The Greek Myths, Volume2

  l. But the more ancient legend is that the Olympic Games were founded by Heracles the Dactyl, and that it was he who brought the wild olive from the land of the Hyperboreans. Charms and amulets in honour of Heracles the Dactyl are much used by sorceresses, who have little regard for Heracles son of Alcmene. Zeus’s altar, which stands at an equal distance between the shrine of Pelops and the sanctuary of Hera, but in front of both, is said to have been built by this earlier Heracles, like the altar at Pergamus, from the ashes of the thigh-bones he sacrificed to Zeus. Once a year, on the nineteenth day of the Elean month Elaphius, soothsayers fetch the ashes from the Council Hall, and after moistening them with water from the river Alpheius – no other will serve – apply a fresh coat of this plaster to the altar.16

  m. This is not, however, to deny that Heracles the son of Alcmene refounded the Games: for an ancient walled gymnasium is shown at Elis, where athletes train. Tall plane-trees grow between the running-tracks, and the enclosure is called Xystus because Heracles exercised himself there by scraping up thistles. But Clymenus the Cretan, son of Cardis a descendant of the Dactyl, had celebrated the Festival, only fifty years after the Deucalionian Flood; and subsequently Endymion had done the same, and Pelops, and Amythaon son of Cretheus, also Pelias and Neleus, and some say Augeias.17

  n. The Olympic Festival is held at an interval alternately of forty-nine and fifty months, according to the calendar, and now lasts for five days: from the eleventh to the fifteenth of the month in which it happens to fall. Heralds proclaim an absolute armistice throughout Greece for the whole of this month, and no athlete is permitted to attend who has been guilty of any felony or offence against the gods. Originally, the Festival was managed by the Pisans; but, after the final return of the Heraclids, their Aetolian allies settled in Elis and were charged with the task.18

  o. On the northern side of the Hill of Cronus, a serpent called Sosipolis is housed in Eileithyia’s shrine; a white-veiled virgin-priestess feeds it with honey-cakes and water. This custom commemorates a miracle which drove away the Arcadians when they fought against the holy land of Elis: an unknown woman came to the Elean generals with a suckling child and gave it to them as their champion. They believed her, and when she sat the child down between the two armies, it changed into a serpent; the Arcadians fled, pursued by the Eleans, and suffered fearful losses. Eileithyia’s shrine marks the place where the serpent disappeared into the Hill of Cronus. On the summit, sacrifices are offered to Cronus at the spring equinox in the month of Elaphius, by priestesses known as ‘Queens’.19

  1. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 2; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 31–3.

  2. Pausanias: v. 1. 8 and v. 2. 2; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ix. 834 and xxiii. 1442.

  3. Homer: Iliad xi. 709; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Ibycus, quoted by Athenaeus: ii. 50; Porphyry: Questions Relevant to Homer’s Iliad 265; Plutarch: On Brotherly Love i.

  4. Pausanias: v. 1. 8 and v. 3.4; Homer: Iliad ii. 615–24; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 172.

  5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 31–3; Pausanias: v. 2. 1 and viii. 14. 6; Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5.

  6. Hyginus: Fabula 33; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 5 and 7. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 33; Pausanias: vii. 25. 5–6.

  7. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: viii. 14. 1–3.

  8. Apollodorus: ii. 7.2; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 15. 1; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 26 ff.

  9. Pausanias: v. 2. 2–3.

  10. Pausanias: viii. 25. 5 and v. 3. 1; Apollodorus: ii. 7.2; Homeric scholiast, quoted by Meursius: On Lycophron 40; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 666.

  11. Athenaeus: x. 412; Pausanias: v. 4. 1; 4. 4 and 5. 3–4.

  12. Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 43 ff.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 41; Hyginus: Fabula 273.

  13. Pindar: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: v. 13. 1 and 14. 2–3.

  14. Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 11 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 14; Pausanias: v. 15. 3.

  15. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 60 ff.; Pausanias: v. 8. 1; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 41.

  16. Pausanias: v. 7.4 and 13. 5; Diodorus Siculus: v. 64.

  17. Pausanias: vi. 23. 1 and v. 8. 1.

  18. Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes iii. 35 and v. 6; Demosthenes: Against Aristocrates pp. 631–2; Strabo: viii. 3. 33.

