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    The Greek Myths: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    The Greek Myths: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    The Greek Myths: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Ebook1,322 pages19 hours

    The Greek Myths: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

    By Robert Graves, Rick Riordan and Ross Macdonald

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    About this ebook

    Robert Graves, classicist, poet, and unorthodox critic, retells the Greek legends of gods and heroes for a modern audience 

    And, in the two volumes of The Greek Myths, he demonstrates with a dazzling display of relevant knowledge that Greek Mythology is “no more mysterious in content than are modern election cartoons.” His work covers, in nearly two hundred sections, the creation myths; the legends of the births and lives of the great Olympians; the Theseus, Oedipus, and Heracles cycles; the Argonaut voyage; the tale of Troy, and much more.
                All the scattered elements of each myth have been assembled into a harmonious narrative, and many variants are recorded which may help to determine its ritual or historical meaning, Full references to the classical sources, and copious indexes, make the book as valuable to the scholar as to the general reader; and a full commentary on each myth explains and interprets the classical version in the light of today’s archaeological and anthropological knowledge.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 24, 2012
    ISBN9781101580509
    The Greek Myths: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Author

    Robert Graves

    Robert Graves (1895-1985), born in London, was one of the most talented, colorful, and prolific men of letters in the twentieth century. He is best known for his historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God. He spent much of his life on the island of Majorca.

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    Reviews for The Greek Myths

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      I recommend this text for high school and college students exploring myths. It's superior to other Greek myth compilations because Graves includes a rich sourced retelling of the myth, but (and here's the kicker), he includes an explanatory section for each myth and a historical-anthropological reading of the myth — including a list of ancient sources. I feel like Graves is the antithesis to Joseph Campbell — because Graves doesn't use the archetype method to explain myths as part of a collective unconscious; instead, he relies on archaeological and evidence-based research to traces the origin of these tales.
    • 4/5
      I liked reading this book. I bought it as a part of an art history class, but I enjoyed the tales and provides great contexts to a lot of Ancient Greek and Western art.
    • 3/5
      Scholarly, academic, comprehensive retelling of the myths with copius footnotes. The comprehensive and academic slant perhaps mean that the stories themselves don't have as much room to shine through as i some other versions and translations. But definitely worth giving shelf space to for the sheer depth and breadth of the myths covered.
    • 4/5
      Review of Volume I: One down, one to go on this chore of a read. To be honest, I gave up (to a degree) on trying to keep every single thing straight. There are so many names and places, places named after mythic people, similar names (Metis and Thetis, Aglauros and Agraulos are just a few examples) 32 names beginning with 'Ae', and a 37 page index of names, just too much data for complete absorption. Not to mention the contradictory stories from other sources. There is a lot of 'Other people say...' something totally different. But, the book is also stuffed with data making analogies between the mythic stories and how they relate to the invasions and migrations of people and ideas in the pre-Classical era before the historical era that we know much more about. Most of the myths recall the patriarchal Dorian, Mycenaean, Aeolian and other invaders merging with pre-existing goddess cults. Hence the allusions to the mighty heroes either conquering or ritually marrying representatives of animal totems, not to mention the whole concept of a 'tanist' twin to the king, ritually sacrificed at the end of his reign. All in all, pretty confusing and convoluted stuff. Graves' work has been downgraded by the academic world, but I think there is a lot of truth to his ideas, even if a scholar could poke holes in his theory here and there, there is just too much supporting data. Not to mention similarity between mythic tales from far flung areas of Europe and West Asia. Like the Greeks claiming that the Danaids travelled to 'Hyperborea' beyond the Pillars of Heracles, and the Irish claim a mythic origin from the Tuatha de Danaan, who came from the south and ridded Eire of the Balrogs. Just an example, but is it coincidence? There are further examples of this linkage in trees representing the same 'magical' properties in both Greece and Ireland, and a matching tree magic based calendar. This topic is more the domain of The White Goddess, but the Greek Myths by Graves is presented in such a way, with a synopsis of the versions of a story followed by an analysis of what they mean applied to what I suppose you could call 'The White Goddess Theory', that these works go hand in hand, or opposite sides of the same coin, if you will.

      The first book is pretty much the early creation myths, and stories about local heroes, all early stuff, along with Perseus and Theseus. The second covers Oedipus, Heracles, Jason and the Argonauts, and the mythic side of Homer, all later additions to the Greek saga.

      As a concluding remark, these make a great reference and are important works of scholarship, but Edith Hamilton's 'Mythology' is a much more accessible, concise and frankly handier book on the subject, and is a easy to find Signet paperback. Her 'The Greek Way' is also a great primer on the literary history of Athens.

      Review of Volume II: Boy am I glad that's over. Not a very interesting book as far as the mythic stories are concerned, but filled to overflowing with the data that makes up those stories. They just had all of the fun sucked out of them and replaced with information. Like trying to read Leviticus and all of the geneologies and laws that it contains. A great compendium, but a boring read. I have honestly never fallen asleep so many times reading any single book ever. Still, it is an impressive work that will be referred back to many times over.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating if a bit convoluted.
    • 5/5
      The most comprehensive and scholarly study of the Greek Myths and relating them to the way Greeks lived and thought in the milenium from 1400BC.
    • 4/5
      The Greek myth I chose was “Dionysus’s Nature and Deeds.” With Dionysus’s birth, Hera ordered the titans to tear him to shreds, from which a pomegranate tree sprouted from his blood split. His grandmother Rhea brought him back to life, and was kept under watch by Persephone, who then took him to King Athamas of Orchomenus, and was temporality reared as a girl. Hermes then transformed Dionysus into a ram, hiding him in a cave, where until reaching manhood, was fed on honey by appointed nymphs. Once affirmed by Hera as Zeus’s son, he travelled the world with his tutor Silenus, and an army of Satyrs and Maenads. Traveling to Europe, he brought the vine, defeated the Titans and restored King Ammon to his throne. He then went off to India, conquering the whole country, and teaching the art of “viniculture.” Returning to Europe, he was purified for his murders by his grandmother Rhea and initiated into her mysteries. He then invaded Thrace, but met by King Lycurgus, he was the only one to escape to sea from his captured army. Rhea helped the prisoners to escape, driving Lycurgus mad, and from such phenomena, Lycurgus axed his own son, Dryus to death; from this act, all the lands of Thrace grew barren. Dionysus subsequently travelled to Boeotia, stopping in Thebes, and was arrested by King Pentheus, along with his Maenads; but King Pentheus, struck by the madness of Dionysus, shackled a bull instead. Reaching Boeotia, he was acknowledged with divinity. Arriving at Icaria, on his way to Naxos, he was captured by pirates. To escape, he made a vine grow and envelop the mast of the ship, turned their oars into serpents, became a lion, and filled the ship with “phantom beasts and the sound of flutes,” inciting the fearing pirates to leap overboard and become dolphins. Reaching Naxos, he married Ariadne, and having established his worship throughout the world, sits at the right hand of Zeus. Although a bit advanced for the younger child, the Greek Myths offer depictions of the Greek Gods, Goddesses, Monsters, tales, etc, accurately transcribed from the Greek language. The myths themselves offer a look into a world and culture lost to the winds of time, and re-living the Greek Myth is a treat everyone may diverge their consciousness into a belief structure once held true to ancient civilization.
    • 3/5
      Comprehensive, but the stories themselves are not given primacy. The culture whence they came, the power of the ideas and (potentially) the language to convey them too often get lost in the mass of genealogies, and recording of all the different versions of a myth. As the editorial intro says, Graves clearly immersed himself in the literature, which gives him a great insight, but in the afterwords which follow each chapter he's keener to show off what he's read than to illuminate it. Apparently, he also adopted a pretty cavalier attitude to contemporary (though not classical) scholarship, though I think that's less important given the subject matter. In the second, more recent foreword, Graves details his theory that ambrosia was in fact magic mushrooms...
    • 4/5
      On the one hand, Robert Graves is an elegant writer and possesses a thorough knowledge of classical mythology. On the other, his notes are full of pseudo-scholarship derived from highly speculative notions about the development of pagan Greek religion.
    • 3/5
      Read section overviews, not interpretation (which are aparently highly criticized and not widely accepted). Definitive overview with complete citations to all great works. A good reference.
    • 4/5
      long since superseded, but still very readable

