THE MAKING OF A GODDESS.
‘οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖκα μεμίμηται κυήσει καὶ γεννήσει ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν.’
In the last chapter we have traced the development from Keres to Erinyes,
and have seen that, on the whole, this development was a downward course.
The Erinyes are in a sense more civilized than the Keres; they are beings
more articulate, more clearly outlined and concerned with issues moral
rather than physical; but the career they start as angry souls they end
as Poinae, ministers of vindictive torment; there is in them no element
of hope, no kindly impulse towards purification, they end where they
began as irreconcileable demons rather than friendly gods.
We have further marked the attempt of Aeschylus to turn the vindictive
demons of the old religion into the gentler divinities of the new, and
we have seen that, for all his genius, the attempt failed wholly. The
Erinyes never, save here and there to a puzzled antiquarian, became
really Semnae; the popular instinct of their utter distinctness remained
sound. We have now to note that, where the genius of a poet fails, the
slow-moving widespread instinct of a people may prevail; ghosts are not
wholly angry, and the gentler form of ghost may and does become a god.
The line between a spirit (δαίμων) and a regular god (θεός) is drawn with
no marked precision. The difference is best realized by remembering the
old principle that man makes all the objects of his worship in his own
image. Before he has himself clearly realized his own humanity—the line
that marks him off from other animals, he makes his divinities sometimes
wholly animal, sometimes of mixed, monstrous shapes. His animal-shaped
gods the Greek quickly outgrew; something will be said of them when we
come to the religion of the Bull-Dionysos. Mixed monstrous shapes long
haunted his imagination; bird-woman-souls, Gorgon-bogeys, Sphinxes,
Harpies and the like were, as has been seen, the fitting vehicles of a
religion that was mainly of vague fear. But as man became more conscious
of his humanity and _pari passu_ grew more _humane_, a more complete
anthropomorphism steadily prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human
gods man mirrored his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered
relations of life.
Xenophanes[678], writing in the 6th century B.C., knew that God is
‘without body, parts or passions,’ but he knew also that, till man
becomes wholly philosopher, his gods are doomed perennially to take and
retake human shape. His thrice-familiar words still bear repetition:
‘One God there is greatest of gods and mortals;
Not like to man is he in mind or body.
All of him sees, all of him thinks and hearkens....
But mortal man made gods in his own image
Like to himself in vesture, voice and body.
Had they but hands, methinks, oxen and lions
And horses would have made them gods like-fashioned,
Horse-gods for horses, oxen-gods for oxen.’
We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as necessarily a
clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a certain element of
barbarity is softened or extruded, but with this gain comes loss, the
loss of the element of formless, monstrous mystery. The ram-headed
Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic more religious than any of the
beautiful divine humanities of the Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a
store of lovely motives for art, but that spirit is scarcely religious
which makes of Eros a boy trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming
a stone at a lizard, of Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal.
Xenophanes put his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He
saw that it comprised and confined the god within the limitations
of the worshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as
anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not very far.
Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods few and
scattered. Pausanias[679] heard at Phigaleia of a horse-headed Demeter,
and again of a fish-bodied Eurynome[680] whom some called Artemis, but
for the most part by the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. mixed forms, half
animal, half human, belong to beings half-way between man and god, demons
rather than full-fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than
beneficent. Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants.
[Illustration: FIG. 59.]
In the design from a black-figured cylix[681] in fig. 59 we have a
curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously
beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On the
reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, but goats,
the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine-stems. On the
obverse (fig. 59) we have snake-bodied nymphs rejoicing in the grape
harvest. Two of them hold a basket of net or wicker in which the grapes
will be gathered, a third holds a great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth
plays on the double flutes.
Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape-gathering,
flute-playing snake-nymphs. They are δρακοντώδεις κόραι, but assuredly
they are not Erinyes and we dare not even call them Eumenides. Probably
any Athenian child would have named them without a moment’s hesitation,
but we must be content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites,
givers of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not
as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genii of fertility. They are near
akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, and we are
tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in literature, he may have
lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid nymphs, his daughters. Later it will
be seen that earth-born goddesses, though they shed their snake-form,
keep as their vehicle and attribute the snake they once were.
THE MOTHER AND THE MAID.
The gods reflect not only man’s human form but also his human relations.
In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a family group of the ordinary
patriarchal type, a type so familiar that it scarcely arrests attention.
Zeus, Father of Gods and men, is supreme; Hera, though in constant and
significant revolt, occupies the subordinate place of a wife; Poseidon is
a younger brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus
and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and daughters
are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant insurrection against
father and mother, but still they constitute a family, and a family
subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority of a father.
But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these mirror
the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is quite other
than patriarchal. Hera, subject in the Homeric Olympus, reigns alone
at Argos; Athene at Athens is no god’s wife, she is affiliated in some
loose fashion to Poseidon, but the relation is one of rivalry and
ultimate conquest, nowise of subordination. At Eleusis two goddesses
reign supreme, Demeter and Kore, the Mother and the Maid; neither Hades
nor Triptolemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in
historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess[682]
knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses:
‘First in my prayer before all other gods
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess.
Next Themis on her mother’s oracular seat
Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent
Another Titan, daughter too of Earth,
Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift
To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.’
Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus[683] tells us that
Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the future was
foretold him by his mother:
‘Themis she
And Gaia, one in form with many names.’
In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part traced
through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect another condition
of things, a relationship traced through the mother, the state of society
known by the awkward term matriarchal[684], a state echoed in the lost
_Catalogues of Women_, the _Eoiai_ of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian
heroines of the _Nekuia_. Our modern patriarchal society focusses its
religious anthropomorphism on the relationship of the father and the son;
the Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the figure of
the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is still in some sense
subordinate to the Father and the Son.
Of the many survivals of matriarchal notions in Greek mythology one
salient instance may be noted. St Augustine[685], telling the story
of the rivalry between Athene and Poseidon, says that the contest was
decided by the vote of the citizens, both men and women, for it was the
custom then for women to take part in public affairs. The men voted for
Poseidon, the women for Athene; the women exceeded the men by one and
Athene prevailed. To appease the wrath of Poseidon the men inflicted on
the women a triple punishment, ‘they were to lose their vote, _their
children were no longer to be called by their mother’s name_ and they
themselves were no longer to be called after their goddess, Athenians.’
The myth is aetiological, and it mirrors surely some shift in the social
organization of Athens. The citizens were summoned by Cecrops, and it
is noticeable that with his name universal tradition associates the
introduction of the patriarchal form of marriage. Athenaeus[686] quoting
from Clearchos, the pupil of Aristotle, says, ‘At Athens Cecrops was the
first to join one woman to one man: before connections had taken place
at random and marriages were in common—hence, as some think, Cecrops
was called “Twy-formed” (διφυής), since before his day people did not
know who their fathers were, on account of the number (of possible
parents).’ A society that had passed to patriarchy naturally misjudged
the marriage-laws of matriarchy and regarded it as a mere state of
promiscuity. Cecrops, tradition[687] said, was the first to call Zeus the
Highest, and with the worship of Zeus the Father it is possible that he
introduced the social conditions of patriarchy. Apollo, the son of Zeus,
was worshipped at Athens as _Patrôos_.
The primitive Greek was of course not conscious that he mirrored his
own human relations in the figures of his gods, but, in the reflective
days of Pythagoras, the analogy between human and divine was not left
unnoted. The evidence he adduces as to the piety of women is perhaps the
most illuminating comment on primitive theology ever made by ancient or
modern. ‘Women,’ he[688] says, ‘give to each successive stage of their
life the same name as a god, they call the unmarried woman _Maiden_
(Κόρη), the woman given in marriage to a man _Bride_ (Νύμφη), her who
has borne children _Mother_ (Μήτηρ), and her who has borne children’s
children _Grandmother_ (Μαῖα).’ Invert the statement and we have the
whole matriarchal theology in a nutshell. The matriarchal goddesses
reflect the life of women, not women the life of the goddesses.
Of these various forms of the conditions of woman, woman as maiden,
bride, mother and grandmother, the last, grandmother, comes little
into prominence; it only lends a name to Maia, the mother of Hermes.
Nymphs we have everywhere, but the two cardinal conditions are obviously
to a primitive society Mother[689] and Maiden. When these conditions
crystallized into the goddess forms of Demeter and Kore, they appear
as Mother and _Daughter_, but primarily the conditions expressed are
Mother and Maid, woman mature and woman before maturity, and of these
two forms the Mother-form as more characteristic is, in early days, the
more prominent; Kore _as daughter_ rather than maiden is the product of
mythology. When we come to the religion of Dionysos, it will be seen that
the Mother-goddess has for her attribute of motherhood a son rather than
a daughter.
THE EARTH-MOTHER AS KARPOPHOROS OR LADY OF THE WILD THINGS.
The Mother-goddess was almost necessarily envisaged as the Earth. The
ancient Dove-priestesses at Dodona[690] were the first to chant the
Litany:
‘Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be, O great Zeus.
Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.’
The two lines have no necessary connection; it may be that their order
is inverted and that long before the Dove-priestesses sang the praises
of Zeus they had chanted their hymn to the Mother. It was fitting that
women priestesses should sing to a woman goddess, to Ga who was also
Ma. Mother-Earth bore not only fruits but the race of man. As the poet
Asius[691] said:
‘Divine Pelasgos on the wood-clad hills
Black Earth brought forth, that mortal man might be.’
Pelasgos claimed no father, but he, the first father, had a mother.
And here it must be noted that the local mother must necessarily have
preceded Gaia the abstract and universal. Primitive man does not tend
to deal in abstractions. Each local hero claimed descent from a local
earth-nymph or mother[692]. Salamis, Aegina and ‘dear mother Ida’ are not
late geographical abstractions; each is a local mother, a real parent,
and all are later merged in the great All-Mother Ge.
[Illustration: FIG. 60.]
The Earth-Mother and each and every local nymph was mother not only of
man but of all creatures that live; she is the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’
(πότνια θηρῶν). Art brings her figure very clearly before us. On an early
stamped Boeotian amphora[693] in the National Museum at Athens (figs. 60
and 61) she is vividly presented. The Great Mother stands with uplifted
hands exactly in the attitude of the still earlier figures recently
discovered in the Mycenaean shrine at Cnossos. To either side of her is
a lion, heraldically posed like the lions of the Gate at Mycenae; below
her is a frieze of deer. The figure is supported or rather encircled by
two women figures, one at either side. These seem to be part of a ring of
encircling worshippers[694].
[Illustration: FIG. 61.]
[Illustration: FIG. 62.]
The design in fig. 62 from a painted Boeotian amphora[695], also in the
Museum at Athens, shows a similar and even more complete conception of
the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Her two lions still keep heraldic guard,
above her outstretched arms are two birds[696], her gown is decorated
with the figure of a great fish. We are reminded of the Eurynome of
Phigalia with her fish-tailed body.
The interesting thing about these early representations, these and
countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper name. We
call her rightly the Great Mother and the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but
farther we cannot go. She has been named Artemis and Cybele, but for
neither name is there a particle of evidence.
[Illustration: FIG. 63.]
The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. The design
in fig. 63 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb in Phrygia[697]. The
great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies the whole height of the
back wall of the tomb. ‘All things,’ as Cicero[698] says, ‘go back to
earth and rise out of the earth.’ ‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall
return,’ and more tenderly Aeschylus[699]:
‘Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life
And rears and takes again into her womb.’
And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the _metro_polis of the dead, and
therefore ‘the Athenians of old called the dead “Demeter’s people”[700].’
On the festival day of the dead, the _Nekusia_ at Athens, they sacrificed
to Earth. To a people who practised inhumation, such ritual and such
symbolism were almost inevitable. When the Earth-Mother developed into
the Corn-Mother, such symbolism gained new life and force from the
processes of agriculture. Cicero[701] records that in his day it was
still the custom to sow the graves of the dead with corn: ‘that which
thou sowest is not quickened except it die[702].’ Out of the symbolism of
the corn sown the Greeks did _not_ develope a doctrine of immortality,
but, when that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the
seed lay ready to hand.
THE MOTHER AS KOUROTROPHOS.
Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion as
_Kourotrophos_, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the design in
fig. 64 taken from an early black-figured amphora of the 6th century
B.C. in the British Museum[703]. This figure of the Mother is usually
explained as Leto with the twins Apollo and Artemis, but such an
interpretation is, I think, over-bold, and really misleading. The artist
knows that there is a Mother-Goddess; one child would be sufficient
as an attribute of motherhood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he
wishes to emphasise her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can
conveniently hold, one on each shoulder.
[Illustration: FIG. 64.]
We have no right to name the children Apollo and Artemis, unless
inscribed or marked as such by attributes. This is clear from the
fact that, on a fragment of a vase found in the Acropolis excavations
and unhappily still unpublished, we have a figure closely analogous,
though later in style, to our Kourotrophos, bearing on her elbows two
little naked imps _who are inscribed_: the one is _Himeros_, the other
_E_(ros). The mother can in this case be none other than Aphrodite. The
attribution is confirmed by another fragment[704] in which only half of
the Mother-goddess is preserved and one child seated on her elbow; the
child is not inscribed, but against the mother, in archaic letters, is
written _Aphrodi_(te); near her as on our vase is standing Dionysos.
Pausanias[705], when examining the chest of Cypselos, saw a design on
which was represented ‘a woman carrying a white boy sleeping on her right
arm; on the other arm she has a black boy who is like the one who is
asleep; they both have their feet twisted (ἀμφοτέρους διεστραμμένους τοὺς
πόδας); the inscriptions show that the boys are Death and Sleep, and that
Night is the nurse of both.’ He adds the rather surprising statement that
it ‘would have been easy to see who they were without the inscriptions.’
A woman with a child on each arm can then represent Aphrodite with
Himeros and Eros; if one child is white and asleep and the other black,
the group represents Night with Death and Sleep; if the group is to
represent Leto and her twins, there must be something to mark the twins
as Apollo and Artemis. On another amphora in the British Museum[706]
there does exist just the necessary differentiation: the child on the
left arm is naked, the child on the right though also painted black
wears a short chiton. We are justified in supposing that the one is a
boy the other a girl, and there is at least a high probability that the
differentiation of sex points to Apollo and Artemis.
I have dwelt on this point because vase-paintings are here, as so
often, highly instructive in the matter of the development and slow
differentiation and articulation of theological types. At first all is
vague and misty; there is, as it were, a blank formula, a mother-goddess
characterized by twins. If we give her a name at all she is Kourotrophos.
As her personality grows she differentiates, she is Aphrodite with Eros
and Himeros, she is Night with Sleep and Death. When Apollo and Artemis
came from the North they became _the_ twins _par excellence_, and they
are affiliated to the old religion; the Mother as Kourotrophos became
Leto with Apollo and Artemis.
The like process goes on in literature, though it is less obviously
manifest. At the opening of the Thesmophoria the Woman-Herald in
Aristophanes[707] makes proclamation as follows:
‘Keep solemn silence. Keep solemn silence. Pray to the two
Thesmophoroi, to Demeter, and to Kore, and to Plouton, and
to Kalligeneia, and to Kourotrophos, and to Hermes, and the
Charites.’
Discussion from the time of the scholiast onwards has raged as to who
Kourotrophos is—is she Hestia, is she Ge? The simple truth is never
faced that she is _Kourotrophos_, an attribute become a personality.
Her personality, it is true, faded before the dominant personality of
the Mother of Eleusis, but her presence in the ancient ritual-formulary
speaks clearly for her original actuality. Once she had faded, all the
other more successful goddesses, Ge, Artemis, Hekate, Leto, Demeter,
Aphrodite, even Athene, contend for her name as their epithet. There is
no controversy so idle and apparently so prolific as that which seeks to
find in these ancient inchoate personalities, such as Kourotrophos and
Kalligeneia, the epithets of the Olympians they so long predated.
* * * * *
The figure of the Mother as Kourotrophos lent itself easily to later
abstractions. Themis is one of the earliest, and she attains a real
personality; her sisters Eunomia and Dike are scarcely flesh and blood,
they are beautiful stately shadows. The ‘making of a goddess’ is always
a mystery, the outcome of manifold causes of which we have lost count.
At the close of the 5th century B.C. at the end of the weary, fatal
Peloponnesian war, Eirene, Peace, almost attained godhead, and godhead as
the Mother. Cephisodotos, father of Praxiteles, made for the market-place
at Athens a statue of her carrying the child Ploutos, the Athenians built
her an altar and did sacrifice to her, Aristophanes brings her on the
stage, but it is all too late and in vain, she remains an abstraction as
lifeless as Theoria or Opora, and finds no place among the humanities of
Olympus.
[Illustration: FIG. 65.]
Tyche, Fortune, another late abstraction of the Mother, though she
is scarcely more human than Eirene, obtained a wide popularity.
Pausanias[708] saw at Thebes a sanctuary of Tyche; he remarks after
naming the artists, ‘it was a clever plan of them to put Ploutos in
the arms of Tyche as his mother or nurse, and Cephisodotos was no less
clever; he made for the Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos.’
These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular with the
Orphics. Their very lack of personality favoured a growing philosophic
monotheism. The design in fig. 65 is carved in low relief on one of the
columns of the Hall of the Mystae of Dionysos, recently excavated at
Melos[709]. Tyche holds a child—presumably the local Ploutos of Melos—in
her arms. Above her is inscribed, ‘May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious
to Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.’ Tyche, Fortune, might
be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any and every city,
but to the mystic she had another and a deeper meaning; she, like the
Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his life and soul. In her house,
as will later be seen (Chap. XI.), he lodged, observing rules of purity
and abstinence before he was initiated into the underworld mysteries of
Trophonios, before he drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is
one of the countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the
Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the Mother or
the Daughter.
