From 5b6e1230dc1560a989b01858512ac50d7b1162ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: mosaic Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:06:38 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] enrich: tier deploy (Zaley enrichment) --- deity/achilles/index.html | 2 ++ deity/agamemnon/index.html | 4 ++-- deity/andromeda/index.html | 2 +- deity/bellerophon/index.html | 2 +- deity/daedalus/index.html | 2 +- deity/hector/index.html | 4 ++-- deity/heracles/index.html | 2 +- deity/jason/index.html | 2 +- deity/meleager/index.html | 2 +- deity/narcissus/index.html | 4 ++-- deity/odysseus/index.html | 8 +++++--- deity/orpheus/index.html | 4 ++-- deity/paris/index.html | 4 ++-- deity/patroclus/index.html | 3 +++ deity/perseus/index.html | 6 ++++-- deity/theseus/index.html | 4 +++- 16 files changed, 33 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-) diff --git a/deity/achilles/index.html b/deity/achilles/index.html index 7e8a4f3..9604c9f 100644 --- a/deity/achilles/index.html +++ b/deity/achilles/index.html @@ -18,6 +18,8 @@

The Iliad does not end in vengeance but in an extraordinary scene of shared grief. Guided by the gods and by Hermes through the night, old King Priam of Troy comes alone and unarmed into the very tent of the man who killed his son, and kneels, and does the thing no man has done before: he kisses the hands of Achilles, "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons" (Iliad 24.478–479), and begs for Hector's body, asking Achilles to remember his own father Peleus, an old man far away who longs for a son he will never see again. The appeal breaks through Achilles' rage at last. The two of them, the young killer and the bereaved old king, weep together — Priam for Hector, Achilles for Patroclus and for his own father and his own approaching death — and Achilles, gentled by a grief he now shares, gives the body back and grants a truce for the funeral. In this moment the wrath that opened the poem is finally spent, and the greatest of warriors becomes, for a night, simply a man who understands another's sorrow. It is the note on which the Iliad chooses to end.

The death of Achilles

Homer's Iliad closes before Achilles dies, but his death is foretold within it again and again, and the fuller story was told in the lost epics of the Trojan cycle and by many later authors. After Hector's fall Achilles goes on fighting and winning until, near the Scaean Gate of Troy, he is struck down — not by a great warrior but by Paris, Hector's brother and the unwarlike prince whose theft of Helen began the war. Paris shoots an arrow, and Apollo, who has favoured Troy throughout and whose priest Achilles' side had dishonoured, guides the shaft to its mark. In the later tradition of the vulnerable hero, the arrow finds the one mortal spot, the heel; and so the greatest of the Greeks is brought down by an arrow from the weakest of his enemies, god-guided, at the gate of the city he could not quite live to take. His body was fought over and rescued, mourned by the Greeks and by his mother and her sister Nereids rising from the sea, and his ashes were laid, the tradition held, together with those of Patroclus, so that the two who could not be parted in life lay mingled in death.

+

The shade in the Underworld: better a living serf than king of the dead

+

The Odyssey gives us the most piercing epilogue to Achilles' story. When Odysseus journeys to the land of the dead (the Nekyia of Odyssey 11), among the shades he meets is Achilles, come forward with Patroclus and the other fallen. Odysseus tries to comfort him, saying that no man was ever more blessed, honoured in life like a god by the Greeks and now a great ruler among the dead — surely he need not grieve at dying. But Achilles cuts the consolation down with the bitterest words in Homer: "Do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather be bound to the soil as another man's serf — a landless man with next to nothing to live on — than be king over all the perished dead" (Odyssey 11.488–491). It is a devastating reversal of the very heroic bargain the Iliad had celebrated: the man who chose a short bright life for undying fame now says, from beyond the grave, that any living breath would be worth more than all the glory of the dead. The one thing that lifts his gloom is news of the living: when Odysseus tells him how bravely his son Neoptolemus fought at Troy, Achilles' shade strides away across the field of asphodel "with great steps, rejoicing" that his boy had proved himself. This shadowed, sorrowing Achilles of the Odyssey stands in deliberate contrast to the blessed hero of the later Leuke tradition, who was carried off to a paradise island rather than down to Hades — two different answers, held side by side in the tradition, to the question of what became of the greatest of the Greeks after death.

Worship — Ancient

A hero raised toward a god

Achilles was not a god of the Olympian kind but a hero in the technical Greek sense — a powerful dead mortal honoured with cult at his tomb, believed to remain present and potent in the place where his bones lay and able to help or harm the living. Yet of all the Greek heroes he was worshipped the most widely and the most fervently, and in some places his cult rose so high that he was addressed almost as a god. His worship spread far beyond his Thessalian homeland, carried especially by Ionian and Milesian settlers around the shores of the Black Sea, where he became one of the great protecting powers of the region.

The tomb at Sigeion and the Troad

diff --git a/deity/agamemnon/index.html b/deity/agamemnon/index.html index 570e24f..03100e2 100644 --- a/deity/agamemnon/index.html +++ b/deity/agamemnon/index.html @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@

King of Mycenae and overlord of the Greeks

Agamemnon rules Mycenae — and in some tellings Argos, the two great citadels of the Argive plain often standing for one realm in the poems — and he holds the sceptre of Pelops, made by Hephaestus and handed down through the family, the very emblem of his paramount kingship. When Menelaus's wife Helen is carried off to Troy by Paris, and the many suitors who had once sought Helen are bound by their old oath to defend her marriage, it is Agamemnon who gathers and leads the vast coalition — the "catalogue of ships" in Iliad 2 numbers the contingents of all Greece under his command. He is the commander-in-chief of the Achaean host, contributing the largest single force (a hundred ships) and holding supreme authority over kings who are, many of them, greater men than he. This is the paradox the poems keep returning to: Agamemnon's power is real and necessary — without a single overlord the expedition falls apart — yet he is temperamentally unfit for it, quick to anger, grasping over honour, and prone to the errors of a proud man who mistakes his rank for his worth.

The sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis

-

Before the fleet can even sail, the curse exacts its first price from Agamemnon directly. Gathered at Aulis, the ships are held in harbour by a dead calm or by contrary winds sent by the goddess Artemis, angered — the tellings vary — by a boast of Agamemnon's, or by his killing of a sacred deer, or simply demanding a price for the passage. The seer Calchas declares that the winds will not turn until Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia. It is the most terrible choice in his story: to disband the army in disgrace, or to kill his child. He sends home for Iphigenia on the pretext that she is to be married to Achilles, and when she comes he has her led to the altar and her throat cut, so that the fleet may sail. (Content note: a father's ritual killing of his daughter.) Aeschylus makes this the deed that seals Agamemnon's own death — the wound in Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, that will never close, and the just cause she will claim for murdering him. A major variant to flag: in a widespread and gentler tradition, dramatised by Euripides in the Iphigenia at Aulis and the Iphigenia among the Taurians, Artemis snatches Iphigenia away at the last instant, substituting a deer on the altar, and carries her off to the land of the Taurians (the Crimea) to serve as her priestess — so that the girl does not die at all, but is spared and lost to her family for years. Both versions were current in antiquity; Homer, notably, does not mention the sacrifice at all. The story is at its darkest and most consequential in the tragic version, where Iphigenia truly dies and her blood is the first of the debts that bring Agamemnon down.

+

Before the fleet can even sail, the curse exacts its first price from Agamemnon directly. Gathered at Aulis, the ships are held in harbour by a dead calm or by contrary winds sent by the goddess Artemis, angered — the tellings vary — by a boast of Agamemnon's, or by his killing of a sacred deer, or simply demanding a price for the passage. The seer Calchas declares that the winds will not turn until Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia. It is the most terrible choice in his story: to disband the army in disgrace, or to kill his child. He sends home for Iphigenia on the pretext that she is to be married to Achilles, and when she comes he has her led to the altar and her throat cut, so that the fleet may sail. (Content note: a father's ritual killing of his daughter.) Aeschylus makes this the deed that seals Agamemnon's own death — the wound in Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, that will never close, and the just cause she will claim for murdering him. A major variant to flag: in a widespread and gentler tradition — already told in the early epic Cypria (part of the cycle around Homer, known now from Proclus's summary), long before it reached the tragic stage — Artemis snatches Iphigenia away at the last instant, substitutes a deer on the altar, and carries her off to the land of the Taurians (the Crimea), where she is made immortal (in the tragedians she lives on there as the goddess's priestess). Euripides dramatised this rescue in the Iphigenia among the Taurians (and left it hanging as a last-moment possibility at the close of the Iphigenia at Aulis): in it the girl does not die at all, but is spared and lost to her family for years. Both versions were current in antiquity — the rescue is in fact the older, epic account — and Homer, notably, does not mention the sacrifice at all. The story is at its darkest and most consequential in the tragic version, where Iphigenia truly dies and her blood is the first of the debts that bring Agamemnon down.

The wrath of Achilles — the quarrel that opens the Iliad

The Iliad does not tell the whole war but a few weeks of its tenth and final year, and it begins with Agamemnon's pride. A plague is destroying the Greek army, sent by Apollo because Agamemnon has taken and refused to ransom Chryseis, the daughter of the god's priest Chryses. When the prophet Calchas reveals the cause, Agamemnon is forced to give the girl back — but, unwilling to be the only chief without a prize of honour (a geras), he compensates himself by seizing Briseis, the war-prize of Achilles, the greatest fighter in the army. It is a naked assertion of rank over merit, and it is a catastrophic misjudgement. Achilles, publicly dishonoured, withdraws himself and his Myrmidons from the fighting and prays through his goddess-mother Thetis that Zeus grant the Trojans victory until the Greeks learn what they lost in slighting him. The prayer is granted; the Greeks are driven back to their ships with terrible slaughter, and the death-toll of the whole poem — including, at last, Achilles' beloved Patroclus, and through him Achilles' own doom — flows from Agamemnon's refusal to master his pride. He comes eventually to admit his fault (Iliad 9, 19), offering vast gifts and Briseis back to win Achilles' return, and calling his own action atē, the blind ruin the gods send on men — but the reconciliation comes only over Patroclus's corpse. The Iliad's whole moral architecture rests on Agamemnon's hubris and what it costs: the poem's first word is mēnis, the wrath — Achilles' wrath, kindled by Agamemnon.

Agamemnon in the war

@@ -31,4 +31,4 @@

Agamemnon's most famous modern afterlife is an accident of archaeology. When Heinrich Schliemann excavated the shaft graves of Mycenae in 1876 and lifted a magnificent golden funeral mask from a Bronze Age burial, he is said to have declared, "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon" — and though the mask is in fact centuries too early to be his, the name has stuck: the "Mask of Agamemnon," now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, is one of the most recognisable objects to survive from the ancient world. Through it, and through the Lion Gate and the great walls of Mycenae, Agamemnon has become the human face of the whole Mycenaean age — the legendary king standing for a lost civilisation that history has since recovered in fact.

The tragedy that will not close

Above all Agamemnon endures through the tragedians, and through the questions his story forces. Aeschylus's Oresteia remains one of the foundational works of Western drama, staged and re-staged and rewritten across every generation, precisely because Agamemnon's murder is where the Greeks confronted the deepest problem of justice: how a cycle of vengeance, each killing "just" in the eyes of the killer, can ever be brought to an end. His death, and the trial of his avenger-son, mark the mythic birth of the law-court out of the blood-feud — a theme that has never lost its force. To read Agamemnon now is to meet the archetype of the great and flawed leader, magnificent and ruinous at once, and to weigh, as the Athenians did, what such greatness costs the people who follow it and the family that must live and die with it.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/andromeda/index.html b/deity/andromeda/index.html index 94af29b..7e55bfb 100644 --- a/deity/andromeda/index.html +++ b/deity/andromeda/index.html @@ -29,4 +29,4 @@

Far more than through any cult, Andromeda lives on where the ancients set her — in the stars. The constellation Andromeda still rides the northern autumn sky, the chained maiden with her arms outstretched, flanked by her husband Perseus, her parents Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and the sea-monster Cetus below — the one Greek myth that any clear night still tells in full. And her name marks the most famous object in that patch of sky: the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31), the great spiral two and a half million light-years away that is the most distant thing the naked human eye can see, and the nearest large galaxy to our own. Every stargazer who finds that faint smudge of light is, without knowing it, keeping the princess's name alive in exactly the way the ancients meant a catasterism to work.