  19. Pausanias: vi. 20. 1–3.

  1. This myth apparently records an unsuccessful Achaean invasion of the Western Peloponnese followed, at the close of the thirteenth century B.C., by a second, successful, invasion which has, however, been confused with the Dorian invasion of the eleventh century B.C. – Heracles having also been a Dorian hero. The murder of Eurytion may be deduced from the same wedding-icon that showed the killing of Pholus. Heracles’s digging of the Aroanian channel is paralleled by similar feats in Elis (see 121. d), Boeotia (see 142. 3), and Thrace (see 130. b); and the honours paid to the three hundred and sixty Cleonensians probably refer to a calendar mystery, since three hundred and sixty are the number of days in the Egyptian year, exclusive of the five sacred to Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.

  2. The leprosy associated with Lepreus was vitiligo, a skin disease caused by foul food, which the Moon-goddess of the white poplar could cure (White Goddess, p. 432); true leprosy did not reach Europe until the first century B.C.

  3. Heracles’s title of Buphagus originally referred to the eating of an ox by his worshippers.

  4. Sosopolis must have been the ghost of Cronus after whom the hillock was called, and whose head was buried on its northern slopes, to protect the stadium which lay behind it, near the junction of the Cladeus and Alpheius. His British counterpart Bran similarly guarded Tower Hill, commanding London (see 146.2). The spring equinox, when fawns are dropped, occurs during the alder-month of the tree-calendar, also called Elaphius (‘of the fawn’), and peculiarly sacred to Cronus-Bran (White Goddess, pp.168–72 and 206–7). This suggests that, originally, the Elean New Year began at the spring solstice, as in parts of Italy, when the King of the old year, wearing horns like Actaeon (see 22. 1), was put to death by the wild women, or ‘Queens’; Heracles the Dactyl belongs to this cult (see 53. b). The Pelopians seem to have changed the calendar when they arrived with their solar chariot and porpoise, making the funeral games celebrate the midsummer murder and supersession of Zeus, the sacred king, by his tanist – as the king revenged himself on the tanist at midwinter. In Classical times, therefore, the Elean New Year was celebrated in the summer. The mention of Pelops suggests that the king was sacrificially eaten and the ashes of his bones mixed with water to plaster the Goddess’s altar. He was called the Green Zeus, or Achilles (see 164. 5), as well as Heracles.

  5. Wild olive, used in Greece to expel old-year demons and spites, who took the form of flies, was introduced from Libya, where the cult of the North Wind originated (see 48.1 and 133. 5), rather than the North. At Olympia, it will have been mistletoe (or Ioranthus), not wild-olive, which the boy lopped with a golden sickle (see 7. 1 and 50. 2); wild-olive figured in the Hyperborean tree-calendar (see 119. 3). The girls’ foot-race for the position of priestess to Hera was the earliest event; but when the single year of the king’s reign was prolonged to a Great Year of nominally a hundred months – to permit a more exact synchronization of solar and lunar time – the king reigned for one half of this period, his tanist for the other. Later, both ruled concurrently under the title of Moliones, and were no less closely united than the kings of Sparta (see 74. 1). It may be that a case of Siamese twins had occurred in Greece to reinforce the metaphor. But Augeias’s division of Elis, reported by Homer, shows that at a still later stage, the sacred king retained a third part of his kingdom when he was due to retire; as Proetus did at Argos. Amarynceus’s share was evidently gained by conquest.

  6. Molione is perhaps a title of the Elean Moon-goddess, the patroness of the Games, meaning ‘Queen of the Moly’; the moly being a herb which elsewhere defied moon-magic (see 170. 5). She was also known as Agam
ede (‘very cunning’); and this is the name of Augeias’s sorceress daughter, who ‘knew all the drugs that grow on earth’ (Homer: Iliad xi. 739–41). In Classical Greece, ‘Athene the Mother’ was a strange and indecent concept and had to be explained away (see 25. 2 and 141. 1), but the Elean tradition suggests that erotic orgies had been celebrated in her honour beside the river Bady.

  7. The mastery of Arion, it seems, formed part of the coronation rite at Arcadian Oncus (see 130. 1).

  139

  THE CAPTURE OF PYLUS

  HERACLES next sacked and burned the city of Pylus, because the Pylians had gone to the aid of Elis. He killed all Neleus’s sons, except the youngest, Nestor, who was away at Gerania, but Neleus himself escaped with his life.1

  b. Athene, champion of justice, fought for Heracles; and Pylus was defended by Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and Ares. While Athene engaged Ares, Heracles made for Poseidon, club against trident, and forced him to give way. Next, he ran to assist Athene, spear in hand, and his third lunge pierced Ares’s shield, dashing him headlong to the ground; then, with a powerful thrust at Ares’s thigh, he drove deep into the divine flesh. Ares fled in anguish to Olympus, where Apollo spread soothing unguents on the wound and healed it within the hour; so he renewed the fight, until one of Heracles’s arrows pierced his shoulder, and forced him off the field for good. Meanwhile, Heracles had also wounded Hera in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow.2

