The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (47 page)

n
. Meanwhile, Aegyptus had come to Greece, but when he learned of his sons’ fate, fled to Aroe, where he died, and was buried at Patrae, in a sanctuary of Serapis.
¹²

o
. Amymone’s son by Poseidon, Nauplius, a famous navigator, discovered the art of steering by the Great Bear, and founded the city of Nauplius, where he settled the Egyptian crew that had sailed with his grandfather. He was the ancestor of Nauplius the Wrecker, who used to lure hostile ships to their death by lighting false beacons.
¹³

1
. Herodotus: ii. 91; Euripides, quoted by Apollodorus: ii. 1. 4.

2
. Apollodorus: ii. 1. 5; Hyginus:
Fabula
168; Eustathius on Homer, p. 37.

3
. Hyginus:
loc. cit.
; Apollodorus: ii. 1. 4; Herodotus: ii. 234; Diodorus Siculus: v. 58. 1; Strabo: xiv. 2. 8.

4
. Pausanias: ii. 38. 4 and 19. 3; Euripides, quoted by Strabo: viii. 6. 9; Strabo:
loc. cit
.; Herodotus: ii. 171; Plutarch:
On the Malice of Herodotus
13.

5
. Hyginus:
Fabula
169; Apollodorus: ii. 1. 4.

6
. Pausanias: ii. 37. 1 and 4; Strabo: viii. 6. 8.

7
. Hyginus:
Fabula
168; Apollodorus: ii. 1. 5; Strabo: viii. 6. 9.

8
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Fabula
170.

9
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: ii. 25. 4; 19. 6 and 21. 1.

10
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Lucian:
Marine Dialogues
vi; Hyginus:
Fabula
168; Ovid:
Heroides
xiv; Horace:
Odes
iii. 11. 30.

11
. Pindar:
Pythian Odes
ix. 117 ff.; Pausanias: iii. 12. 2; Hyginus:
Fabula
170; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
x. 497.

12
. Pausanias: vii. 21. 6.

13
. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 136–8; Theon on Aratus’s
Phenomena
27; Pausanias: iv. 35. 2.

1
. This myth records the early arrival in Greece of Helladic colonists from Palestine, by way of Rhodes, and their introduction of agriculture into the Peloponnese. It is claimed that they included emigrants from Libya and Ethiopia, which seems probable (see
6.
1
and
8.
2
). Belus is the Baal of the Old Testament, and the Bel of the Apocrypha; he had taken his name from the Sumerian Moon-goddess Belili, whom he ousted.

2
. The three Danaids, also known as the Telchines, or ‘enchanters’, who named the three chief cities of Rhodes, were the Triple Moon-goddess Danaë (see
54.
1
and
73.
4
). The names Linda, Cameira, and Ialysa seem to be worn-down forms of
linodeousa
(‘binder with linen
thread’),
catamerizousa
(‘sharer out’), and
ialemistria
(‘wailing woman’) – they are, in fact, the familiar Three Fates, or Moerae, otherwise known as Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos (see
10.
1
) because they exercised these very functions. The classical theory of the linen-thread was that the goddess tied the human being to the end of a carefully measured thread, which she paid out yearly, until the time came for her to cut it and thereby relinquish his soul to death. But originally she bound the wailing infant with a linen swaddling band on which his clan and family marks were embroidered and thus assigned him his destined place in society.

3
. Danaë’s Sumerian name was Dam-kina. The Hebrews called her Dinah (
Genesis
xxxiv), also masculinized as Dan. Fifty Moon-priestesses were the regular complement of a college, and their duty was to keep the land watered by rain-making charms, irrigation, and well-digging; hence the Danaids’ name has been connected with the Greek word
dānos
, ‘parched’, and with
danos
, ‘a gift’, the first
a
of which is sometimes long, sometimes short. The twinship of Agenor and Belus, like that of Danaus and Aegyptus, points to a regal system at Argos, in which each co-king married a Chief-priestess and reigned for fifty lunar months, or half a Great Year. Chief-priestesses were chosen by a foot race (the origin of the Olympic Games), run at the end of the fifty months, or of forty-nine in alternate years (see
53.
4
). And the Near Year foot race at Olympia (see
53.
3
), Sparta (see 160.
d
), Jerusalem (Hooke:
Origin of Early Semitic Ritual
, 1935, p. 53), and Babylon (Langdon:
Epic of Creation
, lines 57 and 58), was run for the sacred kingship, as at Argos. A Sun-king must be swift.

