PRE-HELLENIC GODS

We are now prepared to turn to the proto-Hellenic gods, whom we cannot separate from those possessed by the first stratum of immigrants; and what the second brought with it likewise cannot be disentangled in exposition, since in the motherland the two lie one upon the other. It has not been welcome to the author—and it will be inconvenient for the reader as well—that we still by no means arrive at the Hellenic gods. Yet in the course of working this out, it became apparent that those gods must first be set apart which were taken over from the earlier inhabitants; this, just as later, leads to many individual investigations that not infrequently yield an unsatisfactory result. The reader is not compelled to pursue these in every case; he may even at first pass over the entire section on the foreign gods, for they did not exert any profound influence upon Hellenic religion. This is altogether different from what occurs in Asia, where peoples intermingle and the Homeric world of gods is formed, which is familiar to us as the generally Hellenic one.

Let us first set apart what came with the Dorians. They brought with them only a single god, by name Karnos; yet nothing has been preserved of him except his festival, the Κάρνεια, and the month Καρνεῖος. The god himself yielded to others, to whom he gave only his by-name. It is a bold claim, but one that can seriously be maintained, that the Karneia was a pre-Dorian festival, later disseminated from Sparta, and that the month probably was as well. We find the month, often also the festival, and the epithet Καρνεῖος only in Dorian states, but almost everywhere among them: in Laconia (also among the Eleutherolaconians) together with Thera and Cyrene, in Crete, in Argos with Epidaurus, Sicyon, Cos, Rhodes, and from there further on in Acragas and so forth; in Syracuse, from which we may infer Corinth as well.¹ I should think that suffices. One must entirely forget history if one allows Argos to borrow a god from its mortal enemy; the same holds of Crete. That another god is concealed beneath Καρνεῖος follows from the fact that he is equated with various Hellenic gods: with Apollo in Sparta and its colonies, with Zeus in Argos, where the Καρνεῖος was also called ἁγητής, as in Sparta a consecrated boy did,² who thus represented the leader³ who had guided them into the land. The name Κάρνος is given at once by its derivation, but it is also contained in a place called Κάρνιον, if the vowel in Polybius V.19 is reliable. The widespread legend relates that the Acarnanian seer Karnos, who guided the Heraclidae, was slain by one of them and thereafter received worship as an act of expiation. This is one of those many poor inventions that like to turn festivals into rites of atonement; yet Karnos himself is preserved, and the connexion with Acarnania, which is also inherent in the name, accords well with the route by which I have the Dorians proceed; there lay also an island Κάρνος (Steph. Byz. from Artemidorus). Long since the sheep, the ram, has been recognised in the name (Hesychius Κάρ, Κάρνος, and others), and who could still be unconvinced when Pausanias III.13 has the Κάρνειος Οἰχέτας dwell in the house of a seer Koidas, from whom the Heraclidae learned how they might make themselves masters of Sparta (originally, no doubt, Lacedaemon)? That is invented in order to be rid of the ram-form of Karnos Karneios, who had become Apollo. We now possess his image in a herm (Ath. Mitt. 29, p. 22, recognised by its discoverer Br. Schroeder), and upon a stele with an archaic dedication to Karneios there stand ram’s horns (IG V 1, 222). Usener (Rh. M. 53, 359) has already said what is evidently correct, and I independently arrived at the same result (Herm. 38, 580). Usener has also already recognised that Καρνεῖος was still a ram when the Theraeans came to Cyrene, and that Zeus Ammon received his ram’s horns from him. This formation, later universally current, was thus created by Cyrenaean art of the sixth century.⁴ That the Dorians preserved in Laconia for so long the animal form of the god which they had brought with them, while elsewhere it had been abandoned, accords with the preservation of the ancient social forms. But if we ask whether the god so venerated is not inwardly identical with one of the Hellenic gods, the answer is not difficult. Hermes Kriophoros, as we know him for example from Tanagra, was originally nothing other than a ram; and whoever finds on the coins of Aenus a ram’s head alongside the head of Hermes cannot doubt this. What god, moreover, is better suited to be the guide of a march along unknown paths than the διάχτορος? It accords excellently with the assumption of a Hellenic god by Apollo that, in the cult, the older Hellenic number nine still appears alongside Apollo’s number seven.⁵

Formerly I saw in Heracles a hero of the Dorians; but at that time I still conceived this tribal name too broadly, and also failed to recognise that the profound poetry which, in the Dodekathlos, leads man after a life full of struggle and toil into the hall of the gods, does not accord with the religion of primeval times. The name Heracles derives from Hera; with that Argos is given. In Crete the figure is lacking; in Sparta it is scarcely indigenous. Thus it cannot be specifically Dorian. For this reason even conjectures concerning his roots will be touched upon only later, where the Heracles of Argos must be appraised in his proper significance.

In Hellas there are so many prehistorical names of mountains and rivers that it is striking when great rivers such as the Alpheius and the Eurotas bear Greek names, and when the Messenian Pamisus, and in Elis the Peneius and the Enipeus, though un-Greek in form, nevertheless received from the immigrants of the second stratum, the Aeolids, names that were familiar to them from their Thessalian homeland. In Hellenic genealogies the rivers play a great role as primeval fathers of the people or of the most ancient heroes; Inachus as father of Io is certainly very old. Especially in Boeotia and Attica the native rivers are gladly designated as givers of children—Asopos⁶ (also the Sicyonian), Kephisos.⁷ In Asia, Scamander is already in the Iliad an acting god; later the bride was said to have offered him her maidenhood.⁸ We may reasonably assume that the Hellenes did not first adopt the cult of the river from the earlier inhabitants, but rather found themselves in agreement with them. The dedication of hair, Ψ 146, Aeschylus Choeph. 6, speaks especially in favour of this. They also possessed, however, a stream from which all fresh water derived, in Achelous, who likewise gives children, as the names Ἀχελωιόδωρος, Ἀχελωίων prove, since they do not come from the regions through which that Aetolian river flows which has taken over the name and is alone counted by Hesiod (Theog. 340). It is important that the Iliad knows him (Ω 194) and from him derives, besides all springs and rivers, even the sea—this beyond his otherwise attested power—so that a verse has been added which introduces Oceanus and degrades Achelous to a great river.⁹

The situation is otherwise with the mountains. For the Cappadocians the mountain is god¹⁰; the Mother of the Gods dwells upon the mountains; cult on the summit of Ida has been practised continuously—perhaps it has not even yet been abandoned. That the weather-god Zeus is conceived as sitting upon Apesas, likewise upon the mountain of Aegina, is natural; but this does not entail that one must ascend the summit in order to worship him.¹¹ Atlas, with his transparent name, is the bearer of heaven and was once the highest mountain of Arcadia, father of many daughters. Yet we know him only as a Titan who in the farthest West supports the sky; there too he has given his name to a mountain range.¹² Perhaps the Titan Crius was likewise a mountain.¹³ Mimas is the name of a mountain by no means particularly lofty, opposite Chios, which, though no Titan, has become one of the most eminent of the Giants. It could also give its name to a Centaur, and even appears among heroes.¹⁴ Most impressive of all are the mountain-giants Cithaeron and Helicon (despite his Hellenic name) in the poetry of Korinna¹⁵; and the wild head of Helicon on the relief (Bull. Corr. Hell. XIV, pl. 10) is unmistakable. Parnes too appeared in Corinna, remarkable in having a feminine name, although the stem is the same as in Παρνησσός. In Attica it is unheard of to conceive the mountains as personal beings,¹⁶ and art too did not represent them at an early date.¹⁷

Aphrodite bears her foreign origin in her very name,¹⁸ which Hesiod already attempts to interpret. Yet the immigrants can scarcely have found her in the land, for Κύπρις, which indicates her provenance, is not of later date, as the accent already shows, which arose when it came to be felt as a full proper name. The early settlement of Greeks on Cyprus, where the goddess was in fact most highly venerated, accords well with this. Hesiod also mentions Kythera,¹⁹ which again agrees with the fact that Laconia in particular is especially rich in cults of Aphrodite. By naming these places Hesiod himself makes clear that this Οὐρανία is not at home in Hellas. This epithet, which the goddess later often bears, not infrequently for cults that are manifestly foreign, induced Hesiod to invent or adopt the strange story of her origin,²⁰ which was of course later ignored; but the birth from the sea is retained. It did not come about that the foreign deity entered together with a new religion, as later Dionysus did, in a certain sense also Apollo, and hardly in the manner that Artemis was in essence only a new name; rather it seems that the nature of the Cyprian goddess was apprehended differently and reshaped. At Paphos she was androgynous; this was never adopted, and when an Ἀφρόδιτος became known and art created Hermaphrodites, no god was ever worshipped in them.²¹ Against modern assertions it must above all be established negatively that Aphrodite in cult has never had anything to do with the vegetative life of nature. Adonis never became a Greek god, and his cult, though already practised by the Lesbian women of Sappho’s time, always remained foreign. Even the power of the sexual impulse in the animal world was only in the reflection of the fifth century referred back to the working of Aphrodite. If, then, she concerned human beings alone, this could be turned in various ways. In Sparta there was an Aphrodite who was at the same time called Hera, because mothers sacrificed to her for the marriages of their daughters (Paus. III 13.9); otherwise Aphrodite has nothing whatever to do with marriage. In Sicyon the priestess and the νεωχόρος must be virginal; the ritual is ancient and strict (Paus. II 10.5). There an older goddess of women will no doubt have received the name, in place of whom we should otherwise expect Artemis. In the gardens of Athens she was Οὐρανία and the eldest of the Moirai; at Olympia she is associated with the Horae (Paus. V 15.3), which amounts to much the same thing. On the Cadmeia at Thebes she herself was not a single person but a triad (Paus. IX 16.3), likewise in Megara (Paus. I 43.6) and in Megalopolis (VIII 32.2). In the ancient market-place of the oldest city of Athens the Aphrodite πάνδημος had her seat and still in the third century received a πομπή, even though the cult was very modest. The name occurs elsewhere too, even alongside Οὐρανία, but its age and significance cannot be determined, and it was early understood as vulgivaga.²² Temple-slaves, whose prostitution paid tribute to the goddess, as later existed in Corinth, are adopted from Semitic custom, but remained isolated²³; they must not be projected back into early times. Moreover, as the coins show, Aphrodite was by no means the principal goddess of Corinth.²⁴ She became such in no Hellenic city. Even the Εὔπλοια, Ποντία, and the like do not arise from the essence of the goddess, but result from the fact that she came from without and thus first gained entry in harbour towns,²⁵ to which her Hesiodic birth from the sea conveniently attached itself. In several Peloponnesian places there were statues of an armed Aphrodite, which were later no longer understood and gave rise only to frigid antitheses. Yet at some time the foreign goddess must also have been conceived in this manner. The foreign name readily received differing content.²⁶ Homer then decided that the ἀφροδίσια were and remained her domain.