    Book preview

    The Greek Myths - Robert Graves

    1

    The Pelasgian Creation Myth

    In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves. She danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! the great serpent Ophion. Eurynome danced to warm herself, wildly and more wildly, until Ophion, grown lustful, coiled about those divine limbs and was moved to couple with her. Now, the North Wind, who is also called Boreas, fertilizes; which is why mares often turn their hind-quarters to the wind and breed foals without aid of a stallion.¹ So Eurynome was likewise got with child.

    b. Next, she assumed the form of a dove, brooding on the waves and, in due process of time, laid the Universal Egg. At her bidding, Ophion coiled seven times about this egg, until it hatched and split in two. Out tumbled all things that exist, her children: sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures.

    c. Eurynome and Ophion made their home upon Mount Olympus, where he vexed her by claiming to be the author of the Universe. Forthwith she bruised his head with her heel, kicked out his teeth, and banished him to the dark caves below the earth.²

    d. Next, the goddess created the seven planetary powers, setting a Titaness and a Titan over each. Theia and Hyperion for the Sun; Phoebe and Atlas for the Moon; Dione and Crius for the planet Mars; Metis and Coeus for the planet Mercury; Themis and Eurymedon for the planet Jupiter; Tethys and Oceanus for Venus; Rhea and Cronus for the planet Saturn.³ But the first man was Pelasgus, ancestor of the Pelasgians; he sprang from the soil of Arcadia, followed by certain others, whom he taught to make huts and feed upon acorns, and sew pig-skin tunics such as poor folk still wear in Euboea and Phocis.⁴

    1. Pliny: Natural History iv. 35 and viii. 67; Homer: Iliad xx, 223.

    2. Only tantalizing fragments of this pre-Hellenic myth survive in Greek literature, the largest being Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica i. 496–505 and Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1191; but it is implicit in the Orphic Mysteries, and can be restored, as above, from the Berossian Fragment and the Phoenician cosmogonies quoted by Philo Byblius and Damascius; from the Canaanitish elements in the Hebrew Creation story; from Hyginus (Fabula 197—see 62. a); from the Boeotian legend of the dragon’s teeth (see 58. 5); and from early ritual art. That all Pelasgians were born from Ophion is suggested by their common sacrifice, the Peloria (Athenaeus: xiv. 45. 639–40), Ophion having been a Pelor, or ‘prodigious serpent’.

    3. Homer: Iliad v. 898; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 1232; Apollodorus: i. 1. 3; Hesiod: Theogony 113; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Adana; Aristophanes: Birds 692 ff.; Clement of Rome: Homilies vi. 4. 72; Proclus on Plato’s Timaeus ii p. 307.

    4. Pausanias: viii. 1. 2.

    1. In this archaic religious system there were, as yet, neither gods nor priests, but only a universal goddess and her priestesses, women being the dominant sex and man her frightened victim. Fatherhood was not honoured, conception being attributed to the wind, the eating of beans, or the accidental swallowing of an insect; inheritance was matrilineal and snakes were regarded as incarnations of the dead. Eurynome (‘wide wandering’) was the goddess’s title as the visible moon; her Sumerian name was Iahu (‘exalted dove’), a title which later passed to Jehovah as the Creator. It was as a dove that Marduk symbolically sliced her in two at the Babylonian Spring Festival, when he inaugurated the new world order.

    2. Ophion, or Boreas, is the serpent demiurge of Hebrew and Egyptian myth—in early Mediterranean art, the Goddess is constantly shown in his company. The earth-born Pelasgians, whose claim seems to have been that they sprang from Ophion’s teeth, were originally perhaps the neolithic ‘Painted Ware’ people; they reached the mainland of Greece from Palestine about 3500 B.C., and the early Hellads—immigrants from Asia Minor by way of the Cyclades—found them in occupation of the Peloponnese seven hundred years later. But ‘Pelasgians’ became loosely applied to all pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece. Thus Euripides (quoted by Strabo v. 2. 4) records that the Pelasgians adopted the name ‘Danaans’ on the coming to Argos of Danaus and his fifty daughters (see 60. f). Strictures on their licentious conduct (Herodotus: vi. 137) refer probably to the pre-Hellenic custom of erotic orgies. Strabo says in the same passage that those who lived near Athens were known as Pelargi (‘storks’); perhaps this was their totem bird.

