THE GREEK MYTHS
Greek Mythology as Historical Tradition
William Harris, Prof. Em. Middlebury College
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
This book investigates the Greek myths as a thinly cloaked chapter in an ancient Historical
Tradition, which goes far back into the history of the Near East. A captious critic of conservative
cast might call this approach Cultural Materialism, while many who have read and loved the
Greek stories as highschool students will resent a theory which threatens the pleasure of the days
when they were entranced with their Bulfinch's Mythology. The Myths themselves have no real
basis in a Greek "Theology", which never was developed at any period.. The Mystery Religions
which coursed through Hellenic culture from Homer to Christ were the real "Religion" of the
Hellenic world, but their myths which were secret are ill known and generally had small influence
outisde the cults.. But the Myths do have many traces of historical fact, much of it going back to a
Pre-Greek period, even into the third millennium BCE. Examining these considerations will be the
core of the twelve chapters of this study.
The ancient Greek myths are a familiar part of the intellectual background of Western society.
Along with the materials of the Old Testament and New Testament, Greek mythology supplies a
variety of names, situations and awarenesses which no educated person can ignore. Reading the
Greek and Roman literary Classics, one is constantly confronted with mythological references,
and this is equally true of our English Classics, which from the Renaissance on used Classical
mythological names and references as a part of the modern Western cultural tradition. The Greek
and also the Hebraic traditions did contribute many of the views and traditions which crystallized
in the mind of modern Western society. But it was from Charles Bulfinch's popularizing book (The
age of Fable, l855) that Greek mythology became a part of the English language consciousness,
while mythical motifs reappeared indirectly in painting, sculpture and the curious Greek Revival
architecture in America. Even now elementary school classes learn the more common stories
about the Greek gods, especially those which present material consonant with our society's
esthetics and morals, while the less attractive tales of incest, murder and cannibalistic atrocities are
conveniently avoided.
For the Romans the Greek myths were readily available, and since they reflected the values and
status of the literary models of the Greek world, they were often used for largely illustrative and
decorative purposes. We see a fascination with the Greek stories in Ovid's and Propertius' poetry,
but sheer proliferation of mythologizing tends to become an end in itself. Mythological
"references" in Propertius are often nothing more than literary "asides" for the recognition of an
educated class of readers, while the poet's value lies more in his personal and subjective processes
than in the mythological trimming.
For earlier authors Aeschylos and especially Pindar, the myths were intertwined with the poet's
meaning in an inextricable interplay of forces, but already in the Hellenistic period and especially
in Alexandrian circles the Greek myths were either reference points for new treatments of
traditional themes, or used for purely decorative effects. By the time Apollodoros' Library of
Mythology was put together about l50 B.C. for literary readers' use, the myths had become a web
of stories which had lost both religious and historical significance. When the Roman learned his
mythology out of Julius Hyginus' strange little abridgment in Latin, he was familiarizing himself
with materials which he would find useful in his Classical reading, much as the modern student of
literature uses his pocket dictionary of mythology to decode Milton's Paradise Lost or the Greek
Drama which is on his reading list.
When one compares Greek mythology with the myth cycles of the Indian tradition, one sees
immediately that there is a vast difference between the two. The Indian myths have as wide a
story-telling range as the Greek myths, but they have also been incorporated into, and also formed
by a strong religious tradition. They are used to develop philosophical points, to indicate moral
choices, and to reinforce sincere religious views if value to the society. Part of the reason for this
transparency of purpose lies in the fact that there is a continuous religious tradition which extends
with many changes from Vedic to modern times, even as Hinduism became fused and
amalgamated with Buddhism, to reappear later as the dominant religious system of India. Within
this long, living tradition the position of the myths in India is full of new developments but their
use is relatively stable and clear.
Working with the Greek myths carefully, I have always felt that they are far more History than
Storytelling. Their theological and philosophical content is questionable and can often seem
evanescent. We do know the Greeks were early in contact with India by the 7th century BC, and I
believe some thoughtful Greeks absorbed some of the format of the Indian myths while entirely
missing their religious and philosophical penchant. But most of the the Greek myths reach further
back into the history of migrations into Europe from the Near East, and represent a different
segment of historical evolution.
I and many others have found the mythic interpretations of Joseph Campbell misleading and
embarked on an entirely wrong track. But Campbell achieved a certain degree of public fame in
the decades before his death. I feel we should not leave the public with an impression of Campbell
as the major authority in this area. Campbell started his studies with serious interest in the Hindu
myths, which are remarkable examples of myth, story and philosophy rolled into one. But then he
returned to the Greek materials, with a conviction that they were analogous to the Indian corpus
and throughout his long career he preached the message of the Indian doctrine on very different
Greek social and textual grounds. It is no pleasure to discredit Campbell under the adage "Nihil de
mortuis nisi malum...", but his loose and uncritical treatment of Greek myths as a close cousin of
the Indian mythologies, which has become popular in the last few decades, has led us on an
entirely wrong path.
The Greek myths had no regular religious structure or "Theology" to reinforce popular belief,
since Greek religion never became institutionalized beyond the needs of the individual city-state.
Myths became formalized and politicalized after the fifth century, and in the Hellenistic period
they became more of a political or even literary tradition than a religious phenomenon. It was the
ancient Mystery Cults which were the real religion of the Greeks, from the time of Homer down
into the Hellenistic Period, even with some features which were absorbed into early
Christianity.The myths were reduced to a complicated system of formalized storytelling, largely
bereft of historical and the earlier pre-Greek associations. Greek mythology turned into a
formalized political apparatus with specific associations and rituals assigned to each city-state, but
it could also be used as entertainment for a literary Hellenistic society. It is in this mode that it
appeared in Bulfinch's l9th century translation as a delightful set of stories from the ancient world,
arranged,compacted and regularized for modern readers.
Beyond being entertaining and useful for understanding the Classics read in translation and our
older English poetry, what do the Classical myths tell us? Often their meaning is obscure,
contradictory and (if taken literally) frightening. One might well ask if there is another way of
approach. Euhemeros, a Greek writer on myth and mythic history in the early third century B.C.
had already suggested an alternate path of interpretation for myths, his views were widely known
in the ancient world, and the fact that he did develop a new method of approach shows that even in
the Classical period people were not satisfied with the traditional, story-cycle approach to
mythology. His methods were of a sort that educated Hellenistic Greeks could understand and use.
His ideas enjoyed a considerable vogue in the Hellenistic world, although their extension was
limited by the accusation of atheism which was leveled against their founder. In the Christian
period Euhemeros' theories were used in another way, to demonstrate the man-made and hence
harmless notions of the Greek gods, and his notions became a stock demonstration of the futility
of the heathen world's atheistic theology.
In the last two centuries we have learned a great deal about man's behavior from the formal fields
of sociology, psychology, political science and economics. Archaeology has thrown a whole new
light upon man's recently unknown past, while anthropology has broadened the scope of all
studies of the human condition. Scientific aids, such as carbon-dating methods and pollen
identification, as well as information gathered by students of the history of science, have extended
our range of inquiry far beyond what the ancient Greek could have imagined. This "new thought"
must be present in any serious study of humankind, and much of this material is so important and
pervasive that it simply cannot be ignored. Our study of Man's history extends from the very
beginning of humankind some five millions years ago, to the time after the last glacial retreat,
when much factual material about the rise of civilization as a social phenomenon starts to appear.
A great deal of light on the human condition can be elicited from the rich matrix of human history
interpreted in the light of the newly evolving disciplines, and it is in this spirit that the present
study of Greek mythology is undertaken. Euhemeristic interpretation of myth has much to work
with in conjunction with modern studies of myth as part of the human social and historical record.
The Greek myths are of two sorts. Some are what can be called the "mythic" myths, which are
stories which find ways of telling important things about difficult and even ineffable matters
through stories. Some of the Greek myths explore profound matters and have through the ages
challenged people with examples of serious thought, these are the true and spiritual myths, which
abundantly deserve religious and philosophical study, and constitute to a major section of Greek
thought.
A second much larger group may be called the "historical" myths. These are the ones which
Euhemeros identified and began to interpret, and it is these which the present study will discuss.
Many of the myths, when viewed as mythology will seem confusing, self-contradictory and
somewhat pointless as myths, but this is because are historical records of social and historical
events which lose their meaning when read as quasi-religious mythology. And when the historical
mythology loses its original social and historical factuality, it becomes inane and superficial. Over
the years it has become common to tell and retell the myths as imaginative stories, leaving
historical origins aside, rather than trying to fathom an original meaning.
A partial parallel may be seen in the fossilized Mother Goose stories which date from l8th century
England. Children and their elders still enjoy telling and retelling the traditional tales about Jack
and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, and the old lady who lived in a shoe, but most of us have no idea of
they mean, if they do mean anything. Historical studies have shown that these stories once had
pertinent, often trenchant political meaning, but for most of us, they are amusing but essentially
meaningless. Yet by being familiar and historically "indestructible", they do form a part of our
cultural baggage, meaning left quite aside. We can enjoy the mouse who went up the clock,
without having any idea of what he was doing and that the story means. Appreciation of most of
the Greek myths is exactly of this nature, we know and retell and enjoy Greek mythology without
having much idea of what it is really about.
The germ of the idea behind the present study goes back to Euhemerus, a writer on mythology
who flourished about 300 B.C. at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedonia. Very little is
known about his life, even the place of his birth is disputed, the date of his death is unknown, and
there are no personal particulars to give us a better idea of the man. He is known chiefly as the
author of a book called The Sacred History, which purports to be based on inscriptional material
found on the island of Panchaea while traveling around the coast of Arabia Felix. These
inscriptions have never been taken to be any more real than the imaginary island of Panchaea, but
the Sacred History also outlines the theory for which Euhemerus' name is famous. Euhemeros
seems to have picked up some parts of his theory of interpretation from eastern sources which he
heard of on his travels, but some parts of his theory may come from Greek sources, or even from
his own imagination.
This study proceeds with an analysis of the Greek myths partly analogous to Euhemeros' outline.
His scant material has been collected by Nemethy (Euhemeri Reliquiae, Budapest l889), as a
source of what later became the Euhemeristic school of interpretation of the Greek myths. His
suggestions seem perhaps hesitant or tntative, either because they were not well developed in
ancient times, or because our historical information about them is so fragmentary. This study will
graft onto the Euhemeristic rootstock, a number of concepts and sources of information which are
available at the present time. Using Euhemeros' original and authentically Greek interpretations as
a starting point, we can go a great deal further than he would have gone, probably further than he
could have imagined.
Some of the inscriptions Euhemerus cites claimed to have come from Greece proper, others from
"Panchaia" which may be as far away as Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Sacred History has never been
taken seriously as a document, but a full and entertaining description of Euhemerus' travels among
the Panchaeans is found in Diodorus Siculus (V, c. 4l-46), which at first glance might seem to
belong somewhere in the imaginative range between Psalmanazer's 1702 description of Formosa
and Gulliver's Travels. But we have more skills these days about processing of presumed "fake"
data for bits of fact, enough perhaps to make rereading the Sacra Historia worthwhile, if it is
undertaken by someone competent in ancient Near Eastern history.
One may wonder why Euhemerus was traveling in the Near East in the first place. He was
authorized to travel there by Cassander who found himself passed over after Alexander's death as
ruler of Macedonia, a position which he clearly expected not only because he was ambitious, but
also since he had married Alexander's half-sister Thessalonica. After killing Alexander's son
Alexander, and Alexander's wife Roxana, and making connections with various powers, he did
finally become ruler of Macedonia in 30l, just four years before his death. Everything that
Cassander did, seems to have been done in opposition to Alexander. He worked against
Alexander's family, against the assignment of rule in the empire, and he even rebuilt Thebes,
which Alexander had previously razed. Hence it is not surprising that the chapter of Alexander's
history, his trip to the East and specifically to India, should have been the one thing which
Cassander could not equal. When he sent Euhemerus to the East on an exploratory
cultural-historical mission, he probably thought he was ensuring for his memory the kind of fame
which Alexander had accrued in his lifetime as world-king in Greece and abroad.
Euhemerus' name would have probably been consigned to the library files of antiquity forever, had
he not incorporated in his writing the one idea which made his name famous. He maintained that
heroes and gods were actually men of note, who were commemorated for their achievements by
being relegated to divine status by a grateful populace. It has been suggested that this idea was
drawn from Indian or Arabian sources, which Euhemerus may have picked up in his travels either
from written materials or from discussion with the natives. Whatever the origin of this singular
idea, the ancient world fastened onto it with great interest, since it promoted a train of historical
thinking about the gods and heroes which few people in Greece had contemplated.
Euhemerus' theory proposed that the divine and semi-divine personages of myth were just people,
perhaps remarkable people, but actually humans and not of divine origin. For some people
Euhemerus was considered an evil man, oras the poet Callimachos put it "an idly babbling old
man", or still worse, an atheist, although for Hellenistic scholars his name was not identified with
atheism.
But the Christians took an opposite tack. If one could prove that the gods of antiquity were mere
human fabrications, whether they were so constructed for bad or for good reasons, Christians can
get rid of the weight of millennia of pagan thought with one swift stroke. This is rendered even
more plausible when it is suggested that Euhemerus himself was an atheist. From this odd notion
comes the important flow of Christian comment and quotation on this author, to which we owe a
great deal of our knowledge of Euhemerus and his theories. A great deal of this material is
hopelessly garbled, not only because of slanted arguments which the Christians were using, but
also because they had almost no authentic material at hand on which to base their views.
Second-hand historical criticism, especially when done with a zealot's vengeance, is not a good
source for exact information, but this is exactly the case of the many Christian apologists who
rehandled Euhemeros' name in the interests of proving old errors and establishing the true faith.
In l889 Geyza Nemethy brought together everything that is known about Euhemerus (G. Nemethy:
Euhemeria Reliquiae, Budapest l889), and this material was carefully sifted through by Jacoby in
his article on Euhemerus (Pauly Wissowa s.v. Euhemerus). Much of the ancient material is thin
and disappointing, especially when one considers the serious studies in the Euhemeristic spirit
which have been undertaken since the l8th century, starting with Banier's "Explication de la Fable,
Expliquee par la Histoire ", the l9th century factualizing historians and even the sociology of
Herbert Spencer.
Cicero intelligently remarks that "Those who maintain that famous and important men after their
death became the gods to whom we pray and bow.... are these men not actually immune to religion?
This kind of thinking has been developed by Euhemerus, which our Roman Ennius later translated
and interpreted. But it is Euhemerus who has portrayed the deaths and burials of the gods. Does he
(Euhemerus) seem on the one hand to have provided a factual base for religion, or has he actually
removed the need for it?" (Cicero De Natura Deorum I 42).
One wonders why, with all the rich Greek literary materials available, the 3 c. BC Roman poet
Ennius chose to translate the work of Euhemerus. It may have been that the Romans were uneasy
with the superior status of the Greek deities as compared to their own familiar if shadowy
Animistic spirits, and wanted an explanation which rendered these distant theological concepts
more understandable. If they turned to debunking them by analysis, it suits well the hardheaded,
practical Romans, who were at work developing a few things on their own, like Rustic Comedy
and the genre of Satire. Most people in the third century B.C. would still have been aware of the
subtleties of the old Roman animistic beliefs, which carried their own interpretation for a
perceptive country folk . If the Greek gods and heroes were not interpretable, they would seem
inaccessible, and in such a quandary Ennius' interest in approaching Euhemerus' doctrine seems
reasonable. Since Ennius' translation with his own commentary has disappeared and is known
only from slight references, there is little more that we can draw from this source.
Sextus Empiricus is not the best witness for subtle thought, he is as often disappointing in his
remarks about early Greek philosophical figures as he is informative. But in the case of
Euhemeros he is the only source which gives a clear and unequivocal statement of his basic views,
and his remarks can serve as a general introduction to Euhemeristic thought:
"In the days when life was unsettled, those who were superior to the others in strength and
intelligence, so as to get greater control over the rest (figuring that they might seem more
remarkable and serious), fabricated the story that there was some surpassing and, as it were, divine
power about their persons, and it is from this that they were venerated by the people as gods."
This is an extension of the rule of "man is the measure of all things", to the role of "measure of the
gods". Man made the gods, and in a typically Greek mode, made them out of human forms and
notions, and even eventually from human beings who had died. Xenophanes had said in parallel
spirit some centuries earlier "if oxen and lions had hands which enabled them to draw, they would
portray their gods as having bodies like their own, horses would portray them as horses, and oxen
as oxen". Moreover he noted "Ethiopians have gods with flat noses and black hair, Thracians have
gods with blue (glaukos!) eyes and red hair." With such well known statements serving as
intellectual background, Euhemeros' words would not have been surprising to the educated Greek
public. However he does, as Cicero remarked, work this process in reverse, and the results of his
theorizing can finally dispense with deity altogether.
In the history of the West after the Greek period, divification is common. It started with the cult of
Romulus and the Roman founding fathers, who are not actually deified, but given a special
position of respect and veneration in the Roman consciousness. The serious tone in which the
Augustan poets speak of these early heroic figures at Rome marks a semi-religious sanctity which
verges more on the religious than on the historical side. The formal divification of Caesar and the
Roman Emperors follows easily from Greek myths, from the old idea Eastern Monarchs were
gods in their own right, and from the old Roman hero tradition. As Christianity gathered strength
and numbers within the Roman world, it too found the practice of sanctifying certain holy men
with the title of "saint" to be a useful focus for public veneration. The transition from humanness
to godliness seems easier to imagine than the conversion of a god into a human being, which can
only be done as aa temporary disguise. Holifying famous men produces hallowed examples of
holiness out of human fabric, and this probably offers a greater opportunity for social
identification than the gods who reside apart in the clouds like Epicuros' "reformed" deities, aloof
and unconcerned.
The very familiarity of a great deal of Greek mythology, which was heavily used in a borrowed
form by everybody from the Romans to the classically oriented nineteenth century, obscures the
fact that many Greek myths are obscure in themselves, and so heavily reworked into later fabrics
that the basic meaning of the original cannot be imagined. But following an Euhemeristic thread,
and weaving it into the fabric of modern studies of the three pre-BC millennia which are now
appearing, we may elicit from the Greek Myths a wealth of surprising information.
In summary, the aim of this study is to bring into focus the Greek myths of the class which belong
less to a religious than to a historical class, and to elicit from them where possible,factual social
and historical meaning. There is much important information which we can draw from myths if
we treat them as carriers of the social and historical activities which were current in the early
Greek and pre-Greek periods, at the time when story-cycles (later to become myths) were alive
and responsive to social issues. In the last two hundred years we have learned a great deal about
man and his early history. If we can use a portion of our modern, multifarious frame of reference
in the interpretation of Greek myths, we can extend our knowledge of man's earlier history
considerably further back into the shadowy realm of Pre-History.
Chapter 1
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Heroes and Heroic Deeds
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The world we live in is the natural frame or reference for our views, since our lives are passed in
close physical association with others, and we work closely with other people as the normal
function of urban living, which is now almost synonymous with the idea of civilization. It is
natural for us to see other human beings, whether in the past or present, as social animals, Aristotle
put it just that way, and for him, living in Greece in the fourth century B.C., the term was perfectly
well suited. But as we roll back the curtain of Greek history into Homer's time, and into the myths
which themselves reach into remote prehistory, we find a considerable list of important personages
(called Heroes) who do remarkable deeds, and are in every way worthy of admiration, except for
one thing: They have almost no capacity for integrated social behavior. When Diomedes in the
Iliad says,"This I learned from my father, always to seek after super-excellence (arete), and to be
superior to others... ", he a speaks of a world in which the individual is still the protagonist on the
human stage. He works alone, wins fame alone, and usually dies tragically, without the comfort of
family or solace of progeny.
What we call Civilized Man's history dates only from the period of the retreat of the last glacial
cold, after which time by crossbreeding and selecting certain strains of grasses, which were
eventually to become the grains as we know them, he made possible a greatly expanded human
population is needed, which in turn depends on a greatly expanded food supply. In order to
manage this, large numbers of people were need to plant, tend, harvest and finally store the
relatively non-perishable grains, thereby extending life through the non-growing winter months in
a secure manner. Whether the grains were evolved in response to larger population, or the
population increased because of the availability of the grains, is not clear, and this may ultimately
be something of an academic distinction. We know that both things happened about the same time,
and neither would have occurred without the other. The major discovery of this period was
certainly the realization that concerted, social behavior, probably with a great deal of organized
control from a ruling class, ushered in the larger social groups which we know as the ancient
kingdoms of the Near East and the Indus Valley. Without social interaction none of what we call
"Major Civilization" would have been possible.
On the other hand, ninety nine percent of man's known history was passed in the hunter-gatherer
stage, iin small social units of family, extended family and tribe. Within this pattern, the individual
hunter who works alone has a sure niche of identity. To expect that old patterns going back
hundreds of thousands of years should immediately fall into line with new social demands, and all
this in half a dozen millennia, is unreasonable. One of the important messages which we can read
in the Greek myths, is that most of the great heroes had a such a strong preference for working
alone that they were virtually unable to engage in regular social interaction with their peers. In fact,
heroes can never have peers, since they believe that they are unique and live their lives in this
spirit. To us they may seem uncooperative, egotistical, and fatally flawed by a sense of
overweening pride, but we should remember that our world on the other hand produces many
persons flawed by having no sense of their own value or personal identity. We and the early Greek
heroes are a world apart, actually polar opposites, and this often makes it difficult for us to see
what they were doing or from what historical level they were emerging. In the following pages we
can examine some of the more important Greek heroes in the matrix of their myth-histories, not
viewing the sagas literarily and humanistically in relation to our world, but as documentary
statements coming from a remote past.
In Homer's epic, Achilles has grandeur of manner, he is complete and entire in his absolute
confidence, he has a great-spirit (as the Greek term 'megalo-psychos implies), but he is essentially
a lone warrior who is not able to work closely with a well knit military campaign. As every
student reading Homer immediately notices, Achilles does not play the game right; when crossed,
he withdraws and lets his fellows fend for themselves, he is (in our terms) a poor sport, sulky and
impossibly ego-centric. If everyone in the Greek army behaved like Achilles there would have
been no victory over Troy, let alone even the possibility of a campaign. Achilles stands as the
representative of an earlier genre of hero, who works singlehandedly against great odds, finally
achieving hero-status by his superb and concentrated fighting skill.
Greek mythology is populated by many such heroes, Heracles is another great example, better
documented than Achilles in the wide range of his endeavors. These "left-over heroes" from an
earlier stage of history still dominate the Greek idea of excellence, but they do not fit into the new
social world forming after the deterioration of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization. In that new
world the clever man wins out, he is often unadmirable in the eyes of later generations, he has like
Odysseus "seen many cities, and known the minds of men", he is a socially aware operator who
will lead toward the world which Greece was about to forge. In Homer's story about the campaign
at Troy, Achilles is a throwback to a state of human existence which had probably become extinct
a thousand years before. For that reason he is tragic in spirit, since he is condemned to early death
not by his mother's incomplete immersion in holy water, but by the steady development of a new
kind of society.
The story about Achilles' heel is odd, certainly more is involved than the mother dipping him in
protecting waters by the heel. In the tradition of the Japanese Judo Revival Points, massaging the
heel is performed to revive tired legs, perhaps we had here a similar process, which was
misunderstood by people who had no idea of its meaning.
But even the personal nature of Achilles is unclear to he. In Homer's war narrative Achilles is
fierce and devoted to warfare like a samurai, yet he is said to have been as being disguised as a
girl by his mother to avoid the Trojan war. We must remember his gentle affection and human
connection with Patroclos, which probably had homosexual overtones, as Bayle had already
suggested in l702. in his Dictionaire Biographique et Critique. While sulking in his tent after his
argument with Agamemnon, he plays music on the lyre, which recalls the uses of the samurai who
not only fought to perfection but also painted and composed song and poetry. A brief look at the
history of the l7th century samurai Miyamoto Mushashi arranges the possibilities of a warrior's
life: painting, poetry, calligraphy, design, sculpture, as well as the long list of the victims of his
sword and mind. The range of the warrior tradition was no longer clear in Homer's time, he gives
us only the outlines of Achilles, and none of the inner details about the kind of mind which directs
the body to the highest levels, whether of fighting, or any other human activity. But even so
enough of the Greek samurai comes through to gives us a chilling dash of admiration.
The complete warrior knows that he must expect death at every moment (without expecting or
thinking about it), he must have no regard for himself or any other person, and he will always
seem cold, passionless and faceless to the world. In this removal from connections lies one of the
sources of his power; the other lies in eternal practice with the body, the weapon and with the
mind. Only when Achilles forgets this rule of no-caring-ness, as he return to the fight to avenge
his one friend Patroclos whom he does really love, does he become vincible.
Hector, his opposite in the Trojan ranks, and also his opposite in the way he is cast in life, is warm,
caring, loving, even tolerant of an idiotic dandyish Alexandros, deeply understanding of Helen,
and dear to his family. Having all the human virtues which we think good, he has a weight of
responsibilities which unfit him for the role of a first-class warrior, and it is clear that he must die
in battle. But caring or not caring seems to make little difference, neither hero is fated to have a
long life and die a patriarch at home. Tragedy surrounds the Homeric hero, who is tragic because
he is obsolescent in social terms.
The samurai felt this same sadness when they were formally disbanded in the l7th century, their
days had run out and there was no longer a place for them in the world they had known.In the
story of Ajax, we trace a superior and proven warrior disintegrating into suicidal schizophrenia
over the issue of the inheritance of the famous arms of Achilles. The administrators of the society
refuse his claim, but since he has no understanding of the society's priorities or of the way they
work, giving now this and holding back that for the good of the many perhaps, his sense of self
falls apart. Since there is no other identity than this "sense of self", which is the sole premise on
which Ajax operates, when that identity is violated, there is no other course than death.
The schizophrenia suffered by Ajax when he was denied the arms of Achilles, indicates a general
social appreciation of arms as technology at a time when the availability of such equipment was
scarce. We know that bronze was being cast in the Near East and in parts of Europe before the
fourth millennium B.C., and that iron technology was being developed, if rare, a thousand years
later. Hence this story must go back to a much earlier period, perhaps the first few generations
after the development of usable metal arms. By 700 B.C. arms were sufficiently cheap for the
poet-soldier Archilochos to joke about scrapping a nice new shield in his hasty retreat, something
which Ajax would never have considered.
Ajax slaughtered a flock of sheep, thinking them his enemies, then took his own life. The presence
of sheep may suggest a date for this episode, and either a locale in inner Asia Minor whence sheep
seem to have spread, or a place to which sheep were already being imported. Jason's Argonautic
expedition after the "Golden Fleece" is discussed elsewhere as a first effort to bring sheep for
breeding from the Eastern Euxine area to Greece, and should be of a date somewhat earlier than
Ajax's period.Heracles is the fullest source for information about the man of strength and courage
who antedates regularized socialization, his "Labors" are important marks for man's future
development, but they are outlined as actions which one man performs alone. Only in the
friendship with his apprentice Hylas, who will be discussed later, does he work with another man,
and even then his friend is doomed to death and early disappearance from the story.
Heracles does not deal with other men, he cannot even understand the strategem by which his wife
Deianeira uses a poisoned cloak to burn and destroy him. Even that poison came from the blood of
a Centaur, a man-horse warrior of another age which Heracles still could not understand. Heracles
had tamed the wild horses, but he had not foreseen the social 'poison' that horse-warriors could
bring to to the world, and even finally to him. Heracles is a central figure for Euhemeristic
interpretation. Described and portrayed in art as a massive man with a growth of beard, wearing a
lion's or other animal's skin, and carrying a club as his regular weapon, his date must be pushed
back to a pre-Minoan-Mycenean culture, of the type which existed from Greece northwards into
central Europe at an early period. Perhaps the views of Rhys Carpenter about desiccation of the
Aegean area, and subsequent flight of the Hellenes into the better- watered northlands, may
contain some truth. Were this view eventually found workable, then Heracles would represent the
physical and social type of barbarized Hellene whose people had spent some three centuries in the
wooded north as they reverted to neolithic culture, finally returning when the drought was over, to
their homeland in Greece in the ninth century B.C. with the physical characteristics of a
Heracles-type. Attractive as this view seems, in order to be accepted, it will have to be be
supported by carbon dating of successive campfires going north and finally returning to Greece.
Confirmation of this view must wait until the Balkan countries are in a position to undertake
research of this sort.
In literary texts Heracles is described as going through various stages of insanity, Euripedes' extant
and very odd play, the Heracles Mad, explores his insane state of mind. But recall that erratic
social behavior, especially in the case of an adoptive neolithic with three centuries of forest living
behind him, may be at the root of this "dislocation". Behavior which would have been well suited
to survival in the forests, would be out of place in a land which was again increasing in population
and developing fast-growing social patterns. The Labors of Heracles (Gr. ' athloi' or 'ponoi') are
listed as an even dozen. This number may have significance, since dozen-counting was practiced
in the Near East in some areas. We can assume that the final listing of Heracles' Labors was late,
since it matches Homer's listing of his books by the dozen, twenty four in all in each epic, but we
cannot be sure at what period of redaction this ennumeration took place. Babylonian counting was
sexagesimal, since sixty is conveniently the common divisor for twelves, tens, and threehundred
and sixty, all of which have strangely persisted to the present day as minutes, seconds, hours, and
degrees, but it difficult to state exactly when these numbers entered into the Greek tradition.
The Greeks' inability to deal with numbers effectively, since they never developed a good cipher
system, makes us suspect that any odd numbers that they used must have been borrowed from
Near Eastern sources, probably along with the Phoenician letters which appeared somewhere in
the ninth century. Looking at the "Labors" in the traditional order, we find a wide range of feats
which must obviously have been performed by many men over a long period of time. Heracles'
name has an etymological connection with Hera, the meaning of which is not clear; perhaps his
name ('Hera' + 'cleos' "fame") may have violated some ancient sacral copyright. However Hera is
his enemy throughout life, ostensibly because of his birth from Alkmene by Zeus. She persecutes
him with serpents when he is an infant, with murderous madness when he is adult, perhaps as
some mark of an ancient cult-rivalry which we are not aware of.
l) The story of the Nemean Lion,which Heracles strangles and then rips open with its own claws in
order to remove the skin from the body, must be a very early myth. Learning to make flaked
flintstone implements, man developed the kind of edged tool necessary to open up an animal
which he had clubbed to death with a stick or a broken off antelope-bone shillelagh.
Anthropologists have discovered that the only animal a man can rip open for food after killing it is
a rabbit, everything bigger resists the action of his nails, fingers and teeth. The man who sees that
the cat's claws are first-rate slitters must be living in early old stone age culture, since later flaked
and sharpened stone gives him his own tools, with an excellent cutting edge. Middens and
stoneworking fields show that slitting stones were common and used everywhere in Europe in
neolithic times.
2) The next encounter was with the Hydra, a watersnake equipped with numerous heads. We may
be dealing with a story describing the octopus, which confuses legs and heads in the whirl of
activity. But soon a crab appears to aid the Hydra against Heracles, his legs are of course
genetically coded for regrowth upon loss, and this feature enters the story. Fighting the hydra and
the crab, which is probably not a freshwater animal, Heracles must be in a very wet, perhaps
brackish area, one suspects a location somewhere in the Euphrates valley near the extensive
marshlands where the river empties into the sea. Clearing wetlands of any dangerous animals (the
exact kind is less important than their presence in the face of increasing population and land-use),
would be an early activity, perhaps derived from the experience of NearEastern history at the time
time when the Euphrates valley was being drained and productively irrigated. Placing the story in
Greece loses the point, since very few Greek locations were suitable for such water-life, and those
were so small in area that they could be ignored without loss. The fifth millennium B.C. might be
a good rough date for this sort of feat, presumably with an eastern locale.
3)The Erymanthian Boar might be a a denizen of deep forest and possibly middling highlands,
either in Asia Minor or Europe. Driving the boar into the snow where its short legs sink it in deep
snowdrifts, Heracles may be reflecting the Carpenter-theory sojourn in Hungary or Southern
Germany, where such a scene could easily have occurred. Were this possible, it would point to a
wide geographical distribution of Heraclean mythologizing, which can be interpreted as the
conflation of many "Heracles-type" adventures which are not necessarily referable to one single
actor. At the present time large and aggressive boars are still found in the marshes of the lower
Euphrates valley, and the story could have its origin there; but the detail of driving it into deep
snow points to a second-level development in the Central European hill country.
4) The Stag of Ceryneia seems to fall into the same class as the boar, it would be the inhabitant of
densely forested areas, again suggesting a northern locale. One difficulty, of course, is that we do
not know exactly which animals inhabited which forests at remote periods, although again further
scientific study of plant pollens and animal bones in identifiable age-levels could be of critical use
in such arguments. We can consider the possibilities now, but for proof we will need more detailed
study.
