by Jack Lindsay
The problem of Paris as a herdsman was a problem only for a world that had lost the sense of Homeric things and found it anomalous for a prince to herd cattle. But such a job was a normal part of a Trojan hero’s routine. (In the same way people forgot the power wielded by a tribal-feudal overlord like Agamemnon and could credit a gathering of the Achaians only as the result of something like the suitors’ oath.) Anchises was a herdsman on Ida when Aphrodite waylaid him; the Iliad twice mentions the situation, which was also known to the poet of the Sack. But mostly Homer is ready to refer to such tales only in brief genealogical asides. Aias wounds Satnios, ‘whom the good nymphs of the stream bore to Enops as he tended his cattle by the banks of the Satnioeis’. Boukolion, son of Laomedon, lay with the nymph Abarbaree; ‘as he pastured his sheep he lay with her in love’s embrace, and she conceived and bore twin sons’, who were killed in the war. Enops’ girl has no name, as is normal in folktales; and Boukoli on (Cowherd) is a type, not a saga hero.[279]
The exposed child of myth was reared by nymphs or suckled by an animal, and then brought up by shepherds. Ancient Greece had many such tales. Often twins were exposed, but most of the babes were single and male. The motif was very ancient, and reasserted itself at all phases of Greek culture, reaching its apex (aided by Euripides) in the New Comedy and the romances — the theme being vulgarized by making the exposed child turn out to be a lost heir, his identity proved by tokens or birthmarks, then by the testimony of his foster-parents. The roots of the tale type lie in initiation ritual, where the youth dies and is reborn: he is taken away from his parents and normal life, is plunged into a series of tests or ordeals, and then, emerging, is recognized as an adult with a new status. (Often the lad had to stay for varying periods alone in the wilds: an experience which, linked with fasting and perhaps with drugs, could beget the conviction of terrible environing dangers and attacking demons. This withdrawal phase does not appear strongly in the evidence from the classical era in Greece; but its mark is clear on the myths and tales.) The moment of recognition passed as anagnorōsis into the structure of Greek tragedy, which in its structure reflects an agōn or struggle drawn from the passage rite. Thus the stages of initiation, expressing the key points in the experience of change, crisis, deep conflict and its resolution, provided the basis for dramatic structure. In tragedy the movement to a new level of life or consciousness was defeated, but the recognition moment expressed the sudden and complete awareness of what had been at stake, so that this understanding passed into the work of art in its totality, however the protagonist might go down. In comedy the breakthrough into the new life provided the conclusion, the kōmos or revel.[280]
Some scholars think that Sophokles introduced the exposure motif into the Paris saga, adapting Herodotos’ tale of Kyros. Certainly that tale did much to increase the motif’s popularity and affected the treatment of Paris by the dramatists; but it did not beget the motif. Elements taken from Herodotos perhaps included the regal behaviour of Paris as a boy, the stamp of his features, his freeborn manner, his independent behaviour (as in Euripides’ Alexandros). Paris, we are told, showed a remarkable likeness to the sons of Priam; though poor, he defeated the acknowledged princes in aretē, his nobility was inherent and showed that wealth was unimportant. Sophokles’ play dealt with the funeral games and doubtless gave Paris much the same cast as did Euripides, though less emphatically.[281]
A detail pointing to initiation is the double name. The fostering shepherd called the boy Paris; then Paris was called Alexandros for his courage in defending flocks and shepherds: Alex-andros means Defender of Men. Names with the prefix Alex- suggest protectors, especially during the dangerous transitions of initiation. Thus Herakles, the supreme image of the heroic initiate who passes ordeal after ordeal, was Alexikakos, Warder-off of Evil. A relief shows him standing by his shrine with a wine-krater on it; the inscription calls him Alexikakos; a worshipping ephebos (a lad nearing adolescence) comes up. Photios in his gloss on the Oiniasteria, the festival when the lads had their hair and beard down cut, mentions ‘a libation to Herakles performed by the epheboi before the hair-cutting’. Hesychios confirms that the rite occurred at Athens and Pamphilos adds that the libation was made from a big cup of wine. Hesiod calls the ‘race of gold’, become daimones, Alexikakoi. Alexandra was an epithet of Hera as well as the second name of Kassandra.[282]
For the second name given in initiation we may take the Tohungas of New Zealand: a naming rite was performed over the pupils in the Whare Wananga: that is, they were renamed during the initiation experience which brought them the ancestral lore. Maui, the great Polynesian hero, reared by sea-deities and an ancestor, at last found his ‘real parents’; his father purified him over a running stream and performed a naming rite, but omitted one name, thus ultimately causing Maui’s death. Here the initiation goes wrong; the full new name is not successfully obtained.[283]
Paris, we see, not only gains a second name, but by that name reveals himself as a sort of protective daimōn of initiation itself.
