The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (34 page)

5
. It is the country of the Atlantians, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (see 131.
m
) as a most civilized people living to the westward of Lake Tritonis, from whom the Libyan Amazons, meaning the matriarchal tribes later described by Herodotus, seized their city of Cerne. Diodorus’s legend cannot be archaeologically dated, but he makes it precede a Libyan invasion of the Aegean Islands and Thrace, an event which cannot have taken place later than the third millennium
B
.
C
. If, then, Atlantis was Western Libya, the floods which caused it to disappear may have been due either to a phenomenal rainfall such as caused the famous Mesopotamian and Ogygian Floods (see
38.
3–5
), or to a high tide with a strong north-westerly gale, such as washed away a large part of the Netherlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and formed the Zuider Zee,
^*
or to a subsidence of the coastal region. Atlantis may, in fact, have been swamped at the formation of Lake Tritonis (see
8.
a
)
, which apparently once covered several thousand square miles of the Libyan lowlands; and perhaps extended northward into the Western Gulf of Sirte, called by the geographer Scylax ‘the Gulf of Tritonis’, where the dangerous reefs
suggest a chain of islands of which only Jerba and the Kerkennahs survive.

6
. The island left in the centre of the Lake mentioned by Diodorus (see 131.
l
) was perhaps the Chaamba Bou Rouba in the Sahara. Diodorus seems to be referring to such a catastrophe when he writes in his account of the Amazons and Atlantians (iii. 55): ‘And it is said that, as a result of earthquakes, the parts of Libya towards the ocean engulfed Lake Tritonis, making it disappear.’ Since Lake Tritonis still existed in his day, what he had probably been told was that ‘as a result of earthquakes in the Western Mediterranean the sea engulfed part of Libya and formed Lake Tritonis.’ The Zuider Zee and the Copaic Lake have now both been reclaimed; and Lake Tritonis, which, according to Scylax, still covered nine hundred square miles in Classical times, has shrunk to the salt-marshes of Chott Melghir and Chott el Jerid. If this was Atlantis, some of the dispossessed agriculturists were driven west to Morocco, others south across the Sahara, others east to Egypt and beyond, taking their story with them; a few remained by the lakeside. Plato’s elephants may well have been found in this territory, though the mountainous coastline of Atlantis belongs to Crete, of which the sea-hating Egyptians knew only by hear-say.

7
. The five pairs of Poseidon’s twin sons who took the oath of allegiance to Atlas will have been representatives at Pharos of ‘Keftiu’ kingdoms allied to the Cretans. In the Mycenaean Age double-sovereignty was the rule: Sparta with Castor and Polydeuces, Messenia with Idas and Lynceus, Argos with Proetus and Acrisius, Tiryns with Heracles and Iphicles, Thebes with Eteocles and Polyneices. Greed and cruelty will have been displayed by the Sons of Poseidon only after the fall of Cnossus, when commercial integrity declined and the merchant turned pirate.

8
. Prometheus’s name, ‘forethought’, may originate in a Greek misunderstanding of the Sanskrit word
pramantha
, the swastika, or fire-drill, which he had supposedly invented, since Zeus Prometheus at Thurii was shown holding a fire-drill. Prometheus, the Indo-European folk-hero, became confused with the Carian hero Palamedes, the inventor or distributor of all civilized arts (under the goddess’s inspiration); and with the Babylonian god Ea, who claimed to have created a splendid man from the blood of Kingu (a sort of Cronus), while the Mother-goddess Aruru created an inferior man from clay. The brothers Pramanthu and Manthu, who occur in the
Bhagavata Purāna
, a Sanskrit epic, may be prototypes of Prometheus and Epimetheus (‘afterthought’); yet Hesiod’s account of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an antifeminist fable, probably of his own invention, though based on the story of Demophon and Phyllis (see 169.
j
). Pandora (‘all-giving’) was the Earth-goddess Rhea, worshipped under that title at Athens and elsewhere (Aristophanes:
Birds
971; Philostratus:
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vi. 39), whom the pessimistic Hesiod blames for man’s mortality and all the ills
which beset life, as well as for the frivolous and unseemly behaviour of wives. His story of the division of the bull is equally unmythical: a comic anecdote, invented to account for Prometheus’s punishment, and for the anomaly of presenting the gods only with the thigh-bones and fat cut from the sacrificial beast. In
Genesis
the sanctity of the thigh-bones is explained by Jacob’s lameness which an angel inflicted on him during a wrestling match. Pandora’s jar (not box) originally contained winged souls.