    3. The Titans (‘lords’) and Titanesses had their counterparts in early Babylonian and Palestinian astrology, where they were deities ruling the seven days of the sacred planetary week; and may have been introduced by the Canaanite, or Hittite, colony which settled the Isthmus of Corinth early in the second millennium B.C. (see 67. 2), or even by the Early Hellads. But when the Titan cult was abolished in Greece, and the seven-day week ceased to figure in the official calendar, their number was quoted as twelve by some authors, probably to make them correspond with the signs of the Zodiac. Hesiod, Apollodorus, Stephanus of Byzantium, Pausanias, and others give inconsistent lists of their names. In Babylonian myth the planetary rulers of the week, namely Samas, Sin, Nergal, Bel, Beltis, and Ninib, were all male, except Beltis, the Love-goddess; but in the Germanic week, which the Celts had borrowed from the Eastern Mediterranean, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday were ruled by Titanesses, as opposed to Titans. To judge from the divine status of Aeolus’s paired-off daughters and sons (see 43. 4), and the myth of Niobe (see 77. 1), it was decided, when the system first reached pre-Hellenic Greece from Palestine, to pair a Titaness with each Titan, as a means of safeguarding the goddess’s interests. But before long the fourteen were reduced to a mixed company of seven. The planetary powers were as follows: Sun for illumination; Moon for enchantment; Mars for growth; Mercury for wisdom; Jupiter for law; Venus for love; Saturn for peace. Classical Greek astrologers conformed with the Babylonians, and awarded the planets to Helius, Selene, Ares, Hermes (or Apollo), Zeus, Aphrodite, Cronus—whose Latin equivalents, given above, still name the French, Italian, and Spanish weeks.

    4. In the end, mythically speaking, Zeus swallowed the Titans, including his earlier self—since the Jews of Jerusalem worshipped a transcendent God, composed of all the planetary powers of the week: a theory symbolized in the seven-branched candlestick, and in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The seven planetary pillars set up near the Horse’s Tomb at Sparta were said by Pausanias (ii. 20. 9) to be adorned in ancient fashion, and may have been connected with the Egyptian rites introduced by the Pelasgians (Herodotus: ii. 57). Whether the Jews borrowed the theory from the Egyptians, or contrariwise, is uncertain; but the so-called Heliopolitan Zeus, whom A. B. Cook discusses in his Zeus (i. 570–76), was Egyptian in character, and bore busts of the seven planetary powers as frontal ornaments on his body sheath; usually, also, busts of the remaining Olympians as rear ornaments. One bronze statuette of this god was found at Tortosa in Spain, another at Byblos in Phoenicia; and a marble stele from Marseilles displays six planetary busts and one full-length figure of Hermes—who is also given greatest prominence in the statuettes—presumably as the inventor of astronomy. At Rome, Jupiter was similarly claimed to be a transcendent god by Quintis Valerius Soranus, though the week was not observed there, as it was at Marseilles, Byblos, and (probably) Tortosa. But planetary powers were never allowed to influence the official Olympian cult, being regarded as un-Greek (Herodotus: i. 131), and therefore unpatriotic: Aristophanes (Peace 403 ff.) makes Trygalus say that the Moon and ‘that old villain the Sun’ are hatching a plot to betray Greece into the hands of the Persian barbarians.

    5. Pausanias’s statement that Pelasgus was the first of men records the continuance of a neolithic culture in Arcadia until Classical times.

    2

    The Homeric and Orphic Creation Myths

    Some say that all gods and all living creatures originated in the stream of Oceanus which girdles the world, and that Tethys was the mother of all his children.¹

    b. But the Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe,² was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the Universe in motion. Eros was double-sexed and golden-winged and, having four heads, sometimes roared like a bull or a lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram. Night, who named him Ericepaius and Protogenus Phaëthon,³ lived in a cave with him, displaying herself in triad: Night, Order, and Justice. Before this cave sat the inescapable mother Rhea, playing on a brazen drum, and compelling man’s attention to the oracles of the goddess. Phanes created earth, sky, sun, and moon, but the triple-goddess ruled the universe, until her sceptre passed to Uranus.⁴

    1. Homer: Iliad xvi. 201.

    2. Ibid.: xiv. 261.

    3. Orphic Fragments 60, 61, and 70.

    4. Ibid.: 86.

    1. Homer’s myth is a version of the Pelasgian creation story (see 1. 2), since Tethys reigned over the sea like Eurynome, and Oceanus girdled the Universe like Ophion.

    2. The Orphic myth is another version, but influenced by a late mystical doctrine of love (Eros) and theories about the proper relations of the sexes. Night’s silver egg means the moon, silver being the lunar metal. As Ericepaius (‘feeder upon heather’), the love-god Phanes (‘revealer’), is a loudly-buzzing celestial bee, son of the Great Goddess (see 18. 4). The beehive was studied as an ideal republic, and confirmed the myth of the Golden Age, when honey dropped from the trees (see 5. b). Rhea’s brazen drum was beaten to prevent bees from swarming in the wrong place, and to ward off evil influences, like the bull-roarers used in the Mysteries. As Phaëthon Protogenus (‘first-born shiner’), Phanes is the Sun, which the Orphics made a symbol of illumination (see 28. d), and his four heads correspond with the symbolic beasts of the four seasons. According to Macrobius, the Oracle of Colophon identified this Phanes with the transcendent god Iao: Zeus (ram), Spring; Helius (lion), Summer; Hades (snake), Winter; Dionysus (bull), New Year.

    Night’s sceptre passed to Uranus with the advent of patriarchalism.

    3

    The Olympian Creation Myth

    At the beginning of all things Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and bore her son Uranus as she slept. Gazing down fondly at her from the mountains, he showered fertile rain upon her secret clefts, and she bore grass, flowers, and trees, with the beasts and birds proper to each. This same rain made the rivers flow and filled the hollow places with water, so that lakes and seas came into being.

    b. Her first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briareus, Gyges, and Cottus. Next appeared the three wild, one-eyed Cyclopes, builders of gigantic walls and master-smiths, formerly of Thrace, afterwards of Crete and Lycia,¹ whose sons Odysseus encountered in Sicily.² Their names were Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, and their ghosts have dwelt in the caverns of the volcano Aetna since Apollo killed them in revenge for the death of Asclepius.

    c. The Libyans, however, claim that Garamas was born before the Hundred-handed Ones and that, when he rose from the plain, he offered Mother Earth a sacrifice of the sweet acorn.³

    1. Apollodorus: i. 1–2; Euripides: Chrysippus, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, p. 751; Lucretius: i. 250 and ii. 991 ff.

    2. Homer: Odyssey ix. 106–566; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 4.

    3. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1493 ff.; Pindar: Fragment 84, ed. Bergk.