There is yet one more point about his exposure. He was suckled by a she-bear and was thus a Bear’s Son, as were so many other heroes, eg Beowulf (Bee-wolf, Bear), Salmoxis, Odysseus. Odysseus was grandson of Arkeisios (Bear-son, got by Kephalos on a she-bear) and brother of Kallisto (a bear name as we shall see); he had a son Arkesilaos, Bearcub. Homer omits the hero’s bear connections. Zeus was reared on Mt Ida in Crete in the Bear Cave, Arkesion Antron. Elements of the tale type called The Bear’s Son, perhaps the most important of all folktales, cling to Odysseus, but there are no signs of them in Paris’ story. However, not far from Ida lay Kyzikos, built on a hill called Bear Mountain; and here the nurses of Zeus were bears.[284] The Minoan-Mykenean basis of the bear-nurse seems clear; and bear-cults were strong in Arkadia, with its very old traditions. The region’s ancestor was Arkas, Bear; his mother was changed into a bear shortly before he was born. Her name was Kallisto, Megisto, or Themisto: all epithets of Artemis, a companion of whom she was in myth. The link of bear-cults and the initiation mysteries of girls is manifest in the Attic cult of Artemis Brauronia, with its centre at Brauron. Aristophanes tells us that young girls, dressed in saffron robes, used to dance there; like the priestess, they were called Bears. (The saffron robe may have been a substitute for bear-skins.) The dance was called Arkteia, and the girls were aged five to ten. Various rationalizing tales were devised in late times. Once a tame bear lived there, but a girl, teasing it, was torn to pieces; her brother killed the bear. So a plague fell on Athens, till an oracle bade the citizens to put their daughters through the rite arkteuein. As a result all girls had to dance the bear role before being allowed to marry. The bear-dance may also have been performed at the festival of Demeter or Artemis at Lykousoura; and the link of bear and Artemis is brought out by the myth of Atalanta, who, exposed on Mt Parthenion by a spring, was suckled by a bear and became a swift huntress, loved by the goddess.[285]
Through the fostering she-bear we then come back to the ancient mothers or nurses with whom initiation rites, of boys as well as girls, were connected. Only by an analysis such as we have been making can we realize the vast importance in early Greek religion of nature-goddesses, their shrines and cults; and we cannot doubt that the roots go back to Minoan-Mykenean times. Consider Aglauros whom we saw connected as a nymph heroine with Herse and Drosos (Dew) on the Acropolis at Athens. Nothing seems further from the initiations of lads; yet a slab from Acharnai, giving the oath of the Athenian epheboi, begins with her name: ‘I will venerate the cults of my fathers. I take in witness of this path the gods, Aglauros, Hestia, Enyo, Enyalios, Ares and Athena Areia, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hēgemonē, the Boundaries of my native land, the fields of wheat, barley, vineyards, olive and fig groves...’ Aglauros and the Hearth-goddess open the list; the three Graces end it. At least in the fourth century the oath was taken in Aglauros’ temple. In the Homeric pantheon gods have the superior role, though the goddesses are far from being inactive or ineffective; but
as soon as we get back behind that pantheon, we find the earth-goddess in varying forms and functions, but related with a special potency to birth, puberty, marriage, death: the great moments of change or initiation. Gods, in so far as we can make them out, are children — baby Zeus or Dionysos — for the nurses to attend, or they are faint son-lovers like Iacchos in the Eleusinian Mysteries with Demeter and Korē. Paris, from the mythical angle, fits in with this pattern. He is the exposed babe of the wilds with an animal suckler, the young herdsman awaiting the moment of test and of recognition, awaiting the advent of the goddess who will take him between her thighs, though in his case, unlike that of Anchises, Adonis, Attis, it is not a single goddess who turns up. It is a quarrelling triad among whom Aphrodite offers, not herself, but her earthly deputy, Helen.