DEMETER AND KORE.
So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by hunting, the
figure of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ would content his imagination.
But, when he became an agriculturist, the Mother-goddess must perforce
be, not only Kourotrophos of all living things, but also the Corn-mother,
Demeter.
The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed[710]. The
most popular etymology is that which makes her Δαμήτηρ, Earth-mother,
Δᾶ, which occurs in such interjections[711] as φεῦ δᾶ, οἰοῖ δᾶ, being
regarded as the equivalent of Γᾶ. From the point of view of meaning this
etymology is nowise satisfactory. Demeter is _not_ the Earth-Mother, not
the goddess of the earth in general, but of the fruits of the civilized,
cultured earth, the _tilth_; not the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but
She-who-bears-fruits, _Karpophoros_. Mannhardt was the first to point
out another etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author
of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[712], after stringing together a whole
series of senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like
the truth. ‘Deo,’ he says, ‘may be derived from τὰς δηάς, for barley
grains are called by the Cretans δηαί.’ The Cretan word δηαί is near
akin to the ordinary Greek ζειά, the word used for a coarse wheat or
spelt; the fruitful field in Homer[713] bears the epithet ζείδωρος,
‘spelt-yielding.’ Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 565), probably came
from Crete, and brought her name with her; she is the Earth, but only in
this limited sense, as ‘Grain-Mother.’
To the modern mind it is surprising to find the processes of agriculture
conducted in the main by women, and mirroring themselves in the figures
of women-goddesses. But in days when man was mainly concerned with
hunting and fighting it was natural enough that agriculture and the
ritual attendant on it should fall to the women. Moreover to this
social necessity was added, and still is among many savage communities,
a deep-seated element of superstition. ‘Primitive man,’ Mr Payne[714]
observes, ‘refuses to interfere in agriculture; he thinks it magically
dependent for success on woman, and connected with child-bearing.’ ‘When
the women plant maize,’ said the Indian to Gumilla, ‘the stalk produces
two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. They
only know how to plant corn to ensure its germinating. Then let them
plant it, they know more than we know.’ Such seems to have been the mind
of the men of Athens who sent their wives and daughters to keep the
Thesmophoria and work their charms and ensure fertility for crops and man.
It was mainly in connection with agriculture, it would seem, that the
Earth-goddess developed her double form as Mother and Maid. The ancient
‘Lady of the Wild Things’ is both in one or perhaps not consciously
either, but at Eleusis the two figures are clearly outlined; Demeter and
Kore are two persons though one god. They take shape very charmingly in
the design in fig. 66, from an early red-figured skyphos[715], found
at Eleusis. To the left Demeter stands, holding in her left hand her
sceptre, while with her right she gives the corn-ears to her nursling,
Triptolemos, who holds his ‘crooked plough.’ Behind is Kore, the maiden,
with her simple chiton for dress, and her long flowing hair, and the
torches she holds as Queen of the underworld. Mother and Maid in this
picture are clearly distinguished, but not infrequently, when both appear
together, it is impossible to say which is which.
[Illustration: FIG. 66.]
* * * * *
The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses, whether
Mother or Maid, to the male figures that accompany them is one altogether
noble and womanly, though perhaps not what the modern mind holds to be
feminine. It seems to halt somewhere half-way between Mother and Lover,
with a touch of the patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they
choose a local hero for their own to inspire and protect. They ask of
him, not that he should love or adore, but that he should do great deeds.
Hera has Jason, Athene Perseus, Herakles and Theseus, Demeter and Kore
Triptolemos. And as their glory is in the hero’s high deeds, so their
grace is his guerdon. With the coming of patriarchal conditions this high
companionship ends. The women goddesses are sequestered to a servile
domesticity, they become abject and amorous.
It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the Earth or
Corn-goddess are not Mother and _Daughter_, but Mother and Maiden,
Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the older and younger form of
the same person, hence their easy confusion. The figures of the Mother
and _Daughter_ are mythological rather than theological, i.e. they arise
from the story-telling instinct:
‘Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing,
She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king
Aïdoneus seized, by Zeus’ decree. He found her, as she played
Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn with golden blade[716].’
The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. Aetiology is
ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the young fruit of the earth,
was caught by a lover, kept for a season, and in the spring-time returns
to her mother; the mother is comforted, and the earth blossoms again[717]:
‘Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield
And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy field,
And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things
Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings
And taught them, Triptolemos first.’
Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly
distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold of the
truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate[718] in fig.
67 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or Maid it is
difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She is a great
goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high polos on her
head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch; before her is an
omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pomegranate—is she Demeter
or Persephone? I incline to think she is both in one; the artist has not
differentiated her.
[Illustration: FIG. 67.]
The dead, according to Plutarch’s[719] statement, were called by the
Athenians ‘Demeter’s people.’ The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’
with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the tombs of
Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But in Greece
proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and the Maid take
mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and her daughter Persephone,
their individual functions tend more and more to specialize. Demeter
becomes more and more agricultural, more and more the actual corn. As
Plutarch[720] observes—with full consciousness of the anomalous blend of
the human and the physical—a poet can say of the reapers:
‘What time men shear to earth Demeter’s limbs.’
The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual—the Mother
is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of the underworld.
Demeter as Thesmophoros has for her sphere more and more the things of
this life, laws and civilized marriage; she grows more and more human and
kindly, goes more and more over to the humane Olympians, till in the
Homeric Hymn she, the Earth-Mother, is an actual denizen of Olympus. The
Daughter, at first but the young form of the mother, is in maiden fashion
sequestered, even a little _farouche_; she withdraws herself more and
more to the kingdom of the spirit, the things below and beyond:
‘She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn.
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.’
And in that kingdom aloof her figure waxes as the figure of the Mother
wanes:
‘O daughter of earth, my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also I also thy brother, I go as I came unto earth.’
She passes to a place unknown of the Olympians, her kingdom is not of
this world.
‘Thou art more than the Gods, who number the days of our temporal
breath,
For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, Death.’
All this is matter of late development. At first we have merely the
figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, the Two Despoinae.
Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in Arcadia[721] she is at once Erinys
and Lousia. But it is not surprising that, as will later be seen, a
religion like Orphism, which concerned itself with the abnegation of this
world and the life of the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure
of the underworld Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to
make her way alone into Olympus.
THE ANODOS OF THE MAIDEN EARTH-GODDESSES.
In discussing the Boeotian plate (fig. 67), it has been seen that it
is not easy always to distinguish in art the figures of the Mother and
the Maid. A like difficulty attends the interpretation of the series of
curious representations of the earth-goddess now to be considered (figs.
68-72).
[Illustration: FIG. 68.]
We begin with the vase-painting in fig. 68, where happily an inscription
makes the interpretation certain. The design is from a red-figured
krater, now in the Albertinum Museum at Dresden[722]. To the right is a
conventional earth-mound (χῶμα γῆς). In front of it stands Hermes. He
holds not his _kerykeion_, but a rude forked _rhabdos_. It was with the
_rhabdos_, it will be remembered (p. 44), that he summoned the souls from
the grave-_pithos_. Here, too, he is present as Psychagogos; he has come
to summon an earth-spirit, nay more, _the_ Earth-goddess herself. Out
of the artificial mound, which symbolizes the earth itself, rises the
figure of a woman. At first sight we might be inclined to call her Ge,
the Earth-_Mother_, but the figure is slight and maidenly, and over her
happily is written (Phe)rophatta. It is the Anodos of Kore—the coming of
the goddess is greeted by an ecstatic dance of goat-horned _Panes_. They
are not Satyrs: these, as will later be seen (p. 380), are horse demons.
By the early middle of the 5th century B.C., the date of this red-figured
vase, the worship of the Arcadian Pan was well-established at Athens, and
the goat-men, the Panes, became the fashionable and fitting attendants of
the Earth-Maiden. The inscriptions above their heads can, unfortunately,
not be read.
[Illustration: FIG. 69.]
A vase of much later date (fig. 69) shows us substantially the same
scene. The design is from a red-figured krater[723] in the Berlin
Antiquarium. The goddess again rises from an artificial mound decorated
with sprays of foliage. The attendant figures are different. A
goat-legged Pan leans eagerly over the mound, but Dionysos himself, with
his thyrsos, sits quietly waiting the Anodos, and with him are his real
attendants, the horse-tailed Satyrs. In the left-hand corner a little
winged Love-god plays on the double flutes. The rising goddess is not
inscribed, and she is best left unnamed. She is an Earth-goddess, but
the presence of Dionysos makes us suspect that there is some reminiscence
of Semele (p. 407). The presence of the Love-god points, as will be
explained later (Chap. XII.), to the influence of Orphism.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.]
More curious, more instructive, but harder completely to explain, is the
design in fig. 70, from a black-figured lekythos in the Bibliothèque
Nationale[724] at Paris. The colossal head and lifted hands of a woman
are rising out of the earth. This time there is no artificial mound, the
scene takes place in a temple or sanctuary, indicated by the two bounding
columns. Two men, not Satyrs, are present, and this time not as idle
spectators. Both are armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them
strikes the head of the rising woman.
