The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (29 page)

3
. The philosophical Nemesis was worshipped at Rhamnus where, according to Pausanias (i. 33. 2–3), the Persian commander-in-chief, who had intended to set up a white marble trophy in celebration of his conquest of Attica, was forced to retire by news of a naval defeat at Salamis; the marble was used instead for an image of the local Nymph-goddess Nemesis. It is supposed to have been from this event that Nemesis came to personify ‘Divine vengeance’, rather than the ‘due enactment’ of the annual death drama; since to Homer, at any rate,
nemesis
had been merely a warm human feeling that payment should be duly made, or a task duly performed. But Nemesis the Nymph-goddess bore the title Adrasteia (‘inescapable’ – Strabo: xiii. 1. 13), which was also the name of Zeus’s foster-nurse, an ash-nymph (see
7.
b
); and since the ash-nymphs and the Erinnyes were sisters, born from the blood of Uranus, this may have been how Nemesis came to embody the idea of vengeance. The ash-tree was one of the goddess’s seasonal disguises, and an important one to her
pastoral devotees, because of its association with thunderstorms and with the lambing month, the third of the sacral year (see
52.
3
).

4
. Nemesis is called a daughter of Oceanus, because as the Nymph-goddess with the apple-bough she was also the sea-born Aphrodite, sister of the Erynnyes (see
18.
4
).

33

THE CHILDREN OF THE SEA

T
HE
fifty Nereids, gentle and beneficent attendants on the Sea-goddess Thetis, are mermaids, daughters of the nymph Doris by Nereus, a prophetic old man of the sea, who has the power of changing his shape.
¹

b
. The Phorcids, their cousins, children of Ceto by Phorcys, another wise old man of the sea, are Ladon, Echidne, and the three Gorgons, dwellers in Libya; the three Graeae; and, some say, the three Hesperides. The Gorgons were named Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa, all once beautiful. But one night Medusa lay with Poseidon, and Athene, enraged that they had bedded in one of her own temples, changed her into a winged monster with glaring eyes, huge teeth, protruding tongue, brazen claws and serpent locks, whose gaze turned men to stone. When eventually Perseus decapitated Medusa, and Poseidon’s children Chrysaor and Pegasus sprang from her dead body, Athene fastened the head to her aegis; but some say that the aegis was Medusa’s own skin, flayed from her by Athene.
²

c
. The Graeae are fair-faced and swan-like, but with hair grey from birth, and only one eye and one tooth between the three of them. Their names are Enyo, Pemphredo, and Deino.
³

d
. The three Hesperides, by name Hespere, Aegle, and Erytheis, live in the far-western orchard which Mother Earth gave to Hera. Some call them daughters of Night, others of Atlas and of Hesperis, daughter of Hesperus; sweetly they sing.
⁴

e
. Half of Echidne was lovely woman, half was speckled serpent. She once lived in a deep cave among the Arimi, where she ate men raw, and raised a brood of frightful monsters to her husband Typhon; but hundred-eyed Argus killed her while she slept.
⁵

f
. Ladon was wholly serpent, though gifted with the power of
human speech, and guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides until Heracles shot him dead.
⁶

g
. Nereus, Phorcys, Thaumas, Eurybia, and Ceto were all children born to Pontus by Mother Earth; thus the Phorcids and Nereids claim cousinhood with the Harpies. These are the fair-haired and swift-winged daughters of Thaumas by the Ocean-nymph Electra, who snatch up criminals for punishment by the Erinnyes, and live in a Cretan cave.
⁷

1
. Homer:
Iliad
xviii. 36 ff.; Apollodorus: i. 2. 7.

2
. Hesiod:
Theogony
270 ff. and 333 ff; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iv. 792–802; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius iv. 1399; Euripides:
Ion
989 ff.

3
. Hesiod:
Theogony
270–4; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 2.

4
. Hesiod:
Theogony
215 and 518; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 27. 2; Euripides:
Heracles
394.

5
. Homer:
Iliad
ii, 783; Hesiod:
Theogony
295 ff.; Apollodorus: ii. 1. 2.

6
. Hesiod:
Theogony
333–5; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1397; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 11.

7
. Apollodorus: i. 2. 6; Hesiod:
Theogony
265–9; Homer:
Odyssey
xx. 77–8; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 298–9.

1
. It seems that the Moon-goddess’s title Eurynome (‘wide rule’ or ‘wide wandering’) proclaimed her ruler of heaven and earth; Eurybia (‘wide strength’), ruler of the sea; Eurydice (‘wide justice’) the serpent-grasping ruler of the Underworld. Male human sacrifices were offered to her as Eurydice, their death being apparently caused by viper’s venom (see
28.
4
; 154.
b
and 168.
e
). Echnidne’s death at the hand of Argus probably refers to the suppression of the Serpent-goddess’s Argive cult. Her brother Ladon is the oracular serpent who haunts every paradise, his coils embracing the apple-tree (see 133.
4
).

