Author: Robert Graves
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/robert-graves/page,19,36100-the_greek_myths.html
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.
5. It is the country of the Atlantians, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (see 131. m) as a most civilized people living to the westward of Lake Tritonis, from whom the Libyan Amazons, meaning the matriarchal tribes later described by Herodotus, seized their city of Cerne. Diodorus’s legend cannot be archaeologically dated, but he makes it precede a Libyan invasion of the Aegean Islands and Thrace, an event which cannot have taken place later than the third millennium B.C. If, then, Atlantis was Western Libya, the floods which caused it to disappear may have been due either to a phenomenal rainfall such as caused the famous Mesopotamian and Ogygian Floods (see 38. 3–5), or to a high tide with a strong north-westerly gale, such as washed away a large part of the Netherlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and formed the Zuider Zee,* or to a subsidence of the coastal region. Atlantis may, in fact, have been swamped at the formation of Lake Tritonis (see 8. a), which apparently once covered several thousand square miles of the Libyan lowlands; and perhaps extended northward into the Western Gulf of Sirte, called by the geographer Scylax ‘the Gulf of Tritonis’, where the dangerous reefs suggest a chain of islands of which only Jerba and the Kerkennahs survive.
6. The island left in the centre of the Lake mentioned by Diodorus (see 131. l) was perhaps the Chaamba Bou Rouba in the Sahara. Diodoru
s seems to be referring to such a catastrophe when he writes in his account of the Amazons and Atlantians (iii. 55): ‘And it is said that, as a result of earthquakes, the parts of Libya towards the ocean engulfed Lake Tritonis, making it disappear.’ Since Lake Tritonis still existed in his day, what he had probably been told was that ‘as a result of earthquakes in the Western Mediterranean the sea engulfed part of Libya and formed Lake Tritonis.’ The Zuider Zee and the Copaic Lake have now both been reclaimed; and Lake Tritonis, which, according to Scylax, still covered nine hundred square miles in Classical times, has shrunk to the salt-marshes of Chott Melghir and Chott el Jerid. If this was Atlantis, some of the dispossessed agriculturists were driven west to Morocco, others south across the Sahara, others east to Egypt and beyond, taking their story with them; a few remained by the lakeside. Plato’s elephants may well have been found in this territory, though the mountainous coastline of Atlantis belongs to Crete, of which the sea-hating Egyptians knew only by hear-say.
7. The five pairs of Poseidon’s twin sons who took the oath of allegiance to Atlas will have been representatives at Pharos of ‘Keftiu’ kingdoms allied to the Cretans. In the Mycenaean Age double-sovereignty was the rule: Sparta with Castor and Polydeuces, Messenia with Idas and Lynceus, Argos with Proetus and Acrisius, Tiryns with Heracles and Iphicles, Thebes with Eteocles and Polyneices. Greed and cruelty will have been displayed by the Sons of Poseidon only after the fall of Cnossus, when commercial integrity declined and the merchant turned pirate.
8. Prometheus’s name, ‘forethought’, may originate in a Greek misunderstanding of the Sanskrit word pramantha, the swastika, or fire-drill, which he had supposedly invented, since Zeus Prometheus at Thurii was shown holding a fire-drill. Prometheus, the Indo-European folk-hero, became confused with the Carian hero Palamedes, the inventor or distributor of all civilized arts (under the goddess’s inspiration); and with the Babylonian god Ea, who claimed to have created a splendid man from the blood of Kingu (a sort of Cronus), while the Mother-goddess Aruru created an inferior man from clay. The brothers Pramanthu and Manthu, who occur in the Bhagavata Purāna, a Sanskrit epic, may be prototypes of Prometheus and Epimetheus (‘afterthought’); yet Hesiod’s account of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an antifeminist fable, probably of his own invention, though based on the story of Demophon and Phyllis (see 169. j). Pandora (‘all-giving’) was the Earth-goddess Rhea, worshipped under that title at Athens and elsewhere (Aristophanes: Birds 971; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vi. 39), whom the pessimistic Hesiod blames for man’s mortality and all the ills which beset life, as well as for the frivolous and unseemly behaviour of wives. His story of the division of the bull is equally unmythical: a comic anecdote, invented to account for Prometheus’s punishment, and for the anomaly of presenting the gods only with the thigh-bones and fat cut from the sacrificial beast. In Genesis the sanctity of the thigh-bones is explained by Jacob’s lameness which an angel inflicted on him during a wrestling match. Pandora’s jar (not box) originally contained winged souls.