    1. This patriarchal myth of Uranus gained official acceptance under the Olympian religious system. Uranus, whose name came to mean ‘the sky’, seems to have won his position as First Father by being identified with the pastoral god Varuna, one of the Aryan male trinity; but his Greek name is a masculine form of Ur-ana (‘queen of the mountains’, ‘queen of summer’, ‘queen of the winds’, or ‘queen of wild oxen’)—the goddess in her orgiastic midsummer aspect. Uranus’s marriage to Mother Earth records an early Hellenic invasion of Northern Greece, which allowed Varuna’s people to claim that he had fathered the native tribes he found there, though acknowledging him to be Mother Earth’s son. An emendation to the myth, recorded by Apollodorus, is that Earth and Sky parted in deadly strife and were then reunited in love: this is mentioned by Euripides (Melanippe the Wise, fragment 484, ed. Nauck) and Apollonius Rhodius (Argonautica i. 494). The deadly strife must refer to the clash between the patriarchal and matriarchal principles which the Hellenic invasions caused. Gyges (‘earth-born’) has another form, gigas (‘giant’), and giants are associated in myth with the mountains of Northern Greece. Briareus (‘strong’) was also called Aegaeon (Iliad i. 403), and his people may therefore be the Libyo-Thracians, whose Goat-goddess Aegis (see 8. 1) gave her name to the Aegean Sea. Cottus was the eponymous (name-giving) ancestor of the Cottians who worshipped the orgiastic Cotytto, and spread her worship from Thrace throughout North-western Europe. These tribes are described as ‘hundred-handed’, perhaps because their priestesses were organized in colleges of fifty, like the Danaids and Nereids; perhaps because the men were organized in war-bands of one hundred, like the early Romans.

    2. The Cyclopes seem to have been a guild of Early Helladic bronze-smiths. Cyclops means ‘ring-eyed’, and they are likely to have been tattooed with concentric rings on the forehead, in honour of the sun, the source of their furnace fires; the Thracians continued to tattoo themselves until Classical times (see 28. 2). Concentric circles are part of the mystery of smith-craft: in order to beat out bowls, helmets, or ritual masks, the smith would guide himself with such circles, described by compass around the centre of the flat disk on which he was working. The Cyclopes were one-eyed also in the sense that smiths often shade one eye with a patch against flying sparks. Later, their identity was forgotten, and the mythographers fancifully placed their ghosts in the caverns of Aetna, to explain the fire and smoke issuing from its crater (see 35. 1). A close cultural connexion existed between Thrace, Crete, and Lycia; the Cyclopes will have been at home in all these countries. Early Helladic culture also spread to Sicily; but it may well be (as Samuel Butler first suggested) that the Sicilian composition of the Odyssey explains the Cyclopes’ presence there (see 170. b). The names Brontes, Steropes, and Arges (‘thunder,’ ‘lightning’, and ‘brightness’) are late inventions.

    3. Garamas is the eponymous ancestor of the Libyan Garamantians who occupied the Oasis of Djado, south of the Fezzan, and were conquered by the Roman General Balbus in 19 B.C. They are said to have been of Cushite-Berber stock, and in the second century A.D. were subdued by the matrilineal Lemta Berbers. Later they fused with the Negro aboriginals on the south bank of the Upper Niger, and adopted their language. They survive today in a single village under the name of Koromantse. Garamante is derived from the words gara, man, and te, meaning, ‘Gara’s state people’. Gara seems to be the Goddess Ker, or Q’re, or Car (see 82. 6 and 86. 2), who gave her name to the Carians, among other people, and was associated with apiculture. Esculent acorns, a staple food of the ancient world before the introduction of corn, grew in Libya; and the Garamantian settlement of Ammon was joined with the Northern Greek settlement of Dodona in a religions league which, according to Sir Flinders Petrie, may have originated as early as the third millennium B.C. Both places had an ancient oak-oracle (see 51. a). Herodotus describes the Garamantians as a peaceable but very powerful people, who cultivate the date-palm, grow corn, and herd cattle (iv.174 and 183).

    4

    Two Philosophical Creation Myths

    Some say that Darkness was first, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos sprang Night, Day, Erebus, and the Air.

    From a union between Night and Erebus sprang Doom, Old Age, Death, Murder, Continence, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Misery, Vexation, Nemesis, Joy, Friendship, Pity, the Three Fates, and the Three Hesperides.

    From a union between Air and Day sprang Mother Earth, Sky, and Sea.

    From a union between Air and Mother Earth sprang Terror, Craft, Anger, Strife, Lies, Oaths, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Treaty, Oblivion, Fear, Pride, Battle; also Oceanus, Metis, and the other Titans, Tartarus, and the Three Erinnyes, or Furies.

    From a union between Earth and Tartarus sprang the Giants.

    b. From a union between the Sea and its Rivers sprang the Nereids. But, as yet, there were no mortal men until, with the consent of the goddess Athene, Prometheus, son of Iapetus, formed them in the likeness of gods. He used clay and water of Panopeus in Phocis, and Athene breathed life into them.¹

    c. Others say that the God of All Things—whoever he may have been, for some call him Nature—appearing suddenly in Chaos, separated earth from the heavens, the water from the earth, and the upper air from the lower. Having unravelled the elements, he set them in due order, as they are now found. He divided the earth into zones, some very hot, some very cold, others temperate; moulded it into plains and mountains; and clothed it with grass and trees. Above it he set the rolling firmament, spangling it with stars, and assigned stations to the four winds. He also peopled the waters with fish, the earth with beasts, and the sky with the sun, the moon, and the five planets. Lastly, he made man—who, alone of all beasts, raises his face to heaven and observes the sun, the moon, and the stars—unless it be indeed true that Prometheus, son of Iapetus, made man’s body from water and clay, and that his soul was supplied by certain wandering divine elements, which had survived from the First Creation.²

    1. Hesiod: Theogony 211–32; Hyginus: Fabulae, Proem; Apollodorus: i. 7. 1; Lucian: Prometheus on Caucasus 13; Pausanias: x. 4. 3.

    2. Ovid: Metamorphoses i–ii.

    1. In Hesiod’s Theogony—on which the first of these philosophical myths is based—the list of abstractions is confused by the Nereids, the Titans and the Giants, whom he feels bound to include. Both the Three Fates and the Three Hesperides are the Triple Moon-goddess in her death aspect.

    2. The second myth, found only in Ovid, was borrowed by the later Greeks from the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the introduction to which records the goddess Aruru’s particular creation of the first man, Eabini, from a piece of clay; but although Zeus had been the Universal Lord for many centuries, the mythographers were forced to admit that the Creator of all things might possibly have been a Creatrix. The Jews, as inheritors of the ‘Pelasgian’, or Canaanitish, creation myth, had felt the same embarrassment; in the Genesis account, a female ‘Spirit of the Lord’ broods on the face of the waters, though she does not lay the world egg; and Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’, is ordered to bruise the Serpent’s head, though he is not destined to go down to the Pit until the end of the world.

    3. Similarly, in the Talmudic version of the Creation, the archangel Michael—Prometheus’s counterpart—forms Adam from dust at the order, not of the Mother of All Living, but of Jehovah. Jehovah then breathes life into him and gives him Eve who, like Pandora, brings mischief on mankind (see 39. j).

