The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (71 page)

g
. Later, Glaucus led an expedition westward, and demanded a kingdom from the Italians; but they despised him for failing to be so great a man as his father; however, he introduced the Cretan military girdle and shield into Italy, and thus earned the name Labicus, which means ‘girdled’.
⁶

h
. Androgeus visited Athens, and won every contest in the All-Athenian Games. But King Aegeus knew of his friendship for the fifty rebellious sons of Pallas and fearing that he might persuade his father Minos to support these in an open revolt, conspired with the Megareans to have him ambushed at Oenoë on the way to Thebes, where he was about to compete in certain funeral games. Androgeus defended himself with courage, and a fierce battle ensued in which he was killed.
⁷

i
. News of Androgeus’s death reached Minos while he was sacrificing to the Graces on the island of Paros. He threw down the garlands and commanded the flute-players to cease, but completed the ceremony; to this day they sacrifice to the Graces of Paros without either music or flowers.
⁸

j
. Glaucus son of Minos has sometimes been confused with Anthedonian Glaucus, son of Anthedon, or of Poseidon, who once observed the restorative property of a certain grass, sown by Cronus in the Golden Age, when a dead fish (or, some say, a hare) was laid upon it and came to life again. He tasted the herb and, becoming immortal, leaped into the sea, where he is now a marine god, famous for his amorous adventures. His underwater home lies off the coast of Delos, and every year he visits all the ports and islands of Greece, issuing oracles much prized by sailors and fishermen – Apollo himself is described as Glaucus’s pupil.
⁹

1
. Pausanias: viii. 53. 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Apollodorus: iii. 1. 2.

2
. Pausanias:
loc. cit.
; Plutarch:
Agis
9.

3
. Plutarch:
Theseus
20; Apoll odorus : iii. 2. 1–2; Euripides:
Hippolytus
; Pausanias: ii. 7. 7; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1493 ff.

4
. Hyginus:
Fabula
136; Apollodorus: iii. 3. 1; Pausanias: i. 43. 5.

5
. Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Hyginus:
loc. cit
.

6
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vii. 796.

7
. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60. 4; Apollodorus: iii. 15. 7; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vi. 14; Hyginus:
Fabula
41.

8
. Apollodorus: iii. 15. 7.

9
. Athenaeus: vii. 48; Tzetzes:
On Lycophron
754; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xiii. 924 ff.; Pausanias: ix. 22. 6; Servius on Virgil’s
Georgics
i. 437.

1
. Pasiphaë as the Moon (see
51.
h
) has been credited with numerous sons: Cydon, the eponymous hero of Cydon near Tegea, and of the Cydonian colony on Crete; Glaucus, a Corinthian sea-hero (see
71.
4
); Androgeus, in whose honour annual games were celebrated at Ceramicus, and whom the Athenians worshipped as ‘Eurygyes’ (‘broad-circling’), to show that he was a spirit of the solar year (Hesychius
sub
Androgeus); Ammon, the oracular hero of the Ammon Oasis, later equated with Zeus; and Catreus, whose name seems to be a masculine form of Catarrhoa, the Moon as rain-maker. Her daughters Ariadne and Phaedra are reproductions of herself; Ariadne, though read as
ariagne
, ‘most pure’, appears to be a Sumerian name,
Ar-ri-an-de
, ‘high fruitful mother of the barley’, and Phaedra occurs in South Palestinian inscriptions as
Pdri
.

2
. The myth of Acacallis (‘unwalled’) apparently records the capture, by invading Hellenes from Aegialae, of the West Cretan city of Tarrha which, like other Cretan cities, was unwalled (see
98.
1
); and the flight of the leading inhabitants to Libya, where they became the rulers of the unwarlike Garamantians.

3
. White, red, and black, the colours of Minos’s heifer, were also those of Io the Moon-cow (see
56.
1
); those of Augeias’s sacred bulls (see 127.
1
); and on a Caeretan vase (
Monumenti Inediti
vi-vii.p.77) those of the Minos bull which carried off Europe. Moreover, clay or plaster tripods sacred to the Cretan goddess found at Ninou Khani, and a similar tripod found at Mycenae, were painted in white, red, and black and according to Ctesias’s
Indica
, these were the colours of the unicorn’s horn – the unicorn, as a calendar symbol represented the Moon-goddess’s dominion over the five seasons of the Osirian year, each of which contributed part of an animal to its composition. That Glaucus was chasing a mouse may point to a conflict between the Athenian worshippers of Athene, who had an owl (
glaux
) for her familiar, and the worshippers of Apollo Smintheus (‘Mouse Apollo’); or the original story may have been that Minos gave him a mouse coated with honey to swallow – a desperate remedy prescribed for sick children in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His
manner of death may also refer to the use of honey as an embalming fluid – many jar-burials of children occur in Cretan houses – and the owl was a bird of death. The bees are perhaps explained by a misreading of certain cut gems (Weiseler:
Denkmale der Alten Kunst
ii. 252), which showed Hermes summoning the dead from burial jars, while their souls hovered above in the form of bees (see
39.
8
and
82.
4
).

