by Jack Lindsay
Vase painters did not know of the episode of Eris or the Apple at Thetis’ marriage, or ignored it. Take a mixing-bowl painted by Sophilos about 560. Peleus stands with wine-cup to greet the deities coming to honour him; Thetis is apparently inside the house. Iris with herald wand leads the guests. First is a group on foot, in which appears Themis with a triad of Nymphs; then five chariots driven by deities in pairs, with Muses, Graces or Fates. No doubt the idea of an ugly disturbance at a ceremony attended by all the high gods was distasteful. But that point underlines the unlikelihood of the Eris episode being originally attached to the scene. The episode was no doubt invented to link the birth of the great hero with the heroine who caused the war in which he fought. The same impulse underlaid the later attempt to bring Helen and Achilles together and to mate them in the spiritworld.
The ancient roots of the theme of birth-fairies is shown by the role of the Seven Hathors in Egyptian folklore. When the god Khnum shapes a woman for Bata, a woman ‘who had fairer limbs than any other in the whole land and every god was in her’, as if each god had brought the gift of his special powers, ‘the Seven Hathors came to see her and said with one mouth: She will die a violent death.’ In the tale of the Enchanted Prince, when a son is born to the king, ‘the Hathors came to decree him his destiny, and they said: He will die by the crocodile or the snake or the dog. The people about the child heard it and repeated it to the king.’ The Hathors are invisible. What they prophesy is the child’s birth-fate. In Ugaritic epic we meet goddesses, the Kosharot, who turn up at births and are called songstresses. In Aqhat they attend the birth for seven days, fed by the father, the king, and are called the ‘daughters of shouting’, the ‘swallows’. Their songs are clearly of great importance to the child, but in what way is not clarified. However, we learn that the craftsman god Kothar brings as a gift a magical bow, which later the goddess Anath covets.[243]
We may surmise then that folktales dealing with the gifts of the triadic birth-fates (Moirai, Graces, Nymphs, Goddesses) were floating about in the eighth century: tales where the hero faced a choice of three ways or chances, tales of three riddles or a riddle with triadic form like that the Sphinx posed for Oidipous. But that does not prove they had crystallized into a story about Paris. What is unusual in the Judgement is the use of an arbitrator. Still, there is a dual aspect. The man chooses one of the fates or goddesses as preferable or superior; but he also chooses which of three gifts he wants for himself. In folktales the first aspect is not rare; we often meet three girls, one of whom is more desirable than the others, eg Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters. Grimm has a tale of a prince who cannot decide between three women and tries a test; and a modern folktale of Corinth combines gifts, arbitration, and the Aktaion-motif of the too-venturesome hero torn to pieces:
There was once a man whom the Nymphs had made rich because they liked him, though he was poor before. One day they suddenly appeared before him and asked him which of them all was most beautiful. But he, cunning fellow, told them that when he saw them all together he could not make out which was the most beautiful; they must come one at a time day after day so that he could look at them closely and then tell them afterwards. The Nymphs accepted this and arranged to go to him one at a time day after day, and when they’d arranged everything they went away. So the Nymphs came to him one by one, and he examined them naked with the utmost freedom. But when he’d finished, they presently came back all together and pressed him to tell which of them all had the most outstanding beauty. He tried to escape them, asking them to come to him again, since he’d found them all so beautiful and didn’t know how to choose. But the Nymphs were angry, for they understood his purpose, and falling upon him they tore him to pieces.[244]
In the Cypria the folk aspect is stressed by the episode of Eris turning up at the wedding of Thetis as the uninvited fairy who upsets the friendly prophecies of the others — though the Apple of Discord with the label ‘For the Fairest’ does not appear in a text before Hyginus.