5) The Birds of Lake Stymphalos (said to be in Arcadia which is centrally located in the
Peleponnese) are harder to understand. They were supposed to be man-eating birds, but we know
now that the largest avian predators have no ability to carry off anything larger than a small lamb,
and this with some difficulty. Perhaps the birds were vultures feeding on dead flesh and
occasionally eating dead human remains, so that hunters chancing on such a scene would naturally
assume the birds had killed the men. Annual migration patterns of birds are quite stable in time,
we should consider whether these birds were storks, cranes or some other large birds migrating
from European summer grounds to North Africa for winter, as they still do. Heracles would have
had no purpose in killing these birds, but if we could identify the migratory patterns, we should be
able to place the scene of his action fairly well. Raptor patterns of annual migration at the present
time go in two paths: Some cross the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, others go clear around the
eastern end of the water. Apparently there is a strong aversion to flying over open stretches of sea,
either from fear, or because of loss of typical landmarks which are their migratory "map". We
would seem to be dealing in this myth with the eastern migratory flight, which would place the
scene in which Heracles is involved either at the Bosporos, or possibly east of the Euxine Sea,
perhaps in Colchis. Again, only ornithological experts with historical background can contribute
useful material here.
6) The episode of the cleaning of the Augean Stables, on the other hand, has clear relevance to an
important stage of developing civilization. The vast herds of King Augeas (said to be of Elis in
Greece), had accumulated such piles of manure, that their disposal presented an insurmountable
problem. The story tells that Heracles was requested to clear out the stables in one day, but the
time factor may be merely a reflection of the fact, that when Heracles diverted a portion of a river
through the stables, the manure went out quickly, perhaps in one day, in a fast-moving, liquid
slurry. Water is still one of the practical ways of cleaning barn manure, in a pre-machinery time it
would have seemed the magic barn cleaning machine.The story implies that animal breeding was
so far advanced that disposal of manure was beginning to be a problem. Herds of hundreds of
horses and cows would make people wonder where the manure might go, but herds of thousands
would make disposal a real problem. Manure fulfils a special role in farming, since the
complicated blends of enzymes which are required to break down grasses in ruminants' multifold
stomachs, when spread on the fields make possible a more intensive and productive farming
enterprise than can be envisioned without animal excrement. The double cycle which involves
animal breeding along with plant cultivation was certainly the foundation of the prosperity and
larger population potential of the Mesopotamian valley area, and the myth of Heracles and the
stables embraces both aspects, since the river conveniently floods the manure out of the barns and
right onto the fields. We may assume that we are dealing with a complicated and well-organized
flood-cleansing system, which used animal manure and plant culture to the fullest potential.
Strangely, the concoctor of this myth saw only the cleaning of the stables as worthy of comment,
he makes no mention of where the river waters went, or what use they finally served. This is a
good example of a Greek myth which contains procedures far more sophisticated than the story
teller knows.
9) Heracles expedition against the Amazons is located in the same mythic plane as his struggles
against various monsters, which have led some scholars to believe that the Amazons are as
fictitious as the other beasts. Since we have found grains of truth in many of the other labors, we
will approach the Amazons as reality to start with. First, they are associated with the north shore
of the Black or Euxine Sea, where we know about Greek activity from an early period. Achilles,
Theseus, Priam and others have already been reaching into the Euxine Basin, and the conflicts
which arose from eastward expansion must have been the original cause of the trouble at Troy.
It is possible that western peoples meeting primitive tribes on the southern plains of Russia, where
warlike behavior may have been coupled with long hair and what seemed to the Greeks traditional
female dress, could effect a sexual mis-identification. Killing one of these barbarians, the victor
would soon see that there were no breasts, but rather than yield to fact, he could fabricate the story
that they burned their breasts off for easier fighting, or if they were right-handed archers, they
removed only the right breast. But the difference between male and female genitals is clear,
therefore his seems an obtuse interpretation.
One of the most basic human identifications is the discrimination between the sexes, yet it must be
remembered that even in our time clever transvestites can fool the observant eye. On the other
hand, if we assume the existence of a thorough-going matriarchy, coupled with female
aggressiveness extended even to warfare, then patriarchal Western people would surely see this as
a totally different and threatening type of social organization, to be wiped out not because these
women were inherently dangerous, but because they represented such a basically different social
structure. The Bohemian queen Vlasta in the 8th c. A.D. waged a fully staged war against the King,
in the l6th century Spanish explorers found women warriors in Brazil, which is why they named
the central river the Amazon. Women in the l9th century were active warriors in Dahomey in
Africa, and women have been effective soldiers in the modern army of Israel.
Since Womens' Lib. in the United States, the levels of female violence have risen gradually,
including several murders of seeming rapists by karate-skilled females. Our myths of the naturally
gentle sex have probably been generated by the domination which men have been able to exercise
over women for millennia, although hormonal factors must also be at work. We are probably as
much in the dark in such matters of sexual identification as was Heracles when he faced his first
Amazonic Lady of Scythia. But the interesting point to make in closing, is that despite the long
and even history of "pacification" of women in the Western world, the story of Heracles and the
Amazons documents, although in puzzling manner, the possible existence of wild and untamed
warrior women at an early, pre-Hellenic date.
Perhaps the real difference between Hellene and Amazon lies in the distinction between tame, that
is socialized being and one who is "wild". Anyone who has raised children,or even dogs, will
recognize that in the infant animal there are traits of a "wild phenomenon", which can be subdued
by touching with the hands, petting, cajoling and finally threatening. Children and most
domesticated animals respond well to this pacification if it is done in the period of early
development, and wild animals can be dealt with in the same manner if the treatment is started
early enough, although the results are never completely assured. Certain types of human criminal
"psychopaths" seem not to have been influenced by these processes; in wartime men are "taught"
to unlearn their peaceful training, which may not be recoverable later in the normal social world.
Perhaps the Amazons represent nothing more than the way "wild" humans at a different level of
development would appear to highly socialized Greek men.
l0) The Cattle of the Sun God, which were stolen by a monster named Geryon who fled with them
to the remote western part of the Mediterranean Basin, refers to a western movement of
colonization, which threatened the beef-industry of the East, much as the Australian sheep market
has threatened the European and American lamb and mutton packers. If this is the meaning of this
story, we must tie it to the thrust of Western expansion, which we generally date relatively late in
the second millennium B.C. But on the other hand there are Indic myths of the cattle of the sun
being stolen, but these are always sheep whose fleecy coats are identified with the rainclouds
which must be returned if the country is to prosper agriculturally. The transfer from sheep to oxen
is strange, but after the meaning of sheep (as rainclouds) vanished, the name of any prevalent
herd-animal could easily be substituted. An interesting parallel is found in the myth of Helios the
Sun God, the son of Hyperion and Thea, who each day rides his chariot across heaven and in the
night is transported back again in a golden bowl.
Homer notes in Odyssey Book 11 that the sun-god has cattle and sheep in Trinacria, later renamed
Sicily, which would certainly be a western frontier for the early Greek colonists. If archaeologists
find many sheep bones and few ox bones in the western fringes of civilization, we can assume that
the original meaning of the Vedic myth lay behind the Greek story, and that the desiccation which
Rhys Carpenter has posited for the second half of the second millennium B.C. was the driving idea
behind this myth: Someone had to go and get the rain back. If Heracles is one of the "Dorians"
who went north into Hungary to escape the drought, and his people came back later with rainfall
(in Herodotos' words) as "the return of the descendants of Heracles", then he would be a natural
person about whom to center a story telling why the rainclouds went to the west. If climatologists
find that the rainfall in Spain was plentiful through all this period, then Heracles may be assumed
to be a "rainmaker". Identification of his name with the Pillars of Hercules shows that he was
thought of as going all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in his search.
ll) The Apples of the Hesperides are fruit which Heracles found while on the previous adventure in
the far West. If pollen indicating the presence of Seville Oranges or some similar fruit can be
identified for this period, then we would have to look no further in the unravelling of this myth. In
any case some exotic fruit seems to be involved, and it is either brought to Greece before it rots by
fast shipping, or the plant has been successfully transplanted.
l2) In the final Labor, Heracles descends to the underworld to capture the three headed dog
Cerberus; or in the Homeric variant of the tale, he tries to conquer Hades or Death himself This
story is analogous to the less aggressive descent of Odysseus into the underworld, and furthermore
to the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which in its earlier Babylonian fragments points to a date
before the second millennium B.C. (A full, if old summary of the provenance and detailed
contents of the Gilgamesh material is to be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed.
s.v.Gilgamesh, by the American Semiticist Morris Jastrow.) Here again what seems to be typically
Greek, is clearly connected with the thought and history of a much earlier period in the NearEast.
The fact that the Greek stories are so well known known to us all, while the NearEastern stories
are fragmentary and obscure, makes it difficult see exactly what sections Greek mythology
derived from the myth-histories of the eastern peoples.
A detailed inquiry into the parallels which exist between the Greek and Sumerian stories is beyond
the scope of this chapter; the important thing to note is the existence of clearly parallel storylines,
the Greek myth being the derivative version. All in all, the stories associated with the name of
Heracles contain materials for the identification of a new type of semi-social man who is quite
different from his late neolithic ancestors. He performs heroic deeds which pave the way for the
requirements of civilizing man, opening up large tracts of land for profitable use. But he works
alone, he is a singular figure and only for a short time takes on the apprentice Hylas, who soon
disappears. The broad scope of these stories, as well as their regular development in later Greek
mythologizing culture, places them at the center of any serious search for fact in myth.
A hero of quite different dimensions is the master archer Philoctetes. He has one special ability, he
wields the bow that never misses its mark, and his ability with this remarkable weapon, which
would make him a supreme hunter in a age which lived by hunting, makes him the object of illwill
and hostility in an age which devotes itself to warfare. Needing his bow, but being unwilling to
accept the pure and direct mind of the master hunter who owns it, the Greek leaders are unable to
give Philoctetes recognition for his talents. On the other hand he cannot recognize their the
legitimacy of their military purpose, which is foreign to the world from which his skills in archery
emerged.
Isolation and tragedy are his reward in the original story, although Sophocles characteristically
gives his play an ending worthy of the social aspirations of the Athenian 5th century, and has him
willingly return to the world of men and the Trojan War.Heracles gave his bow and arrows to
Poias on his death, they passed in turn to Poias' son Philoctetes who was one of the Greek warriors
who sailed against Troy. On the way there, he was bitten in the foot by a snake, the wound festered,
he screamed out in such pain that the superstitious Greeks shanghaied him on Lemnos where he
lived for years, sick and lonely, living by the bow which could never miss its mark. Later it was
revealed at Troy that the city could be taken only with the bow of Heracles, now the Greeks
realized they had to reclaim Philoctetes, or kill him and get his bow, in order to conclude the long
and costly war. But the story has other dimensions. The man who possesses and wields the
unerring bow, is a hunting virtuoso in a primitive hunting world. Philoctetes uses the bow to hunt
and provide his food for all those years at Lemnos, this is probably the original scope of the
unerring-hunter tale. But it is now injected as an episode in the life of a military archer, which is
what the Greeks expect Philoctetes to become. For some reason, circumstantially ascribed to his
bad foot, Philoctetes cannot be drawn into the military expedition against Troy, his excellence
remains entirely with his weapon and never involves social action in an organized army.
When it is revealed that the Greeks cannot win the war without the weapon, they send someone
(Odysseus is just the man for such a job) to get it done at any cost. Sophocles creates a
sophisticated story of honor and duty, finalized with an apocalyptic vision of the hero's patron
"saint" as Heracles gives him instructions, and Philoctetes returns voluntarily with the bow,
behaving as a as a good Greek soldier should. One suspects that the original of the story was less
pleasing, that the soldiers killed the man and thus got the bow, thinking that they too would be
able to use it unerringly. (The missing sequel would have been the efforts of Greek archers to bend
the bow which only Philoctetes can use, in the manner of the story of Robin Hood's bow, but in a
country not populated by a youth skilled in archery, such a sequence would pass unnoticed.)
Archery in fact was more an Eastern than a Greek skill. To become a great archer is a life's work,
the archery tradition in Japan makes this clear, and the remarkable account by Herrigel on the
difficulties of learning bowmanship shows that only a dedicated and talented man, with more than
a little monomania, can become a great archer. There was just such a Greek myth about
Philoctetes, but it focused on his weapon rather than his skill. But when an effort is made to "hire"
Philoctetes into the army, to use his proven skills at archery for a common goal, and no longer for
the private and personal purpose that the hunter and archer have developed, it is doomed to failure.
Philoctetes has powers that cannot be used socially, and for this reason they had to be rid of him.
Needing the bow, they went back to him and probably murdered him; in Sophocles Fifth Century
version an arrangement is made by which Philoctetes goes back to men and the world of Troy, just
as the Elizabethan Prospero must also finally return to the world of men.
Early men of great power, inventors of new techniques and devices, as characters on the stage of
man's early dramatization, seem to have great difficulty in accepting concerted social interaction.
Heracles is the model for a man of great effectiveness, so long as he works by himself or with one
companion, and Philoctetes inherits along with the bow this same social disability. Achilles'
grandeur lies in the fact that he works alone and only for his own honor, this is his heroic mark
and in social terms this is his fatal flaw. The earliest levels of Greek myth point again and again to
a period before the regularized socialization of Man begins, and the tragedy of many of these early
figures, especially in their death scenes, lies in their unwillingness or inability to involve
themselves in social behavior. Note that the Classical Japanese samurai, who have many of the
same traits of independence and individuality,were legally dispersed as a warrior class in the
sixteenth century as the country progressed into a more unified, federally controlled state. They
converted themselves quickly into leaders in the arts and crafts, and finally socialize under an
entirely different professional guise. The Greek individual heroes, like Achilles, Heracles and
Philoctetes, eventually disappear from the scene, and are replaced by willing social partners in the
mould of the wily, venal Odysseus.
It seems that in the course of the development of a civilization, there comes a time when powerful
individualists are no longer needed, when society assumes that it can get the same impressive
results from the group-effort of many less gifted persons. The ants experimented with this problem
three hundred million years ago, they developed societal goals so far as to completely eliminate
individuality and even individual sexuality. They seem to have been correct for themselves in
evolutionary terms, but whether this is also true for our breed remains to be seen.
A Greek wit remarked that there is a curious contradiction in the use of the Greek word 'bios'
(which means both "bow" and also as a separate homonym, "life"), since the bow is the instrument
which represents and at the same time destroys life. The weapon is a great advantage to
humankind, but at the same time a deadly threat to life, situations of this kind are familiar to men
of the twentieth century, the atomic energy which our society has pioneered can offer the greatest
benefit to mankind, since it produces energy without the cumulative combustive pollution of wood,
coal or oil, yet it presents the greatest possible threat to the survival of mankind. This is our
modern "bow". It is worth noting that Robert Oppenheimer, the one member of the original
pioneering group at Los Alamos who had serious doubts about the use and misuse of atomic
energy, was singled out during the infamous MacCarthy period as "suspect", not on the count of a
snakebitten foot, but because he may have carried a Communist card many years before. He was
shanghaied, as was Philoctetes, not to Lemnos but to the Institute for Advanced Studies at
Princeton, where certain political powers felt he would be rendered harmless. He fulfilled
administrative duties there to consume his time, and died many years later, unheard and largely
unknown. The society took his weapon away from him, they used it for their purposes, and they
silenced this one serious opponent of unbridled use of atomic energy by an act of ostracism rather
than by death. Some situations which confront men do not change a great deal through the
centuries, apparently the critical and lethal weapon is still usable without the consent or advice of
its owner. We have progressed greatly in the size and destructiveness of the weaponry, but not in
our understanding of its control or proper use.
A striking example of the opposition of one individual to coercive social commands is the story of
Antigone. In Sophocles' version, from which most of our portrayal of Antigone's character comes,
the issue is between what one owes the "state", represented by Creon the king, as against what one
owes the older structures of clan and family religion. There is more to the story than this skeletal
outline, but the basic problem is simple and central: Does the state have the final say in this new
world of social imperatives, or are there moral and personal roots which go back into the ancestral
past? The drama of Antigone in its most elemental form, demonstrates the inability of a woman
who is schooled in the traditional values inherited from her past, to comprehend, let alone obey,
the orders which society presses on her through the agency of the King.
This is only part of the gist of Sophocles' drama, but it is probably an original part of the ancient
myth, since this same inability to socialize is found in almost all the genuinely early hero-myths.
The insistence of the Greeks in the 5th c. B.C. on the absolute value of social behavior may well
be a last act in the difficult drama of the earlier Greek people in accepting any form of social
enforcement. Even in the Greeks of the later Classical Period there remains a wild streak of
intransigent individuality, which makes the process of democratic cooperation always difficult and
often impossible. Each of the mythic figures which we have been examining has a striking and
distinguished personal history, each reveals details which stem from centuries or possibly
millennia of advancing human experience in the eastern Mediterranean world. But all show the
same inability or at least unwillingness to act in social concert with others, their minds are entirely
oriented to what they are doing and not what the others want. Hence they fail in what socialized
and civilized men and women consider the core of civilized behavior. Yet there is something grand
and independent which we recognize in their lives, since individuality is still prized among us,
especially as vast social forces seem about to swallow up our remaining personal identities.
The real problem is certainly not a conflict between individual and social action as such, but an
understanding of what each can do especially well in its own sphere. In our day when committees
and think-tanks tend to be the socially approved modes of generating new ideas, we might well
remember the effectiveness of thought and action which individuals have shown in the past. It is
usually when the force of a social experiment is new, or on the other hand when times are
especially desperate, that society tends to force one pattern onto us as mandatory. This is exactly
what was happening in the first two millennia before Christ, and it is the inability of some ancient
men of great force and ability to adjust to the new social ways that is so insistently recorded in the
curious chronicles of Greek mythology.
As times went on, the Romans started to "create" myths of their own, to suit their own social
needs. These are largely based on the form and general style of the Greek mythologists, with
whom the Romans were well acquainted. If they could not read the large full-scale version of
Greek mythology in the Greek of Apollonius they could read an abridged version more
conveniently in the Latin of Julius Hyginus. The myths which they constructed should be
considered "myths-of-the-second-level", or pseudo-myths. As examples of this phenomenon, one
can note these: Aeneas is the sort of fabrication which every people develops for its own honor. It
seems possible that the whole Aeneas myth was generated out of the archaic Latin word
"trossulus" a cavalryman of the early period. The word has no known affinities and may be of
Etruscan origin, but since "trossulus" would be interpreted by any Roman as a "little Trojan,
descendant of Troy", or even more specifically "descendant of Tros (the fourth generation in the
formal family tree of Troy, viz. Zeus, Dardanus, Erichthonius, and Tros), this would provide a
convenient point of departure for a noble legend following the influx of Greek literature into
Rome in the third century B.C. This view is by no means accepted by Classical scholars, however
the fabrication of quasi-archaic figures is well known to Americans, who have acculturated a
largely reshaped Santa Claus, a wholly new Paul Bunyan whose cycle dates only from the l920's,
as well as a long series of Western style gunfighters who have only the slimmest connections with
history.
There is a certain advantage in fabricating one's own national heroes, since they have an uncanny
way of fitting the society perfectly. The one Roman who fits the pattern of the Greek hero tales is
Romulus, and then only in one single matter, the confrontation of the pasturing and the farming
ways of life. When Romulus built a wall for his city, Remus jumped over it with a sneer, to be
immediately killed by his brother, who was not held guilty. We have here in a late form the old
confrontation of the settling field-tender, who marks off land for cultivation, as against the
free-roaming pasturer of flocks. The story is identical with that of Cain and Abel, and it is a
foregone conclusion that the herdsman must die, which signifies that civilization must be allowed
to go forward. Many of the young Greek hunters of myth faced death for similar reasons, since as
hunters they crossed cultivated land (probably unbeknownst to themselves) and thus were a threat
to agriculture.
For a very brief period in the middle of the l9th century the same confrontation was found among
the Western settlers in the United States; the cattlemen detested the dirt farmers, and exactly the
same kind of bloody antagonism prevailed as the earlier peoples had known. The cattlemen
received a secure place in the society only because of the useful transportability of live meat by
the newly developed rail lines to distant markets in the East, as well as increasing American
consumption of meat, while agriculture proceeded at its own pace. A double-headed market can
ensure compatibility between these two opposed groups. If we can reliably date Romulus as 8th c.
B.C., then Cain and Abel would fall into a proper place some centuries earlier; this tells us
something about the date of the advent of serious cultivation of the land for crops in the
Mediterranean area.
At an early date there was a separate Latin divinity named Saturnus, "he who sows (seed for
grain)" from the verb ''serere, satus'. Roman tradition states, in a virtually Euhemeristic tone, that
he was an early king at Rome who introduced agriculture and was hence elevated to deity-status.
(The later identification with Cronos is merely a part of the Greco-Roman equivalent
identification of deities, a process which often obscures important, original details.) Here again we
have a newly fabricated "doer-deity", with real social meaning for his society; he does not
however have a historical pedigree going back into the time of the earlier cultures from which the
Roman benefited. The socialization of man does not take place in a moment or in a thousand years.
Despite the difficulties of early heroes in adapting to group behavior, the process of socialization
goes on unrelentingly, since larger frameworks of social action are needed for larger populations
and their daily support.
A transitional stage between the hero as isolated individual and the new hero as part of a societal
effort, is to be seen in a curious inter-stage, which serves as bridge between the two patterns. We
find as adjunct to lone hero, the hero-pair, consisting of the hero, a man of great power and
experience, and an apprentice and companion, usually a younger man who is clearly in a
subordinate position. This inter-stage marks the transition of the hero as individual to becoming
group-member, it is clearly transitional and short-lived as a social phenomenon. Achilles
relationship to Patroclos is typical of this kind of association. Patroclos is tent-mate, householding
assistant, and a general purpose companion, but when he dies wearing the master's ill-suited armor,
the full depth of Achilles' tragic feeling for him emerges. This is no mere apprentice to the trade, it
may be a relationship which contains seeds of love and even homosexuality. But paramount is the
fact that it is the kind of pair relationship which joins two unequals, as Aristotle will remark of a
class of friends at a later time in the Nichomachean Ethics. There is no competition for honor or
glory, so the two can be companions in a real sense, and useful to each other in dangerous
situations.
The origin of this uneven-pair system apparently goes back in history as far as the story of
Gilgamesh, whose friend and companion Eabani is fated to die, to the hero's great grief. Achilles
and Patroclos fulfill similar roles, and in the Greek cycles of myth there are many examples of
such relationships, including the popular story of the twins heroes Castor and Polydeukes. They
are nearly equal, Polydeukes however is immortal and Castor perishes; the story that Zeus gave
the mourning twins alternate days in Hades as a special favor may well be a later addition. At
Rome Castor is the more popular figure, and Pollux (Polydeuces) is clearly subordinate. The story
of Hylas fits into this hero-friend classification well. On the Argonautic expedition, Heracles took
along the young Hylas, who was sent to fetch water for the sailors when stranded temporarily off
the coast of Mysia (Asia Minor). The nymphs of the fountain at which he was drawing water fell
in love with him, and sucked him down into their world. Heracles was stricken with grief, and
only left the area when, at his behest, the natives instituted a ritual springtime sacrifice to Hylas,
who thus appears retrospectively in the light of a vegetative annual-cycle deity. Hylas fulfills the
basic conditions of companion to a hero: He is young, subservient, handsome, devoted, helpful,
and at the proper moment he dies, leaving the hero free to go on his road of achievement alone, as
was proper. This unequal but friendly working relationship between two men would seem to be
one of the primitive stages of social development. Not only do the two men work and fight beside
each other, but a sincere emotional atmosphere develops between them, so that the survivor
mourns long and hard for his lost friend.
Humans seem to find it much easier to develop working relationships in pairs than to participate in
the more complicated group activities, although the history of civilization in the West has relied on
group efforts in the main. Even today the ancient two-man team persists, we still find it
widespread in the modern world. Carpenters seem to get a great deal more work done if they have
a helper, cement finishers generally work in pairs, and in the army and police force the two man
"buddy system" is found useful. The single-combat, with one man fighting against another as
portrayed in Homeric scenes, is a much older structure, which seems to have intellectually
influenced a great deal of Greek military strategics in the historical period. By the time of the
developing tactics of the Punic Wars we have genuine group tactics on both sides, and the modern
concept of field-warfare is borne.
When Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics outlines friendship in its various forms, he speaks of
something which we often fail to identify, the friendship between unequals as contrasted to the
friendship between equals. The working relationships which we have been discussing are all
friendships between unequals, and although these sound unegalitarian to modern ears, their
function may be more basic than friendships between equals. By admitting an inequality between
two men, competition and edging for position are avoided. Societies which establish formalized
ranking and pecking orders tend to be more peaceful than those in which each must fight for his
own place in the sun. When a poster is put up in a factory announcing that "The Boss may not
always be right, but he is the Boss", or when Japanese businessmen bow automatically to
superiors in the organization as they pass in the hall, inequality is tacitly stated while harmony is
strengthened. Strongly individualistic persons find this hard to accept, but we must remember that
the development of mega-civilizations has never been a friend to the individual as individual, but
only as a small part of the social mega-structure. Social relations between one generation and the
next, between the young and the older generation, or between fathers and sons, is strained in
Greek mythology, often to a point near murder, or to murder.
Paris, the son of Priam and seducer of Helen, was exposed as a child to die in the woods, because
of a prophecy that he would destroy the city of Troy. Brought up by shepherds, he did in an
indirect manner cause the fall of Troy as the result of his affaire with Helen. It is interesting to
note that Paris has the same start in life as Oedipous, each is exposed to die because of a
threatening oracle, but each lives, and causes some major social cataclysm. Fathers and sons seem
to have a strange tension in ancient Greece, which often results in murder. The death of Odysseus
is a case in point: Telegonos (the name is revealing, "he who is born far away") is his son by Circe,
he has come to Ithaca to present himself to his father, and kills him by sheer error. The
improbability of the story is less important than the fact that a son kills his father, which has
coherent social meaning, since it is a regular theme in Greek mythology. The locus classicus for
this kind of familial tension is found in the angry dialogue between Admetus and his father in the
Alcestis of Euripides, which involves not only the logical arguments about who should, or should
not die for whom, but also the brutal hostility of a son to his begetter. The audience must have
been shocked and at the same time entranced by seeing acted out this double-sided argument in
which now the son, and now the father, seems to have justice on his side.
This was no radically new idea, just a new recreation on the stage of a very old story which the
Greeks had heard in the myths many times before. Kings do not ordinarily expose their children
unless there is a special reason (for example the curse on Laius' house for kidnapping) and only
then would exposure of his son seem a way of expiating guilt by lex talionis. Behind this action
lies the socially approved pattern of death by exposure, since it does not incur blood guilt as,in
effect, no blood is shed. (Perhaps this is conceived as similar to our legal categories of causation
of death, which can be seen as homicide, second degree murder or first degree murder. If Greek
ideas of what was acceptable causation of death seem forced to us, think how utterly inexplicable
our legal classifications of violent death would have been to them.) In summary, Laius expiates
child-stealing by sacrificing his own child, but he cannot do this in a self-incriminatory way, so he
chooses the socially acceptable mode in exposing the infant, which does not incur blood-guilt.
From the very beginning of his identity some million or more years ago, Man was clearly a social
animal, his hunting habits, his system of protection for the group, and his provisions for rearing
the young were highly social, and without this trait he would not have survived. But in the smaller
group of family, extended family, or tribe, social behavior is clearer and more understandable than
when the social group begins to involve men and women in the thousands and the tens of
thousands. These larger numbers appear for the first time, so far as our information goes, in a
relatively recent period, starting some twelve thousand years ago, and it is only from that time that
we can date what we pridefully call "civilization". But if civilization has its rewards, it also has its
difficulties, the first of which is the submerging of the individual's will in the will of the group.
This is still a problem which is by no means ironed out in our twentieth century, so we can
imagine how difficult adjustment to such new sets of standards must have been when they first
appeared.
It is the thesis of this study that the Greek myths document, although often in a somewhat cloaked
manner, the early confrontations of "heroes" with societies. The heroes are still the only
imaginable worthies which the society can think of appreciating, they stand out as admirable
figures in Greek mythology. But they all have a fatal flaw of some kind, and what is more
revealing, they all meet a tragic doom and end their lives in despair or violent death. This key,
which has generally been overlooked, marks the difficulty of adapting to new social environments,
especially when the hero is trained and tested in the old ways which date from an earlier,
pre-mega-social stage of development. The fact that the myths are able to combine praise for great
heroism, while at the same time chronicling the heroes' tragedies, points to their basic seriousness
and truthfulness.
Chapter 2:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Godesses Women and Sex.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------When man was first emerging from the last Ice Age, human population was small, and the first
imperative surely was to produce progeny. Since life was short, life expectancy probably being no
more than forty years, and since half the children born probably died before the age of three, the
matter of producing young was by necessity primary business for the societies which were going
to survive. We often say that the distinguishing mark of humans is the ability to use tools, and
toolmaking is certainly for archaeologists a characteristic sign of human activity. But it is the
dynamic rise of population which marks the difference between Man the hunter-gatherer and his
descendant, Man the agriculturalist and animal breeder. When increasing numbers of men and
women can no long find food, they have to learn to raise it, and this in turn calls for numbers of
workers to provide the complex duties of the farmer.
Greece's problems with population are similar to the problems faced by any newly developing
society. As late as the nineteenth century, America which still was facing the challenge of "new
land", with all the problems of civilization compressed into a single century, large families were a
necessity. If a woman could give birth to thirteen children in her childbearing years, if eight could
survive, and if four were male, then a man could look forward to having a workforce sufficient to
farm a small acreage. By breeding one's own workers, one made survival possible, and family
farms without progeny simply failed. Possibly the only exception to this was the energetic group
called the Shakers, who excluded sex but practiced adoption into their society, finally succumbing
to obsolescence by attrition in an age when other lucrative forms of employment appeared. Love,
sex and procreation are, in that order, the primary tools of rising humanity, and anything that can
be done to foster sexuality will profit humanity so long as population is scarce.
Aphrodite has come down to us from antiquity as a larger than life, rather Rubensesque lady
sculpted in stone, a symbol of universal charm and grace, but having a reputation in poetry for
light-headed and flirtatious sexuality. In the Classical world she was all this, but at an earlier time
she must have had an entirely different role and function. The primitive deity Aphrodite, whose
traces go back to a time long before the Greek society was formed, is a figure of primary
importance.
Aphrodite's central role, although she is the queen of charm and physical loveliness, is basically
sexual. Although sex is usually thought of as pleasure, it is the only pleasure which leads directly
to procreation, which is a matter of high priority to developing peoples. After the last ice-retreat,
the development of grain hybrids not only made greater population feasible, but in turn required
greater population for sowing, reaping, hoarding and protecting the supplies of grain. At this stage
Aphrodite becomes a major deity, since she represents the magical function of procreation, which
we now formalize under the name of genetics.
It may seem strange that in Homer and the later tradition Aphrodite is married to Hephaistos, the
smith and tool maker, whom Homer displays in a somewhat pathetic and at the same time comical
manner. However, if we add to Aphrodite's procreative abilities, the equipment which a metal
worker can provide, whether he is a Neolithic, early Bronze age or Iron Age craftsman, we have
two of the basic ingredients for civilizations: Progeny and Tools. In the passage of time this
changes, the maker of tools becomes a subsidiary of a new man of power, the military man who
discovers that the easiest way to increase your GNP is to wage war against someone who has what
you need and take it away from him.. Stealing is the first stage of economic transfer, buying is
more sophisticated and appears much later.
As soon as Hephaistos is secure in Ares' back pocket, Ares assumes Hephaistos' previous role with
military arms and of course with Hephaistos' wife, who is forever attractive and always socially
useful. The new pair standing at the head of advancing civilization is now Aphrodite and Ares,
which is precisely what Homer shows in the Iliad. Ares seduces Aphrodite, and Hephaistos is
pretty much out of the picture except as a Chaplinesque figure contributing minor comic relief.
This scenario is repeated throughout history, we can still point to the military in modern Western
countries as master of power and contractor-owner of the engineering talents of the modern
Hephaistos. In the eyes of the last generation in America, Douglas MacArthur is as much a symbol
of power in our society, as Marilyn Monroe is an embodiment of the eternal allure of Love. Put in
a prehistoric context, there must have once been a time at which the smith-toolmaker was
accorded the same respect as the Goddess of Love who made population possible, but this must
antedate the appearance of the military. Since we know of military force as early as the 6th
millennium B.C., we should date the Aphrodite/Hephaistos dyad back somewhere towards the 8th
millennium, which allows just enough time for the important developments in agriculture which
follow the last ice age.
The portrayal of Aphrodite in sculpture is so familiar to our eyes, both in the original work and in
the multitudinous Roman and Modern copies, that we often fail to notice some important aspects
of the goddess' representation. Restricting ourselves to Greek originals, we discern a strange
uneasiness in Aphrodite's stance, her arms and legs seem to be going in opposite directions,
although this is cloaked by garments and not immediately apparent. One arm gestures to cover her
breasts, while the other vaguely hovers over her groin, so she may be seen to be rather
ineffectually defending her sexuality. Her facial features are calm and impassive, neither agonized,
nor as ecstatic as we might expect a goddess of sex to be. Yet she is, according to the Greek notion
of her role, sexually enticing. A survey of Greek sculpture shows this attitude toward her in the
sculptural representation to be conventional; there are no moments either of desperation or of
orgasmic ecstasy, which emotions are not found in her any more than in Greek women, with the
exception of the short-term female ecstasy which the cult of Dionysos provides.