4
. Polyeidus is both the shape-shifting Zagreus (see
30.
a
) and the demi-god Asclepius, whose regenerative herb seems to have been mistletoe (see
50.
2
), or its Eastern-European counterpart, the loranthus. The Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh provides a parallel to the serpent’s revivification. His herb of eternal life is stolen from him by a serpent, which thereupon casts its slough and grows young again; Gilgamesh, unable to recover the herb, resigns himself to death. It is described as resembling buckthorn: a plant which the Greeks took as a purge before performing their Mysteries.

5
. Glaucus’s spitting into the open mouth of Polyeidus recalls a similar action of Apollo when Cassandra failed to pay him for the gift of prophecy; in Cassandra’s case, however, the result was not that she lost the gift, but that no one believed her (see 158.
q
).

6
. The goddesses to whom Minos sacrificed without the customary flutes or flowers, when he heard that his son had died, were the Pariae, or Ancient Ones (see
89.
a
), presumably the Three Fates, euphemistically called the ‘Graces’. Myth has here broken down into street-corner anecdote. Androgeus’s death is a device used to account for the Cretan quarrel with Athens (see
98.
c
), based, perhaps, on some irrelevant tradition of a murder done at Oenoë.

7
. Anthedonian Glaucus’s oracular gifts, his name, and his love-affairs, one of which was with Scylla (see 170.
t
), suggest that he was a personification of Cretan sea-power. Both Minos (who received his oracles from Zeus) and Poseidon, patron of the Cretan confederacy (see
39.
7
), had enjoyed Scylla (see
91.
2
); and Anthedon (‘rejoicing in flowers’) was apparently a title of the Cretan Springflower hero incarnate in every Late Minoan king (see
85.
2
). The King of Cnossus seems to have been connected by sacred marriages with all member states of his confederacy (see
89.
1
); hence Glaucus’s amatory reputation. It is probable that a representative from Cnossus made an annual progress around the Cretan overseas dependencies in the style of Talos (see
92.
7
), giving out the latest oracular edicts. Delos was a Cretan island and perhaps a distribution centre for oracles brought from the Dictaean Cave at Cnossus. But this Glaucus also resembles Proteus, the oracular sea-god of Cretan Pharos (see 169.
6
), and Melicertes the sea-god of Corinth, identified with another Glaucus (see
71.
4
). Cronus’s grass of the Golden Age may have been the magical
herbe d’or
of the Druids.

8
. A version of the Glaucus myth is quoted from the Lydian historian Xanthus by Pliny (
Natural History
xxv. 14) and Nonnus (
Dionysiaca
xxv. 451–551), and commemorated on a series of coins from Sardis. When the hero Tylon, or Tylus (‘knot’ or ‘phallus’), was fatally bitten in the heel by a poisonous serpent (see 117.
1
), his sister Moera (‘fate’) appealed to the giant Damasen (subduer’), who avenged him. Another serpent then fetched ‘the flower of Zeus’ from the woods, and laid it on the lips of its dead mate, which came to life again; Moera followed this example and similarly restored Tylus.

91

SCYLLA AND NISUS

M
INOS
was the first king to control the Mediterranean Sea, which he cleared of pirates, and in Crete ruled over ninety cities. When the Athenians had murdered his son Androgeus, he decided to take vengeance on them, and sailed around the Aegean collecting ships and armed levies. Some islanders agreed to help him, some refused. Siphnos was yielded to him by the Princess Arne, whom he bribed with gold; but the gods changed her into a jackdaw which loves gold and all things that glitter. He made an alliance with the people of Anaphe, but was rebuffed by King Aeacus of Aegina and departed, swearing revenge; Aeacus then answered an appeal from Cephalus to join the Athenians against Minos.
¹

b
. Meanwhile, Minos was harrying the Isthmus of Corinth. He laid siege to Nisa, ruled by Nisus the Egyptian, who had a daughter named Scylla. A tower stood in the city, built by Apollo [and Poseidon?], and at its foot lay a musical stone which, if pebbles were dropped upon it from above, rang like a lyre – because Apollo had once rested his lyre there while he was working as a mason. Scylla used to spend much time at the top of the tower, playing tunes on the stone with a lapful of pebbles; and here she climbed daily when the war began, to watch the fighting.

c
. The siege of Nisa was protracted, and Scylla soon came to know the name of every Cretan warrior. Struck by the beauty of Minos, and by his magnificent clothes and white charger, she fell perversely in love
with him. Some say that Aphrodite willed it so; others blame Hera.
²

d
. One night Scylla crept into her father’s chamber, and cut off the famous bright lock on which his life and throne depended; then, taking from him the keys of the city gate, she opened it, and stole out. She made straight for Minos’s tent, and offered him the lock of hair in exchange for his love. ‘It is a bargain!’ cried Minos; and that same night, having entered the city and sacked it, he duly lay with Scylla; but would not take her to Crete, because he loathed the crime of parricide. Scylla, however, swam after his ship, and clung to the stem until her father Nisus’s soul in the form of a sea-eagle swooped down upon her with talons and hooked beak. The terrified Scylla let go and was drowned; her soul flew off as a ciris-bird, which is well known for its purple breast and red legs.
³
But some say that Minos gave orders for Scylla to be drowned; and others that her soul became the fish ciris, not the bird of that name.
⁴