The apple however does bring us back to birth-gifts. Apples probably had an erotic significance in archaic Greece; but more important is the apple, pomegranate, poppyhead held by the ancient Aegean mother-goddess as her attribute. The link of mother-goddess and such fruits or flowers carried on strongly into classical times.[245] Demeter is often shown with pomegranate or poppy, or both. The image of Athena Victory at Athens had a helmet in its right hand, a pomegranate in its left. Hera’s statue at Argos held a sceptre and a pomegranate; Pausanias adds, ‘I won’t say more about the pomegranate, as the story about it is in the nature of a secret’: that is, it was a myth told during the Mysteries. Hera holds baskets of pomegranates in statuettes from the Heraion in Lucania. More, we find in archaic times the divinized dead shown with pomegranates in their hands. (The man on the Spartan comb may be holding a pomegranate before a triad of goddesses.)[246]
Fruit and seed of the pomegranate are a brilliant red; the seed, kokkos, yielded a dye that provided the word for scarlet, kokkinos. It was felt to be magically related to blood; Hesychios tells us that kokkos was a word used for the female genitals. The fruit’s magical and medicinal use was for menstruation and pregnancy. With Demeter it had the same fertility value as the poppy. It was tabooed in the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Arkadian Mysteries of Despoina. At Athens, women keeping the Thesmophoria did not copulate or eat pomegranates; they slept on beds of withy, thought antagonistic to sex and snakes. Only in a secondary way was the fruit connected with violent death, as when it sprouted from the blood of the Titans, bloomed over the corpse of the suicide Menoikeus, or was planted on the grave of Eteokles by the Erinyes who caused his death. To dream of it portended wounds.[247] There was a special link with Hera. The apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, which were grown for her marriage, were probably quinces or pomegranates. She turned up in the Garden to greet Herakles on his arrival there, and she was ready with a welcome when he came home with the golden apples. Apples or quinces were (and still are) used as offerings of love or marriage. Attic brides were told to eat a quince before lying down to open their bodies to the bridegroom.[248] Stesichoros, describing Helen’s marriage, told of revellers casting quinces at the bridal chariot. To offer the pomegranate-apple was thus to make a gift of fertility or renewed life. The apple of Eris perverted the whole nature of the gift.
In the Judgement the choice is connected with a beauty contest; and this aspect gained ever more stress in later literature and art. Some scholars have seen in the beauty contest the original inspiration of the Judgement motif. Such contests seem to have grown up in the cults of Hera and Demeter. We have no evidence for them before the mid-seventh century, but they may have existed for some time before that. Nikias in his History of Arkadia related how Kypselos, after founding a city in the plain of the Alpheios with a precinct and altar dedicated to Demeter of Eleusis, instituted a beauty contest where the first winner was his own wife. ‘The contest is held even now,’ adds Pausanias, ‘and the women who enter are called Gold-wearers. Theophrastos says there’s a beauty contest of men in Elis, the trial being held in all solemnity, with weapons as prizes. These, says Dionysios of Leuktra, are dedicated to Athena; and the winner, bound with a headband by his friends, leads the procession to her temple. But the crown for winners is of myrtle, as Myrsilos records in his Historical Paradoxes.’ In some places prizes were given to women for sobriety and housekeeping; Tenedos and Lesbos stuck to beauty contests. (Tenedos, an island near Troy, was said to have the loveliest women; and a fragment of Alkaios attests to the Lesbian contests.) Pausanias also tells us that the chest of Kypselos had the Judgement scene: Hermes bringing the Three Goddesses. ‘Why Artemis has wings on her shoulders I don’t know; in her right hand she grips a leopard, in her left a lion.’ She was represented as the Lady of Wild Things.[249]
Athenaios says that at Elis the winner carried the vessels of the goddess (? Hera), the runner-up led the ox, the man with third place set the preliminary offerings on the fire. He the
n goes on to tell how the Spartans admired beautiful men and women, ‘the loveliest women in the world being born in Sparta’, and how kingship should be allied with physical beauty. He cites the account in the Iliad of Helen’s effect on Priam and the Trojan elders, and declares that many people have chosen their most handsome men as kings. ‘Beauty it seems is a special attribute of kingship. Goddesses quarrelled about their beauty; and because of his beauty the gods “caught up and carried off” Ganymedes to be Zeus’ cup-bearer.’ Goddesses carried off beautiful men and lived with them. Eos (Dawn) had Kephalos, Kleitos and Tithonos; Demeter had Iasion; Aphrodite had Anchises. Zeus changed his shape to rape lovely women. ‘The Spartan custom, too, of stripping young girls before strangers [or guests] is highly praised; and on Chios it’s very pleasant to watch the lads wrestling with the girls,’ naked. The theme of competitive beauty shades off into that of beauty as the object of admiration and of exploits involving carrying away.[250]
