The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (63 page)

m
. Cheiron gave Peleus a spear; Athene had polished its shaft, which was cut from an ash on the summit of Pelion; and Hephaestus had forged its blade. The Gods’ joint gift was a magnificent suit of golden armour, to which Poseidon added the two immortal horses Balius and Xanthus – by the West Wind out of the Harpy Podarge.
¹³

n
. But the goddess Eris, who had not been invited, was determined to put the divine guests at loggerheads, and while Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite were chatting amicably together, arm in arm, she rolled a golden apple at their feet. Peleus picked it up, and stood embarrassed by its inscription: ‘To the Fairest!’, not knowing which of the three might be intended. This apple was the protocatarctical cause of the Trojan War.
¹⁴

o
. Some describe Peleus’s wife Thetis as Cheiron’s daughter, and a mere mortal; and say that Cheiron, wishing to honour Peleus, spread the rumour that he had married the goddess, her mistress.
¹⁵

p
. Meanwhile Peleus, whose fortunes the kindly Cheiron had
restored, and who now also acquired large herds of cattle as a dowry, sent some of these to Phthia as an indemnity for his accidental killing of Eurytion; but, when the payment was refused by the Phthians, left them to roam at will about the countryside. This proved to have been a fortunate decision, because a fierce wolf which Psamathe had sent after them, to avenge the death of her son Phocus, so glutted its hunger on these masterless cattle that it could hardly crawl. When Peleus and Thetis came face to face with the wolf, it made as if to spring at Peleus’s throat, but Thetis glowered balefully, with protruded tongue and turned it into a stone, which is still pointed out on the road between Locris and Phocis.
¹⁶

q
. Later, Peleus returned to Iolcus, where Zeus supplied him with an army of ants transformed into warriors; and thus he became known as King of the Myrmidons. He captured the city single-handed, killed first Acastus, then the cowering Cretheis; and led his Myrmidons into the city between the pieces of her dismembered body.
¹⁷

r
. Thetis successively burned away the mortal parts of her six sons by Peleus, in order to make them immortal like herself, and sent each of them in turn up to Olympus. But Peleus contrived to snatch the seventh from her when she had already made all his body, except the ankle-bone, immortal by laying it on the fire and afterwards rubbing it with ambrosia; the half-charred ankle-bone had escaped this final treatment. Enraged by his interference, Thetis said farewell to Peleus, and returned to her home in the sea, naming her son ‘Achilles’, because he had as yet placed
no lips
to her breast. Peleus provided Achilles with a new ankle-bone, taken from the skeleton of the swift giant Damysus, but this was fated to prove his undoing.
¹⁸

s
. Too old to fight at Troy himself, Peleus later gave Achilles the golden armour, the ashen spear, and the two horses which had been his wedding presents. He was eventually expelled from Phthia by Acastus’s sons, who no longer feared him when they heard of Achilles’s death; but Thetis instructed him to visit the cave by the myrtle-bush, where he had first mastered her, and wait there until she took him away to live with her for ever in the depths of the sea. Peleus went to the cave, and eagerly watched the passing ships, hoping that one of them might be bringing his grandson Neoptolemus back from Troy.
¹⁹

t
. Neoptolemus, meanwhile, was refitting his shattered fleet in Molossia and, when he heard of Peleus’s banishment, disguised himself as a Trojan captive and took ship for Iolcus, there contriving to kill
Acastus’s sons and seize the city. But Peleus, growing impatient, had chartered a vessel for a voyage to Molossia; rough weather drove her to the island of Icos, near Euboea, where he died and was buried, thus forfeiting the immortality which Thetis had promised him.
²⁰

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
v. 13.

2
. Plutarch:
Parallel Stories
25; Pausanias: x. 1. 1 and ii. 29. 7; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.;
The Alcmaeonis
, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s
Andromache
687; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
175; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72.

3
. Apollodorus : iii. 12.7; Pausanias : ii. 29.7; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.

4
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Hesiod, quoted by Strabo: ix. 1. 9; Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Kychreios Pagos; Eustathius on
Dionysius’s Description of the Earth
507; Plutarch:
Solon
9; Lycophron:
Cassandra
110; Pausanias: i. 36. 1.

5
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.

6
.
Ibid
.: iii. 13. 1–2; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
175; Eustathius on Homer’s
Iliad
ii. 648.

7
. Pindar:
Nemean Odes
v. 26 ff. and iv. 59; Scholiast on Pindar’s
Nemean Odes
iv. 54 and 59; Zenobius:
Proverbs
v. 20; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.