Compare this with Indic religious art, which depicts female deities with enticing body and
enraptured facial expression. The difference is that at some point India made its peace with sex,
incorporating it into the flow of religious thought, or even raising it to special levels of
respectability because of its involuntary and ecstatic nature. The way in which Greek sculpture
portrays the goddess of Love says important things about the way Greek men envisioned sexually
desirable women. The half-ashamed, half hiding, partly covered but partly naked posture of an
attractive female must have been pleasing and sexually exciting to men, especially if the face were
impassive, calm, willing and (above all) not competitive. Consider the parallel in modern Oriental
countries, where women are expected to be charming, modestly suggestive, indulging in socially
approved smiles accompanied by light laughter with hand over mouth, always available but never
sexually challenging. In the past forty years a new type of woman has emerged in the Orient, she
is as well educated and intelligent as any man, and she values her new identity, but faced with this
"new" woman, many Oriental men find themselves ill at ease, and may even be sexually affronted.
Greeks had the same problem, and fled to 'hetairai' for sexual expression, much as modern
Oriental men tend to do. Wives are selected on a different basis, since family and society must
approve of them. From a careful study of the sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite, an important and
revealing chapter on sexuality of the ancient Greek male can be written.
The role of female sexual behavior and orgasm in ancient Greece needs elucidation. In one of
Lucian's sketches of people and personalities, admittedly material taken from a much later period,
a pair of Lesbian girls is portrayed in the sexual act. What seems most surprising to Lucian is that
the more active (masculine) Lesbian is puffing and breathing heavily,(Gr.. 'asthmainei'...he says),
in fact just like a man. If more evidence of this kind can be found, it may suggest that female
orgasm was rare, and what is worse, socially unacceptable. Certain African groups still surgically
remove the clitoris, presumably with the same aim of orienting sex solely toward the male. As the
century ends, public attention has been drawn to this insane mayhem, and many groups are
actively trying to get change instituted for the coming generations. It is estimated that some
hundred millions of women have been mutilated, and the seeds of this practice are deeply rooted
in the minds of African males. But traditional curltural and quasi-religious practices are the
hardest to reason with and change.
Many men in our own time still fear a woman who is in all ways an equal, and high fashion cover
girl portraiture often shows a girl whose eyes are frozen in a scared stare, which apparently is also
taken as a look of sexual enticement. This must be oriented specifically toward the male who it
excited by the image of a beautiful but scared woman, and may be parallel to the passive and
empty look on Aphrodite's face.
Niobe is the daughter of Tantalos, she suffers in Hades for some impropriety related her children.
Having seven sons and seven daughters, she boasted so much of her children and their number,
that Apollo and Artemis, the two children of Leto by Zeus, took offense, killed her children and
turned her, weeping incessantly, into a tear-dripping column of stone. This is a story which reflects
the tendency towards overpopulation which a reckless cult of Aphrodite produces, Since early
historical times, Greece was plagued by overpopulation in a small land area, much in the manner
of Japan past and present. Having a dozen or more children has been the pattern of many cultures
over the centuries, since children were basically desirable, since people felt that population should
increase, and since infant mortality removed more than half of the progeny. With her fourteen
children, Niobe represented the old way, whereas Apollo and his one sister Artemis point to zero
population increase.
The number seven, especially when repeated, is magical. A striking example of its use is seen in
the passage in the Aeneid in which Juno bribes Aeolus with "twice-seven fair nymphs". Solon says
that there are seven-year units which mark out the periods of a man's life., and the title Pleiad was
the name used in the time of Ptolemy II for the seven most distinguished tragic poets We also note
the symmetry of the generations by sevens at the beginning of Matthew's gospel, which in the
third group leads inexorably to Jesus.. In constructing polygons with simple classical tools (the
straight-edge and compass), the first really difficult construction is the pentagon (a magic form
often associated with the Devil), the construction of which the mathematical Arabs understood.
But constructing the heptagon is far more difficult, for the Greeks an impossible problem, hence
seven is still an unimaginable, and magical number. Niobe's number had doubly unfortunate
associations!
The still weeping column of stone which was once Niobe calls to mind Lot's wife and the act of
looking back,. as well as the Gorgon's' snaky gaze which "petrified" men, but it may also reflect
knowledge of deposits of salty limestone, worn away by wind and water so as to leave a column
standing alone in the desert. Tasting the surface, one would taste the "salt of tears". The similarity
of this columnar shape to one of the early Greek stone female figures of the Archaic Period could
easily reinforce the female origin. In a sense, such stories are a world away from the Indic myth of
Indra and the Ants, which have figurative, moral and philosophical meaning clearly injected into
the story line, and that may be one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek myths: They
are stories drawn from experience and history, which have not been worked over and reformed in
the light of a consolidated religious system. This may seem to be a weakness, but as documents
illustrating the rise of early civilization, in this lies their real strength and interest.
There are so many interpretations of the myth of Oedipous, that the central problem of inbreeding
is often ignored. The fact that Oedipous did inbreed incestuously is probably less important than
the possibility that he himself was the result of intensive inbreeding, as is evidenced by his
genetically, if not paralytically maimed clubfeet, and possibly his defective eyesight. (These
matters will be taken up in the chapter which concern itself with medicine and medical problems.)
Alongside of the cult of Aphrodite the producer of men, stands a set of tabus which come from the
careful observance of the background of many genetically defective children. The original layer of
the story of King Oedipous refers to such tabu, although the later Greek treatment in the drama is
focused entirely on bad fate and unlucky chance, since incest as a problem had already been
convincingly dealt with in Greek society.
One important fact about Helen which often escapes notice is the manner of her marriage to
Menelaus. Wooed by many because of her beauty, she was accorded, by Odysseus' intervention,
the opportunity of making her own marital choice, which united her with Menelaus. As Odysseus
represents the prototype of the new man, a trader, a practical and realistic dealer with all odds, it is
interesting that it is he who proposes for Helen this new and novel way of marrying, by the
woman's choice. This would be condemned by traditional public opinion as immoral, permit a
woman to choose one man, and she will soon have it in her head to choose another, married or not
(say the conservatives), and so goes the story of Paris and Troy and the war. The Trojan War may
be a war over trade routes to the Black Sea, but it is also a war over a new and dangerous role for
womens' choice which apparently had been tried at Mycene or somewhere else once upon a time.
Moreover property goes with persons by ancient tradition, so when a person disappears, what is
the legal status of the property?
The deity (Pallas) Athene, familiar as she is, is strangely puzzling. Nothing is known about the
name "Pallas". Athene shows the ending '-ene,' which is apparently Mycenean in origin, and often
is used for goddesses, some of whom (like Helene) are also queens. She was described as the
daughter of Zeus and Metis (this name is actually the common word for "plan, intelligence"),
whom Zeus swallowed fearing that she might produce offspring more powerful and wise than
himself. Athene sprang from the head of Zeus, the seat of the intelligence (like Metis), which was
split open by either Prometheus or Hephaistos. Hephaistos, the smith and metal worker, is always
associated with fire, as is Prometheus, not only in the story told by Aeschylos about stealing fire
for mortals, but in light of the exact verbal correspondence of his name with the Pramanthas
family, a Vedic Indian family of fire worshipping priests in the service of the fire deity Agni (cf.
Latin ignis). Since Zeus was originally a sun-god, as was Dyaus his linguistic counterpart in Vedic
mythology, the splitting open of Zeus' head with fire is interesting. Recall also that Zeus' aides
were the Cyclops, who were recognized by the ancients as volcanoes or volcanic spirits, again
establishing a connection with fire. [Were linguistics less unforgiving, one might be tempted to try
to connect Ath-ene with the verb 'aith-' " to flame, burn".]
There is a tradition that the often used epithet of Athene, 'glauk-opis'. which is generally taken as
"gray eyed", may actually refer to blue eye pigment, and Pausanias mentions seeing a statue of the
goddess with blue eyes. Genetically blue-eyedness goes with blond hair color, so that even the
Latin word 'flavus" "blond" is linguistically connectable with English 'blue" and the other
Germanic cognates. One might consider the possibility of Athene being blue eyed and blond
haired. That the daughter of the sun-sky god should be blond, or have hair of the color of bright
fire, would seem natural, although that trait has disappeared in the later tradition. Sun-fire as the
common ground between Zeus and Athene and also Prometheus and Hephaistos is certainly
possible, and may produce further light.
The myth of Attis, although set in Asia Minor, repeats the pattern of the vegetative cycles that we
saw in the story of Adonis. His mother conceived him while gathering almond blossoms from a
tree which contained the blood of Agdistis, a female Phrygian deity more commonly known as
Cybele (or Cybebe) the Great Earth Mother. Cybele loved Attis, opposed his seeking a mate, and
drove him mad enough to castrate himself, upon which he died. By Zeus' intervention his
life-force passed into the pine tree, while his blood grew into violets. The connection of Attis, who
like Adonis is a handsome young man beloved of a goddess, with plant life is clear.Hippolytos, the son of the great hero Theseus, a hunter and a man of immaculate purity of life and
mind, and totally devoted to his huntress lady Artemis, is approached sexually by Phaedra, the
daughter of the Cretan king Minos and wife of Theseus. Rejected,she hangs herself, at the same
time denouncing Hippolytos as her seducer. Comparing the sexually violent fate of another Cretan
lady, Pasiphae, one might almost think that the breeding of bulls, which was well developed in
Crete, might lead to people eating unaccustomed amounts of animal protein, with distressing
results. The role of diet in national culture is well established, but and it may enter, if only
symbolically, into stories of personal history. Here we have another young man who is a hunter,
being killed, but unlike the others we have been dealing with, he is involved in a personal set of
circumstances which indirectly violate his faith with his chaste lady goddess, Artemis. Even being
suspect of sex and seduction condemns him to death. Perhaps we are reading in this story some
ancient legend which marks the hunter as one who must be perfectly single-minded, in other
words socially uncommitted and neutral, since only in such a state of mind will he be able to have
the sensitivity and all-around-awareness which the master hunter requires. Other societies at early
stages have special requirements for the hunter, on whose supersensitive perceptive powers the
life of the whole community depends. Once we can control animals by breeding and slaughtering
them in captivity, and can sow vegetation to supplement or replace animal protein, we no longer
have a need for the highly developed mental concentration and purity of the hunter, whose death is
staged in the myths in a convenient, accidental manner. Modern TV directors do this with an actor
they no longer need, they write him out of the script. A chariot accident writes Hippolytos out of
the script circumstantially, but conveniently, and with obvious intent.
In Artemis, the severely virginal huntress, we witness the existence of woman as hunter-(gatherer)
without the responsibilities of reproduction. This would be entirely understandable in a world
which was short of food supplies, where the getting of victuals was more important than the
begetting of new mouths to feed. Artemis is fossilized somehow at this ancient stage of
development, and in the world of Classical myth, she is a strange and rather outree personality.
She is often involved in the death of young male hunters, she is clearly dangerous and yet must be
propitiated on many occasions, since in the forest and hunting world she cannot be avoided. As
long as deep forests persist, she is real, a sign of the connection between man and the prey he
needs to survive, but when hunting disappears and animals are bred for meat, she becomes a
symbol of ingrown virginity, even more dangerous. At some ancient date her hunting role must
have been real, and perhaps the Amazons are her only historical descendant.
Like Artemis, some women had a marked aversion to sex.. Atalanta's story is well known, how she
rejected every suitor by outrunning them, until one dropped "Apples of the Hesperides" as he went,
which she stopped to gather, and so lost the race and presumably her virginity. The story tells us
something about the ancient art of running, which must have preceded Greece by millennia in the
service of Neolithic hunters. Only recently has the world re-discovered long distance running, to
be surprised at the naturalness of this ancient activity for large numbers of men and women. The
stuffy Roman 'incessus',. which was a kind of pompous, gliding gait suitable to formal Quirites
and the ancient businessmen of the world, created a staticness of personal stance which stayed
with the world for centuries, while only folk dance retained real body movement.
The "Apples of the Hesperides" cannot be positively identified, but the phrase makes it clear than
new kinds of fruit were being imported into Greece proper from outlying areas, even from as far
west as Spain. We have some evidence here for l) fast sea transportation, since fruit rots quickly, 2)
for other strains of fruit being produced in the West Mediterranean Basic, strains not found in the
East, and 3) for a specific kind of fruit so striking in its appearance that a shrewd, male-phobic girl
could be taken in by their striking appearance . One thinks of oranges, found since the fifteenth
century in Spain, which produced a striking impression when first imported into central Europe.,
and were not eaten, but reserved as the playthings of bishops and royalty.
Hestia is formally recognized as the goddess of the hearth, she is a deity who presides over fire,
but only the kind of fire which is used in the preparation of food. Her role is certainly more
ancient than any of the deities we have been discussing, since we know from carbon-datable
remains that fire was used at an extremely early date in human history for campfires, which are
primarily used for cooking, although they are also used for warmth and frightening wolves and
felids away from the mouths of man's caves at night. It seems strange that nobody thought of
associating Hestia in a marital pair (like Aphrodite) with Hephaestos, but the use of fire for
extracting ores and working metals was of a much later date, while the fire-hardening of wooden
spearpoints, as was still recently done in Africa, is too marginal to deserve a special presiding
deity. Hestia remains as custodian of hearth and family life, naturally enough, since in historical
times each house, and a designated hall in each town, and the special facilities at Delphi and
Olympia kept fires burning continually. At some ancient time fire was found burning in nature,
taken from burning grasslands, and preserved as precious, since there was no easy way of
reproducing it anew. The story of Prometheus tells about divulging fire to men, against the will of
Zeus who apparently wanted it kept for his special priestly guild to dispense. At the very end of
Odyssey Book 5, when Odysseus, wet and beaten by the seastorm, finally crawls under a thick
bush, Homer compares this act of preserving life and body heat to that of a man who lives in a far
distant country dwelling, where he must go far to get a new light if his fire should fail. Whatever
the actual state of fire-production at Homer's time, there seems to be no knowledge of how
spinning a stake into a dry board, or striking iron on flint could produce flame. Originally the light
of the fire was (as it was for Odysseus) like the warmth of life itself.
Hestia is a ubiquitous goddess, since there was a fire in every farmhouse in Greece, but she is also
in a minor way a deity of fire, with her role transferred to home and the purity of family life. With
typical conservatism, the Romans at a much later date commemorated the finding and preservation
of fire by the rites of the Vestal Virgins, which commemorate something once very important to
human existence. All in all, Hestia represents the conversion of Woman from procreator to
householder and family cook, a change of function which is bound to happen in the proliferating
world which Aphrodite creates.
Dryads are female deities who are associated with trees. Each Dryad or Hamadryad exists in
relationship to an individual tree, and is respected and venerated as the life force in that tree. The
concept of tree life is holy.- - - -The name Dryad is derived from Gr. 'drus' which is an oak tree.
The word in the same linguistic format appears in the term Druid, a Celtic priest related to tree life
force, but with other political and administrative overtones in the historical period. - - - - In Greek
and Latin the tree names may be masculine in form, but are always considered feminine in gender;
this is partly owing to their composite and all-embracing nature, since trees are (to humans)
composed of many parts from root to leaf, but there is also a feeling for femaleness in trees as the
ancients see them.- - - -The important thing to note is that in a time when people venerate trees
and endow them with a female deity. they have not arrived at a stage of civilization at which trees
are seen merely as lumber. When this has occurred, Aristotle can speak of 'hyle" ("wood") as the
basic material for constructing the world, i.e. "matter", and the Romans can use the term 'materies"
for matter, or building material as such. (American lumber yards are still sometimes called
Material Companies.) Wood as a construction material, especially as it becomes costly and
valuable, is different in nature from wood on the live root or trees as biological miracles of design
and evolution, home for "spirits" of some spiritual importance. - - - -All the myths of Dryads and
Druids ante-date the larger growth of mega-societies, which in turn learn to use trees as a source
for wood and nothing more. This is a constant danger to expanding societies, they see things only
in consideration of their uses, exactly as Pliny the Elder in discussing biology, starts his list of
animals with the chicken, goat, sheep and cow, which he assume are specifically created for
Roman use. Primitive peoples are much more sensitive.
The nymph Eidothea, whose name comes from 'eidos' which is "appearance; a form, a
"form"(Plato)", is the daughter of Proteus, whom we will deal with later. Her aid to Menelaos is
not important, but her father's infinite changeability of forms, so that nobody can pin him down on
anything, true of false, is most interesting. See: Proteus.
A curious example of a semi-divine heroic personality in the making is found in the scene in
Euripides' play in which Alcestis is preparing for her departure and death (Euripides Alcestis ll.....).
A servant relates in a tone of exaggerated adoration the exact stages by which Alcestis prepared
herself for the death-ritual, how she bathed, what garments she drew forth from cedar smelling
chests, with what face and manner she conducted herself. Bursting into tears, she slips back into
humanness, then rights herself and calmly says farewell to each weeping servant in the receiving
line. An emotional tone is maintained throughout this remarkable passage, which is intent on
describing the "last moments" of a lady about to be sanctified. The whole passage is remarkably
similar in tone to Plato's portrayal of the last moments of Socrates, and both descriptions are
constructed on the pattern of divification of an ordinary person, who is raised before our very eyes
to the rank of a blessed semi-divine being. We are not surprised by the religious tone used in
describing Socrates last hours, since Socrates is in terms of the West's appreciation already a partly
holy man, but since the obscure Saintette Alcestis is not a part of our intellectual history, her case
seems more sudden and strange. Euripides apparently also thought this sanctification a little odd,
since in the denouement of the play, he reverses the whole procedure and has her come back hale,
hearty and quite alive to her amazed household. He seems to enjoy the role of first creating a saint
our of a dying woman, and then creating a real woman in place of the saint, merely as a
playwright's change of mind. But if he can do that, he can also dispense with holiness also, and
that is what happens to the creation of religious figures in the ensuing centuries.
Chapter 3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Domestication of Animals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------In the last hundred years we have so completely replaced the horse as a means of locomotion and
a source of power, that we have forgotten how really necessary he was to our civilization. The
term "horsepower" is retained as a sepulchral reminder of a remarkable animal who helped us for
at least a dozen millennia in becoming what we are. The formulae which we still use, such as
750W + 1 Electrical HP, or 550 Ft. Lbs. per Sec., give little idea of what the horse once was, for
he carried man on his back at a speed otherwise unthinkable, he alone or in teams hauled loads of
twice his body weight, he pulled plows through sticky clay fields, turned grain millstones by the
hour day and year, and when times were bad he was even acceptable, if not delicious to eat. His
hide made boots and a variety of leathergoods, his hooves and hide boiled out glue, and his tail
provided the only suitable material for the musician's bow, without which the violin would have
stayed a guitar. The horse has rendered us good service, which is why a certain number of the rich
and also the poor keep a horse or two around, just for the reminder, since the horse has also
learned to be a good companion to man. We have come a long way together.
The taming of the wild horse who roamed the plains of southern Russia and Mongolia must have
taken place. at a remote period. We know from study of Przewalski's wild horse which is still
found in Mongolia, how different tamed horses are from the wild prototype, and it is reasonable to
assume that several millennia were required to both tame and select tamable examples from the
wild horse pool. The prevalence of the horse-root in Greek proper names containing the root
"Hippo-", is remarkable, but since the taming of horses took place much earlier than Greek times,
we must assume that the names go back a great deal further than the Greeks realized.
Achilles was educated by Chiron, a centaur, which places him some time after the domestication
of the wild horse, since in the simplest statement, the Centaur represents a unit consisting of horse
and rider. Achilles is stated to have been worshipped as a deity by the colonies on the Euxine
(Black) sea, an area rich in grain and fish At an earlier date than the period of the Trojan War, he
may have had another biography on the plains of what is now Southern Russia, specifically as
tamer of wild horses. Achilles is famous for his pair of horses, Xanthus and Balios; horses come
from the distant North East and are best raised on open grasslands, which also produce the newly
developed grains; however Thessaly in Greece proper is also a suitable area for horses, and this is
actually the place from which the myths tell us Achilles came.
If we search for an etymological connection for Achilles' name, we will find in Hesychius under
'acheilos' a form 'a-chilos' "without grass" or "rich in grass". (We are dealing with either alpha
-privative or on the other hand -sm- with sonant -m- giving -a-, an intensifying prefix).
Cheilos/chilos (long -i-) means "fodder, feed for animals", by itself this etymology would not be
convincing, but taken along with horse breeding which is clearly connected with Achilles, it is
worth considering. The old view that Achilles comes from Gr. 'achos' "pain" (in view of his sad
end) is unconvincing and rather silly. There are no other linguistic approaches to the hero's name,
but of course it may be an ethnic name which does not yield to this kind of analysis.
Achilles' mother disguised her son as a girl and thus kept him from war, which would not have
been a natural sphere of activity for an horse-rancher; a grass eating Centaur later educated him,
and he is mythically connected with horse breeding in the agrarian areas of the Euxine area. In that
capacity he requires social connections for passage in and out of the Euxine Sea. After his death
Achilles' ghost proposed to Priam's daughter Polyxena (she of "many guests", etymologically) and
she was said to have been sacrificed on his grave. It appears that Achilles may not have been just a
hero of the wars, but a hero associated with land and agriculture. Recall that he says in Iliad Book
I "they (the Trojans) never hurt my crops or bothered my cattle... ", a remark as well suited to a
man living on the extended grasslands north of the Euxine Sea, as to one living on the very similar
plains of Thessaly.
If Achilles did have connections with the Euxine area, he would have had connections to pass the
Bosporos, which would be furnished by Priam's daughter Polyxena, who provides a safe passport
for her host and guest.. If Polyxena was slain on his tomb, from what culture does this custom
come? It is certainly not Greek, and must point to a foreign influence from some source.
The horse Xanthos, meaning "tawny", one of the two horses of Achilles, was supposed to have
been able to speak, thus preceding " Mr. Ed the Talking Horse" of l950's TV by more than two
millennia. Communication between the skilled rider and his trained mount is complex and
approaches the basic functions of language within a fairly narrow spectrum of situations. The idea
that Achilles' horse talked suggests that there could be a special kind of communication between
horse and man at that time. Such psychological sophistication points to a late date for the story in
the history of the domestication of the wild horse. The stages of development from wild and
untamable horse, to tamable and breedable horse, to rideable horse which works closely with man
in hunting and even in warfare, to the horse which is so close to the owner that there exists a
special bond of communication, by touch, gesture and even mood.... these stages require a great
time span, a good handful of millennia. The talking horse of Achilles is the final point in this long
process, at which time the man and his horse virtually communicate with each other.
Although this may appear strained to many of us, professional horsemen and women recognize
that such communicative situations exists, and this must be one of the reasons for our continued
interest in the horse almost a century after it has ceased to be necessary for draft or travel. It is
interesting that the father of Achilles' horses Xanthos and Balios was said to be Zephyros, the West
wind. When the horse was the fastest thing imaginable, the wind would seem a natural father to
him, although the selection of the West wind does not carry a clear meaning, since it has always
been assumed that the horse came from the East. However the much earlier cave paintings in
central Europe show portrayals of the horse, which was apparently hunted for meat, so we may
have a western as well as an eastern source for wild horse herds.
Achilles was not the only hero taught by a centaur, Asclepios was also entrusted to Chiron the
centaur for a time, and learned medicine from him. The centaur baby-sitter and pedagogue appears
in many myths, for reasons which are not by any means clear. ESP communications have been
posited between animals and sensitive humans, especially the very young, and this may be a part
of the picture, of which we have only a part. If the horse had an aversion to plants which are
poisonous to men, or showed men where sources of salt, a rare material and a necessity to all
mammals, existed, stories about the horse's medical knowledge might arise; perhaps there is
something more to be discovered in this area.
Another approach to the problem of the medical knowledge of horses, one which seems sounder
all in all, is through the development of veterinary medicine. By the time a society has learned
how to tame horses, how to breed selected strains, how to do minor surgery on cuts, how to
cauterize wounds with a hot ember, and how to castrate the stallion who thus becomes better at
everything except breeding.... by that time society has gone a long way to developing the
rudiments of basic veterinary skills. This skill may have outstripped human medicine at some
period, and then the magic which surrounds horse-medicine can be switched from the doctor to the
horse. The sensitive veterinarian would even sense, or feel he was sensing, information from the
horse pertaining to what he should prescribe, and such closeness between horse-doctor and horse
would be seen as "horse-medicine" to outsiders, who could easily generate the myth of the
medical horse.
Jason was a central figure in this new-frontier drama, he was sent from his home in northern
Greece to be cared for at a time of troubles by the centaur Cheiron. "Centaurs" are the first
reaction of people who have no experience of horses, in their first viewing with a horse-borne
rider, who is assumed to be one with the animal, as his practiced seat and integrated body motions
imply. The fact that Jason is entrusted to a Centaur, who does not again appear in the Argonautic
myth, implies that horses are already well known and constitute an old technology which is safe
and respectable. The great number of Greek personal names which have the '-hippo-' "horse" root,
points to the impact which horsebreeding must have had on the Greeks when horses were first
introduced from the East.
Bellerophon's story is complicated. Having killed a local hero by mistake, he fled to Argos where
the king received and forgave him his sin. But the king's wife fancied him, and when he refused
her favors, told the king he had tried to seduce her. Bellerophon was then sent into the imminent
dangers of warfare, which were intended to kill him. Riding Pegasos, the winged horse, he fought
and killed the monster Chimaera, fended off men instructed to murder him, and finally won the
desperate king's daughter in marriage., thus becoming a wealthy and royal landowner. At this point
bad luck from the gods started to hound him, his son was killed by Ares, his daughter by Artemis,
and his attempt to reach heaven on the winged horse was thwarted by Zeus' gadfly, which made
the horse throw its heroic rider. From then on it is all disaster and despair, he is last seen "
wandering by himself, eating his heart out, avoiding the ways of men" (Homer. Iliad VI 201).
We have here elements of a story about the "super-hero", who fights the super-monster, riding the
super-horse to fame and wealth. But his equipment, new and dazzling as it is, ultimately fails him,
presumably as it becomes obsolete, leaving the hero a tired and worn-out old soldier, who is
finally not acceptable to the very society which had made him a hero. Jason has this same fate,
after a lifetime of grand adventure, he is hit on the head and killed by a falling spar, as he sits in
his old age under the rotting hulk of his old super-ship, the Argo. Theseus, a parallel type of hero,
suffers a similar fate.
In the finale of these stories we see a philosophical reminder about the futility of fame, which
Chuang Tzu was warning people about in China in a world which was developing in remarkably
parallel ways.. Is it not curious that the three disasters (the death of his son, his daughter, and
himself) which crushed Bellerophon came from three jealous deities, Ares, Artemis and Zeus, who
"envied" his fame? "Envy of the Gods", meaning envy on the part of the gods (Gr. 'phthonos
theon'),was one of the items which Herodotos listed in his analysis of the stages of fate, cautioning
us not to overstep human limits; apparently Bellerophon was thought to have done just this.
One suspects that the winged horse Pegasos represents the first reactions of people to the startling
speed. of a horse. Since a man walks at three miles an hour, and runs at eight, a horse which can
run for short distances at more than twenty-five miles an hour seems to be moving incredibly fast.
In fact the only animal that could be compared with him would be a bird., which explained why
the epithet "winged" is used so often of horses. Just so the early steam locomotives of l825,
traveling at the unthinkable speed of twenty-five miles per hour, stunned the imagination and an
early commentator, projecting himself into the remote future, said he could even imagine trains
running at sixty miles an hour! After WW II, when we were accustomed to plane flight of around
three hundred miles an hour, we marveled at the idea of crossing the "sound barrier", assuming
that 600 miles was the theoretical limit, until we left it far behind in the escalating race for speed.
The same sense of sheer wonder exists at any brink of speed which man has not yet crossed, the
incredible swiftness of a horse would be as unbelievable to an unhorsed society as a jet plane
would seem to an isolated Amazonian Indian. It may well be the speed of the horse, rather than
their size and appearance, which so intimidated the Aztecs when the Spanish centaurs appeared on
their horseless scene.
The story of how Heracles tamed the wild horses is set in the north of Greece in Thrace, where
horses may have been successfully bred at an early Greek date, but much later than the original
efforts at taming the original wild horse. Horses have been witnessed as early as the period of the
European cave paintings, in which they are drawn as small and stocky, and apparently classified
along with the other animals which man hunted for food. Remains of horse bones are commonly
found among signs of human habitation, and it may be assumed that horses were a regular source
of meat for early hunting man. Within the last two centuries tarpans, the untamable, wild horses of
the Southern Steppes of Russia, were still found. They have become extinct, but are identifiable as
similar to horses portrayed in the cave paintings, and on incised deer antlers. The Mongolian wild
horse, known as "Przewalski's wild horse", is still found in the wild state, it is fiercely protective
of its independence and its herd, and has been found completely untamable. From some such
primitive stock man selected and bred tamable examples, obviously over a long period of time and
with much effort.
Upon such a scene Heracles enters, dedicated to the taming of horses "which ate human flesh",
according to the later Greeks myth, although this is impossible considering the nature of equine
appetite and the complicated stomachs of ruminants which are specifically designed for the
digestion of vegetation. It was the humans who were wild and meat-eating, not the horses!. The
long history of equine domestication, with the development of valuable specialized breeds suited
for everything from draft to speed, is a historical fact. The interesting thing is that Greek myth
recognizes that there was previously a wild, unmanageable horse, which some one person, who is
nominally called Heracles, did actually tame. It would have been more facile to propose a divine
origin for horses, created by special dispensation for Man's use; but Greek myth has an odd way of
cleaving to the historical truth, although generally in covert terms.
A parallel line of information concerning horse-breeding comes from another source. Erichthonius
king of Dardania and heir to the Trojan line of royalty, is described as a wealthy horsebreeder.
There seems to be some connection between his name and Erechtheus, the ancient legendary king
of Athens, who was the grandson of Erichthonios, and so we are presumably dealing with
influences which took place through migration, conquest or cultural influence from east to west.
Homer knows only of Erechtheus of Athens, but the Trojan horse-breeding Erichthonios is well
attested in other legend sources..
When we consider these two personal royal names, Erechtheus and Erichthonius, we should be
aware of the existence of the ancient Sumerian city called in Biblical texts Erech, in the
Babylonian inscriptions Uruk, and in later Greek references Orchoe. (The traditional etymology of
Erichthonius into a hypothetical Ere- + chthon- "earth" is nothing more than modern
folk-etymology, and should be forgotten.) Since we know that Babylonian sites and before them
Sumerian cities had a continuous history back to the sixth millennium B.C.,, we must consider a
westward migration of civilization in which Dardania and then Greece are late cultural colonies.
Without a web of cultural techniques and artifacts, such a hypothesis at this point is only an
educated guess, but with further investigation it should lead to an expansion of our knowledge of
early history of the eastern Mediterranean area. In any case the striking similarities of the
etymological pattern should be registered as having meaning, even if we are not sure of the
historical succession of facts.
The sea-god Poseidon is often associated with horses, an oddity which can be best explained by
the necessity of marine transportation of horses, not only when the horse is first introduced to a
new area, but as specialized breeds are moved back and cross across the sea for breeding purposes.
The development of totally tamable horses from stock which was originally wild, as well as the
breeding of specialized types useful for ploughing, for wagon, carriage and riding purposes, was
effected over a long period, during which access to the Mediterranean's whole equine gene-pool
would have been necessary. Without genetic variants, effective horse breeding cannot be done, and
without Poseidon's favorable winds you cannot get horses from place to place.
When man first began learning how to tame the plains-roaming wild horse, he was a primitive
hunter, but by the time he had bred horses in large numbers and integrated them into the many
usages of his society, he has clearly emerged as a civilized human being of the modern stamp. In
the interval, he learned a great deal about dealing with animals, breeding them, caring for them
with such basic medicine as he knew, fencing them in, harnessing them up, yoking them to the
wagons which he could now make and use. When he discovered how manure multiplied the
output of his newly sown fields, and how the fields could in turn feed the horse, he opened the
door to agricultural expansion, which produced the modern type of cities and states. It is not the
horse alone which is so important, but rather the difficulty of a hundred and fifty pound man
learning to ride and regulate a fifteen hundred pound animal, which with the attendant skills which
he must also face, which goads Man into developing a clever and persistent relationship with his
environment.
But the horse was just one of the domesticated animals, sheep and goats were also being tamed
and bred. Whether the horse or the bull was first tamed and domesticated is not clear; in this paper
it has been assumed that the domestication of the horse came first, on the basis of the following
argument:
The Centaur is familiar to all as a beast of fable, the half- horse half-man, who is represented by
centuries of pictorial artists as a fused personage with part of equine and part of human anatomy,
just as Angels have been represented as partly human and partly avian in appearance. We have
become so accustomed to this item of Western thought, that we tend to gloss over the origin and
the meaning of the Centaur. To the Greek, Centaurs were completely barbaric figures, which may
be understood as referring to people residing completely outside the range of pre-Hellenic culture.
Since horses originate in the New World, according to the detailed and very convincing fossil
record, and migrated across the Bering Straits into Asia at a time when there was a land bridge
between the two continents, it is not surprising that the horse slowly filtered down from Mongolia
through China, and eventually reached the borders of Europe in the area of southern Russia. This
would have been "barbaric" territory fortth Greeks, yet a good breeding ground for wild and
semi-wild horses in view of the open grasslands. Hence the Greek view of the barbarism of the
Centaurs may best be explained by their extra-Hellenic origins, rather than actual barbarism of
character, which is the way the later Greeks took these Horse-Man beings.
