4. Diodprus Siculus: v. 55; Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 1387.
5. Scholiast on Euripides: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 25; Euripides: Medea 1271; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogue viii. 47.
6. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Homer: Odyssey i. 260, with scholiast.
1. The number of Medea’s children recalls that of the Titans and Titanesses (see 1. 3 and 43. 4), but the fourteen boys and girls who were annually confined in Hera’s Temple may have stood for the odd and even days of the first half of the sacred month.
2. Glauce’s death was perhaps deduced from an icon showing the annual holocaust in the Temple of Hera, like that described by Lucian at Hierapolis (On the Syrian Goddess 49). But Glauce will have been the diademed priestess who directed the conflagration, not its victim; and the well, her ritual bath. Lucian explains that the Syrian goddess was, on the whole, Hera; though she also had some attributes of Athene and the other goddesses (ibid. 32). Here Eriopis (‘large-eyed’) points to cow-eyed Hera, and Glauce (‘owl’) to owl-eyed Athene. In Lucian’s time, domestic animals were hung from the branches of trees piled in the temple court of Hierapolis, and burned alive; but the death of Medea’s fourteen children, and the expiation made for them suggest that human victims were originally offered. Melicertes, the Cretan god who presided over the Isthmian Games at Corinth (see 70. h and 96. 6), was Melkarth, ‘protector of the city’, the Phoenician Heracles, in whose name children were certainly burned alive at Jerusalem (Leviticus xvii. 21 and xx. 2; 1 Kings xi. 7; 2 Kings xxiii. 10; Jeremiah xxxii. 35). Fire, being a sacred element, immortalized the victims, as it did Heracles himself when he ascended his pyre on Mount Oeta, lay down and was consumed (see 145. f).
3. Whether Medea, Jason, or the Corinthians sacrificed the children became an important question only later, when Medea had ceased to be identified with Ino, Melicertes’s mother, and human sacrifice denoted barbarism. Since any drama which won a prize at the Athenian festival in honour of Dionysus at once acquired religious authority, it is very probable that the Corinthians recompensed Euripides well for his generous manipulation of the now discreditable myth.
4. Zeus’s love for Medea, like Hera’s for Jason (Homer: Odyssey xii. 72; Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 66), suggests that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ were titles of the Corinthian king and queen (see 43. 2 and 68. 1. Corinthus, though the son of Marathon, was also styled ‘son of Zeus’, and Marathon’s father Epopeus (‘he who sees all’) had the same wife as Zeus (Pausanias: ii. 1. 1; Asius: Fragment 1).
157
MEDEA IN EXILE
MEDEA fled first to Heracles at Thebes, where he had promised to shelter her should Jason ever prove unfaithful, and cured him of the madness that had made him kill his children; nevertheless, the Thebans would not permit her to take up residence among them because Creon, whom she had murdered, was their King. So she went to Athens, and King Aegeus was glad to marry her. Next, banished from Athens for her attempted poisoning of Theseus, she sailed to Italy and taught the Marrubians the art of snake-charming; they still worship her as the goddess Angitia.1 After a brief visit to Thessaly, where she unsuccessfully competed with Thetis in a beauty contest judged by Idomeneus the Cretan, she married an Asian king whose name has not survived but who is said to have been Medeius’s true father.