  c. Neleu’s eldest son, Periclymenus the Argonaut, was gifted by Poseidon with boundless strength and the power of assuming whatever shape he pleased, whether of bird, beast, or tree. On this occasion he turned himself first into a lion, then into a serpent and after a while, to escape scrutiny, perched on the yoke-boss of Heracles’s horses in the form of an ant, or fly, or bee.3 Heracles, nudged by Athene, recognized Periclymenus and reached for his club, whereupon Periclymenus became an eagle, and tried to peck out his eyes, but a sudden arrow from Heracles’s bow pierced him underneath his wing. He tumbled to earth, and the arrow was driven through his neck by the fall, killing him. Some say, however, that he flew away in safety; and that Heracles had attacked Poseidon on an earlier occasion, after the murder of Iphitus, when Neleus refused to purify him; and that the fight with Hades took place at the other Pylus, in Elis, when Heracles was challenged for carrying off Cerberus without permission.4

  d. Heracles gave the city of Messene to Nestor, in trust for his own descendants, remembering that Nestor had taken no part in robbing him of Geryon’s cattle; and soon came to love him more even than Hylas and Iolaus. It was Nestor who first swore an oath by Heracles.5

  e. The Eleans, though they themselves rebuilt Pylus, took advantage of the Pylians’ weakness to oppress them in petty ways. Neleus kept his patience until one day, having sent a chariot and a prize-winning team of four horses to contest for a tripod in the Olympic Games, he learned that Augeias had appropriated them and sent the charioteer home on foot. At this, he ordered Nestor to make a retaliatory raid on the Elean Plain; and Nestor managed to drive away fifty herds of cattle, fifty flocks of sheep, fifty droves of swine, fifty flocks of goats, and one hundred and fifty chestnut mares, many with foal, beating off the Eleans who opposed him and blooding his spear in this, his first fight. Neleus’s heralds then convoked all in Pylus who were owed a debt by the Eleans, and when he had divided the booty among the claimants, keeping back the lion’s share for Nestor, sacrificed lavishly to the gods. Three days later, the Eleans advanced on Pylus in full array – among them the two orphaned sons of the Moliones, who had inherited their title – and crossed the Plain from Thryoessa. But Athene came by night to warn and marshal the Pylians; and when battle had been joined, Nestor, who was on foot, struck down Amarynceus, the Elean commander and, seizing his chariot, rushed like a black tempest through the Elean ranks, capturing fifty other chariots and killing a hundred men. The Moliones would also have fallen to his busy spear, had not Poseidon wrapped them in an impenetrable mist and spirited them away. The Eleans, hotly pursued by Nestor’s army, fled as far as the Olenian Rock, where Athene called a halt.6

  f. A truce being then agreed upon, Amarynceus was buried at Buprasium, and awarded funeral games, in which numerous Pylians took part. The Moliones won the chariot race by crowding Nestor at the turn, but he is said to have won all the other events: the boxing and the wrestling match, the foot-race and the javelin-throw. Of these feats, it is only right to add, Nestor himself, in garrulous old age, was the principal witness; since by the grace of Apollo, who granted him the years of which his maternal uncles had been deprived, he lived for three centuries, and no contemporary survived to gainsay him.7

  1. Pausanias: ii. 2. 2; iii. 26. 6 and v. 3. 1; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 3, Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68.

  2. Pausanias: vi. 25. 3; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xi. 689; Hesiod: Shield of Heracles 359 ff.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 30–1; Homer: Iliad v. 392 ff.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 39.

  3. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 156–6; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 285; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad ii. 336 and xi. 286.

  4. Apollodorus: i. 9. 9; Hersiod, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 156; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 548 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 10; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes ix. 30 ff.

