The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (35 page)

e
. Some, however, say that the scorpion stung Orion to death, and that Artemis was vexed with him for having amorously chased her virgin companions, the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. They fled across the meadows of Boeotia, until the gods, having changed them into doves, set their images among the stars. But this is a mistaken account, since the Pleiades were not virgins: three of them had lain with Zeus, two with Poseidon, one with Ares, and the seventh married Sisyphus of Corinth, and failed to be included in the constellation, because Sisyphus was a mere mortal.
²

f
. Others tell the following strange story of Orion’s birth, to account for his name (which is sometimes written Urion) and for the tradition that he was a son of Mother Earth. Hyrieus, a poor bee-keeper and farmer, had vowed to have no children, and he grew old and impotent. When, one day, Zeus and Hermes visited him in disguise, and were hospitably entertained, they enquired what gift he most desired. Sighing deeply, Hyrieus replied that what he most wanted, namely to have a son, was now impossible. The gods, however, instructed him to sacrifice a bull, make water on its hide, and then bury it in his wife’s grave. He did so and, nine months later, a child was born to him, whom
he named Uroin – ‘he who makes water’ – and, indeed, both the rising and setting of the constellation Orion bring rain.
³

1
. Homer:
Odyssey
xi. 310; Apollodorus: i. 4. 3–4; Parthenius;
Love Stories
20; Lucian:
On the Hall
28; Theon:
On Aratus
638; Hyginus:
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 34.

2
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.

3
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
i. 539; Ovid:
Fasti
v. 537 ff.; Hyginus
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 34.

1
. Orion’s story consists of three or four unrelated myths strung together. The first, confusedly told, is that of Oenopion. This concerns a sacred king’s unwillingness to resign his throne, at the close of his term, even when the new candidate for kingship had been through his ritual combats and married the queen with the usual feasting. But the new king is only an
interrex
who, after reigning for one day, is duly murdered and devoured by Maenads (see
30.
1
); the old king, who has been shamming dead in a tomb, then remarries the queen and continues his reign (see 123.
4
).

2
. The irrelevant detail of the Cyclop’s hammer explains Orion’s blindness: a mythological picture of Odysseus searing the drunken Cyclops’s eye (see 170.
d
) has apparently been combined with a Hellenic allegory: how the Sun Titan is blinded every evening by his enemies, but restored to sight by the following Dawn. Orion (‘the dweller on the mountain’) and Hyperion (‘the dweller on high’) are, in fact, identified here. Orion’s boast that he would exterminate the wild beasts not only refers to his ritual combats (see 123.
1
), but is a fable of the rising Sun, at whose appearance all wild beasts retire to their dens (compare
Psalm
civ. 22).

3
. Plutarch’s account of the scorpion sent by the god Set to kill the Child Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, in the hottest part of the summer, explains Orion’s death by scorpion-bite and Artemis’s appeal to Asclepius (Plutarch:
On Isis and Osiris
19). Horus died, but Ra, the Sun-god, revived him, and later he avenged his father Osiris’s death; in the original myth Orion, too, will have been revived. Orion is also, in part, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian Heracles, whom Scorpion-men attack in the Tenth Tablet of the Calendar epic – a myth which concerned the mortal wounding of the sacred king as the Sun rose in Scorpio. Exactly at what season the wounding took place depends on the antiquity of the myth; when the Zodiac originated, Scorpio was probably an August sign, but in Classical times the precession of the equinoxes had advanced it to October.

4
. Another version of Orion’s death is recorded on one of the Hittite Ras Shamra tablets. Anat, or Anatha, the Battle-goddess, fell in love with
a handsome hunter named Aqhat, and when he vexatiously refused to give her his bow, asked the murderous Yatpan to steal it from him. To her great grief the clumsy Yatpan not only killed Aqhat, but dropped the bow into the sea. The astronomical meaning of this myth is that Orion and the Bow – a part of the constellation, which the Greeks called ‘The Hound’ – sink below the southern horizon for two whole months every spring. In Greece this story seems to have been adapted to a legend of how the orgiastic priestesses of Artemis – Opis being a title of Artemis herself – killed an amorous visitor to their islet of Ortygia. And in Egypt, since the return of the constellation Orion introduces the summer heat, it was confusingly identified with Horus’s enemy Set, the two bright stars above him being his ass’s ears.

5
. The myth of Orion’s birth is perhaps more than a comic tale, modelled on that of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid:
Metamorphoses
viii. 670–724), and told to account for the first syllable of his ancient name, Urion – as though it were derived from
ourein
, ‘to urinate’, not from
ouros
, the Homeric form of
oros
, ‘mountain’, Yet a primitive African rain-producing charm, which consists in making water on a bull’s hide, may have been known to the Greeks; and that Orion was a son of Poseidon, the water-god, is a clear allusion to his rain-making powers.

