Classics and the Western Canon discussion

6. Cretan and Theban mythology (the Inachids, Agenorid line)
To recap: Poseidon and Libya had two sons, Belos and Agenor. The heros of the Belid line played out to with Heracles’ generation. Now we go back to the other son, Agenor and the resulting Agenorid line.

The abduction of Europa to Crete, and dispersal of the sons of Agenor
Agenor’s daughter, Europa is kidnapped by Zeus. The search for Europa by Agenor’s sons ends by their settling Phoenicia, Cilicia, and Thrace.

Minos and his brothers
Some notables from this line:
Sarpedon, King of Lycia
Radamanthys, who married Heracles’ mother, Alcmene, after Amphitryon’s death, and ended up a judge in Hades.
Minos who became King of Crete and step-father to the Minotaur.

Minos, Pasiphae, and the origin of the Minotaur
Another cattle related story. The level of detail regarding Pasiphae’s bestial impregnation by the bull is pretty shocking. Does learning the Minotaur had a name, Asterios, add an uncomfortable humanizing aspect for anybody else?

Catreus and Althaimenes
Another forecast of a son, Althaimenes, killing the father, Catreus. This time instead of the father conspiring against the son, the son takes it upon himself to leave. I was surprised to find that a mortal, Apsemosyne, could outrun Hermes. However, the results of the trickster god resorting to slippery animal skins to catch and rape the object of his passions, we get an ancient Greek version of what seems to be an honor killing when Althaimenes kills his sister. Catreus comes looking for Althaimenes who mistakes him for a pirate and kills him as foretold.

Polyidos and the revival of Glaucos
Glaucos is resurrected by example of herbs used by snakes.

Cadmos and the foundation of Thebes
The city of Thebes is founded when Cadmos is told by an oracle to follow a cow and found a city where it fell exhausted. Trouble ensues when Cadmos kills Ares dragon. The dragon’s teeth our sewn and fully armed men spring from them. They either fight each other, or tricked into fighting each other when Cadmos throws stones at them that some of the armed men assume were thrown by the other armed men.

Semele and Dionysos: the death of Actaion
Cadmos had four daughters.
One daughter, Semele, sleeps with Zeus and dies of fright. Zeus births the Dionysos from his leg. Dionysos is a god and his superpower is apparently driving people, most often women, mad. He also shows he is a god by turning a Tyrrhenian Pirate ship masts and oars into snakes and filling the ship with ivy and sounds of flutes causing the pirates to jump into the sea where they are turned into dolphins.

Another daughter, Ino, married Athamas. They are driven mad by Hera when Zeus brings Dionysos to them to raise.
A third daughter, Autonoe, married Aristaios. They have a son Actaion who saw Artemis bathing and is transformed into a stag and killed by his own dogs. A fourth daughter, Agave, married Echion. They have a son, Pentheus. Pentheus is torn to pieces by Agave when she mistakes him for a wild beast attempting to stop Dionysos’ baccchic frenzies.


Successors and usurpers at Thebes
Cadmos becomes king of the Illyrians and ends up in the Elysian Fields a snake with Harmonia. Zethos and Amphion kill their great uncle Lycos for exposing them as a punishment to their mother, Antiope for running away after sleeping with Zeus and take over rule of Thebes.

Amphion, Niobe, and their Children
Artemis and Apollo kill Amphion and Niobe’s children for Niobe’s boasting they were more blessed with children than Leto.

Laios and Oedipus
Finally we get an much abbreviated story of Oedipus.

There seems to have been a lot of madness lately. Hera caused Heracles to go mad last week. This week Hera and Dionysos causing various men and women to kill themselves and others. I'm afraid an accurate movie today would demand an NC-17 rating. I wonder if parents sugar-coated these stories for their children, or did they use them to scare them straight?

I’ve always found Dionysus to be one of the most interesting of the Greek gods. Records from texts written in Linear B from around 1300 BC suggests that he is one of the oldest Greek gods but despite this many myths regard Dionysus as a foreign deity who was only reluctantly accepted into the standard Greek pantheon at a relatively late date. Why do people think this is?

Actually, while the myths present Dionysus as a god who had difficulty finding acceptance, from human worshipers and the other Olympians, they present this as a series of events in the mythological period, corresponding roughly to the later Bronze Age, what we now call the Mycenaean period.

It seems to have been eighteenth- or nineteenth-century philologists, who were too sophisticated to believe in a Mycenaean Age, or a Trojan War, to begin with, who decided that these myths were instead legends of real events, based on when a foreign (maybe Thracian) god was introduced into Greece in fairly late pre-classical times. And that they were only projected back in time to the period of the equally mythical royal family of Thebes, before the Trojan War.

This became a sort of unquestioned dogma, and there was shock when a name read as Dionysus showed up in Linear B tablets: some scholars, included the eminent M.P Nilsson, comforted themselves with the hope that it was still a human name, but later discoveries showed Dionysus receiving worship, which does seem to answer the question..... (For the available information, see Anthology Of Classical Myth, second edition, with an appendix on names in the Linear B tablets by Thomas G. Palaima.)

There are versions of the myths in which Dionysus has nothing in particular to do with Theban royalty, and seems more strictly mythological. And there is a long Homeric Hymn in which a youthful Dionysus encounters Etruscan pirates, who are definitely Iron Age characters: but the poetic tradition in general was not strong on relative chronology, and a god could appear to be whatever age he wished.

My own supposition would be that Dionysus was always a Greek god, perhaps as far back as it makes sense to to talk about Greeks, and not just people speaking a proto-Hellenic branch of the Indo-European languages.

And that the idea of his arriving from elsewhere, of being foreign, was simply not historical, but instead was a key part of his mythology -- Dionysus was conceived of as a god who appeared suddenly, disrupting ordinary life, and arousing opposition. And the stories about him were told with that as a basic assumption.

Of course, some new textual discovery could upset this opinion, which is strictly my own (so far as I know, anyway).

Edited to add: Classical Philologists could be very self-assured. In Germany, they were quite indignant about Schliemann "discovering" Troy and excavating "Mycenae rich in gold," which they were quite certain were figments of the imagination. That Schliemann was a millionaire from a very middle-class background may also have been a factor in Wilhelmine Germany.

Some English scholars were somewhat more accepting of facts on the ground, even when they ran contrary to received opinion: it may have helped that Schliemann was a foreigner anyway, so that his social standing was less of an issue. Also that some of the same German philologists had been quite vocal about the low level of classical studies among "the Englanders," and their gullibility in taking some classical authors seriously.

I came across an interesting detail to the story of Pasiphae, which I don't recall seeing before, in Anthology Of Classical Myth.

It contains a selection from the Greek "Collection of Metamorphoses" (Metamorphoseon Synagoge) of Antoninus Liberalis, from probably the 2nd Century AD, in which he summarized (in verse) transformation stories from older Greek sources. It is not to be confused with Ovid's eclectic and more ambitious Latin "Metamorphoses."

In an aside on the backstory of Minos, which is backstory to another myth in which a transformation is involved, Antoninus happens to mention (on page 15) that "Pasiphae was the immortal daughter of Helios...."

This makes her the half-sister of Circe, and of Medea's father Aeetes, and of Phaethon, who attempted to drive his father's sun-chariot.

It also means that her daughters Ariadne and Phaedra, and Asterion (the Minotaur), were also of divine lineage.

This casts an interesting light on the better-known stories that Minos himself was the son of Zeus (with Europa), and that the real father of Theseus was not King Aegeus but Poseidon.

And on the story that Ariadne, the granddaughter of, respectively, a Titan and Zeus himself, became the bride of Dionysus. I don't recall where I saw it pointed out, but with Zeus involved on both sides of that marriage, it is a typically Olympian incestuous relationship....

So far I have picked up on the common recurrence of cattle and the importance of cattle this seems to imply. Something even more obvious that I have missed is akin to not seeing the forest for the trees. What about all of the detailed and complicated genealogies that are the backbone of the work?

What purpose do these genealogies serve? Was it an attempt to tie all of these gods and heroes together for consistency, or was it important to be able to tie ones family to them to make ancestral claims, or both?

Do these ties offer some real providence to certain claims of lands or titles? Were claims of some relationship to Heracles or some other immortal god or mortal hero taken seriously? Their detailed inclusion here makes it seem these mythical claims carried much more weight then than potentially real claims do today, for example, claiming ancestors that came over on the Mayflower, fought in the revolution, etc. Why might that be?

Genealogies were the main device for ordering ambitious tellings of Greek mythology from Hesiod and his imitators onward, including the early prose collectors (mythographers), who provided most of the extended sources used by Apollodorus (or pseudo-Apollodorus, whoever he was) -- when they didn't use thematic principles, such as transformations or tragic love stories. This allowed for a modicum of organization, although paradoxes showed up if the implied chronologies were treated too rigorously.

Suddenly claiming descent from a mythological hero or divinity was problematic, but a lot of aristocratic families had a long tradition of such claims, which had to be at least formally respected. Lack of consciousness of history helped: but some writers were dubious about it all. Herodotus tells of a predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletos, who only amused the Egyptians when he claimed that his family went back to a god in the third generation. Herodotus lets us form our on conclusions on what he thought of the whole idea.