We may add the custom of contests held among the ten tribes of Attika at the Panathenaia and the Theseia; a passage in Xenophon suggests that mental and moral, as well as physical, qualities were considered. But later it seems the most handsome lads were most favoured.[251]
Many myths tell of contests in beauty. Athena punished Medousa for boasting that she had more beautiful hair or body, or for lying with Poseidon in Athena’s temple; Medousa was given tresses of live snakes. Kassiopeia vaunted her beauty above that of the Nereids; her daughter Andromeda paid the penalty by being offered up to the sea. Hyginus says it was the girl’s beauty she bragged of. Gerana (or Oinoe), queen of the Pygmies, was so arrogant about her charms that she refused to honour any goddess; her subjects worshipped her; Hera changed her into a crane, geranos. Ovid makes her challenge Hera to a beauty contest. Keyx and Alkyone called themselves Zeus and Hera, so he was changed into a sea-bird, keyx, she into a halcyon. Myrrha, changed into a tree for incestuous love of her father, had her fate brought on her through her mother boasting that she, Myrrha, surpassed Aphrodite. ‘At the sight of Myrrha letting her hair down on her shoulders,’ sings Theokritos, ‘her mother in wonder cried out: Not even Aphrodite has such hair!’ Her child Adonis was brought up by the Nymphs. Niobe boasted that her children were comelier than Leto’s, or that she had a dozen to Leto’s two, and so was shot down by Artemis and Apollo, or turned to stone. Chione, daughter of Deukalion, boasted of beauty greater than that of Artemis, who shot her.[252]
Already in the Cypria the three goddesses with their differing attributes represent different kinds of women, different ways in which a woman may develop; but this aspect is largely implicit. With the vulgarizing of the theme, in which the offered gifts become mere bribes, it grows stronger. Finally the choice of which goddess approximates to the choice of which road is to be taken by Herakles, in the allegory set out by Prodikos. In Sophokles’ satyr play, the Judgement, Aphrodite with her armament of mirrors, scents, unguents, is like Pleasure, Hedonē, while Athena with her bottle of oil for use after exercise represents Phronesis, Thought or Capacity of Judgement. In the allegory Herakles is waylaid by Pleasure and Virtue, and listens to their arguments. In fact, the contrast of the values of Athena and Aphrodite goes back to the Iliad, where Achilles says he would not marry Agamemnon’s daughter, ‘not though she competed in beauty with golden Aphrodite and in craftwork was the equal of flashing-eyed Athena’. In the Judgement the opposition of these two goddesses to one another grows stronger than their common opposition to Hera. Still we can reject the thesis that the original contest omitted Hera and dealt only with Athena and Aphrodite.[253] Behind the differentiated forms of the three goddesses what we see is a primitive type in which the competitors were a triad of nymphs such as the Graces or Moirai.
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To appreciate this point we must realize how common was the development of dual or triple form by deities, especially by earth-mother goddesses. The earth-mother might be split into mother and daughter, to express the stages of summer fullness and of spring rebirth after the wintry death. This sort of division is most clearly seen at Eleusis, with Demeter and her girl Persephone who was raped away by the underworld god Hades and who came back to the upper world in the spring. Other deities appear in both single and plural forms. The multiplication often has a functional significance, eg triple Hekate standing at the crossroads or a birth-goddess such as Eileithyia becoming plural so that she might give aid on either side of the bed. The increased number was felt to strengthen the protective power of an invoked goddess. Thus Artemis became Artemides Praai — praos meaning gentle, loving, cognate with Sanskrit prinati, to love, give pleasure to. So we get the Mothers, Dameteres, Cereres, Junones, Nemeseis, a double Kybele, Fortunae.[254] Some deities or heroes appear only in the plural as two, three, or more beings: the Hours, Graces, Muses, Nymphs, Dioskouroi, Korybantes, Telchines, Daktyls, Eumenides. Pairs may have different names, but always appear together. Iconographical multiplication may express the different natures of a deity or a location in different cults; and such differentiation, existent in archaic times, can end by classical times in seeming to beget distinct deities, eg the various forms of Hera or Artemis. We even find a deity with one qualifying term set out as superior to himself with a different term. Thus in the Oath of the Cretan Lyttians, Hestia (the mother-goddess as the central or uniting hearth) heads the list, but Zeus Kretagenes (Cretan-born) comes next, taking precedence over Zeus Tallaios, Idaian Zeus, Zeus Monnitios as well as over Hera, Athena Polia, and all the others.[255]
