Eurydice (249): see Orpheus.
Fates (Gk. Mόîραι, Lat. Parcae) (24 f., 108, 139): the implacable goddesses of destiny, equivalent to the Norms of Nordic mythology; they were thought of as three old women spinning the thread of human life.
Fauns (39, 173): see Satyrs.
Furies (called in Gk. ‘Eριvυες) (25 f.): spirits of vengeance who executed curses, pursued and tormented the guilty, and brought about famines and pestilences. In later sources there are three of them, with the names that Goethe uses, though he deliberately trivializes their roles.
Galatea (112, 120 f.): a sea-nymph, the favourite daughter of the old sea-god Nereus (q.v.), who thinks of her (8144-9) as inheriting the functions of Aphrodite (q.v.) and sharing her divinity. Galatea riding on a chariot of shells was a motif in paintings by Raphael which Goethe had seen in Rome. He introduces her at the climax of the sea-pageant as if to emphasize her special importance.
Gorgon (249): a female monster with terrifying attributes, such as snakes growing out of her head instead of hair and eyes that turned anyone who looked at her to stone. Homer mentions only one gorgon, other sources three (Sthenno, Euryale, and Medusa; see also Phorcyads). The hero Perseus (q.v.), with divine assistance, killed and decapitated Medusa.
Graces (23 f., 112): the goddesses personifying social charm and attractiveness, usually three in number (Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne), but in Athenian tradition the name Hegemone is also found, which Goethe adopts possibly to avoid confusion with the Muse Thalia.
Graiae (131): see Phorcyads.
Griffin or Gryphon (Gk. γρυψ) (81, 96, 192 f., 246): a gold-guarding monster with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The Griffins lived in the remote north-east of the known world, like their enemies the Arimaspians; the historian Herodotus compared them to pedantic, grumpy old men, a motif which Goethe adopts in 7093 ff. In medieval times the griffin was adopted as a heraldic animal (cf. 10625 ff., where its hybrid shape also befits the false emperor).
Hades (144, 171): the god of the underworld, whose name was later extended to refer to the underworld itself. Originally his domain fell to him by lot, as the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, who became gods of the sky and the sea respectively. Hades, who carried off and married Persephone, was also euphemistically called Pluto (Gk. Πλουτων, ‘the giver of riches’, because metals were found under the earth).
Harpies (134, 246): wind-demons who carried off persons or things (Gk. αρπαζω, ‘snatch’) and defiled food as it was being eaten. They were portrayed as winged women or birds with women’s faces.
Hebe (90): a daughter of Zeus, who poured out nectar for the gods and personified eternal youth, like the Nordic goddess Freya. She conducted favoured mortals to Olympus and became the wife of Hercules when he joined the immortals there.
Hecate (105): see Diana.
Helen (Helena) (50, 60-3, 84, 90-3, Act III passim): a mortal daughter of Zeus, said to have been born of an egg (9521) laid by Leda, queen of Sparta, after Zeus had visited her in the form of a swan. She was reputedly the most beautiful of all women, and renowned for her fatal attractiveness to men. After marrying Menelaus (q.v.), who then became king of Sparta, she was abducted by the Trojan prince Paris (q.v.), thus occasioning the war of the Greeks against Troy; according to another story, however, Zeus allowed only a phantom of her to go to Troy, and removed the real Helen to Egypt for safe keeping during the war (8872 f.). Among many other legends about her and her lovers is that in which she and the hero Achilles (q.v.) are for a time miraculously united after death (8876 ff., 7435) and she bears him a son called Euphorion (q.v.)). For Goethe’s use of this story and of the figure of Helen generally, see Introd., passim.
Helios (117, 173): the sun-god (Gk. ηλιος, sun); see Apollo.
Hercules (Gk. Heracles) (84, 90, 135): the son of Zeus and Alcmena, a mortal woman whom the god seduced by impersonating her husband Amphitryon. Their son became the most famous of the Greek heroes, having legendary strength and endurance. He performed twelve seemingly impossible tasks (the ‘labours of Hercules’), killed various monsters, and was eventually raised to Olympus and worshipped as a god.
Hermaphrodite (109): originally from the name (‘Eρμαϕρóδιτος) of a son of Hermes and Aphrodite whose body became joined to that of a nymph; hence, a being having the physical characteristics of both sexes (‘hermaphroditical’, 8256).
Hermes (90, 144, 161 f.): son of Zeus and the goddess Maia, identified by the Romans with their god Mercurius (Mercury). He acted as messenger to the other gods and as guide of departed souls to the underworld (9116 ff.). He was thought to have been born in Arcadia (q.v.), and was especially associated with merchants, thieves, bodily agility, clever speech, and mischievous exploits (9644-78).