A pre-Greek place-name is Eleusis in Attica and on Thera, whither it probably came from Laconia, as the festival Ἐλευσύνια, in which Damonon was victorious, indicates; in Attica Ἐλευσίνια is derived from the place, like Βραυρώνια, and the goddess is called in Laconia Ἐλευσινία, Ἐλευσία, Ἐλυσία, Εἰλυθύα (Hesych.), Ἐλευθία, likewise in Messenia, and Ἐλευθώ in Tarentum. Evidently Εἰλείθυια is the same name,²⁷ which is written in very different ways; in literature the Homeric form has prevailed, though Εἰλήθυια also occurs.Under this name the goddess appears in literature only at the moment of childbirth: she sends the pangs, but she also brings the child into the world. The Messenian Ἐλευθία does the same and is therefore called by Pausanias (IV 31.9) also Εἰλείθυια.²⁸ But on Paros, where her cult long persisted, the inscriptions (189 ff.) show that she was also χουροτρόφος, and thus too Pindar conceives her (Nem. 7). The Odyssey (Τ 188) mentions a cave of Eileithyia at Amnisos in Crete, and her cult occurs elsewhere on the island as well. It does not follow from this that she originated in Crete, for she could just as well have come there from the islands²⁹; nor do we know whether the Cretans of Minos were not themselves immigrants who found Carians already there. In Attic Eleusis, by analogy with the other places, a goddess with a corresponding name must once have been worshipped; but she had to yield to the Hellenic Demeter, and assistance at childbirth has nothing to do with her. The fame of Demeter’s mysteries became so great that in later times the Eleusinia elsewhere were regarded as offshoots, as is certain in the case of the Egyptian Eleusis. It follows inexorably that the mysteries of Demeter have nothing whatever to do with Crete, a fact not altered by the use of χέρνοι. The cult of Eileithyia, whose name also occurs in the plural,³⁰ remained in use for a long time, especially in the Peloponnese³¹; but on the whole, apart from the conventional language of poetry, the goddess has almost vanished, and has not attained a plastic form. In Athens scarcely ever will a woman in labour have turned to her, and even the genuinely Hellenic Γενετυλλίδες still alive here in the fifth century, or a Γενετυλλίς, in Phocaea Γενναίδες,³² likewise a Καλλιγένεια,³³ who was thus to grant fair children—τερπναὶ ὠδῖνες³⁴—soon disappeared. Artemis displaced her, as the New Comedy shows. At Cape Kolias Aphrodite thus came to be associated with Genetyllis.

One might be inclined to ascribe Cretan origin to the pair of goddesses whom Herodotus (V.83) calls Damia and Auxesia, because according to Pausanias (II.32.2) in Troezen they were taken for two Cretan maidens who were stoned through a misunderstanding and gave occasion for a festival of Λιθοβόλια. But this is a poor aetiology; for if they were stoned, they were no goddesses, and Cretan provenance suggested itself in Troezen to the inventor of the aition, since the Cretan Phaedra was there the wife of Theseus. On the Laconian stone 363 stand the datives -σία χαὶ Δαμοία³⁵; one is tempted, with Kumanudes, to supply Αὐξησία or a variant form. In IG V 1, 1314 there stands, before a list of officials (once it is Hadrian), Δαμοια ἐπί…. One interprets Δαμοίαι, but it does not look like a dedication; rather like a festival Δάμοια, and then one will adduce Hesychius’ Δάμεια ἑορτὴ παρὰ Ταραντίνοις³⁶; otherwise in Sparta one might also think of δαμόἱα. On Thera an old inscription names λοχαία Δαμία, IG XII 3, 361; with this a Damia is secured also for Laconia, and λοχαία shows concern for the crop of the field, thus comparability with Demeter; but a goddess beside her is lacking here and remains altogether uncertain. Herodotus has given Ἀζησία, and this therefore later forced itself to the fore, so that the names in Troezen cannot be relied upon. Sophocles (fr. 894) has Ἀζησία as an epithet of Demeter; he had to lengthen the second syllable; what matters is only the identification with Demeter. The genuine names are supplied only by Epidaurus. There a month is called Ἀζόσιος (Hecatombaeon)³⁷ the goddesses are grouped together as Ἀζόσιοi, IG IV² 434, admittedly on a very late inscription which also has Αὐξησία. The other goddess is correctly named Μνία, 410.³⁸ This teaches us to recognise her as the Subduer, Δμία having become Μνία just as μνωία on Crete from δμωία; Δαμία contains the stem for it. Δμία is still preserved by Hesychius.³⁹ From Herodotus we learn that in the Aeginetan village of Oea the goddesses were represented kneeling, which Welcker ingeniously, but not compellingly, interpreted as birth-goddesses. Ten choregoi were appointed for their festival; the choruses were female and delivered mockeries against the Korōna (the ἐπιχώριαι). If there were two choruses corresponding to the two goddesses, they may have stood opposite one another; something similar might be conjectured for the Troezenian λιθοβόλια and compared with the Eleusinian βαλλητύς. But everything is far too uncertain. In Oea they were γυναιχεῖαι θεοί, not mother and daughter; but in Thera the Δαμία was, for Sophocles, the Ἀζοσία comparable to Demeter. Pausanias (II 30.4) found Eleusinian rite on Aegina, which, however, signifies nothing for the genuine cult. The final result remains that nothing points to Crete: the goddesses are proto-Hellenic, another form of the cult of the Earth-Mother, which we know only very inadequately, confined to the eastern Peloponnese.

Quite certainly pre-Greek is Ino, whose name is evidently of the same stem as Inachos and Inopos. Hesychius’ gloss Ἰνάχεια ἑορτὴ Λευχοθέας ἐν Κρήτηι ἀπὸ Ἰνάχου shows both the kinship and a cult which was still paid to an Ἰνάχη. She has cults only along the Laconian coast as far as Corone in Messenia, as Pausanias records.⁴⁰ Only Alcman the Laconian speaks of Ἰνὼ θαλασσομέδοισα. Already the Odyssey equates her, as daughter of Cadmus, with the goddess Leucothea, and as such she appears in many tales, with Athamas but also with Dionysus, entirely human. That is Boeotian, and we should make no headway if we did not find at the Copais a White Goddess. The sea-goddess Leucothea is identical with this figure, but has her strong veneration—if only in early times—in Ionia. She was therefore equated by the Hellenes of the first stratum with the foreign Ino and carried over into Asia: the same goddess who, under the name Ino, was taken up in Boeotia into the lineage of Cadmus, a fate which the Phrygian Semele shared.

On Delos, thanks to the French excavations and the acumen of the discoverers, it proved possible to establish, from what at first was a puzzling state of affairs, that in the sacred precinct before and behind the Artemision there were, in each case, two graves from early Minoan times carefully preserved—thus here certainly Carian. Graves on Delos are astonishing, since Apollo in the year 423 forbade every burial and enforced the destruction of those that existed. Only special sanctity could have led to an exception, certainly present already at the time when the cult-site was transferred from the height to the shore. Herodotus (IV 33–35) informs us about the venerated occupants and the cult-practices. They were the maidens who had first brought something sacred, bound in ears of wheat, from the Hyperboreans to Delos, as was still done.⁴¹ Old poems told of this and named the maidens, in part differently; most of the names are soundly Hellenic.⁴² The rites have nothing to do with this. At the graves before the temple, bridegroom and bride laid down the offering of their hair. Thus it was done in Troezen in honour of Hippolytus, and in Megara in honour of Iphinoe (Paus. I 43.4). Upon the graves behind the temple came the ashes of the burnt-offerings, and to their occupants was directed a procession of maidens, who sang an ancient song and collected gifts which fell to Eileithyia. Ἀγερμοί were widespread in Ionia. All this is wholly Hellenic, and accords well with deified πάρεδροι of Artemis, who herself assumed the name Opis or Upis,⁴³ as the only certainly un-Greek name ran. It is obvious that this is a different sanctification of the graves from that of the Hyperborean maidens: both were attached to graves of whose occupants nothing was known, but which had to be provided with owners because they remained holy.

A male pre-Greek god is Enyalios, with Enyo, who lives almost solely in poetry, but who in Erythrae possesses a cult together with him (Syll. 1014, 35). Enyalios looks like a derivative; and if Skyros is called Ἐνυῆος πτολίεθρον (Ι 668), this will be a collateral form.⁴⁴

In the Iliad Ἐνυάλιος, who in a very ancient formula is called ἀνδρειφόντης, is identical with Ares,⁴⁵ so that the ancient mythographers do not distinguish the persons. In truth it is particularly clear here that the Ares who appears in Homer has reduced Enyalios, who alone had previously prevailed in the motherland, to a mere epithet, and soon altogether displaced him from human consciousness. The latter was indeed a Carian, but was adopted even by the Arcadians; in Mantineia a tribe is named after him, and when in Orchomenus oaths are sworn “by Ζεὺς Ἄρης and Ἰνυάλιος Ἄρης” (IG V 2, 343), Ἄρης is an epithet. In Sparta, where Enyalios is repeatedly worshipped, he receives the un-Hellenic sacrifice of a dog, and our informants there also employ the name Ares.⁴⁶ Thus by this Enyalios too we must understand what is meant when the Carians sacrifice dogs to Ares (Clem. Protr. 2, p. 25 P.). Likewise Ares must be regarded as the younger, when in Hermione even in the third century A.D. the full name Ἄρης Ἐνοιάλιος still occurs (IG IV 717). In Corinth, Ares was still so foreign that on the chest of Cypselus, Enyalios led Aphrodite (Paus. V 18.5). Thucydides (IV 67) incidentally mentions a temple of Enyalios in Megara. In Athens the polemarch sacrifices not to Ares but to Enyalios (Arist. Ath. Pol. 58). Above all it is important that the war-cry, the ἐλελεῦ, is addressed to Enyalios.⁴⁷ We shall therefore be justified in distrusting a Peloponnesian cult of Ares and in assuming already for Homer that Ares—who had been elevated to a son of Zeus—displaced Enyalios, originally Carian but already adopted in the motherland.⁴⁸

Hyacinthus of Amyclae bears in his very name the stamp of his origin: his festival and the festival-month passed from Laconia to Thera and (if indeed he was always lacking in Argos) to the Dorians of Asia⁴⁹; in Lato on Crete we have the month Βαχίνθιος, ϝαχίνθια in Tylissus (Schwyzer 83). In Amyclae Apollo displaced him, so that only his grave remained consecrated⁵⁰; yet he was more than the beautiful boy whom Apollo slew with a throw of the discus,⁵¹ for Bathycles represented on the Amyclaean throne how he entered Olympus with his sister and thus became a god.⁵² Polyboea, who received a Hellenic name, had been a mighty goddess; in Cnidus she became an Artemis Hyakinthotrophos, after whom the festival was now named.⁵³ If she was the guardian of her brother, he had always to remain a boy and to die as a boy. Thus this was a dying god, such as the Orient and Asia know; the Hellenes reshaped him even here, because they did not possess this conception.

Whether the god was once more widely diffused is not certain, but probable; for in Attica a tract of land bore this name, and in place of immortal nymphs the Ὑαχινθίδες παρθένοι die for their fatherland.⁵⁴ Presumably the original cult led to the invention of this αἴτιον when its meaning was no longer understood. On Tenos a place was named after Hyacinthus, and a phyle corresponded to it.⁵⁵ The flower cannot be separated from the god; it is known and beloved since Homer, though unfortunately still not botanically determined with certainty.