Some possible light is thrown on this difficult vase by the consideration
of two others. First we have two designs from the obverse and reverse
of an amphora[725], shown together in fig. 71. On the obverse to the
left we have a scene fairly familiar, a goddess rising from the ground,
watched by a youth, who holds in his hand some sort of implement, either
a pick or a hammer. The meaning of the reverse design is conjectural.
A man, short of stature and almost deformed in appearance, looks at
a curious and problematic figure, half woman and half vase, set on a
quadrangular basis. Before it, if the drawing be correct, is a spiked
crown; round about, in the field, a number of rosettes. A design so
problematic is not likely to be a forgery. Before its meaning is
conjectured, another vase, whose interpretation is perfectly clear and
certain, remains to be considered. Its meaning may serve to elucidate the
others.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.]
The design in fig. 72 is from a red-figured amphora[726] of the finest
period, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. At a first glance, when we
see the splendid figure rising from the ground with outstretched arms,
the man with the hammer and Hermes attendant, we think that we have the
familiar scene of the rising of Kore or Ge. As such, had no inscriptions
existed, the design would certainly have been interpreted. But, as it
happens, each figure is carefully inscribed. To the left _Zeus_, next to
him _Hermes_, next _Epimetheus_, and last, not Ge or Kore, but _Pandora_.
Over Pandora, to greet her uprising, hovers a Love-god with a fillet in
his outstretched hands.
[Illustration: FIG. 72.]
Pandora rises from the earth; she _is_ the Earth, giver of all gifts.
This is made doubly sure by another representation of her birth or rather
her making. On the well-known _Bale_-cylix of the British Museum[727]
Pandora, half statue half woman, has just been modelled by Hephaistos,
and Athene is in the act of decking her. Pandora she certainly is, but
against her is written her other name (A)nesidora[728], ‘she who sends up
gifts.’ Pandora is a form or title of the Earth-goddess in the Kore form,
entirely humanized and vividly personified by mythology.
* * * * *
In the light of this substantial identity of Pandora and the Earth-Kore,
it is possible perhaps to offer an explanation of the problematic vase
in fig. 71. Have we not on obverse and reverse a juxtaposition of the
two scenes, the Rise of Kore, the Making of Pandora? On this showing the
short deformed man would be Hephaistos, and Pandora, half woman half
vase, may be conceived as issuing from her once famous _pithos_.
The _contaminatio_ of the myths of the Making of Pandora and the Anodos
of Kore may explain also another difficulty. In the making and moulding
of Pandora, Hephaistos the craftsman uses his characteristic implement,
the hammer[729]. This hammer he also uses to break open the head of Zeus,
in representations of the birth of Athene (p. 366). On vases with the
Anodos of Kore the Satyrs or _Panes_ carry and use sometimes an ordinary
pick, sometimes a hammer, like the hammer of Hephaistos. The pick is the
natural implement for breaking clods of earth, the spade appears to have
been unknown before the iron age—the hammers have always presented a
difficulty. May they not have arisen in connection with the myth of the
making of Pandora, and then, by confusion, passed to the Anodos of Kore?
Finally, returning to the difficult design in fig. 70, I would offer
another suggestion. The fact that the scene takes place in a sanctuary
seems to me to indicate that we have here a representation of some sort
of mimetic ritual. The Anodos of Kore was, as has already been seen (p.
131), dramatized at certain festivals; exactly how we do not know. At the
festival of the _Charila_ (p. 107) a puppet dressed as a girl was brought
out, beaten, and ultimately hanged in a chasm. Is it not possible that
at some festival of the Earth-goddess there was a mimetic enactment of
the Anodos, that the earth or some artificially-formed chasm was broken
open by picks, and that a puppet or a real woman emerged. It is more
likely, I think, that the vase-painter had some such scene in his mind
than that the Satyrs with their picks or hammers represent the storm and
lightning from heaven beating on the earth to subdue it and compel its
fertility[730]. At Megara, near the Prytaneion, Pausanias[731] saw ‘a
rock which was called Anaklethra[732], “Calling Up,” because Demeter,
if anyone like to believe it, when she was wandering in search of her
daughter, called her up there.’ He adds, ‘the women of Megara to this day
perform rites that are analogous to the legend told.’ Unhappily he does
not tell us what these rites were. Lucian devotes a half-serious treatise
to discussing the scope and merits of pantomimic dancing, Xenophon[733]
in his _Banquet_ lets us see that educated guests after dinner preferred
the acting of a myth to the tumbling of a dancing girl, but the actual
_ritual_ pantomime of the ancients is to us a sealed book. Of one thing
we may be sure, that the ‘things done’ (δρώμενα) of ritual helped to
intensify mythological impersonation as much as, or perhaps more than,
the ‘things spoken’ (ἔπη) of the poet.
PANDORA.
To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess,
in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the
time of Aristophanes[734] she had become a misty figure, her ritual
archaic—matter for the oracles of ‘Bakis.’ The prophet instructing
Peisthetairos reads from his script:
‘First to Pandora sacrifice a white-fleeced ram.’
The scholiast gives the correct and canonical interpretation ‘to Pandora,
the earth, because she bestows all things necessary for life.’ By his
time, and long before, explanation was necessary. Hipponax[735] knew of
her; Athenaeus, in his discussion of cabbages, quotes from memory the
mysterious lines:
‘He grovelled, worshipping the seven-leaved cabbage
To which Pandora sacrificed a cake
At the Thargelia for a pharmakos.’
The passage, though obscure, is of interest because it connects Pandora
the Earth-goddess with the Thargelia, the festival of the first-fruits
of the Earth. Effaced in popular ritual she emerges in private
superstition. Philostratos[736], in his _Life of Apollonius_, tells how
a certain man, in need of money to dower his daughter, ‘sacrificed’ to
Earth for treasure, and Apollonius, to whom he confided his desire,
said, ‘Earth and I will help you,’ and he prayed to Pandora, sought in a
garden, and found the desired treasure.
* * * * *
Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but
in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely
changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature,
the handiwork of Olympian Zeus. On a late, red-figured krater in the
British Museum[737], obviously inspired by Hesiod, we have the scene
of her birth. She no longer rises halfway from the ground, but stands
stiff and erect in the midst of the Olympians. Zeus is there seated with
sceptre and thunderbolt, Poseidon is there, Iris and Hermes and Ares
and Hera, and Athene about to crown the new-born maiden. Earth is all
but forgotten, and yet so haunting is tradition that, in a lower row,
beneath the Olympians, a chorus of men, disguised as goat-horned Panes,
still dance their welcome. It is a singular reminiscence, and, save as a
survival, wholly irrelevant.
Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to
his own _bourgeois_, pessimistic ends; he tells it twice. Once in the
_Theogony_[738], and here the new-born maiden has no name, she is just
a ‘beautiful evil,’ a ‘crafty snare’ to mortals. But in the _Works and
Days_[739] he dares to name her and yet with infinite skill to wrest her
glory into shame:
‘He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord,
For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word
Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair,
And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair.
And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set
Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet,
The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of
spring,
While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything.
Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place,
Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways.
He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice,
Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her this was his choice,
PANDORA, because in Olympus the gods joined together then
And _all_ of them gave her, a _gift_, a sorrow, to covetous men.’
Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself by the
vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of theological
animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and
Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure _is_ from the
beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the
temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become
their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and
with a slave’s tricks and blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal
_bourgeois_, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian
jest[740]:
‘He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.’
Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to
patriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming retrogression, is
a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to women a false
because a magical prestige. With patriarchy came inevitably the facing
of a real fact, the fact of the greater natural weakness of women. Man
the stronger, when he outgrew his belief in the magical potency of
woman, proceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave
her as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non-natural,
mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger had a need, real
and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature had from the outset
compelled a certain recognition of this truth, but that the physical was
a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard saying, and its understanding
was not granted to the Greek, save here and there where a flicker of the
truth gleamed and went through the vision of philosopher or poet.
* * * * *
So the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, suffered eclipse:
she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman; she opened her great
grave-_pithos_[741], she that was Mother of Life; the Keres fluttered
forth, bringing death and disease;—only Hope remained. Strangely enough,
when the great figure of the Earth-Mother re-emerges, she re-emerges, it
will later be seen, as Aphrodite.
THE MAIDEN-TRINITIES.
So far we have seen that a goddess, to the primitive Greek, took twofold
form, and this twofold form, shifting and easily interchangeable, is seen
to resolve itself very simply into the two stages of a woman’s life, as
Maiden and Mother. But Greek religion has besides the twofold Mother and
Maiden a number of _triple_ forms, Women-Trinities, which at first sight
are not so readily explicable. We find not only three Gorgons and three
Graiae, but three Semnae, three Moirae, three Charites, three Horae,
three Agraulids, and, as a multiple of three, nine Muses.