6
. The name Pleiades, from the root
plei
, ‘to sail’, refers to their rising at the season when good weather for sailing approaches. But Pindar’s form
Peleiades
, ‘flock of doves’, was perhaps the original form, since the
Hyades
are piglets. It appears that a seventh star in the group became extinct towards the end of the second millennium
B
.
C
. (see
67.
j
); since Hyginus (
Fabula
192) says that Electra disappeared in grief for the destruction of the House of Dardanus. Orion’s vain pursuit of the Pleiades, which occur in the Bull constellation, refers to their rising above the horizon just before the reappearance of Orion.

42

HELIUS

H
ELIUS
, whom the cow-eyed Euryphaessa, or Theia, bore to the Titan Hyperion, is a brother of Selene and Eos. Roused by the crowing of the cock, which is sacred to him, and heralded by Eos, he drives his four-horse chariot daily across the Heavens from a magnificent palace in the far east, near Colchis, to an equally magnificent far-western palace, where his unharnessed horses pasture in the Islands of the
Blessed.
¹
He sails home along the Ocean stream, which flows around the world, embarking his chariot and team on a golden ferry-boat made for him by Hephaestus, and sleeps all night in a comfortable cabin.
²

b
. Helius can see everything that happens on earth, but is not particularly observant – once he even failed to notice the robbery of his sacred cattle by Odysseus’s companions. He has several herds of such cattle, each consisting of three hundred and fifty head. Those in Sicily are tended by his daughters Phaetusa and Lampetia, but he keeps his finest herd in the Spanish island of Erytheia.
³
Rhodes is his freehold. It happened that, when Zeus was allotting islands and cities to the various gods, he forgot to include Helius among these, and ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘now I shall have to begin all over again’.

‘No, Sire,’ replied Helius politely, ‘today I noticed signs of a new island emerging from the sea, to the south of Asia Minor. I shall be well content with that.’

c
. Zeus called the Fate Lachesis to witness that any such new island should belong to Helius;
⁴
and, when Rhodes had risen well above the waves, Helius claimed it and begot seven sons and a daughter there on the Nymph Rhode. Some say that Rhodes had existed before this time, and was re-emerging from the waves after having been overwhelmed by the great flood which Zeus sent. The Telchines were its aboriginal inhabitants and Poseidon fell in love with one of them, the nymph Halia, on whom he begot Rhode and six sons; which six sons insulted Aphrodite in her passage from Cythera to Paphos, and were struck mad by her; they ravished their mother and committed other outrages so foul that Poseidon sank them underground, and they became the Eastern Demons. But Halia threw herself into the sea and was deified as Leucothea – though the same story is told of Ino, mother of Corinthian Melicertes. The Telchines, foreseeing the flood, sailed away in all directions, especially to Lycia, and abandoned their claims on Rhodes. Rhode was thus left the sole heiress, and her seven sons by Helius ruled in the island after its re-emergence. They became famous astronomers, and had one sister named Electryo, who died a virgin and is now worshipped as a demi-goddess. One of them, by name Actis, was banished for fratricide, and fled to Egypt, where he founded the city of Heliopolis, and first taught the Egyptians astrology, inspired by his father Helius. The Rhodians have now built the Colossus, seventy cubits high, in his honour. Zeus also added to Helius’s dominions the new
island of Sicily, which had been a missile flung in the battle with the giants.

d
. One morning Helius yielded to his son Phaëthon who had been constantly plaguing him for permission to drive the sun-chariot. Phaëthon wished to show his sisters Prote and Clymene what a fine fellow he was: and his fond mother Rhode (whose name is uncertain because she had been called by both her daughters’ names and by that of Rhode) encouraged him. But, not being strong enough to check the career of the white horses, which his sisters had yoked for him, Phaëthon drove them first so high above the earth that everyone shivered, and then so near the earth that he scorched the fields. Zeus, in a fit of rage, killed him with a thunderbolt, and he fell into the river Po. His grieving sisters were changed into poplar-trees on its banks, which weep amber tears; or, some say, into alder-trees.
⁵

1
.
Homeric Hymn to Helius
2 and 9–16;
Homeric Hymn to Athene
13; Hesiod:
Theogony
371–4; Pausanias: v. 25. 5; Nonnus:
Dionysiaca
xii. 1; Ovid:
Metamorphosis
ii. 1 ff. and 106 ff.; Hyginus:
Fabula
183; Athenaeus: vii. 296.

2
. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 10; Athenaeus: xi. 39.

3
. Homer:
Odyssey
xii. 323 and 375; Apollodorus: i. 6. 1; Theocritus:
Idylls
xxv. 130.

4
. Pindar:
Olympian Odes
vii. 54 ff.

5
. Scholiast on Pindar’s
Olympian Odes
vi. 78; Tzetzes:
Chiliads
iv. 137; Hyginus:
Fabulae
52, 152 and 154; Euripides:
Hippolytus
737; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 598 ff.; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
25; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
i. 755 ff; Virgil:
Eclogues
vi. 62; Diodorus Siculus v. 3; Apollodorus: i. 4. 5.