Alongside Hyacinthus stands a Korynthos⁵⁶ on the Messenian south coast, who was equated with Apollo. The place-name Κόρινθος is not to be separated from this name.

The Damonon inscription names a festival Παρπαρώνια, which is referred to a mountain Πάρπαρος mentioned by Pliny (IV 17), and is connected with Hesychius’ Πάρπαρος, ἐν ὧι ἀγὼν ἤγετο χαὶ χοροὶ ἵσταντο, where admittedly the country has fallen out. Hesychius also has Πασπάριος Ἀπόλλων παρὰ Παρίοις χαὶ Περγαμηνοῖς. There is a place of the Πασπαρεῖται (Dittenberger, Or. inscr. 491); thus Pasparos or Pasparon is also a place-name, and in Paros matters will not be otherwise. From the place a god is also named who is worshipped there. The name is, as Pergamon in particular shows, pre-Greek; it may always have been Apollo, but it may also be a Hellenic interpretation. For the god of the Παρπαρώνια nothing can be inferred from this. Such is the state of the facts; it by no means justifies Usener’s hypotheses (Rh. M. 49, 461).

After the Alexandra of Amyclae Lycophron named his poem, thus having known something of the rare cult of the lyre-playing goddess, and also of her identification with Cassandra, which must have arisen when Agamemnon was transferred to Laconia. How the lyre was justified escapes us; it does not suit the Hellenic name which displaced the genuine one, as Polyboea did. Löschcke,⁵⁷ in publishing the decisive relief, said what was necessary and also adduced the cult of Alexandra at Laconian Leuctra (Paus. III 26.5) and plausibly interpreted a lyre-playing 'Spartan figure'⁵⁸ (III 18.8) as Alexandra. That a pre-Greek goddess lies concealed in her is in itself probable at Amyclae, and the ill-fitting identification with Cassandra confirms it. Further conjectures are idle.

There are more such isolated cults, whose gods admit of no determination: the Ganymeda of Phlius, whom one equated with Hebe, because she, alongside Ganymede, serves nectar on Olympus. But what is Ganymede? For later ages as for ourselves, he derives from the Iliad; at that time more will have been known of him. Damonon is victorious ἐν Ἀριοντίας; this goddess is named after the place, whose name recurs on Chios in the οἶνος Ἀριούσιος; who the goddess was, no one knows. Who is the Koronis of Sicyon, whose strange cult Pausanias (II 11.7) describes? It seems to be a rite of expiation and may be connected with the Orion-daughters, the Κορωνίδες in Orchomenus, of whom Nicander (in Antoninus Liberalis 25) and Ovid (Met. XIII 685, much corrupted) tell. That is in part poor invention, but the maidens were mentioned by Corinna.

It is of little interest to enumerate such isolated cults, and names can deceive, especially when they are transparent and bear a wide meaning. Late antiquity is inclined to raise the dignity of every god whose cult it happens to profess to immeasurable heights; it gladly attributes omnipotence to him. This lies in the name Πασιχράτεια. We find it at two corners of the Hellenic world; yet it is applied to different goddesses and must not at all be treated as a real divine name. At Selinus it stands in the famous inscription (Schwyzer 166) beside Μαλοφόρος among the gods who have granted victory. The Apple-Bearer is Demeter; the name derives from the mother-city (or rather grandmother-city) Megara (Pausanias I 44.3) and had also come to Byzantium, as the month Μαλοφόριος proves.⁵⁹ Thus the All-Powerful may be the Mistress of the Dead, perhaps the consort of Meilichios; both names are here euphemistic, for the Demeter-temple lay, as Gabrici’s excavations have shown, beside a necropolis. In Pagasae-Demetrias not a few dedications have been found to a Πασιχράτα, also reliefs that give her a form which points rather to Aphrodite than to Artemis, with whom she is nevertheless once equated. She therefore remains obscure, but with Persephone she can scarcely have anything to do, although the sanctuary lies in a necropolis.⁶⁰

Already the fluctuation of the name-form proves that Περσεφόνεια, Φερεφάττα, Πηριφόνα⁶¹ are un-Greek. To this circle must belong Πέρσης, who, according to Hesiod (Theog. 377), is distinguished by ἰδμοσύνη; but nothing further is heard of him, for it was only the redactor who inserted Hecate that made him her father; hence she is later often called Perseis, which in Hesiod (356)⁶² is the name of an Oceanid. The name of the hero Perseus, who is also called Perses, may be separated, but we do not understand it. Iliad Ι 569 already knows Persephoneia as the wife of Hades; for him 457 strikingly gives Ζεὺς χαταχθόνιος; the Nekyia presents her as the true Mistress of the Dead; her abduction by Hades and Demeter as her mother appear in Hesiod 913. With this the cult of the θεώ is given, and her return from the underworld is by no means necessarily implied; the Hymn to Demeter is wholly Eleusinian, yet it requires the proper name,⁶³ whereas later Κόρη predominates. Persephone, as Mistress of the Underworld, has wholly displaced the earlier Hellenically named goddess. She bears a quite different character when she can kindle a dread fire or send up dirges with the Sirens.⁶⁴ Then she can be equated with Hecate, who does not belong in the underworld. For this Persephone, the Styx as mother is fitting—a very striking statement in the Apollodoran Bibliotheca I 13, since elsewhere it follows the Theogony. Near the Attic market-place lay a Φερεφάττιον (Demosthenes Against Conon 8), where she seems to have been separate from Demeter. What the goddess was like who was taken over by the Greeks cannot be said; she must have been a chthonic power. But the Mistress of the Dead and the abduction which made her so are Greek, as the rape of Basile by Zeuxippos and the pair Neleus and Basile show. One is rather led to think of a sender of baneful hauntings, for whom the Styx as mother would be appropriate. The Queen of the Dead had no cult and thus lived essentially in poetry; Kore is wholly the complement of her mother.

In two places, rather on the fringe of the genuinely Hellenic world, Persephone became a principal goddess: at Cyzicus and at Epizephyrian Locri. At Cyzicus, in Mithradatic times, as their historians report, the chief festival was called the Περσεφόνεια, and it was said that she had received the city as her bridal gift—something likewise claimed for Thebes and for Sicily, so that here too, as at Cyzicus, the motif of the abduction was transferred. The coins already in the fourth century bear the head of the Σώτειρα: the goddess must therefore at some definite moment have manifested herself as saviour, and this recurred once more before the repulse of Mithradates, for the Delian stone (Bull. Corr. Hell. IV 472) records the institution of a festival Σωτήρια and the Delphic oracle which declared the city ἱερά (but not ἄσυλος). From this one might suppose the goddess to have been autonomous; fortunately, however, an archaic stone with a dedication to δεσπόνησιν has been preserved (Röhl, Inscr. antiquiss. 501). Thus the ancient cult merely developed in a peculiar fashion.

At Locri, despite the Lacinian Hera, the treasure of Persephone is mentioned as especially rich when plundered by Dionysius I, by Pyrrhus, and above all by C. Pleminius. It lay outside the city (Livy 29.18), and the Italian excavations have produced archaic representations of the abduction. It will therefore have been a sanctuary of the two goddesses, as so often lay in the suburbs. How it came about that Periphona displaced the mother escapes us. A cult of the natives may have prevailed here, as so often in Sicily.

Not a foreign name, yet despite the name Helios a foreign cult: the worship of the sun which we find in some places of the Peloponnese. It is best treated by asking at once whether the widespread assumption is justified which claims this cult for Crete, and accordingly derives it for Hellas from Crete. That the Minoan monuments show no reliable trace of it has been demonstrated by Nilsson (Minoan-Mycenaean Religion, pp. 356–62), since the heavenly bodies are depicted only as they appear to the eye. Yet people speak almost everywhere as though the matter were settled, and in the end the bull of Europa and even the Minotaur become a sun-god. One point of support is the gloss of Hesychius Ταλῶς ὁ ἥλιος, whose reliability Lobeck doubted. The bronze giant Talos, who guarded the island of Crete, invites association by the echo of the name. But how is he to be the sun? The myth introduces him merely in order to relate how, despite his brazen body, he perished, and poets accomplished this at will and through various agents. That he was a Cretan figure of legend is proved by the coins of Phaistos, where he is called Τάλων and is winged; what was intended thereby is uncertain. As a person he appears among poets in genealogies, and they continue to play with him—Ibicus, fr. 32 Bergk. He is brought into connexion with the sun only when one adds that on Crete a Ζεὺς Ταλλαῖος occurs repeatedly, also a Ταλλαῖα ὄρη, and that in the central Taygetus there lies a Ταλετόν (ὄρος), from which a Ζεὺς Ταλετίτας is named.⁶⁵ Thus a pre-Greek place-name is secured, with which the brazen Talos may somehow be connected; the sun enters only if one assumes that in Laconia and Crete Zeus had taken the place of Helios, because the Ταλετόν was sacred to Helios, to whom horses were sacrificed.⁶⁶ But Zeus and the sun in fact have nothing to do with one another⁶⁷; Zeus, however, does lay claim to the mountain-peak. Are we then to refer the Hesychian gloss Ταλῶς to the Laconian Ταλετόν, and is it trustworthy?

Asterios is the name of the mortal husband to whom Zeus hands over Europa; Asteria is said to have been the name of Crete itself (Hesychius). Both names are common in heroic legend, but for the most part empty. The pragmatism which could not tolerate the bull of Minos made Theseus overcome a son of Minos named Asterion (Pausanias II 31, 1; others said it was a general Tauros), and this in turn led to the notion that the Minotaur had been called Asterios by name (Apollodorus, Bibliotheca III 11). Nothing of the sun is perceptible in this; and even if in Gortyn a Ζεὺς Ἀστέριος should indeed have been worshipped,⁶⁸ the two fathers of Minos would then be identified—strange enough, certainly, but Zeus would never become the sun through an epithet taken from the stars. The bull whose form Zeus assumed in order to swim through the sea may have been chosen by the tale which made Europa a Phoenician, because it was known that there the highest god was worshipped in the form of a bull; but was he therefore the sun? Yahweh never was, and yet he too was worshipped in bull-form. Above all, the bull is as little a god as the swan in whose form Zeus impregnates Leda: Zeus in fact lays aside precisely the form required for the swim in order to beget Minos. And the whole matter has nothing at all to do with religion—at least as we know the story. Europa is not a goddess either, for her bones were carried in the festival procession.⁶⁹ She may be ancient Cretan, but not her name, which she shares with a Boeotian goddess, whether that be a spring or the earth. If the bronze relief found by Persson in the grave at Midea, which depicts a woman upon a bull, is truly early Mycenaean, one must concede that the tale is very ancient; but even then it is not proved that it is Minoan, nor, if it is, that the woman was called Europa.

