The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (62 page)

4
. Apollodorus: iii. 9. 2; Hyginus:
Fabula
185; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
iii. 113; First Vatican Mythographer: 39.

5
. Hyginus:
Fabulae
70, 99, and 270; First Vatican Mythographer: 174.

6
. Apollodorus: iii. 9. 2, quoting Euripides’s
Meleager
; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
x. 565 ff.; Tzetzes:
Chiliades
xiii. 453; Lactantius on Statius’s
Thebaid
vi. 563; Hyginus:
Fabula
185.

1
. Greek physicians credited the marshmallow (
althaia
, from
althainein
, ‘to cure’) with healing virtue and, being the first spring flower from which bees suck honey, it had much the same mythic importance as ivy-blossom, the last. The Calydonian hunt is heroic saga, based perhaps on a famous boar hunt, and on an Aetolian clan feud occasioned by it. But the sacred king’s death at the onset of a boar – whose curved tusks dedicated it to the moon – is ancient myth (see
18.
3
), and explains the introduction into the theory of heroes from several different Greek states who had suffered this fate. The boar was peculiarly the emblem of Calydon (see 106.
c
) and sacred to Ares, Meleager’s reputed father.

2
. Toxeus’s leap over the fosse is paralleled by Remus’s leap over Romulus’s wall; it suggests the widespread custom of sacrificing a royal prince at the foundation of a city (1
Kings
xvi. 34). Meleager’s brand recalls several Celtic myths: a hero’s death taking place when some external object – a fruit, a tree, or an animal – is destroyed.

3
. Artemis was worshipped as a
meleagris
, or guinea-hen, in the island of Leros, and on the Athenian Acropolis; the cult is of East African origin, to judge from this particular variety of guinea-fowl – which had a blue wattle, as opposed to the red-wattled Italian bird introduced from Numidia – and its queer cluckings were taken to be sounds of mourning. Devotees of neither Artemis nor Isis might eat guinea-fowl. The Lerans’ reputation for evil-living may have been due to their religious conservatism, like the Cretan’s reputation for lying (see
45.
2
).

4
. She-bears were sacred to Artemis (see
22.
4
), and Atalanta’s race
against Melanion is probably deduced from an icon wich showed the doomed king, with the golden apples in his hand (see
32.
1
and
53.
5
), being chased to death by the goddess. A companion icon will have shown an image of Artemis supported by two lions, as on the gate at Mycenae, and on several Mycenaean and Cretan seals. The second version of the myth seems to be the older, if only because Schoeneus, Atalanta’s father, stands for Schoenis, a title of Aphrodite’s; and because Zeus does not figure in it.

5
. Why the lovers were punished – here the mythographers mistakenly refer to Pliny, though Pliny says, on the contrary, that lions vigorously punish lionesses for mating with leopards (
Natural History
viii. 17) – is a problem of greater interest than Sir James Frazer in his notes on Apollodorus allows. It seems to record an old exogamic ruling, according to which members of the same totem clan could not marry one another, nor could lion clansmen marry into the leopard clan, which belonged to the same sub-phratry; as the lamb and goat clans could not intermarry at Athens (see
97.
3
).

6
. Oeneus was not the only Hellenic king who withheld a sacrifice from Artemis (see
69.
b
and
72.
i
). Her demands were much more severe than those of other Olympian deities, and even in Classical times included holocausts of living animals. These Oeneus will hardly have denied her; but the Arcadian and Boeotian practice was to sacrifice the king himself, or a surrogate, as the Actaeon stag (see
22.
1
); and Oeneus may well have refused to be torn in pieces.

81

TELAMON AND PELEUS

T
HE
mother of Aeacus’s two elder sons, namely Telamon and Peleus, was Endeis, Sciron’s daughter. Phocus, the youngest, was a son of the Nereid Psamathe, who had turned herself into a seal while unsuccessfully trying to escape from Aeacus’s embraces. They all lived together in the island of Aegina.
¹

b
. Phocus was Aeacus’s favourite, and his excellence at athletic games drove Telamon and Peleus wild with jealousy. For the sake of peace, therefore, he led a party of Aeginetan emigrants to Phocis – where another Phocus, a son of Ornytion the Corinthian, had already colonized the neighbourhood of Tithorea and Delphi – and in the course of time his sons extended the state of Phocis to its present limits.
One day Aeacus sent for Phocus, perhaps intending to bequeath him the island kingdom; but, encouraged by their mother, Telamon and Peleus plotted to kill him on his return. They challenged Phocus to a fivefold athletic contest, and whether it was Telamon who felled him, as if accidentally, by throwing a stone discus at his head, and Peleus who then despatched him with an axe, or whether it was the other way about, has been much disputed ever since. In either case, Telamon and Peleus were equally guilty of fratricide, and together hid the body in a wood, where Aeacus found it. Phocus lies buried close to the Aeaceum.
²