Hippocampus (117): a sea-horse with front hooves and a dolphin’s tail.
Hours (4 (Gk. ‘Ωραι, Lat. Horae)): strictly, these were goddesses personifying the seasons or other fixed periods of the natural cycle. They were thought of as daughters of Zeus and attendants on the gods. Homer (Iliad, book v) describes them as the keepers of the gates of the sky; later they were especially associated with the sun-god.
Ibycus (98 (‘Cranes of Ibycus’)): the poet Ibycus was killed by bandits as a flock of cranes passed overhead; later, the murderers saw the birds again, and were stricken by this avenging omen into confessing their guilt. The story is told in one of Schiller’s ballads.
Icarus (169): son of the legendary master craftsman Daedalus. He succeeded in flying with the pair of wings his father had made for him out of feathers and wax, but flew so near the sun that the wax melted and he fell into the sea.
Ilium (Ilion) (112): see Troy.
Jason (90): leader of the Argonauts (q.v.). His uncle Pelias had usurped his kingdom in Thessaly, but promised to restore it if Jason brought him the Golden Fleece from Colchis. The sorceress Medea, daughter of the king of Colchis, helped Jason to carry it off and eloped with him to Greece, where she took revenge on his enemies and later on Jason himself by killing their two children after he had deserted her.
Juno (108, 175): wife of Jupiter (see Zeus); she was identified by the Romans with Zeus’s wife Hera.
Jupiter: see Zeus.
Lamiae (85, 99 ff., 248): vampire-like monsters who fed on human flesh and blood and took on attractive female shapes to entice their victims.
Leda (175): wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta; loved by Zeus, who took the shape of a swan to visit her, and by whom she became the mother of Helen and the Dioscuri (see Twins).
Lemurs (Lat. lemures) (221-4): restless ghosts of the dead. Goethe had seen an ancient tomb near Naples on which they were portrayed as skeletons with still enough muscles and sinews to enable them to move.
Lernaean snake (Lernaean Hydra) (85): a monstrous water-serpent in the marshes of Lerna near Argos, with many heads, which multiplied as they were hacked off; it was killed by Hercules with the help of a companion who sealed the stumps with firebrands.
Lethe (3, 68, 250): in Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the rivers of the underworld, whose water when drunk by the dead caused them to forget their earthly lives (Gk. ληθη, oblivion); hence, death or forgetfulness generally.
Leto (94): a goddess loved by Zeus, who became the mother of Apollo and Artemis (Diana); see Delos.
Leuce (250): an island in the western Black Sea on which the shade of Helen was allowed to meet that of Achilles, on condition that she did not leave Leuce (see Euphorion, Pherae).
Luna (61, 105): the moon-goddess (Gk. Σεληνη; see Diana). She was said to have loved the beautiful youth Endymion and descended to him as he lay asleep in a cave.
Lynceus (90, 147-51, 210 f., 214 f.): one of the Argonaut heroes, gifted with far sight; his name (Λυγκηιως) is evidently derived from ‘lynx’ (λυγξ).
Maia (161): a goddess, the daughter of the Titan Atlas, who became the mother of Hermes by Zeus.
Manto (92 f., 249 f.): an aged prophetess or sibyl
, also seen as a Thessalian sorceress paralleling Erichtho in her ability to raise the dead. According to the received mythological tradition her father was the blind seer Tiresias; but in his final version of Act II Goethe makes her a daughter of Aesculapius (q.v.), the god of healing, in order to emphasize her therapeutic role towards Faust (7446-51, 7487). He also invents her story of having guided Orpheus to the underworld (7493), as the Cumaean sibyl guided Virgil’s Aeneas (Aeneid, book vi). (See Introd., pp. xxii, xxxv, xxxvii.)
Marsi (119): see Psylli.
Menelaus (124, 135, 140, 153): younger brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae; as husband of Helen he succeeded her putative father Tyndareus as king of Sparta. The elopement of Helen with the Trojan prince Paris provoked the expedition of the Greeks against Troy, which Agamemnon commanded.
Muses (Gk. Moυσαι, Lat. Musae) (95): the goddesses who inspired men to poetry, music (μουσικη τεξνη, the art named after them), and other intellectual achievements. They were associated with Apollo (q.v.) and Parnassus (q.v.), but their number, names, and attributes varied.
Neptune (114, 117, 222): see Poseidon.
Nereids (44, 110, 113 f., 247): sea-nymphs, daughters of Nereus (q.v.).