The couplet in the last book of the Iliad in which Paris is said to have reviled the goddesses would make more sense, however, if it applied to an episode where they offered, not gifts, but themselves. The rejection would then echo the episode where Gilgamesh in the Sumerian-Babylonian epic scorns the advances of Isthar, or that in the Ugaritic epic where Aqhat rejects the offers of Anath for his bow and ends by abusing her. We might indeed go on to say that the rejection motif, displaced, has been attached to the nymph Oinone, through whom (by her refusal to provide the needed pharmakon) Paris dies. From this perspective then we could say that the pattern of the Aqhat (Thammuz-Adonis) story may be traced in the various episodes of Paris’ life, in displaced and reorganized forms. Not that we could then argue that Paris originated as a secularized version of the son-lover of the Great Mother. More likely, his role as Helen’s lover had the effect of attracting elements from the supreme myth pattern — elements that ended by fitting to some extent together. (He has indeed something of the role of a god like Hades, or a hero like Theseus, who carry off or seek to carry off the earth-maiden Korē.) The rebirth motif appears in terms of what we have called the tragic twist, in the frustration of his effort to gain the pharmakon from Oinone; the return to the sources of renewal (to natural process as life-death and life-death) fails. Ida, we may note, means Forest; as well as having some definite locations, it was like Olympos, a heaven-mountain or sky-pillar.
*
We may now again ask, in the light of our deepened analysis, if Homer was aware of the Judgement motif. What is sure in the Iliad is that something has happened to differentiate Paris from the other princes of Troy; he is ‘odd man out’. This point is strongly brought out by the contrast with Hektor; the aberrant person who provokes division and disaster is set against the man of strong family roots, who provides a norm of social attitudes, of all that unites individual and group. Even the role of Paris as wielder of the bow makes him unlike Hektor and the others. We cannot say that it is the possession of Helen that makes the difference; for it was the difference that sent him after her. The disparities may arise from the way Homer combines different bardic traditions; but it may also derive from some such background episode as the Judgement, which Homer suppresses as distracting and trivializing. He shows the close interaction of human and daimonic forces, but he does not want to explain away the broad issues by a mythological sideshow.
We may go on to ask how far the underlying psychology of the judgement episode suits Homer and the world around 750. Though we saw that it was too simple to find in the trio of goddesses a vulgarized version of the undifferentiated nymph triad, a certain truth resides in that contrast. The oppositions of Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, show a breakdown of the unity of the concept of a good woman such as Penelope, who expresses in a comprehensive way the aretē of a woman in Homeric society. The gifts that the goddesses offer represent the qualities of their characters, so that each goddess stands for a different way of life for women. The unified concept, expressed by the nymph triad, has broken up into three opposed concepts of what a woman might or should be. Hera stands for the wife who bases herself on family life and exalts the power of the male by separating out her own lesser power; Athena stands for that part of woman which can compete with the man, which sees the virginal aspect of her own body, which turns also to craft, industry, intellectual matters; Aphrodite stands for the need to find sensuous enjoyment and excitement without concern for the family or society.
