Each day that I teach a myth course, I’ll post an interesting fact about the myth I taught that day.
February 20, 2023: Hyrieus and his Ox. The weird way in which Orion was conceived in this version of his birth probably reflects the fact that the Greeks would have heard their word for urine (ouron) in his name. What the name really means is uncertain, but it is unlikely that it was really derived from ‘urine’! The myth of the gods peeing on the ox’s hide is a secondary development that was later added to the tale.
February 17, 2023: Procne and Philomela. There are some other variations of this tale in which Aedon (the other name for Procne) acts alone in slaying her son. In one case, she does so accidentally, thinking he is the son of her sister-in-law, whose fecundity Aedon envies (Antoninus Liberalis #11). This is an interesting twist on the unity of sisters acting together in the myth as we studied it in class. Behind this other version, we glimpse the intense pressure that women felt to produce children, especially male children, and the possible competition that women of a single household may have experienced.
February 13, 2023: Io’s story. Today in lecture we also discussed the story of Melampus curing the daughters of Proteus through his knowledge of natural substances as well as arcane religious expertise. The way in which he first began to acquire these gifts is intriguing. He took pity on orphaned snakes and raised them. They licked his ears while he was asleep, giving him the ability to understand the speech of all animals. But listening the the animals, he learned things about the world and the gods that other humans didn’t know. From this, he built his career as a wonder-worker.
February 10, 2023: Lycaon Tests Zeus. The travel-writer Pausanias, who lived in the 2nd century CE and travelled around Greece visiting famous spots—especially spots where interesting myths were said to have occurred. He didn’t always believe that what the myths said had really happened. In the case of Lycaon turning into a wolf, however, interestingly, he did believe the story. He gives as his reasons the fact that in the old days, mortals and gods ate together all the time (as Lycaon and Zeus do in the myth) and the fact that back then, the gods more openly and clearly punished mortals for their transgressions. (Pausanias 8.2.1-6)
February 8, 2023: Pandora’s Gifts. In 2021, Pandora was the 3,771st most popular girl's name, world-wide. Wow—quite a few people are willing to overlook (or do not know about) the dire implications of Pandora's story. But already in antiquity, the Greeks were able to think of the story in a more light-hearted manner than Hesiod did, as well: comic versions of it were produced on the Athenian stage.
February 6, 2023: Prometheus, Epimetheus and the First Men. It’s interesting that most cultures do not tell separate stories about the creation of men and the creation of women. It is assumed that the two genders were created at the same time. The Greek myth that we looked at today was only about the creation of men, however; the first woman was created later. Similarly, one of the two traditions that we find in the biblical book of Genesis says that God created Adam and then later created Eve (Gen. 2:7-23). There is another tradition in Genesis that tells of the two genders being created at the same time, however (Gen. 1:26-28).
February 3, 2023: Demeter and Persephone. According to the way that Ovid told today's myth (in his Metamorphoses, Book 5), there were pomegranate trees growing in the Underworld, from which Persephone idly picked a pomegranate and then ate its seeds, apparently not realizing the implications of what she was doing. It's an odd detail; usually the Underworld is described as dark, musty and gloomy. The only types of vegetation mentioned, typically, are cypress trees, willows, and asphodel flowers—all of which are symbols of death. Ovid may have been having a small joke, toying with the solution to a question that might have nagged at his own brain: how did a pomegranate get to the Underworld? But he also is giving Persephone agency in her fate, even if it is agency of an accidental kind. Look at George O’Connor’s treatment of this version of the myth…
February 1, 2023: Demeter’s Wanderings. There is another story about piglets and Persephone and Demeter that I didn’t tell today. According to this story, a swineherd was watching over his pigs near where Persephone was picking flowers when Hades kidnapped her. The chasm in the earth swallowed up the swineherd and all of his pigs at the same time as it swallowed up Hades’ chariot, with Persephone in it. The pigs tumbled down into the Underworld, never to be seen again. This is a different way of playing with that slang meaning of ‘piglet’ that I talked about today: what happened to Persephone happened to piglets, too.
January 30, 2023: Persephone’s Story. Hecate, who appeared in our story today as a divinity who helped Demeter, appears often elsewhere in Greek myth and Greek cult as a divinity who helps both mortals and immortals. She accompanies both Artemis and Persephone as a sort of lady-in-waiting, she carries messages from the gods to mortals and sometimes also reports to the gods about what is happening on earth, she carries prayers from mortals to gods, she lights the way for other gods by carrying her torches in front of them, she helps women give birth, and so on. What is now her better-known reputation, as a frightening, nasty goddess of witches who leads forth the souls of the dead, is a distortion of this. She does help ancient magicians, and some magic did require the presence of a ghost, whom Hecate could send up, but the truly dreadful picture of Hecate that we see in Shakespeare's Macbeth and other sources from the Medieval and Early Modern periods is mostly due to Christians wanting to defame her.