Nereus (in ff., 119-22): an ancient sea-god, whose cult probably preceded that of Poseidon in this role. Being benevolent and gifted with prophecy, he was said to have warned Paris of the disastrous consequences of his abduction of Helen (8109 ff.).
Nestor (154): the king of Pylos in Messenia, who took part as an old man in the Trojan War.
Oedipus (84): son of Laius, king of Thebes, who exposed him on a mountainside as an infant because a prophecy foretold that he would kill his father and many his mother; he survived and was brought up by foster-parents in Corinth, but returned to Thebes, was welcomed as a hero after killing a monstrous sphinx by guessing its riddle, and unwittingly fulfilled both parts of the prophecy.
Olympus (92 f, 112): the highest mountain in Greece, at the eastern end of the range dividing Thessaly from Macedonia (see map). Its summit (2985m) or the sky above it was believed to be the dwelling of Zeus and the other gods (the ‘Olympians’ as distinct from the Titans (q.v.) who preceded them).
Ops (108): see Rhea.
Oread (102): a mountain-nymph (Gk. ớρος, mountain); cf. the chorus of mountain-nymphs, 9999-10004.
Orion (133): a giant renowned as a huntsman, who had already been exalted to heaven as a constellation in Homer’s time. Since he belonged to the very remote past, the Chorus’s suggestion that his nurse must have been Phorcyas’s great-great-granddaughter implies that Phorcyas herself is a hag of even more repulsive antiquity.
Orpheus (90, 93, 249): the legendary pre-Homeric poet and inventor of poetry, supposed to have taken part in the expedition of the Argonauts and to have been gifted with magical powers of song which could move animals, trees, and rocks. Seeking to recover his wife Eurydice from the dead, he descended to the underworld (7493), and by his music persuaded its queen, Persephone, to allow her to follow him to the world of the living, but on condition that he should not look back at her until they reached it; this condition he broke at the last moment, losing her for ever.
Pan (38-42, 46, 157, 172): god of forests and pastures, responsible for the fertility of flocks and herds and said to be native to Arcadia. He was represented with a human face, torso, and arms but the legs, ears, and horns of a goat, and is thus akin to the Satyrs (q.v.) (fauns) and sileni (see Silenus). As a symbol of the wildness and phallic potency of life, he was reputedly a lustful pursuer of nymphs, one of whom was Echo (cf. 10002 ff.); destroyed for resisting his advances, she survived only as a voice repeating the last words of what she hears. Pan was said to haunt woods and mountains and caves and to cause sudden groundless ‘panic’ fear (‘Pan’s dread voice’, 10002). He was frequently called ‘the Great Pan’, and in later times, by confusion of his name (Πν) with the Greek word for ‘all’ (πν), he was sometimes understood as some kind of universal god. The Emperor is disguised as ‘Great Pan’ in the Carnival (Sc. 3).
Paphos (113): see Aphrodite.
Paris (50, 59 f., 112, 142): a son of Priam, king of Troy, to whom it was prophesied that the child would bring destruction on the city; he was exposed in the mountains but rescued, and spent his youth as a shepherd (6459). In the story known as the ‘judgement of Paris’ he was called upon, as the most beautiful of mortal men, to settle a beauty contest between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and awarded the prize to Aphrodite who had promised him the love of the most beautiful of mortal women. Restored later to his family, he was sent on an embassy to Sparta, where King Menelaus’s wife Helen (q.v.) fell in love with him and fled with him to Troy. This brought about the Trojan War, at the end of which Paris was fatally wounded by a poisoned arrow.
Parnassus (95): the high mountain near Delphi, the site of the famous ‘Delphic oracle’ of Apollo; the whole mountain was sacred to Apollo and the Muses, as was the spring named after the nymph Castalia, who threw herself into it when fleeing from the god. The stream runs between two peaks which were sometimes thought of as the mountain’s twin summits (to which Goethe here refers), though the real summit (2460m) is in fact high above them.
Patroclus (135): in Homer’s Iliad, the beloved friend and companion-in-arms of Achilles (q.v.). While the latter, having quarrelled with Agamemnon, remains in his tent refusing to fight, the Greeks come close to defeat, and Patroclus begs his friend to allow him to rejoin the war on his behalf. Achilles lends him his own armour to terrify the Trojans (hence ‘lookalike’, 8855), but Patroclus is killed by the Trojan leader Hector. The grief-stricken Achilles turns his rage against Troy, and fights and kills Hector, which seals the fate of the city.
Peleus (44): a mortal descended from Zeus who became king of Phthia in Thessaly and married the sea-nymph Thetis, daughter of the old sea-god Nereus; their only child was Achilles, who is frequently referred to as ‘the Peleid’.