  5. Pausanias: ii. 18.6; Philostratus: Heroica 2.

  6. Pausanias: vi. 22. 3; Homer: Iliad xi. 671 and 761.

  7. Homer: Iliad xxiii. 630–42; Hyginus: Fabula 10.

  1. The capture of Pylus seems to be another incident in the thirteenth-century Achaean invasion of the Peloponnese. Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and Ares, the elder deities, are aiding Elis; the younger ones, Athene reborn from Zeus’s head, and Heracles as Zeus’s son, oppose them. Heracles’s defeat of Periclymenus, the shape-shifter, may mark the suppression of a New Year child-sacrifice; and Periclymenus’s power to take the shape of any tree refers, apparently, to the succession of thirteen months through which the interrex passed in his ritual ballet, each month having an emblematic tree, from wild-olive to myrtle (see 52. 3 and 169. 6). The wounding of Hades presents Heracles as the champion destined to cheat the grave and become immortal (see 145. h); moreover, according to Homer (Iliad v. 319 ff.), he wounded Hades ‘at Pylus, among the corpses’ – which could equally mean: ‘at the gate, among the dead’; the gate being that of the Underworld, perhaps in the Far North (see 170. 4). If so, Hades is a substitute for Cronus, whom Heracles defeated in the sepulchral island of Erytheia (see 132. d), and the encounter is a doublet of the Twelfth Labour, when he harrowed Hell. Heracles’s Pylian allies, significantly aided by Athene, are described by Homer (Iliad xi. 617 and 761) as Achaeans, though Neleus’s dynasty was, in fact, Aeolian.

  2. Heracles’s wounding of Hera in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow seems to allegorize the Dorian invasion of the Western Peloponnese when the three tribes, who called themselves Sons of Heracles, humbled the power of the Elean Goddess (see 146. 1).

  140

  THE SONS OF HIPPOCOÖN

  HERACLES decided to attack Sparta and punish the sons of Hippocoön. They had not only refused to purify him after the death of Iphitus, and fought against him under Neleus’s command, but also murdered his friend, Oeonus. It happened that Oeonus son of Licymnius, who had accompanied Heracles to Sparta, was strolling about the city when, just outside Hippocoön’s palace, a huge Molossian hound ran at him; in self-defence, he threw a stone which struck it on the muzzle. Out darted the sons of Hippocoön and beat him with cudgels. Heracles ran to Oeonus’s rescue from the other end of the street, but arrived too late. Oeonus was cudgelled to death, and Heracles, wounded in the hollow of his hand and in the thigh, fled to the shrine of Eleusinian Demeter, near Mount Taygetus; where Asclepius hid him and healedhis wounds.1

  b. Having mustered a small army, Heracles now marched to Tegea in Arcadia and there begged Cepheus the son of Aleus to join him with his twenty sons. At first, Cepheus refused, fearing for the safety of Tegea if he left home. But Heracles, whom Athene had given a lock of the Gorgon??
?s hair in a brazen jar, presented it to Cepheus’s daughter Aerope: should the city be attacked, he said, she was to display the lock thrice from its walls, turning her back to the enemy, who would immediately flee. As events proved, however, Aerope had no need of the charm.2

  c. Thus Cepheus joined the expedition against Sparta, in which, by ill fortune, he and seventeen of his sons fell. Some say that Iphicles was also killed, but this is likely to have been the Aetolian Argonaut of that name, not Amphitryon’s son. Herades’s army suffered few other casualties, whereas the Spartans lost Hippocoön and all his twelve sons, with numerous other men of high rank; and their city was taken by storm. Heracles then restored Tyndareus, leaving him the kingdom in trust for his own descendants.3

  d. Since Hera, inexplicably, had not thwarted him in this campaign, Heracles built her a shrine at Sparta, and sacrificed goats, having no other victims at his disposal. The Spartans are thus the only Greeks who surname Hera ‘Goat-eating’, and offer goats to her. Heracles also raised a temple to Athene of the Just Deserts; and, on the road to Therapne, a shrine to Cotylaean Asclepius which commemorates the wound in the hollow of his hand. A shrine at Tegea, called ‘The Common Hearth of the Aicadians’, is remarkable for its statue of Heracles with the wound in his thigh.4

  1. Apollodorus: ii. 7.3; Pausanias: iii. 15.3; iii. 19. 7; iii. 20. 5 and viii. 53. 3.

  2. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: viii. 47.4.

  3. Apollodorus: loc. cit. and iii. 10. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 33.

  4. Pausanias: iii. 15. 7, iii. 19.7 and viii. 53. 3.

  1. Here the Heracles myth is lost in saga; and pseudo-myth is introduced to explain such anomalies as Goat-eating Hera, Hollow-of-the-Hand Asclepius, Heracles of the Wounded Thigh, and Tegea’s long immunity from capture. But Hera’s wild women had once eaten Zagreus, Zeus, and Dionysus in wild-goat form; Asclepius’s statue probably held medicines in the hollow of the hand; the wound in Heracles’s thigh will have been made by a boar (see 157. e); and the Tegeans may have displayed a Gorgon’s head on their gates as a prophylactic charm. To assault a city thus protected was, as it were, to violate the maiden-goddess Athene: a superstition also fostered by the Athenians.