    4. Greek philosophers distinguished Promethean man from the imperfect earth-born creation, part of which was destroyed by Zeus, and the rest washed away in the Deucalionian Flood (see 38. c). Much the same distinction is found in Genesis vi. 2–4 between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’, whom they married.

    5. The Gilgamesh tablets are late and equivocal; there the ‘Bright Mother of the Hollow’ is credited with having formed everything—‘Aruru’ is only one of this goddess’s many titles—and the principal theme is a revolt against her matriarchal order, described as one of utter confusion, by the gods of the new patriarchal order. Marduk, the Babylonian city-god, eventually defeats the goddess in the person of Tiamat the Sea-serpent; and it is then brazenly announced that he, not anyone else, created herbs, lands, rivers, beasts, birds, and mankind. This Marduk was an upstart godling whose claim to have defeated Tiamat and created the world had previously been made by the god Bel—Bel being a masculine form of Belili, the Sumerian Mother-goddess. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to have come about in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, through the revolt of the Queen’s consort to whom she had deputed executive power by allowing him to adopt her name, robes, and sacred instruments (see 136. 4).

    5

    The Five Ages of Man

    Some deny that Prometheus created men, or that any man sprang from a serpent’s teeth. They say that Earth bore them spontaneously, as the best of her fruits, especially in the soil of Attica,¹ and that Alalcomeneus was the first man to appear, by Lake Copais in Boeotia, before even the Moon was. He acted as Zeus’s counsellor on the occasion of his quarrel with Hera, and as tutor to Athene while she was still a girl.²

    b. These men were the so-called golden race, subjects of Cronus, who lived without cares or labour, eating only acorns, wild fruit, and honey that dripped from the trees, drinking the milk of sheep and goats, never growing old, dancing, and laughing much; death, to them, was no more terrible than sleep. They are all gone now, but their spirits survive as genii of happy music retreats, givers of good fortune, and upholders of justice.

    c. Next came a silver race, eaters of bread, likewise divinely created. The men were utterly subject to their mothers and dared not disobey them, although they might live to be a hundred years old. They were quarrelsome and ignorant, and never sacrificed to the gods but, at least, did not make war on one another. Zeus destroyed them all.

    d. Next came a brazen race, who fell like fruits from the ash-trees, and were armed with brazen weapons. They ate flesh as well as bread, and delighted in war, being insolent and pitiless men. Black Death has seized them all.

    e. The fourth race of man was brazen too, but nobler and more generous, being begotten by the gods on mortal mothers. They fought gloriously in the siege of Thebes, the expedition of the Argonauts, and the Trojan War. These became heroes, and dwell in the Elysian Fields.

    f. The fifth race is the present race of iron, unworthy descendants of the fourth. They are degenerate, cruel, unjust, malicious, libidinous, unfilial, treacherous.³

    1. Plato: Menexenus 6–7.

    2. Hippolytus: Refutation of All Heresies v. 6. 3; Eusebius: Preparation for the Gospel iii. 1. 3.

    3. Hesiod: Works and Days 109–201, with scholiast.

    1. Though the myth of the Golden Age derives eventually from a tradition of tribal subservience to the Bee-goddess, the savagery of her reign in pre-agricultural times had been forgotten by Hesiod’s day, and all that remained was an idealistic conviction that men had once lived in harmony together like bees (see 2. 2). Hesiod was a small farmer, and the hard life he lived made him morose and pessimistic. The myth of the silver race also records matriarchal conditions—such as those surviving in Classical times among the Picts, the Moesynoechians of the Black Sea (see 151. e), and some tribes in the Baleares, Galicia, and the Gulf of Sirté—under which men were still the despised sex, though agriculture had been introduced and wars were infrequent. Silver is the metal of the Moon-goddess. The third race were the earliest Hellenic invaders: Bronze Age herdsmen, who adopted the ash-tree cult of the Goddess and her son Poseidon (see 6. 4 and 57. 1). The fourth race were the warrior-kings of the Mycenaean Age. The fifth were the Dorians of the twelfth century B.C., who used iron weapons and destroyed the Mycenaean civilization.

    Alalcomeneus (‘guardian’) is a fictitious character, a masculine form of Alalcomeneis, Athene’s title (Iliad iv. 8) as the guardian of Boeotia. He serves the patriarchal dogma that no woman, even a goddess, can be wise without male instruction, and that the Moon-goddess and the Moon itself were late creations of Zeus.

    6

    The Castration of Uranus

    Uranus fathered the Titans upon Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons, the Cyclopes, into Tartarus, a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as far distant from the earth as the earth does from the sky; it would take a falling anvil nine days to reach its bottom. In revenge, Mother Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father; and they did so, led by Cronus, the youngest of the seven, whom she armed with a flint sickle. They surprised Uranus as he slept, and it was with the flint sickle that the merciless Cronus castrated him, grasping his genitals with the left hand (which has ever since been the hand of ill-omen) and afterwards throwing them, and the sickle too, into the sea by Cape Drepanum. But drops of blood flowing from the wound fell upon Mother Earth, and she bore the Three Erinnyes, furies who avenge crimes of parricide and perjury—by name Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. The nymphs of the ash-tree, called the Meliae, also sprang from that blood.

    b. The Titans then released the Cyclopes from Tartarus, and awarded the sovereignty of the earth to Cronus.

    However, no sooner did Cronus find himself in supreme command than he confined the Cyclopes to Tartarus again together with the Hundred-handed Ones and, taking his sister Rhea to wife, ruled in Elis.¹

    1. Hesiod: Theogony 133–87 and 616–23; Apollodorus: i. 1. 4–5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 801.

    1. Hesiod, who records this myth, was a Cadmeian, and the Cadmeians came from Asia Minor (see 58. 5), probably on the collapse of the Hittite Empire, bringing with them the story of Uranus’s castration. It is known, however, that the myth was not of Hittite composition, since an earlier Hurrian (Horite) version has been discovered. Hesiod’s version may reflect an alliance between the various pre-Hellenic settlers in Southern and Central Greece, whose dominant tribes favoured the Titan cult, against the early Hellenic invaders from the north. Their war was successful, but they thereupon claimed suzerainty over the northern natives, whom they had freed. The castration of Uranus is not necessarily metaphorical if some of the victors had originated in East Africa where, to this day, Galla warriors carry a miniature sickle into battle to castrate their enemies; there are close affinities between East African religious rites and those of early Greece.

    2. The later Greeks read ‘Cronus’ as Chronos, ‘Father Time’ with his relentless sickle. But he is pictured in the company of a crow, like Apollo, Asclepius, Saturn, and the early British god Bran; and cronos probably means ‘crow’, like the Latin cornix and the Greek corōne. The crow was an oracular bird, supposed to house the soul of a sacred king after his sacrifice (see 25. 5 and 50. 1).