First it should be noted that the trinity-form is confined to the
women goddesses. Greek religion had in Zeus and Apollo the figures of
the father and the son, but of a male trinity we find no trace. Zeus
and Apollo, incomers from the North, stand alone in this matter of
relationship. We do not find the fatherhood of Poseidon emphasized, nor
the sonship of Hermes; there is no wide and universal development of the
father and the son as there was of the Mother and the Maiden. Dualities
and trinities alike seem to be characteristic of the old matriarchal
goddesses.
Evidence is not lacking that the trinity-form grew out of the duality.
Plutarch[742] notes as one of the puzzling things at Delphi which
required looking into, that two Moirae were worshipped there, whereas
everywhere else three were canonical. It has already been seen (p. 242)
that the number of the Semnae varied between two and three, and that,
as three was the ultimate canonical number, we might fairly suppose the
number two to have been the earlier. It is the same with the Charites.
Pausanias[743] was told in Boeotia that Eteocles not only was ‘the first
who sacrificed to the Charites,’ but, further, he ‘instituted three
Charites.’ The names Eteocles gave to his three Charites the Boeotians
did not remember. This is unfortunate, as Orchomenos was the most ancient
seat of the worship of the Charites; their images there were natural
stones that fell to Eteocles from heaven. Pausanias goes on to note that
‘among the Lacedaemonians two Charites only were worshipped; their names
were Kleta and Phaenna. The Athenians also from ancient days worshipped
two Charites, by name Auxo and Hegemone.’ Later it appears they fell
in with the prevailing fashion, for ‘in front of the entrance to the
Acropolis there were set up the images of three Charites.’ The ancient
Charites at Orchomenos, at Sparta, at Athens, were two, and it may be
conjectured that they took form as the Mother and the Maid.
The three daughters of Cecrops[744] are by the time of Euripides ‘maidens
threefold’; the three daughters of Erechtheus[745], who are but their
later doubles, are a ‘triple yoke of maidens,’ and yet—in the case of
the daughters of Cecrops—there is ample evidence[746] that originally
they were two, and these two probably a mother and a maid. Aglauros and
Pandrosos are definite personalities; they had regular precincts and
shrines, known in historical times, Aglauros on the north slope of the
Acropolis[747], where the maidens danced, Pandrosos to the west of the
Erechtheion[748]. But of a shrine, precinct, or sanctuary of Herse we
have no notice. Ovid[749] probably felt the difficulty; he lodges Herse
in a chamber midway between Aglauros and Pandrosos. The women of Athens
swore by Aglauros and more rarely by Pandrosos[750]. Aglauros, by whom
they swore most frequently, and who gave her name to the Agraulids, was
probably the earlier and mother-form. Herse was no good even to swear
by; she is the mere senseless etymological eponym of the festival of
the Hersephoria, a third sister added to make up the canonical triad.
The Hersephoria out of which she is made was not in her honour; it was
celebrated to Athene, to Pandrosos, to Ge, to Themis, to Eileithyia.
The women trinities rose out of dualities, but not every duality became a
trinity. Plutarch[751], in discussing the origin of the nine Muses, notes
that we have not three Demeters, or three Athenes, or three Artemises.
He touches unconsciously on the reason why some dualities resisted the
impulse to become trinities. Where personification had become complete,
as in the case of Demeter and Kore, or of their doubles, Damia and
Auxesia, no third figure could lightly be added. Where the divine pair
were still in flux, still called by merely adjectival titles that had
not crystallized into proper names, a person more or less mattered
little. Thus we have a trinity of Semnae, of Horae, of Moirae, but the
Thesmophoroi, who _as_ Thesmophoroi might have easily passed into a
trinity, remain always, because of the clear outlines of Demeter and
Kore, a duality.
When we ask what was the impulse to the formation of trinities, the
answer is necessarily complex. Many strands seem to have gone to their
weaving.
* * * * *
First, and perhaps foremost, in the ritual of the lower stratum, of the
dead and of chthonic powers, three was, for some reason that escapes us,
a sacred number[752]. The dead were thrice invoked; sacrifice was offered
to them on the third day; the mourning in some parts of Greece lasted
three days; the court of the Areopagus, watched over by deities of the
underworld, sat, as has been seen (p. 242), on three days; at the three
ways the threefold Hecate of the underworld was worshipped. It was easy
and natural that threefold divinities should arise to keep ward over a
ritual so constituted. When the powers of the underworld came to preside
over agriculture, the transition from two to three seasons would tend in
the same direction. For two seasons a duality was enough—the Mother for
the fertile summer, the Maid for the sterile winter—but, when the seasons
became three, a trinity was needed, or at least would be welcomed.
Last, the influence of art must not be forgotten. A central figure of the
mother, with her one daughter, composes ill. Archaic art loved heraldic
groupings, and for these two daughters were essential. Such compositions
as that on the Boeotian amphora in fig. 60 might easily suggest a
trinity[753].
* * * * *
Once the triple form established, it is noticeable that in Greek
mythology the three figures are always regarded as _maiden_ goddesses,
not as mothers. They may have taken their rise in the Mother and the
Maid, but the Mother falls utterly away. The Charites, the Moirae, the
Horae, are all essentially maidens. The reverse is the case in Roman
religion; trinities of women goddesses of fertility occur frequently in
very late Roman art, but they are Matres, Mothers[754]. Three Mothers are
rather heavy, and do not dance well.
[Illustration: FIG. 73.]
In the archaic votive relief[755] in fig. 73 we have the earliest
sculptured representation of the maiden trinity extant. Had the relief
been uninscribed, we should have been at a loss how to name the three
austere figures. Two carry fruits, and one a wreath. They might be
Charites or Eumenides, or merely nymphs. Most happily the sculptor
has left no doubt. He has written against them Κορας Σοτιας, ‘Sotias
(dedicated) the Korai’ the Maidens.’ Sotias has massed the three
stately figures very closely together; he is reverently conscious that
though they are three persons, yet they are but one goddess. He is half
monotheist.
The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in the
relief[756] in fig. 74, found during the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations in
the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of the relief is
occupied by two figures of _Panes_, with attendant goats; between them
an altar. The Panes are twofold, not because they are father and son,
but because there were two caves of Pan, and the god is thought of as
dwelling in each. After the battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was
established in the ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids; by the time
of Euripides[757], Pan is thought of as host and they as guests:
‘O seats of Pan and rock hard by
To where the hollow Long Rocks lie,
Where before Pallas’ temple-bound
Agraulos’ daughters three go round
Upon their grassy dancing-ground
To nimble reedy staves,
When thou, O Pan, art piping found
Within thy shepherd caves.’
But Pan was a new-comer; the Agraulids were there from the beginning, as
early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy though he is with Pan,
the new-comer, the artist cannot, may not forget the triple maidens. He
figures them in the upper frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that
though three they are one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a
threefold goddess, a Hecate[758].
[Illustration: FIG. 74.]
But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more and more
forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by Hermes in the dance;
by Hermes _Charidotes_, whose worship as the young male god of fertility,
of flocks and herds, was so closely allied to that of the Charites.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.]
There is no more frequent type of votive relief[759] than that of which
an instance is given in fig. 75. The cave of Pan is the scene, Pan
himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, dance. The cave,
the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, but the ancient dwellers
there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. As a rule the reliefs are
not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedication ‘to the Nymphs.’ The
personality of the Agraulids has become shadowy, they are merely Maidens
or Brides.
The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, paled before
the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing attendant maidens; but
sometimes, in the myths told of these very Olympians, it is possible to
trace the reflection of the older potencies. A very curious instance
is to be found in the familiar story[760] of the ‘Judgment of Paris,’
a story whose development and decay are so instructive that it must be
examined in some detail.
THE ‘JUDGMENT OF PARIS.’
The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to please the
taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar enough to make
material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern _opera-bouffe_.
‘Goddesses three to Ida came
Immortal strife to settle there—
Which was the fairest of the three,
And which the prize of beauty should wear.’
The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the marriage
of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it was written, ‘Let
the fair one take it,’ or, according to some authorities, ‘The apple for
the fair one[761].’ The three high goddesses betake them for judgment to
the king’s son, the shepherd Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according
to this version, a καλλιστεῖον, a beauty-contest.
[Illustration: FIG. 76.]
On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that remain,
is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 76 is from a late
red-figured krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[762]. Paris, dressed as
a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is telling of his mission.
Grouped around, the three goddesses prepare for the beauty-contest in
characteristic fashion. Hera needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes
well satisfied in a mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a
Love-God fastens ‘a bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athene, watched
only by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and,
clean-hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown
about her, and has—a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone when she cries:
‘“O Paris,
Give it to Pallas!” but he heard me not,
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!’
It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a
beauty-contest, the apple is absent.
[Illustration: FIG. 77.]
