordered the Etesian Winds, in future, to cool all Greece and its adjacent islands for forty days from the Dog-star’s rising. Thus the plague ceased, and the Ceans not only showered
Aristaeus with gratitude, but still continue to propitiate the Dog-star every year before its appearance.
⁵

g
. He then visited Arcadia and, later, settled at Tempe. But there all his bees died and, greatly distressed, he went to a deep pool in the river Peneius where he knew that Cyrene would be staying with her Naiad sisters. His aunt, Arethusa, heard an imploring voice through the water, put out her head, recognized Aristaeus, and invited him down to the wonderful palace of the Naiads. These washed him with water drawn from a perpetual spring and, after a sacrificial feast, he was advised by Cyrene: ‘Bind my cousin Proteus, and force him to explain why your bees sickened.’

h
. Proteus was taking his midday rest in a cave on the island of Pharos, sheltering from the heat of the Dog-star, and Aristaeus, having overcome him, despite his changes, learned that the bees’ sickness was his punishment for having caused Eurydice’s death; and it was true that, when he had made love to her on the river-bank near Tempe, she had fled from him and been bitten by a serpent.

i
. Aristaeus now returned to the Naiads’ palace, where Cyrene instructed him to raise four altars in the woods to the Dryads, Eurydice’s companions, and sacrifice four young bulls and four heifers; then to pour a libation of blood, leaving the carcasses where they lay; and finally to return in the morning, nine days later, bringing poppies of forgetfulness, a fatted calf, and a black ewe to propitiate the ghost of Orpheus, who had now joined Eurydice below. Aristaeus obeyed and, on the ninth morning, a swarm of bees rose from the rotting carcasses, and settled on a tree. He captured the swarm, which he put into a hive; and the Arcadians now honour him as Zeus for having taught them this method of raising new swarms of bees.
⁶

j
. Later, distressed by the death of his son Actaeon, which roused in him a hatred of Boeotia, he sailed with his followers to Libya, where he asked Cyrene for a fleet in which to emigrate. She gladly complied, and soon he was at sea again, making north-westward. Enchanted by the savage beauty of Sardinia, his first landfall, he began to cultivate it and, having begotten two sons there, was presently joined by Daedalus; but is said to have founded no city there.
⁷

k
. Aristaeus visited other distant lands, and spent some years in Sicily, where he received divine honours, especially from the olive-growers. Finally he went to Thrace, and supplemented his education by taking part in the Mysteries of Dionysus. After living for a while
near Mount Haemus, and founding the city of Aristaeum, he disappeared without trace, and is now worshipped as a god both by the Thracian barbarians and by civilized Greeks.
⁸

1
. Pindar:
Pythian Odes
ix. 5 ff.; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 500 ff.; Callimachus:
Hymn to Artemis
206.

2
. Pindar:
loc. cit
.

3
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 81; Pindar:
loc. cit
.; Apollonius Rhodius:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Fabula
14; Apollodorus: ii 5. 8.

4
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc cit
.; Apollodorus: iii. 4. 4; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1131 and ii. 500 ff.; Pindar:
loc. cit
.

5
. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 500 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 82; Hyginus :
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 4.

6
. Virgil:
Georgics
iv. 317–558; Pindar, quoted by Servius on Virgil’s
Georgics
i. 14.

7
. Servius:
loc. cit
.

8
. Diodorus Siculus:
loc cit
.; Pausanias: x. 17. 3.