    3. Here the three Erinnyes, or Furies, who sprang from the drops of Uranus’s blood, are the Triple-goddess herself; that is to say, during the king’s sacrifice, designed to fructify the cornfields and orchards, her priestesses will have worn menacing Gorgon masks to frighten away profane visitors. His genitals seem to have been thrown into the sea, to encourage fish to breed. The vengeful Erinnyes are understood by the mythographer as warning Zeus not to emasculate Cronus with the same sickle; but it was their original function to avenge injuries inflicted only on a mother, or a suppliant who claimed the protection of the Hearth-goddess (see 105. k, 107. d, and 113. a), not on a father.

    4. The ash-nymphs are the Three Furies in more gracious mood: the sacred king was dedicated to the ash-tree, originally used in rain-making ceremonies (see 57. 1). In Scandinavia it became the tree of universal magic; the Three Norns, or Fates, dispensed justice under an ash which Odin, on claiming the fatherhood of mankind, made his magical steed. Women must have been the first rain-makers in Greece as in Libya.

    5. Neolithic sickles of bone, toothed with flint or obsidian, seem to have continued in ritual use long after their supersession as agricultural instruments by sickles of bronze and iron.

    6. The Hittites make Kumarbi (Cronus) bite off the genitals of the Sky-god Anu (Uranus), swallow some of the seed, and spit out the rest on Mount Kansura where it grows into a goddess; the God of Love thus conceived by him is cut from his side by Anu’s brother Ea. These two births have been combined by the Greeks into a tale of how Aphrodite rose from a sea impregnated by Uranus’s severed genitals (see 10. b). Kumarbi is subsequently delivered of another child drawn from his thigh—as Dionysus was reborn from Zeus (see 27. b)—who rides a storm-chariot drawn by a bull, and comes to Anu’s help. The ‘knife that separated the earth from the sky’ occurs in the same story, as the weapon with which Kumarbi’s son, the earth-born giant Ullikummi, is destroyed (see 35. 4).

    7

    The Dethronement of Cronus

    Cronus married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred.¹ But it was prophesied by Mother Earth, and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him. Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him: first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon.²

    b. Rhea was enraged. She bore Zeus, her third son, at dead of night on Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia, where no creature casts a shadow³ and, having bathed him in the River Neda, gave him to Mother Earth; by whom he was carried to Lyctos in Crete, and hidden in the cave of Dicte on the Aegean Hill. Mother Earth left him there to be nursed by the Ash-nymph Adrasteia and her sister Io, both daughters of Melisseus, and by the Goat-nymph Amaltheia. His food was honey, and he drank Amaltheia’s milk, with Goat-Pan, his foster-brother. Zeus was grateful to these three nymphs for their kindness and, when he became Lord of the Universe, set Amaltheia’s image among the stars, as Capricorn.⁴ He also borrowed one of her horns, which resembled a cow’s, and gave it to the daughters of Melisseus; it became the famous Cornucopia, or horn of plenty, which is always filled with whatever food or drink its owner may desire. But some say that Zeus was suckled by a sow, and rode on her back, and that he lost his navel-string at Omphalion near Cnossus.⁵

    c. Around the infant Zeus’s golden cradle, which was hung upon a tree (so that Cronus might find him neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in the sea) stood the armed Curetes, Rhea’s sons. They clashed their spears against their shields, and shouted to drown the noise of his wailing, lest Cronus might hear it from far off. For Rhea had wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes, which she gave to Cronus on Mount Thaumasium in Arcadia; he swallowed it, believing that he was swallowing the infant Zeus. Nevertheless, Cronus got wind of what had happened and pursued Zeus, who transformed himself into a serpent and his nurses into bears: hence the constellations of the Serpent and the Bears.⁶

    d. Zeus grew to manhood among the shepherds of Ida, occupying another cave; then sought out Metis the Titaness, who lived beside the Ocean stream. On her advice he visited his mother Rhea, and asked to be made Cronus’s cup-bearer. Rhea readily assisted him in his task of vengeance; she provided the emetic potion, which Metis had told him to mix with Cronus’s honeyed drink. Cronus, having drunk deep, vomited up first the stone, and then Zeus’s elder brothers and sisters. They sprang out unhurt and, in gratitude, asked him to lead them in a war against the Titans, who chose the gigantic Atlas as their leader; for Cronus was now past his prime.⁷

    e. The war lasted ten years but, at last, Mother Earth prophesied victory to her grandson Zeus, if he took as allies those whom Cronus had confined in Tartarus; so he came secretly to Campe, the old gaoleress of Tartarus, killed her, took her keys and, having released the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handed Ones, strengthened them with divine food and drink. The Cyclopes thereupon gave Zeus the thunderbolt as a weapon of offence; and Hades, a helmet of darkness; and Poseidon, a trident. After the three brothers had held a counsel of war, Hades entered unseen into Cronus’s presence, to steal his weapons; and, while Poseidon threatened him with the trident and thus diverted his attention, Zeus struck him down with the thunderbolt. The three Hundred-handed Ones now took up rocks and pelted the remaining Titans, and a sudden shout from Goat-Pan put them to flight. The gods rushed in pursuit. Cronus, and all the defeated Titans, except Atlas, were banished to a British island in the farthest west (or, some say, confined in Tartarus), and guarded there by the Hundred-handed Ones; they never troubled Hellas again. Atlas, as their war-leader, was awarded an exemplary punishment, being ordered to carry the sky on his shoulders; but the Titanesses were spared, for the sake of Metis and Rhea.⁸

    f. Zeus himself set up at Delphi the stone which Cronus had disgorged. It is still there, constantly anointed with oil, and strands of unwoven wool are offered upon it.⁹

    g. Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horseherds.¹⁰ And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is buried.¹¹

    1. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 1124.

    2. Apollodorus: i. 1. 5; Hesiod: Theogony 453–67.

    3. Polybius: xvi. 12. 6 ff.; Pausanias: viii. 38. 5.

    4. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 13; Aratus: Phenomena 163; Hesiod: loc. cit.

    5. Philemon: Pterygium Fragment i. 1 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 1. 6; Athenaeus: 375f. and 376a; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 42.

    6. Hesiod: 485 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 1. 7; First Vatican Mythographer: 104; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 52 ff.; Lucretius: ii. 633–9; Scholiast on Aratus: v. 46; Hyginus: Fabula 139.

    7. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hesiod: loc. cit.