9. Greek islanders still carry fire from one place to another in the pith of giant fennel, and Prometheus’s enchainment on Mount Caucasus may be a legend picked up by the Hellenes as they migrated to Greece from the Caspian Sea: of a frost-giant, recumbent on the snow of the high peaks, and attended by a flock of vultures.
10. The Athenians were at pains to deny that their goddess took Prometheus as her lover, which suggests that he had been locally identified with Hephaestus, another fire-god and inventor, of whom the same story was told (see 25. b) because he shared a temple with Athene on the Acropolis.
11. Menoetius (‘ruined strength’) is a sacred king of the oak cult; the name refers perhaps to his ritual maiming (see 7. 1 and 50. 2).
12. While the right-handed swastika is a symbol of the sun, the left-handed is a symbol of the moon. Among the Akan of West Africa, a people of Libyo-Berber ancestry (see Introduction, end), it represents the Triple-goddess Ngame.
40
EOS
AT the close of every night, rosy-fingered, saffron-robed Eos, a daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, rises from her couch in the east, mounts her chariot drawn by the horses Lampus and Phaëthon, and rides to Olympus, where she announces the approach of her brother Helius. When Helius appears, she becomes Hemera, and accompanies him on his travels until, as Hespera, she announces their safe arrival on the western shores of Ocean.1
b. Aphrodite was once vexed to find Ares in Eos’s bed, and cursed her with a constant longing for young mortals, whom thereupon she secretly and shamefacedly began to seduce, one after the other. First, Orion; next, Cephalus; then Cleitus, a grandson of Melampus; though she was married to Astraeus, who came of Titan stock, and to whom she bore not only the North, West, and South Winds, but also Phosphorus and, some say, all the other stars of Heaven.2
c. Lastly, Eos carried off Ganymedes and Tithonus, sons of Tros or Ilus. When Zeus robbed her of Ganymedes she begged him to grant Tithonus immortality, and to this he assented. But she forgot to ask also for perpetual youth, a gift won by Selene for Endymion; and Tithonus became daily older, greyer, and more shrunken, his voice grew shrill, and, when Eos tired of nursing him, she locked him in her bedroom, where he turned into a cicada.3
1. Homer: Odyssey v. 1 and xxiii. 244–6; Theocritus: Idylls ii. 148.
2. Apollodorus: i. 4. 4; Homer Odyssey xv. 250; Hesiod: Theogony 378–82.
3. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 115; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–38; Hesiod: Theogony 984; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 4; Horace: Odes iii. 20; Ovid: Fasti i. 461.
1. The Dawn-maiden was a Hellenic fancy, grudgingly accepted by the mythographers as a Titaness of the second generation; her two-horse chariot and her announcement of the Sun’s advent are allegories rather than myths.
2. Eos’s constant love affairs with young mortals are also allegories: dawn brings midnight lovers a renewal of erotic passion, and is the most usual time for men to be carried off by fever. The allegory of her union with Astraeus is a simple one: the stars merge with dawn in the east and Astraeus, the dawn wind, rises as if it were their emanation. Then, because wind was held to be a fertilizing agent, Eos became the mother by Astraeus of the Morning Star left alone in the sky. (Astraeus was another name for Cephalus, also said to have fathered the Morning Star on her.) It followed philosophically that, since the Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star, and since Evening is Dawn’s last appearance, all the stars must be born from Eos, and so must every wind but the dawn wind. This allegory, however, contradicted the myth of Boreas’s creation by the Moon-goddess Eurynome (see 1. 1).