We here come back to the Moirai; for a person’s character is inseparable from his or her chosen role in life, and that role is a central part of the person’s fate or share in things. We see a primitive expression of the tendency to division of labour and social roles in the way in which Zeus, after the war with the Titans, becomes king as war-leader, and assigns a geras (gift, guerdon, honour) or moira to each deity. Hephaistos gets fire as his geras. The moira of Atlas is to hold up the sky. Apollo has music and dancing, while Hades has lamentation. Hesiod (though not using the term moira) says that the Nymphs, ‘together with the Lord Apollo and the Rivers, have youth in their keeping’ — kourizein, literally ‘shear the youth, watch over their puberty-rites’. Note the stress on the Rivers in this relationship, supporting what was said above of springs or rivers and rituals of initiation or marriage. Aphrodite’s moira was love-making. But once, the poet Nonnos tells us, she was caught at the loom. The Graces, ‘the dancers of Orchomenos, attendants on the Paphian, had then no dancing to do; but Pasithea made the spindle run round, Peitho dressed the wool, Aglaia gave thread and yarn to her mistress. And marriages went all astray in human life. Time, the ancient who guides our existence, was disturbed and lamented the bond of wedlock used no more....Life dwindled, birth was hard-smitten, the bolts of indivisible union were shot back.’ Athena protested to Zeus that Aphrodite had stolen her kleros or lot, so that she could no longer carry out the vocation that the Moirai had given her. (In Aischylos the Erinyes accuse Apollo of robbing them of the lachos that the Moirai gave them at birth; and Asklepios was punished for trespassing on the moira of Hades when he raised the dead.) Athena complains, ‘I no longer manage the gift of the Moirai; for your daughter Aphrodite has taken to weaving and stolen my kleros.’ She claims that she has never trespassed on the share of Artemis. ‘When have you seen Athena in your forest shooting arrows or hunting game? Who calls upon Glaukopis [owl-eyed, bright-eyed, Athena] when in labour?’ The gods rush to see the strange sight. Hermes jokes and remarks that if Aphrodite takes Athena’s loom she should also wield her spear and shield. Such things upset all order. ‘Take care once more of marriage; for the immemorial nature of the kosmos has been going astray since you took to weaving cloth.’ Aphrodite in shame goes off to Cypros ‘to be the nurse, tithēnētaira, of the human race’.[286]
Division of labour, once established, seems a part of the eternal nature of things. In the Judgement we see the differentiation of function among goddesses used to express a new social sense of woman’s place. A woman is no longer an harmonious mixture of Hera, Athena, Aphrodite: wife-housekeeper, mistress of crafts, and the lovely provoker of desire which she herself enjoys. She tends to be one or other in an inner imbalance which reflects increased social division. Paris by his choice of Helen becomes the factor precipitating a vast new rift in the human sphere. We cannot imagine this sort of myth arising in the Bronze Age; it is linked with the great social expansion and differentiation going on in the Ionian cities of which Homer was a member. So it could have been in existence in his day though we might also argue that it shows the crystallization in the mythological schema of the spiritual and social divisions embodied in his Helen image. The new consciousness of women expressed in the Judgement would then be post-Iliad, though not long after the epic had begun to make its impact.
There is one further question we may ask in connection with the material set out above about the nurse-mother, the initiation-mother, and the child god, Zeus or Dionysos. At some time during Mykenean days and the Dark Ages Zeus began to take on the role of a supreme and fully-grown god. How this happened is still quite hidden. But we find some suggestive parallels in such a group as the Ibibios of southern Nigeria. Here Eka Abassi, Mother of the Gods
, was the main deity. As the Great Mother she bore all things, including her son-consort Obumo the Thunder-god. ‘She is not as the others. She it is who dwells on the Other Side of the Wall.’ Her spiritforce lives in everything, twig, stone, or waterdrop, but is most manifest in the unhewn stones set amid the sacred waters that are scattered about the land, or in the great trees, the Givers of Babes. At death, men say: Eka Abassi has taken our brother. ‘Holy pools and rocks, many of which are regarded as the earthly manifestation of Eka Abassi, and are often connected with the rites of her son and spouse, Obumo the Thunderer, hold first place among jujus, in the opinion of the greater number of Ibibio women.’ She also has a triadic form. ‘Water, earth, and stone, the three great Mothers, are most always to be found within the groves of the All-Father.’ Her cult has been invaded and partly taken over by Obumo. He had originally been inferior. Eka’s eldest born, he once lived on the earth, then he went up to join the sky-people; the earth-folk lost the road of passage to the sky, and now the sky-people rarely come down it. Only one informant could recall the use of sacrificial altars, but the offerings had been made to Eka. They had been set on altars of logs crisscrossed in alternate layers to breast height; twigs were put on the logs, and on them the body of a white hen, who had been a good layer but now was old; the twigs were then fired.[287]
Something of this sort must have happened in Greece, no doubt beginning in Mykenean days and carried further during the Dark Ages. The developments were clearly much influenced by ideas of the Council of the Gods and the like, long prevalent in the Near East and probably flowing into the Aegean world particularly via Ugarit; but there must have been local assertions of father-rights and of the powers of the war-chieftain, laying the basis on which the eastern influences could prove fertile. As we shall see later, among the Ibibios the men have taken over the cult-associations once belonging to the women.