Now the ταῦρος Μίνω—for to the Greeks, Minotauros is not a word. He does nothing but devour human beings until Theseus slays him, and he sits imprisoned in the Labyrinth. That scarcely speaks for a solar bull. The decaying yet not dismantled palace of Knossos the Greeks called λαβύρινθος, if it did not already bear that name earlier. The ruinous site was uncanny to them, and in the tangle of corridors one could indeed lose one’s way even now. Hence the story of Ariadne’s thread. Only thus did that one Theseus escape, whom the king’s daughter aided. And whoever did not escape was devoured by a monster; art very early fashioned it as half bull—or rather as a man with a calf’s head; Achelous looks quite different, very similar to oriental prototypes. Whether this formation derives from Minoan art is uncertain; even if so, it would prove only the borrowing of the form, not of the essence. When a hero, with the aid of the king’s daughter, overcomes the monster, finds his way out by the thread, and sails home with the king’s daughter—who would not recognise in this a myth, a fairy-tale, which has nothing to do with religion? The deliverance of children (not originally Athenian) was added, probably on Delos as an aition of the Crane Dance. The whole story was scarcely invented in Crete, where Minos remained the just king; rather, it arose where the liberating hero was at home or worshipped. This saga is old and widely diffused, drawing Naxos, Delos, Troezen, and Athens into itself, so that the Cretan bull fetched by Heracles and the Marathonian bull of Theseus will have arisen only on its basis, where the bull was simply a bull—indeed a particularly mighty one, which was somehow grounded, perhaps already from the outset in such a way that it was the bull sent to Minos from the sea by Poseidon, thus having to do with the sea and with the god who himself is called ταύρειος, but not with the sun; the true Poseidon could equally send him from the earth. He is, however, the same bull from which Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios and wife of Minos, conceived the Minotaur. She alone has given occasion to the hypotheses about the Minotaur and the solar bull. Poseidon sent the bull at Minos’ command in order to confirm his claim to rule; but Minos had promised to sacrifice him and did not do so, because the bull was too beautiful. His punishment was that Pasiphaë too found him too beautiful. So the Apollodoran Bibliotheca III 8. The assistance of Daedalus is easily eliminated as an addition, first devised when curiosity asked how the coitus was possible. Whether the rest is uniform one will doubt, but one gets no further, since we know the story only in later form. The polemic against mystic cults in Euripides’ Cretans we may at once leave out of account; but was Pasiphaë always in love with the bull and did she beget the monstrosity, or was she originally the noble mother of Deucalion, grandmother of Idomeneus,⁷⁰ and only through anti-Cretan malice transformed into the mother of the monster that was hidden in the Labyrinth from the eyes of the world—just as Minos himself, already by the poets (not first by the tragedians), was turned from the ὀαριστὴς Διός into an evil king? In any case it is a modern act of violence to see in Pasiphaë’s relation to the bull the same thing as in that of Europa. It might be a malicious imitation. In the end we reach the sun only through the name Pasiphaë, which indeed does not make its bearer a goddess, for the “All-radiant” might be so called after her father Helios; but is this father assured merely because he alone is named? Here an unquestionable goddess intervenes: Pasiphaë, who at Thalamae on the Taenarian coast possessed a dream-oracle held in high honour even by the Spartan state.⁷¹ A statue of Helios stood beside hers, and he had sacred flocks of sheep at Taenarum.⁷² Pausanias declares Pasiphaë to be the Moon,⁷³ evidently in opposition to other views; and this lay near at hand once it was recognised that the moon receives its light from the sun. Stoic theology, which soon became generally authoritative, could say nothing else; but already Aeschylus had made the Moon the daughter of the Sun.⁷⁴ When Phylarchus, who took an interest in myths, came to speak of Pasiphaë in his account of Agis (Plutarch, Agis 9), he offered quite different interpretations: daughter of Atlas—thus like Taygete (she is an Atlantid together with Sterope in the old Cyrenaean Acusilaus; unfortunately we are not told which Pasiphaë he means)—or Cassandra, that is, the Alexandra of Amyclae, appropriate for an oracular goddess, with the name derived ἀπὸ τοῦ φαίνειν πᾶσι τὰ μαντεῖα. Phylarchus himself decides for Daphne, daughter of Amyclas; this is the least serviceable, since it points towards the oracular god Apollo. The father Helios disappears entirely here, and at Taenarum the local community could be led to him without the daughter herself needing to become a goddess of light. Even if one does not draw in φαίνειν, “to show,” this goddess who appears in dreams may well bear brightness in her name, just as αἴγλα lies in Asclepius. To πασιφαής properly belongs also πασιφάεσσα, and thus Aphrodite is named in a spurious oracle of the Θαυμάσια ἀχούσματα 133. It is therefore anything but certain that the late-antique interpretation of Pasiphaë as the Moon is correct, and upon it hangs the entire interpretation of the Minotaur fable. If we are honest, we must say: the goddess and the mother of the calf-man bear the same name; they must therefore be connected in some way—we only do not know how.⁷⁵

Cretan worship of the sun cannot be demonstrated; for that very reason it may nevertheless have existed. On the margins of the Peloponnese, however, it is secure. Taenarum and Taleton are not the only places. In Elis the displacement of the Epeians destroyed the cult, but Augeas, son of Helios, whom the Iliad knows, bears the radiance of his father in his name and is the owner of countless herds of cattle. On the southern side of the Saronic Gulf, for Troezen, Hermione, and especially Corinth, temples or altars of Helios are attested by Pausanias⁷⁶—though this of course gives no guarantee of antiquity. Corinth is indeed not a city in Homer, but the name, originally that of the mountain, is Carian, and Sisyphus attests a seat of power of the second pre-Dorian immigrants. Thus Helios may be ancient here, even if he became famous only through Corinthian poetry.⁷⁷ The cult of the sun was wholly un-Greek; we shall later see how the Hellenes position themselves with respect to the heavenly bodies. Where it properly belongs is shown by Rhodes, the only place that made Helios its chief god; and despite the power of Rhodes, no offshoots of this cult arose. There is no cult of the moon.⁷⁸

Already in this investigation Crete has been of particular importance. We now come to the principal question: whether and to what extent the gods of the Minoan Cretans lived on in later Hellenic religion—wherein it may be entirely disregarded whether these Cretans belonged to the Asiatic population which I call Carian, or whether, in Crete itself as on the islands, they ruled over people of that stock. In practical terms this means engaging exclusively with monumental tradition; and already in this lies the fact that, especially since I lack any autopsy of my own, I take everything at second hand and am conscious how little weight my words carry. Above all, besides the writings of Sir Arthur Evans, I have relied upon G. Karo (Crete in the Realencyklopädie and the Bilderatlas zur Religionsgeschichte), G. Rodenwaldt, and of course Martin Nilsson’s Minoan and Mycenaean Religion, since he treats precisely this question exhaustively. His incisive criticism has in fact first given me the courage to speak of Crete at all.

One thing must never be forgotten. Religious thoughts and feelings can be read only with the utmost imperfection from a tradition that does not speak to us in words. When we interpret representations of ancient vanished gods and of their cult by analogy with later monuments of another faith, we run the risk of presupposing in the interpretation itself the very survival of belief and cult that is at issue. From the princes of the Argolid we see that they adopted the cult-forms of the Cretans, built no temples, but arranged cult-spaces within their palaces. This, then, was not done for the people; of its cult we know nothing. The whole external culture in Hellas has so completely perished that not even its memory endured here. The emigrants preserved this in heroic legend, but lost the external culture entirely. That speaks little in favour of the view that here or there Cretan belief and cult were permanently maintained. The few and not very significant tholos-tombs on Crete are only imitations of the incomparably more splendid ones of the Argolid. The shaft-graves contain the richest Cretan ornaments, but their construction is entirely original. They also contain the gold masks, and to these nothing Cretan corresponds, whereas the find from Trebenischte does. In the regions in which the Hellenic people of the Argolid had once dwelt, the custom was thus preserved for many centuries of placing a mask upon the face of the corpse for the solemn laying-out. The prothesis in general persisted, though limited to the time allowed by the condition of the body. Thus the mass of the people will always have acted.

At Mycenae, more than half a millennium after the destruction of the palace, a temple of Athena was built upon its site. In this will lie the fact that the place had remained unbuilt because it was holy, ἱερόν, that is, belonging to the gods and inaccessible to profane use. Even that is too much, if one assumes a continuity of cult for which every trace is lacking; and only then could the same god have remained the occupant. But one could just as well employ the desolate site—of which it was known that it had been the castle of the enemies—now for the god of the victors. That Athena ultimately derived from the Shield-Goddess, who had here been the protectress of the princes after five hundred years, could not possibly have been conscious to the builders of the temple. By now she was universally recognised as the citadel-goddess. In Tiryns Hera had a cult; and since no temple has been found, it must have been celebrated in the old great hall—however much must be subtracted from the ingenious conclusions which Frickenhaus set forth so attractively. All the more important that Hera was worshipped, the goddess of Prosymna, of the Heraion, who from this place became the Homeric and then the panhellenic goddess. The Dorians of Argos found her and took her over; thus she had long been worshipped and was Hellenic; her nature has nothing related to that of the Cretans. In Tylissos–Knossos she was introduced directly from Argos (Schwyzer 83).

On the citadel of Thebes a part of the Cretan-painted palace had been preserved in its ruins. It lay at the later marketplace; one part—probably that still preserved in remains today—had remained ἄβατον. Otherwise Dionysus had established himself there, since Semele was said to have borne him here, for which the traces of fire provided occasion.

In Athens, Athena dwelt in the house of Erechtheus; he was not an ancient king, but Poseidon Erechtheus, whose marks in the rock sanctified the place—whereby we see that Athena was truly a newcomer. That on the same spot there had once been the royal palace is beyond doubt: Cecrops with his daughters had lived there, his grave was close by, and in the sacred serpent the ancestral spirit lived on. This may be traced back to the Cretan palace-goddess, the snake-goddess, whom Nilsson has convincingly demonstrated. But since the serpent of the Erechtheion is male, the general Hellenic belief in the survival of the dead in serpent-form cannot possibly derive from the Cretans alone.

Even if nothing had been found, one would have to assume that beneath the Castalia at Delphi people had dwelt already before the Mycenaean period, for the spring and its position on a natural route of traffic invited this. But before Poseidon and Ge, who later had to admit Apollo and Dionysus to their presence, there is no occupant of the place; and these are again purely Hellenic deities of primeval time.

Very similar is the case with Mycenaean sherds or clay figurines which have been found at Tegea, Elateia, and Nemea in the investigation of Hellenic temples (Nilsson 405): they are insufficient to establish a cult-place, still less that the gods must have remained the same.

The veneration of Hyacinthus at Amyclae has endured, and he himself has preserved his pre-Greek name; we have seen that on Crete he survives in the name of a month, though we know nothing of his cult there. In Laconia he was wholly transformed by Apollo. Eileithyia too had a cult at Amnisos; but whether that was her origin appeared quite uncertain.

