The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (74 page)

8
. Talos’s single vein belongs to the mystery of early bronze casting by the
cire-perdue
method. First, the smith made a beeswax image which he coated with a layer of clay, and laid in an oven. As soon as the clay had been well baked he pierced the spot between heel and ankle, so that the hot wax ran out and left a mould, into which molten bronze could be poured. When he had filled this, and the metal inside had cooled, he broke the clay, leaving a bronze image of the same shape as the original wax one. The Cretans brought the
cire-perdue
method to Sardinia, together with the Daedalus cult. Since Daedalus learned his craft from Athene, who was known as Medea at Corinth, the story of Talos’s death may have been a misreading of an icon which showed Athene demonstrating the
cire-perdue
method. The tradition that melted wax caused Icarus’s death seems to belong, rather, to the myth of his cousin Talos; because Talos the bronze man is closely connected with his namesake, the worker in bronze and the reputed inventor of compasses.

9
. Compasses are part of the bronze-worker’s mystery, essential for the accurate drawing of concentric circles when bowls, helmets, or masks have to be beaten out. Hence Talos was known as Circinus, ‘the circular’,
a title which referred both to the course of the sun and to the use of the compass (see
3.
2
). His invention of the saw has been rightly emphasized: the Cretans had minute double-toothed turning-saws for fine work, which they used with marvellous dexterity. Talos is the son of an ash-tree nymph, because ash-charcoal yields a very high heat for smelting. This myth sheds light also on Prometheus’s creation of man from clay; in Hebrew legend Prometheus’s part was played by the Archangel Michael, who worked under the eye of Jehovah.

10
. Poeas’s shooting of Talos recalls Paris’s shooting of Achilles, also in the heel, and the deaths of the Centaurs Pholus and Cheiron (see 126.
3
). These myths are closely related. Pholus and Cheiron died from Heracles’s poisoned arrows. Poeas was the father of Philoctetes and, when Heracles had been poisoned by another Centaur, ordered him to kindle the pyre; as a result, Philoctetes obtained the same arrows (see 145.
f
), one of which poisoned him (see 161.
l
). Paris then borrowed Thessalian Apollo’s deadly arrows to kill Achilles, Cheiron’s foster-son (see 164.
j
); and finally, when Philoctetes avenged Achilles by shooting Paris, he used another from Heracles’s quiver (see 166.
e
). The Thessalian sacred king was, it seems, killed by an arrow smeared with viper venom, which the tanist drove between his heel and ankle.

11
. In Celtic myth the labyrinth came to mean the royal tomb (
White Goddess
p. 105); and that it also did so among the early Greeks is suggested by its definition in the
Etymologicum Magnum
as ‘a mountain cave’, and by Eustathius (On Homer’s
Odyssey
xi. p. 1688) as ‘a subterranean cave’. Lars Porsena the Etruscan made a labyrinth for his own tomb (Varro, quoted by Pliny:
Natural History
xxxvi. 91–3), and there were labyrinths in the ‘Cyclopean’, i.e. pre-Hellenic, caves near Nauplia (Strabo: viii. 6. 2); on Samos (Pliny:
Natural History
xxxiv. 83); and on Lemnos (Pliny:
Natural History
xxxvi. 90). To escape from the labyrinth, therefore, is to be reincarnate.

12
. Although Daedalus ranks as an Athenian, because of the Attic
deme
named in his honour, the Daedalic crafts were introduced into Attica from Crete, not contrariwise. The toys that he made for the daughters of Cocalus are likely to have been dolls with movable limbs, like those which pleased Pasiphaë and her daughter Ariadne (see
88.
e
), and which seem to have been used in the Attic tree cult of Erigone. At any rate, Polycaste, Daedalus’s sister, hanged herself, as did two Erigones and Ariadne herself (see
79.
2
and
88.
10
).

13
. The Messapians of Hyria, later Uria, now Oria, were known in Classical times for their Cretan customs – kiss-curl, flower-embroidered robes, double-axe, and so on; and pottery found there can be dated to 1400
B
.
C
., which bears out the story.

93

CATREUS AND ALTHAEMENES

C
ATREUS
, Minos’s eldest surviving son, had three daughters: Aerope, Clymene, and Apemosyne; and a son, Althaemenes. When an oracle predicted that Catreus would be killed by one of his own children, Althaemenes and the swift-footed Apemosyne piously left Crete, with a large following, in the hope of escaping the curse. They landed on the island of Rhodes, and founded the city of Cretinia, naming it in honour of their native island.
¹
Althaemenes afterwards settled at Cameirus, where he was held in great honour by the inhabitants, and raised an altar to Zeus on the near-by Mount Atabyrius, from the summit of which, on clear days, he could gain a distant view of his beloved Crete. Around this altar he set brazen bulls, which roared aloud whenever danger threatened Rhodes.
²

b
. One day Hermes fell in love with Apemosyne, who rejected his advances and fled from him. That evening he surprised her near a spring. Again she turned to flee, but he had spread slippery hides on the one path of escape, so that she fell flat on her face and he succeeded in ravishing her. When Apemosyne returned to the palace, and ruefully told Althaemenes of this misadventure, he cried out ‘Liar and harlot!’ and kicked her to death.

c
. Meanwhile Catreus, mistrusting Aerope and Clymene, the other two, banished them from Crete, of which he was now king. Aerope, after having been seduced by Thyestes the Pelopid, married Pleisthenes and became by him the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus; and Clymene married Nauplius, the celebrated navigator. At last, in lonely old age and, so far as he knew, without an heir to his throne, Catreus went in search of Althaemenes, whom he loved dearly. Landing one night on Rhodes, he and his companions were mistaken for pirates, and attacked by the Cameiran cowherds. Catreus tried to explain who he was and why he had come, but the barking of dogs drowned his voice. Althaemenes rushed from the palace to beat off the supposed raid and, not recognizing his father, killed him with a spear. When he learned that the oracle had been fulfilled after all, despite his long, self-imposed exile, he prayed to be swallowed up by the earth. A chasm accordingly opened, and he disappeared, but is paid heroic honours to this day.
³

1
. Apollodorus: iii. 2. 1.