Pelion and Ossa (95): two high mountains south-east of Olympus; giants rebelling against Zeus piled the one on top of the other and both on Olympus, in an attempt to scale the heavens.
Pelops (166): a descendant of Zeus who became the ruler of the whole southern peninsula of Greece, thereafter known as the Peloponnese (Πλοπος νσος, ‘island of Pelops’); see map.
Peneus (76, 86, 93): as the principal river of Thessaly (see map), the Peneus becomes a symbolic point of reference for the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ scenes, eventually leading down to its outflow into the Aegean for the last of these (cf. note to p. 78, ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’). It is personified as a god (7249-56) and attended by nymphs and sirens. Faust’s lines 7271-306 associate it in a dream-like way with the begetting of Helen and thus with the river Eurotas (q.v.).
Persephone (Lat. Proserpina) (93, 170 f., 249): daughter of the earth-mother Demeter; Hades (Pluto) carried her off and made her queen of the underworld. She was allowed to return to her mother during part of every year, her story thus symbolizing the annual growth of corn and the cycle of death and life.
Perseus (xxxix): a son of Zeus by Danae, a princess imprisoned in a tower to whom the god descended in the form of golden rain. His most famous exploit was the killing of the monstrous Gorgon (q.v.) Medusa; Goethe seems to have liked this story, to which Mephistopheles alludes twice in Part One (4194, 4208).
Pherae (91): a city in Thessaly, ruled by Admetus, whose wife Alcestis was brought back from the dead by Hercules after voluntarily sacrificing her life for her husband. By substituting ‘Pherae’ for ‘Leuce’ in 7435, Goethe deliberately associates this well-known story with that of the post-mortal encounter of Helen with Achilles on the island of Leuce (q.v.), which he uses as the main parallel to Helen’s union with Faust and to which he refers elsewhere, mentioning the traditionally correct venue (see Euphorion, Leuce). In 7435 Helen and Achilles meet ‘on [auf] Pherae’; the preposition, which suggests an island, is possibly an oversight.
Philemon and Baucis (Act
V, Sc. 17-19): Ovid (Metamorphoses, book VIII) retells the Greek story of how Zeus and Hermes were travelling incognito in Phrygia and were refused hospitality by everyone until a poor but pious couple took them in. The gods punished the rest of the people by causing a flood to engulf the land, but rewarded Philemon and Baucis by turning their hut into a temple and granting their wish to die together; the husband was turned into an oak and his wife into a linden-tree. For the indirect connection between this story and the opening scenes of Act V, see Introd., p. lxiii and note.
Philyra (88): an ocean-nymph who became the mother of the centaur Chiron (q.v.); appalled at having given birth to a monster, she asked to be turned into a linden-tree (ϕιλρα).
Phoebus (94): one of the names of Apollo, associating him particularly with the sun.
Phorcyads (107 ff.): three hags, also known as the Graiae, representing extreme old age and ugliness; they lived in a remote, dark place, sharing one eye and one tooth between them. Like their sisters and neighbours the Gorgons (q.v.), they were daughters of the sea-ancient Phorcys or Phorcos; Goethe varies the usual Greek form of their name (Φορκδες, Lat. Phorcydes) to Phorkyaden, which I have imitated as ‘Phorcyads’. For his use of the myth generally, see Introd., pp. xxxviii f.
Phorcyas (130-43 and Act III, passim): Mephistopheles in the shape (8027) of one of the Phorcyads (q.v.). Goethe uses ‘Phorcyas’ (his adaptation of the Greek singular form Φορκς, ‘daughter of Phorcos’) virtually as a proper name, instead of’the Phorcyad’; his procedure in the case of’(the) Homunculus’ seems to be similar.
Phorcys, Phorcos (131): see Phorcyads.
Pluto (43, 104 (‘Plutonian’)): see Hades.
Plutus (31-43): a god personifying riches (Gk. πλουτος, wealth; see Hades). Faust assumes the disguise of Plutus in the Carnival (see Introd., pp. xxv f. and note), but Goethe has ignored the tradition which represents Plutus as blind.
Poseidon (124): the brother of Zeus and Hades, to whom it fell by lot to be the ruler of the seas, though he was also responsible for earthquakes (in Homer he is ‘the earth-shaker’). As an important god embodying and controlling elemental forces, he enjoyed an ancient and widespread cult; the Romans came to identify him with their water god Neptune. He was represented as stirring up the ocean with a trident, or riding across it with brazen-hooved horses. He was said to have fathered various monsters, including the one-eyed ‘Cyclops’ giants encountered by Ulysses during his voyage.
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