The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (33 page)

11
. The scarabaeus beetle was an emblem of immortality in Lower Egypt because it survived the flooding of the Nile – the Pharoah as Osiris entered his sun-boat in the form of a scarabaeus – and its sacral use spread to Palestine, the Aegean, Etruria, and the Balearic Islands. Antoninus Liberalis also mentions the myth of Cerambus, or Terambus, quoting Nicander.

39

ATLAS AND PROMETHEUS

P
ROMETHEUS
, the creator of mankind, whom some include among the seven Titans, was the son either of the Titan Eurymedon, or of Iapetus by the nymph Clymene; and his brothers were Epimetheus, Atlas, and Menoetius.
¹

b
. Gigantic Atlas, eldest of the brothers, knew all the depths of the sea; he ruled over a kingdom with a precipitous coastline, larger than Africa and Asia put together. This land of Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles, and a chain of fruit-bearing islands separated it from a farther continent, unconnected with ours. Atlas’s people canalized and cultivated an enormous central plain, fed by water from the hills which ringed it completely, except for a seaward gap. They also built palaces, baths, race-courses, great harbour works, and temples; and carried war not only westwards as far as the other continent, but eastward as far as Egypt and Italy. The Egyptians say that Atlas was the son of Poseidon, whose five pairs of male twins all swore allegiance to their brother by the blood of a bull sacrificed at the pillar-top; and that at first they were extremely virtuous, bearing with fortitude the burden of their great wealth in gold and silver. But one day greed and cruelty overcame them and, with Zeus’s permission, the Athenians defeated them single-handed and destroyed their power. At the same time, the gods sent a deluge which, in one day and one night, overwhelmed all Atlantis, so that the harbour works and temples were buried beneath a waste of mud and the sea became unnavigable.
²

c
. Atlas and Menoetius, who escaped, then joined Cronus and the
Titans in their unsuccessful war against the Olympian gods. Zeus killed Menoetius with a thunderbolt and sent him down to Tartarus, but spared Atlas, whom he condemned to support Heaven on his shoulders for all eternity.
³

d
. Atlas was the father of the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the Hesperides; and has held up the Heavens ever since, except on one occasion, when Heracles temporarily relieved him of the task. Some say that Perseus petrified Atlas into Mount Atlas by showing him the Gorgon’s head; but they forget that Perseus was reputedly a distant ancestor of Heracles.
⁴

e
. Prometheus, being wiser than Atlas, foresaw the issue of the rebellion against Cronus, and therefore preferred to fight on Zeus’s side, persuading Epimetheus to do the same. He was, indeed, the wisest of his race, and Athene, at whose birth from Zeus’s head he had assisted, taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind. But Zeus, who had decided to extirpate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents.
⁵

f
. One day, when a dispute took place at Sicyon, as to which portions of a sacrificial bull should be offered to the gods, and which should be reserved for men, Prometheus was invited to act as arbiter. He therefore flayed and jointed a bull, and sewed its hide to form two open-mouthed bags, filling these with what he had cut up. One bag contained all the flesh, but this he concealed beneath the stomach, which is the least tempting part of any animal; and the other contained the bones, hidden beneath a rich layer of fat. When he offered Zeus the choice of either, Zeus, easily deceived, chose the bag containing the bones and fat (which are still the divine portion); but punished Prometheus, who was laughing at him behind his back, by withholding fire from mankind. ‘Let them eat their flesh raw!’ he cried.
⁶

g
. Prometheus at once went to Athene, with a plea for a backstairs admittance to Olympus, and this she granted. On his arrival, he lighted a torch at the fiery chariot of the Sun and presently broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoal, which he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel-stalk. Then, extinguishing his torch, he stole away undiscovered, and gave fire to mankind.
⁷

h
. Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses
of Olympus to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever created, Zeus sent as a gift to Epimetheus, under Hermes’s escort. But Epimetheus, having been warned by his brother to accept no gift from Zeus, respectfully excused himself. Now even angrier than before, Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture tore at his liver all day, year in, year out; and there was no end to the pain, because every night (during which Prometheus was exposed to cruel frost and cold) his liver grew whole again.

i
. But Zeus, loth to confess that he had been vindictive, excused his savagery by circulating a falsehood: Athene, he said, had invited Prometheus to Olympus for a secret love affair.

j
. Epimetheus, alarmed by his brother’s fate, hastened to marry Pandora, whom Zeus had made as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful – the first of a long line of such women. Presently she opened a jar, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion. Out these flew in a cloud, stung Epimetheus and Pandora in every part of their bodies, and then attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the jar, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide.
⁸

1
. Eustathius:
On Homer
p. 987; Hesiod:
Theogony
507 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 2. 3.

2
. Plato:
Timaeus
6 and
Critias
9–10.

3
. Homer:
Odyssey
i. 52–4; Hesiod:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
Fabula
150.

4
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 27; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 11; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iv. 630.