The word "centaur" is interesting linguistically, since it embodies a familiar word-stem 'taur-os'
meaning "bull, cow". The root occurs again in the compounded name of the Minotaur of Crete, it
remains familiar in all phases of later Greek culture, so there seems no reason to doubt its meaning
here. But why a word for Man+Horse should contain the root for the word "bull, cow" seems a
mystery, and it is possibly a mystery just because the idea of a "centaur" has become so fixedly
familiar in our cultural iconology.
If we accept the second part of the word Centaur as containing the Gr. 'taur-os', what can the first
part mean? The only word in Greek that seems suitable is the verb "kent-o, kent-ein', which means
"to goad, drive on (of animals)". If we put this verbal root together with the noun root for "bull,
cow", we come up with a perfectly reasonable compound: "bull-goading, cow-driving".
At this point we should consider which was tamed earlier, the horse or the wild cow. Both are
animals with strong herd-instincts, but the horse seems to have a stronger tendency for social
bonding with humans, at least in the light of the subsequent history of equines in human societies.
The intelligence of the horse, coupled with its capacity for imprinting on humans in early training,
suggests the earlier domestication of horses. Only two animals that we know of, the horse and the
elephant, can grow to maturity in the wild state, and yet when captured, becomes completely
tamable in a matter of months. There may be genetic traits in both animals stemming from long
period of human domestication before reverting to wildness, but there still remains a strong
argument for the tractability of both breeds.
We now approach the cogent center of the argument. Assuming that the horse may have been
domesticated first and tamed to the point of being rideable, what would the etymology of the name
Centaur mean? If we accept the derivation outlined above, it could have a very clear meaning:
"one who goads, directs, herds bulls and cows". With trained horses man can herd bovines
effectively, without horses he can only hunt and kills them for meat. Herding them into enclosures,
killing some and retaining the more tractable for breeding purposes, Man is well on his way to
becoming a stockman. And the one indispensable piece of equipment he needs for this is the
trained herdsman riding horse.
Watching the imaginative figurativeness of mythology, we have missed an important stage of
historical development. The horse is named not for what it is (Man and Horse), but for what it can
do: It can "drive bulls" in herds into enclosures. And with that starting point one of the major
developments of civilization begins. But the development in agriculture are not a different path to
civilization, since horses require large amount of fodder and especially grain; animal culture and
agriculture proceed hand in hand, pari passu as it were.
If any proof were needed for the use of horses in herding, they can be found in the history of the
American Western territories, which have been open range-land for more than a century. The dogs
which have been useful in the smaller landscapes of Scotland and New Zealand cannot work
effectively in the larger lands of the West, the horse has retained its mastery over herds into the
present century, although it has in recent years been materially aided by the use of helicopters. But
simply put, without horses you could not expect to get the range herd of steers to the market, it is
that simple. And the pre-Hellenic peoples must have found it exactly the same. Hence we can say,
first Man trained the horse, and with horses to aid him, he could go on to round-up and breed the
bovine herds.
Both horse and cow have huge social impact on man's existence, they emancipate him from
immediate locales and the restrictions of seasonal food supplies, and they both tax his strength and
his ingenuity by the difficulties which both processes present. Perhaps the highly social dog was
the first animal to join in man's history, the horse has social traits which may have brought him
into human contact next, while the bull-cow is less liable to join in Man's efforts willingly, and
may come into his sphere of influence last; however this is a very partial argument indeed.
Amalthea is the name of a nymph, or possibly of a goat who gave goat's milk to the infant Zeus,
and he in return gave her the horn of plenty, a device which would produce anything desired. If
there is any etymological meaning in the name, it probably connects not with Gr. 'amelgo' "to
milk" (although to the Greeks this may have fostered the turn of the story), but with Gr. 'amala' or
'amalla ' "sheaf of wheat", which would be the food of choice for the goat who is preferentially a
browsing feeder. We can tentatively if very roughly date Zeus' adaptation from India (where his
name, in the Sanskrit form Dyaus, refers to a minor sun god in the Vedic literature) as
contemporary with the breeding of goats on Crete, where this story is said to have occurred, which
points to a date somewhere in the third millennium B.C.
In the essay on Air Waters and Places, Hippocrates specifically identified goats with Near Eastern
peoples, saying that goats are not used in Greece, and he cites problems of disease in the Asian
countries which do use goats. This comment is of a much later date, but diseases carried by
animals have unusually long and persistent histories. In the historical period goats are found
everywhere in Greece, since the mountainous land is suitable for their feeding habits and agile
climbing. But the introduction of goats into Greek lands may be early, perhaps earlier (according
to the tenor of this myth) than the introduction of bulls from Tyre and horses from an area possibly
as far away as the steppes north of the Euxine Sea. Our only piece of evidence is that Zeus, an
imported "Indo-European" Eastern deity, is connected in myth with a story about a nourishing goat.
Since the cult of Zeus Xenios is of Cretan origin, we may reasonably expect early goat culture on
Crete, although they do not appear in the formal Minoan representations at Cnossos. Country
people on Crete still offer goat's milk as a friendly gift to the stranger.
The story of Ajax has been discussed before, as an example of a hero who cannot adjust to group
decisions, more specifically the leaders' disposition of the arms of Achilles. Driven insane by his
desire for the weapons which were given to Odysseus, Ajax slaughters a herd of sheep,
maintaining that they were the evil Greeks who had deprived him of his due. When he recovers
and sees what he had done, he kills himself but his sword. What is interesting is the fact that it is
sheep that he slaughters, clear evidence that sheep were bred in herds at the time of the later
heroes of the time of the Trojan War, and were sufficiently common on the Greek scene to serve as
the chance object of a crazed hero's wrath.
On the other hand the story of Jason lies in an earlier stratum, since he was sent to the eastern end
of the Euxine Sea to bring back the Golden Fleece, clearly a periphrasis for sheep, to be brought
back for breeding in Greece proper. A fuller account of the Argonautic expedition is given in
Chapter --- under the heading of heroes and their naval expeditions.
Europa was the daughter of Agenos, king of Tyre. Zeus, by way of wooing her, turned himself into
a lovely bull, and persuaded her to climb on his back, upon which he swam away to Crete, where
later she bore to him as sons Minos and Rhadamanthos. A less probable story is hard to imagine,
unless we read it as a disguised account of the transfer of bull-breeding to Crete. Since the cow
was cultivated much earlier in Mesopotamia, and in inscriptions and figurative tablets from that
area was often associated with royalty, it may be assumed that Europa represented a cow, who was
transported by someone from the East for breeding in the new land of Crete. This must be around
2000 B..C., since shortly thereafter the Minoan culture was well on the way to its independent
development, and already depicts bulls on the wall-painting from Cnossos. The secret of the
transportation, that a girl was carried over by a bull, rather than a cow carried over by a man, is
possibly a token of the kind of the secrecy surrounding such a process, which would have been a
most secret mission because of economic implications.
It is interesting to note that the story of Io is virtually the inverse of the story of Europa. Io,
beloved by Zeus in Argos, is turned into a calf to hide her from Hera, who steals her and appoints
Argos of the hundred eyes to guard her. Hermes, god of merchandising and none too savory in his
general business dealings, kills Argos, then Hera send a gadfly to persecute the poor heifer Io, who
flees madly over land and sea, settling finally in Egypt. If there is any fact in this second calf-myth,
it would suggest that cows originated in the Semitic Near East, after which they were transported
to Crete, whence they spread throughout the Minoan-Myceanean world. Egypt,. not having cows,
or at least this special breed of cow, got its breeding stock from Greece, not from the cities along
the Phoenician coast. A study of bovine bone remains in the various sites would probably make a
good deal of this clear, or at least help us rearrange the facts.
Lest this seem completely unlikely from an economic point of view, we can consider the
development of sheep-breeding in the l9th century. Rams and ewes were brought from Scotland
where they had been highly bred, to Vermont, where a sheep-kingdom overran the state, with over
ten million sheep in this small area by l840. Introduction of bred stock from Vermont, and also
from Scotland, furnished Australia with the animals needed for starting an extensive sheep culture
there, after which Vermont lost its sheep flocks entirely, with not more than five thousand animals
carrying over into the 20th century. A future historian might find this as improbable as the story of
Europa and Io.
The Bull of Crete can be considered in the first version, in which Europa, daughter of a Tyrian
king, was persuaded to ride on the back of Zeus, disguised himself as a bull, thus coming to Crete.
But there is also the variant version, according to which Minos, who was the son of Zeus and the
Tyrian maiden Europa, married Pasiphae by whom he had two children; but when he refused to
sacrifice to Poseidon a beautiful specimen of a bull, Poseidon in revenge had Pasiphae raped by
the bull thus producing the "Mino-taur", part bull and part man. Whichever story one follows, it is
clear that the bull was imported from the east, that it came over a sea-route, as is evident from the
role of Poseidon in the story, as well as the insular location of Crete. Crete would be a convenient
stop for a small ship with a large live load of several animals, it would also have been a major
civilization at a time when mainland Greece was less developed, specifically in the first half of the
second millennium B.C. or a little earlier.
When we speak of shipping, we must consider the deities who directly affect sea transport. Aeolus,
"King of the Winds", the son of Hellen (ancestor of the Hellenes, Hellenic etc.) is described as the
founder of the Aeolian or Eastern-Greek ethnic group. In the Odyssey he ties up adverse winds in
a leather bag which he gives to Odysseus to assure a safe home-voyage, and later myths refer to
him as controller or king of the winds, in which role he persists through the ages. Magical control
of the winds only becomes important when seafaring is an critical part of a nation's life. If Aeolus
is representative of the Aeolian islands and western Asia Minor, and also controller of the winds,
he must be pivotal in some major trade route, probably the passage of ships from the
Mediterranean into the economically valuable Euxine Sea. He thus fulfills the role of the priest
who performs wind-magic, as well as a king who has the power to manipulate naval trade routes,
and may be less a mythic symbol than a real figure in the historical record.
Aristaeus is a minor deity concerned with hunting, farming in general, and bee-keeping, which last
regard would be especially sensitive to changes in the annual sugar supplies coming from the
flowering plants or Compositae. Aristaeus sacrificed to Sirius, the "dog-star" who presides over
the hot period of July, and to Zeus, ruler of the sky, who sent the Etesian Winds which came in
from the moisture laden countryside of southern Germany and Hungary to ease the drought. Rhys
Carpenter, in his suggestive book on climatological problems involving the Greeks of the second
millennium B.C., maintains that during the period of prolonged desiccation, the inhabitants of
Greece went north to the very regions from which myth says the Winds came, and returned
centuries later when the climate had become more humid. In such an area it would seem wise to
invite a panel of climatologists to discuss the general trends of climate in the Mediterranean over
the past five thousand years. Problems of this sort need expert scientific information, which can be
connected with the historical record only after serious conference. History can no longer afford to
be a science which restricts itself to the spotty accounts of the ancient historians. Archaeology has
done a great deal to reify ancient history, and the sciences can do a great deal more..
If the Minotaur represents a man-animal confusion, it would be parallel to the early Greek views
of the Centaurs as having a similar double nature, but in reality both would have been nothing
more than an animal ridden by a man. Castrating the normally savage and dangerous bull would
have been necessary for such a venture, as well as for creating the ox as a sturdy draft animal, but
still the image of a man riding on an ox would be powerful for someone who had never seen a
bovine before.. The wall paintings from Cnossos attest the presence of bulls in Crete before the
l3th century B.C., so it seems reasonable to push the original introduction of bull breeding stock
back at least a few centuries before that time. The bull was bred and considered an emblem of
royalty from remote times in the Near East, as regal sculptural tableaux from Assyria show. It was
inevitable that the technology of bull-rearing should spread to the new lands in the west, the only
obstacle being the sea. We can assume that boats capable of carrying several bovines were
available at that time, since only one animal would obviously be useless for breeding, while one
bull and three or four cows would be much better for experienced breeders' purposes. The story in
the Old Testament of Noah stowing pairs of all animals into his "boat" during the flood, would
seem to reflect knowledge of transmarine animal shipping, or at least an intuition that such a
process could one day be useful.
Although the domestication of the horse and cow have many things in common, there is one thing
which sets the bovine breed apart: Although sheep and goats do produce milk, the milk of the cow
is far more plentiful, and the sheer volume of the milk which comes from a fair sized herd of cows
makes the discovery of cheese, sooner or later, inevitable. Milk is perishable in hot countries,
although its life is prolonged by introduction of the bacilli which make various kinds of yogurt
possible. But cheese when dipped in a bath of melted beeswax to keep off the air, will last through
a year's cycle, and thus provides, along with the grains, some elements of a year-round food
supply. Only with a fairly even supply of victuals can large populations exists, this is one of the
clearest pre-conditions for mega-societies and for civilization as we know it. The cow provides
everything that the horse offers except riding, and it gives beside leather, meat, and glue, milk for
the daily need and cheese for the needs of the coming winter. With horse and cow and sheep, man
can now think of riding fast to distant places, eating regularly of meat and cheese, and clothing
himself in a weave-able material called wool. These are among the basic necessities of life and of
living, with these assets civilization can think of moving forward.
Chapter 4
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Development of Agriculture
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Agriculture is developed and animals are being tamed and bred at the same time. However myths
about plants are much less precise in meaning than those about animals, probably because of
man's greater perception and appreciation of the mammals as being nearer to his own nature. An
important source of information about early agriculture is the story of Alcmaion.
Avenging his father by killing his own mother, he is pursued by the Furies in a manner remarkably
similar to the history of Orestes. Just at that time the crops fail, and it is assumed that this is a
divine act connected with Alcmaeon's unholy state, so he sets out to discover new lands on which
the sun had not shone at the time when he killed his mother. (To fulfill this condition exactly, he
would have had to know that the earth was a globe, and he would have to travel halfway around its
periphery. Alcmaeon apparently has an intuitive idea of this, since he assumes that when the sun
shines on one place it will not be shining on a distant land. However he is realistic and goes only a
short distance to the west.)
It is interesting to connect crop failure with royal guilt, but it is more pertinent to consider the
failure of land which has been overused without provision for manuring and letting it lie fallow If
drought occurred, responsibility would only not normally be referred to human agents, but sheer
lack of knowledge about basic agricultural economy would certainly be within the responsibility
of the king or landowner. Going to the west and finding new, unused land, does point to the latter
situation. Rotation of crop fields was tried at various times in the ancient world, but it was not
until the l7 th century that English experimenters put the whole matter on a secure footing. Until
that time responsibility for failure other land would have to rest upon human shoulders, and that
seems to be the critical part of Alcmaion's story.
In a very different vein, the stories of Attis and Heracles' young friend Hylas, which have been
discussed already, point to fusing human histories into ancient vegetative cycles which antedate
man's agriculture. Being turned into a pine tree (Attis), becoming a flowering bulb (Narcissos), or
becoming part of a pond (Hylas), these minor heroes return to nature unscathed by societies
concerns with agriculture, since they belong to an older stage of human existence which predates
the domestication of plants.
The myth of Attis, although set in Asia Minor, repeats the pattern of the vegetative cycles that we
saw in the story of Adonis. His mother conceived him while gathering almond blossoms from a
tree which contained the blood of Agdistis, a female Phrygian deity more commonly known as
Cybele (or Cybebe) the Great Earth Mother. Cybele loved Attis, opposed his seeking a mate, and
drove him mad enough to castrate himself, upon which he died. By Zeus' intervention his
life-force passed into the pine tree, while his blood grew into violets. The connection of Attis, who
like Adonis is a handsome young man beloved of a goddess, with plant life is clearly established
in the story.
Hylas is the handsome young friend and companion in adventure to Heracles, who was lost on the
Argonautic expedition to Colchis at the far end of the Euxine Sea when water nymphs drowned
him out of love for his beauty. Heracles stayed at Mysia looking for him, a cult of Hylas was
established there at a sacred spring, in which ritual he is incorporated in the life-rhythms of plants,
water and nature.
The Apples of the Hesperides, listed as the eleventh labor of Heracles, seem to be an exotic fruit
coming from the far West, possibly from Spain. We are not able to identify this fruit from the myth,
although one thinks immediately of the modern Spanish orange trade. Importation of fresh fruit
from any western point to Greece would imply relatively fast naval transport, considering the
short life of fresh fruit, but if the fruit were citric, its shelf life would be relatively long, while its
color and smell, whether orange, lemon or any other member of the same family, would be
arresting. We should remember that citric fruit are a primary source of Vitamin C, which is the
immediate cure for the disabling disease we call scurvy, so the "Apples" may have had a medical
use in Greece, although this is not insinuated in the myth. In any case, an imported fruit of some
distinctive form or probably coloration seems to have come to the attention of the Greeks, who
could not produce it at home.
Ceres is the Roman goddess of grain, identified by the Romans as the counterpart of the Greek
deity Demeter. There is an basic connection of both goddesses with the production of grain, which
is still the staple of diet for the greater part of humanity. Having the ten grains at hand, we forget
that the production of the "grains" as such, which was only effected by millennia of purposeful
hybridizing of some of the natural grasses, took place only after the last glacial period, and was
the main factor which made possible the sudden rise of human population. Conversely, when grain
became a major harvested comestible, large numbers of people were required for sowing the seed
and reaping the harvest, so increasing populations went hand in hand with grain production.
Civilization as we know it owes more to the development of the grains than to any single factor
beyond human genetics. Grain deities are always to be treated with respect. Note that the Greek
name 'Demeter" is analyzable into the rare 'de', meaning "earth" according to Hesychios' gloss,
and the common noun 'meter" "mother". It is reasonable that an agricultural deity should be so
named.
The rare Latin adjective 'cerritus' means "frenzied, possessed by Ceres, mad" , and is found in only
six Latin texts, three in Plautus, one from Cicero and one each from Horace and Suetonius. All the
uses clearly point to a state of insanity. It has been known for a hundred years now that "ergota"
(or Secale cornutum) is a stage of the fungus Claviceps Purpurea, found in the pistils of many
grasses, but predominantly growing on rye (Secale Cereale). The drug ergot was extracted and
purified during the l9th c. and used intravenously as well as orally as a hemostatic agent, since it is
a powerful vaso-constrictor. In the last thousand years various epidemics of "ergotism" have been
attested, especially among poor peasants who subsisted mainly on bread products. The fungus
progressively takes over the structure of rye, so that the more that people eat to assuage their
hunger, the more of the ergot they ingest, which leads to itching, loss of sensation, amblyopia, loss
of hearing, finally involuntary spasms, mental failure and even death. (Enc. Brit. llth ed. IX 737 f.
Anon.)
No such symptomatology occurs in the words associated with the Greek divinity Demeter, but
when she revealed her divinity at Eleusis, she instituted the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were
characterized by trances and hallucinopathic states of mind, from the earliest period on through
Roman times. Gordon Wasson thought that the active hallucinogen involved in these Mysteries
may have been mushrooms of the Amanita family, basing his views on parallel developments in
modern and ancient Mexican drug cults. However the Eleusinian Mysteries turned out, their origin
may have been based on ingestion of ergot, since this is related to grain and hence to the
grain-goddess Demeter. Selective doses of this fungus as an essential reagent in a
hallucinogenic-religious cult could account for the trance-like states associated with the developed
Eleusinian Mysteries. Peyotism among the American Indians assumed a similar role, and persisted
in and alongside of the society without ill effects, much as did the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Two facts emerge from this discussion: First that ergot and ergotism poisoning were already
known in the ancient world of the first millennium B.C., and second that the use of ergot could
easily be incorporated in a religious rite. This means either that the fungus was less pronounced in
its effects than in l8l6, when the last general European "poisoning" occurred, or that a way was
found to administer selective doses, in such a manner as to produce religious illusions without the
possibility of lethal effects.
An intimate view of what a thriving Mycenean agricultural community was like can be drawn
from the story of Aeacos. Aeacus is son of Zeus (the older sun-god, cf Skt 'dyaus') and Aegina, a
nymph who is eponymous with the island Aegina which lies in the Saronic Gulf. Aegina is of
triangular shape, with only about 4l square miles of area, apparently a well developed Mycenean
site, which may have retained its old Mycenean culture for a while after the Dorians invaded,
according to Evans' interpretation of the archaeological evidence (A.J.Evans JHS l3, l95). Under
Aeacus' rule the population was decimated by a plague, but quickly repopulated, in fact so fast
that the myth arose that people (after that called Myrmidones), were actually created like ants
(murmekes), which is the ethnic name for the island's inhabitants used by Homer.
The highly social behavior of ant colonies would not be ignored by clever and imaginative people
living close to the land, and the use of this insect appellation implies that the island of Aegina was
heavily populated before and after the plague, which was probably the result of invasion of
foreigners carrying new pathogens. Aegina is described early in the present century as free from
marshes and hence from malaria, the healthiest climate in Greece. A ridge divides it down the
middle with very fertile plains on either side. The plains were well cultivated and produced
"luxuriant crops of grain, of some cotton, vines, almonds and figs" (Enc. Brit ll ed., l, 25l, a
description which although modern is valuable since it antedates the economic developments and
resultant polluting changes of climate which the later part of this century has produced).
The situation resulting from isolation of the island, lack of malaria and fertile croplands would be
the ideal setting for a dense population;which is what the "ant metaphor" connotes. We can thus
outline an early chapter of Aegina's history, on the basis of increasing population becoming active
with agriculture, rather than through trading and shipping across the Aegean Sea in typical
Mycenean fashion..
Chapter 5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Medicine and Pharmacopoeia
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------A surprising number of Greek myths show some connection with medicine. Some refer to
common pathological conditions, others describe psychological disabilities, and still others are
concerned with genetics and the problems which can arise from inbreeding. This is not surprising,
considering the later Greeks' special interest in the medical arts from the fifth century on well into
the Christian period. The Greek pharmacopeia as listed by Dioscorides must have had millennia of
experimental antecedents, and some of these seem couched in the ancient stories. The older cults
of Apollo the Healer, and his son-apprentice Asclepios, are from a far earlier level than
Hippocratic medicine and present a different roster of medical preoccupations, but even these
seem to have been concerned with outlining the range of what medicine could, and possibly could
not do.
Asclepios, the Father of Medicine, has a strange background. Apollo begot him by a woman
named Coronis, whom he killed when he found she had been unfaithful to him. (The Greek noun
'korone' refers to a seabird, possibly the puffin, but also to the crow'; how this enters the storyline
is not clear. One thinks of Penelope being derived from 'penelops' "duck"; wild waterfowl are
monogamous.) Sorry for what he had done, Apollo decided to save the child Asclepios, and
entrusted him to the care of the wise centaur, Chiron, from whom he learned the art of medicine.
At the wish of Artemis. Asclepios restored Hippolytos to life, angering Zeus who slew him (a sad
setback for medical art!), upon which Apollo killed the Cyclops who were the volcano-smiths of
Zeus' weaponry. For this crime he was forced to do ritual penance as servant to a local king
Admetos, who was slated to die unless he could find someone else to take his place. (From this
point on the extant play of Euripides provides us with the basic facts.) Alcestis, the wife of the
king elects to die for him, and does so, but Heracles, an unexpected and rather riotous guest in in
the house,dives down to hell and brings her back, thus usurping the role of Asclepius to some
degree.
From this exaggerated melange of inconsistent story -telling, we can abstract these facts: Apollo is
the original medical healer, but when his role shifts to new areas (forgiveness for sin at Delphi,
archery, justice, music, literature and so forth), Asclepius is invented to take over his purely
medical functions. The connection with the centaur, who is a stock nursemaid and instructor to
various young heroes, is interesting and probably has further meaning. But Asclepios can not save
himself, and dies by violence, which is a symbolic way of stating the truth that no medicine is
proof against death. Yet his name persists in Greece as the curator of medicine, his great temple at
Epidauros was for centuries a center for healing, and he lives on through the ages in Greco-Roman
society as the ultimate medical authority.
Asclepius' two most striking symbols are the snake and the dog. The snake may have purely
symbolic value, but it has been suggested that snakes tied to a stick (the famous caduceus of
medical art) may have been a way of inoculating patients with non-lethal doses of snake venom,
actually a primitive hypodermic injection device. Snake venom is chemically similar to bee venom,
which has been studied for fifty years now (Charles Mraz of Middlebury has been a leader in this
research), and seems to be an important material in treating of various kinds of arthritis. If bee
venom proves effective as medicine in arthritic cases, and if snake venom is similar enough to bee
venom to come into the picture, then the snakes of Asclepius may turn out to have had a
non-symbolic, medical value. Of the dog, who appears often in graphic representation of the
master, less seems to be known.
The story of Admetus is told in detail in Euripides' play, which is the main source for this myth.
Since Apollo is "father" to Asclepios, the god of healing, and Asclepios had just been killed, the
role of Apollo in "healing Admetus from death" is apparent. We are dealing with a well developed
medical cult which has at least two generations, first Apollo and then and his successor, who died.
The core of the original story must have been how Apollo alone could save a man from death,
even resuscitate the wife who died in his place. But when his apprentice Asclepios takes over, and
then as doctor cannot even save himself, the story verges back toward the basic truth that we all
know: People do die.
Recall that the religious-medical motif was still effective in public eyes in the first century A.D.
when Jesus in some respects takes the place of Apollo, even finally healing himself from death,
although in a complicated and unorthodox manner. Death cults are pervasive, persistent and very
ancient, since they have to do with answering the one mystery which cannot be answered at all
from a human point of view.
In the ancient tradition Heracles became insane, the play of Euripedes treats this matter in an odd
and disconnected manner, which easily puzzles the modern reader. The fit of insanity is sent upon
him by his ancient enemy Hera, he kills his own children under the illusion that they are the
children of Eurystheus, and also his wife. Recognizing his act, he is only saved from suicide by
the intervention of Theseus (whom he had previously saved from Hades), whereupon he goes to
Athens to be purified and freed from guilt. The parallels with the madness of Ajax are obvious:
Ajax killed sheep thinking that they were Greeks, Heracles killed his children thinking they were
the "children" of Eurystheus, who controlled the wild horses of Diomedes which Heracles had
previously tamed! The confusion of a present person with a past agent who is totally unrelated,
define this kind of illusion as a true schizophrenia.
Under the unimportant name of Phineus, king of Salmydessus on the Black Sea, comes the
opportunity to bring together for review the various occurrences of blindness mentioned in Greek
myths, so we may see if there is any sort of a common basis. Phineus' two children by a first
marriage were blinded by a second wife's instigation, but the remainder of the story seems
insignificant.
Homer was blind according to tradition, this is easy to understand in modern terms, since the blind
often exhibit remarkable memory and sensitivity, two things which a poet of the stature of a
Homer would certainly require. But recall that the name Homer (Gr.' homeros') is a common noun
meaning "hostage", and the possibility of hostages being blinded as a precaution against escape, as
well as spying, seems plausible. The Cyclops Polyphemus is blinded by Odysseus, we take this as
a clever trick on the part of Odysseus to escape, or perhaps as the blind eye of a red-rimmed
volcano about to erupt, but there may be other explanations. It is curious that the monster-volcano
is named Polyphemus (Gr. 'poly + phem-', "much speaking"), from such an appellation one might
rather think of a poet or raconteur, than a gigantic monster. Of course the most notable example of
blindness is the self-inflicted punishment of Oedipous at the moment when he discovers that he is
guilty of incest. Recalling that Oedipous was exposed as a child, and that the story about his
having pins driven through his feet may actually be a periphrasis for his being genetically
club-footed, one might wonder if he had defective vision also (whether blind, legally blind, or
highly amaurotic), in which case he could easily kill a man on the road without knowing who he
was, go on to marry a woman twice his age without a protest, and when criminally arraigned,
point to his blindness. If, from a medical point of view, genetic foot deformity is in any way
related to sight impairment, we might well be dealing with the case of a man, himself inbred to the
point of turning up unfavorable characteristics, who continues with the process of inbreeding. In
that case the Oedipous myth would begin to make sense on various levels: genetic, error of
judgment, error of perception, and "blind" fate. Tiresias, known later as a seer and prophet in the
Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, was temporarily turned into a woman as punishment for killing a
female snake. Whether this represents a sexual, phallic symbol, or is to be connected with the
Indic nagas which are beneficial snake dieties, or to both, is unclear, but in his female state he was
asked by Zeus and Hera which sex enjoyed lovemaking more. Answering that it was the male, he
was instantly blinded by Hera in fury, but Zeus compensated as best he could by giving him
another gift of "seeing", which is prophecy. Clearly his blindness has something to do with sexual
matters, and the views of modern clinicians on this are important.
Thamyris seems to be another appearance, beside Homer, of a blind, or blinded poet. He contested
in poetry with the Muses, who harmed (blinded?) him and blocked his musical gifts, out of a spirit
of rivalry. He seems to another Homer type who had not made it into immortality via literary
history.
Since the concept of micro-biological life was only introduced by the microscope of Van
Leuwenhoeck in the l7 th. century, and established in the world of Pasteur and Lister two centuries
later, we have no reason to expect the ancient Greeks to have a clear idea of microorganisms
which can cause disease. But there are clues in one myth which imply an intuitive sense of where
disease comes from and how it is transmitted:
Prometheus first men humans out of clay, when Zeus was wroth and denied them fire, Prometheus
stole it for them. He later taught the gods which were the "best " parts of animal sacrifices offered
up to them, tricking them into taking the bad parts and leaving the best for men to eat. The story
has been ingeniously reversed from its more probable first script: A clever priest teaches men to
eat the "worst" parts, leaving the best for the gods, the "worst" actually being the best. Zeus is
naturally enraged.
As punishment Zeus ordered Hephaistos to fabricate out of clay, which was actually Prometheus'
original medium rather than his own, a woman into whom the gods would breathe every necessary
charm and skill, including Hermes' gift of lying and flattery. She was sardonically destined not to
be a wife for Prometheus but for his brother Epimetheus. Her name was Pandora (Gr. 'pan + dora'
"all gifts") and she brought to her mate the infamous box which contained all mankind's' ills,
flying like insects from the box as soon as it was opened. Hope alone remained in the container as
the sole, sad solace for mankind. What is interesting is the very early anticipation of something
like bacteria in the image of flying insects, an opinion which was not be be bettered until the
invention of the microscope and the biology laboratory. People in general still speak of contagious
cold infection as carried by "bugs", no wiser in their speech than the men of antiquity.
The Cretan leader Idomeneus was returning from Troy when he was caught in a storm. Vowing to
kill sacrificially the first thing he met upon reaching home safely, the first person he saw was his
own son. As he prepared to fulfill this vow, a plague broke out, which the people attributed to this
evil action, and drove him from the island into exile. (The killing of the son as a result of a vow
seems to be a part of an entirely different story, it is like the biblical son-sacrifice in its bare fact,
and not an essential part of this myth.) We are obviously dealing with the transmission of a viral
pathogen of some unidentifiable sort, carried by a man who had been away for ten years in a
foreign country. Bringing this back with him, he finds that his son falls sick first, and then it
spreads to the community, which acts in partial hindsight trying to quarantine the disease by
removing the carrier.
Considering the disease to actually be a curse, the story falls into the error which Hippocrates
inveighs against in the preface to his treatise On the Sacred Disease (epilepsy), when he states that
there are no sacred diseases, that diseases are of an entirely different origin and nature, and they
are treatable by the medical art. It is strange that in this story of Idomeneus we have all the
elements which would be necessary to posit the appearance of a contagious disease, all the
necessary information is there, lying just beneath the surface, but the Greeks of the
pre-Hippocratic period do not have the required mental preparation to make connections which
would lead to seeing disease as disease. Just so early astronomers in the l7th century made
drawings of Saturn which were directly based on their observations of the planet as seen in their
telescopes. The drawings lack some bit of critical mental assessment, and come out terrible
distorted, looking like a disc with a dot or a circular bracket on each side. Lacking an
"object-hypothesis" of the ring of Saturn, they fail to draw what they actually saw, although today
a grade-schooler can easily deduce the true form from a telescopic photograph. (The example is
taken from R.L. Gregory: The Intelligent Eye, l970 p l22-4) Lacking an "object-hypothesis" for
disease, the Cretans distortedly assume a curse.
Hippocrates much later remarks that Asians (i.e. Near Easterners) use goats extensively for food
and their skins to sleep on, whereas Greeks do not use goats, and so lack certain diseases
characteristic of the Asian populace. Informed medical opinion suggests that Hippocrates may
have been speaking of goat-carried anthrax, which we know to have been prevalent in the ancient
world, and since Idomeneus was returning from Asia Minor, is it possible that he was carrying
anthrax with him on his person and clothing. Anthrax can be dormant for a period up to fifty years
and is carried on skins and clothing in the dormant state. Medical history depends on the searching
out of just such details, although documentation is always difficult.
One of the most remarkable medical myths concerns a problem associated with antisepsis, and
demonstrates ancient knowledge of an area which we have never suspected. Heracles' son
Telephos, ruler of the kingdom of Mysia, was wounded by the spear of Achilles when the Greeks
invaded his country. The wound did not heal, but an oracle told him he must seek the one that
wounded him to be healed. It turned out, as the myth tell it, that it was not Achilles that the oracle
meant, but the actual spear which inflicted the wound.