The rescued princess in art and story

Andromeda endures, too, as one of the most painted women in the history of Western art. From the Roman frescoes of Pompeii through Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Pre-Raphaelites — Frederic Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda, Edward Burne-Jones's great Perseus cycle — the chained maiden and her winged rescuer have drawn painters for two thousand years, and the scene remains a touchstone of the whole rescue-narrative tradition. Her story stands behind every later tale of the captive maiden freed by a hero, from the dragon-slaying legends of the Middle Ages to the fairy tales and films of the present day; the image she gave the world — innocence bound to the rock and delivered at the last moment — is one of the oldest and most enduring patterns in storytelling.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/bellerophon/index.html b/deity/bellerophon/index.html index 1e4ed75..a9917e4 100644 --- a/deity/bellerophon/index.html +++ b/deity/bellerophon/index.html @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@

Bellerophon began his exile in the house of Proetus, king of Tiryns (or of Argos), who received the young man as a guest and purified him of an earlier killing. But Proetus's wife — Homer calls her Anteia, the tragedians Sthenoboea — conceived a violent passion for the handsome stranger, and when he refused her she turned her desire to hatred. She went to her husband and accused Bellerophon of the very crime she had attempted, swearing that he had tried to force himself upon her and demanding his death. (Content note: the tale turns on a false accusation of attempted rape and a plot to murder an innocent guest.)

Proetus believed her, but he would not kill a man who had eaten at his table — to murder a guest was to break the sacred bond of hospitality that the gods themselves protect. So he chose a colder path. He sent Bellerophon away to Lycia, to the court of his father-in-law Iobates, and gave him a folded tablet to carry, scratched inside with "baneful signs" and instructions that the bearer be put to death. Bellerophon, not knowing he carried his own death warrant, delivered it faithfully — and from this moment comes the ancient phrase, the "Bellerophontic letter," the message whose carrier bears his own doom sealed in his hand.

The golden bridle and the taming of Pegasus

-

Before the tasks could be met, Bellerophon needed the winged horse. The tradition tells it so: the hero longed to master Pegasus, the immortal winged stallion, but the horse could not be caught by any ordinary means. Sleeping in the temple of Athena, Bellerophon received the goddess in a dream, and she set beside him a golden bridle — and when he woke, the bridle lay there in truth, no dream but a gift. With it he came to the spring of Peirene in Corinth, where Pegasus was drinking, and the golden bridle tamed the untamable horse at a touch. So mounted, on a steed born of the sea and the blood of Medusa, Bellerophon rose into the air, and the impossible errands of Lycia became possible. (Pegasus has his own tale and his own page; here he is the hero's mount and the instrument of his rise.)

+

Before the tasks could be met, Bellerophon needed the winged horse. The tradition tells it so: the hero longed to master Pegasus, the immortal winged stallion, but the horse could not be caught by any ordinary means. Sleeping in the temple of Athena, Bellerophon received the goddess in a dream, and she set beside him a golden bridle — and when he woke, the bridle lay there in truth, no dream but a gift. With it he came to the spring of Peirene in Corinth, where Pegasus was drinking, and the golden bridle tamed the untamable horse at a touch (Pindar, Olympian 13.60–92). So mounted, on a steed born of the sea and the blood of Medusa, Bellerophon rose into the air, and the impossible errands of Lycia became possible. (Pegasus has his own tale and his own page; here he is the hero's mount and the instrument of his rise.)

The Chimera and the lead-tipped spear

Iobates, honouring his guest, feasted Bellerophon for nine days before he read the tablet — and then, bound like Proetus by the law of hospitality, he too would not kill the young man outright. Instead he set him a task no man was meant to survive: to slay the Chimera, the monster ravaging Lycia — a single creature part lion, part goat, part serpent, that breathed living fire. Flying above it on Pegasus, out of reach of its flame, Bellerophon still faced the problem of its breath, which no blade could pass. His answer was cunning as much as courage: he fixed a lump of lead to the point of his spear and drove it into the Chimera's jaws, and the monster's own fire melted the lead, which ran molten down its throat and choked and burned it from within. So the Chimera died by its own flame turned against it. (The Chimera has her own page, coming; here she is the first and greatest of Bellerophon's trials.)

The Solymi, the Amazons, and the ambush

diff --git a/deity/daedalus/index.html b/deity/daedalus/index.html index 4c0b9f4..8f0b537 100644 --- a/deity/daedalus/index.html +++ b/deity/daedalus/index.html @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@

His life runs in three acts across three lands. He begins as an Athenian of royal descent, the most gifted artisan of his city — until jealousy drives him to murder his own nephew and apprentice, a boy more inventive than himself, and exile drives him to Crete. There, in the service of King Minos, he does the work for which he is best remembered: he builds the great Labyrinth at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur; he crafts the hollow wooden cow that lets Queen Pasiphaë satisfy her monstrous desire for the Cretan Bull; and he gives Princess Ariadne the secret of the thread that guides Theseus out of the maze alive. For that last betrayal Minos shuts him up in his own creation — and Daedalus, who cannot go by land or sea because Minos rules them both, invents the one road left: he makes wings of feathers and wax and flies. His son Icarus flies with him, and falls; and the master who could build anything could not save the one thing he loved.

The third act is escape and revenge-by-proxy: Daedalus flees to Sicily and the court of King Cocalus, where the pursuing Minos, tracking him by a clever riddle, meets his death in a scalding bath at the hands of Cocalus's daughters. Daedalus lives on there as a founder-hero of Sicilian craft. Across the whole arc he is the pattern of the maker whose ingenuity is never in doubt and whose judgment always is — the man clever enough to solve any problem, including the problems his own cleverness creates, but never wise enough to leave the deadly ones unsolved.

Mythology

The Athenian craftsman and the murder of his nephew

-

(Content note: this origin turns on the murder of a child.) Daedalus was born at Athens, of the royal house — the tradition makes him a descendant of the earth-born king Erechtheus, his father named as Eupalamus ("Skilful-hand") or Metion. From the first he was the marvel of the city, the sculptor and inventor without equal. But his gift had a rival under his own roof. His sister had given him her son to raise and teach — a boy called Perdix in some tellings and Talos in others (not to be confused with the bronze giant of Crete who shares the name) — and the apprentice proved even more inventive than the master. Walking on the shore, the boy took the spine of a fish, or the jaw of a snake, and copied its row of teeth in iron: he had invented the saw. He devised the potter's compass, two arms of iron joined at a pivot, one fixed and one tracing a circle. Consumed by envy that a child should outstrip him, Daedalus led the boy up onto the Acropolis and, on the pretext of showing him the view, threw him headlong from the height.

+

(Content note: this origin turns on the murder of a child.) Daedalus was born at Athens, of the royal house — the tradition makes him a descendant of the earth-born king Erechtheus, his father named as Eupalamus ("Skilful-hand") or Metion. From the first he was the marvel of the city, the sculptor and inventor without equal. But his gift had a rival under his own roof. His sister had given him her son to raise and teach — a boy called Perdix in some tellings, Talos or Calos (Kalos) in others (the Talos here not to be confused with the bronze giant of Crete who shares the name) — and the apprentice proved even more inventive than the master. Walking on the shore, the boy took the spine of a fish, or the jaw of a snake, and copied its row of teeth in iron: he had invented the saw. He devised the potter's compass, two arms of iron joined at a pivot, one fixed and one tracing a circle. Consumed by envy that a child should outstrip him, Daedalus led the boy up onto the Acropolis and, on the pretext of showing him the view, threw him headlong from the height.

As the boy fell, the goddess Athena — patroness of craftsmen, who loved ingenuity — caught him in pity and changed him into a bird, the partridge (in Greek perdix), which took his name. The partridge remembers the fall: it never nests or flies high, but keeps low to the ground and builds in the hedgerows, wary of heights, its old terror bred into the species forever. Daedalus buried the little body in secret, but the crime came out; the court of the Areopagus condemned him for murder, and he fled Athens into exile — the first of the flights that shape his life. So the master craftsman's story opens not with a marvel but with a jealousy dark enough to kill, the shadow that follows all his brilliance afterward.

Crete, Minos, and the wooden cow of Pasiphaë

(Content note: this episode involves bestiality and its monstrous offspring.) Daedalus came at last to Crete, to the great palace at Knossos and the service of King Minos, the most powerful ruler of the age, and there he found a patron worthy of his skill. But the house of Minos was under a curse. Minos had prayed to Poseidon for a sign of his right to rule, and the god had sent a magnificent bull from the sea to be sacrificed back to him; Minos, coveting the beast, sacrificed a lesser one and kept the sea-bull for himself. In revenge Poseidon afflicted Minos's queen, Pasiphaë, with an unnatural passion for the animal — a consuming desire to couple with the Cretan Bull.

diff --git a/deity/hector/index.html b/deity/hector/index.html index 5211f73..fc7c6b0 100644 --- a/deity/hector/index.html +++ b/deity/hector/index.html @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@

The duel with Achilles and the flight round the walls (Iliad 22)

The death of Patroclus brings Achilles roaring back into the war, transformed by grief into a force of almost pure destruction, caring now for nothing but to kill Hector and avenge his friend. New armour is forged for him by Hephaestus, and he sweeps the Trojans before him in carnage back to the very gates of the city. And here comes the climax of the whole poem, Iliad 22. The Trojans flee inside the walls — all but Hector, who alone will not go in. His father Priam and his mother Hecuba call down from the ramparts, begging him to come inside, not to face Achilles; Priam foretells his own ruin and the sack of the city over his son's corpse; Hecuba bares her breast and pleads. But Hector stays, wrestling with himself: shame will not let him retreat behind the walls after his own overconfidence has cost so many Trojan lives, and he knows the fault is partly his. For a moment he thinks of setting down his arms and offering Achilles Helen and all the treasure back — but he knows Achilles is past bargaining and would cut him down defenceless. Then Achilles comes on like the war-god himself, and at the last, Hector's nerve breaks: he turns and runs. Three times the two of them race around the great walls of Troy, Achilles the swifter but unable to close the gap, Hector unable to reach the safety of a gate, while the watching gods look on and the whole city holds its breath. At last Athena, who means Hector to die, works the final cruelty: she takes the shape of his brother Deiphobus and appears at his side, promising to stand and fight beside him — and Hector, heartened, no longer flees but turns to face Achilles two against one. He casts his spear; it strikes Achilles' god-made shield and bounces off; he turns to call Deiphobus for a fresh spear — and Deiphobus is not there. The goddess has vanished. In that instant Hector understands everything: the gods have tricked him, his death is here, he is alone. "So now my death is upon me," he says. But he will not die without a fight, "not without a struggle, nor ingloriously, but in some great deed for men to come to hear of" — and he draws his sword and rushes in. Achilles, knowing every weak point of his own old armour that Hector now wears, drives his spear through the one gap at the throat, and Hector falls. Dying, he begs Achilles for one thing: not to let the dogs and birds tear his body, but to give it back to his parents for burial, for a ransom of bronze and gold. Achilles refuses him savagely — he wishes he could eat Hector's flesh raw for what Hector's people have done — and Hector, with his last breath, warns him that his own death waits at the Scaean Gate, at the hands of Paris and Apollo. Then he dies, and his soul goes wailing down to Hades, "leaving manhood and youth behind."