9
. Greek islanders still carry fire from one place to another in the pith of giant fennel, and Prometheus’s enchainment on Mount Caucasus may be a legend picked up by the Hellenes as they migrated to Greece from the Caspian Sea: of a frost-giant, recumbent on the snow of the high peaks, and attended by a flock of vultures.

10
. The Athenians were at pains to deny that their goddess took Prometheus as her lover, which suggests that he had been locally identified with Hephaestus, another fire-god and inventor, of whom the same story was told (see
25.
b
) because he shared a temple with Athene on the Acropolis.

11
. Menoetius (‘ruined strength’) is a sacred king of the oak cult; the name refers perhaps to his ritual maiming (see
7.
1
and
50.
2
).

12
. While the right-handed
swastika
is a symbol of the sun, the left-handed is a symbol of the moon. Among the Akan of West Africa, a people of Libyo-Berber ancestry (see
Introduction, end
), it represents the Triple-goddess Ngame.

40

EOS

A
T
the close of every night, rosy-fingered, saffron-robed Eos, a daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, rises from her couch in the east, mounts her chariot drawn by the horses Lampus and Phaëthon, and rides to Olympus, where she announces the approach of her brother Helius. When Helius appears, she becomes Hemera, and accompanies him on his travels until, as Hespera, she announces their safe arrival on the western shores of Ocean.
¹

b
. Aphrodite was once vexed to find Ares in Eos’s bed, and cursed her with a constant longing for young mortals, whom thereupon she secretly and shamefacedly began to seduce, one after the other. First, Orion; next, Cephalus; then Cleitus, a grandson of Melampus; though she was married to Astraeus, who came of Titan stock, and to whom
she bore not only the North, West, and South Winds, but also Phosphorus and, some say, all the other stars of Heaven.
²

c
. Lastly, Eos carried off Ganymedes and Tithonus, sons of Tros or Ilus. When Zeus robbed her of Ganymedes she begged him to grant Tithonus immortality, and to this he assented. But she forgot to ask also for perpetual youth, a gift won by Selene for Endymion; and Tithonus became daily older, greyer, and more shrunken, his voice grew shrill, and, when Eos tired of nursing him, she locked him in her bedroom, where he turned into a cicada.
³

1
. Homer:
Odyssey
v. 1 and xxiii. 244–6; Theocritus:
Idylls
ii. 148.

2
. Apollodorus: i. 4. 4; Homer
Odyssey
xv. 250; Hesiod:
Theogony
378–82.

3
. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 115;
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite
218–38; Hesiod:
Theogony
984; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 4; Horace:
Odes
iii. 20; Ovid:
Fasti
i. 461.

1
. The Dawn-maiden was a Hellenic fancy, grudgingly accepted by the mythographers as a Titaness of the second generation; her two-horse chariot and her announcement of the Sun’s advent are allegories rather than myths.

2
. Eos’s constant love affairs with young mortals are also allegories: dawn brings midnight lovers a renewal of erotic passion, and is the most usual time for men to be carried off by fever. The allegory of her union with Astraeus is a simple one: the stars merge with dawn in the east and Astraeus, the dawn wind, rises as if it were their emanation. Then, because wind was held to be a fertilizing agent, Eos became the mother by Astraeus of the Morning Star left alone in the sky. (Astraeus was another name for Cephalus, also said to have fathered the Morning Star on her.) It followed philosophically that, since the Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star, and since Evening is Dawn’s last appearance, all the stars must be born from Eos, and so must every wind but the dawn wind. This allegory, however, contradicted the myth of Boreas’s creation by the Moon-goddess Eurynome (see
1.
1
).