2
. Diodorus Siculus: v. 78; Apollodorus:
loc. cit
.; Strabo: xiv. 2. 2; Scholiast on Pindar’s
Olympian Odes
vii. 159.

3
. Apollodorus: iii. 2. 1–2; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit
.

1
. This artificial myth, which records a Mycenaeo-Minoan occupation of Rhodes in the fifteenth century
B
.
C
., is intended also to account for libations poured down a chasm to a Rhodian hero, as well as for erotic sports in the course of which women danced on the newly-flayed hides of sacrificial beasts. The termination
byrios
, or
buriash
, occurs in the royal title of the Third Babylonian Dynasty, founded in 1750
B
.
C
.; and the deity of Atabyrius in Crete, like that of Atabyrium (Mount Tabor) in Palestine, famous for its golden calf worship, was the Hittite Tesup, a cattle-owning Sun-god (see
67.
1
). Rhodes first belonged to the Sumerian Moon-goddess Dam-Kina, or Danaë (see
60.
3
), but passed into the possession of Tesup (see
42.
4
); and, on the breakdown of the Hittite Empire, was colonized by Greek-speaking Cretans who retained the bull-cult, but made Atabyrius a son of Proteus (‘first man’) and Eurynome the Creatrix (see
1.
a
). In Dorian times Zeus Atabyrius usurped Tesup’s Rhodian cult. The roar of bulls will have been produced by the whirling of
rhomboi
, or bull-roarers (see
30.
1
), used to frighten away evil spirits.

2
. Apemosyne’s death at Cameira may refer to a brutal repression, by the Hittite rather than the Cretan invaders, of a college of Oracular priestesses at Cameirus. The three daughters of Catreus, like the Danaids, are the familiar Moon-triad: Apemosyne being the third person, Cameira’s counterpart. Catreus accidentally murdered by Althaemenes, like Laius accidently murdered by his son Oedipus (see 105.
d
), and Odysseus by his son Telegonus (see 170.
k
), will have been a predecessor in the sacred kingship rather than a father; but the story has been mistold – the son, not the father, should land from the sea and hurl the sting-ray spear.

94

THE SONS OF PANDION

W
HEN
Erechtheus, King of Athens, was killed by Poseidon, his sons Cecrops, Pandorus, Metion, and Orneus quarrelled over the succession; and Xuthus, by whose verdict Cecrops, the eldest, became king, had to leave Attica in haste.
¹

b
. Cecrops, whom Metion and Orneus threatened to kill, fled first to Megara and then to Euboea, where Pandorus joined him and founded a colony. The throne of Athens fell to Cecrops’s son Pandion, whose mother was Metiadusa, daughter of Eupalamus.
²
But he did not long enjoy his power, for though Metion died, his sons by Alcippe, of Iphinoë, proved to be as jealous as himself. These sons were named Daedalus, whom some, however, call his grandson; Eupalamus, whom others call his father; and Sicyon. Sicyon is also variously called the son of Erechtheus, Pelops, or Marathon, these genealogies being in great confusion.
³

c
. When the sons of Metion expelled Pandion from Athens he fled to the court of Pylas, Pylus, or Pylon, a Lelegian king of Megara,
⁴
whose daughter Pylia he married. Later, Pylas killed his uncle Bias and, leaving Pandion to rule Megara, took refuge in Messenia, where he founded the city of Pylus. Driven thence by Neleus and the Pelasgians of Iolcus, he entered Elis, and there founded a second Pylus. Pylia bore Pandion four sons at Megara: Aegeus, Pallas, Nisus, and Lycus, though Aegeus’s jealous brothers spread the rumour that he was the bastard son of one Scyrius.
⁵
Pandion never returned to Athens. He enjoys a hero shrine in Megara, where his tomb is still shown on the Bluff of Athene the Diver-bird, in proof that this territory once belonged to Athens; it was disguised as this bird that Athene hid his father Cecrops under her wings, and carried him in safety to Megara.
⁶

d
. After Pandion’s death his sons marched against Athens, drove out the sons of Metion, and divided Attica into four parts, as their father had instructed them to do. Aegeus, being the eldest, was awarded the sovereignty of Athens, while his brothers drew lots for the remainder of the kingdom: Nisus won Megara and the surrounding country as far west as Corinth; Lycus won Euboea; and Pallas Southern Attica, where he bred a rugged race of giants.
⁷

e
. Pylas’s son Sciron, who married one of Pandion’s daughters, disputed Nisus’s claim to Megara, and Aeacus, called in to judge the dispute, awarded the kingship to Nisus and his descendants, but the command of its armies to Sciron. In those days Megara was called Nisa, and Nisus also gave his name to the port of Nisaea, which he founded. When Minos killed Nisus he was buried in Athens, where his tomb is still shown behind the Lyceum. The Megareans, however, who do not admit that their city was ever captured by the Cretans, claim that Megareus married Nisus’s daughter Iphinoë and succeeded him.
⁸