The dishonouring of the body

-

(Content note: mutilation and abuse of a corpse.) What follows is the ugliest thing Achilles does, and Homer means it to appal. In his unslaked grief and rage, Achilles will not let the body rest. He pierces the tendons of Hector's ankles, threads them with a leather thong, and binds the corpse behind his chariot, and drags it face-down in the dust from the walls of Troy all the way back to the Greek camp, the head that was once so beautiful trailing and fouled in the dirt — while on the walls above, Hecuba shrieks and tears her hair, Priam has to be held back from rushing out through the gates, and Andromache, who has been quietly weaving indoors and heating a bath for a husband she does not yet know is dead, hears the wailing, runs to the wall, sees her husband's body dragged toward the ships, and faints away, the bright headdress Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day falling from her head. Day after day, through the funeral games for Patroclus and beyond, Achilles drags Hector's body around Patroclus's tomb, trying to work off a grief that cannot be worked off. But the gods will not permit the outrage to stand: Apollo wraps the corpse in a golden cloud and keeps it whole and unmarred, untouched by rot or wound, no matter how it is abused — for even in death Hector is beloved of the gods, and even the immortals are sickened by what Achilles is doing.

+

(Content note: mutilation and abuse of a corpse.) What follows is the ugliest thing Achilles does, and Homer means it to appal. In his unslaked grief and rage, Achilles will not let the body rest. He pierces the tendons of Hector's ankles, threads them with a leather thong, and binds the corpse behind his chariot, and drags it face-down in the dust from the walls of Troy all the way back to the Greek camp, the head that was once so beautiful trailing and fouled in the dirt — while on the walls above, Hecuba shrieks and tears her hair, Priam has to be held back from rushing out through the gates, and Andromache, who has been quietly weaving indoors and heating a bath for a husband she does not yet know is dead, hears the wailing, runs to the wall, sees her husband's body dragged toward the ships, and faints away, the bright headdress Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day falling from her head. Day after day, through the funeral games for Patroclus and beyond, Achilles drags Hector's body around Patroclus's tomb, trying to work off a grief that cannot be worked off. But the gods will not permit the outrage to stand. Aphrodite keeps the dogs from the body day and night and anoints it with rose-scented ambrosial oil, so that Achilles cannot tear it as he drags it (Iliad 23.184–187); and Apollo draws a cloud down over the corpse — Homer at last calls it the golden aegis (Iliad 24.18–21) — and keeps it whole and unmarred, untouched by rot or wound, no matter how it is abused. For even in death Hector is beloved of the gods, and even the immortals are sickened by what Achilles is doing.

The ransom of Hector (Iliad 24)

The Iliad, which began with the wrath of Achilles, ends not with a battle but with an act of mercy, and it is the most moving thing in the poem. The gods in council decide the abuse must stop; Zeus sends word by Thetis that Achilles must give the body back, and sends the goddess Iris to old Priam with the astonishing command that the king should go, alone but for one aged herald, into the enemy camp by night to ransom his son. Guided in secret by Hermes, who takes the shape of a young squire and leads him unseen past the Greek sentries, the old king comes to Achilles' hut in the dark, and does the thing no one watching could have believed: he kneels before the man who has killed so many of his sons and killed and defiled his best, and he takes Achilles' hands — "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons" — and kisses them, and begs. He asks Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus, far away and old, who at least still hopes to see his son come home; Priam has no such hope, and has done what no other man on earth has ever done, to raise to his lips the hands of the man who slew his children. And Achilles, hearing this, is broken open. He thinks of his own father whom he will never see again, and of Patroclus, and the two of them, the old enemy king and the young killer, weep together in the hut — Priam for Hector, Achilles for Patroclus and for Peleus — until the whole tent is filled with the sound of their grief. Then Achilles, gentled at last, raises the old man up, and grants him the body, and has it washed and anointed and wrapped with his own hands so that Priam will not see it defiled and cry out; and the two of them eat together and look at each other in wonder, the old king marvelling at the young man's beauty and the young man at the king's nobility. Achilles promises a truce of eleven days so that Troy may mourn and bury Hector properly, and sends Priam home with his son's body in a wagon. The poem closes with the burial: the lamentations of Andromache, of Hecuba, and of Helen — who mourns Hector as the one man in Troy who was always kind to her and never spoke a harsh word — the raising of the pyre, the gathering of the bones into a golden casket, the heaping of the great mound, and the funeral feast in Priam's halls. And the last line of the Iliad is his: "Such was the burial of Hector, tamer of horses."

After the Iliad — the ruin foretold

@@ -31,4 +31,4 @@

More than through formal cult, Hector endures as one of literature's first and greatest portraits of the sympathetic enemy — the good man on the losing side, braver than his cause and gentler than his trade, whom the storytellers refused to flatten into a villain. Every later tragedy and epic that grants dignity and inner life to the opponent is in some sense his heir. His name has passed into the language: "to hector" someone came, by a strange later turn, to mean to bully or bluster (from the swaggering Hector of medieval and Renaissance drama, a coarsening of the Homeric figure), even though the Homeric Hector is the opposite of a bully; and "Hector" remains a living given name across Europe. In the medieval "Nine Worthies," the great exemplars of chivalry, Hector stood first among the three pagan heroes, remembered as the very model of the noble knight.

The farewell that never loses its force

Above all, Hector lives on through the two scenes Homer gave him that have never been surpassed: the farewell at the Scaean Gate, where a soldier lifts off his terrifying helmet so his baby will know him and prays for a son who will be better than himself — perhaps the most humane moment in ancient literature — and the ransoming of his body, where a grieving father and the killer of his son weep together and, for one night, the war stops. Poets, novelists, and scholars return to these again and again; they are taught wherever the Iliad is read, and they remain the clearest proof of why the Greeks chose to end their national epic not with a triumph but with the funeral of the enemy they loved best: "Such was the burial of Hector, tamer of horses."

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/heracles/index.html b/deity/heracles/index.html index 10cda76..9006516 100644 --- a/deity/heracles/index.html +++ b/deity/heracles/index.html @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@

Sidebar — The Choice of Herakles

The philosopher Prodicus told a parable that the Greeks never forgot (preserved for us by Xenophon in the Memorabilia). When Herakles was a youth coming to manhood, he went out to a quiet place to consider what path his life should take, and there two women, tall and grave, came to him where the road forked. One was Vice (Kakia), gorgeously adorned and painted, who promised him a life of ease, pleasure and shortcuts, with every appetite fed and no hardship borne. The other was Virtue (Arete), plain and modest and clear-eyed, who promised him nothing easy: only that the good is won through toil, that the gods give no true prize without labour, and that honour must be earned. Herakles chose the harder road of Virtue — and his whole life of labour is the choosing of it, over and over. The Choice of Herakles at the crossroads became one of the most enduring images of the ancient world, a byword for the moral decision every person faces between the easy wrong and the difficult right.

Death and apotheosis — the shirt of Nessus and the pyre on Oeta

-

Herakles' end came, as so much of his life did, through the poison of the Hydra returning upon him. He had taken a later wife, Deianira, and while carrying her across a river the centaur Nessus tried to assault her; Herakles shot the centaur with one of his Hydra-poisoned arrows. As Nessus died he told Deianira a lie disguised as a gift: to keep her the blood from his wound, he said, would be a charm to hold her husband's love forever. Long after, fearing Herakles' affection was straying, Deianira soaked a robe in the centaur's blood — not knowing it was steeped in the Hydra's venom — and sent it to him. When Herakles put on the shirt of Nessus, the poison burned into his flesh and could not be removed, tearing at him with agony no strength could master. Knowing he could not be healed, he had a great pyre built on Mount Oeta, climbed onto it, and asked to be burned — and when at last a passing hero (Philoctetes, who received the great bow for the kindness) set it alight, the flames took his mortal part. But the immortal part of him, the divine inheritance of Zeus, did not die. Herakles was taken up to Olympus in a chariot, made a god among the gods, and there at last he was reconciled with Hera, whose enmity had driven his whole life; in token of the peace between them he was given her daughter Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth, as his immortal bride. So the hero named "glory of Hera" came, through all her hatred and all his suffering, to be her son-in-law and a deathless god — the one mortal who endured his way onto Olympus.

+

Herakles' end came, as so much of his life did, through the poison of the Hydra returning upon him. He had taken a later wife, Deianira, and when the couple came to the river Euenos the centaur Nessus, who plied the crossing as its ferryman, took her upon his back to carry her over — and midway across tried to rape her. Herakles heard her cry out and shot the centaur down with one of his Hydra-poisoned arrows. As Nessus died he told Deianira a lie disguised as a gift: to keep her the blood from his wound, he said, would be a charm to hold her husband's love forever. Long after, fearing Herakles' affection was straying, Deianira soaked a robe in the centaur's blood — not knowing it was steeped in the Hydra's venom — and sent it to him. When Herakles put on the shirt of Nessus, the poison burned into his flesh and could not be removed, tearing at him with agony no strength could master. Knowing he could not be healed, he had a great pyre built on Mount Oeta, climbed onto it, and asked to be burned — and when at last a passing hero (Philoctetes, who received the great bow for the kindness) set it alight, the flames took his mortal part. But the immortal part of him, the divine inheritance of Zeus, did not die. Herakles was taken up to Olympus in a chariot, made a god among the gods, and there at last he was reconciled with Hera, whose enmity had driven his whole life; in token of the peace between them he was given her daughter Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth, as his immortal bride. So the hero named "glory of Hera" came, through all her hatred and all his suffering, to be her son-in-law and a deathless god — the one mortal who endured his way onto Olympus.

Worship — Ancient

Hero and god — a double cult

What sets Herakles apart in Greek religion is that he was worshipped in two ways at once — both as a hero and as a god. The distinction mattered deeply to the Greeks: heroes were honoured with chthonic rites at their tombs, with offerings poured downward into the earth for a powerful dead man, while the Olympian gods received burnt sacrifice on raised altars with the smoke rising to heaven. Herakles alone was regularly given both. Herodotus already notes the practice (2.44): the wisest course, he was told, was to sacrifice to Herakles in two manners — to the one Herakles as to an immortal god, and to the other as to a hero. This twofold cult is the ritual face of the truth his myth tells: he is the mortal who became divine, and the worshipper meets him on both sides of that threshold.

Wide worship and the founding of cities

diff --git a/deity/jason/index.html b/deity/jason/index.html index 1fef1f7..83b3b0c 100644 --- a/deity/jason/index.html +++ b/deity/jason/index.html @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@

Jason was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcus in Thessaly, but the throne had been seized by Aeson's half-brother Pelias. Fearing for the infant's life, Jason's parents smuggled him out of the city and gave him to be raised in secret on Mount Pelion, in the cave of the centaur Chiron — the wise, immortal tutor of heroes, healer and teacher, who reared the boy through his whole childhood in the mountain wilderness and taught him the arts of medicine, music, and the hunt. (It is from this healing lore that the ancients derived his name, Iason, "the healer.") So Jason grew to manhood far from the city that was his by right, knowing nothing of courts.

Pelias, meanwhile, had been warned by an oracle to beware the man wearing a single sandal. Years later, when Pelias held a great sacrifice, a tall young stranger came down out of the hills — long-haired, clad in a leopard-skin, and wearing only one sandal, having lost the other while carrying an old woman (the goddess Hera in disguise, the tradition says) across the flooded river Anauros. Pelias saw the single sandal and knew his doom had come. He asked the young man what he would do if an oracle told him he would be killed by one of his own people; Jason (prompted by Hera, some say) answered that he would send that man after the Golden Fleece — the hide of a magical golden ram, which hung in a sacred grove in far-off Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea, guarded by a serpent that never slept. Pelias seized on the answer and laid the quest on Jason himself, promising the throne in return, certain the young man would never return alive.

