The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (60 page)

1
. Hyginus:
Fabula
8; Apollodorus: iii. 5. 5; Pausanias: ii. 6. 2; Euripides:
Antiope
, Fragments; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1090, with scholiast.

2
. Homer:
Odyssey
xi. 260; Hyginus:
Fabula
7; Pausanias: vi. 20. 8; ix. 5. 3 and 17. 4; Horace:
Epistles
i. 18. 41; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 735–41.

3
. Pausanias: ix. 17. 3.

1
. These two versions of the Dirce myth show how free the mythographers felt to make their narrative fit the main elements of a literary tradition which, in this case, seems to have been deduced from a series of sacred icons. Antiope, emerging joyfully out of her dungeon and followed by the scowling Dirce, recalls Core’s annual reappearance in Hecate’s company (see
24.
k
). She is called Antiope (‘confronting’) in this context, because her face is upturned to the sky, not bent towards the Underworld, and ‘Daughter of Night’ – Nycteis, not Nycteus – because she emerges from the darkness. The ‘raging on the mountain’ by Dirce and Antiope has been misinterpreted as a Bacchic orgy; theirs was clearly an erotic gadfly dance, for which they behaved like Moon-heifers in heat (see
56.
1
). Dirce’s name (‘double’) stands for the horned moon, and the icon from which the myth is taken will have shown her not being tied to the bull in punishment, but ritually marrying the bull-king (see
88.
7
). A secondary meaning may be concealed in
dirce
: namely ‘cleft’, that is, ‘in an erotic condition’. The Dircaean spring, like Hippocrene, will have been moon-shaped. Antiope’s sons are the familiar royal twins borne by the Moon-goddess: her sacred king and his tanist.

2
. Amphion’s three-stringed lyre, with which he raised the walls of Lower Thebes – since Hermes was his employer, it can have had only three strings – was constructed to celebrate the Triple-goddess, who reigned in the air, on earth, and in the Underworld, and will have been played during the building to safeguard the city’s foundations, gates, and towers. The name ‘Amphion’ (‘native of two lands’) records his citizenship of Sicyon and Thebes.

77

NIOBE

N
IOBE
, sister of Pelops, had married Amphion King of Thebes and borne him seven sons and seven daughters, of whom she was so inordinately proud that, one day, she disparaged Leto herself for having only two children: Apollo and Artemis. Mante, the prophetic daughter of Teiresias, overhearing this rash remark, advised the Theban women
to placate Leto and her children at once: burning frankincense and wreathing their hair with laurel branches. When the scent of incense was already floating in the air, Niobe appeared, followed by a throng of attendants and dressed in a splendid Phrygian robe, her long hair flowing loose. She interrupted the sacrifice and furiously asked why Leto, a woman of obscure parentage, with a mannish daughter and a womanish son, should be preferred to her, Niobe, grandchild of Zeus and Atlas, the dread of the Phrygians, and a queen of Cadmus’s royal house? Though fate or ill-luck might carry off two or three of her children, would she not still remain the richer?

b
. Abandoning the sacrifice, the terrified Theban women tried to placate Leto with murmured prayers, but it was too late. She had already sent Apollo and Artemis, armed with bows, to punish Niobe’s presumption. Apollo found the boys hunting on Mount Cithaeron and shot them down one by one, sparing only Amyclas, who had wisely offered a propitiatory prayer to Leto. Artemis found the girls spinning in the palace and, with a quiverful of arrows, despatched all of them, except Meliboëa, who had followed Amyclas’s example. These two survivors hastened to build Leto a temple, though Meliboëa had turned so pale with fear that she was still nicknamed Chloris when she married Neleus some years later. But some say that none of Niobe’s children survived, and that her husband Amphion was also killed by Apollo.

c
. For nine days and nine nights Niobe bewailed her dead, and found no one to bury them, because Zeus, taking Leto’s part, had turned all the Thebans into stone. On the tenth day, the Olympians themselves deigned to conduct the funeral. Niobe fled overseas to Mount Sipylus, the home of her father Tantalus, where Zeus, moved by pity, turned her into a statue which can still be seen weeping copiously in the early summer.
¹

d
. All men mourned for Amphion, deploring the extinction of his race, but none mourned for Niobe, except her equally proud brother Pelops.
²

1
. Hyginus:
Fabulae
9 and 10; Apollodorus: iii. 5. 6; Homer:
Iliad
xxiv. 612 ff.; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vi. 146–312; Pausanias: v. 16. 3; viii. 2. 5 and i. 21. 5; Sophocles:
Electra
150–52.

2
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
vi. 401–4.

