The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (83 page)

1
. ‘Amazons’, usually derived from
a
and
mazon
, ‘without breasts’, because they were believed to sear away one breast in order to shoot better (but this notion is fantastic), seems to be an Armenian word, meaning ‘moon-women’. Since the priestesses of the Moon-goddess on the South-eastern shores of the Black Sea bore arms, as they also did in the Libyan Gulf of Sirte (see
8.
1
), it appears that the accounts of them which travellers brought back confused the interpretation of certain ancient Athenian icons depicting women warriors, and gave rise to the Attic fable of an Amazonian invasion from the river Thermodon. These icons, which were extant in Classical times on the footstool of Zeus’s throne at Olympia (Pausanias: v. 11. 2), at Athens on the central wall of the Painted Colonnade (Pausanias: i. 15. 2), on Athene’s shield, in the sanctuary of Theseus, and elsewhere (Pausanias: i. 17. 1), represented either the fight between the pre-Hellenic priestesses of Athene for the office of High-priestess or a Hellenic invasion of Attica and the resistance offered by them. There will also have been armed priestesses at Ephesus – a Minoan colony, as the name of the founder Cresus (‘Cretan’) suggests – and in all cities where Amazons’ graves were shown. Oreithyia, or Hippolyte, is supposed to have gone several hundred miles out of her way through Scythia; probably because the Cimmerian Bosphorus – the Crimea – was the seat of Artemis’s savage Taurian cult, where the priestess despatched male victims (see 116.
2
).

2
. Antiope’s interruption of Phaedra’s wedding may have been deduced from an icon which showed the Hellenic conqueror about to violate the High-priestess, after he had killed her companions. Antiope was not Theseus’s legal wife, because she belonged to a society which resisted monogamy (see 131.
k
). The names Melanippe and Hippolytus associate the Amazons with the pre-Hellenic horse cult (see
43.
2
). Soloön’s name (‘egg-shaped weight’) may be derived from a weight-tossing event in the funeral games celebrated at the Greek colony of Pythopolis, so called after the oracular serpent of its heroic founder; there seems to have been a practice here of throwing human victims into the river Thermodon. The Boedromia (‘running for help’) was a festival of Artemis, about which little is known: perhaps armed priestesses took part in it, as in the Argive festival of the Hybristica (see 160.
5
).

101

PHAEDRA AND HIPPOLYTUS

A
FTER
marrying Phaedra, Theseus sent his bastard son Hippolytus to Pittheus, who adopted him as heir to the throne of Troezen. Thus Hippolytus had no cause to dispute the right of his legitimate brothers Acamas and Demophoön, Phaedra’s sons, to reign over Athens.
¹

b
. Hippolytus, who had inherited his mother Antiope’s exclusive devotion to chaste Artemis, raised a new temple to the goddess at Troezen, not far from the theatre. Thereupon Aphrodite, determined to punish him for what she took as an insult to herself, saw to it that when he attended the Eleusinian Mysteries, Phaedra should fall passionately in love with him. He came dressed in white linen, his hair garlanded, and though his features wore a harsh expression, she thought them admirably severe.
²

c
. Since at that time Theseus was away in Thessaly with Peirithous, or it may have been in Tartarus, Phaedra followed Hippolytus to Troezen. There she built the Temple of Peeping Aphrodite to overlook the gymnasium, and would daily watch unobserved while he kept himself fit by running, leaping, and wrestling, stark naked. An ancient myrtle-tree stands in the Temple enclosure; Phaedra would jab at its leaves, in frustrated passion, with a jewelled hair-pin, and they are still much perforated. When, later, Hippolytus attended the All-Athenian Festival and lodged in Theseus’s palace, she used the Temple of Aprodite on the Acropolis for the same purpose.
³

d
. Phaedra disclosed her incestuous desire to no one, but ate little, slept badly, and grew so weak that her old nurse guessed the truth at last, and officiously implored her to send Hippolytus a letter. This Phaedra did: confessing her love, and saying that she was now converted by it to the cult of Artemis, whose two wooden images, brought from Crete, she had just rededicated to the goddess. Would he not come hunting one day? ‘We women of the Cretan Royal House,’ she wrote, ‘are doubtless fated to be dishonoured in love: witness my grandmother Europe, my mother Pasiphaë, and lastly my own sister Ariadne! Ah, wretched Ariadne, deserted by your father, the faithless Theseus, who has since murdered your own royal mother – why have the Furies not punished you for showing such unfilial indifference to
her fate? – and must one day murder me! I count on you to revenge yourself on him by paying homage to Aphrodite in my company. Could we not go away and live together, for awhile at least, and make a hunting expedition the excuse? Meanwhile, none can suspect our true feelings for each other. Already we are lodged under the same roof, and our affection will be regarded as innocent, and even praiseworthy.’
⁴

e
. Hippolytus burned this letter in horror, and came to Phaedra’s chamber, loud with reproaches; but she tore her clothes, threw open the chamber doors, and cried out: ‘Help, help! I am ravished!’ Then she hanged herself from the lintel, and left a note accusing him of monstrous crimes.
⁵

f
. Theseus, on receiving the note, cursed Hippolytus, and gave orders that he must quit Athens at once, never to return. Later he remembered the three wishes granted him by his father Poseidon, and prayed earnestly that Hippolytus might die that very day. ‘Father.’ he pleaded, ‘send a beast across Hippolytus’s path, as he makes for Troezen!’
⁶