At Thebes a triad of Aphroditai was linked with Harmonia; and Megalopolis had the same triad. Aphrodite was at times linked with the three Moirai; at Athens she was even one of them, the oldest; at Olympia she was linked with the Horai; at Sparta with the Moirai Lacheseis; on an Etruscan mirror she appears with the Fate Atropos. As Pandemos she seems charged with the defence of collective prosperity and is connected with the magistrates who superintend economic activities; she was also probably linked with Apatouria and presided over the puberty rites; as Leader of the People she was honoured at Athens with the Graces, one of whom was named Leader, Hēgemonē.[256]
The dual form, we noted, was especially associated with earth-goddesses of vegetation. So far there is no evidence from Linear-B texts of the cult of a dual mother or of two nymph-nurses of Zeus. (A Pylian reading, taken to mean ‘Two Queens worshipped with a King’, cannot be substantiated.) But images of two identical women side by side occur already in early Minoan tombs; they may have been put in children’s graves as blessing-goddesses or divine nurses to protect the children in their journey to the other-world. At Perati a few Psi-figures (with upraised arms) had been given to children. But adults too may have needed such guides and aids.[257] A famous ivory from Mykenai may represent a pair of goddesses, or mother and daughter, with a young boy. The subject has been interpreted as Dionysos and the Nymphs; Demeter, Korē and Iacchos; the Divine Child and Nurses. What matters is that the maternal and nursing aspects are strong, as later with the Nymphs and earth-goddesses, whether the link is direct or indirect.[258]
Minoan art gives us some clues. On some late gems two women, side by side, make the gesture of epiphany, as if multiplying the familiar image of a single goddess with raised arms; but in many groups of two or three women it is uncertain whether they are mortals or deities. In the archaic period we meet triadic groupings; Artemis and Leto were worshipped with Apollo under one roof, at least in Crete, from the eighth century; in the shrine of Artemis Orthia a young male god appears in votive ivories between two females. A relief at Gortyna has a female triad: a metope of Thermon, a seated triad.[259] So we go on to classical times. In general we can trace dual goddesses far back in Anatolian cultures such as that of Catal Huyuk. Not that we can prove a direct line of descent; but the persistence of the type shows it was not a mere matter of decorative symmetries. There seems a gap in the Dark Ages, in the Geometric era, till the later eighth century. Then when dual types reappear there seems no clear link with Minoan-Mykenean
times; rather they seem to follow, more or less closely, Egyptian-Phoinikian prototypes. We can hardly doubt that the types came in through the increased trading and cultural contacts with the east, as did many other art forms; but in view of the substantial elements from Bronze-Age religion which certainly carried on, we may hold that various ritual practices and mythological ideas, surviving from the second millennium, helped to acclimatize the new imagery. (The Minoans themselves had not been free from eastern influences.)[260]
In view of the complex developments behind the dual or triple figures, it is natural that the ancients were themselves often puzzled. Thus the names of the Nurses of Zeus were many, according to different localities. At Delphoi the Moirai were two, though elsewhere a triad. The Semnai (August Ones, called at Athens the Erinyes) were both dual and triple. Pausanias notes that in Boiotia Eteokles was said to have been the first to sacrifice to the Graces, a triad; the Lakedaimonians worshipped a pair, Kleta and Phaenna. The Athenians also had a pair, Auxo and Hēgemonē, but later, ‘before the entry of the Akropolis they set up the images of three Graces’. At Orchomenos the ancient Graces were two; on the Throne of Amyklai were two Hours, two Graces. At Athens the three daughters of the legendary king, Kekrops, were ‘maidens threefold’, and the three girls of Erechtheus (their later doubles) were ‘a triple yoke of maidens’. But at first there seems to have been a pair: Aglauros with a site on the northern slope of the Akropolis where girls danced, and Pandrosos with a site to the west of the Erechtheion. In Ovid a third is inserted, Herse, drawn from the festival of the Hersephoria (in fact celebrated for Athena, Pandrosos, Earth, Themis, Eileithyia). Both drosos and hersē mean dew; aglauros (aglaos) — shining, beautiful. After the battle of Marathon the cult of Pan invaded the old Aglaurid dancing ground, and by the time of Euripides Pan was considered the guest and the girls his guests. A relief found in the precinct of Dionysos shows two Pans, each with a goat and a cave; above are three dancing nymphs, to whom the artist has added a figure of triple Hekate (as if to suggest that the three are really one).[261] Such images help us to grasp the rich elements of ritual and myth behind the motif of Hermes leading his triad on the mountains.