The Argo and the voyage out

-

Jason accepted the impossible task and had a great ship built for it — the Argo, constructed by the shipwright Argus with the help of Athena, who set into its prow a speaking beam of oak from the oracle of Dodona, so that the ship itself could prophesy. He then sent out a summons across Greece, and the finest heroes of the generation before Troy answered it: among the Argonauts came Heracles, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, the winged sons of the North Wind Zetes and Calais, the great singer Orpheus whose music kept the rowers in time, the keen-eyed helmsman Tiphys, the seer Idmon, and many more — the roll of the crew is one of the great catalogues of Greek myth.

+

Jason accepted the impossible task and had a great ship built for it — the Argo, constructed by the shipwright Argus with the help of Athena, who set into its prow a speaking beam of oak from the oracle of Dodona, so that the ship itself could prophesy. He then sent out a summons across Greece, and the finest heroes of the generation before Troy answered it: among the Argonauts came Heracles, the twins Castor and Polydeuces, the winged sons of the North Wind Zetes and Calais, the great singer Orpheus whose music kept the rowers in time, the keen-eyed helmsman Tiphys, the seer Idmon, Peleus and Telamon (fathers-to-be of Achilles and Ajax), and Lynceus, whose sight was so sharp he was said to see through the very earth; some lists add the huntress Atalanta, though Apollonius has Jason leave her behind, fearing that one woman among so many men would breed strife. The roll of the crew is one of the great catalogues of Greek myth.

The voyage out was a chain of wonders and dangers. On the island of Lemnos the Argonauts found a kingdom of women who had killed all their men, and lingered there in the beds of the Lemnian women — Jason with their queen Hypsipyle — before Heracles shamed them back to the sea. They passed through the country of the Doliones and, by tragic accident, killed their own host King Cyzicus in a night battle. They lost Heracles himself when his beloved companion Hylas was drawn down into a spring by a water-nymph and Heracles refused to sail on without him. At Salmydessus in Thrace they came to the blind prophet Phineus, whom the gods punished for misusing his gift of prophecy by sending the Harpies — foul winged snatchers — to befoul and steal his food at every meal, so that he was slowly starving. The winged sons of the North Wind drove the Harpies off through the sky, and in gratitude Phineus told the Argonauts the whole course ahead and how to survive its greatest peril. (The Harpies are treated in their own entry.)

That peril was the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks (also called the Cyanean Rocks) at the mouth of the Black Sea — two cliffs that crashed together to crush anything passing between them. On Phineus's advice, the Argonauts loosed a dove to fly through first: the rocks smashed shut and clipped only the tips of its tail-feathers, then drew apart, and in that instant the Argo drove through under oar with Athena's hand at the stern, losing only the tip of its own stern-ornament as the cliffs closed behind. It was said that after the Argo passed, the Clashing Rocks were fixed forever and never moved again. Beyond them lay the open eastern sea and, at last, the kingdom of Colchis.

Medea and the three feats at Colchis

diff --git a/deity/meleager/index.html b/deity/meleager/index.html index ce2e59b..9e6fd7d 100644 --- a/deity/meleager/index.html +++ b/deity/meleager/index.html @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@

The son of King Oeneus and Queen Althaea of Calydon (both prose figures in these pages, not divine ancestors), Meleager belongs to the heroic age of gatherings and quests: the Argonauts, the boar hunt, the wars of Aetolia. Yet what makes him unforgettable is not simply his valour but the terrible economy of his death. At his birth, the story goes, the three Fates came to the house and foretold the length of his days — and his own mother, hearing it, seized the one object on which that length depended and hid it away, so that for years the hero's life sat locked in a chest, a piece of half-burnt wood no fire could be allowed to touch.

Because Meleager's oldest appearance, in Homer's Iliad, tells his story without any burning brand at all, he stands at a fascinating fork in the tradition. To the archaic poet he is a warrior undone by his own wrath and his mother's curse — a mirror held up to Achilles. To the later poets, above all Ovid, he is a man whose life is literally a log on the hearth, extinguished by a mother's grief-maddened hand. Both versions are preserved here, side by side, as two ancient memories of the same doomed prince.

Mythology

The Fates and the burning brand

-

When Meleager was born to Althaea, queen of Calydon, the three Moirai — the Fates, spinners of every mortal's destiny (they have their own page) — came to the house to pronounce his lot. Clotho said the child would be noble, and Lachesis that he would be brave; but Atropos, she who cannot be turned, looked to the log then burning on the hearth and declared that the boy would live only so long as that piece of wood remained unconsumed. The moment the Fates departed, Althaea sprang from her childbed, snatched the blazing brand from the fire, quenched it, and hid it away in a chest, guarding it through all the years of her son's growing. So Meleager came to manhood with his life kept, quite literally, under lock and key — a hero whose death would come not by spear or sickness but by fire, whenever the hidden wood should burn. This is the version told most fully by Ovid (Metamorphoses 8) and by the mythographers; it does not appear in Homer, and belongs to the strand of the tradition that made his fate a matter of sympathetic magic between a man and a log.

+

When Meleager was born to Althaea, queen of Calydon, the three Moirai — the Fates, spinners of every mortal's destiny (they have their own page) — came to the house to pronounce his lot. Clotho said the child would be noble, and Lachesis that he would be brave; but Atropos, she who cannot be turned, looked to the log then burning on the hearth and declared that the boy would live only so long as that piece of wood remained unconsumed. The moment the Fates departed, Althaea sprang from her childbed, snatched the blazing brand from the fire, quenched it, and hid it away in a chest, guarding it through all the years of her son's growing. So Meleager came to manhood with his life kept, quite literally, under lock and key — a hero whose death would come not by spear or sickness but by fire, whenever the hidden wood should burn. This firebrand version is already attested in early Greek verse — in Bacchylides (Ode 5), where Meleager's own shade, met by Heracles in the underworld, tells how his mother burned the log that was his life — and it is set down in full by the mythographer Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 1.8.2–3); the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 8) only later gave it its most elaborate telling. It does not appear in Homer, and belongs to the strand of the tradition that made his fate a matter of sympathetic magic between a man and a log.

The Calydonian boar hunt

King Oeneus of Calydon, giving thanks at harvest, made offerings to all the gods — but forgot, or slighted, Artemis alone. The goddess of the wild does not forgive neglect, and in her anger she loosed upon the fields of Calydon a boar of monstrous size, a beast with bristles like spears and tusks like an elephant's, that trampled the crops, gored the herds and the herdsmen, and shut the people behind their walls. Against this scourge Meleager summoned the finest hunters and heroes of Greece, and they came: among them Meleager's uncles, the brothers of Althaea; the twins Castor and Polydeuces; Theseus and Peirithous; Jason; the swift-footed Idas and Lynceus; Ancaeus and Cepheus; the seer Amphiaraus; Nestor in his youth — and, alone among the men, a woman: Atalanta of Arcadia, the virgin huntress sworn to Artemis (she has her own page here). The gathering of so many named heroes made the hunt one of the great "assemblies" of myth, rivalled only by the voyage of the Argo.

The chase was bloody and confused. The boar broke from a marshy thicket and scattered the hunters, killing several outright and maiming others; spears flew wide, and some struck their own throwers' companions in the chaos. It was Atalanta who drew first blood, planting an arrow behind the beast's ear — and then, as it turned in its fury, Meleager drove his spear home and killed it. The greatest monster of the age lay dead in the Aetolian mud, and the honour of the kill was his to award.

diff --git a/deity/narcissus/index.html b/deity/narcissus/index.html index d8ee06e..c95e7e7 100644 --- a/deity/narcissus/index.html +++ b/deity/narcissus/index.html @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@

The flower on the empty ground

When the nymphs of the wood, and the grieving Echo, came to gather his body for the funeral fire, they found no body at all: it had vanished from the place where it lay. In its stead they found a flower — white petals set about a heart of yellow — growing where the beautiful youth had died, and this is the flower that has been called narcissus ever after. So the transformation that gives the myth its shape and its name: the boy who bent over the water forever becomes the nodding flower that still leans, in gardens and by streams, as if to look at its own reflection in the pool below.

The Boeotian variant — a lost twin, and the doubting of Pausanias

-

Ovid's is the version the world remembers, but it is a Roman literary telling, the fullest and most artful, and not the only shape the story took. The traveller Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.31.7), describing the spring of Narcissus on Mount Helicon in his native Boeotia, preserves a darker and quite different local tale — and adds a rare note of open scepticism. In this Boeotian version Narcissus had a twin sister, his exact double in looks, whom he loved dearly; and when the girl died, the grieving Narcissus took to visiting a spring, and there, seeing his own reflection, he consoled his grief by imagining that he saw not himself but his lost sister looking back at him. Pausanias, the rationalist, rejects even this softened account, and dismisses the whole idea of a man not knowing his own reflection as sheer folly — remarking drily that a person old enough to fall in love is surely old enough to tell a real face from an image in the water. The mythographer Conon (Narrations 24) gives yet another version, set at Thespiae, in which a rejected male lover named Ameinias, driven to despair by Narcissus's cruelty, kills himself with a sword Narcissus had sent him and calls down a curse with his dying breath — after which Narcissus, seeing himself in a spring, falls in love, despairs in turn, and takes his own life; and from his blood springs the flower. These older Greek versions are grimmer and less tender than Ovid's, closer to a simple morality-tale of cruelty punished, and it is worth remembering that behind the exquisite Roman poem lies a harder local legend of pride and its price.

+

Ovid's is the version the world remembers, but it is a Roman literary telling, the fullest and most artful, and not the only shape the story took. The traveller Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.31.7), describing the spring of Narcissus on Mount Helicon in his native Boeotia, preserves a darker and quite different local tale — and adds a rare note of open scepticism. In this Boeotian version Narcissus had a twin sister, his exact double in looks, whom he loved dearly; and when the girl died, the grieving Narcissus took to visiting a spring, and there, seeing his own reflection, he consoled his grief by imagining that he saw not himself but his lost sister looking back at him. Pausanias, the rationalist, rejects even this softened account, and dismisses the whole idea of a man not knowing his own reflection as sheer folly — remarking drily that a person old enough to fall in love is surely old enough to tell a real face from an image in the water. The mythographer Conon (Narrations 24) gives yet another version, set at Thespiae, in which a rejected male lover named Ameinias, driven to despair by Narcissus's cruelty, kills himself with a sword Narcissus had sent him and calls down a curse with his dying breath — after which Narcissus, seeing himself in a spring, falls in love, despairs in turn, and takes his own life; and from his blood springs the flower. A further and genuinely old Greek witness came to light only in modern times, recovered from the sands of Egypt: a fragment of Greek hexameter verse, the Oxyrhynchus papyrus catalogued as P.Oxy. 4711 and tentatively attributed to the Hellenistic poet Parthenius of Nicaea (first century BC, an elder contemporary of Ovid), which tells the same tale and has Narcissus, in shame at his hopeless love for his own image, put an end to himself. Together with Conon, this fragment shows that the harsher ending — in which the youth kills himself outright rather than simply melting away at the water's edge — was already current in Greek before Ovid, and that the Roman poet's exquisite death-by-pining was in part a softening of a bleaker Greek original. These older Greek versions are grimmer and less tender than Ovid's, closer to a simple morality-tale of cruelty punished, and it is worth remembering that behind the exquisite Roman poem lies a harder local legend of pride and its price.

Worship — Ancient

A figure of story, not of cult

Narcissus was not a god and received no worship: he belongs to the class of mythical mortals — beautiful, doomed youths transformed at death — whose place in Greek religion is not the altar but the story, the landscape, and the flower. There was no temple of Narcissus, no festival, no priesthood; what the ancients kept of him was a tale told to explain a plant and to point a moral, and a place or two in Boeotia that claimed his memory. His function in the ancient imagination was that of a warning-figure and an origin-story rolled together: the youth whose fate accounts for the narcissus flower, and whose ruin illustrates, more sharply than any sermon could, the cost of pride and the danger of self-love.

The spring on Helicon

@@ -29,4 +29,4 @@

The plainest legacy is the one you can grow in a garden. The narcissus — the botanical genus that includes the daffodil and the jonquil — is a real and common spring flower, and it carries the youth's name in every language of botany, so that the transformation at the end of the myth is, in a sense, permanent and everywhere: the boy really did become a flower, and the flower is still here. The old fancy that the narcissus bends over streams and pools as if gazing at its own reflection has clung to it ever since, and gardeners and poets alike still read the drooping bloom as the image of the self-regarding youth frozen forever at the water's edge.

An enduring emblem in art and thought

Beyond the word and the flower, Narcissus has remained one of the most painted, written, and thought-about of all the myths. Painters from Caravaggio — whose famous canvas shows the youth and his reflection joined in a single dark circle — to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists (Salvador Dalí's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus") have returned again and again to the image of the boy at the pool; poets and essayists have used him as the type of self-love, of the artist's self-absorption, of the age of the mirror and the selfie. He endures because the thing he stands for never dates: the hunger to be admired, the difficulty of truly loving another, the trap of seeing in other people only a reflection of oneself. The Golden Thread keeps him as the tradition kept him — beautiful, cold, and doomed, the great warning at the water's edge, from whose ruin came a flower and a word we still cannot do without.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/odysseus/index.html b/deity/odysseus/index.html index 9de1eda..372b49f 100644 --- a/deity/odysseus/index.html +++ b/deity/odysseus/index.html @@ -6,13 +6,13 @@

The taker of Troy: the Palladium and the Wooden Horse

Odysseus is, before all else, the mind that finally broke Troy — his signature is not a duel but a stratagem. Two feats stand out. First, with Diomedes, he crept into the besieged city by night and stole the Palladium, the ancient wooden image of Athena on which, prophecy said, the safety of Troy depended; some tellings have him slip in first alone, disguised in rags and self-inflicted wounds as a beaten beggar, scouting the city (Helen recognised him but kept his secret). And then, at the last, the Wooden Horse. When ten years of war had taken neither the walls nor the will of Troy, it was Odysseus who devised the trick that did: a great hollow horse of wood, built by Epeius, left on the empty plain as a pretended offering to Athena while the Greek fleet sailed out of sight to wait behind the island of Tenedos. Inside, in the dark and the cramped silence, sat Odysseus and the best of the Greeks. He held them steady when Helen walked around the horse calling out in the voices of their own wives to lure them into answering, and he throttled the impulse of the man who nearly cried out. The Trojans, deceived by Sinon's false tale and heedless of Laocoön's and Cassandra's warnings, dragged the horse inside their own walls; in the night the hidden men climbed down, opened the gates, and let in the returning army, and Troy that had stood for ten years fell in one. It is the purest emblem of Odysseus: the city that could not be stormed was talked and tricked into destroying itself.

The homecoming begins: the Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, and the Cyclops

-

(Content note: the wanderings that follow include the deaths of all Odysseus's companions, cannibalism, and, at the end, mass killing.) Homer's Odyssey tells the ten-year nostos — the homeward voyage — mostly through Odysseus's own mouth, as a tale he spins for his hosts. Sailing from Troy his men first sacked the city of the Cicones and, drunk on plunder, refused to leave until a counter-attack cut them down; then a storm drove them to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, whose honeyed fruit made the men who tasted it forget all thought of home, so that Odysseus had to drag them weeping back to the ships and bind them under the benches. Worst and most famous was the island of the Cyclopes. (Cross-reference to come — Polyphemus.) Odysseus led a scouting party into the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, who trapped them behind a boulder no man could move and began eating them two at a time. Odysseus's answer was pure mētis: he gave the giant strong wine and told him his name was Outis, "Nobody"; when Polyphemus was drunk and asleep, they drove a sharpened, fire-hardened stake into his single eye. Blinded, the Cyclops roared for help, but when his neighbours called through the door who was hurting him he bellowed "Nobody!" — and they went away. Odysseus and the survivors escaped at dawn lashed beneath the giant's rams. But here his cunning shades into the flaw that dooms the voyage: safely aboard, he could not resist shouting back his true name, and Polyphemus prayed to his father Poseidon to curse the homecoming — that Odysseus reach Ithaca late, alone, in a stranger's ship, and find grief in his house. The sea-god heard.

+

(Content note: the wanderings that follow include the deaths of all Odysseus's companions, cannibalism, and, at the end, mass killing.) Homer's Odyssey tells the ten-year nostos — the homeward voyage — mostly through Odysseus's own mouth, as a tale he spins for his hosts. Sailing from Troy his men first sacked Ismarus, the city of the Cicones, and, drunk on plunder, refused to leave until a counter-attack cut them down; then a storm drove them to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, whose honeyed fruit made the men who tasted it forget all thought of home, so that Odysseus had to drag them weeping back to the ships and bind them under the benches. Worst and most famous was the island of the Cyclopes. (Cross-reference to come — Polyphemus.) Odysseus led a scouting party into the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, who trapped them behind a boulder no man could move and began eating them two at a time. Odysseus's answer was pure mētis: he gave the giant strong wine and told him his name was Outis, "Nobody"; when Polyphemus was drunk and asleep, they drove a sharpened, fire-hardened stake into his single eye. Blinded, the Cyclops roared for help, but when his neighbours called through the door who was hurting him he bellowed "Nobody!" — and they went away. Odysseus and the survivors escaped at dawn lashed beneath the giant's rams. But here his cunning shades into the flaw that dooms the voyage: safely aboard, he could not resist shouting back his true name, and Polyphemus prayed to his father Poseidon to curse the homecoming — that Odysseus reach Ithaca late, alone, in a stranger's ship, and find grief in his house. The sea-god heard.

Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Circe's island

Given the bag of winds by Aeolus, keeper of the winds, Odysseus came within sight of Ithaca's very shore — his men could see the fires — before his crew, suspecting he was hoarding treasure, opened the bag and loosed the storm that blew them all the way back. The cannibal Laestrygonians then smashed and speared all his ships but one. That single ship reached the island of Circe (cross-reference to come), the witch-goddess who turned his scouting party into swine with a stroke of her wand. Warned by Hermes and armed with the herb moly against her drugs, Odysseus alone withstood the spell, forced her at sword-point to release his men, and became her lover; for a year they feasted on her island before his crew reminded him of home. It was Circe who told him what he must do first: to sail to the very edge of the world and consult the dead.

The Nekyia: the journey to the land of the dead

-

So Odysseus did what few living men ever did — he went down to the borders of the Underworld (the Nekyia, the "rite of the dead," Book 11 of the Odyssey). At the grove of Persephone he dug a pit, poured offerings of milk, honey, wine and water, and let the black blood of sacrificed sheep pool in it, and the thronging shades of the dead came crowding up to drink and speak. He met the blind prophet Teiresias, who foretold his hard road home, the danger of the cattle of the Sun, and a strange final journey inland with an oar; he spoke with the shade of his own mother, Anticleia, dead of grief for him, and three times tried and failed to embrace her; he saw the great heroines and heroes, Agamemnon murdered at his homecoming, and Achilles, who told him he would rather be a landless serf among the living than king over all the dead — a line that shadows the whole poem's love of life and home. The descent is the still, dark centre of the wanderings: the man of many turns turning, for once, to face what waits at the end of every road.

+

So Odysseus did what few living men ever did — he went down to the borders of the Underworld (the Nekyia, the "rite of the dead," Book 11 of the Odyssey). At the grove of Persephone he dug a pit, poured offerings of milk, honey, wine and water, and let the black blood of sacrificed sheep pool in it, and the thronging shades of the dead came crowding up to drink and speak. He met the blind prophet Teiresias, who foretold his hard road home, the danger of the cattle of the Sun, and a strange final journey inland with an oar; he spoke with the shade of his own mother, Anticleia, dead of grief for him, and three times tried and failed to embrace her; he saw the great heroines and heroes, Agamemnon murdered at his homecoming, and Achilles, who told him he would rather be a landless serf among the living than king over all the dead — a line that shadows the whole poem's love of life and home. And he saw the shade of Ajax, still nursing his grief and wrath over the contest for the arms of Achilles, which Odysseus had won; when Odysseus spoke gently to him, Ajax answered nothing at all but turned away in furious silence and stalked off into the dark among the other dead — the most eloquent silence in Homer, the one soul the man of words could not reach. The descent is the still, dark centre of the wanderings: the man of many turns turning, for once, to face what waits at the end of every road.

The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of the Sun

-

Returning past Circe's isle for her final sailing-directions, Odysseus faced the last great perils. The Sirens (cross-reference to come) sang from their meadow of bones a song no sailor could hear and live, for it promised knowledge of all things; Odysseus, wanting both to survive and to know, had his men stop their own ears with wax and lash him upright to the mast with orders to bind him tighter the more he begged — and so he alone heard the song and lived. Then came the strait guarded on one side by Scylla, the six-headed monster in her cliff, and on the other by Charybdis, the whirlpool that swallowed the sea three times a day (cross-reference to come). Circe had told him the cruel arithmetic: there was no way through without loss, and better to lose six men to Scylla than the whole ship to the whirlpool. He said nothing to his crew, and as they rowed past, Scylla snatched six of his best companions and ate them writhing and screaming above his head — the most helpless moment of the voyage, a horror his cunning could not prevent, only survive. On the island of the Sun-god Helios, trapped by contrary winds and starving, his men at last broke the one taboo Teiresias had warned of and slaughtered the god's sacred cattle; for that sacrilege Zeus split their ship with a thunderbolt at sea and drowned every man. Odysseus alone survived, clinging to the keel, sucked back once through Charybdis and out again.

+

Returning past Circe's isle for her final sailing-directions, Odysseus faced the last great perils. The Sirens (cross-reference to come) sang from their meadow of bones a song no sailor could hear and live, for it promised knowledge of all things; Odysseus, wanting both to survive and to know, had his men stop their own ears with wax and lash him upright to the mast with orders to bind him tighter the more he begged — and so he alone heard the song and lived. Then came the strait guarded on one side by Scylla, the six-headed monster in her cliff, and on the other by Charybdis, the whirlpool that swallowed the sea three times a day (cross-reference to come). Circe had told him the cruel arithmetic: there was no way through without loss, and better to lose six men to Scylla than the whole ship to the whirlpool. He said nothing to his crew, and as they rowed past, Scylla snatched six of his best companions and ate them writhing and screaming above his head — the most helpless moment of the voyage, a horror his cunning could not prevent, only survive. On Thrinacia, the island of the Sun-god Helios, trapped by contrary winds and starving, his men at last broke the one taboo Teiresias had warned of and slaughtered the god's sacred cattle; for that sacrilege Zeus split their ship with a thunderbolt at sea and drowned every man. Odysseus alone survived, clinging to the keel, sucked back once through Charybdis and out again.

Calypso and the raft

Washed up alone on the island of Ogygia, Odysseus fell into the hands — and the bed — of the nymph Calypso, "the Hider," who kept him there seven long years, promising him agelessness and immortality if he would stay and be her husband forever. It is one of the poem's deepest tests, and its answer defines him: offered the one thing no other mortal is offered, an endless life free of suffering, he refuses it. Homer shows him sitting on the shore day after day, weeping and looking out over the barren sea toward home, so that though he lies in Calypso's arms by night he longs only for Penelope, who is mortal and ageing and cannot compare to a goddess — and whom he chooses anyway. At last Athena won Zeus's order for his release; Calypso, grieving, taught him to build a raft, and he set out again, only for Poseidon to wreck it in a final storm that left him swimming for two days to the friendly land of the Phaeacians. There, at the court of Alcinous, he told the whole tale of his wanderings, and there at last a magic ship carried the sleeping hero home and set him, with the treasure they gave him, on the shore of Ithaca.