b. Hearing, finally, that Aeëtes’s Colchian throne had been usurped by her uncle Perses, Medea went to Colchis with Medeius, who killed Perses, set Aeëtes on his throne again, and enlarged the kingdom of Colchis to include Media. Some pretend that she was by that time reconciled to Jason, and took him with her to Colchis; but the history of Medea has, of course, been embellished and distorted by the extravagant fancies of many tragic dramatists.2 The truth is that Jason, having forfeited the favour of the gods, whose names he had taken in vain when he broke faith with Medea, wandered homeless from city to city, hated of men. In old age he came once more to Corinth, and sat down in the shadow of the Argo, remembering his past glories, and grieving for the disasters that had overwhelmed him. He was about to hang himself from the prow, when it suddenly toppled forward and killed him. Poseidon then placed the image of the Argo’s stern, which was innocent of homicide, among the stars.3
c. Medea never died, but became an immortal and reigned in the Elysian Fields where some say that she, rather than Helen, married Achilles.4
d. As for Athamas, whose failure to sacrifice Phrixus had been the cause of the Argonauts’ expedition, he was on the point of being himself sacrificed at Orchomenus, as the sin-offering demanded by the Oracle of Laphystian Zeus, when his grandson Cytisorus returned from Aeaea and rescued him. This vexed Zeus, who decreed that, henceforth, the eldest son of the Athamantids must avoid the Council Hall in perpetuity, on pain of death; a decree which has been observed ever since.5
e. The homecomings of the Argonauts yield many tales; but that of Great Ancaeus, the helmsman, is the most instructive. Having survived so many hardships and perils, he returned to his palace at Tegea, where a seer had once warned him that he would never taste the wine of a vineyard which he had planted some years previously. On the day of his arrival, Ancaeus was informed that his steward had harvested the first grapes, and that the wine awaited him. He therefore filled a wine-cup, set it to his lips and, calling the seer, reproached him for prophesying falsely. The seer answered: ‘Sire, there is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip!’, and at that instant Ancaeus’s servants ran up, shouting: ‘My lord, a wild boar! It is ravaging your vineyard!’ He set down the untasted cup, grasped his boar-spear, and hurried out; but the boar lay concealed behind a bush and, charging, killed him.6
1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Apollodorus: i. 9. 28; Plutarch: Theseus 12; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 750.
2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: v.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55–66.2; Hyginus: Fabula 26; Justin: xlii. 2; Tacitus: Annals vi. 34.
3. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55; Scholiast on the Hypothesis of Euripides’s Medea; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy xxxvi.
4. Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 10; and on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 814.
5. Herodotus: vii. 197.
6. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 185.
1. An Attic cult of Demeter as Earth-goddess has given rise to the story of Medea’s stay at Athens (see 97. b). Similar cults account for her visits to Thebes, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; but the Marrubians may have emigrated to Italy from Libya, where the Psyllians were adept in the art of snake-charming (Pliny: Natural History vii. 2). Medea’s reign in the Elysian fields is understandable: as the goddess who presided over the cauldron of regeneration, she could offer heroes the chance of another life on earth (see 31. c). Helen (‘moon’) will have been one of her titles (see 159.1).
2. In the heroic age, it seems, the king of Orchomenus, when his reign ended, was led for sacrifice to the top of Mount Laphystium. This king was also a priest of Laphystian Zeus, an office hereditary in the matrilinear Minyan clan; and at the time of the Persian Wars, according to Herodotus, the clan chief was still expected to attend the Council Hall when summoned for sacrifice. No one, however, forced him to obey this summons, and he seems from Herodotus’s account to have been represented by a surrogate except on occasions of national disaster, such as a plague or drought, when he would feel obliged to attend in person.
The deaths of Jason and Ancaeus are moral tales, emphasizing the dangers of excessive fame, prosperity, or pride. But Ancaeus dies royally in his own city, from the gash of a boar’s tusk (see 18. 7); whereas Jason, like Bellerophon (see 75. f) and Oedipus (see 105. k), wanders from city to city, hated of men, and is eventually killed by accident. In the Isthmus where Jason had reigned, the custom was for the royal pharmacos to be thrown over the cliff, but rescued from the sea by a waiting boat and banished to the life of an anonymous beggar, taking his ill-luck with him (see 89. 6 and 98. 7).
3. Sir Isaac Newton was the first, so far as I know, to point out the connexion between the Zodiac and the Argo’s voyage; and the legend may well have been influenced
at Alexandria by the Zodiacal Signs: the Ram of Phrixus, the Bulls of Aeëtes, the Dioscuri as the Heavenly Twins, Rhea’s Lion, the Scales of Alcinous, the Water-carriers of Aegina, Heracles as Bowman, Medea as Virgin, and the Goat, symbol of lechery, to record the love-making on Lemnos. When the Egyptian Zodiacal Signs are used, the missing elements appear: Serpent for Scorpion; and Scarab, symbol of regeneration, for Crab.
