The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (10 page)

1
. Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
355.

2
. Euripides:
Ion
995.

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

T
HERE
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 19.
3
).

11

THE BIRTH OF APHRODITE

A
PHRODITE
, 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.