It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds in her
hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design in fig. 77,
from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[763]. Fruit and flowers
are held indifferently by one or all of the goddesses, and the reason
will presently become clear. In the present case Hera holds a fruit, in
fig. 81 the two last goddesses hold each a fruit. In fig. 77, against
both Aphrodite and Hera, is inscribed Καλή, ‘Beautiful,’ and before the
blinding beauty of the goddesses Paris veils his face. The inscription
Χαρμίδης enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of
the 5th cent. B.C.
Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in fig. 78
from a patera[764] in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. The three
goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the centre one only
distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow Hermes into the
presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest alarm. In the curious
design[765] in fig. 79, Hermes actually seizes Paris by the wrist to
compel his attendance. There is here clearly no question of voluptuous
delight at the beauty of the goddesses. The three maiden figures are
scrupulously alike; each carries a wreath. Discrimination would be a hard
task. The figures are placed closely together, as in the representation
of the Maidens in fig. 73.
[Illustration: FIG. 78.]
[Illustration: FIG. 79.]
Finally, in fig. 80, a design from a black-figured amphora[766], we
have the type most frequent of all; Hermes leads the three goddesses,
but in the Judgment of Paris _no figure of Paris is present_. Without
exaggeration it may be said that in three out of four representations of
the ‘Judgment’ in black-figured vase-paintings the protagonist is absent.
The scene takes the form of a simple procession, Hermes leading the three
goddesses.
This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist who
has examined the art types of the ‘Judgment.’ It has been variously
explained. At a time when vase-paintings were supposed to have had
literary sources, it was usual to attempt a literary explanation.
Attention was called to the fact that Proklos[767], in his excerpts
of the _Kypria_, noted that the goddesses, ‘by command of Zeus were
led to Ida by Hermes’; of this leading it was then supposed that the
vase-paintings were ‘illustrations.’ Such methods of interpretation are
now discredited; no one supposes that the illiterate vase-painter worked
with the text of the _Kypria_ before him. Art had its own traditions.
[Illustration: FIG. 80.]
Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. ‘Archaic
art,’ we are told, ‘loved processions.’ Archaic art, concerned to fill
the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed ‘love
processions,’ but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, and it
loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In depicting
other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story in the terms of
an inappropriate procession; it is indeed largely governed by traditional
form, but not to the extent of tolerating needless obscurity. The
‘Judgment’ is a situation essentially stationary, with Paris for centre;
Hermes is subordinate.
We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain effort
of the imagination to conceive of the myth embodied otherwise. But, if we
shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the natural lucid
way of depicting the myth would be something after this fashion: Paris in
the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, to whom he speaks or hands
the apple or a crown; behind him, to indicate neglect, the two defeated
goddesses; Hermes anywhere, to indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a
form does indeed appear later, when the vase-painter thought for himself
and shook himself free of the dominant tradition. The procession form,
as we have it, _was not made for the myth_, it was merely adapted and
taken over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ‘Did not the myth itself
in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art form in
which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was not?’ That form
was the ancient type of _Hermes leading the three Korai or Charites_.
In the design in fig. 80, the centre figure Athene is differentiated by
her tall helmet and her aegis. Athene is the first of the goddesses to
be differentiated—and why? She was not victorious, but the vase-painter
is an Athenian, and he is concerned for the glory of ἡ Ἀθηναία Κόρη, the
Maiden of Athens.
[Illustration: FIG. 81.]
In the design in fig. 81, from a black-figured amphora in the Berlin
Museum[768], the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds a flower,
the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. Hermes, their
leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep—irrelevant for the herald of the
gods on his way to Ida, significant for the leader of the Charites, the
god of the increase of flocks and herds. Does the picture represent a
‘Judgment,’ or Hermes and the Charites? Who knows? The doubt is here, as
often, more instructive than certainty.
From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, that the
‘Judgment of Paris’[769] is really based on Hermes and the Charites,
but literary evidence confirms the view. The Κρίσις, the Decision,
of Paris is always as much a Choice as a Judgment; a Choice somewhat
like that invented for Heracles by the philosopher Prodicus, though at
once more spontaneous and more subtle than that rather obvious effort
at edification. The particular decision is associated in legend with
the name of a special hero, of one particular ‘young man moving to and
fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight[770].’ It is an anguish of
hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest tragedy of
Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice was there. The exact
elements of the Choice vary in different versions. Athene is sometimes
Wisdom and sometimes War. But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur;
Athene is Prowess; Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the
‘young man’ to decide? Which of the three is fairest? Or whose gifts he
desires the most? It matters not at all, for both are different ways of
saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and Roman, degrade the
story into a beauty-contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses,
vulgar in itself and complicated by bribery still more vulgar. But early
versions scarcely distinguish the goddesses from the gifts they bring.
There is no difference between them except the difference of their gifts.
They are Charites, Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the
Greek put it, their gifts are their σημεῖα, their tokens. And Hermes
had led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and
all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as mere
Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little reflection
to see that Χάρις often wars against Χάρις, and that if one be chosen,
others must be rejected[771].
* * * * *
As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the myth of the
daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not rivals; and with them
comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is significant. Homer tells the
story by the mouth of Penelope[772]:
‘Their father and their mother dear died by the gods’ high doom,
The maidens were left orphans alone within their home;
Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee
And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see,
And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis
Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss
Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s artifice.’
[Illustration: FIG. 82.]
The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer _the_ Maiden above
all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus[773]. He puts
the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a prayer to Artemis.
It is curious and significant that the early vase-painter, in dealing
with the story of the daughters of Pandareos, knows of three goddesses
only. The design in fig. 82 is from the lid of a pyxis, of early
black-figured style, in a private collection at Athens[774]. The
vase-painter is concerned mainly with the story of the theft of the
great golden dog of Crete. He makes the dog of supernatural size, with
a splendid high-curled tail. Pandareos has stolen it, and the theft has
been discovered by Hermes, who comes hurriedly up to seize the prize.
Pandareos[775] is just making off in eager haste. His two daughters,
quaintly enveloped in one cloak to show their close relationship, stand
by. Behind Hermes, with his huge kerykeion, come in familiar procession
the three ancient maidens—Aphrodite with a wreath, her hair arrayed in
a quaint twisted pigtail; Hera with a ram-headed sceptre; Athene with
a helmet nearly as big as herself. The goddesses have come a little
proleptically; Pandareos is still there, the maidens are not yet ‘alone
within their home,’ but the vase-painter wants to tell all he knows, and,
not being inspired by Homer, he is faithful to the old three goddesses.
Artemis is—nowhere[776].
But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he represented,
the figure of Artemis waxes more and more dominant, and this especially
by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, Aphrodite. In the
_Hippolytus_ of Euripides they are set face to face in their eternal
enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue of two moral ideals, but
the human drama is played out against the shadowy background of an
ancient racial theomachy, the passion of the South against the cold
purity of the North.
Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the figure of
Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of the ancient
maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, clean strength. An
epigram[777] to her honour in the _Anthology_ is worth noting, because
it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the maidenhood of the worshipper
mirrors itself in the worship of a maiden, whether of the South or of the
North:
‘Maid of the Mere, Timaretè here brings,
Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball
To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings,
Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all,
Hold, Leto’s Child, above Timaretè
Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.’
* * * * *
It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable task to take
each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess assumed and examine
it in turn, to enquire into the rise and development of each local Kore,
of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, of Hecate, of Bendis and the like.
Instead it will be necessary to confine ourselves to the three great
dominant Korai of the ‘Judgment,’ Hera, Athene and Aphrodite.
ATHENE.
The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader’s mind, whether two
of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim to the title maiden.
Happily in the case of Athene no such difficulty arises. She is _the_
Parthenos, _the_ maiden; her temple is the maiden-chamber, the Parthenon;
natural motherhood she steadfastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of
heroes after the old matriarchal fashion; Ge, the real mother, bears
Erichthonios, and Athene nurtures him to manhood; she bears the like
relationship to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles (Ἡρακλέους
κόρη[778]).
Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form of her
name _Athenaia_ is purely adjectival[779], she is the Athenian one, the
Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato[780] in the _Laws_ sees
clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the incarnation of Athens,
though, after the fashion of his day, he inverts cause and effect; he
makes the worshipper in the image of the worshipped. Speaking of the
armed Athene, he says, ‘and methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells
among us, joying her in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play
with empty hands, but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished
her dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens
should imitate her.’ It was she who imitated her youths and maidens, she
who was the very incarnation of their life and being, dancing in armour
as they danced, fighting when they fought, born of her father’s head when
they were reborn as the children of Reason and Light.
Athene’s other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is the Kore
of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of the clan of the
Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus; later their male eponym was
Pallas[781]:
‘Pallas had for lot
The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears
A brood of giants.’
The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the maiden. Suidas
in defining the word says, ‘a great maiden, and it is an epithet of
Athene.’ More expressly Strabo[782], in discussing the cults of Egyptian
Thebes, says, ‘To Zeus, whom they worship above all other divinities,
a maiden of peculiar beauty and illustrious family is dedicated; _such
maidens the Greeks call Pallades_.’ This local Pallas had for her
dominion the ancient court of the Palladium; her image as Pallas, not
as Athene, was carried in procession by the epheboi[783]; but with the
subjection of her clan her figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia.