158
THE FOUNDATION OF TROY
ONE story told about the foundation of Troy is that, in time of famine, a third of the Cretan people, commanded by Prince Scamander, set out to found a colony. On reaching Phrygia, they pitched their camp beside the sea, not far from the city of Hamaxitus,1 below a high mountain which they named Ida in honour of Zeus’s Cretan home. Now, Apollo had advised them to settle wherever they should be attacked by earth-born enemies under cover of darkness; and that same night a horde of famished field mice invaded the tents and nibbled at bow-strings, leather shield-straps, and all other edible parts of the Cretans’ war-gear. Scamander accordingly called a halt, dedicated a temple to Sminthian Apollo (around which the city of Sminthium soon grew) and married the nymph Idaea, who bore him a son, Teucer. With Apollo’s help, the Cretans defeated their new neighbours, the Bebrycians, but in the course of the fighting Scamander had leaped into the river Xanthus, which thereupon took his name. Teucer, after whom the settlers were called Teucrians, succeeded him. Yet some say that Teucer himself led the Cretan immigrants, and was welcomed to Phrygia by Dardanus, who gave him his daughter in marriage and called his own subjects Teucrians.2
b. The Athenians tell a wholly different story. They deny that the Teucrians came from Crete, and record that a certain Teucer, belonging to the deme of Troes, emigrated from Athens to Phrygia; and that Dardanus, Zeus’s son by the Pleiad Electra, and a native of Arcadian Pheneus, was welcomed to Phrygia by this Teucer, not contrariwise. In support of this tradition it is urged that Erichthonius appears in the genealogy both of the Athenian and the Teucrian royal houses.3 Dardanus, the Athenians go on to say, married Chryse, the daughter of Pallas, who bore him two sons, Idaeus and Deimas. These reigned for a while over the Arcadian kingdom founded by Atlas, but were parted by the calamities of the Deucalionian Flood. Deimas remained in Arcadia, but Idaeus went with his father Dardanus to Samothrace, which they colonized together, the island being thereafter called Dardania. Chryse had brought Dardanus as her dowry the sacred images of the Great Deities whose priestess she was, and he now introduced their cult into Samothrace, though keeping their true names a secret. Dardanus also founded a college of Salian priests to perform the necessary rites; which were the same as those performed by the Cretan Curetes.4
c. Grief at the death of his brother Iasion drove Dardanus across the sea to the Troad. He arrived alone, paddling a raft made of an inflated skin which he had ballasted with four stones. Teucer received him hospitably and, on condition that he helped to subdue certain neighbouring tribes, gave him a share of the kingdom and married him to the princess Bateia. Some say that this Bateia was Teucer’s aunt; others, that she was his daughter.5
d. Dardanus proposed to found a city on the small hill of Ate, which rises from the plain where Troy, or Ilium, now stands; but when an oracle of Phrygian Apollo warned him that misfortune would always attend its inhabitants, he chose a site on the lower slopes of Mount Ida, and named his city Dardania.6 After Teucer’s death, Dardanus succeeded to the remainder of the kingdom, giving it his own name, and extended his rule over many Asiatic nations; he also sent out colonies to Thrace and beyond.7
e. Meanwhile, Dardanus’s youngest son Idaeus had followed him to the Troad, bringing the sacred images; which enabled Dardanus to teach his people the Samothracian Mysteries. An oracle then assured him that the city which he was about to found would remain invincible only so long as his wife’s dowry continued under Athene’s protection.8 His tomb is still shown in that part of Troy which was called Dardania before it merged with the villages of Ilium and Tros into a single city. Idaeus settled on the Idaean Mountains which, some say, are called after him; and there instituted the worship and Mysteries of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods.9
f. According to the Latin tradition, Iasion’s father was the Tyrrhenian prince Corythus; and his twin, Dardanus, the son of Zeus by Corythus’s wife Electra. Both emigrated from Etruria, after dividing these sacred images between them: Iasion went to Samothrace, and Dardanus to the Troad. While battling with the Bebrycians, who tried to throw the Tyrrhenians back into the sea. Dardanus lost his helmet and, although his troops were in retreat, led them back to recover it. This time he was victorious, and founded a city named Corythus on the battlefield: as much in memory of his helmet (corys), as of his father.10
g. Idaeus had two elder brothers, Erichthonius and Ilus, or Zacynthus; and a daughter, Idaea, who became Phineus’s second wife. When Erichthonius succeeded to the kingdom of Dardanus, he married Astyoche, the daughter of Simoeis, who bore him Tros.11 Erichthonius, described also as a king of Crete, was the most prosperous of men, owner of the three thousand mares with which Boreas fell in love. Tros succeeded his father Erichthonius, and not only Troy but the whole Troad took his name. By his wife Callirrhoë, a daughter of Scamander, he became the father of Cleopatra the Younger, Ilus the Younger, Assaracus, and Ganymedes.12