In this story we have an early study in the effects of chemical reagents on wounds. If we assume
that the spearpoint was of iron, then the active ingredient must be iron oxide or iron rust, which
would have no special curative properties. But the spearpoint were made of bronze, we would be
dealing with a copper based oxide. It is well known that copper sulphate (CuSo4) occurs naturally
in cupriferous mine waters, and since Cyprus was mined extensively for copper all through the
historical period, we may assume that the strikingly blue solution of copper sulfate would have
been well known in Homer's world. In applying solution to iron, the copper is readily replaced by
iron, so that if one dipped an iron knife blade or spearpoint into a saturated solution, the iron
would immediately be coated by a deposit of bright reddish copper. (Early in this century this
process was well known to mechanics, who used a saturated solution of copper sulphate to mark
and identify tools and machine parts, the letters and numbers being masked off before immersion.)
If we can hypothetically assume for the moment that Achilles used this decorative treatment on his
spearpoint, coloring his iron point with a bright copper plate, would it have any another use
beyond the decorative color, which would incidentally prevent surface iron rust? We find that
copper sulfate was used in pharmacy in the l9th century (Enc. Brit. ll ed. Vol VII, 110 b, unsigned)
as a not very good emetic, but as a fairly effective superficial caustic and antiseptic. If Telephos
were to follow his oracular response carefully, he would wend his way back to Achilles, find out
what superficial chemical treatment his spearpoint had undergone, and then treat his wound with
that same material. Copper mine-water (or CuSo4) will actually disinfect his suppurating wound.
This argument makes good chemical and medical sense, and answers fairly the problem of how to
cure Telephos' festering wound. More important, since we know very little about the ancients' use
of antiseptics in the complicated surgical processes of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, we
might well search for later use of this compound in medical texts, and for its general availability in
the Greco-Roman world.
Various chapters of Greek medical history are concerned with the use of hallucinogens. Ergotism
and the cults at Eleusis have been discussed under the grain deity Ceres or Demeter. The
lotus-eaters of the Odyssey are clearly being drugged, possibly with opium or a form of cannabis,
which have both been associated with central Asia Minor and India since early historical times.
The views of Gordon Wasson about the Greeks' use of mushrooms as hallucinogens are interesting,
especially in light of the prevalence of mushrooms in Greece, extending perhaps even to the name
of the city Myc-enae (Gr. 'mycos' "mushroom"). The priestesses of the old temple of Athene on the
north edge of the acropolis wended their way down to the lower town each day to bring up a
carefully wrapped secret object, which is usually thought to be a cult-statue; it seems possible that
they went down each day to get a fresh supply of some addicting vegetable material, which would
incidentally reinforce their habit-forming ritual.
Hallucinogens may well have been in the fruit eaten by the Lotus Eaters, whom Odysseus meets in
the ninth book of the Odyssey. Upon eating the fruit of the "lotus" (which is not the root which
you get in oriental food stores), they lose memory and forget any wish to return home, content to
stay in that country forever. It is possible that they are seduced by the natural climate, as Gauguin
and Stevenson were charmed by the simpler, more natural ways of living in the South Sea islands,
but on the other hand the effects of drugs may be involved. Our Western society has so recently
become aware of the mass use of drugs, that it forgets that drugs of one kind or another (medical,
anesthetic, hallucinogenic, and poisonous) have been with mankind longer than human memory
can recall. Four thousands years ago Vedic priests were extolling the spiritual qualities of "soma",
which was apparently some form of non-alcoholic hallucinogen, and primitive warrior peoples
deep in the wildernesses of Brazil drug themselves with a locally gathered hallucinogen for
extended warlike religious rites. Note that the Greek word 'pharmakon' means "drug, medicine,
(and) poison", much as English 'drug' can alternately mean "medicine" and "hallucinogen". (Soma
is, in fact, the psychoactive chemical found in the Amanita muscaria "fly agaric" mushroom,
which has been used by many groups, most notably South American, Viking, and Vedic,
throughout history - and is commonly believed to be poisonous. Its image is perhaps one of the
best known of a mushroom; the short, stout stalk with a large red cap covered by white spots, and
it can be found 爂 rowing in areas all over the United States.)
Antaeos, was a giant killed by Heracles, who, perceiving that whenever Antaeus touched the earth
he became stronger, lifted him in the air, depriving him of his strength, so defeating him. This
story is generally taken as indicating the magic of Antaeos' earth-contact, but it might be asked
whether there are any pathological conditions which cause dizziness by affecting the semicircular
canals in the inner-ear. If any such identification can be made, this story would document the
existence such a condition at a very early date, since the myths involving Heracles go back in
some parts to pre-Mycenean times.
When the later Greeks, if not Jason and his crew, investigated Colchis, a country known for its
extensive magic and pharmacology, they probably brought back samples of Colcicum autumnale,
in English called Meadow Saffron or sometimes Autumn Crocus. It was known to come from
Colchis in Greek times, although it is found growing wild over much of central Europe and
England, and is still used in gardens as an autumn flowering decorative plant. The Greeks named
it in their standard pharmacopoeia, and it was listed by Discorides as a poison, which it is in
improper dosages. The Arabs discovered its uses in the treatment of gout, in the treatment of
which it persisted into the twentieth century. The chief constituents of colchicum are colchicine
and veratrine, which last alkaloid is useless in the treatment of gout. British Pharmacopoeia of the
turn of the century listed Vinum Colchici and in an alcoholic base Tinctura Seminum Colchici, as
having beneficial effects on the severity, pain and frequency of recurrence of gout.
Greek medicine is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Greek mind, it reaches from a
time somewhat before Hippocrates down to the time of Galen and Celsus, it ranges from
prophylactic medicine and dietary medicine to surgery, it includes a great deal of valid anatomical
research as well as a fully developed herbal pharmacopoeia. Since the beginning of the l9 century,
Greek medicine has ceased to be the reigning medical art of our world, we have gone further than
our fathers and grandfathers would have thought possible, and we are on the edge of still greater
forward strides. In view of our accelerating medical acceleration, it is important to trace the
discipline back to its origins, not only in order to document the early history of medical science,
but in order to isolate the germs of imaginative thought which guided the Greeks on the road to the
medical art. Some of these elements of medical thought are to be found centuries before
Hippocrates, buried in the myths of the early Greeks, and some evidence of millennia of
experimentation with herbal materials can be found in the early mythological tradition as well as
in the later manual of Dioscorides. What medical matters we find in the myths may be primitive,
but they are the first stumbling steps of thinking men trying to find the road to medical
understanding, and as such they are to be observed carefully, and they are to be respected.
Chapter 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Discovery and Uses of Metals
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------If we ask what things (rather than ideas or processes) civilization as we know it is most dependent
on, we would probably start out list with the metals. Copper, especially in its alloy bronze,. and
iron are the metals which are useful for making tools and weapons, while gold and silver are the
"decorative " metals, all these metals have high value in themselves, whether for use of show, and
they raise the value-level of the society mightily, since the purchasing power of the metals is high.
Clay and fired ceramics might seems second choice, but there is a major difference: clay is found
everywhere, its forming is done by simple handicraft and requires only basic equipment, firing it
requires some organization of labor but on a simple level, and the final product is cheap. Working
ceramics is an important industry in the developing world, one which produces objects which are
parallel to our plastics, since they are cheap and disposable. But the net effect of a general
ceramics industry does not do much to change the nature of the society, whereas the use of metals
transforms into one which is moving forward at an accelerated rate. Since the middle l9th century
electricity has had similarly dynamic effects on modern Western society, and since the middle of
the 20th century electronics has been in a similar position. The important thing to observe is that
the society develops special myths about its state of acceleration, which completely occupy its
mind for the time. Later we may look back and think that the move forward was not great,
compared to what followed, but this has nothing to do with the imagery of progress which
dominates times of change. By l9l6 the bicycle industry seems absolutely remarkable, the thirty
years' growth from a novel toy to a major world-product with new standards of production and
dedicated specialized machinery impressed every person concerned with industry, but looking
back we find the bicycle interesting mainly as a sample of the mechanized production that was to
follow. The early history of the metals, which were being developed before the 4th millennium
B.C., certainly fostered this dynamic kind of optimism for progress
The history of metals and metal fabrication has an important place in the development of Greek
civilization. The intense heat of volcanic action suggests the myth that the volcanoes are the
smiths of Zeus' fire, but his lightning is of course a static electric discharge, quite a different form,
but still a state of energy. Hephaistos represents the original smith and bronze caster, but before
the myth-history of the metals is completely written, we start to hear a strong note of warning,
danger after disaster accompanies the development of metal technology, and one can well wonder
if the Greeks felt the same fear of high tech techniques which our modern world is so
apprehensive about.
The Cyclopes are the traditional smiths and artificers of Zeus' fiery thunderbolts. In the encounter
of Odysseus with Polyphemus, whose name literally means "he who speaks much, the loud talker",
the connection of Cyclops with volcanoes becomes clear. Odyssey with a burning brand puts out
the one eye of the monster, which is patterned on the red ring of an active volcano, he slips out of
the cave, hanging under the belly of the sheep of the Cyclops, who, blinded now, feels over their
backs for escaping riders but never thinks of their underside. When Odysseus is on ship again and
taunts the monster with the deceit play on him, he roars and hurls huge stones at him, quite in
keeping with his volcanic origin.
The sheep of the Cyclops are interesting since they compare directly with the sheep of the god
Indra in the Vedic myth cycles. These represent rain clouds and are of prime importance to the
whole country, when stolen they must be found and brought back. The stolen cattle of Apollo
mentioned at the beginning of the Odyssey may be of similar origin, and seem to present certain
similarities with the Vedic story-line. There are many correspondences between Vedic and early
Greek myths, as MacDonnell noted years ago in his work on Vedic Mythology.
The volcanic and chthonic deities stand in general opposition to the celestial divinities of the open
sky, which are assumed to come into Greece with the Dorian invasion. But until we know more
about the materials still couched unread in the Linear A Mycenean-Minoan tablets, it seems better
to avoid final answers. If Rhys Carpenter's theories about desiccation of the Aegean area after the
l4th century B.C. have any truth in them, the incursion of Indo-European speaking Dorians who
conquered the autochthonic population (which has still not actually been identified) is likely to be
a guess and nothing more. Comparison of Greek with Vedic myths must proceed from the written
materials as they stand, we cannot work outward from history since the patterns and dates of
westward migration are not secure. Nineteenth century historical linguistics started from the
written materials in just this manner, and the results of a century of research indicates the
correctness of this approach, which took documents as fact, and reserved theory for an expanded
stage of study.
The god Hephaistos was said to be the son of Zeus and Hera (or perhaps just Hera), he understood
the use of fire in relation to the forge, and was celebrated as the earliest metal-worker and smith.
He was lame, either because Hera cast him down from heaven in disgust at his deformed foot, or
according to another story, because Zeus threw him out when he interfered in a quarrel between
his parents and thus lamed him. It is easy to see imagine division of labor in a primitive society on
the basis of physical disqualifications, so the poet will be the blind man, and the smith, who has no
great need for running, can be lame, but this is a bit too neat an argument to be convincing. To
work intelligently with fire, to develop the techniques necessary to cast copper based alloys, and
later hammer-weld iron which has been smelted out of un-metallic looking ore.... these things
demands great knowledge and a wide ranges of techniques. To assign the role of ironworker to a
disabled person primarily because he is disabled is unlikely, although in a later age when
metalworking had become available and cheap technology, such a story could easily be
back-formed.
Hephaistos at an early date was paired off with Aphrodite in marriage, and the nature of their
relationship is discussed in detail under her role in another chapter. To summarize, Aphrodite
could provide increasing population, while her husband Hephaistos contributed the metal tools
which the larger population needed in order to increase its agricultural efficiency. But soon it is
discovered that metal implements like ploughshares, can be turned into swords, and the practice of
warfare becomes institutionalized. Ares is the leader of armies and war god, and subsumes the tool
and weapon maker under his more aggressive role, incidentally having a publicly acknowledged
affaire with Aphrodite. Hephaistos is no longer essential to the society, and (with his lame leg)
becomes a comic figure as the sadly cuckolded husband. It is interesting to note that the
conversion of metal implements used to till the land to new uses in military weaponry, the beating
of plowshares into swords, is curiously paralleled in the l9th century. The Ostwald process,
developed in Germany before WW I, made possible the oxidation of atmospheric nitrogen, and
thus could produce on the one hand great amounts of cheap ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer, or on
the other hand explosives such as nitrocellulose, nitroglycerine, and trinitroglycerine (TNT),
which wreaked such havoc on the countries of Europe in the great artillery World War.
The Casseterides were islands in the West from which the Greeks imported tin, the Greek word for
which is 'kassiteros". The word is borrowed in this exact form from Babylonian 'kassitire', from
which it is assumed that Skt. 'kastiram' "tin" is taken. The importance of tin to the Greeks was its
immense value in alloying copper, which was mined from ancient times in Cypros, whence the
Greek name 'kupros' for "copper". Copper by itself is very difficult to cast, but with the addition of
about ten percent of tin, it flows nicely in the molten state, and has greater hardness than copper.
The "Bronze Age" was dependent on tin from its very inception.
It is strange that the Latin word for copper is 'cuprum', which is derived directly from Cyprus'
mines, but the only word the Greeks used was 'chalkos', which originally meant copper (especially
when specified as 'red chalkos), but could also be used for bronze. Probably the general use of
bronze as a superior material rendered the original word "copper" obsolete, but it may be that the
bronze casting guild kept their formulae for the processing of bronze from copper secret, and the
public only knew the finished product as 'chalkos", whether soft like copper or hard like true
bronze. Both are austenitic, that is they harden under working, bending or hammering, so part of
the difference which we maintain may derive from our use of copper in the soft or annealed state
as electrical wire or tubing. The ancients would have been interested only in work-hardened
copper and especially in bronze for tools and weapons.
Ancient tin mining sites have been discovered in England, specifically in Cornwall, although tin
was known from Roman times in Spain. The precise location of the Cassiterides or "tin islands"
(which the insular location of the British Isles suggests) is less important than the fact that tin
came from a great distance. This points to the early development of ships capable of carrying
heavy loads of metallic ore the length of the Mediterranean. In l900 the only relatively pure tins
available to industry in England were the island Banka tin and that mined in England, called grain
tin because of the way it fractures under blows in string like or grainy structure. Since nothing
approaching the refining procedures developed since l700 was unavailable to the ancient Greeks
and the peoples of the Near East, they had to get supplies of fairly pure tin, and the only place
from which to get such tin we know of is in England.
In Homer (Odyssey, Telemacheia) Athena in male disguise tells a fictitious story about her
occupation as captain of a ship hauling "white iron" ('leukon sideron') to Cypros. There would
surely be no reason to carry iron to Cypros, which is the home of copper and bronze, but a second
look at the cargo reveals something more complicated. It is curious that although the word
'kassiteros' occurs half a dozen times in the Iliad and also in Hesiod, it never occurs in the Odyssey;
if on the other hand the. 'white iron' of Athena is tin, then the absence of the regular word for tin
('kassiteros') would make sense, since in Odyssean speech tin is known only as "white iron". Tin
(St) occurs in two allotropic forms, one is a white metallic state, the other, which occurs at -39
Deg. C. is a gray powder. The powder was felt to be inferior, the white form was most suitable for
alloying with the copper found on Cypros. Although Athena uses the word iron (leukos sideron), it
would appear that she is referring to the white metallic allotrope of tin, presumably mined in
England. (Iron which has been decarbonated by open hearth firing will be whitish, hence the
confusion of two metals which are not dissimilar in appearance.) Since the conversion from the
one state of tin to the other occurs at -39 C.(or near -38 F.), we can assume either that all British
tin was white metallic, or that at some point in pre- history the temperatures had fallen to below
the critical temperature and it was converted into the less desirable gray powder. This low
temperature probably did not occur in historical times in England, but might be evidence for low
temperatures at a glacial period. Temperatures must have stayed generally above the critical
temperature, or all the British tin would have been converted to the gray-powder form. These
details do not concern ancient historians, but may be to be valuable for historical geologists.
In the Odyssey Homer remarks, just at the moment when Odysseus thrusts the red-glowing
wooden spindle into the eye of Polyphemus to blind him (incidentally exploding the volcano), that
the hot wood sizzled like red-hot metal plunged into cold water by the smith, "for that, at least (Gr.
'ge') is the strength of iron". Whether Homer is speaking for the eighth century in which he lived,
or reminiscing about an earlier time is not clear, but the remark shows basic metallurgical
knowledge, since when hot iron is suddenly quenched it becomes extremely hard. This is why he
says "at least", that is "if you are speaking of iron.", but if on the other hand you are thinking of
copper and copper based alloys, Homer reminds you that copper when given the same
treatment,becomes completely soft, or annealed.
The fact that the Homeric line gives such summary treatment to a complex set of metal heat
treating relationships shows that the process is well known in his world, and needs only a casual
remark. But what we call "cast iron" with its high carbon content does not respond to this
hardening process, nor does completely decarbonized iron (meteoric or heart-decarbonized Fe.),
so we must assume that the use of heat-treatable steel was already known in the first millennium
B.C. even to poets such as Homer, and the techniques were probably developed in the previous
millennium. There seems now to be some opinion that true steel was known somewhat before
3000 B.C., and existed for a long time on a competitive basis with bronze, which was thought to
be the superior material.
Talos, the bronze monster who patrolled the coast of Crete, grasping foreign visitors and clutching
them in his hot and fiery grip, was said to have been fashioned by Hephaistos, and must have
occupied the same niche in the Greek's awareness as the robot has in ours. The idea that
technology, whether it is of the Greek metallurgical or modern electro-mechanical type, will create
monsters dangerous to human life, must have been a part of ancient thought, but with the proviso
that each such monster has a weak-spot and hence can be "killed" (Hal-like) by a hero with
sufficient insight and information. Jason does this with the aid of the magical princess Medea,
which proves to the Greek world that mystic human knowledge surpasses the wit of the machines!
The killing of the monster is effected by breaking the tube in his structure which carries the blood,
which in Greek thought is the basic, life bearing material, whereas we pull the plug to cut the
current, believing that electricity is really the primal force. But the stories have a great deal in
common. The word "robot" was first used in a play by the Czech playwright Capek in l935, it is
drawn from the Czech noun 'robotnik" which means "a serf". (Servants have a peculiar way of
wanting to become masters.) The Greek story shows that our confrontation with robots is not the
first occasion that men have had to face this kind of problem, the psychological roots of which are
perhaps far deeper than the immediate confrontation of man with man-machine implies.
The "Golden Age" is the first of the metallic Ages of Man which Hesiod described in the
introduction to his eighth century poem Works and Days The Golden Age for Hesiod parallels
Eden in the Old Testament, a hypothetical age in which innocent man supposedly lived at his ease.
Prehistory points to nothing like this paradisiacal existence, the very name of which is drawn from
the Old Persian word 'para-deisas" or "walled around parkland (of a king) " via the Gr. cognate
'teichos' "wall"; "paradise" of this sort appears at a sophisticated state of historical development.
In an ensuing Silver Age innocence is lost and man starts to exhibit those criminal tendencies so
well known in the annals of history, and this is followed by the Bronze Age. This is not our
historical "Bronze Age", but an unrealistic, nightmarish time in which everything was made out of
bronze, including the things the Greek normally made of ceramic and wood. A trace of such a
story may be seen in Midas' wish for everything to be turned into gold; even his food and drink are
suddenly made of metal, and hence are useless to him. Apparently metal when it first appeared
was thought to represent a new social danger, much as plastics now are thought by many to be
inherently bad. As we learn more about them,especially their non-biodegradable characteristics,
we can easily begin to think of them as positively evil. Whatever the level of apprehension of evil
to come to men through the use of bronze, men were supposed to have become evil and murderous
in this time, according to Hesiod.
Next came the Age of the Heroes, which the Greek thought of as being in the second millennium
B.C. since it encompassed the Trojan and Theban Wars. This seemed to them to be a better time
that the previous two ages, probably because it came more clearly into historical focus and told
about men and events which looked real and possible. This period contain a strong vein of
historical optimism, such which is understandable, since it tells the Greeks about "men doing
things" in a manner approaching their own sense of reality. But we should not think of this time as
being restricted to one or two millennia, since many of the historical and pseudo-historical items
relegated to this period point to a considerable antiquity, which goes back at times to the period
immediately after the last retreat of the icecap.
Next came the Age of Iron, at which point the poet pauses to wish he had not been born here, but
rather before or after, for men "work all day by the sweat of their brow, and perish miserably at
night". It has been noticed that in Hesiod's world-view, which persisted throughout the next
millennium and a half of Greek civilization, it is assumed that the world is degenerating, that times
are consistently getting worse, and that a doctrine of automatic Regress (rather than our idea of
automatic Progress) is based on the inherent nature of things. This point of view, which is
widespread and long-enduring, casts a certain unhappy tone over the whole of the Greco-Roman
culture, and unfortunately works against all advancements of human living conditions, as well as
the development of technological aids for a progressing society. Our view, that the sky is the limit,
and that science can answer all questions and also supply everything we need in order to live a
perfect, paradisiacal life, is no more grounded in reality than the Greek idea of Regress, although
neither we nor they would be able to accept criticism of an opinion so long and so firmly rooted in
the society.
The intermixing of the story of the rise of civilization with the development of metallurgical
technology is interesting, since it produces a separate metal-mythology of its own: Gold is pure
and holy, because, as we know, it does not enter into chemical combination naturally, is found
dripping in a pure, molten form out of ore bearing rocks when exposed to fire, and it stays perfect
and untarnished forever, as a quick look at the unbelievably clean and shiny Mycenean gold
goblets in the National Museum at Athens will show. Silver occurs in no such pure form, it must
be smelted, early men burned over silver bearing areas to isolate metallic silver, which when it is
purified, tarnishes quickly if exposed to air. Silver offers none of the magic of liquid gold oozing
out of one's campfire rocks, it requires social organization and a modicum of metallurgical
experience and knowledge, to extract silver from ore. Iron offers even more problems, it must be
separated from contaminants, decarbonized to make usable steel, which in turn must be slightly
recarbonized to be hardenable . An exception to this may be the small amounts if meteoric iron
which were probably found as early as the fifth millennium B.C., since they were already
decarbonized by entering the atmosphere red-hot, they would not rust, harden, or seem the same
material as earth-found iron, which is in Greek 'sideron'. But these would be rare curiosities. (If
this word is to be connected with Latin 'sidus, sideris' "star" the meteoric origin would have been
already noticed in ancient times; the question is how good this etymology is, since Latin -srepresents IE -s-, which evaporates in Greek into the 'rough breathing", which is not found here.)
Hesiod's description of man suffering and sweating out a miserably short life, is probably only
incidentally connected with metallurgy, but is rather the result of exploitation of the individual
which was a followed expanding populations after the last glacial retreat. The new forms of social
control which developed as part of the art of administration of multitudes were not designed to
make men happy. Government designed to ensure happiness and the enjoyment of a humanly full
life is only two hundred years old in first draft form, and less than a hundred years old in terms of
its incorporation into society. Exactly the same phrases as Hesiod's described f the conditions of
English miners and factory-workers in the middle of the l9th century, when the same parameters
for getting the most work out of masses of workers existed. After that time, greatly increased
reserves of capital, important discoveries in biology and especially in medical science, and a
genuine humanitarian feeling toward workers as fellow-humans started to appear. We all know
Aristotle's description of man as the 'zoon politikon' (whether we translate it as ''political being,
'social being', or 'the animal who lives in city-states'. ..), but it is surprising to most of us to hear
his term for the slave: 'zoon automatikon', which means about the same thing as a " human robot".
It is surprising that Hesiod sees these levels of social and economic development so clearly, but
we must remember that his era is not early or primitive in any way. He lived at a time which
followed seven or eight millennia of continuous development, beside which the two and a half
millennia which separate him from us, are much less important in terms of social development.
The stage for much of what has come into being in the last thousand years was probably already
set by Hesiod's time, long before the Greeks received the part that they were to play in the drama
of man's history.
The story of Telephos was discussed under the heading of medicine, but since it concerns a
metallic compound, it can be summarized here. Told he could be cured of Achilles' spear's wound
by "what had hurt him", it seems that he deduced that copper sulphate (CuSo4) would cure his
suppurating wound. That solution is found in copper mine water, and would be known from the
mines in Cypros, but the story implies that copper sulphate was used somehow on Achilles'
spearpoint. A saturated solution of CuSo 4 will deposit on a clean iron surface, which suggests that
in Achilles' time rustable iron may have been considered an inferior material, and copper plating it
gave the appearance of the copper based alloy bronze, while retaining the internal strength of iron.
All too often we imagine that iron immediately replaced bronze, forgetting that bronze existed for
a long time beside iron, and that it has certain advantages in its ease of casting, resistance to
oxidation, and its work hardening or Austenitic characteristics. Even now high quality bronze
castings and forgings are generally considered superior to cast-iron parts, which is likely to be
used when cost rather than quality rules.. In the same way bronze, when it was first introduced
into Europe, was considered inferior to the intensely hard flint and chert stone axe-heads which
had given such satisfactory service for thousands of years, and bronze only became popular
because of the low cost of casting vis a vis the very high labor costs of flaking and hand-grinding.
One example which is concerned with the technology of glass rather than metal, should be
included here, since it is interesting for its economic implications. In Petronius' Satyricon a story
is told of a man who claimed that he had invented a new type of unbreakable glass, which he
demonstrated to the Emperor by knocking dents in glassware and hammering them out again. The
emperor asked if anyone else knew of this secret formula, the man said he and the emperor were
the only two, upon which the emperor had the man killed.
outside the strict time period of Euhemeristic interpretation, it has all the elements which a myth
requires: a royal name, confrontation with a problem, the new idea (economic preservation of an
existing market, rather than the slaying of monsters), and the focus on a single moment at which
the story points to something more important than is immediately evident. We grasp the meaning
of the story immediately, since we know this sort of thing has occurred in our time, and we are not
surprised at the "new invention" which is supposedly too good to put on the market. Even now we
hear "myths" again and again of the man with the car which will get a hundred miles to the gallon
of gasoline, but it is kept off the market by the big car manufacturers, or the story of an engineer
working for a major glass company which produced an undullable glass razorblade, which is duly
researched, tested, patented and permanently;y shelved for a large price.
This story is placed in the early Roman Empire. Since we know a great deal about the politics and
economics of the time,. we can envision among the Romans a brand of economics the main
purpose of which would have been to maintain existing markets despite engineering advances. We
know this process from in own society, we understand why it occurs and might well to call the
process something like social economics. But if we had no inkling of what the story meant, and
had no idea that such an occurrence could ever repeat itself, the story would be classified as
obscure mythologizing, and we would probably search for an psychological or religious
interpretation, which is exactly what generations of scholarly critics working with the Greek
myths have done. (This material is discussed in fuller form in Chapter 8 under Economics.)
The development and use of metals marks a great forward lunge in any society, not only because
they are so useful in a variety of ways, but because the stages which a metalworking society
requires, involve a large array of workers with a variety of talents and knowledge. The work
begins with the miners, whose products requires transportation by wheel or boat to the smelter,
then the expert at alloying is called in, the factory hands pour or cast the molten material, which is
then worked or recast, and when near a final form, ground and polished before it reaches the
marketplace. Now we turn over the product to the salesman, the banker,, arrange final transport to
the user (who may not be the last user at all). Even the scrap dealer does not end the chain of the
metals trades, but recycles the scrap back to the foundry repeatedly, minus the small amount that
gets lost. The specialized stages which the metals call into being are many, the market is vast, and
there exist possibilities for repeated profits all along the line. In microcosm, we can see the idea of
a mega-society conceived with the initial idea of metal, and turned into reality before much time
has passed. The complexity of the whole process, from, mine to user, posits the existence of a
complex social structure, and it is probably by some intuitive realization of this, that Hesiod
projects his remarkable myth of the sequence of the Ages.
CHAPTER 7
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Man the Inventor of Tools
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The ability to invent new devices, techniques and ideas is one of the most basic characteristics of
Mankind. Other animals, especially some of the most advanced primates, do invent new
approaches to problems which confront them, but nothing in the biological world that we are
aware of has the almost compulsive drive to invent which Man displays. As Sophocles foretold ,
sometimes this turns to good, sometimes to ill, but the trait of inventive thought continues through
the ages. Greek mythology records Man's talent for inventiveness, but there often appears a
strange twist which leads to a bad end. Men had relatively recently evolved from the older
hunter-gatherer stage, and many innovative notions which we take for granted must have seemed
new and dangerous. It is of such a transitional world that the Greek stories speak.
Daedalos is the earliest Greek example of 'homo faber', the contriver, artificer and craftsman who
invents, rather than inherits, the techniques of his craft. He is said to be descended from
Hephaistos, who is his parallel person among the gods. At some point, when threatened by the
achievements of a nephew who invented the potter's wheel and the saw, he killed him and had to
flee from Athens under the curse of murder. The potter's wheel is of much older Near Eastern
origin, certainly as old as the lathe of which it is a vertical adaptation; or possibly the woodturning
lathe was developed from the potter's wheel. The saw also has an ancient pedigree, the Egyptians
had copper saws with hammer hardened teeth at an early date, and neolithic men embedded
animal teeth in wood with a hardsetting resin to make saws at am earlier date. Connecting
Daedalos and his nephew with Mycenean Athens is completely out of kilter with the history of
technology. Leaving Athens, Daedalos went to Crete where he designed the labyrinthic maze for
Minos, when himself locked in the maze, he decided to fly out and glued onto his son Icaros wings,
which melted in proximity to the sun with well known results, this being the earliest attested
splash-down. Daedalos is mentioned several times in Homer as being the designer of all sorts of
objects and garments, his name apparently is used to cover the work of several millennia of
steadily advancing craftsmen. In later Greek times various shrines possessed roughly made statues
of wood, which were said to be the work of this master craftsman; the wooden statues point to a
very early date for Daedalus, since proficiency with working marble, as well as the increasing
scarcity of wood since Minoan times, soon turned artists toward stone which was readily available
everywhere. Even the palace-gates at Cnossos point to a scarcity of wood, since gatesways
plastered over a wood armature in the l4th c. are replaced by an all plaster structure a hundred and
fifty years later, as Evans noted in the descriptions of his work on the site.
It has been stated that the hand is the cutting edge of the mind, if so Daedalos clearly marks the
earlier level of Greek society's awareness of this proverb. Strangely in Greece as it developed after
the Dark Age, the handcrafts were downplayed as abstract thought developed and asserted itself,
with the result that in the Classical Period "homo faber" became a low-ranking servant of the rich,
and much of his work was done by slaves.
Prometheus is the semi-divine personage who was said to have fabricated mankind out of clay.
When Zeus became enraged with men and deprived them of fire, Prometheus stole fire from
Hephaistos in heaven and gave it to men, thus incurring Zeus' eternal wrath. Since clay can
become pottery only by the application of fire (l500-2200 degrees F.), Prometheus' work would be
meaningless without fire. Clay like man, is earthly and available everywhere, but fire comes from
heaven in the form of lightening, hence it is the property of Zeus, and its use must be regulated by
the priestly guild of Zeus' temple, not by mere craft-oriented potters! Prometheus needs more than
clay if he is going to make durable pottery, and since fire is obtainable only through appropriate
channels, he "steals" fire, which means he gets it in an unauthorized way, and therefore must be
punished. A society like the Minoan-Mycenean,which early in the second millennium B.C. had
created the complexities of organized administration, would understand the meaning of this
punishment.
It was noticed long ago on linguistic grounds that the name Prometheus cannot come from Gr. 'pro
+ meth (manthano)' "knowing aforehand" (as Classical scholar had long believed) but it must be
connected with the Sanskrit proper name Pramanthas, which belongs to a Vedic family of
fire-worshipping priests of Agni, god of fire (cf. Lat. 'ignis'). The fake brother Epi-metheus
("hindsight", as against "foresight") is a later transparent addition to the myth. Vedic and Greek
thought have a way of coinciding on unexpected levels, we must become a great deal more aware
of the role of Indic thought in our interpretation of Greek ideas. It is not only in the early period
that this is important, since Heracleitos, Pythagoras and even Plato leave questions which the Indic
evidence may help to understand.
As punishment Zeus ordered Prometheus to "make" out of clay a woman into whom the gods
would breathe every necessary charm and skill, including Hermes' gift of lying and flattery. She
was sardonically destined not to be a wife for Prometheus but for his brother Epimetheus. Her
name was Pandora (Gr. 'pan + dora' "all gifts") and she brought to her mate the infamous box
which contained all mankind's' ills, flying like insects from the box as soon as it was opened. Hope
alone remained in the container as the sole, sad solace for mankind. Knowing but refusing to
reveal the secret about the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, Prometheus was chained to a rock
forever, with an eagle tearing at his liver daily, as Aeschylos portrays him in the Prometheus
Bound. (This has been discussed under Medicine in Chapter 5).