Pallas became a mere adjectival _praenomen_ to Athene, as Phoebus to
Apollo. It may be conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was
resident on the Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably
of sacred association to a local clan long before the dominance of the
Acropolis; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae[784] hail the
goddess:
‘I welcome Pallas’ fellowship.’
In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though
unconsciously, true to fact.
To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the history of the
city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they can be severed, its
political rather than its religious developement. At first the maiden
of the elder stratum, she has to contend for supremacy with a god of
that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the late Mr R. A. Neil[785] has shown,
was the god of the ancient aristocracy of Athens, an aristocracy based,
as they claimed descent from Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The
rising democracy not unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore,
but in reviving her they strangely altered her being and reft from her
much of her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither
man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos of
Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she remains
manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in fact, the Tyche,
the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the
citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, ‘immortal mistress of
a band of lovers[786]’:
‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown
But a head-band to wear
Of violets one-hued with her hair,
For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair
And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births
they bear,’
a city,
‘Based on a crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.’
Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct from
Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brain
of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour:
‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s
head,’
but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born
Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn[787] writer
surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressiveness, yet it
never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him Reason, Light and
Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun:
‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed
His galloping steeds for a space.’
The event is of cosmic import:
‘High Olympus reeled
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side
Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted
With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide
Suddenly.’
Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus is glad,’
but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, theatrical show,
and through it all we feel and resent the theological intent. We cannot
love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang;
always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial[788]:
‘There is no mother bore me for her child,
I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage),
Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’
[Illustration: FIG. 83.]
Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into a non-human,
unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the art of the simple
conservative vase-painter remembered humbler beginnings. The design in
fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron in the Museum at Breslau[789]. In
the centre of the design, Herakles is engaged in slaying a Hydra with an
unusually large number of heads. Iolaos comes up from the right to engage
some of the heads, the charioteer of Iolaos, Lapythos, waits in the
chariot. Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly
inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning of
the 6th century B.C. ‘Athena,’ the Maiden of Herakles, has also come up
(to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just behind her, perched
on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had there been no inscription
we should at once have named it a ‘decorative Siren,’ but against the
woman-headed bird is clearly written Ϝοῦς. At first sight the inscription
does not seem to help much, but happily the lexicographers enable us
to explain the word[790]. The _Etymologicon Magnum_ tells us that by
πώυγγες are meant αἴθυιαι, and that another form of the word was βοῦγγες.
Hesychius merely states that the πῶυξ is ‘a kind of bird,’ and refers
us to Aristotle[791] ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form
φῶυξ. It seems clear that the Ϝοῦς of the Corinthian vase is a variant
form of a name given to the Diver-bird.
The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth is not
far remote from Megara. Pausanias[792], in discussing the genealogies
of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to Megara. There he fell
sick and died, and by the sea in the territory of Megara is his tomb,
on a cliff which is called the cliff of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the
Diver-bird. Bird myths haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela,
Itys and Tereus[793] all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a
regular cult at his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared,
and the story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting
a grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he makes
Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of Ajax and her
own empty prayers[794]:
‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’
Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman-headed bird in
fig. 83, the conclusion seems inevitable that we have in her an early
local form of Athene. The vase-painter had advanced to an anthropomorphic
conception of the goddess, so he draws her in full human form as
Athene, but he is haunted by the remembrance of the Megarian Diver,
Aithuia, so he adds her figure, half as the double of Athene (hence
the parallelism of attitude), half as attendant, and calls her Ϝοῦς.
Athene on the Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that
still at evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of
the Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable would
naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her vehicle
and later her attribute: at seaside Megara the diver, at Athens the
owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as Megara, and adds for
completeness a little owl.
[Illustration: FIG. 84.]
The design in fig. 84 is from a black-figured lekythos in a private
collection in Sicily[795]. The scene represents Cassandra flying from
Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To the left stands old
King Priam, in helpless anguish. The notable point about the scene is
that Athene, who, statue though she be, is apparently about to move to
the rescue, has sent as her advance guard her sacred animal, a great
snake. The snake is clearly regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the
goddess. Just such a snake did Chryse, another local Kore, send out
against the intruder Philoctetes[796], and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles
expressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. This
‘house-guarding snake,’ we may conjecture, was the earliest form of every
earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine statue of Pheidias,
it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition said it was the earth-born
hero Erichthonios, fostered by the goddess. But almost certainly this
guardian snake was primarily the guardian genius and fate of the city,
before that genius or fate emerged to the status of godhead. When the
Persians besieged the citadel, Herodotus[797] says, the guardian snake
left the honey cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and,
‘when the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly
forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had abandoned
the citadel.’
[Illustration: FIG. 85.]
The design in fig. 85 is from a late red-figured lekythos in the National
Museum at Athens[798]. The scene represented is a reminiscence of the
Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is present, Athene, and by her
side, equal in height and majesty, a great snake. The artist seems dimly
conscious that the snake is somehow the double of Athene[799]. To the
left is the figure of a woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring
the little xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing
the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen.
Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed her animal
form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to
attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase-paintings she still
appears with wings. On the obverse of the black-figured cup[800] in fig.
86 the artist gives her wings: but for her helmet we might have called
her an Erinys. In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene
is specially concerned to slough off all traces of primitive origin,
she lays suspicious emphasis on the fact that she can _fly without
wings_[801]:
‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings,
Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’
On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear
conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art type of a
divinity might remain in flux.
[Illustration: FIG. 86.]
APHRODITE.
The next of the three ‘Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. A doubt
perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore she is in her
eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She is rather _Nymphe_
the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order; she is never wife,
never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. In the lovely Homeric hymn
it is clear that her will is for love, not marriage. Admitted to the
patriarchal Olympus, an attempt foolish and futile is made to attach her
to one husband, the craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her
other name as his bride is Charis[802]. She is the Charis of physical
beauty incarnate.
In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, barely
tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like the other alien,
Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. Her Homeric titles, Kypris
and Kythereia, show that originally and locally she is goddess of the
island South, never really at home in the cold austere North, where
Artemis loved to dwell. She has about her too much of the physical joy of
life ever to find an abiding home far from the sunshine.
Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is in
Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human passion.
The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they tend to
be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the influence of
literature conjointly bring together a number of local divinities,
perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide functions and
attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who locally was
Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one element; Hermes, who at
home had dominion over flocks and herds and all life and growth, becomes
merely a herald.
Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may suspect, gone on
in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It would be rash to assert
that she was primarily an earth-goddess, but certain traits in her cult
and character show clearly that she had analogies with the ‘Lady of the
Wild Things.’ Fertile animals belong to her, especially the dove and the
goat, the dove probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine
recently discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses,
a quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears on
her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand years B.C.,
may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the cylindrical bodies of other
similar figures snakes are coiled, as though to mark an earth-goddess.
In those early days differentiation was not sharply marked, and as yet we
dare not give to these early divinities Olympian names.
[Illustration: FIG. 87.]
At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the charming
relief in fig. 87[803], a relief which from its style must date about the
turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is seated Demeter-like
upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as Queen. Worshippers approach,
man and wife and children. The offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove,
mark the goddess as Aphrodite.
* * * * *
The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably took its rise in
part from a popular and dubious etymology—seems, at first sight, to sever
Aphrodite wholly from the company of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even
here, when we come to examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once
manifest that the Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted.
The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria[804] now in the
museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle of the
5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance of the
birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the picture a
goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, but whether from
sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not concerned to express.
Had he wished to utter his meaning more precisely nothing would have
been easier than to represent the sea by the curved lines that in his
day were the conventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I
think significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a
slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia with which
he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood and his presence at
once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we are bound to remember that on
the Ashmolean amphora already discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of
Pandora, not of Aphrodite, that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia.
Moreover, it must also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69)
a Love-god greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or
Semele[805].
[Illustration: FIG. 88.]
So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa hydria we
have the Anodos of _a_ goddess greeted by Eros. But to the right of the
picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another figure, a woman, and
she holds out a piece of drapery with which she is about to clothe the
rising goddess. This is a new element in the Anodos type and it is this
element that inclines me, with certain reservations and qualifications,
to call the goddess Aphrodite, though I am by no means sure that the
vase-painter conceives her as _rising from the sea_.
On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is received
and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites or Horae, on her
Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in Paphos. Of the Bath we
hear in the lay of Demodocus[806]. He tells how after the joy and terror
of her marriage with Ares she uprose
‘And fast away fled she,
Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea,
To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone,
Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon,
Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old,
And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.’
Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn[807]:
‘For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly
And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea
In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold
Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold
Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.’