h. Meanwhile, Ilus the brother of Erichthonius had gone to Phrygia where, entering for the games which he found in progress, he was victorious in the wrestling match and won fifty youths and fifty maidens as his prize. The Phrygian king (whose name is now forgotten) also gave him a dappled cow, and advised him to found a city wherever she should first lie down. Ilus followed her; she lay down on reaching the hill of Ate; and there he built the city of Ilium though, because of the warning oracle delivered to his father Dardanus, he raised no fortifications. Some, however, say that it was one of Ilus’s own Mysian cows which he followed, and that his instructions came from Apollo. But others hold that Ilium was founded by Locrian immigrants, and that they gave the name of their mountain Phriconis to the Trojan mountain of Cyme.13
i. When the circuit of the city boundaries had been marked out, Ilus prayed to Almighty Zeus for a sign, and next morning noticed a wooden object lying in front of his tent, half buried in the earth, and overgrown with weeds. This was the Palladium, a legless image three cubits high, made by Athene in memory of her dead Libyan playmate Pallas. Pallas, whose name Athene added to her own, held a spear aloft in the right hand, and a distaffand spindle in the left; around her breast was wrapped the aegis. Athene had first set up the image on Olympus, beside Zeus’s throne, where it received great honour; but, when Ilus’s great-grandmother, the Pleiad Electra, was violated by Zeus and defiled it with her touch, Athene angrily cast her, with the image, down to earth.14
j. Apollo Smintheus now advised Ilus: ‘Preserve the Goddess who fell from the skies, and you will preserve your city: for wherever she goes, she carries empire!’ Accordingly he raised a temple on the citadel to house the image.15
k. Some say that the temple was already rising when the image descended from heaven as the goddess’s gift. It dropped through a part of the roof which had not yet been completed, and was found standing exactly in its proper place.16 Others say that Electra gave the Palladium to Dardanus, her son by Zeus, and that it was carried from Dardania to Ilium after his death.17 Others, again, say that it fell from heaven at Athens, and that the Athenian Teucer brought it to the Troad. Still others believe that there were two Palladia, an Athenian and a Trojan, the latter carved from the bones of Pelops, just as the image of Zeus at Olympia was carved from Indian ivory; or, that there were many Palladia, all similarly cast from heaven, including the Samothracian images brought to the Troad by Idaeus.18 The College of Vestals at Rome now guard what is reputed to be the genuine Palladium. No man may look at it with impunity. Once, while it was still in Trojan hands, Ilus rushed to its rescue at an alarm of fire, and was blinded for his pains; later, however, he contrived to placate Athene and re
gained his sight.19
l. Eurydice, daughter of Adrastus, bore to Ilus Laomedon, and Themiste who married the Phrygian Capys and, some say, became the mother of Anchises.20 By Strymo, a daughter of Scamander and Leucippe, or Zeuxippe, or Thoösa, Laomedon had five sons: namely, Tithonus, Lampus, Clytius, Hicetaon, and Podarces; as well as three daughters: Hesione, Cilla, and Astyoche. He also begot bastard twins on the nymph-shepherdess Calybe. It was he who decided to build the famous walls of Troy and was lucky enough to secure the services of the gods Apollo and Poseidon, then under Zeus’s displeasure for a revolt they made against him and forced to serve as day-labourers. Poseidon did the building, while Apollo played the lyre and fed Laomedon’s flocks; and Aeacus the Lelegian lent Poseidon a hand. But Laomedon cheated the gods of their pay and earned their bitter resentment. This was the reason why he and all his sons – except Podarces, now renamed Priam – perished in Heracles’s sack of Troy.21
m. Priam, to whom Heracles generously awarded the Trojan throne, surmised that the calamity which had befallen Troy was due to its luckless site, rather than to the anger of the gods. He therefore sent one of his nephews to ask the Pythoness at Delphi whether a curse still lay on the hill of Ate. But the priest of Apollo, Panthous the son of Othrias, was so beautiful that Priam’s nephew, forgetting his commission, fell in love with him and carried him back to Troy. Though vexed, Priam had not the heart to punish his nephew. In compensation for the injury done he appointed Panthous priest of Apollo and, ashamed to consult the Pythoness again, rebuilt Troy on the same foundations. Priam’s first wife was Arisbe, a daughter of Merops, the seer. When she had borne him Aesacus, he married her to Hyrtacus, by whom she became the mother of the Hyrtacides: Asius and Nisus.22