i. Sailing thence to Troy, Heracles rescued Hesione from a sea-monster; and continued his voyage to Thracian Aenus, where he was entertained by Poltys; and, just as he was putting to sea again, shot and killed on the Aenian beach Poltys’s insolent brother Sarpedon, a son of Poseidon. Next, he subjugated the Thracians who had settled in Thasos, and bestowed the island on the sons of Androgeus, whom he had carried off from Paros; and at Torone was challenged to a wrestling match by Polygonus and Telegonus, sons of Proteus, both of whom he killed.13
j. Returning to Mycenae at last, Heracles handed the girdle to Eurystheus, who gave it to Admete. As for the other spoil taken from the Amazons: he presented their rich robes to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and Hippolyte’s axe to Queen Omphale, who included it among the sacred regalia of the Lydian kings. Eventually it was taken to a Carian temple of Labradian Zeus, and placed in the hand of his divine image.14
k. Amazons are still to be found in Albania, near Colchis, having been driven there from Themiscyra at the same time as their neighbours, the Gargarensians. When they reached the safety of the Albanian mountains, the two peoples separated: the Amazons settling at the foot of the Caucasian Mountains, around the river Mermodas, and the Gargarensians immediately to the north. On an appointed day every spring, parties of young Amazons and young Gargarensians meet at the summit of the mountain which separates their territories and, after performing a joint sacrifice, spend two months together, enjoying promiscuous intercourse under the cover of night. As soon as an Amazon finds herself pregnant, she returns home. Whatever girl-children are born become Amazons, and the boys are sent to the Gargarensians who, because they have no means of ascertaining their paternity, distribute them by lot among their huts.15 In recent times, the Amazon queen Minythyia set out from her Albanian court to meet Alexander the Great in tiger-haunted Hyrcania; and there enjoyed his company for thirteen days, hoping to have offspring by him – but died childless soon afterwards.16
l. These Amazons of the Black Sea must be distinguished from Dionysus’s Libyan allies who once inhabited Hespera, an island in Lake Tritonis which was so rich in fruit-bearing trees, sheep and goats, that they found no need to grow corn. After capturing all the cities in the island, except holy Mene, the home of the Ethiopian fish-eaters (who mine emeralds, rubies, topazes, and sard) they defeated the neighbouring Libyans and nomads, and founded the great city of Chersonesus, so called because it was built on a peninsula.17 From this base they attacked the Atlantians, the most civilized nation west of the Nile, whose capital is on the Atlantic island of Cerne. Myrine, the Amazonian queen, raised a force of thirty thousand cavalry and three thousand infantry. All of them carried bows with which, when retreating, they used to shoot accurately at their pursuers, and were armoured with the skins of the almost unbelievably large Libyan serpents.
m. Invading the land of the Atlantians, Myrine defeated them decisively and, crossing over to Cerne, captured the city; she then put every man to the sword, enslaved the women and children, and razed the city walls. When the remaining Atlantians agreed to surrender, she treated them fairly, made friends with them and, in compensation for their loss of Cerne, built the new city of Myrine, where she settled the captives and all others desirous of living there. Since the Atlantians now offered to pay her divine honours, Myrine protected them against the neighbouring tribe of Gorgons, of whom she killed a great many in a pitched battle, besides taking no less than three thousand prisoners.18 That night, however, while the Amazons were holding a victory banquet, the prisoners stole their swords and, at a signal, the main body of Gorgons who had rallied and hidden in an oak-wood, poured down from all sides to massacre Myrine’s followers.
n. Myrine contrived to escape – her dead lie buried under three huge mounds, still called the Mounds of the Amazons – and, after traversing most ofLibya, entered Egypt with a new army, befriended King Horus, the son of Isis, and passed on to the invasion of Arabia. Some hold that it was these Libyan Amazons, not those from the Black Sea, who conquered Asia Minor; and that Myrine, after selecting the most suitable sites in her new empire, founded a number of coastal cities, including Myrine, Cyme, Pitane, Priene, and others farther inland. She also subdued several of the Aegean Islands, notably Lesbos, where she built the city of Mitylene, named after a sister who had shared in the campaign. While Myrine was still engaged in conquering the islands, a storm overtook her fleet; but the Mother of the Gods bore every ship safely to Samothrace, then uninhabited, which Myrine consecrated to her, founding altars and offering splendid sacrifices.
o. Myrine then crossed over to the Thracian mainland, where King Mopsus and his ally, the Scythian Sipylus, worsted her in fair fight, and she was killed. The Amazon army never recovered from this setback: defeated by the Thracians in frequent engagements, its remnants finally retired to Libya.19
1. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iii. 64; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 9; Justin: ii. 4; Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 38 and Fragment 172; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26.
2. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 990–2; Cicero: In Defence of Flaccus 15; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 189; Hyginus: Fabula 30; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 1033.
3. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 659; Plutarch: On Rivers 14; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 976–1000.
4. Arrian: Fragment 58; Diodorus Siculus: ii. 451; Herodotus: iv. 100; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 987–9; Lysias, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1332.
5. Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 38; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 494; Strabo: xi. 5. 1.
6. Diodorus Siculus: ii. 45–6; Strabo: xi. 5.4; Justin: ii.4; Hecataeus: Fragment 352.
7. Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 237 ff.; Hyginus: Fabulae 223 and 225; Pliny: Natural History v. 31; Homer: Iliad iii. 189; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 69; Justin: ii. 4.
8. Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Herodotus: vii. 72; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 754.
9. Strabo: xii. 3.4; Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Pausanias: v. 26.6; Justin: xvi. 3.
10. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 16; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Plutarch: Greek Questions 45.
11. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 966–9, Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1329; Ibycus, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: loc. cit.
12. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 776 ff.
13. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 9.
14. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1327; Euripides: Heracles 418 and Ion 1145; Plutarch: Greek Questions 45.
15. Strabo: xi. 5. 1–2 and 4; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 659.
16. Justin: ii. 4; Cleitarchus, quoted by Strabo: xi. 5.4.
17. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 52–3.
18. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 54.
19. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 55.
1. If Admete was the name of the princess for whose sake Heracles performed all these marriage tasks, the removal of her girdle in the wedding chamber must have marked the end of his Labours. But first Admete will have struggled with him, as Hippolyte did, and as Penthesileia struggled with Achilles (see 164. a and 2), or Thetis with Peleus (see 81. k) – whose introduction into the story is thus explained. In that case, she will have gone through her usual transformations, which suggests that the cuttlefish-like Hydra was Admete – the gold-guarding serpent which he overcame being Ladon (see 133. a) – and that she may also have turned into a crab (see 124. e), a hind (see 125. c), a wild mare (see 16. f), and a cloud (see 126. b) before he contrived to win her maidenhead.
2. A tradition of armed priestesses still lingered at Ephesus and other cities in Asia Minor; but the Greek mythographers, having forgotten the former existence of similar colleges at Athens and other cities in Greece itself, sent Heracles in search of Hippolyte’s girdle to the Black Sea, where matriarchal tribes were still active (see 100.1). A three-tribe system is the general rule in matriarchal society. That the girdle belonged to a daughter of Briareus (‘strong’), one of the Hundred-handed Ones, points to an early setting of the marriage-test story in Northern Greece.
3. Admete
is another name for Athene, who must have appeared in the icons standing by, under arms, watching Heracles’s feats and helping him when in difficulties. Athene was Neith, the Love-and-Battle goddess of the Libyans (see 8. 1); her counterpart in Asia Minor was the great Moon-goddess Marian, Myrine, Ay-Mari, Mariamne or Marienna, who gave her name to Mariandyne – ‘Marian’s Dune’ – and to Myrine, the city of the gynocratic Lemnians (see 149. 1); and whom the Trojans worshipped as ‘Leaping Myrine’ (Homer: Iliad ii. 814). ‘Smyrna’ is ‘Myrine’ again, preceded by the definite article. Marienna, the Sumerian form, means ‘High fruitful Mother’, and the Ephesian Artemis was a fertility-goddess.
4. Myrine is said to have been caught in a storm and saved by the Mother of the Gods – in whose honour she founded altars at Samothrace – because she was herself the Mother of the Gods, and her rites saved sailors from shipwreck (see 149. 2). Much the same mother-goddess was anciently worshipped in Thrace, the region of the river Tanais (Don), Armenia, and throughout Asia Minor and Syria. Theseus’s expedition to Amazonia, a myth modelled on that of Heracles, confuses the issue, and has tempted mythographers to invent the fictitious invasion of Athens by Amazons and Scythians combined (see 100. c).