g
. Hippolytus had set out from Athens at full speed. As he drove along the narrow part of the Isthmus a huge wave, which overtopped even the Molurian Rock, rolled roaring shoreward; and from its crest sprang a great dog-seal (or, some say, a white bull), bellowing and spouting water. Hippolytus’s four horses swerved towards the cliff, mad with terror, but being an expert charioteer he restrained them from plunging over the edge. The beast then galloped menacingly behind the chariot, and he failed to keep his team on a straight course. Not far from the sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, a wild olive is still shown, called the Twisted Rhachos – the Troezenian term for a barren olive-tree is
rhachos
– and it was on a branch of this tree that a loop of Hippolytus’s reins caught. His chariot was flung sideways against a pile of rocks and broken into pieces. Hippolytus, entangled in the reins, and thrown first against the tree-trunk, and then against the rocks, was dragged to death by his horses, while the pursuer vanished.
⁷

h
. Some, however, relate improbably that Artemis then told Theseus the truth, and rapt him in the twinkling of an eye to Troezen, where he arrived just in time to be reconciled to his dying son; and that she revenged herself on Aphrodite by procuring Adonis’s death. For certain, though, she commanded the Troezenians to pay Hippolytus divine honours, and all Troezenian brides henceforth to cut off a lock of their hair, and dedicate it to him. It was Diomedes who dedicated the ancient temple and image of Hippolytus at Troezen, and who first
offered him his annual sacrifice. Both Phaedra’s and Hippolytus’s tombs, the latter a mound of earth, are shown in the enclosure of this temple, near the myrtle-tree with the pricked leaves.

i
. The Troezenians themselves deny that Hippolytus was dragged to death by horses, or even that he lies buried in his temple; nor will they reveal the whereabouts of his real tomb. Yet they declare that the gods set him among the stars as the Charioteer.
⁸

j
. The Athenians raised a barrow in Hippolytus’s memory close to the Temple of Themis, because his death had been brought about by curses. Some say that Theseus, accused of his murder, was found guilty, ostracized, and banished to Scyros, where he ended his life in shame and grief. But his downfall is more generally believed to have been caused by an attempted rape of Persephone.
⁹

k
. Hippolytus’s ghost descended to Tartarus, and Artemis, in high indignation, begged Asclepius to revive his corpse. Asclepius opened the doors of his ivory medicine cabinet and took out the herb with which Cretan Glaucus had been revived. With it he thrice touched Hippolytus’s breast, repeating certain charms, and at the third touch the dead man raised his head from the ground. But Hades and the Three Fates, scandalized by this breach of privilege, persuaded Zeus to kill Asclepius with a thunderbolt.

l
. The Latins relate that Artemis then wrapped Hippolytus in a thick cloud, disguised him as an aged man, and changed his features. After hesitating between Crete and Delos as suitable places of concealment, she brought him to her sacred grove at Italian Aricia.
¹⁰
There, with her consent, he married the nymph Egeria, and he still lives beside the lake among dark oak-woods, surrounded by sheer precipices. Lest he should be reminded of his death, Artemis changed his name to Virbius, which means
vir bis
, or ‘twice a man’; and no horses are allowed in the vicinity. The priesthood of Arician Artemis is open only to runaway slaves.
¹¹
In her grove grows an ancient oak-tree, the branches of which may not be broken, but if a slave dares do so then the priest, who has himself killed his predecessor and therefore lives in hourly fear of death, must fight him, sword against sword, for the priesthood. The Aricians say that Theseus begged Hippolytus to remain with him at Athens, but he refused.

m
. A tablet in Asclepius’s Epidaurian sanctuary records that Hippolytus dedicated twenty horses to him, in gratitude for having been revived.
¹²

1
. Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 18; Pausanias: i. 22. 2; Ovid:
Heroides
iv. 67 ff.

2
. Pausanias: ii. 31. 6; Ovid:
loc. cit.

3
. Ovid:
loc. cit.
; Seneca:
Hippolytus
835 ff.; Pausanias: ii. 32. 3 and i. 22. 2; Euripides:
Hippolytus
1 ff.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62.

4
. Ovid:
loc. cit
.; Pausanias: i. 18. 5.

5
. Apollodorus:
Epitome
i. 18; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62; Hyginus:
Fabula
47.

6
. Plutarch:
Parallel Stories
34; Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vi. 445.

7
. Pausanias: ii. 32.8; Euripides:
Hippolytus
1193 ff.; Ovid:
Metamorhoses
xv. 506 ff.; Plutarch:
loc. cit
.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62.

8
. Euripides:
Hippolytus
1282 ff. and 1423 ff.; Pausanias: ii. 32. 1–2.

9
. Pausanias: i. 22. 1; Philostatus:
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vii. 42 Diodorus Siculus iv. 62.

10
. Ovid:
Metamorphoses
xv. 532 ff. and
Fasti
vi. 745.

11
. Virgil:
Aeneid
vii. 775; Ovid:
Fasti
v. 312 and
Metamorphoses
xv. 545; Strabo: iii. 263 ff.; Pausanias: ii. 27. 4.

12
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
vi. 136; Strabo: v. 3. 12; Suetonius:
Caligula
35; Pausanias:
loc cit
.