The return to Ithaca: the disguise and the reckoning

@@ -20,6 +20,8 @@

Then Penelope — whether guessing the truth or simply exhausted of hope — announced a contest: she would marry the man who could string the great bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through the sockets of twelve axe-heads set in a row, a feat only her husband had ever done. One after another the suitors strained and failed even to bend the bow. The ragged beggar asked to try; over the suitors' jeers he strung it as easily as a bard fits a new string to his lyre, and sent the arrow clean through all twelve axes. Then he threw off his rags, leapt to the threshold with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen at his side, and turned the bow on the men who had eaten his house. (Content note: the slaughter that follows is deliberate and total.) He shot the ringleader Antinous through the throat, and then, the doors barred and no escape possible, he and his small band killed the suitors to the last man, and hanged the twelve serving-women who had gone over to them. It is the reckoning the whole poem has been driving toward — justice and massacre in the same act, the returning king washing his hall in blood.

The recognition by Penelope: the secret of the bed

One recognition remained, and it is the most famous test in the poem — for Penelope is Odysseus's equal in cunning, and she would not take a stranger's word, or even her own hope, for proof. Though he stood washed and restored before her, she remained coolly unconvinced, and to test him she ordered the servant Eurycleia to move their marriage-bed out of the bedchamber to make it up for the stranger. At that Odysseus flared: the bed could not be moved, he said, for he had built it himself around a living olive-tree still rooted in the ground, its trunk one of the bedposts, and no man could shift it unless he had cut it free. Only the two of them and one servant had ever known that secret. Hearing him name it, Penelope's knees went weak and her defences broke at last; she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, and Homer says they wept, holding each other, the way shipwrecked sailors weep at the sight of land. The sign of their marriage is a bed rooted like a tree — a homecoming built, quite literally, on something that cannot be moved. In a coda, Odysseus went out to the country farm to reveal himself to his aged father Laertes, proving himself with the boyhood memory of the trees Laertes had once given him; and the poem closes with Athena imposing peace between the king and the vengeful kin of the slain suitors.

+

The last prophecy: the oar carried inland, and the gentle death from the sea

+

Homecoming, Teiresias had warned him among the dead, would not be the end of Odysseus's travels (Odyssey 11.100–137). Even after he had killed the suitors and set his hall in order, one strange journey would remain. He must take up a well-cut oar and walk inland, away from the sea, until he came at last to a people who knew nothing of ships — who had never seen an oar, and ate their food unmixed with salt. There, when a traveller meeting him on the road remarked that he carried a winnowing-fan on his shoulder — mistaking the oar's blade for the broad wooden shovel with which farmers toss grain into the wind — that would be the sign. On that spot he was to plant the oar upright in the earth and make a rich sacrifice to Poseidon — a ram, a bull, and a boar — making his peace at last with the sea-god whose son he had blinded and whose anger had scattered his ships. Then he was to go home to Ithaca and offer hecatombs to all the deathless gods in turn. So doing, the prophet promised, his own death would come to him softly ex halos — a Greek phrase as slippery as the man it was spoken to, meaning either "out of the sea" or "far from the sea" — a gentle, easy death in a sleek and prosperous old age, with a contented people flourishing around him. It is the one glimpse the poem allows of Odysseus at rest: the restless wanderer carrying his oar to a land with no word for the sea, planting it like a tree in the earth, and dying quietly at home with the long voyage over at last. (In the later Telegony the ambiguous phrase turned dark — see below — but Homer leaves it as a promise of peace.)

Worship — Ancient

Hero, not god

Odysseus was not a god but a hero in the technical Greek sense — a powerful mortal of the age of legend who received cult after death, honoured at a tomb or shrine with offerings poured into the earth rather than burnt on a high altar. Hero-cult was local and grounded, tied to a place that claimed the hero's bones or presence, and it is in that key that the historical honouring of Odysseus must be understood: real, but modest and regional, nothing like the Panhellenic worship of an Olympian.

Ithaca and the cave at Polis Bay

diff --git a/deity/orpheus/index.html b/deity/orpheus/index.html index 83e5ad0..5740a29 100644 --- a/deity/orpheus/index.html +++ b/deity/orpheus/index.html @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@

The backward glance

But there was one condition, laid down by Hades: Orpheus must walk ahead and not turn to look at her until both of them had passed fully out of the underworld into the upper air. So they climbed the long dark road, he in front and her shade following behind, up through the silence toward the world of the living. And at the very threshold — with the daylight in sight, but before Eurydice herself had stepped into it — Orpheus was overcome. Some say by fear that she was not there, some by longing, some by a lover's simple inability to wait; whatever the cause, he turned and looked back. In that instant she slipped from him. With a last faint farewell that he could barely hear, Eurydice was drawn back down into the dark, this time beyond all recovery. He had been given the impossible and lost it by a single glance. He tried to follow again, but the way was shut to him now; the ferryman would not carry a living man across a second time, and he was left to grieve on the wrong side of death. The backward glance has become one of the most enduring images in all of Western art — the moment when love and doubt destroy the very thing they reach for.

The death of Orpheus and the singing head

-

(Content note: a violent death, described plainly, not graphically.) After the loss of Eurydice, Orpheus withdrew from the company of women and gave himself wholly to grief and to his music, and to the worship of Apollon and the sun. In the best-known account this drew upon him the fury of the maenads — the frenzied women of the Thracian worship of Dionysus — who, in the throes of the god's ecstatic rites and enraged (variously) by his scorn of them or by his neglect of Dionysus for Apollon, fell upon the lone singer and tore him apart. But even death did not silence him. His severed head, cast with his lyre into the river Hebrus, went on singing as it floated down to the sea, and the lyre sounded with it; the current carried the head across the water until it came to rest on the island of Lesbos, where it was buried and where — the Greeks said — it kept the gift of prophecy, giving oracles from its shrine until Apollon himself bade it fall silent. From that relic, the poets liked to say, came the island's unrivalled fame for lyric song. His lyre, meanwhile, was taken up into the sky and set among the stars as the constellation Lyra. And his own shade, some told, went down at last to the underworld a second time — now as one of the dead — and there found Eurydice again, and walks with her still, free at last to turn and look back at her as often as he likes.

+

(Content note: a violent death, described plainly, not graphically.) After the loss of Eurydice, Orpheus withdrew from the company of women and gave himself wholly to grief and to his music, and to the worship of Apollon and the sun. In the best-known account this drew upon him the fury of the maenads — the frenzied women of the Thracian worship of Dionysus — who, in the throes of the god's ecstatic rites and enraged (variously) by his scorn of them or by his neglect of Dionysus for Apollon, fell upon the lone singer and tore him apart. This tearing-apart — the sparagmos, the ritual dismemberment that the maenads worked upon their victims — is no late invention of the Roman poets: the scene was already staged in Greek tragedy, in Aeschylus's lost play the Bassarids, where Dionysus, slighted that Orpheus revered the Sun and Apollon above all other gods, sent his Thracian women to rend the singer. The fuller narratives of Virgil and Ovid only elaborate a death the Greeks had long known. But even death did not silence him. His severed head, cast with his lyre into the river Hebrus, went on singing as it floated down to the sea, and the lyre sounded with it; the current carried the head across the water until it came to rest on the island of Lesbos, where it was buried and where — the Greeks said — it kept the gift of prophecy, giving oracles from its shrine until Apollon himself bade it fall silent. From that relic, the poets liked to say, came the island's unrivalled fame for lyric song. His lyre, meanwhile, was taken up into the sky and set among the stars as the constellation Lyra. And his own shade, some told, went down at last to the underworld a second time — now as one of the dead — and there found Eurydice again, and walks with her still, free at last to turn and look back at her as often as he likes.

The name that founded a religion

Beyond his story, Orpheus became the presiding name of the Orphic mysteries — treated in full below — the singer remade into a prophet and theologian, the supposed author of hymns and sacred poems and of a rival account of how the gods and the human soul came to be.

Worship — Ancient

Orpheus as founder of the Mysteries

@@ -25,4 +25,4 @@

The offering most truly his is music or poetry — a song sung, a piece played, a poem written or read aloud in his honour; nothing pleases the son of Calliope more. Alongside this, a libation of wine, or of water, milk, or honey, poured into a bowl set aside for him is traditional, as are laurel leaves, first-fruits, and incense. Because the Orphic tradition prized purity and abstained from bloodshed, a bloodless offering — the fruits of the garden, grain, honey — suits his memory especially well, and some devotees drawn to the Orphic path keep to that older abstinence in his honour.

Prayer & the Orphic legacy

Call on Orpheus as the Father of Songs when beginning any work of music or verse, that his gift may touch it; as the Thracian Singer whose music moved beasts and stones, when you long to reach or to soften something that will not yield; and as the singer who went down among the dead and came back, in grief and mourning, or when your thoughts turn to those you have lost. Devotees drawn to the deeper tradition may read the surviving Orphic Hymns, a genuine ancient collection of short invocations to the gods that circulated under his name, and find in them a way of prayer that reaches back to his legend. Above all, honour him as the Greeks did: as the proof that song can cross even the border of death — almost.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Gallery

Red-figure terracotta hydria showing Orpheus among the Thracians, ca. 430 BCE.
Red-figure terracotta hydria showing Orpheus among the Thracians, ca. 430 BCE. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 17.230.15 — CC0
Marble statue of Orpheus as a laurel-crowned musician, 1600–1601.
Marble statue of Orpheus as a laurel-crowned musician, 1600–1601. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 41.100.242 — CC0
Engraving of Orpheus reaching for Eurydice at the mouth of the underworld, ca. 1590–95.
Engraving of Orpheus reaching for Eurydice at the mouth of the underworld, ca. 1590–95. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 17.37.170 — CC0

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Gallery

Red-figure terracotta hydria showing Orpheus among the Thracians, ca. 430 BCE.
Red-figure terracotta hydria showing Orpheus among the Thracians, ca. 430 BCE. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 17.230.15 — CC0
Marble statue of Orpheus as a laurel-crowned musician, 1600–1601.
Marble statue of Orpheus as a laurel-crowned musician, 1600–1601. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 41.100.242 — CC0
Engraving of Orpheus reaching for Eurydice at the mouth of the underworld, ca. 1590–95.
Engraving of Orpheus reaching for Eurydice at the mouth of the underworld, ca. 1590–95. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 17.37.170 — CC0

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/paris/index.html b/deity/paris/index.html index 45695f3..720fd1f 100644 --- a/deity/paris/index.html +++ b/deity/paris/index.html @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@

The wedding of Peleus, the apple, and "for the fairest"

The chain that would kill him began at a wedding to which he was not even invited. At the marriage of the mortal Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis — the union that would produce Achilles — all the gods were guests save one: Eris, the goddess of Strife and Discord, who was deliberately left off the list. In revenge she came anyway, and threw into the midst of the feast a single golden apple inscribed with two words, tēi kallistēi — "for the fairest." At once three goddesses claimed it as theirs by right: Hera, queen of the gods; Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom and war; and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. None of the gods, and least of all Zeus, would dare to judge between them and make enemies of two. So Zeus sent them, guided by Hermes, to be judged by the one perfectly disinterested and perfectly qualified judge he could think of: the beautiful shepherd on Mount Ida who did not even know he was a prince.

The Judgement of Paris

-

The three goddesses came to Paris on the slopes of Ida and put themselves in his hands, and — this is the heart of it — each tried to bribe him. Hera offered him power: royal dominion, kingship over all Asia, the greatest empire in the world. Athena offered him victory and wisdom: that he should be the wisest of men and unbeatable in war, never defeated in any battle. Aphrodite offered him the one thing that answered his own nature: the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife — Helen of Sparta. Paris weighed empire against invincibility against love, and chose love: he gave the golden apple to Aphrodite. In that moment he made two immortal enemies — Hera and Athena, who would hate Troy implacably ever after and work for its destruction throughout the war — and won one immortal patron, whose gift was another man's wife. The Judgement of Paris is the true first cause of the Trojan War: every death under the walls of Troy runs back to a shepherd's choice on a mountainside.