8
. Apollodorus: iii. 13. 3; Hesiod, quoted by Scholiast on Pindar’s
Nemean Odes
iv. 59.

9
. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 790 ff.; Pindar:
Isthmian Odes
viii. 41ff.

10
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xi. 221 ff.; Sophocles:
Troilus
, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s
Nemean Odes
iii. 35; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 5; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
iv. 62; Pausanias: v. 18. 1.

11
. Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
175 and 178; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 582; Herodotus: vii. 191; Philostratus:
Heroica
xix. 1.

12
. Euripides:
Iphigeneia in Aulis
703 ff. and 1036 ff.; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 790; Catullus: xliv. 305 ff.

13
. Apollodorus: iii. 13. 5; Homer:
Iliad
xvi. 144; xviii. 84 and xvi. 149;
Cypria
quoted by scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
xvi. 140.

14
. Hyginus:
Fabula
92; Fulgentius: iii. 7.

15
. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 558; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius iv. 816.

16
. Antoninus Liberalis:
Transformations
38; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
175 and 901.

17
. Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
175; Homer:
Iliad
xxiv. 536; Pindar:
Nemean Odes
iii. 34; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 7; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 224.

18
. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv, quoted by Photius: p. 487; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 6; Lycophron:
Cassandra
178 ff.; Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
xvi. 37.

19
. Homer:
Iliad
xviii. 434 and xvi. 149; Euripides:
Trojan Women
1128, with scholiast;
Andromache
1253 ff.

20
. Dictys Cretensis: vi. 7–9; Stephanus of Byzantium
sub Icos; Palatine Anthology
vii. 2. 9 ff.

1
. The myth of Aeacus, Psamathe (‘sandy shore’), and Phocus (‘seal’) occurs in the folklore of almost every European country. Usually the hero sees a flock of seals swimming towards a deserted shore under a full moon, and then stepping out of their skins to reveal themselves as young women. He hides behind a rock, while they dance naked on the sand, then seizes one of the seal skins, thus winning power over its owner, whom he gets with child. Eventually they quarrel; she regains her skin and swims away. The dance of the fifty Nereids at Thetis’s wedding, and her return to the sea after the birth of Achilles, appear to be fragments of the same myth – the origin of which seems to have been a ritual dance of fifty seal-priestesses, dedicated to the Moon, which formed a proem to the Chief-priestess’s choice of a sacred king. Here the scene is set in Aegina but, to judge from the story of Peleus’s struggle near Cape Sepias, a similar ritual was performed in Magnesia by a college of cuttle-fish priestesses – the cuttle-fish appears prominently in Cretan works of art, including the standard weight from the Royal Treasury at Cnossus, and also on megalithic monuments at Carnac and elsewhere in Brittany. It has eight tentacles, as the sacred anemone of Pelion has eight petals: eight being the number of fertility in Mediterranean myth. Peleus (‘muddy’) may have become the sacred king’s title after he had been anointed with sepia, since he is described as the son of Endeis, ‘the entangler’, a synonym for the cuttle-fish.

2
. Acastus’s hunting party, the subsequent banquet, and the loss of Pelcus’s magic sword seem to be mistakenly deduced from an icon which showed the preliminaries to a coronation ceremony: coronation implying marriage to the tribal heiress. The scene apparently included the king’s ritual combat with men dressed as beasts, and the drawing of a regal sword from a cleft rock (misinterpreted by the mythographer as a heap of cow dung) – as in the myths of Theseus (see
95.
e
) and King Arthur of Lyonesse. But the ashen spear cut by Cheiron from Mount Pelion is an earlier symbol of sovereignty than the sword.

3
. Thetis’s transformations suggest a display of the goddess’s seasonal powers presented in a sequence of dances (see
9.
d
and
32.
b
). The myrtle behind which Peleus first met her, emblemized the last month of his predecessor’s reign (see
52.
3
and 109.
4
); and therefore served as their rendezvous when his own reign ended.

This myth seems to record a treaty-marriage, attended by representatives of twelve confederate tribes or clans, between a Phthian prince and the Moon-priestess of Iolcus in Thessaly.

4
. It may well be that the author of the old English
Seege or Battayle of Troy
drew on a lost Classical source when he made Peleus ‘half man, half horse’: that is to say, Peleus was adopted into an Aeacid horse-cult clan. Such an adoption will have implied a sacrificial horse-feast (see
75.
3
): which explains the wedding gift of Balius and Xanthus without a chariot for them to draw. The Centaurs of Magnesia and the Thessalians of Iolcus seem to have been bound by an exogamic alliance: hence the statement by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius that Peleus’s wife was, in reality, Cheiron’s daughter.