3
. In Greek art, Eos and Hemera are indistinguishable characters. Tithonus has been taken by the allegorist to mean ‘a grant of a stretching-out’ (from
teinō
and
ōne
), a reference to the stretching-out of his life, at Eos’s plea; but it is likely, rather, to have been a masculine form of Eos’s own name, Titonë – from titō, ‘day’ (Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
941) and
onë
‘queen’ – and to have meant ‘partner of the Queen of Day’. Cicadas are active as soon as the day warms up, and the golden cicada was an emblem of Apollo as the Sun-god among the Greek colonists of Asia Minor.

41

ORION

O
RION
, a hunter of Boeotian Hyria, and the handsomest man alive, was the son of Poseidon and Euryale. Coming one day to Hyria in Chios, he fell in love with Merope, daughter of Dionysus’s son Oenopion. Oenopion had promised Merope to Orion in marriage, if he would free the island from the dangerous wild beasts that infested it; and this he set himself to do, bringing the pelts to Merope every evening. But when the task was at last accomplished, and he claimed her as his wife, Oenopion brought him rumours of lions, bears, and wolves still lurking in the hills, and refused to give her up, the fact being that he was in love with her himself.

b
. One night Orion, in disgust, drank a skinful of Oenopion’s wine, which so inflamed him that he broke into Merope’s bedroom, and forced her to lie with him. When dawn came, Oenopion invoked his father, Dionysus, who sent satyrs to ply Orion with still more wine, until he fell fast asleep; whereupon Oenopion put out both his eyes and flung him on the seashore. An oracle announced that the blind man would regain his sight, if he travelled to the east and turned his eye-sockets towards Helius at the point where he first rises from Ocean. Orion at once rowed out to sea in a small boat and, following the sound of a Cyclops’s hammer, reached Lemnos. There he entered the smithy of Hephaestus, snatched up an apprentice named Cedalion, and carried him off on his shoulders as a guide. Cedalion led Orion over land and sea, until he came at last to the farthest Ocean, where Eos fell in love with him, and her brother Helius duly restored his sight.

c
. After visiting Delos in Eos’s company, Orion returned to avenge himself on Oenopion, whom he could not, however, find anywhere in Chios, because he was hiding in an underground chamber made for him by Hephaestus. Sailing on to Crete, where he thought that Oenopion might have fled for protection to his grandfather Minos, Orion met Artemis, who shared his love of the chase. She soon persuaded him to forget his vengeance and, instead, come hunting with her.
¹

d
. Now, Apollo was aware that Orion had not refused Eos’s invitation to her couch in the holy island of Delos – Dawn still daily blushes
to remember this indiscretion – and, further, boasted that he would rid the whole earth of wild beasts and monsters. Fearing, therefore, that his sister Artemis might prove as susceptible as Eos, Apollo went to Mother Earth and, mischievously repeating Orion’s boast, arranged for a monstrous scorpion to pursue him. Orion attacked the scorpion, first with arrows, then with his sword, but, finding that its armour was proof against any mortal weapon, dived into the sea and swam away in the direction of Delos where, he hoped, Eos would protect him. Apollo then called to Artemis: ‘Do you see that black object bobbing about in the sea, far away, close to Ortygia? It is the head of a villain called Candaon, who has just seduced Opos, one of your Hyperborean priestesses. I challenge you to transfix it with an arrow!’ Now, Candaon was Orion’s Boeotian nickname, though Artemis did not know this. She took careful aim, let fly, and, swimming out to retrieve her quarry, found that she had shot Orion through the head. In great grief she implored Apollo’s son Asclepius to revive him, and he consented; but was destroyed by Zeus’s thunderbolt before he could accomplish his task. Artemis then set Orion’s image among the stars, eternally pursued by the Scorpion; his ghost had already descended to the Asphodel Fields.