5. That the Amazons set up an image under an Ephesian beech is a mistake made by Callimachus who, being an Egyptian, was unaware that beeches did not grow so far south; it must have been a date-palm, symbol of fertility (see 14. 2), and a reminder of the goddess’s Libyan origin, since her statue was hung with large golden dates, generally mistaken for breasts. Mopsus’s defeat of the Amazons is the story of the Hittites’ defeat by the Moschians about 1200 B.C.; the Hittites had originally been wholly patriarchal, but under the influence of the matriarchal societies of Asia Minor and Babylonia had accepted goddess-worship. At Hattusas, their capital, a sculptural relief of a battle-goddess has recently been discovered by Garstang; who regards the Ephesian Artemis cult as of Hittite origin. The victories over the Amazons secured by Heracles, Theseus, Dionysus, Mopsus, and others, record, in fact, setbacks to the matriarchal system in Greece, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Syria.
6. Stephanus of Byzantium (sub Paros) records the tradition that Paros was a Cretan colony. Heracles’s expedition there refers to a Hellenic occupation of the island. His bestowal of Thasos on the sons of Androgeus is a reference to its capture by a force of Parians mentioned in Thucydides iv. 104: this took place towards the close of the eighth century B.C. Euboeans colonized Torone at about the same time, representing Torone (‘shrill queen’) as a daughter of Proteus (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Torone). Hippolyte’s double axe (labrys) was not, however, placed in Labradean Zeus’s hand instead of a thunderbolt; it was itself a thunderbolt, and Zeus carried it by permission of the Cretan goddess who ruled in Lydia.
7. The Gargarensians are the Gogarenians, whom Ezekiel calls Gog (Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix).
8. In his account of Myrine, Diodorus Siculus quotes early Libyan traditions which had already acquired a fairy-tale lustre; it is established, however, that in the third millennium B.C. neolithic emigrants went out from Libya in all directions, probably expelled by an inundation of their fields (see 39. 3–6). The Nile Delta was largely populated by Libyans.
9. According to Apollonius Rhodius (i. 1126–9), Titias was ‘one of the only three Idaean Dactyls (“fingers”) who dispense doom’. He names another Dactyl ‘Cyllenius’. I have shown (White Goddess p. 281) that in finger-magic Titias, the Dactyl, represented the middle finger; that Cyllenius, alias Heracles, was the thumb; and that Dascylus, the third Dactyl, was the index-finger, as his name implies (see 53.1). These three raised, while the fourth and little finger are turned down, made the ‘Phrygian blessing’. Originally given in Myrine’s name, it is now used by Catholic priests in that of the Christian Trinity.
10. Tityus, whom Apollo killed (see 21. d), may be a doublet of Titias. Myrine’s capture of the island of Cerne seems a late and unauthorized addition to the story. Cerne has been identified with Fedallah near Fez; or with Santa Cruz near Cape Ghir, or (most plausibly) with Arguin, a little south of Cabo Blanco. It was discovered and colonized by the Carthaginian Hanno, who described it as lying as far from the Pillars of Heracles as these lay from Carthage, and it became the great emporium of West African trade.
11. So much for the mythical elements of the Ninth Labour. Yet Heracles’s expedition to the Thermodon and his wars in Mysia and Phrygia must not be dismissed as wholly unhistorical. Like the voyage of the Argo (see 148. 10), they record Greek trading ventures in the Black Sea perhaps as far back as the middle of the second millennium B.C.; and the intrusion of Minyans from Iolcus, Aeacans from Aegina, and Argives in these waters suggests that though Helen may have been beautiful, and may have eloped with Paris of Troy, it was not her face that launched a thousand ships, but mercantile interest. Achilles the son of Peleus, Ajax the son of Telamon, and Diomedes the Argive were among the Greek allies of Agamemnon who insisted that Priam should allow them the free passage through the Hellespont enjoyed by their fathers – unless he wished his city to be sacked as Laomedon’s had been, and for the same reason (see 137. 1). Hence the dubious Athenian claims to have been represented in Heracles’s expedition by Theseus, in the voyage of the Argo by Phalerus, and at Troy by Menestheus, Demophon, and Acamas. These were intended to justify their eventual control of Black Sea trade which the destruction of Troy and the decline of Rhodes had allowed them to seize (see 159. 2; 160. 2–3 and 162. 3).