Unquestionably Cretan is Diktyna, later written Diktynna, since she cannot be separated from the eastern mountain Dikte and from the plant δίχταμνον, which was supposed to aid in childbirth. The westernmost cape too is called Diktynnaion, thus proving her wide diffusion on Crete. She has several sanctuaries in Laconia, which Pausanias enumerates and inscriptions confirm; she has also reached the Dorian Astypalaea.⁷⁹ It is striking that in a remote corner near Phocian Anticyra an Ἄρτεμις Δίχτυνα is found.⁸⁰ The equation with Artemis was familiar to the Athenians, and already one plays with the false derivation from δίχτυον, out of which Callimachus (Artem. 197) has made a story.⁸¹ There she is equated with Βριτόμαρτις (also written Βριτόμαρπις), who on Crete remained rather restricted.⁸² The proper nature of both can be grasped no further than that they were virginal and, like so many Hellenic goddesses, could become Artemis.

Ancient theology⁸³ has also equated with these goddesses the Aphaia, to whom the beautiful temple on Aegina belongs. This is non-committal, and the finds too do not prove an un-Greek origin of the cult; but the unintelligibility of the name and the position of the temple far from the city speak in its favour. The votive offerings come from men; that does not argue for Cretan origin or for a nature akin to Artemis. Theology also draws in the Laphria, whose chief seat is at Calydon, that is, in a place whose splendour falls in heroic times. Its treatment would require too many words for this place and is therefore relegated to an appendix. No foreign goddess will emerge.

Thus far what could be demonstrated of pre-Greek figures and cults has not been significant; it soon withers away. Now there must enter what Minoan art offers for religion. The Cretans were not free from foreign influences; indeed no little Babylonian material has been found. From the Egyptians, with whom they had so many relations, extremely little was adopted: the shaven heads and the sistrum on the relief-vase from Hagia Triada recall Egypt, and the sphinx is present; among the Greeks it appears only when they themselves come into contact with Egypt. The influence of the Orient (not further to be specified) is stronger in Crete. From it comes the griffin, appearing among the Hellenes also, mostly as the companion of foreign gods. The heraldic composition of the Lion Gate and of the πότνια θηρῶν is oriental, and Cretan mediation for later Hellenic art is not necessary. Oriental is the so-called Dove Goddess, whose doves, as Nilsson rightly remarks, are by no means secure. The double axe has no religious significance in Greece, and from its Carian name the Greeks named the Labyrinth from it, and not only on Crete.⁸⁴ The naked female figures in stone and clay, frequent since Neolithic times, occur here as on the islands, thus in the oldest Cretan strata⁸⁵; they are grave-gifts, so that in the other life too the woman may not be lacking to the dead.⁸⁶ The Cretans of the florescent period are extraordinarily restrained: the phallus is entirely absent—a highly significant difference from the Hellenes of all periods.⁸⁷ It is of great importance that the human form of the gods is consistently maintained, even if they may also appear as serpent and bird; at least this seems to be so and is in itself probable. The numerous, quite fantastic hybrid forms which occur especially on the “island stones,” the seals, belong, so far as they concern beings that were believed in at all, only to the serving retinue of the gods. It is essential to bear in mind that they have nothing in common with the hybrid or monstrous beings of Hellenic belief, nor with those of myth.⁸⁸

A most remarkable exception is the Chimaira on a bronze sheet found in the grave at Midea. Persson describes it in Forschungen und Fortschritte 1929, no. 18, and displayed it in a lecture at the jubilee celebration of the Archaeological Institute. The Chimaira has the form which Homer describes in Ζ 181; to this corresponds a gem in Furtwängler, pl. V 38a, who also interprets island-stones 16 and 18 as representations of her.⁸⁹ The man beside the Chimaira, however, is no victor, nor does he ride a Pegasos; rather he “seems seized by terror, his knees utterly failing him,” as Persson describes him. Thus it is proved only that the fabulous beast derives from the Cretans, not its conqueror, who in Homer is indeed transferred to the Argolid, but must be a Lycian; and from the Lycians Homer has the story, and with it the Chimaira.

The Cretans did not yet know the horse (and thus not Pegasos either); but the bull, too, is absent as such and in combination with a human head, or even in the Minotaur-formation, however often bulls appear in scenes of life or even in sacrifice. It is no secure assumption that the σφίγγειν τοὺς βοῦς, as the Attic ephebes still practised it in the second century, and the manner of sacrifice as at Υ 404, are of Cretan origin. The cult exhibits a characteristic vessel, the χέρνος, which may come from Crete, since it is still used there in Christian worship; thus in other periods too this vessel could serve different cults. But the so-called “horns of consecration” are lacking; the use of branches is not the same. Homer knows no στέφανοι at all; the olive-branch of the suppliants is wound with fillets—the priest Chryses holds them in his hands; in Crete they are absent. The predominance of the female sex among those participating in the cult is grounded in the predominance of female deities. Orgiastic dance, alien to the Greeks, seems to have been frequent; how rash, therefore, to deny to the Greeks the Laconian Caryatids and the dancers with the kalathiskos.

The numerous representations of goddesses Nilsson’s criticism has reduced to a few figures. First of all, the Snake-Goddess, worshipped by the princes in the house-chapel. It is tempting to compare the serpent of Erechtheus; but we have seen that this is hardly credible. The Snake-Goddess did not become Hellenic. Echidna, who belongs to Typhon, is neither a goddess nor Hellenic. The other goddess much revered by the Cretans is embodied in those images which represent a Mistress of Animals, usually in heraldic grouping: she stands between two wild or tame beasts, even birds, or holds them in her hands, subduing them. This formation is familiar to the Greeks; but did they receive it from Crete, whose Minoan culture had long since perished, or from the Orient? Here I must take an entirely negative stance toward Nilsson’s far-reaching conclusions. Precisely the Arcadian cults, which for me are evidence of the most ancient Hellenic religion, he claims for this Cretan goddess—who thus would have been preserved far better in the interior of the Peloponnese, where even Mycenaean traces are sparse, than on Crete itself. The Arcadian goddesses are later called Artemis, just like the Brimo of Pherae, the goddess of Amarynthos, the Eukleia of Thebes, the Agra, the Brauronia, and the Munichia of Attica with their bears, the goddess of Troezen, of Syracuse, the Laphria of Calydon. All were different, yet all had something that permitted their equation. Nor can Hecate be separated. Are all these then to have arisen from the Mistress of Animals? Britomartis and Diktynna lie far nearer. Differentiation of a single figure apprehended and named as a unity is in itself strange; the diverse naming of a power felt as divine, and then the particular emphasis in name or individual cult upon the dominant conception of the goddess’s activity, is as common as the eventual victory of a Homeric name. I readily believe that the Cretan Mistress of Animals in her substance was not fundamentally different from the Hellenic goddess of the wild. But that similar religious conceptions and feelings among different peoples generate similar divine figures is something familiar to us; the artistic representation is explained by oriental models. Nilsson himself does not doubt that in Artemis there is also a Greek goddess, but he believes in a strong Cretan influence, which I should regard as inessential even if it could be demonstrated for individual details of cult.

A third goddess is securely attested, who was evidently first worshipped in the symbol of the shield—thus warlike, even if she is not introduced in combat. She truly gave Athena her name, and probably more; and this is intelligible, since she must have been a goddess of the ruling class, of princes, and thus to venerate her lay close to the hearts of Hellenic princes, all the more if there existed a similar Hellenic goddess, as will later be considered. Yet already the Homeric Athena has become in her nature so individual and so Hellenic that the foreign root in truth scarcely signifies much. Still, in the birth from the head of Zeus a Cretan epiphany, if not the entire birth-story, is taken over. I refer to this Cretan Athena the impressive epiphany of a goddess upon a mountain summit (Karo, Bilderatlas 66), which one can hardly equate with the Mistress of Animals. The representation declares that she dwells in the mountain or appears upon it. But how perverse it is to see in her the Asiatic “Mountain Mother,” when she so unmaternally brandishes the spear, before which a man or a god recoils in terror. This false interpretation has been seduced by the wish to find a deity who maternally encompassed natural life, including human becoming and growth. How inadequate the attempts are to find such a figure is shown by Nilsson, p. 334. A cult of the Great Mother at Phaistos, to which the well-known late epigram GDI 5112 belongs, cannot be claimed for Minoan times and would in any case be an Asiatic import.⁹⁰

Rather, we miss the Earth-Mother, and with her the most ancient and most important Hellenic deity. For to appropriate the Eleusinian Mysteries for Crete on the basis of a place-name and the use of the χέρνοι is gross prejudice. Timaeus (Diodorus IV 79.6) attests μητέρες for Crete; the same religious feeling will have produced them that gave rise to the Hellenic Γῆ μήτηρ, but this latter never appears in the plural. Otherwise we know no traces of Cretan Mothers; on the Minoan monuments Eileithyia too is lacking.

It has generally been remarked that the male gods almost entirely recede. This is not sufficiently explained by the fact that peace and security prevailed on the island; for dominion over the islands, and wherever else the Cretans sought to establish themselves, demanded fighters, and they must therefore have had gods who granted them victory. There must also have been a god who made the weather, who sent storms and rain. Yet the monuments do not know him. Some representations show, singly and also beside the Mistress of Animals, a male god, apparently of exactly the same type.⁹¹ This duplication does not seem to me as readily intelligible as Nilsson (§ 329) finds it, though I cannot contradict him. The Hellenes know no such god.

Numerous are the testimonies to a tree-cult: a tree stands within a sanctuary. The Hellenes know nothing of this; for them a tree is at most ἱερός, and that a god dwells in it occurs only in isolated instances (cf. p. 34). Rhodian cults such as that of Helen δενδρῖτις are foreign, even if the divine names have become Hellenic, and the Theban Dionysus can have nothing to do with Crete.⁹² Neither the olive-tree beside the Erechtheion, nor the palm of Delos, nor the plane-tree of Cos, nor the oak of Dodona in which the prophetic Zeus dwells, has ever received cult. A divinity, or even several, may indeed dwell in a grove; then one will establish their cult-place before a beautiful tree and hang the votive offerings upon it: thus this tree, like the whole grove, becomes ἱερός, but it does not become a θεός. To be sure, in a tree dwells its soul, the δρυάς, just as in a mountain, a spring, a meadow; but this is wholly different from the Cretan tree-cult. The Cretan pillar-cult, which exists alongside the tree-cult, is something entirely peculiar and has no Hellenic parallel.⁹³ Of the sarcophagus from Hagia Triada I can say nothing, since it is uncertain whether it concerns the cult of gods or of the dead. It still stands quite isolated, and experts hesitate whether a ship or an elephant’s tusk is being offered.