The two events, the ritual Bath and the Sea-birth, are not I think
clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their counterpart in the
making and decking of Pandora, The ritual bath[808] Aphrodite shared with
the two other Korai, Athene and Hera. Callimachus devotes a Hymn to the
‘Bath of Pallas.’ Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for
the prize of beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled
unguents; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she must renew
her virginity by the bath in the river Inachus. The renewal of virginity
is no fancy. Pausanias[809] saw at Nauplia a spring called Canathus
and the Argives told him that every year Hera bathed in it and became a
virgin. He adds significantly, ‘this story is of the mysteries and is
their explanation of a rite which they celebrate to Hera.’ Virginity
was to these ancients in their wisdom a grace not lost but perennially
renewed, hence the immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite.
The artist of the Genoa hydria _probably_ knew of the birth of Aphrodite
from the sea, he _certainly_ knew of her reception by Eros; but that he
remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, clear from the fact that the
scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated in the vase-painter’s fashion
by the altar and sacred palm-tree standing to the right just below the
handle. Probably the sanctuary at Paphos is intended.
The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to the
understanding of another monument, earlier and far more beautiful.
The design in fig. 89 is from a sculptured slab[810], one of three that
served to decorate the so-called ‘Ludovisi Throne’ now in the Boncompagni
collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. Again we have manifestly
an Anodos, again the like uncertainty as to who the goddess is and
whence she uprises. The two women who support her, and to whom in her
uprising she clings, stand on a sloping bank of shingle. Between the
edges of the banks is no indication of the sea, simply a straight line.
Is the goddess rising from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath?
Archaeologists offer explanations apparently the most diverse, and it
is this doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the
Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at the lesser
mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No one, so far as I am
aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as it were halting between,
reminiscences of each and all. Or rather the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth
are as yet undifferentiated. By their articulation and separation we have
immeasurably lost.
[Illustration: FIG. 89.]
One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no Eros. The
relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, the delicate
over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of the lovely breasts,
all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the severe style; they
belong to the last bloom of archaism just before the perfect utterance of
Pheidias. Pheidias[811] on the pedestal of the image of Zeus at Olympia
sculptured ‘Eros receiving Aphrodite as she rises from the sea and Peitho
crowning Aphrodite.’ Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric
tradition, hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He
forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. The artist
of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, but the drapery held
by Peitho, the altar and the palm-tree, recall rather the Bath than
the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief embodies a tradition more
theological, less mythological, than either Pheidias or the vase-painter.
He is inspired by the Anodos[812] and the Bath, which was but one of
its ritual humanized forms, and a form that we may venture to call
matriarchal. What he is concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of
Aphrodite, Aphrodite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure
of a Trinity of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens.
Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, but a poet
remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the air, she is of earth
also:
‘We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, O Love,
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove;
Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea,
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.’
* * * * *
Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an island
Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes Ourania, the Heavenly
One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing through heaven on her great
swan[813]. She is the only goddess who in passing to the upper air yet
kept life and reality. Artemis becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity;
Athene, as we have seen, becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus,
is but a lovely metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control
over nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into
science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, remained,
intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence Aphrodite keeps her
godhead to the end. For a while, owing to special social conditions, and,
as will be seen, owing to the impulse of Orphism, her figure is effaced
by that of her son Eros, but effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity
as Mother rather than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix[814] we have
the old radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the
hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by Ourania, by
Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and every various form of
the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven:
‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure,
Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs
Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land
Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing
Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun.
Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds
And thine approach; for thee the daedal earth
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile,
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased.
Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world
Nor without thee can any living thing
Win to the shores of light and joy and love,
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land
The works of furious war quieted cease.’
HERA.
The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, not
maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen in Olympus by
virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred Marriage is the prototype
of all human wedlock. This is true for Homeric theology, but a moment’s
reflection on the facts of local cultus and myth shows that this marriage
was not from the beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic
legend is queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old
matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really
dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, where
Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the ancient Heraion
where Hera was worshipped alone long predates the temple of Zeus. At
Argos the early votive terra-cottas[815] are of a woman goddess, and the
very name of the sanctuary, the Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos,
at the curious festival of the _Tonea_[816], it is the image of a woman
goddess that is carried out of the town and bound among the bushes, and
Strabo[817] tells us that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the
island of the Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias[818]
says that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a
girl she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete or
Full-Grown (τελεία), separated from Zeus and returned to Stymphalus she
was called Chera (Widow). Long before her connection with Zeus, the
matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s
life; Teleia, full-grown, does not necessarily imply patriarchal marriage.
Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days when Hera was no
wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, unless the poet was the
lowest of low comedians, what means her ceaseless turbulence and the
unending unseemly strife between the Father of Gods and Men and the woman
he cannot even beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny
over Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous
mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric days in her
own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been forcibly married, but she
is never really wife, and a wife’s submission she leaves to the shadowy
double of Zeus, who echoed his nature and (significant fact) took his
name, she who was the real Achaean patriarchal double—Dione[819].
[Illustration: FIG. 90.]
[Illustration: FIG. 91.]
Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one Altar
(ὁμοβώμιοι), and against the conjunction the older women divinities
are but too often powerless. In the designs[820] in figs. 90 and 91 we
have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in which the Olympian
pair extrude the objects of an ancient local cult. In fig. 90 we have a
votive relief to the Nymphs of the familiar type: three maiden figures
linked together. That the figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is
the inscription, ‘To the Mistress Nymphs (Κυρίαις Νύμφαις).’ The relief,
one of a large series found together at Orochák and now in the local
Museum at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 91 shows
a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large stature to
mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront; they hold each an expectant
_phiale_ for libations; to them only is sacrifice to be made. It is
they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the background, minished and
all but effaced, are the three ancient Maidens. The local peasant is
conservative[821], and we may hope they too had their meed of offering.
[Illustration: FIG. 92.]
The intrusion of Zeus[822] and Hera on the local cultus of the Nymphs
brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius[823] in his Life of
Epimenides. Theopompus in his ‘Wonderful Things’ told how when Epimenides
was preparing the sanctuary of the Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven
saying, ‘Epimenides, not of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.’ Perhaps Epimenides
went further than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the
matter of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen
(p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the Semnae; he
introduced ceremonies of purification brought from Crete, and wholly
alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus to reassert himself.
The conflict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in the
design in fig. 92, from a votive relief[824] found at Eleusis and now
in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the design, which
belongs to the class known in English as ‘Funeral Banquets,’ will be
discussed more in detail later, when we come to hero-worship. For the
present it is enough to note that on the left side of the relief we have
the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the old matriarchal couple, seated side
by side as equals, on the right a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the
man reclining at the banquet and holding a great _rhyton_, the wife
submissively seated by his side. In naming them it is safest at present
not to go beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their
heads the non-committal words, ‘To the God,’ and ‘To the Goddess.’
[Illustration: FIG. 93.]
It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously took over to
himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth-Maidens. Even more
marked is the triumph of the Olympian Son, Apollo[825]. The design
in fig. 93 is from a rather late red-figured amphora in the Naples
Museum[826]. A wayfarer, possibly Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult
the god; he finds him seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the
laurel and the lyre in his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to
the _Ion_ of Euripides[827]:
‘To Delphi, where
Phoebus, on earth’s mid navel o’er the world
Enthronèd, weaveth in eternal song
The sooth of all that is or is to be.’
The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess who
utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred tripod, and he
paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head and the sacred taenia
in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo is by this time Lord of All.
[Illustration: FIG. 94.]
In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, where the contest is between the old
angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits of the blood
feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies are at least in part
with the new-comer. But even here, so stately and yet so pitiful are
the ancient goddesses that our hearts are sore for the outrage on their
order. And on the vase-painting, when we remember that the omphalos is
the very seat and symbol of the Earth-Mother[828], that hers was the
oracle and hers the holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion
is hard to bear.
The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly presented in
the design in fig. 94, from a votive relief[829] in the local Museum at
Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the omphalos on a low
basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At either side of it are perched
new guardians, the great eagles of Olympian Zeus. The story[830] said
that starting from either end of the world they met at Pytho, at the
omphalos. The birds were variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither
swans nor eagles have anything to do with the Earth-goddess; they are
Ouranian eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the
omphalos, they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the
artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering over the
omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He holds out a cup,
and libation to him is poured by his sister Artemis. The Olympian victory
is complete.
* * * * *
So far we have dealt with the _Making of a goddess_; we have seen one
woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, as duality and
trinity; we have seen these shapes crystallize into Olympian divinities
as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it were resume themselves again
into the great monotheistic figure of Venus Genetrix. We have noted
evidence, very scattered and fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the
goddess as bird and snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak
point in the argument is just this transitional phase. The goddesses,
when they first come into our ken, _are_ goddesses, fully human and
lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and beautified
by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. In a word
links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake or bogey to
goddess. Two reasons may be suggested. The full development of the women
divinities seems to have been earlier accomplished, the sublimation
earlier complete, and hence the early phases of that development are more
effaced; and next these goddess figures became more completely material
for poetic treatment. In the _Making of a god_ we catch in some figures
the process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the passage
from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest.