The Twelve Olympians

by Dr Charles T. Seltman

  Now Homer, who came from a social group superior to that of Hesiod, would have none of this crude mythology, and so invented another parentage for the goddess, making her the daughter of Zeus and Diōne; which was rather inconsistent, for those two were the most Hellenic of gods and she an undoubted alien. In addition to this, Homer called her the wife of Hephaistos and made Ares her paramour. It is only in later periods that Eros, the boy god of love, and Hermaphroditos were alleged to be her children. But in the early phase of mythology there is a tale of how she gave herself to a mortal man and became the mother of a Hero. It is set down in one of the most exquisite of the Homeric Hymns, which was probably composed early in the seventh century B.C.

  The poet begins by telling us that golden Aphrodite sends love’s sweet desire upon the gods in heaven, upon mortals, and upon birds, beasts, and creatures of the sea. Yet there are three whom she cannot touch, Pallas Athene, Huntress Artemis, and Hestia of the hearth.

  These three, then, Aphrodite has never the power to move,

  These three the sweet cheat snares not. Else from the might of Love

  Nothing escapes—not mortal men, not Gods above.

  Yea, Zeus, the Lord of Thunder, Allmightiest, Prince of Praise,

  She has beguiled his wisdom and led him wandering ways,

  Oft as she would, and laid him by many a mortal’s side

  Forgetting the love of Hera, his sister and his bride...

  So, in return, Zeus wounded the Cyprian’s own white breast

  With sweet desire for a mortal’s love. Once she had lain,

  She too, at last in a mortal’s arms, then never again

  Should she vaunt in the halls of Heaven with sweet, disdainful smile,

  The laughter-loving Cypris, how oft she could beguile

  High Gods to seek the kisses of the daughters of the earth,

  And from their seed immortal bring mortal sons to birth,

  Or daze the daughters of Heaven with love for mortal men.

  Therefore Zeus awakened in Aphrodite a longing for the handsome young Anchises, cousin of Priam, King of Troy, who had his farm on Mount Ida of the many springs of water.

  Over the hill, to the neatherd’s byre she passed; and as she came,

  The grey wolves followed, fawning, and lions with eyes on flame,

  And bears, and lightfoot leopards, devourers of the deer.

  The Goddess smiled to see them; and on all, both far and near,

  She cast her lure of longing—back to their forest-dens,

  Pair by pair, they vanished, down the darkness of the glens.

  But herself to the herdsmen’s huts she came, built well and fair,

  And alone she found Anchises...

  Then Zeus-born Aphrodite stepped forward and drew near,

  Changed to the form and stature of a young unwedded maid,

  Lest his eyes discern her godhead and the hero grow afraid.

  Then Anchises saw and wondered—so beautiful she seemed,

  So tall she towered before him, so gay her garments gleamed.

  For the robe that rippled round her shone like a fire ablaze,

  Richly her twisted armlets, her earrings flashed their rays,

  Round her soft throat fair chains of gold glanced fitfully,

  Light from her soft breasts shimmered, like moonlight, strange to see.

  Then passion gripped Anchises. Swift was his greeting given—

  “Hail to Thee, Queen, whoe’er Thou art among the Blessed in Heaven!...”

  Yet Aphrodite, dissembling, answered him:

  “Why liken me to a Goddess? Mine is no Heavenly birth.

  I am but a mortal woman, that of earthly mother came,

  Daughter of famous Otreus—if ever you heard his name—

  Lord of the well-walled cities of all the Phrygian land.

  Yet the tongue of the Trojans also, like mine, I understand...”

  She was dancing with other girls around Artemis, she said, when suddenly Hermes the Argos-killer caught her away unseen:

  “The Argus-slayer seized me, God of the Golden Wand—

  O’er many a tilth and ploughland he bore me, and beyond

  Many a waste and wilderness, untilled of men,

  Where beasts devouring wander, deep in the shadowy glen—

  I thought that never again should I feel the kindly ground

  For the bride-bed of Anchises the God said I was bound,

  To be the wife you wedded and bear strong sons to you;

  He said it, and pointed towards you, then swiftly away he flew,

  The mighty Argus-slayer, back to the Heavenly Gate—

  And to you I came—for upon me hard lay the hand of Fate.

  But now, by Zeus and the noble hearts that gave you birth,

  I beg you (for, sure, no dastards bred such a son of worth),

  Take me a maid as I am, that nothing know of love,

  Home to your noble mother, home to your sire, to prove;

  And to your brothers show me, bred of the self-same race—

  Let them judge if this bride before you will bring your blood disgrace...”

  So in his heart she made the sweet love-longing stir,

  And passion gripped Anchises, and swift he answered her:

  “If you are a mortal maid indeed, of woman bred,

  And the great Otreus is your sire, as you have said;

  If Hermes, the Herald of Heaven, truly has brought you here,

  To be my wife for always, unto my latest year,

  Then there is no man living, there lives no hand divine,

  Shall have the power to hold me before I have made you mine,

  Now!—no, not even Apollo, though from his silver bow

  The Archer-king should slay me with the arrows of his woe.

  Face fair as the Immortals, once let me share your bed,

  And then the House of Hades may close above my head!”

  Hard by the hand he gripped her. With eyes cast down for shame

  Upon the earth, and bending her face away, she came,

  The laughter-loving Cypris, to the bed of the prince spread fair,

  With many a fleecy mantle, and furs of the forest bear

  Above them, and hides of deep-mouthed lions, that his own hand

  Had stricken to death aforetime, high in that mountainland.

  But when they two together in that fair bed were laid,

  He drew the gems aglitter from the body of the maid,

  Brooches and twisted armlets, earrings and chains of gold;

  And loosed the girdle round her, and drew off fold by fold

  Her garments in their glory, and laid them, soft and still,

  On a seat with silver studded. Then, by the high God’s will,

  Mortal beside the Undying he lay—and knew it not.

  But at the hour’s returning when the herdsman seeks his cot

  With his fat sheep and his cattle, home from the flowery field,

  Then the eyes of Anchises deep in sweet sleep she sealed.

  Once more she clad her body, a Goddess glorified,

  In the beauty of her raiment, and stood at his bedside.

  She wakened him, and, as he shrank in terror because he had lain with a goddess, consoled him:

  “Fear not too much—from me thou hast no ill to fear,

  Nor from the other Immortals. For Heaven holds thee dear.

  And now a loved son shall be born thee. He shall reign as the Trojan’s king,

  And children of thy children, years without end, shall spring.

  His name shall be called Æneas, for deep and bitterly,

  When I sank to the bed of a mortal, the heart was shamed in me.

  But indeed, of all earth’s peoples, the children of thy race

  Have ever stood next the Immortals in comeliness and grace...

  And now beneath my girdle I bear, I too, a child.

  But him, when he sees the sunlight, the Nymphs of the mountain-wild

/>   Shall take to their deep bosoms. This high and holy peak

  Is theirs, and no haunts of mortals, no haunts of the Gods they seek....

  These, then, shall be the nurses to watch and tend my son.

  And when to lovely childhood he grows, as the seasons run,

  The Nymphs shall lead him hither, for thine own eyes to see:

  And again in his fifth summer will I bring him back to thee,

  And thou shalt learn my purpose. At sight of that young face

  In the first flower of its springtide, fair as the Gods in grace,

  Thy heart shall leap rejoicing. Then shalt thou take the boy

  And bring him down beside thee to the windy walls of Troy.

  But as for thy dear son’s mother, if thou art asked of men,

  ‘Who bore him under her girdle?’—beware, Anchises, then!

  This be thine answer (remember!)—’They say he was the child

  Of a flower-faced Nymph of Ida, where wave the woodlands wild.’

  But if, with the mind of a madman, thou boast vaingloriously

  That the fair-crowned Cytherea once gave herself to thee,

  Then Zeus shall loose in his anger his reeking bolt on thy head.

  Therefore take heed what I tell thee. My latest word is said.

  Mind well thy mouth, nor name me. Of the wrath of the Gods beware.”

  She ceased, and vanished, soaring, through the windy wastes of air.{57}

  In all literature there are few poems to equal this Hymn, radiantly alive with its vision of unspoilt youth. “Greece,” as Mr. Lucas has said, “looked in many different ways upon the Paphian; but hardly ever with that sense of inherent guilt, sin, and shame which was to warp the European mind for so many centuries to come.” If any parallel to the Greek attitude exists in our own day it is perhaps to be found in Samoa, where, according to a modern anthropologist, sex is an experience “which will not be sufficiently engrossing to threaten the social order. The Samoans condone light love-affairs, but repudiate acts of passionate choice...Premarital affairs and extra-marital affairs are conducted with enough lightness not to threaten the reliable sex-relationships between married couples.”{58} But not every Greek had such an attitude to aphrodite, and even to Plato the Hymn from which we have quoted would have seemed one of those impious immoralities of the poets; to the Fathers of the Church it was devil-worship; to the Middle Ages something to lure souls into the ante-room of Hell.

  Before such sad times and thoughts befell Europe the myth concerning the love of Aphrodite and Anchises had exercised a mighty influence in the history of the world. Their son was the famous Trojan Hero, Æneas, who fled from burning Troy with his small son Ascanius, whose other name was lulus. After much wandering Æneas came at last to Central Italy and there founded Lavinium, so the later writers from the fifth century onward began to tell. His son, lulus, founded on the Alban Mount Alba Longa, whence came Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. Moreover, that most illustrious of all patrician families, the Julii, were originally from Alba Longa and claimed descent from Iulus himself. Long before Julius Cæsar accepted the supreme power in the Roman Empire, other famous rulers had been claiming divine ancestry. Alexander asserted his descent from Zeus, and Ptolemy did likewise; Seleucus claimed Apollo for his ancestor; Demetrius claimed Poseidon. The world had grown accustomed to such notions of divinity in kingship, and when Julius Cæsar set, time and time again, the head of Venus, upon his coinage, when he built her a temple on the Palatine beside his own house, there were millions who believed not only that the great Dictator was directly descended from lulus of Alba Longa, but also that lulus had been grandson of the goddess Aphrodite.

  Meanwhile in her favourite island, Cyprus, she still lives on, at least in name. At Kouklia—Old Paphos, where her most celebrated temple stood—the Paphian has now merged in the Virgin Mary, who is supplicated there under the title of Panaghia Aphroditessa.{59}

  VII—HEPHAISTOS

  ANY study of the origins and of the cult of the Olympians reveals the fact that most goddesses and gods show traces of a dual personality. There are conflicting stories and incompatible views—they can hardly be called ‘beliefs’—which point to diverse derivations. For Hephaistos, however, this is not the case, and his growth as a divine concept may be observed as a clear phenomenon, since he was gradually transformed from an indefinite spirit into a definite artisan-god; next into a noble craftsman-god and mighty Olympian artist. Yet when his own worshippers fell in public estimation, when—starting with the fourth century B.C.—potters, bronze-workers, and sculptors began gradually to sink in the social scale, Hephaistos, too, seemed to lose much of the respect due to him, and to appear in the guise of a decayed nobleman rather than as a powerful god. His subsequent identification with Vulcan, an Italian volcano-god whose full name was Volcanus Mulciber, ‘Incendiary’ and ‘Fire-extinguisher’, did not greatly improve his status.

  The early development and transformation proceeded in the following manner. In the distant age of bronze the inhabitants of Greece and the islands held the skilled worker in metal in very high regard. His art was both a mystery and a delight, and he was thought to owe his gifts to supernatural beings, around whom many legends grew. There were creatures called Dactyls, smelters of bronze; Curetes and Corybantes, armourers; Cabeiroi, who were skilful smiths; Telchines, gifted workers in gold, silver, and bronze, who made weapons for gods and the earliest statues; and lastly, the mighty Cyclopes forging the bolts of Zeus. All these are vague giants, goblins, and godlings—patron saints of the workshop and the forge whom you might do well to appease and some of whose names just meant ‘Fingers ‘Hammer’, ‘Tongs’, ‘Anvil’, and ‘Fire’. Then, by the time that the Homeric epic began to take form, one of these beings seems to have grown in stature until he attained Olympian rank. Men said he was a lame god because Zeus had once hurled him to the earth, but this is just a story to explain the fact that smiths constantly at work at the anvil tend to have powerful arms and weak legs. In the Homeric world blind men would become minstrels and lame men smiths. An artist’s god must resemble the artist. The Olympian smith was named Hephaistos, a name of great antiquity belonging to some language spoken before ever the Greek-speakers came to Greece.{60} Perhaps his name simply means ‘Fire’.

  The artist, dreaming his dreams of what wonders he would like to make, attributed to his god the power to create just such things of surpassing fineness, and the minstrel set them in epic form. And so, in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, Homer told of the wonderful shield of Achilles made by the famous god.{61} Here once again we may note the closeness of Olympian gods to Homeric heroes who claim to be god-descended. Indeed, ‘the Quality’—Lords and Ladies in the Palace—are proud to be artists and skilful with their hands like their god Hephaistos. The Lady Penelope in the Odyssey wove the great web upon her own loom; her Lord, Odysseus, himself once built, fashioned, and inlaid their marriage-bed. When at last he returned from his long wanderings, weather-beaten and no longer young, his wife, fearing that some stranger might be impersonating him, looked for some proof that this man was really her husband. Then came the enchanting recognition scene in the twenty-third book, when Odysseus began to describe to her his handiwork.

  “A great secret went into the making of that complicated bed; and it was my work and mine alone. Inside the court there was a long-leaved olive-tree, which had grown to full height with a stem as thick as a pillar. Round this I built my room of close-set stone-work, and when it was finished, I roofed it over thoroughly, and put in a solid, neatly fitted, double door. Next I lopped all the twigs off the olive, trimmed the stem from the root up, rounded it smoothly and carefully with my adze and trued it to the line, to make my bedpost. This I drilled through where necessary, and used as a basis for the bed itself, which I worked away at till that too was done, when I finished it off with an inlay of gold, silver, and ivory, and fixed a set of purple straps across the frame.

  “There is our secret, an
d I have shown you that I know it. What I don’t know, madam, is whether my bedstead stands where it did, or whether someone has cut the tree-trunk through and shifted it elsewhere.”

  Her knees began to tremble as she realised the complete fidelity of his description. All at once her heart melted. Bursting into tears she ran up to Odysseus, threw her arms round his neck and kissed his head. “Odysseus,” she cried, “do not be cross with me, you who were always the most reasonable of men. All our unhappiness is due to the gods, who couldn’t bear to see us share the joys of youth and reach the threshold of old age together. But don’t be angry with me now, or hurt because the moment when I first saw you I did not kiss you as I kiss you now. For I had always had the cold fear in my heart that somebody might come here anti bewitch me with his talk...But now all’s well. You have faithfully described our token, the secret of our bed, which no one ever saw but you and I and one maid, Actoris, who was my father’s gift when first I came to you, and sat as sentry at our bedroom door. You have convinced your unbelieving wife.”{62}

  When it is realised that one of the finest things in the life of so heroic a fighter, so intrepid a sailor, as Odysseus was his subtle skill with his hands, then one understands why Hephaistos was a god loved and venerated by a people who for centuries produced and enjoyed so many of the best works of art that mankind has made. There is one respect in which Greece of the Classical Age and Italy of the Renaissance era differ from other historic periods; for in those two epochs a greater number of persons had a ripe judgment and a critical appreciation of works of art—large and small—produced by their contemporaries than European mankind had in any other age. Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy were both humanist, but the latter was also, effectively though not openly, rationalist. Not so the Greeks, for which reason they had great need, in order to help to explain many phenomena, of a god of arts and crafts. In those states where such a need was felt—and most of all in Athens—Hephaistos was precisely the symbolic aspect of godhead which was urgently required. Indeed, at the time when Athens attained the summit of artistic and intellectual domination over the civilised world, Hephaistos rose to a status of near-equality with Zeus himself, for in the central portion of the Parthenon frieze he and Athene are grouped together to form the natural counterpoise to Zeus and Hera. But this high rank was not to endure.