It cannot be demanded that the finds should yield a complete picture of the Minoan world of gods. We do, however, possess in the Cretan cults of the Hellenic period a supplement, for there one may expect a survival of the old gods, and the new names need not alarm us. Britomartis and Diktynna we already know. They have persisted, have even spread a little abroad, but have in essence—even if the cult retained peculiarities—become Artemis, and thus even where this name is current in Crete, they will be concealed beneath it. The goddess upon a tree (not a plane-tree) who appears on beautiful coins of Gortyn will continue the tree-cult, though in such a way that the Hellenic mode conceives the divinity dwelling in the tree as a nymph, even if she may then have been called Europa, which presupposes the myth of her abduction by the god in bull-form. How this arose, how the old Boeotian goddess came hither, has hitherto eluded explanation. The goddess who on the coins of Priansos holds a serpent will at least have the Snake-Goddess as her foundation. The preference for mountain-goats, now called ἀγρίμια, on the coins, especially in western Crete, requires that this Cretan animal possessed great significance, and suggests a theriomorphic goddess, even if the wild goat is now only the animal sacred to the goddess. Cave-cult had formerly been widespread; many caves retained their sanctity; the god could in the meantime become quite another. Particularly impressive is the erection of two highly archaic temples near Prinia in continuation of Minoan cult.⁹⁴ On the other hand, the sanctification of the Idaean cave of Zeus took place only in Hellenic times, and this Zeus is in truth not Hellenic at all. Here, therefore, not merely the form but the content of a religion has been taken over together with its associated myth: the birth of Zeus, which is wholly un-Hellenic, as Welcker⁹⁵ perceived, and as must at once be evident to anyone who knows how to distinguish myth from religion. Yet the monuments of the Minoan period know as little of the Cretan child Zeus as of the Hellenic god of the thunderbolt. Here we must pause. Already Hesiod in Boeotia had heard of the child Zeus who was reared in the cave of the Goat Mountain. He inserted this into another story, which conceals the child from the murderous designs of his wicked father. The mother plays no part at all; instead, Ge brings the child to Crete and must then return to Olympus in order to hand Kronos, in place of the son, the stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes.⁹⁶ How Hesiod came to send Ge to Lyktos, which does not even lie on the sea, is inexplicable; he will have known little of Crete and will have learned the name by some chance. Of the birth of Zeus there is in and near Lyktos no trace, and the Goat Mountain never existed at all⁹⁷; that Hesiod invented it, however, is significant, for he was entitled to do so if he knew that a goat had nourished Zeus. Because the Hellenes very early consecrated to Zeus a cave on—or rather in—the Ida, in the general conception the god grew up there, and Ida herself even became his nurse.⁹⁸ In the hymn of Callimachus the Ash-nymphs⁹⁹ of Dikte likewise await him, and beside them the Corybantes and the Curetes: the fusion of two cult-sites and their attendant daemons is unmistakable. Of the cave on Dikte one hears little; only Apollonius of Rhodes recognises it alone—something we now understand, since the inscriptions from Itanos have taught us that with this city the eastern extremity of Crete belonged to Philadelphus.¹⁰⁰ Here the Eteocretans held out longest at Praisos, so that we may be certain of reaching the genuine pre-Hellenic god. His cave has not yet been found, but the temple, which lay between the cities of Praisos and Itanos, has been discovered, and within it sufficient remains of a hymn which, in later copy, preserves a poem whose form still points back to the fifth century.¹⁰¹ It addresses the god as χῶρε Κρόνειε, so that he was called Zeus; yet his nature has nothing to do with the Hellenic Zeus, for he returns anew each year, like the Christ-child in the song we sing before Christmas, and is to rush forth, θορεῖν, into fields and cattle and the youth of mankind, and so forth. From him there thus comes afresh each year the life-force and generative power; but he also renews the θέμις, the order of right upon earth. In this the Hellenic Zeus acts, however different he was. In that the hymn addresses him as χῶρος, his identity is given with the χούρης who occur frequently on Thera and have now also come to light in Cyrene. The hymn already names, beside the divine χοῦρος, the Curetes, whose armed dance protected the child Zeus; it also names Rhea. This touches upon the birth of Zeus, but the armed dance is Cretan; for it is there that the πυρρίχη arose, and the Curetes are equated with the Kyrbantes–Corybantes. This, however, is not original, for χούρητες here simply means “youths,” as in the Iliad (Ι 193), and is therefore Greek.¹⁰² They are named more frequently in the Cretan inscriptions, in contrast to the very rare Corybantes, and the dedication πρὸ χαρταιπόδων (Schwyzer 192) shows that they act in the same way as the χοῦρος Κρόνειος. That they later spread further—for example, that in Ephesus a priesthood bears this name (cf. the Ionic dancers, μολποι)—proves nothing for their original nature. In truth the un-Greek name Κύρβαντες will be the original one for the divine armed dancers, to whom the cultic dancers corresponded. Euripides (Bacch. 123) calls the Corybantes τριχόρυθες; in this is contained the helmet, resembling a triple tiara, on Mycenaean monuments. The amalgamation with the retinue of the Asiatic Mother of the Gods, and further with that of Dionysus, as given in the parodos of the Bacchae, we must hold entirely apart. The mother of the divine child plays no role in Crete at all, and Rhea above all did not exist there, according to Demetrius of Scepsis (Strabo 472); the epigram from Phaistos mentioned above does not refute him. What matters is only the suckling animal, or the goddess in that form—the wondrous nurture of the child. Coins and isolated literary testimonies mention, besides the goat, the cow, the sow, the dog, and the wolf¹⁰³; the goat appears most frequently, even though the very scene of suckling is lacking. The cow, however, already occurs on a Minoan sherd (Karo 79), then on coins of Praisos, where the goat’s head is nevertheless not absent; the sow in particular is well attested.¹⁰⁴ Thus we grasp the diffusion of the cult; the animal did not vary merely by locality. The goat prevailed, because it belonged to the Idaean cave, and there the goat—or the nymph—is called Amaltheia. One should not see in this a later transformation of the goat, as the bees, who likewise belong among the nourishers of the child,¹⁰⁵ were made daughters of a Melisseus, whereby the χέρας Ἀμαλθείας then becomes a goat’s horn. This has been current in poetry since Phocylides, is borne by Plouton–Ploutos (in whose realm there is a land of plenty), likewise by Achelous¹⁰⁶; if the goddess who nourishes the child possesses it, then in it lies the abundance of fertility and blessing which first fed the child, and which this child brings afresh each year upon earth to cattle and men. The goddess was indeed also conceived in goat-form; both went side by side.

It is, however, very remarkable how this figure—conceived both as goddess and as goat—continued to act. Pausanias (VI 25) reports of an Aphrodite by Scopas in Elis who rides upon a he-goat. She stood beside the dignified Aphrodite upon the tortoise by Phidias, and one now called her πάνδημος; this was said in contrast to the other, in accordance with the two Aphrodites to which one was accustomed from poets and philosophers; with cult and the sense of the epithet it had nothing to do. Correctly one should have called her ἐπιτραγία, a name that occurs repeatedly, and Aphrodite upon the goat is often represented. Böhm (Arch. Jahrb. IV, 408) provides the evidence. Most learnedly Furtwängler treats “Aphrodite Pandemos as a goddess of light” (Münch. Sitz.-Ber. 1900, 590). I need not enter into polemic with either, for they have not understood the vase-painting and the terracotta relief. When a female figure upon a goat (the udder is clearly visible), accompanied by two kids, appears in the sky—which on the relief is marked by stars—this is the Αἴξ with her ἔριφοι, which stands in the constellation of the Charioteer.¹⁰⁷ On the vase a torch-bearer goes before; Hermes looks on in admiration: the constellation is rising; so too is the movement on the relief. Eratosthenes (Catast. 27) knows of the catasterism of the Αἴξ from the Κρητιχά of Epimenides, into which also the Αἰγόχερως is drawn¹⁰⁸; for the goat he cites Musaeus, who calls her a daughter of Helios and tells strange things of her, among them that she belonged to Amaltheia and had nourished Zeus. Nikander explicitly calls the goat Amaltheia (Schol. Arat. 161).

We now fully understand the jokes of the comic poets about an Αἴξ οὐρανία, which the grammarians only half grasped when they said: “ὁ τῆς Ἀμαλθείας χέρας ἔχων πᾶν ὃ ἐβούλετο εἶχεν.”¹⁰⁹ It becomes clear that the bright Capella, as we say, and the small stars beside it were by Hellenic sailors—who in Cancer found the asses at the manger—made into the goat with two kids; her setting was regarded as a dangerous time. Like the asses, they found a place only within one of the great later constellations. Very early, then, Amaltheia was sought in the goat, and one may call the riding woman Amaltheia, although she herself did not come into the sky. She is then present in the goat just as she was in the Cretan myth. It must be left to archaeologists to examine the individual monuments to see whether they do not represent the heavenly goat. Aphrodite ἐπιτραγία rides upon a he-goat, and therefore cannot be directly equated with the goat itself; nor is it sufficient to note that art is much inclined to render animals as male even where the other sex is required. For Aphrodite is indeed οὐρανία, but she has nothing to do with the stars. I therefore can no longer maintain her identification with the Cretan goat-goddess, whose existence is probable, much as I should like to do so; for a justification of the ἐπιτραγία is lacking, and to speak of τραγίζειν is more than tasteless. Nevertheless it deserves notice that in Athens the ἐπιτραγία was connected with the Cretan voyage of Theseus (Plutarch, Thes. 18), whereby a goat becomes a he-goat.

The Arcadians too laid claim to the birth of Zeus;¹¹⁰ and even if many details are late borrowings, one must nevertheless assume on Mount Lycaeum the existence of a corresponding birth-story of a god—he need not have been called Zeus. He was not so called at Olympia, either originally or later; the attempt implied in the name of the Idaean cave (Pindar, Ol. V 18) did not prevail. Here there existed a divine mother who nurtured her child in a small cave of the Cronion; the child was later called Sosipolis, and a ἱερὸς λόγος grew up around him. At Methydrion one even wished to have the Corybantes. At Thelpusa one worshipped an Ἀσχληπιὸς παῖς,¹¹¹ for whom a turtledove had done a service; he was supposed to be an exposed child. The name Asklepios can scarcely be ancient; all the more certain is the child to which it has been attached. One might perhaps also adduce the little Hermes in the Cyllenian cave. But the Dionysus-child with his nurses must be kept entirely apart. The Phrygian god arrived only when Minoan Crete had long since perished, and whoever looks at the inscriptions and coins knows that he never found any significant veneration on the island. Even Asclepius found it only at Lyttos, where he had been adopted from Cyrene. Quite apart from individual cults, the veneration of a sacred child does indeed, as Nilsson has surmised, demonstrate a fertilisation of the Hellenic imagination by the Cretans: this is more than the borrowing of a name or a cult-practice.

What Hesiod relates of the persecution of the little Zeus by his father—a motif which many fairy-tales connect with nourishment by an animal—must not be transferred to the Cretan Kouros-Zeus; the armed dance is wholly in place even without this later motivation. Thus the band of youths does homage to the annually returning youth. He is no longer a child now, even if ἀγένειος, as he was fashioned at Praisos and appears as Zeus Velchanos on Gortynian coins.¹¹² Where the god went after he had accomplished the fertilisation for which he came, we do not know and need not know. As a youth he has come; he will presumably depart elsewhere to exercise his generative power. He has not taken a wife, has therefore not himself celebrated a marriage. To let him die is prompted only by the desire to rank him among the popular dying vegetation-gods.¹¹³ For this one appeals to the tomb of Zeus which is said to have existed somewhere on Crete.¹¹⁴ The offence which this provoked allows one to infer that it was unique. It therefore did not belong to the widespread cult for which the hymn was composed. If annual dying had belonged to that cult, the Kouros would never have become Zeus. Sol invictus never wholly sets, and the Christ-child returns each year. We shall not inquire further: the Kouros will remain god and continue to provide for the χαρταίποδες and for all else. The Hellenes recognised in him Zeus when this latter extended his power over all living things—not at a very early date; but through this equation the Kouros in cult remained what he had been, and Zeus in his Hellenic cult also remained what he was.

