The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (53 page)

‘Climb on my back!’ cried the ram, and Phrixus obeyed.

‘Take me too!’ pleaded Helle. ‘Do not leave me to the mercy of my father.’

e
. So Phrixus pulled her up behind him, and the ram flew eastwards, making for the land of Colchis, where Helius stables his horses. Before
long, Helle felt giddy and lost her hold; she fell into the straits between Europe and Asia, now called the Hellespont in her honour; but Phrixus reached Colchis safely, and there sacrificed the ram to Zeus the Deliverer. Its golden fleece became famous a generation later when the Argonauts came in search of it.

f
. Overawed by the miracle of Mount Laphystium, Athamas’s messengers confessed that they had been bribed by Ino to bring back a false reply from Delphi; and presently all her wiles, and Biadice’s, came to light. Nephele thereupon again demanded that Athamas should die, and the sacrificial fillet, which Phrixus had worn, was placed on his head; only Heracles’s renewed intervention saved him from death.

g
. But Hera was incensed with Athamas and drove him mad, not only on Nephele’s account, but because he had connived at Ino’s harbouring of the infant Dionysus, Zeus’s bastard by her sister Semele, who was living in the palace disguised as a girl. Seizing his bow, Athamas suddenly yelled: ‘Look, a white stag! Stand back while I shoot!’ So saying, he transfixed Learchus with an arrow, and proceeded to tear his still-quivering body into pieces.

h
. Ino snatched up Melicertes, her younger son, and fled; but would hardly have escaped Athamas’s vengeance, had not the infant Dionysus temporarily blinded him, so that he began to flog a she-goat in mistake for her. Ino ran to the Molurian Rock, where she leaped into the sea and was drowned – this rock afterwards became a place of ill repute, because the savage Sciron used to hurl strangers from it. But Zeus, remembering Ino’s kindness to Dionysus, would not send her ghost down to Tartarus and deified her instead as the Goddess Leucothea. He also deified her son Melicertes as the God Palaemon, and sent him to the Isthmus of Corinth riding on dolphin-back; the Isthmian Games, founded in his honour by Sisyphus, are still celebrated there every fourth year.

i
. Athamas, now banished from Boeotia, and childless because his remaining son, Leucon, had sickened and died, enquired from the Delphic Oracle where he should settle, and was told: ‘Wherever wild beasts entertain you to dinner.’ Wandering aimlessly northward, without food or drink, he came on a wolf-pack devouring a flock of sheep in a desolate Thessalian plain. The wolves fled at his approach, and he and his starving companions ate what mutton had been left. Then he recalled the oracle and, having adopted Haliartus and Conorea, his Corinthian grand-nephews, founded a city which he called Alos, from
his wanderings, or from his serving-maid Alos; and the country was called Athamania; afterwards he married Themisto and raised a new family.
¹

j
. Others tell the tale differently. Omitting Athamas’s marriage to Nephele, they say that one day, after the birth of Learchus and Melicertes, his wife Ino went out hunting and did not return. Bloodstains on a torn tunic convinced him that she had been killed by wild beasts; but the truth was that a sudden Bacchic frenzy had seized her when she was attacked by a lynx. She had strangled it, flayed it with her teeth and nails, and gone off, dressed only in the pelt, for a prolonged revel on Mount Parnassus. After an interval of mourning, Athamas married Themisto who, a year later, bore him twin sons. Then, to his dismay, he learned that Ino was still alive. He sent for her at once, installed her in the palace nursery, and told Themisto: ‘We have a likely-looking nurse-maid, a captive taken in the recent raid on Mount Cithaeron.’ Themisto, whom her maids soon undeceived, visited the nursery, pretending not to know who Ino was. She told her: ‘Pray, nurse, get ready a set of white woollen garments for my two sons, and a set of mourning garments for those of my unfortunate predecessor Ino. They are to be worn tomorrow.’