(The Greeks never did seem to catch on that to the Egyptian belief that every legitimate Pharaoh was both the son of the prevailing Sun-god but also was Horus, son of Osiris. Calling Alexander the Great the son of the god Ammon was not "oriental flattery," it was an official acknowledgment of his claim to rule Egypt.....)

For the most part, being able to claim a long series of ancestors who had made the same claim about the origin of the family was crucial for the Greeks.

Philip of Macedon (Alexander's human father) claimed descent from Heracles, not as an explanation of his new importance, but because the dynasty he belonged to claimed descent from a Theban who belonged to a clan that everyone knew had claimed from time immemorial to be descended from Heracles.

Another dynasty that everyone knew was descended from Heracles was the Spartan kings -- or rather, two lineages of them, as the Spartans, always peculiar, had two "kings" simultaneously. (This probably produced a rivalry that reduced their power in face-offs with the Ephors, the real governors of Sparta.)

On one notable occasion, a Spartan king attempted to to enter the old temple of Athena on the Acropolis, only to be blocked by a (very brave) priestess who reminded him that Dorians (the Greek sub-division to which the Spartans belonged) were not permitted there. The King is supposed to have replied "I am an Heraclid," and swept past her.

(The Spartan occupation of the Acropolis, after they assisted in the overthrow of the sons of the tyrant Peisistratos, not long before the first Persian war, turned out to have been a bad idea: they wound up besieged there, without food or water, and were reduced to a humiliating surrender. Obviously, the prohibition that didn't apply to the King did apply to his subjects, and no good could come of violating it.....)

The main exception I can thing of was Roman: Julius Caesar's claim to be descended from Venus by way of the Trojan hero Aeneas, and his son, Ascanius, alias Iulus ("little Trojan." This was popularized by Virgil's Aeneid, but I've never seen evidence cited that this was a very, very old claim on the part of the Julian family, before Julius Caesar and Augustus needed to justify their rises to power. And early accounts of the founding of Rome apparently had nothing to say about Aeneas and the roles of his supposed descendants in it.

However, a surprising number of prominent families in other Italian cities claimed descent from various heroes of the Trojan War, both Greek and Trojan, who supposedly settled there, and the Julian claim may in fact have been an established "fact" earlier in the Republic, even if it was not treated as important.

Cattle-raiding may have been a big-time occupation in early Greece, and it crops up all through Homer and into some of the myths of Heracles in particular (Apollodorus doesn't go into details about his troubles getting the stolen cattle of Geryon back to Greece a series of adventures in which, it was later said, he visited the future site of Rome). In the Homeric Hymns, the baby Hermes steals cows from his big brother, Apollo, and Zeus has to intervene.

This may reflect a level of the economy in the gap between the highly regulated Mycenaean states, with their enormous flocks and herds duly recorded on clay, and the dominance of the polis (city-state), with clear, if disputed, boundaries, and the possibility of "massive retaliation" for cattle rustling by hoplite armies. That instead of just aggrieved aristocratic ranchers and their retinues, which seems to be what Homer had in mind in the stories told by Nestor about when he was a boy, and is suggested in some of the pre-Labors deeds of Heracles.

However, it is tempting to think that this was, or was also, a part of their Indo-European inheritance. In India, in the Rig-Veda, the storm-god Indra, King of the Gods, is renowned for "rescuing" stolen cows (whether they originally belonged to him or not), which are further identified with rain-clouds.

In Ireland, a number of heroic stories with mythological features involve cattle-raids, most prominently in the prose epic of the "Tain bo Cualgne," or "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley."

And so on: however, coincidence, due to similar economies producing similar story themes, can't be ruled out entirely.

David wrote: "The level of detail regarding Pasiphae’s bestial impregnation by the bull is pretty shocking."

It was "shocked" when I learnt the real story about the Minotaur, not the adapted version that appears in children's books. Recently, my stepson asked me about this story and rapidly I had to do the same to tell him. The history indeed repeats itself.

Cphe wrote: "Imagine cattle meant wealth although I also wondered if there was a particularly mythical significance as in other cultures times"

Maybe. The same idea exists in the Mongolia about horses. Those who cannot raise horses are considered to be poor.

I've found a couple of interesting articles on cattle in ancient Greek and other Indo-European religions and literatures.

"The cows and the poet in ancient Greece," by Phoebe Giannisi, in "Pecus. Man and animal in Antiquity, Proceedings of the conference at the Swedish Institute in Rome, September 9-12, 2002., 2004"
https://www.academia.edu/4986815/_The...