It is a most sensitive fact for Greek history that we learn virtually nothing of Crete until Ephorus and Aristotle describe its social conditions. From them and from a few scattered notices we could form no picture at all of ancient Crete; even the Dorian settlement is only inferred. Already in the fifth century the island has scarcely any connections with the rest of the Hellenic world.¹¹⁵ Later it is the ill-reputed, politically fragmented Crete, decaying in language and culture. Grave internal convulsions must have taken place there, of which the other Hellenes— themselves divided—took no notice. For the Hellenic gods had nevertheless come to the island: Poseidon and Demeter, it is true, not frequently; Dionysus still less; Artemis did not displace the native Diktynna and Britomartis; Apollo in Gortyn is the Pythian, but the temple differs from the normal Doric type. Hera, and probably Ares as well, came from Argos; similar transfers must be assumed even where we can no longer prove them. The island offered space for settlers. A city in the interior is called Arkades; where the leading officials are not χόσμοι, as among the true Dorians, but demiourgoi, Peloponnesian immigration is to be recognised. The east remained Eteocretan for a long time. On the other hand we hear of a poet Thaletas of Gortyn, who appeared in Sparta and is named in the history of music. The Cretan metre—that is, a distinctive kind of rhythm—is already mentioned by Pindar. With the names of Rhadamanthys and Minos, the fame of Cretan justice was widespread; and the inscriptions of Gortyn testify, even in their form, to a high and wholly distinctive florescence—the beautiful script is worthy of its content. To what extent the tradition of the Cretan sculptors Dipoinos and Skyllis in the Peloponnese secures a significant influence of Cretan art, as is often believed, is by no means yet established. But if, in contrast to all this, Crete sank to a level that allowed Plato to say that Homer was there scarcely known, a disastrous decline must have taken place.

What is attributed to Crete in matters of religion is peculiar. The Delphic priesthood wished to derive from Crete (or even from Cnidus) when it had detached itself from the association of the Phocian tribe; and even blood-purification, which belonged to the demands of the Delphic god, was said to have been performed for Apollo and Artemis by a Cretan Karmanor of Tarrha,¹¹⁶ and blood-stained murderers were sent by legend to Crete.¹¹⁷ As a priest of expiation the Cretan Epimenides was said to have appeared in Athens, and perhaps also in Sparta; oracles and a theogony were about 500 or later placed under his name. Of the Corybantes–Curetes (they are identical, Strabo 469)¹¹⁸ a more fitting treatment will be given in another context. How much or how little of what is ascribed to Cretan doctrines and cults belonged in Crete itself, or elsewhere, to communal worship, or was practised only alongside it, no one can say; but an impulse for all that in the fifth century was called “Cretan” must once have come from there and points to a religious movement of which later no trace remains on the island.

We shall henceforth have scarcely any occasion to cast a glance toward the Cretans,¹¹⁹ whom Epimenides—that is, an Attic poem of about 500—calls “ἀεὶ ψευσταί, χαχὰ θηρία, γαστέρες οἶον” In Hellenistic times they deserve this characterisation.

1. 1. ↩ The evidence may be found in every handbook. If anyone misses Karneios in Corinth and infers from this that he was absent there, he has not considered that we know virtually nothing about early Corinth, whereas the colonies bear witness for the mother-city.

2. 2. ↩ Alongside this, Zeus is worshipped under the same name (Xenophon, Rep. Lac. 13), which is intelligible in connection with the king’s sacrifice before the army sets out, especially since οἱ σὺν αὐτῶι are honoured at the same time. This is a custom of later times.

3. 3. ↩ According to Hesychius, ἁγητής is the name of a ἱερώμενος τῆς θεοῦ at the Karneia, who thus represents the leader of the advancing Heraclid Dorians. ἡ ἑορτὴ ἁγητόρια stands beside it, evidently a day of the Karneia. The goddess is striking. She is likely to be concealed in the daughter of Crius in the pragmatised story which shows the way to the conquest of Sparta. Then she was once the old local goddess who received Karnos among herself as οἰχέτης.

4. 4. ↩ On coins of Metapontum, first from the fourth century, there appears a youthful head with ram’s horns (Head, Historia Numorum 77). In this period one can scarcely think of Apollo Karneios, nor of Zeus Ammon; the head does not in any case look like either. Karnos might have appeared in this form. But who can say what gods the Metapontines possessed? Even a borrowing from nearby Laconian Tarentum is a possibility.

5. 5. ↩ Nilsson, Griechische Feste, p. 119.

6. 6. ↩ Asopos is the name of two rivers, the Boeotian and the one near Sikyon. Of both it is told that neighbouring or otherwise connected cities were his daughters. Of the Boeotian it is related that Zeus, when he carries off one of the daughters, strikes the pursuing father with the thunderbolt; for in this Asopos there lies a seam of brown coal (Neumann–Partsch, Phys. Geogr. 268). Yet this is connected with the abduction of Aigina, who belongs to the circle of the other Asopos. That circle was represented by a sculptural group at Olympia (Pausanias V 22, 6), since it was dedicated by Phleius; and yet Thebes was included in it, which belongs to the other circle. This intermixture is already present in the poem of Corinna; even Sinope appears in it, which we cannot understand at all. Which group is the older I cannot discern; at its basis lies an influential genealogical poem which one would like to know, since political connexions are embedded in it. Pindar thus grounds the friendship of Thebes and Aigina. Later all this is forgotten.

7. 7. ↩ The Ilisos does not do so, and yet it possesses a not inconsiderable treasury (IG I 310, 206; 324, 89); this is lacking to the Kephisos, but Ion in Euripides (1261) can invoke the ταυρόμορφον ὄμμα Κηφισοῦ πατρός. Springs, whose divinities must be female, bestow no children. In the Peloponnese the practice exists nowhere save with Asopos, not even with Inachos, although the father of Io likewise appears in the genealogies as ancestor of the people. In Thessaly neither the pre-Hellenic nor the Hellenic rivers are related to human names. In the west of northern Greece the greatest river has received the name of the lord of all rivers, doubtless because Dodona prescribed sacrifice to Acheloos (Ephoros in the scholia on Ω 195). The Evenos has recently become Greek as Εὐέανος in Bacchylides (Oxyr. 1361 [XVII § 79]), though it remains uncertain how a river can bear an ἑανός, and with the adjective ἑανός it is not easy to combine εὐ; ἑανοῦ χασσιτέροιο (Χ 613) would otherwise fit well.

8. 8. ↩ The custom may be inferred from the tenth letter of Aeschines.

9. 9. ↩ Zenodotus did not know Ω 195. At Χ 616 there was a variant Ἀχελήιον for Ἀχελώιον, because on Sipylos there was a river Ἀχέλης which seemed to fit the Niobe story. The scholia mention that Ἀχελητίδες occurred in Panyassis, who admitted so much Asiatic material; but whether he was meant to attest the reading, or even did attest it, is unclear. It is false, and Ἀχελώιος does not become Carian or Lydian through mere resemblance. But it was doubtless not understood. On his representations and his significance Matz has written excellently (Naturpersonifikationen, pp. 93 ff.).

10. 10. ↩ Maximus Tyrius VIII 6. A cult of Olympos must not be inferred from the oath there, since at a very early date he is equated with the sky. In itself I hold it to be credible.

11. 11. ↩ Processions—or at least priests—will in many places have ascended mountains in order to implore rain, where a Ζεὺς ὑέτιος or ἰχμαῖος was thought to dwell, as is attested for Pelion; but the arduous ascent was at times replaced by other rites. In later times Olympus was climbed by priests, and traces of cult now seem to have been discovered there, though not on the highest summit. Plutarch, cited by Philoponus in the Meteora (Comm. Aristot. XIV 1, 27), has: γράμματα μεῖναι εἰς ἐτέραν τῶν ἱερέων ἀνάβασιν ἐχ τῆς προτέρας ἐν τῶι Ὀλύμπωι. The transmitted ἱερείων is printed, and one lets the sacrificial animals come to life again, perhaps even write. Philoponus does not have Plutarch before him, but an informant who immediately communicates meteorological observations which he owes to a visitor: this cannot be something Philoponus says of himself. The same author reports shortly before of sacrifices on Kyllene, which of course were offered to Hermes.

12. 12. ↩ Perseus petrified him with the Gorgon’s head (Ovid, Met. IV 657). Vergil, Aen. IV 247, at first, in genuine poetry, merely lets the mountain have head and shoulders; but when chin and beard follow, the metamorphosis nevertheless emerges. It is, like most, only a jeu d’esprit. Hence from the transformation of Haemus and Rhodope (Ovid VI 87) one must not infer Thracian mountain-gods.

13. 13. ↩ Kronos and the Titans, p. 45.

14. 14. ↩ The Centaur in the Aspis 186. A mountain in Aetolia: Hesych. A. Ludwich has extracted a fragment of Diodorus from the Hamburg Odyssey scholia (Rh. Mus. 34, 639), according to which Mimas drives Peleus to Skiathos, until Chiron brings him back to Iolcos. The same Mimas appears in a Boeotian genealogy in Diodorus IV 67. The story runs parallel to the expulsion of Peleus to Ikos. — Callimachus, Hymn. 6, 91, allowed himself to be seduced by the Titanic name into speaking of snow upon Mimas. In Thrace, according to the Etymologicum Magnum, a mountain Mimas is said to have existed; but this rests upon the Gainia of an Ammonius, thus on the fifth century A.D.; Suid. s.v. belongs here.

15. 15. ↩ Berliner Klassikertexte V 2, 284, where I had not yet grasped the matter quite correctly.

16. 16. ↩ An address such as Sophocles, Oed. 1391, does not truly confer personality. Something special is that this poet lets one swear by Olympos (Ant. 758), alongside the address to Cithaeron (Oed. 1089). The μαρμαρόεσσα Ὀλύμπου αἴγλα (Ant. 610) shows that for him Olympus and heaven are the same; but the Greek swears by heaven only very rarely, and then only alongside Ge.

17. 17. ↩ The mountains which Gaia begets in Hesiod (Theog. 129) are not persons, but dwelling-places of the Nymphs, the ὀρειάδες, who under this name happen not to occur early. Hellenistic poetry can of course let the neuter ὄρος lament Daphnis (Theocritus 7.74); Endymion sleeps on sarcophagi in the lap of Latmos, and the little Dionysus is crowned by Νύσης ὄρος as a majestic nymph, on a stucco relief from Portus (Giornale degli Scavi 1928).

18. 18. ↩ Abbreviations Ἀφρώ, Ἀφρεία, also in the Thessalian month-name Ἄφριος, have remained isolated; hence a Zeus Ἄφριος (IG IX 2, 452). It is important that Ἀφορδίτα occurs in Crete (GDI 4952) and in Pamphylia. Frutis is without doubt a Latin mutilation.