+

The three goddesses came to Paris on the slopes of Ida and put themselves in his hands, and — this is the heart of it — each tried to bribe him. Hera offered him power: royal dominion, kingship over all Asia, the greatest empire in the world. Athena offered him victory and wisdom: that he should be the wisest of men and unbeatable in war, never defeated in any battle. Aphrodite offered him the one thing that answered his own nature: the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife — Helen of Sparta. Paris weighed empire against invincibility against love, and chose love: he gave the golden apple to Aphrodite. In that moment he made two immortal enemies — Hera and Athena, who would hate Troy implacably ever after and work for its destruction throughout the war — and won one immortal patron, whose gift was another man's wife. The Judgement of Paris is the true first cause of the Trojan War: every death under the walls of Troy runs back to a shepherd's choice on a mountainside. Homer tells the scene fully nowhere, but he knows it: near the very end of the Iliad he gives it one cold glance, naming the undying hatred Hera and Athena bear Troy "because of the delusion of Alexandros, who slighted the goddesses when they came to his steading, and preferred her who granted him grievous lust" (Iliad 24.25–30) — the single thread in Homer from which the lost Cypria and the later tellings wove the whole scene of the apple and the three bribes.

The winning of Helen and the launch of the war

(Content note: the sources frame this variously as seduction and as abduction — a woman taken.) By now Paris had been recognised and received back into Troy as Priam's son — discovered, in the common version, when he came down to the city for funeral games held (bitterly) in memory of the son long thought dead, won every contest against Priam's own sons, and was known at last by his sister Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings were never believed. Restored to his royal place, Paris built ships and sailed for Sparta, to Aphrodite's promised reward. There Helen was the wife of King Menelaus, and the most beautiful woman alive — herself a daughter of Zeus. Menelaus received Paris as a guest, with all the sacred honour owed to a guest-friend, and then left for Crete; and in his absence Paris carried Helen away back to Troy, and with her a great part of Menelaus's treasure. Here the sources fork, and the ancients never fully agreed: in some tellings Helen was seduced, going willingly, overcome by Aphrodite's power; in others she was taken by force, an unwilling captive — and this "carried off against her will" framing (the abduction of Helen) is the one the tree marks, the act of a guest who betrayed his host. Either way it was the ultimate violation of xenia, the guest-bond that Zeus himself protects. Menelaus called on his brother Agamemnon and on the oath the suitors of Helen had all sworn to defend her marriage, and the whole of Greece launched a thousand ships against Troy. Paris's private desire had become a ten-year war.

The archer of Troy — the duel with Menelaus

@@ -31,4 +31,4 @@

Paris's true modern life is cultural and inexhaustible. The Judgement of Paris has been one of the most painted subjects in all of Western art — Cranach, Rubens, Renoir, Watteau and countless others returned to the three goddesses and the shepherd with the apple — and the phrase became a byword for any contest of beauty, so that a wine-tasting that upset the establishment could be called "the Judgement of Paris" and everyone understood. Helen, his prize, gave English its most famous line about beauty and ruin — Marlowe's "the face that launched a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium" — and Paris stands forever behind it as the man who launched them. He recurs across opera, fiction, and film as the archetype of the beautiful, fatal chooser, the golden youth whose one weak choice undoes a world.

The shepherd and the nymph

Alongside the destroyer runs the gentler, tragic Paris of the beginning and the end — the shepherd of Ida and the nymph Oenone, the first love betrayed and the healer who came too late. That strand, taken up by Tennyson in his poems "Oenone" and "The Death of Oenone," keeps alive the other Paris: not only the cause of a war but a man caught, like everyone in the story of Troy, in a doom set before his birth — the child of the burning dream, exposed to die and living only to fulfil the prophecy that he would burn his city down.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/patroclus/index.html b/deity/patroclus/index.html index b9f6681..da51c92 100644 --- a/deity/patroclus/index.html +++ b/deity/patroclus/index.html @@ -21,6 +21,9 @@

When they bring the body to him, Achilles' grief is monstrous and total. He pours black ashes over his head, tears his hair, throws himself in the dust; his cry is so terrible that his mother Thetis hears it in the depths of the sea and comes with her sister Nereids to mourn. All the rage Achilles had nursed against Agamemnon is burned away in an instant and turned outward, into a single consuming purpose: to kill Hector and avenge Patroclus, though he knows — Thetis has told him plainly — that his own death is fated to follow hard upon Hector's. He does not care. This is the pivot of the entire epic: the private quarrel that opened the poem is swallowed by a grief that ends it. Achilles reconciles with Agamemnon, takes back Briseis, and, in new armour forged for him by Hephaestus at Thetis's plea (the great shield of Achilles among it), returns to the war he had abandoned. He hunts Hector down before the walls, kills him, and in his fury lashes the corpse behind his chariot and drags it round the tomb of Patroclus — grief curdled into cruelty, until the gods and the aged king Priam call him back to his humanity. Everything that happens in the last quarter of the Iliad flows from the death of one gentle man.

The funeral and the ghost's last plea

(Iliad 23.) Before he can rest, Achilles must bury his friend. That night the ghost of Patroclus comes to him in sleep, in the very likeness of the living man — his voice, his stature, his eyes, the clothes he wore — and reproaches him gently: bury me quickly, that I may pass the gates of Hades, for the other shades will not let me cross the river until my body is burned. And then the plea that is Patroclus's last and most tender word: let not my bones be laid apart from yours, Achilles, but together, in the one urn — the golden two-handled jar your own mother gave you — even as we were reared together in your house and never parted in life. Achilles reaches to embrace him, and the spirit slips away into the earth like smoke, gibbering. In the morning the Greeks raise a vast pyre; Achilles cuts his own hair to lay in his friend's dead hands, slaughters sheep and cattle and horses and dogs, and — in the poem's darkest act of mourning — twelve captured young men of Troy, to burn beside Patroclus. When the fire has died they gather his white bones and lay them in the golden urn, to wait until Achilles' own bones should join them, and heap a barrow over the place. Then Achilles holds the great funeral games in his honour — the chariot race, the boxing and wrestling, the foot-race, the archery — the most detailed athletic contest in early Greek poetry, staged as the last and highest gift a man can give his dead companion.

+

The funeral games for Patroclus

+

(Iliad 23.257–897.) The games Achilles held over the barrow of his friend are the fullest picture of athletic contest anywhere in early Greek poetry, and the Greeks looked back to them as the archetype of all funeral games. Achilles brings out the prizes from his ships — cauldrons and tripods, horses and mules and oxen, women skilled in handwork, and grey iron — and sets the events one by one. The greatest is the chariot race: five heroes drive — Eumelus, Diomedes, Menelaus, Antilochus, and Meriones — and the race turns on the meddling of the gods and the recklessness of youth. Apollo strikes the whip from Diomedes' hand, but Athena returns it and shatters the yoke of Eumelus, so Diomedes wins; young Antilochus, Nestor's son, forces his team past Menelaus at a narrow place so dangerously that a quarrel breaks out over the prizes — a dispute Achilles and the two men settle with such courtesy that it becomes a lesson in how anger may be laid down, the very thing Achilles himself could not do at the poem's opening. Achilles gives a prize of honour to the aged Nestor, who can no longer compete, and one to Eumelus out of pity for his wreck.

+

The other contests follow in turn: a boxing match, won by the huge Epeius — the man who would later build the wooden horse — who fells Euryalus with a single blow; a wrestling match between Ajax the Great and Odysseus so evenly matched that Achilles halts it and declares the prize shared; a foot-race in which Athena again intervenes, helping Odysseus and tumbling the swift Ajax son of Oïleus face-first into the ordure of the slaughtered oxen; an armed duel between Ajax the Great and Diomedes, stopped by the frightened onlookers before either can be hurt; a contest of throwing a lump of iron, won by Polypoetes; an archery match in which Meriones, when Teucer forgets to vow a hecatomb to Apollo, prays to the god and shoots the fluttering dove clean through as it wheels above the mast. Last comes the spear-throwing, and here Achilles will not let the contest happen at all: he rises and awards the first prize outright to Agamemnon, the king of men, acknowledging his pre-eminence and sealing between them the reconciliation that Patroclus's death had made possible. So the games end not in strife but in honour freely given — the last and highest gift Achilles can lay upon the grave of the companion he loved.

After the Iliad

The Iliad ends with the burial of Hector, but the tradition carries Patroclus's story to its promised close. When Achilles himself falls not long after, slain by Paris and Apollo at the Scaean gate, his bones were mingled with Patroclus's exactly as the ghost had begged — the Odyssey (24.76–84) shows the two heroes buried together in a single golden urn on the shore of the Hellespont, with Antilochus beside them, under one great mound raised so high that sailors far out at sea could see it. So the name "glory of the fathers" is fulfilled at last: Patroclus, the gentle exile, lies for all time beside the greatest of the Greeks, their bones not to be told apart.

Worship — Ancient

A hero mourned, and a hero honoured

diff --git a/deity/perseus/index.html b/deity/perseus/index.html index f773448..a59ce92 100644 --- a/deity/perseus/index.html +++ b/deity/perseus/index.html @@ -20,7 +20,9 @@

The prophecy fulfilled

One thing remained, and it was the one thing Perseus never sought. Wishing to be reconciled with his grandfather, or simply to see the land of his birth, Perseus travelled toward Argos — and Acrisius, hearing that the grandson the oracle had cursed him with was coming, fled the city in fear and went north to Larissa in Thessaly. There the king of the place was holding funeral games, and Perseus, passing through, entered the contests. When his turn came at the discus, he made his throw — and the heavy disk went wide, or was caught by a gust of wind, and struck an old man among the spectators, killing him. The old man was Acrisius. So the prophecy was fulfilled exactly and by pure accident: Perseus had killed his own grandfather, without knowing him, without meaning it, and without any way it could have been prevented — the perfect Greek image of a doom that runs to its appointed end no matter how far a man flees from it. In grief and shame at having shed the blood of his own house, Perseus would not take up the throne of Argos that was now his by right.

The founding of Mycenae and the Perseid line

-

Because he could not bear to rule in the kingdom of the man he had killed, Perseus made an exchange: he traded Argos to his kinsman Megapenthes and took in its place the neighbouring realm of Tiryns, and there, the tradition says, he founded the great citadel of Mycenae — the Cyclopes building its mighty walls for him, and its name drawn (the storytellers said) from the cap, the mykes, of his scabbard, or the mushroom he found at the spot. From Perseus and Andromeda came a line of sons and daughters — among them a daughter named Gorgophone and a son, Electryon, whose daughter Alcmene would in time bear Heracles to Zeus. So the greatest of all Greek heroes was the great-grandson of Perseus, and the royal house of Mycenae that Homer would set at the head of the Greek host at Troy traced its founding to the boy cast out to sea in a wooden chest. Perseus lived to old age and, with Andromeda, was set at last among the stars, where the whole family — Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus — still stands together in the northern sky.

+

Because he could not bear to rule in the kingdom of the man he had killed, Perseus made an exchange: he traded Argos to his kinsman Megapenthes and took in its place the neighbouring realm of Tiryns, and there, the tradition says, he founded and walled the great citadels of Mycenae and Midea as well — the one-eyed Cyclopes building their mighty ramparts for him (Apollodorus 2.4.4) — Mycenae's name drawn (the storytellers said) from the cap, the mykes, of his scabbard, or the mushroom he found at the spot. From Perseus and Andromeda came a line of sons and daughters — among them a daughter named Gorgophone and a son, Electryon, whose daughter Alcmene would in time bear Heracles to Zeus. So the greatest of all Greek heroes was the great-grandson of Perseus, and the royal house of Mycenae that Homer would set at the head of the Greek host at Troy traced its founding to the boy cast out to sea in a wooden chest. Perseus lived to old age and died full of years.

