Authors: Robert Graves

The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (75 page)

BOOK: The Greek Myths, Volume 1

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f
. Aegeus, like Cecrops and Pandion, found his life constantly threatened by the plots of his kinsmen, among them Lycus, whom he is said to have exiled from Euboea. Lycus took refuge with Sarpedon, and gave his name to Lycia, after first visiting Aphareus at Arene, and initiating the royal household into the Mysteries the Great Goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and also into those of Atthis, at the ancient Messenian capital of Andania. This Atthis, who gave Attica its name, was one of the three daughters of Cranaus, the autochthonous king of Athens reigning at the time of the Deucalonian Flood. The oak-coppice at Andania, where Lycus purified the initiates, still bears his name.
⁹He had been granted the power of prophecy, and it was his oracle which later declared that if the Messenians kept a certain secret thing safely they would one day recover their partrimony, but if not, they would forfeit it for ever. Lycus was referring to an account of the Mysteries of the Great Goddess engraved on a sheet of tin, which the Messenians thereupon buried in a brazen urn between a yew and a myrtle, on the summit of Mount Ithone; Epaminondas the Theban eventually disinterred it when he restored the Messenians to their former glory.
¹⁰

g
. The Athenian Lyceum is also named in honour of Lycus; from the very earliest times it has been sacred to Apollo who there first received the surname ‘Lycaean’, and expelled wolves from Athens by the smell of his sacrifices.
¹¹

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 1 and 5; Plutarch:
Theseus
32; Pausanias: vii. 1. 2.

2
.
Ibid
.: i. 5. 3; Eustathius on Homer p. 281; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 5.

3
. Pherecydes, quoted by Scholiast on Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus
472; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 8; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 76. 1; Pausanias: ii. 6. 3.

4
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 5; Pausanias: iv. 36. 1 and i. 29. 5.

5
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: iv. 36. 1.

6
. Pausanias: i. 41. 6; i. 5. 3; and i. 39. 4; Hesychius
sub
Aethyia.

7
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 6; Sophocles, quoted by Strabo: i. 6; Pausanias: i. 5. 4 and i. 39. 4.

8
. Pausanias: i. 39. 4–5 and 19. 5; Strabo: ix. 1. 6.

9
. Herodotus: i. 173; Pausanias: i. 2. 5 and iv. 1. 4–5.

10
. Pausanias: x. 12. 5; iv. 20. 2 and 26. 6.

11
.
Ibid
.: i. 19. 4; Scholiast on Demosthenes: xxiv. 114.

1
. Mythical genealogies such as these were quoted whenever the sovereignty of states or hereditary privileges came into dispute. The division
of Megara between the sacred king, who performed necessary sacrifices, and his tanist, who commanded the army, is paralleled at Sparta (see
74.
1
). Aegeus’s name records the goat cult in Athens (see
8.
1
), and Lycus’s the wolf cult; any Athenian who killed a wolf was obliged to bury it by public subscription (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 124). The diver-bird was sacred to Athene as protectress of ships and, since the Bluff of Athene overhung the sea, this may have been another of the cliffs from which her priestess launched the feathered
pharmacos
(see
70.
7
;
89.
6
; etc.). Atthis (
actes thea
, ‘goddess of the rugged coast’) seems to have been a title of the Attic Triple-goddess; her sisters were named Cranaë (‘stony’) and Cranaechme (‘rocky point – Apollodorus: iii. 14. 5); and, since Procne and Philomela, when turned into birds, were jointly called Atthis (Martial: i. 54. 9 and v. 67. 2), she is likely to have been connected with the same cliff-top ritual. Atthis, as Athene, has several other bird epiphanies in Homer (see
97.
4
). The Mysteries of the Great Goddesses, which concerned resurrection, had been buried between yew and myrtle because these stood, respectively, for the last vowel and the last consonant of the tree alphabet (see
52.
3
), and were sacred to the Death-goddess.