132
THE TENTH LABOUR: THE CATTLE OF GERYON
HERACLES’S Tenth Labour was to fetch the famous cattle of Geryon from Erytheia, an island near the Ocean stream, without either demand or payment. Geryon, a son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoë a daughter of the Titan Oceanus, was the King of Tartessus in Spain, and reputedly the strongest man alive.1 He had been born with three heads, six hands, and three bodies joined together at the waist. Geryon’s shambling red cattle, beasts of marvellous beauty, were guarded by the herdsman Eurytion, son of Ares, and by the two-headed watchdog Orthrus – formerly Atlas’s property – born of Typhon and Echidne.2
b. During his passage through Europe, Heracles destroyed many wild beasts and, when at last he reached Tartessus, erected a pair of pillars facing each other across the straits, one in Europe, one in Africa. Some hold that the two continents were formerly joined together, and that he cut a channel between them, or thrust the cliffs apart; others say that, on the contrary, he narrowed the existing straits to discourage the entry of whales and other sea-monsters.3
c. Helius beamed down upon Heracles who, finding it impossible to work in such heat, strung his bow and let fly an arrow at the god. ‘Enough of that!’ cried Helius angrily. Heracles apologized for his ill-temper, and unstrung his bow at once. Not to be outdone in courtesy, Helius lent Heracles his golden goblet, shaped like a water-lily, in which he sailed to Erytheia; but the Titan Oceanus, to try him, made the goblet pitch violently upon the waves. Heracles again drew his bow, which frightened Oceanus into calming the sea. Another account is that Heracles sailed to Erytheia in a brazen urn, using his lion pelt as a sail.4
d. On his arrival, he ascended Mount Abas. The dog Orthrus rushed at him, barking, but Heracles’s club struck him lifeless; and Eurytion, Geryon’s herdsman, hurrying to Orthrus’ said, died in the same manner. Heracles then proceeded to drive away the cattle. Menoetes, who was pasturing the cattle of Hades near by – but Heracles had left these untouched – took the news to Geryon. Challenged to battle, Heracles ran to Geryon’s flank and shot him sideways through all three bodies with a single arrow; but some say that he stood his ground and let loose a flight of three arrows. As Hera hastened to Geryon’s assistance, Heracles wounded her with an arrow in the right breast, and she fled. Thus he won the cattle, without either demand or payment, and embarked in the golden goblet, which he then sailed across to Tartessus and gratefully returned to Helius. From Geryon’s blood sprang a tree which, at the time of the Pleiades’ rising, bears stoneless cherry-like fruit
. Geryon did not, however, die without issue: his daughter Erytheia became by Hermes the mother of Norax, who led a colony to Sardinia, even before the time of Hyllus. and there founded Nora, the oldest city in the island.5
e. The whereabouts of Erytheia, also called Erythrea, or Erythria, is disputed. Though some describe it as an island beyond the Ocean stream, others place it off the coast of Lusitania.6 Still others identify it with the island of Leon, or with an islet hard by, on which the earliest city of Gades was built, and where the pasture is so rich that the milk yields no whey but only curds, and the cattle must be cupped every fifty days, lest they choke for excess of blood. This islet, sacred to Hera, is called either Erytheia, or Aphrodisias. Leon, the island on which the present city of Gades stands, used to be called Cotinusa, from its olives, but the Phoenicians renamed it Gadira, or ‘Fenced City’. On the western cape stands a temple of Cronus, and the city of Gades; on the eastern, a temple of Heracles, remarkable for a spring which ebbs at flood tide, and flows at ebb tide; and Geryon lies buried in the city, equally famed for a secret tree that takes diverse forms.7
f. According to another account, however, Geryon’s cattle were not pastured in any island, but on the mountain slopes of the farther part of Spain, confronting the Ocean; and ‘Geryon’ was a title of the renowned King Chrysaor, who ruled over the whole land, and whose three strong and courageous sons helped him in the defence of his kingdom, each leading an army recruited from warlike races. To combat these, Heracles assembled a large expedition in Crete, the birthplace of his father Zeus. Before setting out, he was splendidly honoured by the Cretans and, in return, rid their island of bears, wolves, serpents, and other noxious creatures, from which it is still immune. First, he sailed to Libya, where he killed Antaeus, slaughtered the wild beasts that infested the desert, and gave the country unsurpassed fertility. Next, he visited Egypt, where he killed Busiris; then he marched westward, across North Africa, annihilating the Gorgons and the Libyan Amazons as he went, founded the city of Hecatompylus, now Capsa, in southern Numidia, and reached the Ocean near Gades. There he set up pillars on either side of the straits and, ferrying his army across to Spain, found that the sons of Chrysaor, with their three armies, were encamped at some distance from one another. He conquered and killed them, each in turn, and finally drove off Geryon’s famous herds, leaving the government of Spain to the most worthy of the surviving inhabitants.8