"A Song Worth Fifty Cows: Graeco-Indo-Iranian Variations on the Etiology of Sacrifice," by Peter Jackson, in "Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Heft 68/1, 2014"
Abstract: "This paper explores how the social reality of an ancient sacrificial economy backlights through the medium of mythical etiology, even in contexts where this reality seems to have lost its direct impact. By comparing crucial moments in the Greek myth of Hermes’ theft of Apollo’s cattle (first rendered at length in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) with Indo-Iranian reflexes of the so-called Vala-myth, an attempt is made to resolve a few perplexities evoked by the Greek myth as well as elucidating general aspects of Greek and Indo-European poetics. In addition to these considerations, the original meaning ‘(paid) ally, client’ is proposed for Greek Ὀρφεύς/Vedic R̥ bhúḥ."
https://www.academia.edu/18864725/A_S...

The etymology offered for Orpheus is also interesting.

Interesting articles Ian. I noticed that first link listed a significant number of articles concerning sheep, which were not as prominently mentioned in The Library, nearly absent. I wonder why?

Kindle search results for terms in The Library:
Cattle: 75, herd 14, Cow 33, Bull 71, Calf 2, vs.
Swine 2, Pig 5, Boar 38 vs.
Sheep: 4, flock 5, Ewe 0, Ram 9, Lamb 11.

I also found this article on cattle mentioned in the bible which suggested some interesting meanings given to cattle by their use in different contexts. I noticed at least two omissions. The fatted calf from the Prodigal Son story, and the golden calf idol made by the Israelites when Moses went up to Mount Sinai.
https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topic...

And of course there is the song, Bennie and the Jets, wtih lyrics by Bernie Taupin/Elton John

Hey kids, shake it loose together
The spotlight's hitting something
That's been known to change the weather
We'll kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around
You're gonna hear electric music
Solid walls of sound. . .

For specifically Biblical issues in determining how to translate references to animals, and the imprecision of standard translations, see two articles by David Clines, a Hebrew lexicographer. His findings probably apply to other ancient writings as well.

"Cattle, Flocks and Other Beasts: Why Terms for Animal Groups Matter," by David Clines. Written for the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament Meeting, Aberdeen, 4-9 August, 2019
Abstract: "Terms for groups of Hebrew animals, like cattle and wild beasts, are not well treated by lexica, commentaries and modern versions. “Cattle”, for example, is often used for all domestic animals though it should be used only of bovines like ox and cow. The usage of the Hebrew Bible is fairly clear, though not always consistent. (1) “Beast of the countryside” (29x), “beast of the earth” (11x) and “bad, i.e. dangerous, beast” (7x) are specifically wild animals. (2) Behemah means domestic animals, including cattle, flocks, camels, donkeys, the English term being livestock. (3) Tson means flocks, i.e. sheep and goats. (4) Baqar means only cattle, i.e. oxen, cows. (5) ‘Oph means birds. (6) Remes means crawlers. With these precisions, many biblical texts may be better understood. For example, (1) In Eden, Yhwh brings to the human only wild animals (and birds, but when they are named a distinction is made between wild animals and domestic livestock, which now have names and therefore roles (Gen. 2:19, 20). (2) The serpent is originally a wild animal and thus a quadruped, but when it is cursed it loses not only its legs but also its classification, being demoted to the category of the crawlers (3.14). (3) At the Flood, Noah brings into the ark birds, livestock and crawlers (6.20)—implying that wild animals were not on board the ark. Can this be so?"
https://www.academia.edu/39998538/Cat...

"What's Wrong with Genesis 1: Text and Translation," by David Clines.
Abstract" "The first chapter of the Bible might be supposed to free of textual and translational problems, but I will suggest that it is in no better shape than a typical chapter of the Hebrew Bible, which is to say, it shows signs of a chequered transmission history. On translational issues, I will not linger over well-known cruces like ‘in the beginning’ (v. 1) and ‘in our image’ (v. 26), or tangle with the much debated sense of bara’, but raise only the misuse of ‘cattle’ in most English versions of v. 24. On textual issues, I will focus on the missing wild animals in v. 26 and the intrusive ‘and over all the earth’, the missing domestic and wild animals in v. 28, the misplaced ‘and it was so’ and the missing ‘God saw that it was good’ of v. 7, and the oddity of God ‘finishing’ (kalah) his work on the seventh, not the sixth, day (2:2). Even iconic texts can have blemishes."
https://www.academia.edu/39708081/Wha...