c
. Telamon took refuge in the island of Salamis, where Cychreus was king, and sent back a messenger, denying any part in the murder. Aeacus, in reply, forbade him ever again to set foot in Aegina, though permitting him to plead his case from the sea. Rather than stand and shout on the rocking deck of his ship anchored behind the breakers, Telamon sailed one night into what is now called the Secret Harbour, and sent masons ashore to build a mole, which would serve him as rostrum; they finished this task before dawn, and it is still to be seen. Aeacus, however, rejected his eloquent plea that Phocus’s death was accidental, and Telamon returned to Salamis, where he married the king’s daughter Glauce, and succeeded to Cychreus’s throne.
³

d
. This Cychreus, a son of Poseidon and Salamis, daughter of the river Asopus, had been chosen King of Salamis when he killed a serpent to end its widespread ravages. But he kept a young serpent of the same breed which behaved in the same destructive way until expelled by Eurylochus, a companion of Odysseus; Demeter then welcomed it at Eleusis as one of her attendants. But some explain that Cychreus himself, called ‘Serpent’ because of his cruelty, was banished by Eurylochus and took refuge at Eleusis, where he was appointed to a minor office in Demeter’s sanctuary. He became, at all events, one of the guardian heroes of Salamis, the Serpent Isle; there he was buried, his face turned to the west, and appeared in serpent form among the Greek ships at the famous victory of Salamis. Sacrifices were offered at his tomb, and when the Athenians disputed the possession of the island with the Megarians, Solon the famous law-giver sailed across by night and propitiated him.
⁴

e
. On the death of his wife Glauce, Telamon married Periboea of Athens, a grand-daughter of Pelops, who bore him Great Ajax; and later the captive Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, who bore him the equally well-known Teucer.
⁵

f
. Peleus fled to the court of Actor, King of Phthia, by whose adopted son Eurytion he was purified. Actor then gave him his daughter Polymela in marriage, and a third part of the kingdom. One day Eurytion, who ruled over another third part, took Peleus to hunt the Calydonian boar, but Peleus speared him accidentally and fled to Iolcus, where he was once more purified, this time by Acastus, son of Pelias.
⁶

g
. Acastus’s wife, Cretheis, tried to seduce Peleus and, when he rebuffed her advances, lyingly told Polymela: ‘He intends to desert you and marry my daughter Sterope.’ Polymela believed Cretheis’s mischievous tale, and hanged herself. Not content with the harm she had done, Cretheis went weeping to Acastus, and accused Peleus of having attempted her virtue.

h
. Loth to kill the man whom he had purified, Acastus challenged him to a hunting contest on Mount Pelion. Now, in reward for his chastity, the gods had given Peleus a magic sword, forged by Daedalus, which had the property of making its owner victorious in battle and equally successful in the chase. Thus he soon piled up a great heap of stags, bears, and boars; but when he went off to kill even more, Acastus’s companions claimed the prey as their master’s and jeered at his want of skill. ‘Let the dead beasts decide this matter with their own mouths!’ cried Peleus, who had cut out their tongues, and now produced them from a bag to prove that he had easily won the contest.
⁷

i
. After a festive supper, in the course of which he outdid all others as a trencherman, Peleus fell fast asleep. Acastus then robbed him of his magic sword, hid it under a pile of cow-dung, and stole away with his followers. Peleus awoke to find himself deserted, disarmed, and surrounded by wild Centaurs, who were on the point of murdering him; however, their king Cheiron not only intervened to save his life, but divined where the sword lay hidden and restored it to him.
⁸

j
. Meanwhile, on the advice of Themis, Zeus chose Peleus to be the husband of the Nereid Thetis, whom he would have married himself, had he not been discouraged by the Fates’ prophecy that any son born to Thetis would become far more powerful than his father. He was also vexed that Thetis had rejected his advances, for her foster-mother Hera’s sake, and therefore vowed that she should never marry an immortal. Hera, however, gratefully decided to match her with the noblest of mortals, and summoned all Olympians to the wedding when the moon should next be full, at the same time sending her messenger
Iris to King Cheiron’s cave with an order for Peleus to make ready.
⁹

k
. Now, Cheiron foresaw that Thetis, being immortal, would at first resent the marriage; and, acting on his instructions, Peleus concealed himself behind a bush of parti-coloured myrtle-berries on the shores of a Thessalian islet, where Thetis often came, riding naked on a harnessed dolphin, to enjoy her midday sleep in the cave which this bush half screened. No sooner had she entered the cave and fallen asleep than Peleus seized hold of her. The struggle was silent and fierce. Thetis turned successively into fire, water, a lion, and a serpent;
¹⁰
but Peleus had been warned what to expect, and clung to her resolutely, even when she became an enormous slippery cuttle-fish and squirted ink at him – a change which accounts for the name of Cape Sepias, the near-by promontory, now sacred to the Nereids. Though burned, drenched, mauled, stung, and covered with sticky sepia ink, Peleus would not let her go and, in the end, she yielded and they lay locked in a passionate embrace.
¹¹

l
. Their wedding was celebrated outside Cheiron’s cave on Mount Pelion. The Olympians attended, seated on twelve thrones. Hera herself raised the bridal torch, and Zeus, now reconciled to his defeat, gave Thetis away. The Fates and the Muses sang; Ganymedes poured nectar; and the fifty Nereids performed a spiral dance on the white sands. Crowds of Centaurs attended the ceremony, wearing chaplets of grass, brandishing darts of fir, and prophesying good fortune.
¹²