k
. The following day, Themisto ordered her guards to break into the royal nursery and kill the twins who were dressed in mourning, but spare the other two. Ino, however, guessing what was in Themisto’s mind, had provided white garments for her own sons, and mourning garments for her rival’s. Thus Themisto’s twins were murdered, and the news sent Athamas mad; he shot Learchus dead, mistaking him for a stag, but Ino escaped with Melicertes, sprang into the sea, and became immortal.

l
. Others, again, say that Phrixus and Helle were Nephele’s children by Ixion. One day, as they wandered in a wood, their mother came upon them in a Bacchic frenzy, leading a golden ram by the horns. ‘Look,’ she babbled, ‘here is a son of your cousin Theophane. She had too many suitors, so Poseidon changed her into a ewe and himself into a ram, and tupped her on the Island of Crumissa.’

‘What happened to the suitors, mother?’ asked little Helle.

‘They became wolves,’ Ino answered, ‘and howl for Theophane all night long. Now ask me no more questions, but climb on this ram’s back, both of you, and ride away to the kingdom of Colchis, where Helius’s son Aeëtes reigns. As soon as you arrive, sacrifice it to Ares.’

m
. Phrixus carried out his mother’s strange instructions, and hung up the golden fleece in a temple of Ares at Colchis, where it was guarded by a dragon; and, many years later his son Presbon, or Cytisorus, coming to Orchomenus from Colchis, rescued Athamas as he was being sacrificed for a sin-offering.
²

1
. Pausanias: i. 44. 11; ix. 34.4–5 and 23. 3; Apollodorus: i. 7. 3 and iii. 4. 3; Hyginus:
Fabulae
2 and 4;
Poetic Astronomy
ii. 20; Fragments of Sophocles’s
Athamas;
Nonnus:
Dionysiaca
x. 1 ff.; Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
vii. 86; Eustathius on the same; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
iv. 480–541;
Etymologicum Magnum
70. 8; Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Athamania.

2
. Hyginus:
Fabulae
1, 3, 5 and 88; Fragments of Euripides’s
Ino
; Herodotus: vii. 197; Pausanias: ix. 34. 5.

1
. Athamas’s name is connected in the myth with Athamania, the city which he is said to have founded in the Thessalian wilderness; but seems formed, rather, from
Ath
(‘high’), and
amaein
(‘to reap’) – meaning ‘the king dedicated to the Reaper on High’, namely the Goddess of the Harvest Moon. The conflict between his rival wives Ino and Nephele was probably one between early Ionian settlers in Boeotia, who had adopted the worship of the Corn-goddess Ino, and the pastoral Aeolian invaders. An attempt to make over the agricultural rites of the Ionian goddess Ino to the Aeolian thunder-god and his wife Nephele, the rain-cloud, seems to have been foiled by the priestesses’ parching of the seed-corn.

2
. The myth of Athamas and Phrixus records the annual mountain sacrifice of the king, or of the king’s surrogate – first a boy dressed in a ram’s fleece, and later a ram – during the New Year rain-inducing festival which shepherds celebrated at the Spring Equinox. Zeus’s ram-sacrifice on the summit of Mount Pelion, not far from Laphystium, took place in April when, according to the Zodiac, the Ram was in the ascendant; the chief men of the district used to struggle up, wearing white sheep-skins (Dicearchus: ii. 8), and the rite still survives there today in the mock-sacrifice and resurrection of an old man who wears a black sheep’s mask (see 148.
10
). The mourning garments, ordered for the children sentenced to death, suggest that a black fleece was worn by the victim, and white ones by the priest and the spectators. Biadice’s love for Phrixus recalls Potiphar’s wife’s love for Joseph, a companion myth from Canaan: much the same story is also told of Anteia and Bellerophon (see
75.
a
), Cretheis and Peleus (see
81.
g
), Phaedra and Hippolytus (see
101.
a
–
g
), Phylonome and Tenes (see 161.
g
).