    8. Hesiod: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 118; Apollodorus: i. 1. 7 and i. 2. 1; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 52 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: v. 70; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 27; Pausanias: viii. 8. 2; Plutarch: Why Oracles Are Silent 16.

    9. Pausanias: x. 24. 5.

    10. Ibid.: viii. 8. 2.

    11. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 19; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 8.

    1. Rhea, paired with Cronus as Titaness of the seventh day, may be equated with Dione, Diana, the Triple-goddess of the Dove and Oak cult (see 11. 2). The bill-hook carried by Saturn, Cronus’s Latin counterpart, was shaped like a crow’s bill and apparently used in the seventh month of the sacred thirteen-month year to emasculate the oak by lopping off the mistletoe (see 50. 2), just as a ritual sickle was used to reap the first ear of corn. This gave the signal for the sacred Zeus-king’s sacrifice; and at Athens, Cronus, who shared a temple with Rhea, was worshipped as the Barley-god Sabazius, annually cut down in the cornfield and bewailed like Osiris or Lityerses or Maneros (see 136. e). But, by the times to which these myths refer, kings had been permitted to prolong their reigns to a Great Year of one hundred lunations, and offer annual boy victims in their stead; hence Cronus is pictured as eating his own sons to avoid dethronement. Porphyry (On Abstinence ii. 56) records that the Cretan Curetes used to offer child sacrifices to Cronus in ancient times.

    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 subject-allies 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

    According 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 Nicë (‘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

    Some 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

    1. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355.

    2. Euripides: Ion 993.

    3. Pausanias: ix. 34. 1.

    4. Herodotus: iv. 180.

    5. Hesiod: Theogony 886–900; Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 34 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 3. 6.

    1. J. E. Harrison rightly described the story of Athene’s birth from Zeus’s head as ‘a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions.’ It is also a dogmatic insistence on wisdom as a male prerogative; hitherto the goddess alone had been wise. Hesiod has, in fact, managed to reconcile three conflicting views in his story:

    1. Athene, the Athenians’ city-goddess, was the parthenogenous daughter of the immortal Metis, Titaness of the fourth day and of the planet Mercury, who presided over all wisdom and knowledge.

    2. Zeus swallowed Metis, but did not thereby lose wisdom (i.e. the Achaeans suppressed the Titan cult, and ascribed all wisdom to their god Zeus).

    3. Athene was the daughter of Zeus (i.e. the Achaeans insisted that the Athenians must acknowledge Zeus’s patriarchal overlordship).

    He has borrowed the mechanism of his myth from analogous examples: Zeus pursuing Nemesis (see 32. b); Cronus swallowing his sons and daughters (see 7. a); Dionysus’s rebirth from Zeus’s thigh (see 14. c); and the opening of Mother Earth’s head by two men with axes, apparently in order to release Core (see 24. 3)—as shown, for instance, on a black-figured oil-jar in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. Thereafter, Athene is Zeus’s obedient mouthpiece, and deliberately suppresses her antecedents. She employs priests, not priestesses.

    2. Pallas, meaning ‘maiden’, is an inappropriate name for the winged giant whose attempt on Athene’s chastity is probably deduced from a picture of her ritual marriage, as Athene Laphria, to a goat-king (see 89. 4) after an armed contest with her rival (see 8. 1). This Libyan custom of goat-marriage spread to Northern Europe as part of the May Eve merrymakings. The Akan, a Libyan people, once flayed their kings.

    3. Athene’s repudiation of Poseidon’s fatherhood concerns an early change in the overlordship of the city of Athens (see 16. 3).

    4. The myth of Itonus (‘willow-man’) represents a claim by the Itonians that they worshipped Athene even before the Athenians did; and his name shows that she had a willow cult in Phthiotis—like that of her counterpart, the goddess Anatha, at Jerusalem until Jehovah’s priests ousted her and claimed the rain-making willow as his tree at the Feast of Tabernacles.

    5. It will have been death for a man to remove an aegis—the goat-skin chastity-tunic worn by Libyan girls—without the owner’s consent; hence the prophylactic Gorgon mask set above it, and the serpent concealed in the leather pouch, or bag. But since Athene’s aegis is described as a shield, I suggest in The White Goddess (p. 279) that it was a bag-cover for a sacred disk, like the one which contained Palamedes’s alphabetical secret, and which he is said to have invented (see 52. a and 162. 5). Cyrian figurines holding disks of the same proportionate size as the famous Phaestos one, which is spirally marked with a sacred legend, are held by Professor Richter to anticipate Athene and her aegis. The heroic shields so carefully described by Homer and Hesiod seem to have borne pictographs engraved on a spiral band.

    6. Iodama, probably meaning ‘heifer calf of Io’, will have been an antique stone image of the Moon-goddess (see 56. 1), and the story of her petrification is a warning to inquisitive girls against violating the Mysteries (see 25. d).

    7. It would be a mistake to think of Athene as solely or predominantly the goddess of Athens. Several ancient acropolises were sacred to her, including Argos (Pausanias: ii. 24. 3), Sparta (ibid.: 3. 17. 1), Troy (Iliad vi. 88), Smyrna (Strabo: iv. 1. 4), Epidaurus (Pausanias: ii. 32. 5), Troezen (Pausanias: iii. 23. 10), and Pheneus (Pausanias: x. 38. 5). All these are pre-Hellenic sites.

    10

    The Fates

    There are three conjoined Fates, robed in white, whom Erebus begot on Night: by name Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Of these, Atropos is the smallest in stature, but the most terrible.¹

    b. Zeus, who weighs the lives of men and informs the Fates of his decisions can, it is said, change his mind and intervene to save whom he pleases, when the thread of life, spun on Clotho’s spindle, and measured by the rod of Lachesis, is about to be snipped by Atropos’s shears. Indeed, men claim that they themselves can, to some degree, control their own fates by avoiding unnecessary dangers. The younger gods, therefore, laugh at the Fates, and some say that Apollo once mischievously made them drunk in order to save his friend Admetus from death.²

    c. Others hold, on the contrary, that Zeus himself is subject to the Fates, as the Pythian priestess once confessed in an oracle; because they are not his children, but parthenogenous daughters of the Great Goddess Necessity, against whom not even the gods contend, and who is called ‘The Strong Fate’.³

    d. At Delphi only two Fates are worshipped, those of Birth and Death; and at Athens Aphrodite Urania is called the eldest of the three.⁴

    1. Homer: Iliad xxiv. 49; Orphic Hymn xxxiii; Hesiod: Theogony 217 ff. and 904, Shield of Heracles 259.

    2. Homer: Iliad viii. 69 and xxii. 209; xvi. 434 and 441–3; Virgil: Aeneid x. 814; Homer: Odyssey i. 34; Iliad ix. 411.

    3. Aeschylus: Prometheus 511 and 515; Herodotus: i. 91; Plato: Republic x. 14–16; Simonides: viii. 20.

    4. Pausanias: x. 24. 4 and i. 19. 2.

    1. This myth seems to be based on the custom of weaving family and clan marks into a newly-born child’s swaddling bands, and so allotting him his place in society (see 60. 2); but the Moerae, or Three Fates, are the Triple Moon-goddess—hence their white robes, and the linen thread which is sacred to her as Isis. Clotho is the ‘spinner’, Lachesis the ‘measurer’, Atropos is ‘she who cannot be turned, or avoided’. Moera means ‘a share’ or ‘a phase’, and the moon has three phases and three persons: the new, the Maiden-goddess of the spring, the first period of the year; the full moon, the Nymph-goddess of the summer, the second period; and the old moon, the Crone-goddess of autumn, the last period (see 60. 2).