In this story a Pygmalion-like artificer "makes" a woman out of inert material, but she becomes
alive to confer terrible woes upon the world. If Pandora were a woman from another country,
turned into an acceptable proto-Hellenic lady by Prometheus, the artificer who could make
anything (in the manner of Wendy Hiller's film conversion at the hands of Rex Harrison), her final
gift to her newly adopting country could easily be an epidemic resulting from new pathogens,.
This would explain all the flying things that issue forth when her "brides' box" is opened, and it is
most interesting that diseases are imagined as vicious "bugs", much in the manner of colloquial
20th century parlance. Combined with this may be the ancient notion, expounded in the story of
Adam and Eve, that women are curious at discovering new things, which (like the fructose-laden
"apple" with its resultant dietary imbalance to hunter-gatherers) always lead to trouble. It may be
that women's thought is in some modes different from men's', recent work on brain function points
to some general mental differentiations between the sexes; if this were intuitively recognized by
men, some sense of dangerous difference might well arise. One cannot simplify complex
situations of this sort, but more is certainly involved in the story of Prometheus that initially meets
the investigating eye, since there must be a moral in the fact that Pygmalion gains a wife from a
marble model, while Prometheus loses everything fashioning a woman out of clay. The difference
in luck between the two may be the difference in the social standing of the medium. At the time of
Prometheus' fabrication, clay is an ubiquitous and a cheap material, out of which you can not
make anything valuable. (The same notion is found in the proverb about not being able to make a
silk purse out of a pig's ear.) But by Pygmalion's time, marble is already being carved with
realistic detail, it is considered valuable, and so the sculptor gets the prize of a fine wife. (In a
similar way blacksmithing was an honorable and necessary profession in Colonial America, yet it
was considered old-fashioned and completely bypassed in the l920's by electric and oxy-acetylene
welding. But by l970 it was restored to an honorable position among the historically minded
cognoscenti as an ancient and revivable craft. Woodworking and cabinet making have faced a
similar turnaround in their social prestige since l970.) Different crafts occupy different prestige
niches at different times, as a society develops and then discards the new in favor of still newer
technology.
Gordius, a Phrygian peasant, was chosen king of Phrygia in Asia Minor when he was the first man
to drive his wagon up to the temple of Zeus, this being the condition proposed by the oracles for
selecting a new king. But the knot by which the yoke was connected to the draw-pole of the
wagon was tied by a curiously intricate knot in a rope of cornel bark, and another oracle declared
that whosoever could untie this knot would be king over all Asia. (Many years later Alexander the
Great is supposed to have sliced the knot with his sword, thus generating the proverb about
"cutting the Gordian knot". But the story is not well attested, and in any case would be an
histrionic act made up for a celebrity on a well known situation.)
As in the case of Gyges, who was also a shepherd and hence socially a nobody, Gordius appears
with but a one asset, his special knot. He tied the knot and presumably could untie it, but the
oracle-priests were impressed by the fact that none of them could comprehend its construction, so
their amazement and respect must have come from an intellectual rather than practical base. The
story marks the superiority of the mind of a man who can devise a knot that nobody else can untie,
and this knot is taken to be of such original inventive quality, that the simple shepherd
immediately is made king.. There can be only one reason for this: Gordius represents a new level
of thinking, which is symbolized by the invention of the special knot, which the state cannot
comprehend, and hence accepts as proof of leadership.
Knots seem a simple exercise in BoyScout ingenuity to most of us, for l9 th century sailors they
were more complicated and more interesting, and to many other peoples they have developed into
an art involving difficult mathematical craftsmanship. Asian decorative knot tying of ritual
religious objects and Greek makrame represent a special class of ingenuity, and one most not
forget the Incas' use of knots tied in complex string arrangements to serve as tallies and ledgers for
the extensive administrative procedures of their large empire. Perhaps Gordius' knot symbolizes
something of immediate use to his society, which we are totally unaware of.
The choosing of the Dalai Lama from the children of the people at large, the test being
coordinated with a proof of special thinking capabilities, is too similar to this story to be dismissed
as historical coincidence. This process avoids the consequences of what might be called
intellectual, as against genetic inbreeding. As we find more threads of connections between East
and West which go back into the second millennium B.C., we will find is more natural to consider
the possibility of historical connections of this kind. Note that Gordius' son was Midas, whose
inventive touch turned everything to gold, the story demonstrates the utility as well as the
intellectual worth of the family's intelligence.
At this point we turn to cases in which inventiveness produces evil results for the inventor, or
point to the evil machinations which twisted although inventive minds seem so adept at
concocting. Ixion, whose name has been connected with the mistletoe (Gr. iksos),since oak was
Zeus the sun god's tree and mistletoe grew on it, has also been connected with a blazing wheel
carried by peasants over lands needing the sun's warmth, and finally he has even been considered
to be a byform of Zeus ! A fresh start can be made by examining the myth-history of Ixion's life.
Having married, he murdered his father in law when he came to claim the usual bridal presents, by
arranging that he should fall into a pit in which a charcoal fire was burning. Zeus apparently
pardoned him and accepted him as a member of his society, upon which Ixion tried to seduce Hera
and subsequently, by a phantom called Nephele ("cloud") substituted in her place, he fathered the
Centaurs. Enraged, Zeus punished him by having him tied forever on a revolving wheel in Hades,
which is how Ixion's name goes down in Classical mythology.
One can see in the history of Ixion the evolution of man from Neolithic hunter to clever,
mechanical artificer. To kill his father in law, Ixion uses a device known for tens of thousands of
years for its effectiveness with animals, the pitfall covered with carefully camouflaged greenery.
Putting a charcoal or wood fire in the pit effective since it both makes sure that the animal is killed
and at the same time starts the singeing process. But traps for animals are not considered proper
when used for humans, as is witnessed by the severe laws which most modern countries have
enacted against "man-traps" of every sort.
After this episode, Ixion "produces" (actually he is said to beget) Centaurs, horsemen riding so
closely connected with their mounts in swift motion, that unsuspecting peasants believe this is a
new cross-bred animal of fearsome proportions. proceeding from Neolithic pitfall trapping, Ixion
has appeared again on the forefront of the a new art, the taming and breeding of horses, and he
presumably uses them for aggressive chase hunting. He replaces the passive-technology of pitfall
traps with aggressive horse-borne hunters, and this provides a far greater range of operations.
By this time Ixion had advanced again by an innovative quantum leap to the invention and
construction of the wheel, with which his story is connected in an unfortunate manner. What
would be more natural for an angered Zeus to devise for punishment than tying Ixion to his own
infernal contraption, rotating forever in Hell? We thus see Ixion on several levels,, spanning the
pre-historical period from ice-age hunting traps, as a natural inventor, then taming the wild horse,
and finally constructing the wheel, which when linked to the horse, would make possible the great
emigration of exploding populations out of the wheatlands of Southern Russia southwards into
India, and then westwards across Europe. The wheel must have been developed at a very early
time in the Indo-European spectrum since the same root word persists from India to the British
Isles: Skt. 'cakras' "wheel" on through Gr. 'kuklos' and Lat. 'circus/ circulus' to the Old Engl.
'hweol', all perfectly cognate forms. The same word consistency through a long period of time is
also true of the companion invention, the cart, e.g.. Skt. vahati "he carries", Gr. '(w)ochos', Lat.
veh-iculum', Engl. waggon.
We must remember that the wheel is a very complicated piece of machinery, involving intuitive
engineering of the hub, spokes, rim and (sooner or later) metal tire, all which parts are made
separately but must work as a unit. This is difficult because of the different shrinkage rates of the
various parts, and we may be sure there were many wheels broken under load before men learned
to make a really serviceable unit. The wheel was so well developed over the millennia, that
ashwood wheels only disappeared in US automotive manufacture after l924 when the industry was
faced with a shortage of suitable wood, and the pressed steel wheel was hurried into service to fill
the need.
The fact that Ixion may be associated with these three levels of invention would, at least in our
eyes, make him a hero. This is certainly the kind of thing which Euhemerus was considering in the
third century B.C. when he propounded his myth-historical scheme. It is interesting that as society
moves ahead, it generally faces a counter-cultural-motive force, which attacks with violent rage
the inventor as purveyor of social disruption if not outright evil. Early in l9th century England,
Mary Shelley fabricated the long-lived "Frankenstein" myth to warn the public of the dangers of
surgical organ replacement. Soon after, the Luddites broke into factories with sledgehammers to
smash English power driven machinery. Historians of the Industrial Revolution explain this rage
as coming from fear for lost jobs, and this may have been partly true. But a more critical factor
seems the apprehension of the dangers of the new, which will break up the old ways, introduce
unwanted social change and anarchy. If this counter-reaction to innovation occurs as early as the
prehistoric time of Ixion, then it may turn out to be part of inherited human nature, and not the
warning voice of thoughtful men foreseeing social danger and economic disaster.
Philoctetes, whose story has been treated elsewhere, was a master- archer, perhaps inventor of
some new type of bow, such as the bow with bent -back curvature at the tips for a secondary
spring effect, which is a kind of bow that Homer mentions. But he is rejected by the army
storming Troy, left on a desert island on the weak excuse that he had a badly infected foot which
represented a curse, and only when the military realize that they need his weapon, is there any
attempt to make a reconciliation with him. In Sophocles' masterly treatment of this story in his
play, many other things are introduced which enrich the play but obscure the original story: The
plot revolves not about honor and honesty, as Neoptolemos thought, but about ways to deal with
the inventor of new tools (bow and arrows) which render the old ones (pitfall and club) obsolete.
Inventors of new processes always seem to meet the same kind of angry opposition, which stems
from the society's great satisfaction with what it has achieved, coupled with a guilty suspicion of
what it has not been able to develop. Even the direst need for new solutions to pressing problems
does not alleviate this ancient fear and hostility.
And then there are the genuinely evil uses of what in another situation would be clever and
ingenious devices, things which man has always been eager to develop, from the medieval
"maiden" and the thumbscrew, to this century's mechanical monstrosity at Auschwicz. Theseus,
son of Aegeus the legendary king of Athens, can be tentatively dated by the style of his first three
feats: he killed Sinis who tied men to bent pine trees, tearing them to pieces when the trees were
untied and sprang back; he killed Sciron who had visitors wash his feet on a high precipice, upon
which he kicked them into the sea to drown; and he finally dispatched Procrustes who on his
famous mechanical bed stretched men to make them taller or lopped them off if they were too big.
These episodes must come from a period of brigandage, which permits them to take place locally
on a whimsical,sadistic impulse. The actors are not important kings or tyrants, but local minor
criminal-barons, whose actions would seem most suited to the kind of unsupervised and isolated
communities of Greece which flourished after the 9th century B.C. up to Hesiod's time in the 7th
century B.C.
Ingenuity has always been associated with the Greeks, whether the intellectual cleverness of the
philosophers or the less well known inventiveness of the technical writers, such as Euclid,
Archimedes and the Hippocratic medical writers. With so much intellectual force working for
them, the Greeks did not accomplish as much in the millennium and a half in which their thought
was the only advanced thought available to dwellers on the north side of the Mediterranean Basin.
Perhaps one of the reasons was a certain distrust of mind and what it can accomplish, coupled with
a satisfaction with achievements of the past, and an unwillingness to face new ways of doing
things. Greek society early became static, and the longer that it remained unchanging, the more
faith people had in the tried and true ways of doing things. This is always the danger which
presents itself to cultures which are content with their record, and the Greeks, amazing as they
were in many respects, are no exception to this rule.
Chapter 8
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Beginnings of Trade and Economics
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------When we discuss the economics of the ancient world, we must be careful not to use the concepts
of Economics which we use in analyzing our own society, since Economics is a function of the
way a society run, not the set of rules by which a society operates. Of course we cannot remove
ourselves from awareness of the economic system which our academic disciplines teach, and even
if we formally suspend Economics as a framework, we retain the image of the framework in our
language and our general pool of ideas. Yet some distancing of ourselves from modern economic
theory will be useful in starting an investigation of a foreign world, in order to let the economic
operations of that world display themselves in their documentation. There must be some kind of
intellectual tabula rasa for use in studying an area which is relatively unknown.
Gyges, a young Lydian shepherd, found a cave one day which he entered, in it (according to
Plato's account) he found a hollow cast-brass horse with a dead man's body inside. He discovered
that the ring which he pulled off the dead man's finger made him invisible when he put it on his
finger. Using this newfound power, he went to the palace of Candaules, king of Lydia, the last of a
long line of Heracleid royalty, and first seduced the queen, then with her help killed the king and
took his place as ruler of the country. This story marks the appearance of a new private kind of
public person, someone unknown who comes out of the earth, as the ancient saying goes, and
attains power suddenly largely by virtue of being totally unknown.
In a world in which the rich and famous were all hereditary kings, Gyges points to a new kind of
anonymous person who gets rich by NOT being seen. Working in secret he creates a new type of
enterprise, which is going to be very useful in business deals, and paves the way for people like
Trimalchio in l st c. A.D. Rome, who owes his fortune to a sharp eye on the flow of funds, as seen
from the bottom of the social scale. Countless fortunes have been made in exactly the same way in
modern times, one thinks of Schliemann, Onassis and more recently the Korean Samsung
company's founder, Lee Byung Cheul. On the other hand the economics dynasties of the modern
world seldom produce an effective son and almost never a grandson.
The story has clear economic implications, instead of inheriting vast wealth along with kingliness,
the new "invisible" man grasps wealth by being intelligent and guileful, traits which from ancient
to modern times are the best attributes of the successful businessman. Thus starts off a long chain
of little men from the underside of society who become rich and powerful, retaining a great deal of
their original invisibility until they are securely successful. The fantastically wealthy and
influential freedmen under the early Roman Empire fit this description well, an un-Romanticized
version of this economic tradition is given in Petronius' portrayal of Trimalchio, whose very name
(' tri- + 'malach-' "King" in the Semitic languages) points to his Eastern origins.
There is a strange resemblance of the bronze horse in the earlier part of this story to the brazen
horse of Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas in Sicily, who roasted victims to death in a brass horse under
which a fire was set, amusing himself by the strange roars of the beast. The setting and meaning of
the story are different, but the two dead bodies in brass horses represent so odd as a figure that
they must have some connection.
Midas, an ancient king of Phrygia, entertained the satyr Silenus, who was a companion of the god
Dionysos, getting him hospitably drunk, and accepting his offer of choosing any thing that he
wished. (The story of Icarios and wine is in some ways parallel, but with a different outcome.)
Midas asked that all he touched be turned to gold, but was dismayed to find that his food was gold
and his drink was gold. Finally he was instructed to go the Lydian river Pactolus and wash off his
wish for gold there, with the result that the Pactolus became famous in antiquity as a river carrying
quantities of this precious metal.
Three stories seem to have become interfused: First, there is the story about the "wish", which a
satyr or troll offers an unsuspecting mortal. This becomes burdensome only as the result of human
greed and folly. In the Germanic version, the peasant who receives three wishes asks for a wurst,
upon which his wife angrily wishes the wurst onto his nose, and their last wish is uselessly
expended in getting it removed. Germanic and Classical myth cycles occasionally coincide, we do
not know exactly how and in which mythic areas, despite intensive research on the subject since
the days of the Grimm brothers. A fascinating example of substantial agreement is found in the
late Roman novel by Apuleius, in which the middle books tell a maerchen about a Cinderella like
girl, that could be virtually Baltic or Germanic in outline and detail.
The second theme is the story of financially accruing fortunes, which are probably based more on
interest and especially compound interest than on any lesser magic. The Greeks had a hard time
understanding the growth of funds, and they considered growth by interest somehow unstable or
even possibly unhealthy. Midas' golden touch with gold was presumably the proper commercial
use of the resources which came with his kingdom, which he, better than many others, knew how
to use in the most advantageous manner. But in an age in which growth by interest was unknown,
or considered obscene, this would seem pure magic. Third, the river Pactolus did wash out
metallic gold, and the story of Midas is at a later time joined with the finding of gold in the stream.
The way money grows fascinated and amazed the diners at Trimalchio's Banquet in the first
century A.D. novel., since they talk endlessly about financial growth. In the Cena section of the
Satyricon someone says of a local millionaire that he grew like a honeycomb and that he is so rich
that he doesn't know what he is worth. It still amazes Americans to learn that the company of the
lady in Utah who made the best chocolate-chip cookies in town is now grossing $30 million a year.
Man the hunter is hard pressed in the dawn of civilization by Man the fabricator and engineer, and
they are both eclipsed in recent millennia by Homo Economicus, the man of the present and
apparently the man of the future.
Ixion has been discussed in detail in Chapter 7 under inventions, suffice it to note here that the
economic results of two of his concerns, horse raising and wheel making, are enormous.
Transportation made possible not only the mass conveying of the Indo-European speaking flood
which crosses Europe and spilled down into Persia and India over the period of several millennia,
but it also made possible the transport of food materials and manufactured commodities back and
forth within Europe. The two modes of transportation which made man's population of Europe
fruitful were water transport throughout the Mediterranean, and land transport by wagon with
horse or ox within the landmass. That Ixion should be punished for the wheel is made probably by
the very fact that he is punished,with clear symbolism, on the wheel. As noted before, change
always faces resistance, it is only in simplistic textbooks that we hear of the linear march of
progress as Western Civ. evolves into its present form.
Autolycos' name is from 'auto + lukos",hence "the wolf himself, a very wolf". His father was
Hermes, God of Trade, and his daughter was Anticleia, Odysseus' mother. On the earlier and also
the later side of his pedigree Autolycos' family is characterized by swindling and duplicity, these
are the very things which made his name (in)famous in the Homeric world (as at Iliad X 267 and
Od. XIX 295). He was said to have had the power of making himself invisible, and also making
invisible and unrecognizable the things which he had stolen. Since his father Hermes, the regular
god of business and commerce, is actually somewhat tricky and not a little dishonest, Autolycos
may be suspected of having an inherited commercial aspect to his thievery. The appearance of a
thief like Autolycus marks the beginning of the conversion from barter between proprietors, to
purchase for considerations and terms by agents, who are as invisible as their contractual
agreements. Early people had not yet understood that these things are necessary in an expanding
world with varied and interlocking major markets.
Autolycos' son in law Odysseus continues the mercantile motif and is distrusted not only in the
Homeric epics, but in the later period when he was admitted to be clever, but somewhat of a
scoundrel. Rockerfeller, Carnegie, Mellon and Ford have been thought scoundrelly at one time or
another, but we have learned to live with their astuteness as part of what we assume our society
needs.
Laomedon, king of Troy and the great grandson of Dardanos in the Trojan genealogy, somehow
"employed" Apollo and Poseidon to build walls for him around the city, and later refused to pay
them. Poseidon sent a sea monster against the city, to avoid which it was ordained that Laomedon
must sacrifice his daughter, Hesione. (One thinks of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter on the
way to Troy in order to gain fair winds, which also relate to Poseidon and sea passage.) Heracles
offered to slay the beast if Laomedon would give him his horses, but when the task was done,
Laomedon refused payment to him too. Raising a band of soldiers, Heracles captured the city,
claiming the girl for Telamon who had led in the attack.
The interesting point is the matter of defaulting on debts attributed to the Trojan ruling house. This
kind of fraud demands a certain level of business sophistication, which must be coupled with
gullible workers who have no recourse to court or contract. It would seem that in the Trojan world
of Asia Minor, which is closer to the Eastern seats of ancient culture and business, this sort of
thing happened from time to time, but it was inconceivable to the "Greeks" who were not aware of
financial trickery.
Being cheated is an offense which seems to last in the memory a long time, in the South of the
United States there are still negative attitudes toward New England merchandising
"carpetbaggers", more than a century and a half after the Civil War. Vermonters still seem to have
a deep dislike for "New Yorkers", which can probably be traced back to the l764 arrangements by
which Vermont settlers were informed they would have to repurchase their lands from New York
authorities in Albany, since their area had no valid claims to the land on which they had settled.
When the Pope visits Holland, he can expect a bad reception because of Spain's attempts (over
four hundred years ago) to Catholicize the Dutch, and in certain American Protestant communities
the Jews are still blamed for the death of Jesus!
Reasons for being cheated and deceived may be forgotten, but the idea of being treated badly has
an way of persisting for centuries, and hate would seem to outlast love by a long shot. We are
entirely too economically oriented when we explain the causes of the Trojan War as a need for
Greek free trade into the rich Euxine area, although this may also have been involved. But if the
Trojans habitually distrained on debts, and the Greeks built up a bad memory of many such
defaults, this would provide exactly the kind of insult upon which a war could be based. But since
the common people need simpler reasons, and in the ancient world people prefer personal actors
behind historical events, Helen can better serve as the nominal cause for the war.
Odysseus' family tree must have demonstrated a special moral to the Greek mythologers, since
each generation on his family tree is in one way or another connected with over-sharp dealing.
Odysseus' mother was Anticleia, the daughter of Autolycos, who was known as a professional
thief and virtually con-man, and he himself was the son of Hermes, the deic dealer in goods of
trade. If Odysseus ever seems a bit tricky, he comes by it naturally. So it is no surprise to find that
when Cadmos brings an alphabet of Phoenician letters to the Greeks, Odysseus steals it and claims
it as his own. We are not surprised to find that Odysseus has somehow wangled the famous arms
of Achilles for himself, despite the claims of other warriors and the natural expectation of Achilles'
son Neoptolemos to inherit them. Euripides' treatment of this situation in the play about
Philoctetes give special weight to the poet's point of view, but it is certainly consistent with the
general opinion of the hero.
Greeks derived Odysseus' name from the verb 'odyssasthai', "to be hated (by the gods, especially
Poseidon)", but the derivation could also include the meaning "hateful". Odysseus is never a
favorite son of Hellas, although they admire his cleverness grudgingly, much as we admire, while
we deplore, the American "robber barons" of l9th century finance. Even the simple and fun-loving
Phaeacians, when Odysseus turns down their invitation to participate in the games, note that he
looks like a commercial skipper with his eye on trade, a remark which is not far from the truth.
Odysseus takes good care of himself, but we see that when he arrives home at long last, he is
alone. He takes good care of himself while his companions are on their own, in this case with less
good luck. The businessman first business is to take care of himself, heroics are for the heroes
who are going to finish last, and true heroism is something which Odysseus can easily dispense
with.
Odysseus has one reclaiming human characteristic, his basic monogamousness, despite many
chances for fun with ladies and nymphs who were probably a great deal more interesting than the
down-to-earth wife he left behind. His instinct is for homing, and this probably represents the
theme of an earlier animal-story, in the manner of Aesop and his Indian sources. Animal stories in
Greek, except for the late Aesopic importations from the East, are almost totally lacking, the only
surviving example is the story of the nightingale, and the rest seem to have been converted to
purely human stories at an early date. (It seems fair to make this assumption, since all European
societies, before and after the Greeks, have a goodly store of animal tales, and there is no reason to
think that the earlier Greeks lacked them entirely.) The key to Odysseus' monogamousness
strangely lies in his wife's name, Penelope, in Greek 'Penelopeia', which is in derivation identical
with the noun 'penelops', "a duck". (There can be no question that these two words, with seven
identical phonemes in the same order, have the same meaning.) Wild waterfowl are monogamous,
and clearly the story of Odysseus' years-long wanderings over the face of the waters, opposed by
high seas and the god Poseidon, retells in human terms the story of the drake winging his way
homeward against all odds. This is Odysseus' nature, just as faithfulness to her drake is the mark
of Penelope, who fusses and preens at her embroidery, while avoiding competitive males and
waiting for her husband.
In the Odyssey (but not in the Iliad), Odysseus displays, a special kind of discourse almost every
time he speaks, in which he sets out a pair of opposing possibilities for the situation at hand, and
then selects the one which seems best, which he puts into immediate action. This seems to be a
new method of discourse and certainly a new way of thinking, it does not appear in the Iliad to any
extent, on the other hand it characterizes the development in society of the new Greek
"commercial" man who is trading successfully after the seventh century all over the
Mediterranean.
When we have seen this double-headed logic a few dozen times, we may find it thin, but to people
who had never had such a tool of logic, it would be an important lesson in the structure of
organized thought. Shades of this type of argument can be found in Heracleitos' doctrine of the
complementary opposites, and perhaps even Plato's duality of ideas-versus-things. By the 4th
century society is in need of intellectual simplification of the possibilities, and Aristotle criticizes
Plato's Theory of Ideas in the introductory book of the Metaphysics, on the grounds that it doubles
the number of entries for classifying things, since each item must have an idea-entry as well as a
thing-entry. He clearly prefers a single entry system for his intellectual bookkeeping, since he is
living in a complex world in which the need to simplify comes before the development of new
tools of thought. The Odyssean world has no such constraints, and the idea of noting down the two
major possibilities for an action, and the choosing the "best" one, leads to decisions which are
"weighed", even if they have to be made in a hurry. The more one engages in business, the more
one has to learn to think this way, since there are always at least two ways to invest money; one
will earn you a dollar and the other will probably lose it.
Seeing the polar possibilities of any situation suits a trader and his business deals, it errs mainly in
placing both of the possibilities completely in the conscious mind, and thus avoids opening the
unconscious storehouse of experience. Odysseus' logicism never delves into deep or mysterious
things, it is always used for immediate and practical matters, and it may be this superficiality of
Odysseus' mind which turned the later Greco-Roman world so entirely against him. But the
important thing to note about this "new logic", is that it IS really new, and belongs to the revived
Greek society which awoke after the Dark Age. It does not appear often in the Iliad, which reflects
the older Minoan-Mycenean civilization and the early world of mythopoeia.
Nestor in the Iliad is a fine gentleman of the old school, garrulous and moralistic, with something
of the tone of an earlier day Polonius. Here we have the portrayal of a worthy old grandfather,
highly respected in a patriarchal society, who, despite his longness of speech and shortness of
memory as to the real actions of the past, is all the same quite bearable and somewhat lovable. In
the Odyssey we find him back at home, ruling his ancestral city of Pylos, the name of which is so
similar to the Gr. 'pylai' "Gates, gateway" that we must assume that Pylos was gateway to the well
watered lands which lay north and east of its site. In this very town of Pylos we find Telemachos
visiting after the war, bathing in a bathtub or 'asaminthos', of a design which we find abundantly
represented at museum at Cnossos, enjoying the hospitality of a real Mycenean palace. Here we
find the real Nestor, effective ruler of an important shipping port town.
Now that archaeological discoveries have revealed the real city of Pylos, and the surprising fact
that some ten thousand clay tablets were buried there, bearing in the Greek language lists of
commodities shipped in and out of the port, we begin to see the economic implications of a
Mycenean shipping center. Year by year more of these tablets are deciphered, and they reveal an
entirely different kind of culture that the Odyssey portrays. It is a business society, with
accountants, scribes, managers, bosses, and upper level administrators, each with his own special
prerogatives and title, although we are not always sure from the tablets of the organization of this
economic hierarchy. In fact, what Odysseus is doing with his traveling and trading, follows in the
wake of what had gone on half a dozen centuries before, as Greece after a lapse into a three
hundred year oblivion starts to reassert itself. Nestor and his economic empire represent a world
once thriving but long since gone, with only a few verbal traces in the myths and the ten thousand
clay tablets..
In Petronius' Satyricon a story is told of a man who invented a new type of unbreakable glass,
which he demonstrated to the Emperor. The emperor asked if anyone else knew of this secret
formula, the man said he and the emperor were the only two, upon which the emperor had the man
killed. This episode was discussed previously in Chapter 6, the only thing to note here is that the
story has a clear line of economic meaning. The emperor realizes that anything that disturbs the
glass industry, which we know to have a major industry at Rome if only from the amounts of glass
which archaeologists recover, will disturb the country economically, and this may easily lead to
political turmoil. His reaction is economically sound: If it is that good, keep it off the market.
Although this falls outside the strict realm of earlier Euhemeristic mythology , it has all the
elements which a myth of this sort requires: A royal name, confrontation with a problem, the new
idea of economic preservation of an existing market (rather than slaying of monsters), and it
focuses upon a single moment at which the story line says something more important happened
than is immediately evident. Myth and fact coincide in all Euhemeristic stories, but always in a
covert manner.
In this case we can see the meaning of the story, since we know this sort of thing has occurred in
our own time, and we are not surprised at the "new invention" which is simply too good to put on
the market. Even now we hear "myths" again and again of the man who has a car which will get
one hundred miles to the gallon of gasoline, but it is kept off the market by the big car
manufacturers. Several people aver that they can authenticate the story of an engineer who worked
for a major glass company which produced an undullable glass razorblade, which was duly
researched, tested, patented and kept off the market for a large price. Since this story is placed in
the early Roman Empire, we know a great deal about the politics and economics of the time,. and
can witness among the Romans the development of a brand of economics the main purpose of
which must have been to maintain existing markets despite engineering advances. Since we know
this can occur again, we are likely to call the process prescient viewing of social economics; but if
we had no inkling of what the story meant, and had no idea that such an occurrence could ever
repeat itself, the story would be classed as obscure mythologizing, and we would probably search
for an abstruse psychological or religious interpretation.
Chapter 9
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Influences from the Near East.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Many of the Eastern influences which helped to shape the developing Greek world are obvious.
There are no periods in which some Egyptian influence, whether artistic models or actual
imported objects, is not present. The great antiquity of the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley
Civilizations, which predate activity in Greece by as more than two thousand years, points to a
slowly moving westward progression of the basic ingredients of civilization, e.g. agriculture,
animal breeding, social regulation and the keeping of some sort of written records. There are many
other connections which are possible but problematic, some quite unprovable at the present state
of our historical knowledge, and others which serve merely to tickle the imagination.
The name of Agamemnon is linguistically intriguing. It seems to be a compound of the prefix
'-aga-' (from 'mga-' a reduced grade of mega "big"; the sonant -m- gives Greek -a- regularly),
combined with the proper name Memnon, the leader of the Ethiopians fighting for the Trojans. He
is the son of Tithonos and Eos, both Eastern, dawn-associated names. Memnon was a name also
associated with Egypt, but why a Greek king should be called "The Great Memnon" is not at all
clear. If the Trojan War involved not only Greece and Troy, but also Egypt, that would certainly
cast a different historical light on the Iliad. We might compare the interesting, but highly
theoretical views which compare Oedipous to Ikhn-aton, the Egyptian monotheist and religious
reformer. In short, Agamemnon's name suggest eastern affinities, but we cannot pursue the matter
further at this time.
Cadmos, the son of Agenor, King of Phoencia, was sent to find his sister Europa who had been
abducted by Zeus. (This story has been discussed before in Chapter 3.) At Delphi, where he had
wandered, he was told to follow a cow and build a town where she stopped, which he did and so
founded Thebes. Here in a simplified form is an abridgment of what must have been a lengthy set
of relations between Greece and the Semitic Near East. This story comes later than the
introduction of the cow into Europe under the name of Europa, apparently in a second generation,
the westward traveler retraces a prior line of animal import, and finding cows wandering free in an
unpopulated countryside, he add the next element of Near Eastern life, and he builds a city. The
sequencing of events seems to represent the time scale of a developing country, the first level
breeds animals and pastures them in the open grasslands; the second level is the settling of rising
population in fixed residences, which becomes a small city or polis.
Cadmos killed a dragon at Thebes, sowed the teeth as seeds, which produced armed men fighting
among themselves, which sounds like a reflection on the barbarism of the autochthonous
pre-Cadmean natives. The statement that he "produced" population out of the ground, like
vegetables, points to the speed of the rise of population of Thebes. As soon as a good source of
animal meat is available, population tends to grow geometrically, especially if the location is not a
crossroad of trade route, which brings in disease against which the people have no resistance.
Thebes at an early period fulfils both these conditions.
Cadmus is a civilized man, he brought "letters" from Phoenicia to Greece, which is recorded in the
Semitic names of the letters of the Greek alphabet (e.g. Gr. beta : Hebr. beth, Ar. baita "a house",
but a "letter" without specific meaning in Greek). Note that the triconsonantal root 'k-d-m' in
Phoenician means "east", identifying Cadmus' origins cryptically in his name. According to
Homer Odysseus stole the "letters" from Cadmus, and said that he had invented them, following
dutifully the thievish manner of his father-in-law Autolycos.
This hero has clear Near Eastern origins, and must date from a very early period in the historical
record, the time of cow importation across the Bosporos ("cow-crossing) from Asia Minor into
Europe. Carbon dating of sites which show bovine skeletal remains may ultimately give us more
information about the dates of the domestication of cows in Europe, failing this we have only the
myths to guide us..
The story of Palamedes, which dates from the Trojan War, is an study in the depths of deceit
which Greek civilization was beginning to experience. Palamedes was a clever man who was said
to have invented some of the letters of the Greek alphabet, presumably the special phonemes
which the Greek language required in addition to the letters borrowed from the Phoenician
alphabet. If it is true that Cadmos imported the letters as they were in Phoenician, then Palamedes
must be given the credit of being the first practical phonetician in the West. He is also was credited
with the invention of checkers (called "draughts" in England, "Les Dames" in French and
"Damenspiel" in German), but we know that the game was far older, since Egyptian tombs from at
least as early at the middle of the second millennium B.C. have checkerboards and some pieces.
This is confirmed by Plato's remark that the game was invented by the Egyptian Thoth. The game
was well known in archaic Greece, Homer mentions it at Odyssey 1.107 as played by Penelope's
suitors. Further devices ascribed to this prolific inventor included standards for weighing, dice, the
discus and lighthouses.