1
. The number of Niobe’s children is given by Homer as twelve and (according to various scholiasts) by Hesiod as twenty, by Herodotus as
four, and by Sappho as eighteen; but the account followed by Euripides and Apollodorus, which makes the best sense, is that she had seven sons and seven daughters. Since Niobe, in the Theban version of the myth, was a grand-daughter of the Titan Atlas, and, in the Argive version, was daughter or mother of Phoroneus (see
57.
a
)
, also described as a Titan (Apollodorus: ii. 1. 1 and Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
932), and of Pelasgus; and could claim to be the first mortal woman violated by Zeus (Diodorus Siculus: iv. 9. 14; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: ii. 22. 6), the myth may concern the defeat of the seven Titans and Titanesses by the Olympians. If so, it records the supersession of the calendar system prevailing in Pelasgian Greece, Palestine, Syria, and North-western Europe; which was based on a month divided into four weeks of seven days, each ruled by one of the seven planetary bodies (see
1.
3
and
43.
4
). Amphion and his twelve children, in Homer’s version of the myth (
Iliad
xxiv. 603–17), perhaps stand for the thirteen months of this calendar. Mount Sipylus may have been the last home in Asia Minor of the Titan cult, as Thebes was in Greece. The statue of Niobe is a crag of roughly human shape, which seems to weep when the sun’s arrows strike its winter cap of snow, and the likeness is reinforced by a Hittite Goddess-mother carved in rock on the same mountain and dating from perhaps the late fifteenth century
B
.
C
. ‘Niobe’ probably means snowy – the
b
representing the
v
in the Latin
nivis
, or the
ph
in the Greek
nipha
. One of her daughters is called Chiade by Hyginus: a word which makes no sense in Greek, unless it be a worn-down form of
chionos niphades
, ‘snow flakes’.

2
. Parthenius (
Love Stories
33) gives a different account of Niobe’s punishment: by Leto’s contrivance, Niobe’s father fell incestuously in love with her and, when she repulsed him, burned her children to death; her husband was then mangled by a wild boar, and she threw herself from a rock. This story, confirmed by the scholiast on Euripides’s
Phoenician Women
(159), is influenced by the myths of Cinyras, Smyrna and Adonis (see
18.
h
), and by the custom of burning children to the god Moloch (see
70.
5
and 156. 2).

78

CAENIS AND CAENEUS

P
OSEIDON
once lay with the Nymph Caenis, daughter of Elatus the Magnesian or, some say, of Coronus the Lapith, and asked her to name a love-gift.

‘Transform me’, she said, ‘into an invulnerable fighter. I am weary of being a woman.’

Poseidon obligingly changed her sex, and she became Caeneus, waging war with such success that the Lapiths soon elected her their king; and she even begot a son, Coronus, whom Heracles killed many years later while fighting for Aegimius the Dorian. Exalted by this new condition, Caeneus set up a spear in the middle of the market-place, where the people congregated, and made them sacrifice to it as if to a god, and honour no other deity whatsoever.

b
. Zeus, hearing of Caeneus’s presumption, instigated the Centaurs to an act of murder. During the wedding of Peirithous they made a sudden attack on her, but she had no difficulty in killing five or six of them, without incurring the slightest wound, because their weapons rebounded harmlessly from her charmed skin. However, the remaining Centaurs beat her on the head with fir logs, until they had driven her under the earth, and then piled a mound of logs above. So Caeneus smothered and died. Presently out flew a sandy-winged bird, which the seer Mopsus, who was present, recognized as her soul; and when they came to bury her, the corpse was again a woman’s.
¹

1
. Apollodorus: i. 9. 16; ii. 7. 7 and
Epitome
i. 22; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 57–64, with scholiast; Hyginus:
Fabula
14;
Oxyrhynchus Papyri
xiii. p. 133 ff.; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vi. 448; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xii. 458–531; Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
i. 264.

1
. This myth has three distinct strands. First, a custom which still prevails in Albania, of girls joining a war-band and dressing in men’s clothes, so that when they are killed in battle the enemy is surprised to discover their sex. Second, a refusal of the Lapiths to accept Hellenic overlordship; the spear set up for worship is likely to have been a maypole in honour of the New Moon-goddess Caenis, or Elate (‘fir-tree’), to whom the fir was sacred. The Lapiths were then defeated by the Aeolians of Iolcus who, with the help of their allies the Centaurs, subjected them to their god Poseidon, but did not interfere with tribal law. Only, as at Argos, the clan chieftainess will have been obliged to assume an artificial beard to assert her right to act as magistrate and commander: thus Caenis became Caeneus, and Elate became Elatus. A similar change of sex is still announced by the Queen of the South, a joint ruler of the Lozi Kingdom in the Zambesi basin, when she enters the council chamber: ‘I am transformed to a man!’ – but this is because one of her ancestresses usurped a patriarchal throne. Third, the ritual recorded on a black-figured oil jar (see
9.
1
), in
which naked men, armed with mallets, beat an effigy of Mother Earth on the head, apparently to release Core, the Spirit of the New Year: ‘Caenis’ means ‘new’.