    2. Zeus called himself ‘The Leader of the Fates’ when he assumed supreme sovereignty and the prerogative of measuring man’s life; hence, probably, the disappearance of Lachesis, ‘the measurer’, at Delphi. But his claim to be their father was not taken seriously by Aeschylus, Herodotus, or Plato.

    3. The Athenians called Aphrodite Urania ‘the eldest of the Fates’ because she was the Nymph-goddess, to whom the sacred king had, in ancient times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice. ‘Urania’ means ‘queen of the mountains’ (see 18. 3).

    11

    The Birth of Aphrodite

    Aphrodite, Goddess of Desire, rose naked from the foam of the sea and, riding on a scallop shell, stepped ashore first on the island of Cythera; but finding this only a small island, passed on to the Peloponnese, and eventually took up residence at Paphos, in Cyprus, still the principal seat of her worship. Grass and flowers sprang from the soil wherever she trod. At Paphos, the Seasons, daughters of Themis, hastened to clothe and adorn her.

    b. Some hold that she sprang from the foam which gathered about the genitals of Uranus, when Cronus threw them into the sea; others, that Zeus begot her on Dione, daughter either of Oceanus and Tethys the sea-nymph, or of Air and Earth. But all agree that she takes the air accompanied by doves and sparrows.¹

    1. Hesiod: Theogony 188–200 and 353; Festus Grammaticus: iii. 2; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite ii. 5; Apollodorus: i. 1. 3.

    1. Aphrodite (‘foam-born’) is the same wide-ruling goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshipped in Syria and Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth (see 1. 1). Her most famous centre of worship was Paphos, where the original white aniconic image of the goddess is still shown in the ruins of a grandiose Roman temple; there every spring her priestess bathed in the sea, and rose again renewed.

    2. She is called daughter of Dione, because Dione was the goddess of the oak-tree, in which the amorous dove nested (see 51. a). Zeus claimed to be her father after seizing Dione’s oracle at Dodona, and Dione therefore became her mother. ‘Tethys’ and ‘Thetis’ are names of the goddess as Creatrix (formed, like ‘Themis’ and ‘Theseus’, from tithenai, ‘to dispose’ or ‘to order’), and as Sea-goddess, since life began in the sea (see 2. a). Doves and sparrows were noted for their lechery; and sea food is still regarded as aphrodisiac throughout the Mediterranean.

    3. Cythera was an important centre of Cretan trade with the Peloponnese, and it will have been from here that her worship first entered Greece. The Cretan goddess had close associations with the sea. Shells carpeted the floor of her palace sanctuary at Cnossus; she is shown on a gem from the Idean Cave blowing a triton-shell, with a sea-anemone lying beside her altar; the sea-urchin and cuttle-fish (see 81. 1) were sacred to her. A triton-shell was found in her early sanctuary at Phaestus, and many more in late Minoan tombs, some of these being terracotta replicas.

    12

    Hera and Her Children

    Hera, daughter of Cronus and Rhea, having been born on the island of Samos or, some say, at Argos, was brought up in Arcadia by Temenus, son of Pelasgus. The Seasons were her nurses.¹ After banishing their father Cronus, Hera’s twin-brother Zeus sought her out at Cnossus in Crete or, some say, on Mount Thornax (now called Cuckoo Mountain) in Argolis, where he courted her, at first unsuccessfully. She took pity on him only when he adopted the disguise of a bedraggled cuckoo, and tenderly warmed him in her bosom. There he at once resumed his true shape and ravished her, so that she was shamed into marrying him.²

    b. All the gods brought gifts to the wedding; notably Mother Earth gave Hera a tree with golden apples, which was later guarded by the Hesperides in Hera’s orchard on Mount Atlas. She and Zeus spent their wedding night on Samos, and it lasted three hundred years. Hera bathes regularly in the spring of Canathus, near Argos, and thus renews her virginity.³

    c. To Hera and Zeus were born the deities Ares, Hephaestus, and Hebe, though some say that Ares and his twin-sister Eris were conceived when Hera touched a certain flower, and Hebe when she touched a lettuce,⁴ and that Hephaestus also was her parthenogenous child—a wonder which he would not believe until he had imprisoned her in a mechanical chair with arms that folded about the sitter, thus forcing her to swear by the River Styx that she did not lie. Others say that Hephaestus was her son by Talos, the nephew of Daedalus.⁵

    1. Pausanias: vii. 4. 4 and viii. 22. 2; Strabo: ix. 2. 36; Olen, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 13. 3.

    2. Diodorus Siculus: v. 72; Pausanias ii. 36. 2 and 17. 4.

    3. Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 609; Pausanias: ii. 38. 2.

    4. Homer: Iliad iv. 441; Ovid: Fasti v. 255; First Vatican Mythographer: 204.

    5. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues iv. 62; Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: viii. 53. 2.

    1. Hera’s name, usually taken to be a Greek word for ‘lady’, may represent an original Herwā (‘Protectress’). She is the pre-Hellenic Great Goddess. Samos and Argos were the chief seats of her worship in Greece, but the Arcadians claimed that their cult was the earliest, and made it contemporary with their earth-born ancestor Pelasgus (‘ancient’). Hera’s forced marriage to Zeus commemorates conquests of Crete and Mycenaean—that is to say Cretanized—Greece, and the overthrow of her supremacy in both countries. He probably came to her disguised as a bedraggled cuckoo, in the sense that certain Hellenes who came to Crete as fugitives accepted employment in the royal guard, made a palace conspiracy and seized the kingdom. Cnossus was twice sacked, apparently by Hellenes; about 1700 B.C., and about 1400 B.C.; and Mycenae fell to the Achaeans a century later. The God Indra in the Ramayana had similarly wooed a nymph in cuckoo disguise; and Zeus now borrowed Hera’s

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