4
. The Hydra (see
34.
3
and
60.
h
), destroyed by Heracles, seems to have personified this college of water-providing priestesses (see 124.
2–4
), and the myth of the Danaids apparently records two Hellenic attempts to seize their sanctuary, the first of which failed signally. After the second, successful attempt, the Hellenic leader married the Chief-priestess, and distributed the water-priestesses as wives among his chieftains. ‘The street called Apheta’ will have been the starting-point in the girls’ race for the office of Chief-priestess; but also used in the men’s foot race for the sacred kingship (see
53.
3
and 160.
d
). Lynceus, a royal title in Messene too (see
74.
1
), means ‘of the lynx’ – the caracal, a sort of lion, famous for its sharp sight.

5
. ‘Aegyptus’ and ‘Danaus’ seem to have been early titles of Theban co-kings; and since it was a widespread custom to bury the sacred king’s head at the approaches of a city, and thus protect it against invasion (see 146.
2
), the supposed heads of Aegyptus’s sons buried at Lerna were probably those of successive sacred kings. The Egyptians were called Melampodes (‘black feet’) because they paddled about in the black Nile mud during the sowing season.

6
. A later, monogamous, society represented the Danaids with their
leaking water-pots as undergoing eternal punishment for matricide. But in the icon from which this story derived, they were performing a necessary charm: sprinkling water on the ground to produce rain showers by sympathetic magic (see
41.
5
and
68.
1
). It seems that the sieve, or leaking pot, remained a distinguishing mark of the wise woman many centuries after the abolition of the Danaid colleges: Philostratus writes (
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vi. 11) of ‘women with sieves in their hands who go about pretending to heal cattle for simple cowherds.’

7
. Hypermnestra’s and Lynceus’s beacon-fires will have been those lighted at the Argive Spring Festival to celebrate the triumph of the Sun. It may be that at Argos the sacred king was put to death with a long needle thrust through his heart: a comparatively merciful end.

8
. The Thesmophoria (‘due offerings’) were agricultural orgies celebrated at Athens (see
48.
b
), in the course of which the severed genitals of the sacred king, or his surrogate, were carried in a basket; these were replaced in more civilized times by phallus-shaped loaves and live serpents. Apollo Lycius may mean ‘Apollo of the Light’, rather than ‘Wolfish Apollo’, but the two concepts were connected by the wolves’ habit of howling at the full moon.

61

LAMIA

B
ELUS
had a beautiful daughter, Lamia, who ruled in Libya, and on whom Zeus, in acknowledgement of her favours, bestowed the singular power of plucking out and replacing her eyes at will. She bore him several children, but all of them except Scylla were killed by Hera in a fit of jealousy. Lamia took her revenge by destroying the children of others, and behaved so cruelly that her face turned into a nightmareish mask.

b
. Later, she joined the company of the Empusae, lying with young men and sucking their blood while they slept.
¹

1
. Diodorus Siculus: xx. 41; Suidas
sub
Lamia; Plutarch:
On Curiosity
2; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s
Peace
757; Strabo: i. 11. 8; Eustathius on Homer p. 1714; Aristotle:
Ethics
vii. 5.

1
. Lamia was the Libyan Neith, the Love-and-Battle goddess, also named Anatha and Athene (see
8.
1
and
25.
2
), whose worship the
Achaeans suppressed; like Alphito of Arcadia, she ended as a nursery bogey (see
52.
7
). Her name, Lamia, seems to be akin to
lamyros
(‘gluttonous’), from
laimos
(‘gullet’) – thus, of a woman: ‘lecherous’ – and her ugly face is the prophylactic Gorgon mask worn by her priestesses during their Mysteries (see
33.
3
), of which infanticide was an integral part. Lamia’s removable eyes are perhaps deduced from a picture of the goddess about to bestow mystic sight on a hero by proffering him an eye (see
73.
8
). The Empusae were incubae (see
55.
1
).