The history of Palamedes starts at the time when Odysseus feigned insanity to avoid being
"drafted" into the army against Troy, when he is revealed in his malingering by Palamedes. At the
time of the Trojan War, Odysseus forged a letter sent to Palamedes which purportedly came from
Priam, offering gold for information and action which would betray the Greeks. Gold was
arranged to be hidden in Palamedes' tent, the Greeks found it there, they were furious and ordered
Palamedes to be stoned to death. Later, when the war was over, Palamedes' father Nauplius put out
false lighthouse signals off his island of Euboea, to entice the home-bound Greek fleet onto the
dangerous rocks. If lighthouses were in fact Palamedes' invention as was claimed, this would
indeed be poetic justice exercised by the father for the sufferings of his son.
Note that Odysseus and Palamedes are exact geographical opposites, Odysseus comes from a
rough and rocky little island off the west coast of mainland Greece, while Palamedes is from
Euboea, that rich and fertile island to the east of the mainland, known for its grains, fruit and large
populations under its semi-mythical king Alcmaeon. With an almost Toynbeean historical
vengeance, the man from the hard land wins out against the man from the better agricultural
country, but from the beginning they are destined geographically to be bitter enemies.
Here as often in Greek prehistory, inventing new and useful things seems to disturb society, and
the inventor, whether Ixion with his wheel, Philoctetes with his bow, or Palamedes with his
literacy, is destined to meet a bad end. Since the so-called inventions of Palamedes are
considerably older than Homer's actual time and even older than the later Minoan-Mycenean
period, we may assume that the Greek in the period which Homer describes (exactly what this
period is remains unclear, it may range from l275 B.C. down to his own time in the eighth century)
is already moving away from the stage of creation and invention, and becoming much more
interested in the social and at times anti-social skills which merchandising requires. It is easy to
side with Palamedes against Odysseus, which is what the later Classical world did, but Odysseus
does represent a new strain in the Greek entrepreneurial mind, and one which has, in one way or
another, dominated the Western world ever since. With the development of manipulative
commercial skills, honor gets quickly shuffled off , and the winner, however ignominious,
becomes the hero, while the loser never seems heroic. Achilles was the prototype of that old model
of strong character in the Iliad, but now in the Odyssey it is time to project an image of the "new
man", Odysseus, for whom effectiveness replaces honor. The sad thing is that it will always take
Palamedes-types to invent the things which society needs, but it will be the Odyssean people who
get the credit and profit.
It seems odd that since Palamedes was one of those who developed the Greek writing system, that
it should be a (forged) "letter" from Priam which betrays him, so that he is caught by means of the
very contrivance which he had developed. This would imply that as early as the pre-Homeric
period there is already a distrust of the writing and the literate man, the intellectual and the
"egg-head", and it seems that the public can better trust the man of action and affairs.
The phallus has a certain ritual signification in Greece, it is associated with Dionysos, Hermes,
Pan and strangely even with Demeter as representative of land-fertility, but above all it is the
specific organ of Priapus, the god of growing wood and living trees. Compared with the extended
ritual use of the 'lingam' in India, the Greek use is small. Any serious attempt to see further into its
original, basic meaning must be connected with a detailed study of the history of the lingam in
several millennia of Indic usage. Nothing could be further from the Indic tradition than the phallic
poems put together in the first century B.C. by the clever versifier of the little Latin collection
titled "Priapea", which relegates the role of Priapus to witty obscenities in a gentleman's
garden-orchard. At the time this little volume appeared the Romans were facing a major failure of
the birthrate, as is witnessed by the tax exempting "law of three children". Transferring sexual
symbols from life and nature to light and witty literature indicates that something is going wrong
in the society. On the other hand India incorporated sex and the lingam into its traditional religious
consciousness, and ever since has faced chronic overpopulation. These inverse phenomena point
to the actual force which religious and philosophical tenets can sometimes have in the history of a
nation.
A story about the great Deluge, well known from the Old Testament chronicle of Noah, is noted
peripherally in the tale of an aged country couple, Philomon and Baucis, who received Zeus and
Hermes into their simple home with courtesy, while the rich failed to offer guest-ship to the
disguised travelers. The cult of Zeus Xenios, in ancient times was thought to originate in Crete,
which was an important crossroad stop between Greece and the Near East. Hospitality was
important to Hellenes as a religious observance, but it was also a social necessity. In a world
without hotels, inns, motels and hostels, travel would be inconceivable were it not for the rule of
"universal hostelry" which the cult of theic-ordained hospitality provides. Since essentially
everyone who is unknown may be a deity appearing in disguise, the only way to please Zeus is to
receive all travelers with equal hospitality. Philemon and Baucis are rewarded for their piety by
being saved from the flood. It is interesting that a story based on early hospitality rites is inserted
into the same framework of time as the great Deluge, which is now generally regarded as a
historical happening. This is tentative dating, but it indicates that the flood occurred at a period in
which there was already considerable traveling, enough in fact to make a regular hospitality rite
mandatory.
There are few clues to work with in searching for an etymological base for the personal name
Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, other than a gloss in the Etymologicon Magnum which
mentions the verb 'deukei', "he sees" and another in Hesychios "he thinks, considers". If "thought"
was part of D.'s name, it was parallel to the folk-etymology of his father Prometheus, whose name
was taken by Greeks to mean " he who thinks ahead (manthano)", as against his brother
Epimetheus "hindsight". When Zeus decided to wipe the earth clean of man by a flood, Deucalion
did think things out ahead, he built an "arc" or boat just as Noah did, and escaped with his wife
Pyrrha. To repopulate the world, they tossed stones belonging to Mother Earth over their shoulders,
thus he generated men by his action and she women by hers. Their son Hellen was the founder of
the Hellenic people.
This story confirms the Old Testament account of the flood, which is also known from other Near
Eastern accounts, to the extent that many historians now believe there actually was a flood of vast
proportions in this part of the world. But flooding is more suitable to the low-lying Mesopotamian
areas than to mountainous Greece, and presumably the story about Deucalion took place before he
migrated to the Greek mainland. We seem to have two separate stories which have been conflated,
one about a Noah-like salvation from the flood by means of a boat or raft, the other about entry
into a new and rocky land which was bare of inhabitants. Such a story must be earlier than the
Minoan-Mycenean civilization which had already populated Greece fully before 2000 B.C.,
perhaps the casting of stones is a reminiscence of men of the earlier period, stone-age men who
had vanished leaving only stones behind them. The Devil taunts Jesus in the desert by advising
him to ask God (if he were really his father), to made bread our of the stones on the desert floor.
Stones may have seemed to be a germinative core out of which things in general were born,
possibly in the light of finding fossil animals in stones which were split open; if a stone were like
an ovary to a fossil animal, perhaps they generated life by themselves.... Outlandish as this sounds,
we know that in the first century A.D. Pliny assumes that wasps and bees are generated by carrion
meat, and as late as the l5th c. spontaneous generation of insects and even weird little "homunculi"
was assumed to come from manure. We certainly don't have then answer, but we seem to have a
real problem fairly well isolated.
Prometheus, who has been discussed before in various roles, is the semi-divine personage who
was said to have fabricated mankind out of clay. When Zeus became enraged with men and
deprived them of fire, Prometheus stole fire from Hephaistos in heaven and gave it to men, thus
incurring Zeus' eternal wrath. The work of the potter always demands fire. Clay like man, is
earthly and available everywhere, but fire comes from heaven in the form of lightning, hence it is
the property of Zeus. Prometheus needs more than clay if he is going to make durable products so
he "steals" fire, and therefore must be punished. A society like the Minoan-Mycenean, which early
in the second millennium B.C. had created the complexities of organized administration, would
understand the meaning of this punishment. The linguistic connections with the Sanskrit family
name Pramanthas have been discussed elsewhere, and need not be repeated here. But the fact that
so basic a myth as that of Prometheus should be directly connected with the fire-worshipping
priests of the Indic cult of Agni the Fire-God, even down to the actual names of the priestly class,
indicates an Eastern origin to this myth. Perhaps we should go further, and search for traces of
Eastern origins of pottery as a craft, perhaps in the Indus Valley Civilization. Beyond that there
may be a transfer of some special aspect of the use of fire, such as the easy generation of "new"
fire, rather than preservation of hot coals for future use in the ancient manner.
The story of Europa and the bringing of cows and cow-breeding first to Crete and later to the rest
of Greece has been discussed in detail in Chapter 3; a sequel to the story has been discussed above
in relation to Cadmos and the founding of the city of Thebes in according with a cow-omen. The
important parts of the argument need not be repeated here, but it should be summarily noted that
since cows and bulls in Crete are clearly described in the myths as coming from Tyre, and since
we know of bovines in the Near East at a much earlier time, we can unequivocally state that
cow-breeding was an Eastern practice which came at a late date to Greece via Crete.
The god Dionysos, also called Bacchos and known by various other ritual names, is supposed to
have been a Thracian deity, but he is not listed in the Homeric cycle of divinities, and is generally
thought to have come from the East, although the seventh Homeric Hymn tells the story of his
miraculous apparition to the pirates who were abducting him in the Adriatic Sea, which is west of
Greece. Since in the historical period piracy was common along the Western coasts and up into
Epiros, this may have reformed an earlier story of the god's sea-journey from the East. The ancient
Greek sources unanimously state that Dionysos came to Greece from the East, and we have no
reason to doubt their word, although we cannot point to a similar wine-and-ecstasy cult in any of
the older eastern religions.
One of his names, Lyaios, would seem to come from the verb 'lu-' which means "loosen, let loose"
and this function, performed with the drinking of wine is central to his ritual, along with ecstatic
dancing and flagellation with the 'thyrsos', a rod with a sharp pine-cone tied to the tip.
Accompanied by men and women in various states of self-induced trance like hyper-activity, he
provides for large numbers of men and especially for women an emotional release from emotional
repression through his psychologically liberating services. Similar release mechanisms under the
name of religion and dance are found in many parts of the world, but the rule of Dionysos was
especially needed in later Greece because of the tight hold with which the intellectual processes of
organized thought, often called the Apollonian mind, controlled society at large. Intellectuals in
the Greek upper classes were not likely to be moved by prophets with the ring of ecstasy
employed by Dionysos, yet even such a lofty moralist as Sophocles had apparently entered the
Dionysiac cult, and the Bacchic rituals were practiced throughout the Greco Roman world until
the middle of the second century B.C., when the Roman Senate outlawed them. The Bacchai of
Euripedes is a magnificent portrayal of the Bacchic mind, staged vis a vis the cool and rational
thinking of the critical Pentheus, who must pay for his doubt with his life.
All this seems so near to what Jung has isolated as the world of the unconscious mind, that
modern readers are likely to see in Dionysos the genuine precursor of Jungian thought. Exactly
what all this means in terms of Greek society is not clear, the ancients were not aware of
distinction among parts of the mind, and Socrates is an isolated instance of one man identifying
something like the Freudian superego in his doctrine of the 'daimon'. Yet the Dionysian cults,
widespread and popular as they were for century upon century, must have touched something
central to human consciousness. Eliciting parallels to Jung's thought,in the last analysis, does no
harm, especially if taken with a few grains of salt. Things which are similar may not be identical
in different cultures, it is only when we try to press our identities too hard that we get into trouble.
The demi-god Silenus, often referred to as Sileni in the plural, is, like the Satyrs with whom he
shows some general similarities of personality if not form, associated with the cult of Dionysos.
What did Silenus look like? Socrates was described as looking like a Silenus, and had a short,
snubbed nose, round face, and atypical Greek features. (Compare this to the regular portrayal of
Apollo, who is the very model of upper-class Hellenic good-looks.) One could then ask, where
would a person with these Silenus-Socrates features come from? The physical anthropologist can
best answer this question, working closely with an historian knowledgeable about the ancient
cultures of the Mediterranean and Eastern world. Since Silenus is ancillary to Dionysos, and
Dionysos is said to have been brought to Greece from the East, there should be Eastern candidates
for the portraiture of Silenus. This problem is aided by the large number of Greek sculptural
portrayals of Silenus, although they tend to follow a stereotype.
Proteus is in many ways most ungraspable of the Greek diesels. Herodotos and Euripides regarded
him as an early Egyptian king, which would be the same as an Egyptian deity. He knows all, and
has the ability to transform himself into any shape that he wishes, so that the aggressive Greek
heroes have a real problem trying to pin him down, so that they can kill him. This changing of
shape is the stock characteristic by which Proteus is known in Greek mythology, but he is
probably much more mystical than the factual tone of the Greek stories indicate. His Egyptian
associations indicate that he is part of an older, Eastern tradition, and this is borne out by several
parallels to the Indic materials. In the document called the Devimahatmya, a wondrous goddess
named Devi is described who will route out evil, specifically the demon Mahisha, who lurks in the
form of the huge and vicious water-buffalo. When she attacks him, he turns into a lion, when she
beheads him, he appears as a hero armed with a sword. She shoots him with a volley or arrows, he
appears again as an elephant and grasps her with his trunk, which she deftly severs. Now he
returns to his special shape, the gigantic water-buffalo, tearing up mountains, roaring horribly.
(She pauses, drinking the divine liquid of the life-force brew 'soma',possibly a hallucinogenic
intoxicant suitable for such a kaleidoscopic moment). Dashing down on the buffalo's neck, she
spears him mortally, but there appears from the dying monster's mouth, half in and half out, a hero
with a sword. She beheads him in this intermediate state, and the contest is over.
Since this myth exists both in the Indic tradition, and in a story which portrays a similar changing
of form in Greece, which incidentally is labeled as having an Egyptian origin, it may be assumed
that the Greek story is in some part influenced by Eastern religious mythology. Much of the tale is
changed, but the theme of an evil force that can change shape at will to avoid being cornered, is
identical to the basic story of Proteus, and again we are encouraged to seek meaning for Greek
myths in the Indic materials.
Since Pythagoras was born at the beginning of the sixth century B.C., he is just an historical figure,
yet he has all the marks which go into the making of a mythico-historical personality. He travels
for many years in the East, absorbs or invents the doctrine of reincarnation, and establishes a
rigorous code indicating what things are good and what are bad for men. He proposes the theory
that the earth is of a spherical shape, he investigates the magic of numbers, saying that "number
comes first, next come words and names... ". He defines the length of the hypotenuse on a right
angled triangle as equal when squared to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, by which
"magical" treatment of numbers and figures which he has invented, he makes the subsequent art of
trigonometry possible. He says mystical things about numbers, about the number ten, and about a
pyramid of dots in four tiers of which the sum of dots was this very magic number. One thinks of
the Gordian knot as a primitive demonstration of complex topological relationships, but versed in
a figure rather than numbers. Pythagoras has the same kind of investigating mind, but he goes
farther and leaves a long shadow in the Western world.
Founding a school-monastery in southern Italy, he performs a roster intellectual of feats,
corresponding to the Labors of Heracles, which the wise man should know. In an earlier world he
would have been recognized as a man or hero of extraordinary powers, in the Christian world he
would have been sainted or burned alive, but located as he is at the edge of the historical curtain,
Pythagoras cannot be taken as a hero, but is just a philosopher. Using him as a terminus post quem,
we know that by that time the Heroic Age is clearly dead.
Aesopos (Aesop) is such a familiar figure that we are likely to forget his extra-Hellenic
connections The Roman Phaedrus and the Greek Babrios handed down his style of storytelling,
which in the modern world has developed into a vital and widespread genre. But Aesop himself is
described as being a non-Greek, actually one with dark face ('aitho-+ -ops' "burned face"), which
some have incorrectly taken to mean Ethiopian, but the shade of the dark-skinned southern Indians
is perfectly suitable for the term 'aithops'. His tales go back without question to the storytelling
cycles of ancient India, to the Hitopadeca or "Book of Friendly Instruction", the Panchatantra or
"Five Threads of Myth", as well as other similar collections, which have stories of exactly the
same form and often the same materials, always involving animals as protagonists. If we follow
Herodotos, who says that Aesop lived in the middle of the 6th century B.C., we must assume
serious cultural contact between Greece and India at that date. It is possible that a lone wandering
minstrel may have penetrated Greece with his materials, but since there are other Indic-style traits
in Greece (Heracleitos, Pythagoras, and even the later Plato), it seems better to assume a general
process of east-west contacts in this period.
Icarios, an ancient native of Attica, entertained Dionysos with hospitality, and in return received
from the god knowledge of wine, both its making and its use. Giving this new gift of the god to
the country people in his area, he was killed by them when they became inebriated, which
involves a certain amount of poetic justice. Greek use of wine dates from very ancient times. It
was found that grape juice when fermented produced a stable food-product, which could be stored
for long periods in clean jars from which air was excluded. The alcohol level of natural wines is
about ten or eleven percent, at which concentration the yeasts are rendered ineffective by the
alcohol. (Modern sherries and other "fortified" wines are raised to 20% alcohol by adding distilled
spirits, a process unknown in the ancient world.) Faced with various kinds of water contamination,
the Greeks soon saw that limited use of wine was healthier than drinking raw water, especially if
the wine was mixed with two or three parts of water and allowed to stand for a while. The Greeks
always mixed wine with water, considering drinking it "straight" to be too strong for anything but
heavy drinking parties. Their tolerance to alcohol must have been far different from that of today's
Western peoples, to whom watered wine would probably seem more of an emetic than an
intoxicant. We know that people who have not been in contact with alcoholic drink often show
exaggerated reactions, for many years it was prohibited by law for Canadians to give whiskey to
Indians, and it has been stated that Orientals become intoxicated on smaller amounts of alcohol
than their Western counterparts. It seems reasonable that individuals should develop a tolerance to
alcohol by frequent use, but there seem to be no reasons to posit a genetic change in a given ethnic
group over the very short period of a century or two. Removal of those who show no tolerance by
classing them as delinquents and social misfits would be the only way to explain such group
changes.
The rituals of Dionysos-Bacchos would seem to stem from an early time, perhaps near the
discovery of how wine was made and what effects it had on humans. When it is discovered that
inebriation produces not only disorientation, but also uncloaks the part of consciousness which we
now call the "unconscious mind", someone is likely to see the great power involved in the
exploitation of the drinking process. It can release pent-up emotions, especially in women who
had little of the normal social outlets available to men. It can break through artifice and sham, and
tell the "truth", as many modern drugs are assumed to do (e.g. sodium amydol etc.), in fact the
Greek proverb says "wine is the keyhole into the soul" (actually "oinos dioptron", which is a
different phrase but with similar meaning) At a time when people are becoming more and more
involved in social reality, and fail to connect with the religious usages of their ancestors,
inebriation can instill in the individual a sense of the spiritual and the divine. "Soma" in the Vedic
texts was said to have operated in this way. Gordon Wasson and Levi-Strauss have felt that soma
was a mushroom extract with hallucinogenic properties, but the exact active alkaloid is immaterial,
it is the process is that is important. Use of peyote among Native Americans in a rite called
Peyotism has entirely religious and ethical uses, and reestablishes the contact between the
individual and his god. Such was surely the function of the Dionysiac cult, which used wine as the
psychagogic agent.
It must be recalled that similar reactions can be obtained by self-hypnotism, which for millennia
has been the way to the truth in India. In the last analysis it is the way and not the means which is
critical. Our typically Western error would seem to focus too much on the technique of the rite,
and not on its purpose. It has been more natural for our society, until very recently, to see the
Dionysiac rituals as disorganizing, as the Romans disapprovingly saw them, and miss their
spiritual quality, which we now see as stemming from the Jungian psychological theory of the
unconscious mind.
It is interesting to note that Icarios dies a violent death by getting too close to a powerful deity
(Dionysos) without really understanding him, while the winged Icaros (the name is clearly related,
even down to the long -i-) suffers a similar lethal fate by approaching the sun on simulated wings.
It would seem that in the earlier period the gods kill those who come too near to them, by way of
distinguishing men from deity. There is a curious suitability to Icarios being killed by those very
intoxicated people to whom he gave wine, since the giver of the gift was unaware of the depth of
its effects. The more we understand about the erratic and deteriorative effects of habitual use of
alcohol, the better we can appreciate this prophetic bit of medical justice.
Adonis, an especially handsome youth, was born from a woman named Myrrha (Smyrna?) and her
own father Cinyras, king of Cypros. If his name comes from Phoenician 'kinnor' "harp", we have a
clearly defined Eastern connection. (One thinks of the Cycladic seated harper in the Athens
National Museum as a visual example.) Adonis was killed hunting, and Aphrodite, who loved him,
turned his blood into a flowering red bloom. He was then claimed by her and also by Persephone
for the underworld, and is thus a symbol of renewed life in the vegetative cycles well attested in
Near Eastern thought from Syria to Egypt.
Other aspects of the story of Adonis, which concern the role and fate of a serious of handsome
young hunters, has been dealt with in Chapter 1 and need not be repeated in this context.
Chapter l0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cults, Beliefs and Religion
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------There are many things which can best be studied as chapters in the history of religious rites and
rituals, although they cross over into other matters, such as the connections between the
developing Greek society and the more ancient Near East, which were discussed in Chapter 9. In
this section some of the pertinent material is reviewed, although some of it has previously been
discussed in other places, to which reference is given for the fuller treatment.
Orpheus is the first Greek master of poetry, the poet-singer who accompanied the Argonauts as
bard in residence, since there were no written records that could be made to document such a
significant expedition. Then there is the story of his wife Eurydice, who died from snakebite, and
was almost recovered by Orpheus from Hades had he not "looked back", and so lost her forever.
Orpheus was finally torn apart by raving Maenads because of an interference in their rites, which
recalls Pentheus' death in Euripedes' treatment of the Bacchic rites.. Orpheus is regarded as the
founder of the mystery rites, which spread throughout Greece by the sixth century B.C., and
became the real religion of the country as the cults of the Olympians became formalized and
finally restricted to the state-religions. The role of the Mysteries is hard to define since much of
their ritual was secret, and at a later date information about them was suppressed by Roman and
Christian alike, but we do know that the Mysteries proliferated and dominated Hellas spiritually
for more than a millennium, and were the most effective mass religious cult in the Greco-Roman
world.
If we think of Orpheus as patron saint of poetry and song, we miss the deeper implications which
his role possessed. The poet is the one person in a primitive society who has direct access to the
mesmerizing pulses of rhythmic wording, song and dance; with these aids he can (seem to)
accomplish almost anything. Such a man can record the deeds and feats of famous men many
years dead, and this is his basic historical bardic function. When he calls up memory of persons
long dead, or transfers the hearer to a far distant place which he has never seen, he raises people to
a level of intensity and vivification which they later will refer to as "stepping out of one's body",
the exact meaning of the Greek word "ecstasy".
Since by his poetry he can collapse time and space,, ensures living memory for the living, who
will soon be joining "the many, as the Greeks mysteriously refer to those who have passed over.
He even symbolically overcomes Death. Transferring the symbolic to the real, he can seem to
bring back the dead from Hades, but in his own quest for his wife Eurydice, this fatal flaw
emerges. As long as he "thinks" of her, he can "bring her back" in his own mind and recreate her,
but when he actually turns around and looks, the mental image dissolves and she disappears. The
detail about "looking back" is found elsewhere, in the history of Lot's wife, and in the Pythagorean
Symbola, which imply that looking back is the core of distraction (neurosis), and must be strictly
avoided. The Orphic person did not see fit to draw a line of distinction between what he "makes
appear " by his art, and what actually "is". To us, living as we do in a world of hard factuality, this
seems an error; but it is the kind of error which bring man into contact with the spiritual forces of
the world, or more precisely, the spiritual forces in his own being.
The immense power of the poet, who works by trance like states of auto-hypnosis, is the earliest
stage of mind-conversion. But as soon as the cult of Dionysos appears, since it gets similar results
but more quickly by intoxicating use of wine, tension and rivalry between the two systems is
bound to arise. (The modern analog would be achieving enlightenment by contemplation, in the
manner of the Indic tradition, as against "instant enlightenment" by use of drugs in the manner of
the pharmacagogues of the l960's.) Therefore it is not surprising that in the myth Orpheus is torn
apart by Bacchic maenads, not because of an supposed intrusion into the privacy of their ritual, but
because he represents the old guard of ecstatic ritual which operates with spiritual ecstasy, and his
cult must be eradicated as the wine-based spiritual enlightenment of Dionysos proceeds. (In
exactly the same manner the nascent drug-enlightenment cults in this country in the l960's tended
to be strongly opposed to the "old guard" religious beliefs.)
But the rivalry between the Spirit and the Wine Cult can work in the other direction. Revolving
about a central figure called Dionysos Zagreus, Orphic ritual featured tearing in pieces an animal
who represented Dionysos, probably originally as a way of symbolizing the destruction of the
rival cult, but later as a hysterical release promising purification and absolution. Killing of the
animal probably involves consolidation of the group's guilt on a disposable beast, the black sheep
or guilt-goat of the Old Testament. Christ's remarkable development of the Orphic myth is that he
takes the role of shouldering guilt upon himself, as his followers saw it. Since Orphism was
considered a lower-class, popular cult in the last centuries before Christ, some popular influence
from it may have infiltrated Jesus' own working-class following.
Dionysos, also called Bacchos and known by various other ritual names, is supposed to have been
a Thracian deity, but he is not listed in the Homeric cycle of divinities, and is generally thought to
have come from the East.. The seventh Homeric Hymn tells the story of his miraculous apparition
to the pirates who were abducting him in the Adriatic Sea. One of his names, Lyaios, would seem
to come from the verb 'lu-' which means "loosen, let loose" and this function, performed with the
drinking of wine, with ecstatic dancing and flagellation with the 'thyrsos', a rod with a sharp
pine-cone tied to the tip, is central to his role. Accompanied by men and women who are in
various states of self-induced trance like hyper-activity, he provides for large numbers of men and
especially for women an emotional release from emotional repression through his psychologically
liberating services. Similar release mechanisms under the name of religion and dance are found in
many parts of the world, but the rule of Dionysos seems especially needed in Greece because of
the tight hold with which the intellectual processes of organized thought, often called the
Apollonian mind, controlled society at large. Intellectuals in the Greek upper classes were not
likely to be moved by prophets with the ring of ecstasy like Dionysos, yet even such a lofty
moralist as Sophocles had apparently entered the Dionysiac cult. The Bacchai of Euripedes is a
magnificent portrayal of the Bacchic mentality, staged vis a vis the cool and rational mind-set of
the arch-doubter Pentheus, who must pay for his doubt with his life.
All this seems so near to what Jung has isolated as the world of the unconscious mind, that
modern readers are likely to see in Dionysos the genuine precursor of Jungian thought. Exactly
what all this means in terms of Greek society is not clear, the ancients were not aware of
distinctions among parts of the mind, and Socrates is an isolated instance of one man identifying
something like the Freudian superego in his doctrine of the 'daimon'. Yet the Dionysian cults,
widespread and popular as they were for century upon century, must have touched something
central to human consciousness. Eliciting parallels with Jung's thought in the last analysis does no
harm, especially if taken lightly. Things which are similar in different cultures may not be
identical, it is only when we try to press our identities too hard that we get into trouble.
The Dryads are female deities associated with trees, each Dryad or Hamadryad exists in
relationship to an individual tree, and is respected and venerated as the life force of that tree. The
concept of the life of trees is religious and holy. The name Dryad is derived from Gr. 'drus', "an
oak tree", and the word in the same linguistic format appears in the term Druid, a Celtic priest
related to trees, but with other political and administrative overtones which were developed in the
historical period.
In Greek and Latin the tree names may be masculine in form, but are always considered feminine
in gender; this is partly owing to their composite and all-embracing nature, which is felt to be
female in scope. But there is also a feeling for generative femaleness in trees as the ancients see
them. The important thing to note is that at a time when people venerate trees and endow them
with female divinity, they have not yet arrived at a stage of civilization at which trees are seen
primarily as wood and lumber. After this change of attitude has occurred, Aristotle can speak of
'hyle" ("wood") as the basic material for constructing the world, i.e. "matter", and the Romans can
use the term 'materies" for "matter, or building material" as such. (American lumber yards are still
sometimes called Material Companies, since they participate in the same mechanistic tradition.)
Wood as a construction material, especially as it becomes costly and valuable, is different in
nature from wood growing from the live root, from trees as biological miracles of design and
evolution, which are suitable homes for deities of spiritual importance. The myths about Dryads
must antedate the growth of mega-societies, which soon learn to use trees merely as a source for
wood.
The carbon dating records show that most of Europe was lightly burned over around 6000 B.C.,
presumably as a way of clearing land for development of the newly emerging grains. Pollen from
before this burning shows the usual distribution of diversified European forestation, pollen from a
later date points to restricted tree growth and expanding grain fields. A rough date for the period of
the Dryad myths can be placed in this period.
Commercialism in harvesting wood as timber is a constant danger to expanding societies, since
they see things only in consideration of their uses, trees mean for them nothing more than building
materials. Japan at the present time retains much of its ancient reverence for trees, so the Japanese
import lumber from every country which has forests, thereby decimating the world's wood supply,
while somewhat perversely preserving its old religiosity towards living trees! The Romans has
stripped most of Italy of tree by the time of Augustus, and retained isolated stands of ancient trees
as a formal reminder of the old religion which respected growing groves. Primitive peoples are
much more sensitive!
There may be an entirely different explanation for the belief in spirits of the trees which stems
from a perceptual process in the human mind. Leonardo Da Vinci remarked in his notebooks long
ago that if one stares long enough at an old moss-covered stone wall, he will see scenes of battle
with men and horses and cannon, or anything else that the mind suggests. Foliage in the forests, as
well as the gnarled barks of ancient tree trunks present just this sort of randomized, intricate
patterning. If one stares long enough at bark or branches with leaves, and mildly mesmerizes
himself, he will see faces emerging. Exactly what faces emerge, and what they will mean to him,
are dependent on the coaching which his society has employed in his early education, if the
society is religious, a religious aspect can easily be cast over forms that the mind sifts from
abstract pattern. If one looks out of the window at evening time, and sees a human face in the
forest, it is probably easier in terms of the reasonableness of the explanation, to assume that the
old man of the forest was really there, looking in through the window, and that when seen, he
suddenly disappeared. (The modern, educated explanation, that minds pick out non-reality-related
patterns from random displays, and invest them with values inculcated by both the society and the
individual personality of the viewer, consciously monitoring these displays as "tricks of the mind",
is much more complicated and if it seems more rational us today, it would certainly be
incomprehensible to the most imaginative persons in a primitive society.)From such a base we can
understand the development of a habit of seeing "faces in the forest", investing them with
individual identity and spiritual vitality, and then venerating them as discrete religious entities.
This would be fortuitously fortunate as a point of view, since the world of biological growth is
really remarkable and spiritual, well worth admiration and spiritual respect.
The Satyrs are known as semi-divine creatures of the woods and hills, the attendants of Dionysos.
They are generally connected with lust, sex and fertility, thought of as partly human in form, but
with a horse's tail, with goat's feet and at times goat's horns. It may well be that these beings are
the things which one sees in a nightmarish dream after an evening of heavy eating and drinking,
but it is also possible that the Satyrs represent chimpanzees seen flightingly and at a distance in
heavily wooded habitats. If this were so, it would accord with Dionysos' origins in the East,
perhaps as far south a southern India where monkeys are still found, although chimpanzees are
now associated with Western Africa. Add to this the confused tales about Troglodytes or
"cave-dwellers", whose descriptions in ancient sources vary widely. In some accounts they seem
remarkably like the cattle-devoted African Masai of the present time, in others they are scarcely
human savages, but in any case Troglodytes seen at a distance may have provided part of the
material for concocting the existence of "Satyrs". Nothing conclusive can be said at the present
time, but the portrayal of beings which partake of human and animal elements does fit an
unaccustomed viewer's general impression of the chimp: Ears and hands are virtually human, eyes
are near the human location, teeth are similar although the prognathism is pronounced. From here
on the differences take over, the chimp lurches and bumps along on the ground supporting himself
on his knuckles as he runs, the body is covered with hair, and the intelligence, although clearly
above that of other mammals, is both like and unlike human behavior. Satyrs and chimps can both
be both taken as travesties of men, this would be enough to flesh out their role in the Greek mythic
tradition.
The important point to remember is that this unlikely creature, whatever his identity, is associated
with the soft, sensitive and highly human Dionysos. Their ancillary position cannot possibly be
based on function, but it may point to a common geographic origin for acolyte and leader.
Speaking of man-animal mixtures, a word must be inserted about the perennially interesting
subject of werewolves. The story of Lycaon who offered human flesh to Zeus and was either killed
by him or turned into a wolf, is the Greek locus classicus for the myth, but this story is really more
like the cannibalism of Pelops and the house of Atreus than to lycanthropy as such. By the time of
Petronius in the early Empire, we have a short story of werewolvery, which has most of the
characteristic details developed in Europe in the next two millennia. In Europe the wolf is the
favorite exchange-beast, but in other parts of the world other animals, almost always carnivores,
are employed. For example, in Bengal it is not surprisingly the man turns into a tiger.