2
. Among Eurybia’s other sea-titles were Thetis (‘disposer’), or its variant Tethys; Ceto, as the sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Rahab, or the Babylonian Tiamat (see
73.
7
); Nereis, as the goddess of the wet element. Electra as provider of amber, a sea product highly valued by the ancients (see 148.
11
); Thaumas, as wonderful; and Doris, as bountiful. Nereus –
alias
Proteus (‘first man’) – the prophetic ‘old man of the sea’, who took his name from Nereis, not contrariwise, seems to have been an oracular sacred king, buried on a coastal island (see 133.
d
); he is pictured in an early vase-painting as fish-tailed, with a lion, a stag, and a viper emerging from his body. Proteus, in the
Odyssey
, similarly
changed shapes, to mark the seasons through which the sacred king moved from birth to death (see
30.
1
).

3
. The fifty Nereids seem to have been a college of fifty Moon-priestesses, whose magic rites ensured good fishing; and the Gorgons, representatives of the Triple-goddess, wearing prophylactic masks – with scowl, glaring eyes, and protruding tongue between bared teeth – to frighten strangers from her Mysteries (see
73.
9
). The Sons of Homer knew only a single Gorgon, who was a shade in Tartarus (
Odyssey
xi. 633–5), and whose head, an object of terror to Odysseus (
Odyssey
xi. 634), Athene wore on her aegis, doubtless to warn people against examining the divine mysteries hidden behind it. Greek bakers used to paint Gorgon masks on their ovens, to discourage busybodies from opening the oven door, peeping in, and thus allowing a draught to spoil the bread. The Gorgons’ names – Stheino (‘strong’), Euryale (‘wide roaming’), and Medusa (‘cunning one’) – are titles of the Moon-goddess; the Orphics called the moon’s face ‘the Gorgon’s head’.

4
. Poseidon’s fathering of Pegasus on Medusa recalls his fathering of the horse Arion on Demeter, when she disguised herself as a mare, and her subsequent fury (see
16.
f
); both myths describe how Poseidon’s Hellenes forcibly married the Moon-priestesses, disregarding their Gorgon masks, and took over the rain-making rites of the sacred horse cult. But a mask of Demeter was still kept in a stone chest at Pheneus, and the
priest
of Demeter assumed it when he performed the ceremony of beating the Infernal Spirits with rods (Pausanias: viii. 15. 1).

5
. Chrysaor was Demeter’s new-moon sign, the golden sickle, or falchion; her consorts carried it when they deputized for her. Athene, in this version, is Zeus’s collaborator, reborn from his head, and a traitress to the old religion (see
9.
1
). The three Harpies, regarded by Homer as personifications of the storm winds (
Odyssey
xx. 66–78), were the earlier Athene, the Triple-goddess, in her capacity of sudden destroyer. So were the Graeae, the Three Grey Ones, as their names Enyo (‘warlike’), Pemphredo (‘wasp’), and Deino (‘terrible’) show; their single eye and tooth are misreadings of a sacred picture (see
73.
9
), and the swan is a death-bird in European mythology (see
32.
2
).

6
. Phorcys, a masculine form of Phorcis, the Goddess or Sow (see
74.
4
and
96.
2
), who devours corpses, appears in Latin as
Orcus
, a title of Hades, and as
porcus
, hog. The Gorgons and Grey Ones were called Phorcides, because it was death to profane the Goddess’s Mysteries; but Phorcys’s prophetic wisdom must refer to a sow-oracle (see
24.
7
).

7
. The names of the Hesperides, described as children either of Ceto and Phorcys, or of Night, or of Atlas the Titan who holds up the heavens in the Far West (see
39.
1
and 133.
e
), refer to the sunset. Then the sky is green, yellow, and red, as if it were an apple-tree in full bearing; and the
Sun, cut by the horizon like a crimson half-apple, meets his death dramatically in the western waves. When the Sun has gone, Hesperus appears. This star was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphrodite, and the apple was the gift by which her priestess decoyed the king, the Sun’s representative, to his death with love-songs; if an apple is cut in two transversely, her five-pointed star appears in the centre of each half.

34

THE CHILDREN OF ECHIDNE

E
CHIDNE
bore a dreadful brood to Typhon: namely, Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell; the Hydra, a many-headed water-serpent living at Lerna; the Chimaera, a fire-breathing goat with lion’s head and serpent’s body; and Orthrus, the two-headed hound of Geryon, who lay with his own mother and begot on her the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion.
¹

1
. Hesiod:
Theogony
306 ff.