+

The family set among the stars

+

Perseus's story does not end on earth. When their long lives were over, Perseus and Andromeda were taken up into the sky, and with them the whole cast of the Aethiopian rescue, so that they still stand together in the night sky: Perseus himself, sword raised and the Gorgon's head in his hand; Andromeda, the rescued bride, her arms still outstretched as if chained; her mother Cassiopeia, set upon her throne — and made, as a rebuke for the boast that began it all, to wheel around the celestial pole head-downward for part of each night; her father Cepheus, the Aethiopian king; and even the beast itself, Cetus (the Sea-monster, our modern constellation of the Whale), laid out in the sky below them. The Greek didactic poet Aratus already sets all five as neighbouring figures of the night sky in his Phaenomena (early 3rd century BCE), the constellations named and fixed. The fuller tale that the gods placed them there on purpose, as a memorial of the story — the catasterism proper — belongs to the later astronomical tradition: the Greek Catasterismi handed down under the name of Eratosthenes, and, in Roman dress, the Poetic Astronomy (De astronomia) of Hyginus, who gathers the family's placements together and explains Cassiopeia's undignified, upside-down pose as the sea-gods' revenge for the pride that had loosed the monster in the first place.

Worship — Ancient

Hero, not god

Perseus was worshipped in the manner proper to a hero rather than an Olympian god — that is, with cult centred on his tomb or shrine (a heroon) and directed to a powerful dead man who could help or harm the living, rather than with the sky-facing sacrifices given to the immortals. Hero-cult of this kind was local and particular, attached to a place that claimed the hero's presence or protection, and it typically involved offerings poured or burnt at ground level and honours renewed at his precinct. Perseus's status as a son of Zeus and the founder of a royal dynasty made him an especially natural object of such honour in the lands that traced their kings to him.

The Argolid and beyond

@@ -33,4 +35,4 @@

Following the ancient shape of hero-cult, offerings to a hero are traditionally poured out at ground level rather than raised to the sky-gods: a libation of wine poured onto the earth, given wholly and not taken back, is the simplest and most fitting gift. A candle lit in his memory, a few words recalling his deeds, or the telling of his story keep his name alive in the way the ancients believed a hero most wanted — to be remembered. Because Perseus's tale honours the mother who protected him and whom he protected in turn, acts of loyalty and care within one's own family sit well as a living tribute to him.

Legacy in sky and story

More than through formal cult, Perseus lives on today in the two places the ancients set him. He stands in the northern sky as the constellation Perseus, sword raised and the Gorgon's head in his hand, marked by the eerie winking star Algol — the "Demon's Head," the eye of Medusa — whose regular dimming was noticed as strange for millennia before it was understood as an eclipsing binary; and every August the Perseid meteor shower appears to stream from his constellation, the most watched meteor shower of the year, named for the hero. And he lives in story: the first and cleanest of the Greek heroes, the pattern of the young man sent to fetch an impossible thing and brought home by the gods' favour, whose myth — the prophecy, the monster, the mirror-shield, the chained princess, the petrifying head — has been retold in art and poetry and film from antiquity to the present day.

-

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Gallery

Antonio Canova's marble 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa,' 1804–6.
Antonio Canova's marble 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa,' 1804–6. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 67.110.1 — CC0
Roman wall painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, from the villa at Boscotrecase, late 1st century BCE.
Roman wall painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, from the villa at Boscotrecase, late 1st century BCE. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 20.192.16 — CC0

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file +

Epithets & Cult Titles

Sources & Variants

Gallery

Antonio Canova's marble 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa,' 1804–6.
Antonio Canova's marble 'Perseus with the Head of Medusa,' 1804–6. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 67.110.1 — CC0
Roman wall painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, from the villa at Boscotrecase, late 1st century BCE.
Roman wall painting of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, from the villa at Boscotrecase, late 1st century BCE. — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. 20.192.16 — CC0

Explore Related Figures

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/deity/theseus/index.html b/deity/theseus/index.html index cbea229..f831689 100644 --- a/deity/theseus/index.html +++ b/deity/theseus/index.html @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@

Mythology

Two fathers and the sword beneath the rock

Theseus was born at Troezen, across the Saronic Gulf from Athens, to Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus. His father was Aegeus, king of Athens, who had lain with Aethra while a guest of Pittheus — but on the same night, one tradition holds, Aethra waded to a small island and was visited by Poseidon, so that the child was conceived of a mortal king and the god of the sea together, and belonged to both. This is the paradox the Athenians embraced: Theseus is the son of Aegeus, from whom he takes his throne and his patronymic (Aegeides), and the son of Poseidon, from whom he takes the divine strength that makes him a hero. Before leaving Troezen, Aegeus hid his sword and his sandals beneath a great rock and told Aethra that if the boy could one day move the stone and lift out these tokens, she should send him to Athens as his heir. When Theseus came of age he rolled the rock aside, took up the sword and sandals, and set out to claim his father — choosing, against all advice, the dangerous overland road rather than the safe voyage by sea, precisely so that he might prove himself against the terrors that infested it.

The road to Athens and the clearing of the bandits

-

The coast road from Troezen to Athens was haunted by murderers, and Theseus dealt with each as each had dealt with travellers — the hero's rough justice of paying a man back in his own coin. He killed Sinis, the "Pine-bender," who bent two pine trees to the ground, bound his victims between them, and released the trees to tear them apart; Theseus destroyed him in the same fashion. He killed Sciron, who sat by the cliffs on the Megarian coast and forced passers-by to wash his feet, then kicked them off the rocks into the sea, where a great turtle waited to devour them; Theseus flung Sciron over the same cliff. And near Eleusis he met Procrustes, the "Stretcher," who offered travellers a bed and made them fit it exactly — racking the short until their joints tore and lopping the tall until they were the bed's length — and Theseus fitted Procrustes to his own murderous bed. Between these he overcame others as well: Periphetes the club-bearer, whose bronze club he took as his own emblem, and Cercyon the wrestler, whom he threw and killed. By the time he reached Athens he had made the road safe, and had announced himself as the new Heracles.

+

The coast road from Troezen to Athens was haunted by murderers, and Theseus dealt with each as each had dealt with travellers — the hero's rough justice of paying a man back in his own coin. He killed Sinis, the "Pine-bender," who bent two pine trees to the ground, bound his victims between them, and released the trees to tear them apart; Theseus destroyed him in the same fashion. He killed Sciron, who sat by the cliffs on the Megarian coast and forced passers-by to wash his feet, then kicked them off the rocks into the sea, where a great turtle waited to devour them; Theseus flung Sciron over the same cliff. And near Eleusis he met Procrustes, the "Stretcher," who offered travellers a bed and made them fit it exactly — racking the short until their joints tore and lopping the tall until they were the bed's length — and Theseus fitted Procrustes to his own murderous bed. The other terrors of the road he dealt with in the same measure. At Epidaurus he met Periphetes the club-bearer — a lame son of Hephaestus who beat travellers to death with a bronze club — and took the club from him as his own emblem. At Eleusis he was challenged by Cercyon, who forced all comers to wrestle him and crushed the losers; Theseus lifted him and dashed him to the ground. And at Crommyon he hunted down the Crommyonian Sow — a monstrous wild pig named Phaea, after the old woman who had bred it, that had long laid the countryside waste — and killed it. Six deeds in all cleared the way from Troezen to Athens; by the time he reached the city he had made the road safe, and had announced himself as the new Heracles.

The recognition at Athens and the bull of Marathon

At Athens a danger subtler than any bandit waited. The sorceress Medea, now living with the aged Aegeus, knew by her arts who the young stranger was and feared he would displace her own son; she persuaded Aegeus that the newcomer was a threat and prepared a cup of poison for him at the welcoming feast. But as Theseus drew his sword to carve the meat, Aegeus recognised the blade he had left beneath the rock at Troezen, struck the poisoned cup from his son's hand, and acknowledged him as his heir; Medea fled. To prove himself to the city, Theseus then went out against the Bull of Marathon — the same great bull, once brought from Crete, that had ravaged the plain — captured it alive, and sacrificed it, freeing the countryside of its terror and setting the stage for his greatest deed against a creature that was half bull itself.

Crete, the Minotaur, and the thread

@@ -17,6 +17,8 @@

Theseus's greatest work was not a monster but a city. Attica in his day was a scatter of independent towns, each with its own council and magistrates, often at odds with one another. Theseus dissolved the separate governments and gathered them into a single community centred on Athens — the synoikismos, the "dwelling-together" — establishing one council-chamber and one town-hall for all, so that the many villages became a single polis. He is said to have instituted the festival of the Synoikia to mark the union and the Panathenaea for all Attica together, to have divided the citizens into their orders, and even (the democratic tradition claimed) to have laid down the beginnings of a commonwealth in which he ruled as leader rather than as absolute king. In this founding the Athenians saw the mythical charter of their whole civic life: Theseus was the man who had made them one people.

The descent to the underworld with Pirithous

Theseus's closest friend was Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, and their friendship drew him into his most reckless adventure. The two had sworn to help each other each win a daughter of Zeus for a bride; together they carried off the young Helen for Theseus (later recovered by her brothers), and then Pirithous set his heart on a bride no mortal could take — Persephone herself, the queen of the dead. Bound by their oath, Theseus went down with him living into the underworld to demand her from her husband. Hades received them with a show of hospitality and bade them sit — but the seats were the Chair of Forgetfulness, and the moment they sat their limbs grew fast to the stone and their memories dimmed, so that they could neither rise nor recall why they had come. There they remained fixed and helpless, until Heracles, descending on his own labour to fetch the hound Cerberus, found them; he tore Theseus free from the chair (leaving part of him behind, the Athenians joked, to explain a certain leanness of that stock), but the earth quaked when he reached for Pirithous, and him he was forced to leave forever below. Theseus came back to the light diminished, having overreached the boundary between the living and the dead.

+

The war with the Amazons

+

Among the boldest of Theseus's exploits was his campaign against the Amazons, the warrior-women who dwelt at the world's edge by the river Thermodon. Some say he sailed in the company of Heracles on his labour to win the girdle of their queen; others that he mounted an expedition of his own. However he came among them, he carried off their queen — named Antiope in most tellings, Hippolyta in others — luring her aboard his ship, or taking her as a prize of war, and bringing her home to Athens as his bride. The Amazons did not forgive the theft. In vengeance they mustered a great host and marched the whole breadth of the known world into Attica, and — alone among all the enemies of Athens in the age of myth — they carried their war into the city itself, encamping upon the very hill of the Areopagus beneath the Acropolis. For months the armies fought through the streets in the battle the Athenians remembered as the Amazonomachy, until Theseus broke them and a truce was struck. Antiope, in the tradition that honours her, fought at Theseus's side against her own people and fell in the battle, having borne him a son, Hippolytus. For centuries the Athenians pointed to the graves of the fallen Amazons in their city and kept the memory of the day, and they carved the great combat on the Parthenon and on the shield of Athena as the very image of Greek order overcoming the wild outland foe.

The tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus

(Content note: this myth turns on a false accusation of sexual assault, a father's curse, and the violent death of an innocent son.) In his later years Theseus married Phaedra, another daughter of Minos and sister to the Ariadne he had abandoned. But Aphrodite, angered that Theseus's son Hippolytus — born of the Amazon Antiope — scorned love and devoted himself chastely to Artemis and the hunt, afflicted Phaedra with a consuming, unwilling passion for her own stepson. Hippolytus rejected her in horror. In shame and despair Phaedra hanged herself, leaving behind a letter that falsely accused Hippolytus of having assaulted her. Theseus, believing the lie and mad with grief, called down upon his son one of the three curses his divine father Poseidon had granted him. As Hippolytus drove his chariot along the shore, Poseidon sent a monstrous bull from the sea; the horses bolted in terror, the chariot shattered, and the young man was dragged to his death, tangled in the reins. Only as he lay dying, the poets say, did Artemis reveal the truth to Theseus — that he had killed an innocent son on the strength of a lie, by the hand of the very father whose divine gift had proved his ruin.

Exile and the death on Skyros