3. In Greek art, Eos and Hemera are indistinguishable characters. Tithonus has been taken by the allegorist to mean ‘a grant of a stretching-out’ (from teinō and ōne), a reference to the stretching-out of his life, at Eos’s plea; but it is likely, rather, to have been a masculine form of Eos’s own name, Titonë – from titō, ‘day’ (Tzetzes: On Lycophron 941) and onë ‘queen’ – and to have meant ‘partner of the Queen of Day’. Cicadas are active as soon as the day warms up, and the golden cicada was an emblem of Apollo as the Sun-god among the Greek colonists of Asia Minor.
41
ORION
ORION, a hunter of Boeotian Hyria, and the handsomest man alive, was the son of Poseidon and Euryale. Coming one day to Hyria in Chios, he fell in love with Merope, daughter of Dionysus’s son Oenopion. Oenopion had promised Merope to Orion in marriage, if he would free the island from the dangerous wild beasts that infested it; and this he set himself to do, bringing the pelts to Merope every evening. But when the task was at last accomplished, and he claimed her as his wife, Oenopion brought him rumours of lions, bears, and wolves still lurking in the hills, and refused to give her up, the fact being that he was in love with her himself.
b. One night Orion, in disgust, drank a skinful of Oenopion’s wine, which so inflamed him that he broke into Merope’s bedroom, and forced he
r to lie with him. When dawn came, Oenopion invoked his father, Dionysus, who sent satyrs to ply Orion with still more wine, until he fell fast asleep; whereupon Oenopion put out both his eyes and flung him on the seashore. An oracle announced that the blind man would regain his sight, if he travelled to the east and turned his eye-sockets towards Helius at the point where he first rises from Ocean. Orion at once rowed out to sea in a small boat and, following the sound of a Cyclops’s hammer, reached Lemnos. There he entered the smithy of Hephaestus, snatched up an apprentice named Cedalion, and carried him off on his shoulders as a guide. Cedalion led Orion over land and sea, until he came at last to the farthest Ocean, where Eos fell in love with him, and her brother Helius duly restored his sight.
c. After visiting Delos in Eos’s company, Orion returned to avenge himself on Oenopion, whom he could not, however, find anywhere in Chios, because he was hiding in an underground chamber made for him by Hephaestus. Sailing on to Crete, where he thought that Oenopion might have fled for protection to his grandfather Minos, Orion met Artemis, who shared his love of the chase. She soon persuaded him to forget his vengeance and, instead, come hunting with her.1
d. Now, Apollo was aware that Orion had not refused Eos’s invitation to her couch in the holy island of Delos – Dawn still daily blushes to remember this indiscretion – and, further, boasted that he would rid the whole earth of wild beasts and monsters. Fearing, therefore, that his sister Artemis might prove as susceptible as Eos, Apollo went to Mother Earth and, mischievously repeating Orion’s boast, arranged for a monstrous scorpion to pursue him. Orion attacked the scorpion, first with arrows, then with his sword, but, finding that its armour was proof against any mortal weapon, dived into the sea and swam away in the direction of Delos where, he hoped, Eos would protect him. Apollo then called to Artemis: ‘Do you see that black object bobbing about in the sea, far away, close to Ortygia? It is the head of a villain called Candaon, who has just seduced Opos, one of your Hyperborean priestesses. I challenge you to transfix it with an arrow!’ Now, Candaon was Orion’s Boeotian nickname, though Artemis did not know this. She took careful aim, let fly, and, swimming out to retrieve her quarry, found that she had shot Orion through the head. In great grief she implored Apollo’s son Asclepius to revive him, and he consented; but was destroyed by Zeus’s thunderbolt before he could accomplish his task. Artemis then set Orion’s image among the stars, eternally pursued by the Scorpion; his ghost had already descended to the Asphodel Fields.