THE BIRTH OF THESEUS

A
EGEUS
’
S
first wife was Melite, daughter of Hoples: and his second, Chalciope, daughter of Rhexenor; but neither bore him any children. Ascribing this, and the misfortunes of his sisters Procne and Philomela, to Aphrodite’s anger, he introduced her worship into Athens, and then went to consult the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle warned him not to untie the mouth of his bulging wine-skin until he reached the highest point of Athens, lest he die one day of grief, a response which Aegeus could not interpret.
¹

b
. On his way home he called at Corinth; and here Medea made him swear a solemn oath that he would shelter her from all enemies if she ever sought refuge at Athens, and undertook in return to procure him a son by magic. Next, he visited Troezen, where his old comrades Pittheus and Troezen, sons of Pelops, had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Aetius. Aetius was the successor of his father Anthas, son of Poseidon and Alcyone who, having founded the
cities Anthaea and Hyperea, had lately sailed off to found Halicarnassus in Caria. But Aetius seems to have enjoyed little power, because Pittheus, after Troezen’s death, united Anthaea and Hyperea into a single city, which he dedicated jointly to Athene and Poseidon, calling it Troezen.
²

c
. Pittheus was the most learned man of his age, and one of his moral apothegms, on friendship, is often quoted: ‘Blast not the hope that friendship hath conceived; but fill its measure high!’ He founded a sanctuary of Oracular Apollo at Troezen, which is the oldest surviving shrine in Greece; and also dedicated an altar to the Triple-goddess Themis. Three white marble thrones, now placed above his tomb behind the temple of Artemis the Saviour, used to serve him and two others as judgement seats. He also taught the art of oratory in the Muses’ sanctuary at Troezen – which was founded by Hephaestus’s son Ardalus, the reputed inventor of the flute – and a treatise on rhetoric by his hand is extant.
³

d
. Now, while Pittheus was still living at Pisa, Bellerophon had asked to marry his daughter Aethra, but had been sent away to Caria in disgrace before the marriage could be celebrated; though still contracted to Bellerophon, she had little hope of his return. Pittheus, therefore, grieving at her enforced virginity, and influenced by the spell which Medea was casting on all of them from afar, made Aegeus drunk, and sent him to bed with Aethra. Later in the same night, Poseidon also enjoyed her. For, in obedience to a dream sent by Athene, she left the drunken Aegeus, and waded across to the island of Sphaeria, which lies close to the mainland of Troezen, carrying libations to pour at the tomb of Sphaerus, Pelops’s charioteer. There, with Athene’s connivance, Poseidon overpowered her, and Aethra subsequently changed the name of the island from Sphaeria to Hiera, and founded on it a temple of Apaturian Athene, establishing a rule that every Troezenian girl should henceforth dedicate her girdle to the goddess before marriage. Poseidon, however, generously conceded to Aegeus the paternity of any child born to Aethra in the course of the next four months.
⁴

e
. Aegeus, when he awoke and found himself in Aethra’s bed, told her that if a son were born to them he must not be exposed or sent away, but secretly reared in Troezen. Then he sailed back to Athens, to celebrate the All-Athenian Festival, after hiding his sword and his sandals under a hollow rock, known as the Altar of Strong Zeus, which stood on the road from Troezen to Hermium. If, when the boy grew
up, he could move this rock and recover the tokens, he was to be sent with them to Athens. Meanwhile, Aethra must keep silence, lest Aegeus’s nephews, the fifty children of Pallas, plotted against her life. The sword was an heirloom from Cecrops.
⁵

f
. At a place now called Genethlium, on the way from the city to the harbour of Troezen, Aethra gave birth to a boy. Some say that she at once named him Theseus, because the tokens had been
deposited
for him; others, that he afterwards won this name at Athens. He was brought up in Troezen, where his guardian Pittheus discreetly spread the rumour that Poseidon had been his father; and one Connidas, to whom the Athenians still sacrifice a ram on the day before the Thesean Feasts, acted as his pedagogue. But some say that Theseus grew up at Marathon.
⁶

g
. One day Heracles, dining at Troezen with Pittheus, removed his lion-skin and threw it over a stool. When the palace children came in, they screamed and fled, all except seven-year-old Theseus, who ran to snatch an axe from the woodpile, and returned boldly, prepared to attack a real lion.
⁷

h
. At the age of sixteen years he visited Delphi, and offered his first manly hair-clippings to Apollo. He shaved, however, only the forepart of his head, like the Arabians and Mysians, or like the war-like Abantes of Euboea, who thereby deny their enemies any advantage in close combat. This kind of tonsure, and the precinct where he performed the ceremony, are both still called Thesean. He was now a strong, intelligent and prudent youth; and Aethra, leading him to the rock underneath which Aegeus had hidden the sword and sandals, told him the story of his birth. He had no difficulty in moving the rock, since called the ‘Rock of Theseus’, and recovered the tokens. Yet, despite Pittheus’s warnings and his mother’s entreaties, he would not visit Athens by the safe sea route, but insisted on travelling overland; impelled by a desire to emulate the feats of his cousin-german Heracles, whom he greatly admired.
⁸