5
. Aeschylus:
Prometheus Bound
218, 252, 445 ff., 478 ff., and 228–36.

6
. Hesiod:
Theogony
521–64; Lucian:
Dialogues of the Gods
1 and
Prometheus on Caucasus
3.

7
. Servius on Virgil’s
Eclogues
vi. 42.

8
. Hesiod:
Works and Days
42–105 and
Theogony
565–619; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius ii. 1249.

1
. Later mythographers understood Atlas as a simple personification of Mount Atlas, in North-western Africa, whose peak seemed to hold up the Heavens; but, for Homer, the columns on which he supported the firmament stood far out in the Atlantic Ocean, afterwards named in his honour by Herodotus. He began, perhaps, as the Titan of the Second Day
of the Week, who separated the waters of the firmament from the waters of the earth. Most rain comes to Greece from the Atlantic, especially at the heliacal rising of Atlas’s star-daughters, the Hyades; which partly explains why his home was in the west. Heracles took the Heavens from his shoulders in two senses (see 133.
3–4
and 123.
4
).

2
. The Egyptian legend of Atlantis – also current in folk-tale along the Atlantic seaboard from Gibraltar to the Hebrides, and among the Yorubas in West Africa – is not to be dismissed as pure fancy, and seems to date from the third millennium
B
.
C
. But Plato’s version, which he claims that Solon learned from his friends the Libyan priests of Saïs in the Delta, has apparently been grafted on a later tradition: how the Minoan Cretans, who had extended their influence to Egypt and Italy, were defeated by a Hellenic confederacy with Athens at its head (see
98.
1
); and how, perhaps as the result of a submarine earthquake, the enormous harbour works built by the Keftiu (‘sea-people’, meaning the Cretans and their allies) on the island of Pharos (see
27.
7
and 169.
6
), subsided under several fathoms of water – where they have lately been rediscovered by divers. These works consisted of an outer and an inner basin, together covering some two hundred and fifty acres (Gaston Jondet:
Les Ports submergés de l’ancienne île de Pharos
, 1916). Such an identification of Atlantis with Pharos would account for Atlas’s being sometimes described as a son of Iapetus – the Japhet of
Genesis
, whom the Hebrews called Noah’s son and made the ancestor of the Sea-people’s confederacy – and sometimes as a son of Poseidon, patron of Greek seafarers. Noah is Deucalion (see
38.
c
) and, though in Greek myth Iapetus appears as Deucalion’s grandfather, this need mean no more than that he was the eponymous ancestor of the Canaanite tribe which brought the Mesopotamian Flood legend, rather than the Atlantian, to Greece. Several details in Plato’s account, such as the pillar-sacrifice of bulls and the hot-and-cold water systems in Atlas’s palace, make it certain that the Cretans are being described, and no other nation. Like Atlas, the Cretans ‘knew all the depths of the sea’. According to Diodorus (v. 3), when most of the inhabitants of Greece were destroyed by the great flood, the Athenians forgot that they had founded Saïs in Egypt. This seems to be a muddled way of saying that after the submergence of the Pharos harbour-works the Athenians forgot their religious ties with the city of Saïs, where the same Libyan goddess Neith, or Athene, or Tanit, was worshipped.

3
. Plato’s story is confused by his account of the vast numbers of elephants in Atlantis, which may refer to the heavy import of ivory into Greece by way of Pharos, but has perhaps been borrowed from the older legend. The whereabouts of the folk-tale Atlantis has been the subject of numerous theories, though Plato’s influence has naturally concentrated popular attention on the Atlantic Ocean. Until recently, the Atlantic
Ridge (stretching from Iceland to the Azores and then bending south-eastward to Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha) was supposed to be its remains; but oceanographic surveys show that apart from these peaks the entire ridge has been under water for at least sixty million years. Only one large inhabited island in the Atlantic is known to have disappeared: the plateau now called the Dogger Bank. But the bones and implements hauled up in cod-nets show that this disaster occurred in paleolithic times; and it is far less likely that the news of its disappearance reached Europe from survivors who drifted across the intervening waste of waters than that the memory of a different catastrophe was brought to the Atlantic seaboard by the highly civilized neolithic immigrants from Libya, usually known as the passage-grave builders.

4
. These were farmers and arrived in Great Britain towards the close of the third millennium
B
.
C
.; but no explanation has been offered for their mass movement westwards by way of Tunis and Morocco to Southern Spain and then northward to Portugal and beyond. According to the Welsh Atlantis legend of the lost Cantrevs of Dyfed (impossibly located in Cardigan Bay), a heavy sea broke down the sea-walls and destroyed sixteen cities. The Irish Hy Brasil; the Breton City of Ys; the Cornish Land of Lyonesse (impossibly located between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles); the French Île Verte; the Portuguese Ilha Verde: all are variants of this legend. But if what the Egyptian priests really told Solon was that the disaster took place in the Far West, and that the survivors moved ‘beyond the Pillars of Heracles’, Atlantis can be easily identified.