3
. That Nephele (‘cloud’) was Hera’s gift to Athamas and created
in her own image, suggests that in the original version Athamas the Aeolian king himself represented the thunder-god, like his predecessor Ixion (see
63.
1
), and his brother Salmoneus (see
68.
1
); and that, when he married Themisto (who, in Euripides’s version of the myth, is Ino’s rival), she took the part of the thunder-god’s wife.

4
. Ino was Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess’, and proved her identity with the Triple Muse by revelling on Mount Parnassus. Her name (‘she who makes sinewy’) suggests ithyphallic orgies, and the sturdy growth of corn; boys will have been bloodily sacrificed to her before every winter sowing. Zeus is himself credited with having defied Ino in gratitude for her kindness to Dionysus, and Athamas bears an agricultural name in her honour; in other words, the Ionian farmers settled their religious differences with the Aeolian shepherds to their own advantage.

5
. The myth, however, is a medley of early cult elements. The sacramental Zagreus cult, which became that of Dionysus the Kid (see
30.
3
), is suggested when Athamas takes Ino for a she-goat; the sacramental Actaeon cult is suggested when he takes Learchus for a stag, shoots him, and tears him in pieces (see
22.
1
). Ino’s younger son Melicertes is the Canaanite Heracles Melkarth (‘protector of the city’),
alias
Moloch who, as the new-born solar king, comes riding on dolphin-back towards the isthmus; and whose death, at the close of his four years’ reign, was celebrated at the Isthmian Funeral Games. Infants were sacrificed to Melicertes on the Island of Tenedos, and probably also at Corinth (see 156.
2
), as they were to Moloch at Jerusalem (
Leviticus
xviii. 21 and 1
Kings
xi. 7).

6
. Only when Zeus became god of the clear sky and usurped the goddess’s solar attributes did the fleece become golden – thus the First Vatican Mythographer says that it was ‘the fleece in which Zeus ascended the sky’ – but while he was inducer of the thunderstorm it had been purple-black (Simonides:
Fragment
21).

7
. In one version of the myth (Hippias:
Fragment
12), Ino is called Gorgopis (‘grim-faced’), a title of Athene’s; and savage Sciron who hurled travellers over the cliff, took his name from the white parasol – more properly a paralune – carried in Athene’s processions. The Molurian Rock was evidently the cliff from which the sacred king, or his surrogates, were thrown into the sea in honour of the Moon-goddess Athene, or Ino, the parasol being apparently used to break the fall (see
89.
6
;
92.
3
;
96.
3
and
98.
7
).

8
. Helle’s drowning parallels Ino’s. Both are Moon-goddesses, and the myth is ambivalent: it represents the nightly setting of the Moon and, at the same time, the abandonment of Helle’s lunar cult in favour of Zeus’s solar one. Both are equally Sea-goddesses: Helle gave her name to the junction of two seas, Ino-Leucothea appeared to Odysseus in the guise of a seamew and rescued him from drowning (see 170.
y
).

9
. Athamas’s tribe is more likely to have migrated from Boeotian Mount Laphystium and Athamania to Thessalian Mount Laphystius and Athamania, than contrariwise; he had a strong connexion with Corinth, the kingdom of his brother Sisyphus, and is said to have founded the city of Acraephia to the east of Lake Copais, where there was a ‘Field of Athamas’ (Stephanus of Byzantium
sub
Acraephia; Pausanias: ix. 24. 1). Several of his sons are also credited with the foundation of Boeotian cities. He is indeed plausibly described as a son of Minyas, and King of Orchomenus, which would have given him power over the Copaic Plain and Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 230; Hellanicus on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 265) and allied him with Corinth against the intervening states of Athens and Thebes. The probable reason for the Athamanians’ northward wanderings into Thessaly was the disastrous war fought between Orchomenus and Thebes, recorded in the Heracles cycle (see 121.
d
). Nephele’s ragings on the mountain recall the daughters of Minyas who are said to have been overtaken by a Bacchic frenzy on Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Lycophron’s
Alexandra
1237): the alleged origin of the Agrionia festival at Orchomenus.