There exists a condition of psychological pathology in which the patient feels he has become an
animal, he thinks and acts accordingly, even with mimetic sounds and gait. This would seem to be
a suitable origin for the werewolf story, with automatic confession of the patient generating the
quasi-factual myth. It is also possible that retarded persons who have been rejected by society,
may have managed somehow to exist in nature when the climate was not too forbidding. These,
seen fleetingly, would strike the viewer as something between man and animal; if the person were
male and unshorn, the hairiness of the wolf would be seen. If the interpretation verged toward
Satyrs, the creature would be classified as semi-divine, but if the humanness predominated, actual
change of a quondam man into the beast would be assumed. Werewolves often were supposed to
change at the time of full moon, this would be the very time when a wild-man would be out
hunting, aided by available moonlight.
One must also consider possible response to whatever moon-effects, presumably gravitational
field changes, may contribute to human behavior. Doctors in large city hospitals know that at full
moon time there are more accidents in the emergency room, and they will admit with some
professional embarrassment that more staff is generally assigned for these days. The tides, the
moonlight, the menstrual cycle of women, and a general time keeping effect in the living world
are all associated with the moon. Into this powerful crossroad of forces, the werewolf story has
been injected by the restless improvisation of human imagination.
It is easy to imagine the shock a restless man, awake and wandering in the moonlight, might feel
upon seeing a woods-living human being who screams and rushes away into the forest. Add to this
the confessions of men and women who admit that they have been animals, and you have all the
basic ingredients necessary for generating lycanthropic tales.
There are strange and disguised stories in Greek mythology which deal with cannibalism, often in
a deic situation but without indicating a religious cannibalistic ritual of the sort we find in some
cultures. The most interesting thing about Pelops is his early childhood experience. He was killed
by his father Tantalos, and his flesh was served to the gods to see if they could distinguish between
human and animal meat. They all detected the human aroma except the vegetation goddess
Demeter, who ate part of the shoulder before she found of what it was. Somehow restored to life,
but missing a part of his shoulder, Pelops got a new one made of ivory, the first prosthetic limb in
the West, and his father Tantalos was duly punished in Hades by a torment which deprived him of
what he most craved: food..
Cannibalism is clearly the issue, someone in prehistoric Greece was consuming human flesh, and
since the story has high social impact, it is mirrored down through the ages in the stories which
congregate about the "bloody house of (his descendant) Atreus". But the original cannibalism was
possibly real, perhaps a ritual part of prehistoric, barbaric pre-Hellenic social behavior. In parts of
the world where cannibalism has been observed by anthropologists, it has been remarked that it
has a strictly ritual character, and is practiced either on the enemy in order to imbibe their power,
or on family members so that their vital force will not dissipate. It is worth noting that the flesh
that is eaten in Greek cannibalistic myths is always from family members. Whatever the meaning
of the Pelops story, it clearly points to ingestion of human flesh, and this must bring it back to a
very early date, presumably before the time of civilizing Near Eastern social influences.
Of Atreus and his bloody house, little can be added to the list of horrors which the Greeks knew so
well. Perhaps at a remote period, eastern peoples who came into contact with less advanced
European peoples, saw the western barbarians as meat-eating savages, at times verging on
cannibalism in their ceremonial festivities. Cannibalism, except in the rare instances when it is
employed to preserve starving people from dying, is usually (as Malinowski pointed out many
years ago) a religious and ritual process. If this happened, then the stories about cannibalism
would stem from an Eastern tradition, or from eastern peoples who were immigrating into Crete
and the lands of Greece proper. We might then consider the possibility of some myths, such as the
cannibalism myth we have been discussing, being constructed by peoples with Eastern origins or
at least Eastern connections, but the subject material of the myths would be drawn from the
substratum of the native population, who are the earlier inhabitants of Europe. It has been
suggested that the name Atreus was in Hittite Attarisayas, king of the Ahhiyava (possible the
Achaeans?). If this were correct to any degree, it might suggest that the history of the bloody
house of Atreus was mythologized somewhere in Eastern Asia Minor by the advanced and
civilized Hittites, who would be good candidates for the Eastern myth-carriers we have been
hypothesizing.
Chapter 11
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Psychology and the Inner Mind
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Most ancient myths have a clear psychological content, which is probably one of the reasons why
they have been found so interesting by Western readers over such a long time. But some stories
are more than incidentally "psychological", they display insight into some of the deeper problems
with which we are concerned, and some which we have only lightly grazed. A summary
description of myths which have to do with the human mind does not do justice to the latent
potential of the stories, which must be seen housed in their story cycles and beyond that in their
total culture to be fully understood. Yet even a brief survey can be useful.
Ajax has been previously discussed in Chapter 1 as a hero who cannot adjust to the constraints and
group decisions of his society, and it was suggested there that his confusion of mind and
subsequent dislocation of action was connected with the way society treated him. This may have
been in part true, but not all heroes who are denied rewards fly into insane rage, murder animals
and commit suicide. There is something special in Ajax' case which we probably should consider
as a case of schizophrenia, remembering of course that this is our term for use on people living in
our society, and the terms when used of another culture merely denotes something which seems
generally similar. If in the future we have a clear diagnostic technique which unquestionable
identifies schizoid behavior, since we will not be able to use it on persons long dead, we will have
to qualify our similarities and likelihood-nesses even more cautiously. For the present it seems fair
to draw rough parallels, remembering that they are parallels, not diagnoses.
Ajax is denied something (the arms of Achilles) which has assumed a disproportionate value in his
mind. These are no longer arms, but things of incredible value, in fact of a value which approaches
the value of life itself to him. Denied these, he is denied the appreciation of what he has been
appreciating for years, his holy symbol of maniliness, his pagan Grail, the very reason for existing.
All of life has been rolled up in this one symbol, and when it is removed, he collapses into
emptiness. In this state other thoughts press forward, hatred not only for Odysseus who got the
arms, but hatred of all the Greeks who he hold responsible as a group for the one thing which he
could not have. If his love of the arms is single and highly focused, his hatred of those who took it
away is diffused and general, so it doesn't matter who really did the evil deed, they must ALL
suffer for it. For the Greek "all of them" his mind now can even substitute a herd of sheep, "they"
is seen only as a plural and one plural is as good as another. Kill them all!
One of the marks of a troubled mind is the way it misassociates common words and ideas. The
Greek word for sheep is ''ois', which has the same first and last sound as the most hated name of
Odysseus. This is not more fanciful than the covert association of a disturbed boy of the word
"snail" with S. Nail. the headmaster of his school, Summerhill (). The unconscious mind is a great
phonetician and words day and night in subtle innuendoes. Now what sound do sheep make? The
Greek verb 'mekazo' is fashioned after the bleating sound of sheep and also goats, the root sound
would have been 'me-' or 'me-k-' (with a long -e-) equivalent to an English "ma-a-a-". But there is
another word in Greek which has the same sound, 'me' meaning "no, not, don't... ", which is what
Ajax hears when the herd of sheep bleat around him: "No! No.. !" on and on. When he asked for
the arms of Achilles, the leader had said to him "No!", now the sheep were all saying "No!", just
like the damned Greeks. The Greeks are all saying 'No!", try to stop it, shut them up, but they
won't so... .kill them, those Greeks. But when Ajax finds it was not Greeks but sheep he had killed,
he realizes something inside his mind had snapped, a thing which no hero trained within an inch of
his life in military valor can face. Suicide is not only a way of stopping all this, for a man of honor
it is necessary.
The word "no" has powerful associations. In a somewhat different direction, it sparked confusion,
introspection and later enlightenment when the Far Eastern Buddhist roared out 'mu', which means
both "No" and "nothing". This famous catchword of Buddhist training has a long history and a
philosophical history, but the core notion is the absoluteness of "no" which cuts the thread of old
thought clean. For Ajax, bordering on the edge of a mental precipice, it works in a stronger mode,
it cuts the reason for living.
In the ancient tradition Heracles became insane, as the play of Euripedes shows.. The fit of
insanity is sent upon him by Hera, he kills his own children under the illusion that they are the
children of Eurystheus,, and then his wife. The parallels with the madness of Ajax are obvious:
Ajax killed sheep thinking that they were Greeks, Heracles killed his children thinking they were
the "children" of Eurystheus, who controlled the wild horses of Diomedes which Heracles had
previously tamed. The confusion of a present person with a past agent who is totally unrelated
defines this kind of illusion as a true schizophrenia. There was an ancient tradition that Heracles
suffered from intermittent fits of insanity, from which he recovered completely enough to go on
with his Labors.
The intermittent character of Heracles mental illness may be connected with.. .... There is also the
possibility that we are dealing here with social dislocation: If a group of Greeks did, according to
Rhys Carpenter's theory about desiccation of Greece after l200 B.C. and retreat of the Greeks to
the north, migrate northwards to Hungary or southern Germany, and their descendant Heracles,
clad in a skin and sporting a club as weapon, did return several hundred years later, he would find
Greece much changed and surely inhospitable. Eastern immigrants, whether Tyrians, Philistines or
Lydians, would have infiltrated the Greek islands, and been none to friendly to a rough, Neolithic
type, even if he spoke archaic Greek. We would certainly register dislocated social and national
background as important information the file of a modern psychiatric patient; we should not
ignore it in the possible case of an ancient man.
Endymion, a beautiful young man, and beloved of the moon-goddess Selene, was thrown into a
permanent deep sleep, in which at night Selene came to make love with him. This would seem to
be an early case in the history of catatonic schizophrenia, with incorporation of the specific
illusion which either he maintained, or others felt he believed. The connection of mental illness
with the moon is reflected in the word "lunacy", but this probably comes from cases such as this
rather than from any notion of diagnosis.. The moon and moon lore is not liable to be a key to
schizophrenia, but the light it sheds on how other peoples have interpreted insanity may give some
perspective to oddities in our own methods of interpretation. But doctors in emergency rooms in
large city hospitals know that at full moon time it will be necessary to have extra staff on hand,
although they can't professionally make a great point of this knowledge. Still we should be open to
the possibility that gravitational changes under the moon's influence may have an effect on living
organisms, either as a time clock or in other ways which we are not aware of. The experience of
astronauts in space, where the earth stronger gravitational effect will not be present to mask lesser
gravitational pulls, may eventually offer us positive new information, or prove that gravitational
effects not affect us at all.
The fact that it is under the guise of love and sexual contact that Endymion's immobilization
occurs is especially interesting, since severe sexual shock does disorient and immobilize, although
more generally in the area of sight and speech. Was Endymion made sick by consideration of his
physical beauty, which he felt was undeserved? Selene is often associated and confused in her
roles with Artemis, the severe virgin huntress, which would drastically change the nature of this
"divine loving". The famous case of catatonia in the New Testament, the man lying immobile on
his bed whom Christ "cured" (instantly) by telling him in his ear that his sins were forgiven, points
to connections of body immobilization with guilt.
The story of Narcissus may point to a similar kind of problem. The beautiful youth Narcissus, so
vain and proud that he continually rejected the advances of the nymphette Echo, was finally
punished by Aphrodite, who made him fall in love with his own image, which he discovered one
day reflected in a pool of clear water. Trapped by his own reflection, he gave himself over to the
useless pursuit of himself, with which he finally died, at which point he was converted into the
flower "Narcissus". The symbolism is obvious. Starting from a story about a doomed young man
of great physical handsomeness, a type which we have noted before as scheduled for an early
death, the tale veers into something like modern psychology under the title of Narcissism, without
violence either to the story line or to our theories. Many psychological interpretations of ancient
stories are forced and end up as weak explanations, but this one is true to life from beginning to
end. Turning the person into a symbolically related nature-form, fits in well with the spirit of
ancient animism, which sees person-like forces in all growing life forms., but here we study in
reverse the etiology of such a situation.
This story shows such sensitivity to matters of the personality and mind, that we might suspect
that we should find other tales fashioned on a similar last. There are very few others that ring right
in the same way. The ancients had very different view of the mind from ours, even the redoubtable
Aristotle maintained that the heart and not the brain was the seat of the mind and emotions, and
only Socrates with his mention of the demon that said "no" (like the superego), points in our
direction. This may not be an indications that the Greeks were primitive or psychologically inept,
it may suggest that our commonly accepted psychological lore is only a function of our society's
way of thinking about itself, and that it may have no more universal applicability than a national
diet or a way of dressing. The fast changes in the theory of psychological science in the last
hundred years points to something like this, perhaps when more durable theories begin to appear,
we will have a clue that we are looking in the right direction.
The story of Protesilaos, the first man to leap ashore at Troy at the "beachhead" to be immediately
killed, has an interesting development. His youthful wife Laodamia who stayed at home was so
distressed at the news of his death that, by special deic permission, her husband was allowed to
come back and spend three hours with her, after which he left and she killed herself. We are
apparently dealing in this story with a crossing of the lines of reality and psychic sensation, by
which the appearance of a dead person is taken as a real visit arranged by some sort of special
dispensation. Nobody in the ancient world questions the apparitions that appear in trances and
dream, they are taken as absolute reality, as evidence of the lines of communication that exist
between us and the denizens of the other world.. Our explanation, that there remain in the
memory-bank imprinted patterns of familiar persons which automatically rerun themselves in the
mind, creating the "illusion" of persons, is much more complicated than the ancient assumption of
absolute reality, and even in our sophisticated and highly educated world, they constitute
something of a strain on credibility to persons unread in modern psychology. Our views seem to
us better than those of the ancient peoples, yet the fact that we would not easily accept their
premises should be balanced by the fact that they would be amazed by our unbelievable
assumptions.
The story of Laodamia parallels the rescue of Orpheus' wife Eurydice. Assuming what one "sees"
to be reality may be a perfectly natural reaction, but most of us would feel that believing it to be
absolutely true is surely being credulous. And yet that kind of credulousness is at the core of our
esthetic predisposition to the worlds of art, poetry and religion, where the men and women of
today seem to have more trouble with the price of admission than the ancients did. Insight into the
ways other peoples have reacted to suggested images may help us to understand more about
ourselves, since we too continue to have these imaged apparitions, even if we interpret them as
dreams in a world of fact.
A previous section (Chapter) has dealt with Orpheus as patron saint of poetry and song, we can
limit ourselves here to the parts of the Orphic experience which have a psychological content. The
poet is the one person in a primitive society who has direct access to the mesmerizing pulses of
rhythmic wording, song and dance, with which aids he can seem to accomplish almost anything.
Such a man can record feats long past and the deeds of famous men many years dead, this is his
basic bardic function. When he calls up persons long dead, transfers the hearer to a far distant
place, even perhaps to a place which has never been seen, he raises people to a level of intensity
and vivification which they later will refer to as "stepping out of one's body", which is the
meaning of the Greek word "ecstasy". Since the Orphic poet collapses time and space, he can
symbolically overcome Death. Transferring the symbolic to the real, Orpheus can (almost) bring
back the dead from Hades, but in his quest for Euridice, the fatal flaw emerges. As long as he
thinks of her, he can bring her back in his own mind, but when he actually turns around and looks,
she disappears. As a striking parallel the Pythagorean Symbola state that looking back (as the core
of neurotic distraction) must be strictly avoided.
The stories about Protosilaus and Orpheus share what apparently was a common Greek belief in
the reality of what we call a memory-recalled illusion. If Laodamia sees her dead husband, God
sent him there for a last good-bye, but the terminus of the visit is preordained and it will be no
surprise when he leaves. (She kills herself, but that is out of desperation, not disappointment.) But
in the story of Eurydice, the termination of the vision was not anticipated by Orpheus, who
thought he was really bringing back his wife from the dead by the power of his gift of song. The
catch was hidden in the order not to look back. Orpheus ruins his own achievement by not
performing the ritual just as he was instructed, he does look back, and so terminates the operation.
There are some things which we all do even though we shouldn't, we feel an uncontrollable desire
to scratch our nose while the dentist is drilling, our eye drifts uncontrollably and looks at the one
person we didn't want to be caught staring at, and Orpheus could be counted on to have just such a
flaw. Eurydice disappeared in fact, because she was only in her husband's eye; but the Greek says
she was really there in the flesh, and when Orpheus did the forbidden thing and looked at her, he
terminated her retrieval by his own error. This is quite different from saying that she was not really
there, or that he only thought she was there. This approach to the story preserves the illusion as
reality.
Another way of looking at this myth, thinking not of role and orders and responsibility, is to
remember that Eurydice's existence as they returned from Hades was only in Orpheus' mind, and
he could have kept her that way, in his mind, forever. The mind is one organ of vision, but he
turned his other organ of vision, his actual eye, on the space where he thought she was,...... of
course there was nothing there. Had he not looked she would have stayed forever with him, safe in
his mind.
Of course this is all dependent on one's sense of what is the final reality. If the eye is the ultimate
test of reality, the heaven which many religions speak of is a pitiful illusion, but on the other hand
if heaven is reality, as classical Lutheran theology taught, this life is something like a photographic
negative, a very partial view and quite illusory. Science would have seemed earlier in this century
to have opted for a factual and observable world-view, but the developments in physics in the last
generation have pointed to a mythic world where abstract values which are hardly graspable by
most of us constitute the final truth behind everything. Perhaps it is the mind and not the eye
which decides the final assessment of what is true and real.
Chapter 12
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Land and Climate in the Greek Myths
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------It would indeed be surprising if the body of Greek myths did not make specific mention of the
lands and countries in which the stories took place, or were supposed to have taken place.
However, many of the myths show transposed place names, stories which are clearly set in the
older Middle East, are titles with Greek place names, and told to Greeks as if they were in fact
Greek stories. When an Athenian hears the name Erechtheus, and beside it Erichthonius, he has
little idea that there is a connection between Athens and the name of one of the royal house of
Troy, even less that this name goes back to a Sumerian tradition. Many myths show a functional
type of transposition of locale; for example, if Achilles is connected with the Euxine area and
tamed horses, he can equally well be put in a place more familiar to Greeks, like Thessaly, since it
is also known for horse-raising. Not all such examples can be proven as to place of origin, but the
process seems to occur repeatedly, and is natural at a time when populations are moving around.
In the United States one finds not only many Burlingtons and Bristols and Yorks, buts also Athens'
and Romes, with a thread of cultural connection, thin but still intact. So was it in Greece, which
seems the beginning of our Western tradition; it was equally well the tail end of a much older Near
Eastern tradition.
Atlas was punished for his participation in the revolt of the Titans (which were underground,
volcanic forces) against Zeus god of the sky, and as punishment sent to the far West where he was
to hold apart heaven and earth. Mount Atlas, reaching up into the sky, was the later geographic
reification of this story. The interesting thing is that the same phrase "holding apart heaven and
earth", occurs often in the Vedic literature. Apparently the physical base of this story is the fact
that the clouds, sun, planets, and stars do not fall down, that is, they do not obey the law of
gravitation which we see working everywhere around us. "What hold the heavens up" is a
perfectly reasonable question if one assumes that what is up there has mass, and that gravity
operates at all distances. A counter force equal to the mass of what is up there would be required,
and an early thinker constructs the figure of a "being" of infinite strength. Later this is tied to the
story of Heracles, the man of great strength, and the two stories are conflated.
Not only do volcanoes cast fiery material up into the skies, they also slowly form great mountains,
of which flowed lava is the significant reminder. Strata uplifted at distorted angles in ancient times
tell the same story, that there are forces under the ground which are trying to push up, and
presumably eventually take over heaven. Atlas holds heaven up, while Zeus pushes the volcanic
disturbances down, actually the relationship and balance between these two forces amounts to
what modern geologists term "isostasy". Atlas in his humble way is only trying to maintain
isostasy.
The Cyclopes are the traditional smiths and artificers of Zeus' fiery thunderbolts. In the encounter
of Odysseus with Polyphemus, whose name literally means "he who speaks much, the loud talker",
the identity of Cyclops with volcanoes becomes clear. Odyssey puts out the one eye of the monster,
which is patterned on the red rim of an active volcano, with a burning brand. When Odysseus is on
ship again he taunts the monster, who roars and hurls huge stones at him, clear evidence of his
volcanic origin.
The sheep of the Cyclops compare directly with the sheep of the god Indra in the Vedic myth
cycles, which represent rain clouds and are of prime importance to the whole country. When stolen
they must be found and brought back. The stolen sheep of Apollo mentioned at the beginning of
the Odyssey must be of similar origin, and those emerging from volcanic eruptions seem to
present certain similarities with the Vedic storyline. In any case there are many correspondences
between Vedic and early Greek myths, as MacDonnell noted years ago in his work on Vedic
Mythology. The volcanic and chthonic deities stand in general opposition to the celestial divinities
of the open sky, which are assumed to have come into Greece with the Dorian invasion. But until
we know more about the materials still couched unread in the Linear A Mycenean-Minoan tablets,
it seems safer to leave the matter open. If Rhys Carpenter's theories about desiccation of the
Aegean area after the l4th century B.C. are correct, the incursion of Indo-European speaking
Dorians who conquered the autochthonous population(which is still not identified) is likely to be a
guess and nothing more.
The underworld realms of Hades call to mind two facts: first that there are more than l5,000 linear
miles of caves underlying the greater part of Europe, and also that during the various glacial
periods these caves were the home of man as well as a variety other animals. We find at the
present time that a surface temperature of about zero Fahrenheit contrasts with subsurface
temperatures in the forties at a depth of less than a dozen feet. Inhabitants of our planet older than
Man have observed this difference, and profited by it, from the semi-active rabbit and bear to the
fully winterized woodchuck who has developed a metabolic rate suitable for true hibernation. All
this is dependent on the relatively sharp temperature differential between the surface and the earth
a few feet down, and early Man was not likely to miss this important fact. The documentation for
this historical phase of Man's domiciling lies in the myriad cave-paintings which underly Europe.
It has been estimated that there are at least l75,000 separate figures painted in the caves, and the
configuration and organization of the painting may eventually prove to be a sophisticated form of
communication, equivalent to writing. Man's dwelling in caves is natural, life-preserving, efficient
in glacial times, and well documented.
The world of Hades is drawn graphically from the world of the caves. "Ghosts" live there, the
spirits of the dead, but when we look more carefully at what Homer calls the "forceless heads of
the dead" which flit by Odysseus in his underworld venture, we note the similarity to the flight of
sonar-guided bats who whirr past modern day spelunkers as unerringly as they did two thousand
years ago. Two ounce bats are "forceless" indeed, but their flight is even more remarkable in its
accuracy. They seem unreal, like ghosts, which is what the Greeks thought they were. The
"hateful" rivers of the underworld, with Styx as a literal example (Gr. 'styg-' ="hate"), are the dead,
unoxygenated waters which flow beneath the earth. Cerberus of the three mouths is probably
nothing more than the triple echo of the sounds of cave-dwellers calling out to each other in the
infernal darkness. Lacking physical understanding of sound waves, reflection and echoes, ancient
men would naturally infer a real agent, so that a muted, echoing roar would be taken as the sound
of the Dog of Hell. The less known river, Pyriplegithron "the burning, fiery one". may show
knowledge of underground coal-gas or methane conflagrations, spontaneously combusted.
The spirit of life can be thought of as going upwards as life ceases, joining the gods and merging
heavenward with the smoke of cremation. But if bodies are buried, it would be clear that water
washes the deteriorated human remains downwards, eventually to the aquifer. (When Dido dies at
the end of Book 4 of the Aeneid, part of her goes down and part goes up, a concession to both
burial systems.) Wealth lies below, as discovery of metals proves, and the god Ploutos symbolizes
the wealth of the underworld.
Mushrooms which grow saprophytically without need for sunlight are consonant with the culture
of the underworld life, but when the glaciers withdraw and Zeus makes the overworld fertile again,
men come out of their caves and take advantages of what chlorophyllic plants can do for them.
Strangely, there seems to be a clear line of demarcation between the modern mycophobic and
mycophilic peoples of Europe, which might well be explained by knowing who left the cave world
last. But even later, when men live in the sunlight again, they retain the images and folk-memories
of their underworld sojourn, and from this material they create the mythology of the "other" world,
the world which they feel obtains after death. Rather than thinking of Western man's underworld
mythology as figurative, we should recall that after living for millennia in caves, people would
naturally retain some memory of his cave-life. Using this as a shadowy backcast to above-earth
living, they create the kind of duality of existence which human minds seem to favor. Recall that
this process has a foot in history, and analysis of the underworld myth s should be aware of this
point.
The Song of the Sirens presents something of a puzzle, since music is generally thought to be
pleasing and soothing, not threatening and destructive. The evidence concerning the appearance of
the Sirens is twofold: On the one hand they are said to be birdlike with the faces of women.
(Sailors in the last two centuries have averred that they actually saw mermaids, fish with womens'
heads, which modern oceanographers take to be the way porpoises and seals might have looked to
the eyes of sex-starved men too long at sea. Could a similar visual phenomenon be involved with
the ancient Greek accounts?) On the other hand, we might well consider the reactions of men who
lived in a simpler acoustic world than ours, who would have been far more profoundly affected by
auditory stimuli than we can imagine. The whistling of wind through narrow passages in the rocks
may have had a totally different acoustic value to them, and it is this matter of acoustic
susceptibility which may tell us something about the song of the Sirens. We know from drama and
poetry that Greeks were far more susceptible to suggested visual imagery than we are, it may well
be that their impressions of a poem or a play approach the immediacy and dynamism we find in a
well crafted cinematic performance, which makes the audience feel it is actually "there". Music
seems to have impressed the Greeks just as deeply, and this continued well into the Classical
period; different scales or "modes" suggested excitement, quiet, contemplation, or even
frightening ecstasy. With a wider acoustic-psychological range, the Greeks may have felt a
broader spectrum of emotions from music than we know.
It should also be noted that the word "Siren" means in Greek "twinkler", if it is correctly derived
from the rare verb 'seriazein' "to twinkle".(The word is also applied to the planets after the notions
of the Pythagorean school.) Perhaps it was the "twinkling" or accelerated beats of the music which
seem so absorbing to the Greeks, much in the way that the musical third-interval, which produces
about twenty beats per second, seemed un-calming and frenzied to l4 th century Church officials,
who outlawed it from official church use. This suggests that music is indeed a social variable, and
that our way of dealing with sound strictly as an acoustic-phenomenon is unsatisfactory when we
are dealing with peoples at different cultural levels. Whatever the Greek material shows is
extremely valuable, both because of the Greek society's early date in Western history, and also in
the light of the relative fullness of their recording of personal, human reactions. The fact that we
have less than a half dozen fragments of musical score from l500 years of Greek history, and know
only rudimentary facts about Greek music as an art, makes it all the more important to sift data
pertaining to sound and music very carefully.
The name of Nausicaa calls to mind a young princess of great charm, that elegant young lady who
met Odysseus early one morning as he crawled out of this thicket that was his shelter for the night.
The literary world has always been charmed by the freshness of this remarkable encounter, but
there are details which we are likely to miss in our esthetic enthusiasm. Nausicaa leads Odysseus
directly into the city. There are no guards, no walls, no city gates to open, they walk right into the
palace of her parents, who are the rulers of the island. What could be more reminiscent of the
sea-kingdom of Minos which Evans so carefully outlined as the result of his archaeological
research at Cnossos? This is a thalassocracy, protected by the broad seas, without need of the usual
defenses again land enemies, such as we find around the walled town of Mycene. The ruler to
whom Nausicaa introduces her guest is the queen, Arete (perhaps meaning "she who is to be
prayed to"; there is no connection with 'arete" "honor")), the king is clearly sitting beside her as a
modified consort.. The majority of the people whom Odysseus meets there are ship oriented, most
of their names are palpably sea-fictionalized, like "Fast-sail", "Mr. Quick",and so forth. When the
games begin, the lightness of limb of the natives is contrasted with the stalwart heaviness of our
Greek hero, they even mock him lightly as a ship's captain with his eye on profit. He can't play at
their dancy games, instead he hurls a huge rock past the mark as his kind of feat, which is
reminiscent of the Scottish hammer throw.
This and other details, which correspond to what we know of the Cretan thalassocracy, and are
portrayed in some detail in the remarkable (but heavily reconstructed) Cnossan wall-paintings,
suggests that the author of the Odyssey had access to information about Crete as a living culture.
The court of Nausicaa may not actually be located on Crete at Cnossos, but it is probably not far
away. Homer even has a strange locution about "the present home of the Phaeacians", which
implies that they had migrated to the small island of Phaeacia from somewhere else, `perhaps from
Crete. ()
The Etesian Winds (from Gr. 'etos' "year", hence annual winds) blow out of the north over the
Aegean area in July August and September. It is related that at one times the Cyclades island
group was drought-stricken for a long period. They summoned Aristaeos to come to their aid, he
did and made offerings to Zeus and Sirius, whereupon the Etesian Winds came and relieved the
drought.
Several details must be noted. Aristaeos was the son of Apollo by the nymph Cyrene, whom
Apollo carried off and relocated at the Cyrene in North Africa, a city named after her. This
connection with North Africa suggests a familiarity with problems of drought and desiccation.
Aristaeos was named as a deity presiding over beekeeping. This area of husbandry would be
especially sensitive to climatic changes, since bees father the entire supply of their nectar from the
flowering plants of Compositae in a period of a few weeks in springtime. Anything that affects
flowering plants, touches beekeeping, under which heading Aristaeos is consulted as a suitable
authority. The priests of the Cycladic communities would have had two reasons to call on
Aristaeos: He knew about bees, and the drought had already shrunk their honey flow. Furthermore
he was connected with Cyrene and knew about North African wind circulation, and could thus aid
them.
At the core of this story is knowledge of a time when the islands were affected by a severe period
of drought. After consultation, praying and a presumably a great deal of waiting, the winds did
come and continued to come year after year, so that the country did not have to be abandoned.
This subject leads us to take a look at the remarkable theory of Rhys Carpenter which touches on
this problem.
In his slim volume Evidences of Discontinuity......... () Rhys Carpenter proposes a radical
explanations of some occurrences in the second millennium B.C., which he feels influenced
history dramatically. The books is so short and compressed that it seems inadvisable to give a
summary of it here, other than to mention the explosion of Santorini which indirectly caused
changes in the cross-European wind-cycles. All of Greece was affected by a climate shift in the
direction of desiccation, which made the country uninhabitable by the time of the Trojan
expedition. The various burned archaeological sites, he feels, are the result of desiccation and
accident, in fact they had been abandoned long before the fires, since the inhabitants had fled to
the north, perhaps as far as Hungary and Southern Germany, where rainfall was more plentiful.
There are many problems connected with a theory which is of so ancient a time and so sweepingly
general. But if it proves itself with the climatologists of the ancient Mediterranean, it can explain
many things. First, the flourishing Minoan and Mycenean communities of the second millennium
B.C. simply disappeared from the face of the earth. If they were conquered by invaders, the
invaders disappeared also, which is very odd. Second, Herodotos speaks of the "return of the
descendants of Heracles", which historians have felt was a statement referring to the so-called
Dorian invasion (of Greek speaking Indo-Europeans). But since we know from the Linear B
documents that Greek was used for many centuries before, and the word "return" is ignored, we
can understand Herodotos' statement to mean: "Some long time after the Greeks had left Hellas,
their descendants did return to the country, wearing bearskins and using crude Neolithic weapons
like clubs, which accorded well with the description of Heracles... "
Interpretation of the Heracles myth adds material to Rhys Carpenter's contention, which is far too
important to be discussed in a summary manner. A review of his book and study of what we know
about ancient climatology is suggested for anyone who finds this crossing of the Heracles myth
and the disappearance of the Minoan population an interesting subject.
Aeolus is described as the son of Hellen (ancestor of the Hellenes, Hellenic etc.) as the founder of
the Aeolian or Eastern-Greek ethnic group. In the Odyssey he ties up adverse winds in a leather
bag which he gives to Odysseus to assure a safe home-voyage, later myths refer to him as
controller or king of the winds, in which role he persists through the ages.
Magical control of the winds only becomes important when seafaring is an critical part of a
nation's life. If Aeolus is representative of the Aeolian islands and western Asia Minor, and also
controller of the winds, he must be pivotal in some major trade route, probably the passage of
ships from the Mediterranean into the economically valuable Euxine Sea. He is thus the priest who
performs wind-magic, as well as a king who has the power to manipulate naval trade routes,
possibly less a mythic symbol than a real figure in the historical record.
The Oedipous story is not without spiritual meaning, but it terminates in a different place and a
different way from what we anticipate. After years of wandering, blind and guilt ridden, Oedipous
does find release at the sanctuary of (Athenian) Colonos. What we have failed to notice is that the
sign of his release is evidenced in Sophocles play, which is presumably following and ancient
tradition, by the 'tri-kumia', a "triple wave". This is the exact mark of the tides reversing, a
phenomenon well known to mariners, modern and ancient. Current manuals on tides list this
triple-wave as the sign which marks the reversal of the tidal flow, and we can assume that this
would not have been unknown to a seafaring people as observing as the ancient Greeks. However
the tidal effect in the open parts of the Mediterranean is hardly noticeable, although in long and
narrow bodies of water (such as the Adriatic Sea) it is clearly identifiable. A detailed study of tide
measurements in various Aegean waters should give us a roster of which places are and which are
not suitable for this scene.
As the flow of this life ebbs, and the beginning of another force of flow starts, Oedipous (exactly
at this moment) leaves life and enters into the mysterious, uncharted waters of the next world. The
suffering of his lifetime is understood to be only part of the greater order of things, and Oedipous
embarks on another journey which we can divine but never map. Yet we suspect, as the Greeks
surely knew, that it is there!