January 27: Aphrodite Experiences Desire. As much as Aphrodite liked to pair up male gods with all manner of both female and male partners, mortal and divine, she is not on record, at least in myth, as having ever paired a female with a female. This probably reflects the fact that the Greeks thought male-male relations were fine (as long as the males involved also had sex with women at least long enough to procreate) but thought that female-female relations were odd or even dangerous. There are exceptions of course: in real life we know that Sappho took female lovers. And Sappho prayed to Aphrodite to help her win the women she loved! But in myth at least Aphrodite has nothing to do with that.
January 25, 2023: Hephaestus’ Story. Today's myth mentioned the birth of Erichthonius, the son of Hephaestus and Earth, whom Athena adopted and made an early king of her city, Athens. Erichthonius' birth is a case of what the Greeks called autochthony, a term that comes from Greek words that mean 'from the ground (chthon) itself (auto).' Erichthonius’ own name means ‘very much (eri) from the ground (chthon).’ The Greeks, like many other cultures, loved to think that their ancestors had sprung out of the very soil—particularly if it was the soil of their own locale. But the myth of Erichthonius' birth is even better than other stories the Greeks told about such people because this myth manages to also make him the son of a god (Hephaestus) and the foster-son of a goddess (Athena). What a powerful ancestor for the Athenians to have!
January 23, 2023: Artemis and Apollo. In the version of today's myth that is told in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a poem dating to the late sixth century BCE, there is a long digression that includes a very different story about where the monster Typhon came from. In this story, Typhon is not the son of Earth and Tartarus, as he was in the version I told you last week in class, but rather the son of Hera, whom she produced without the help of any man. She did this after Zeus produced Athena because she was offended that Zeus had chosen to have a child without any help from her, his legal wife. She wanted to produce a strong child who would challenge Zeus. The story starts at line 305 of the Hymn to Apollo
January 20, 2023: The Young Gods Rebel. Today we talked about Zeus’ first wife, Metis, whose name means something such as ‘cleverness’ or ‘wisdom.’ The name of his second wife, Themis, means 'custom' or 'something laid down by law.' She is a goddess concerned with keeping things in order in various ways. The daughters that she bears to Zeus include the Seasons (whose individual names are Justice, Peace and Order) and the Fates. She is the mother of Prometheus and Epimetheus, whom we will meet soon in class, as well, although we don't know who their father was. Even after she ceased to be Zeus' wife, Themis continued to serve as his advisor.
January 18, 2023: Earth and Her Children. Today I mentioned a myth in which Hecate helps Rhea protect and hide the infant Zeus so that his father, Cronus, cannot swallow him. This aligns with other myths in which Hecate helps mothers care for their children and with some rituals connected with Hecate. For example, there is a story in which a servant named Galinthias helps Alcmene give birth to Heracles in spite of the fact that the goddess Hera and her daughter Eileithyia (the goddess who is in charge of women giving birth) are trying to keep Heracles imprisoned in his mother’s womb. When Eileithyia finds out that Galinthias used a trick to ensure that Heracles was born, Eileithyia punishes Galinthias by turning her into a weasel. Hecate, however, then adopts Galinthias the weasel—and all weasels to come—as her sacred animal.
January 13, 2023: Arachne and Athena. Not all of the information that we get about Arachne from ancient authors is as discouraging as the two stories we discussed in class today. Pliny the Elder, a learned Roman man, once wrote about famous inventors and included Arachne in that list. He said that she was the first to discover how to make linen from the flax plant and also that she was the inventor of the fishing net—two very useful inventions. He also said that she had a son, Closter, who invented the spindle (in Greek, the word closter means spindle…as so often in Greek myths, the thing was named after its inventor).
January 11, 2023: Callisto’s Story. In antiquity, there was a small town called Brauron about 17 miles from Athens. Brauron had a large sanctuary dedicated to Artemis. Each year, the Athenians would send some of their children to live at the sanctuary for several months, under the care of the sanctuary’s personnel. The children were said to ‘Play the bear for Artemis.’ We aren’t exactly sure what that means, but it points towards a ritual that in some way articulated the same ideas, roughly, as the myth of Callisto did. These children, by ‘playing the bear’ in Artemis’ honor, may have hoped that their own transitions into adulthood would be happier than that of Callisto.
January 9, 2023: Daphne and Apollo. Today’s myth was about Apollo’s unsuccessful pursuit of the nymph Daphne. Many of Apollo’s love affairs were unsuccessful for one reason or another; another famous one involves the Spartan youth Hyacinthus, who became not only Apollo’s lover but also his student in many subjects, including the throwing of the discus. Unfortunately, the wind-god Zephyr developed a passion for Hyacinthus, as well, and when Hyacinthus rejected him, Zephyr decided to destroy Hyacinthus and hurt his rival Apollo, too. One day, when Apollo and Hyacinthus were practicing their discus throws, Zephyr—who, after all, was a wind—caused Apollo’s discus to veer off course and hit Hyacinthus in the head. The youth died, in spite of all of Apollo’s attempts to save him. Where his blood drenched the soil, a flower sprang up—the hyacinth—small consolation to the god who had accidentally killed the person he loved.