19. 19. ↩ Cythera sank into complete insignificance under Spartan rule, so that we know scarcely anything about the island. Pausanias did not visit it, but copied a periplus. Even today it is wholly neglected. When it still belonged to Argos, matters may have been different, so that Hesiod learned something of it. He acknowledges, yet at the same time restricts, a claim which went to the first reception of the goddess, when he says that she merely approached the island. The form Κυθέρεια was forced by the verse.

20. 20. ↩ To reject the entire passage outright is from the outset forbidden by the consideration that Aphrodite cannot be absent from a Theogony. But the intolerable contradiction between lines 181 and 189, upon which Jacoby bases his athetesis, dissolves if one recalls that the Greek language does not possess the Latin pluperfect, which we have imitated, but must employ the aorist; that is, it cannot in the tense itself mark the temporal interval between two past actions. Now the action of Kronos is a single one: he cuts off the μήδεα of Ouranos; he will therefore have kept the phallus in one hand; he casts it behind him. Yet with this the generative power was not abolished, for drops of blood fell into the bosom of Gaia, and from them children sprang. And the μήδεα? They may well have been disposed of, but we shall not be surprised if the narrative proceeds with μήδεα δέ and, in the aorist, reverts to ἔρριψε. This must be more precisely elaborated, for the μήδεα have come into the sea. The expression is varied; χάββαλε is introduced, intelligibly, since the χατά now becomes important. And if it is said where something falls, is it blameworthy if one adds whence it was thrown? The sea points to “from the land”; ἀπʹ ἡπείροιο avoids a word that could be understood as Gaia. Thus I declare with full conviction for the Hesiodic origin of lines 188 to 198 (excluding 196, of course). But lines 201–206 Jacoby has rightly rejected; there I myself was captivated by the pretty verses which inspired Phidias’ relief on the throne of Zeus. They come from the same poet as lines 121–22.

21. 21. ↩ The tradition evidently goes back to a theologian, thus probably Apollodorus, collected in Meineke, Comici II, 1206. We learn that Aristophanes mentioned an Ἀφρόδιτος, and Theophrastus the Ἑρμαφρόδιτος, as we read in the Characters 16. Clearly this was a phallic herm with a female head, probably also with breasts. What later art fashioned is its own affair.

22. 22. ↩ Since the altar of Pandemos has been found in its place and the epigram upon it protests against the λόγοι ἄδιχοι ψευδεῖς (LG I² 700), it is settled that Apollodorus (Harpocr. Πάνδημος) is right in connecting the Pandemos with the oldest market-place; but the name will probably have meant something like what δημοτελής meant later. The old market, when it no longer sufficed as an assembly-place, seems to have been assigned to the Eleusinion and then to other sanctuaries. The evil repute of the Vulgivaga already existed in the fifth century, and the Aphrodisia, which in the time of New Comedy were especially celebrated by the hetairai (Menander Kolax, Poenulus, Lamia in Alciphron IV 16), will have attached themselves to the πομπή of the Pandemos. At that time the temple lay in ruins, but the priestess enforced a thorough restoration (IG II² 659). For the purificatory sacrifice a dove suffices—the animal of the Semitic goddess, which in any case by no means belongs to the general cult of Aphrodite. When statues of maidens dedicated to a goddess hold a dove, one must not infer a cult of Aphrodite.

23. 23. ↩ The goddess of Eryx is Carthaginian; there prostitution therefore occasions no surprise (Strabo 272).

24. 24. ↩ Euripides, fr. 1084, must not mislead; for she seems to be called πόλις Ἀφροδίτας only because polis has been interpolated. The Ionian dialect excludes the word. The poet speaks of the ἱερὸς ὄχθος Ἀφροδίτας, the Acrocorinth, where her temple stood.

25. 25. ↩ This becomes especially intelligible if one considers Aphrodite at the harbour of Aegina and the seafaring on which the island’s high but brief florescence rested. In Troezen Artemis Soteira assumed the protection of ships—something alien to her proper nature—because Limnatis was the principal goddess.

26. 26. ↩ In Sparta there was also an Aphrodite Ἀφροδίτα ἀμβολογήσα, who was to preserve the bloom of youth. If this was not solely a women’s cult, which is the most likely assumption, she could also appear as ἀρεία. Pausanias III 18.1. Plutarch (Symp. qu. 654d) cites the opening of the cult-song, which has nothing to do with Alcman: ἀνάβαλʹ ἄνω τὸ γῆρας—iambic, ὦ χαλά ʹφροδίτα, ithyphallic in form, that is, in truth iambic.

27. 27. ↩ In Plutarch, Aet. Rom. 52, Amyot rightly corrected Εἰλιονεία to Εἰλείθυια. Beside Orthia, Pausanias (III 17.1) names a temple of Eileithyia; but according to the inscriptions she was called Eleusia (Orthia 51, 143, 370).

28. 28. ↩ IG V 1, 1445: Ἐλευθίαι, Καλοῖς ὑπὲρ Λυχίας Ἀθαναδᾶν. The Καλοί will have assisted at childbirth, as we see on the Spartan votive offering (Athenische Mitteilungen V, plate 6, XXIX, p. 16); here Prott draws attention to the fact that at Argos the temple of Eileithyia stood beside that of the Anakes. At Messene likewise there was a temple of the Corybantes, and it is natural to see in them the Καλοί, which would not essentially alter the meaning of “helpers.” In Orthia 50, fig. 29, a very ancient clay work is reproduced which is supposed to represent two helpers at a birth; it may be my own fault that I cannot recognise this. On a Boeotian pithos (Amer. Journ. Arch. XIV, 374) two female helpers seem to be assisting a great goddess as she rises from the mountain, as with Aphrodite on the Ludovisi throne, where childbirth has also been thought of.

29. 29. ↩ In Callimachus, Hymn 3, 15, Artemis fetches young nymphs from Amnisos to be her companions. There the Eileithyiae seem to have lost both their name and, perhaps, their essence, although Artemis as a helper in childbirth might well require attendants.

30. 30. ↩ For example at Megara, Pausanias I 44, 2.

31. 31. ↩ Especially vivid at Hermione, Pausanias II 35, 11. But at Tegea, VIII 48, 7, the goddess whom Pausanias calls Eileithyia is named Αὔγη ἐν γόνασιν, which points to an image of a woman in labour. That Auge was in fact a birth-goddess, however, I would not venture to affirm.

32. 32. ↩ Pausanias I 1.5; more on Lysistrate in § 3. Aristides, Hieroi Logoi 2.17, mentions a place Γενναίς near Phocaea, thus the former seat of the goddesses who were now forgotten.

33. 33. ↩ Photius s.v., from Apollodorus (fr. 141 Jac.), to which Schol. Thesm. 299 belongs. He had before him the ritual which touches IG I² 5. In his Stoic genealogy Kalligeneia is the Earth, although on the stone she stands beside her. Photius also gives her parents, Zeus and Demeter. The Iliad makes Hera the mother of Eileithyia, where one should not seek a father. Momentary inventions of poets and theological interpretations do not belong to belief.

34. 34. ↩ Thus Pindar says (Oxyr. 1792, 13) ἐραταί Ol. 6.43. Such epithets could be bestowed upon the pangs only by one who was incapable of empathising with a woman.

35. 35. ↩ In IG V 1, 1217 the supplement [Δαμ]οίαι hovers in the air.

36. 36. ↩ Already Ottfried Müller referred, in his note on Festus (Paulus) p. 68, the statement that Damia received a sacrifice at a festival of the Bona Dea to the Tarentine festival.

37. 37. ↩ One would gladly, in accordance with the season, discover ἄζειν in the name—but how?

38. 38. ↩ If on the stone 398 Μνεία is written, this may be intended to interpret the unintelligible name as μνήμη. In similar fashion grammarians have connected ἁ μνία with ἀμνία (from ἀμνός), or misread δαμία in this way—perhaps already before Didymus; Zenobius IV 20 = Plutarch 41, in shorter form Suidas s.v. Ἀμαία. Alongside this stands the Sophoclean Ἀζησία, with a futile interpretation based on the mother’s search for the daughter.

39. 39. ↩ With the genealogy Ὠχεανοῦ χαὶ Δήμητρος, which remains unintelligible and cannot count for more than theological speculation.

40. 40. ↩ At Thalamai Pausanias (III 26) has transferred the oracle of Pasiphaë to Ino; at Brasiai (III 24, 4) Dionysos is brought in—naturally a later addition.

41. 41. ↩ That such a mission from Dodona to Delos actually took place must still be believed for Herodotus’ time; later no trace of it remains. According to his account, ears of wheat figured in the cult of the Thracian Ἄρτεμις Βασιληίη. The mission from the Hyperboreans to Dodona must be laid to the charge of the priests there. Incidentally, Dodona itself is called hyperborean, though only in the unreliable AD (in truth D) scholia on Β 750, ΙΙ 233. The whole matter can have nothing to do with agriculture, since this is impossible on Delos; the inhabitants live there from fishing and sponge-diving—Δήλιος χυρτεύς (Herodas 3, 51), χολυμβητής (Diogenes Laertius IX 1, 12). Rheneia belonged to them and is named from sheep.

42. 42. ↩ Herodotus names the first pair in wholly Hellenic fashion, Hyperoche and Laodike; the second pair in the processional song of the Lycian Olen were called Opis and Arge. Pausanias, who knows more of Delian poems, gives different information (V 7, 8): Olen, he says, names an Ἀχαία—very strange for a Lycian, since that means “Greek woman.” Melanopos of Cyme, in his song, names Opis and Hekaerge. Callimachus (Del. 292) adds a third. The pairs are no longer distinguished; they are in any case a duplication, required by the two graves. The genuine names Opis and Arge = Hekaerge, secured by the songs, had in truth nothing to do with the Hyperboreans.

43. 43. ↩ This form prevails from Callimachus onward; but in his Hymn to Artemis 204 the assonance points to Ὦπι ἄνασσʹ εὐῶπι, and so it stands in Hesychius. Οὖπις in the Etymologicum Magnum is a scholion on that passage. According to Palaiphatos 31, Artemis in Sparta is called Upis.

44. 44. ↩ It is highly remarkable that the earliest Boeotian local writer, Aristophanes, knew of a prophetess as daughter of Enyeus who came to Delphi; Photius, s.v. Ὁμολώιος.

45. 45. ↩ This becomes quite clear at Υ 69, where Enyalios is the same being who in the Theomachy is called Ares, and at Ν 519, where Enyalios is father of Askalaphos, while at Ο 112 it is Ares. Enyalios is an epithet at Π 211, where Aristarchus rightly says that it is a confusion with him when Ares is called son of Enyo; cf. Schol. Aristophanes, Pax 457. The fettering which Ares suffers at Ε 385 (on Naxos) is transferred in Oxyr. 1241, col. 4, to Enyalios in Thrace, and in place of Hermes it is Apollo who rescues him. Askalaphos, “lizard,” is not a name invented by the poet, but a hero of the Boeotian Orchomenians, whose father was Enyalios, not Ares.

46. 46. ↩ Enyalios, says Plutarch (Aet. Rom. 290d) and Pausanias III 14, 9, is Ares; Apollodorus in Porphyry (abst. II 55) likewise, for the human sacrifice must of course have belonged to the older god. In Hesychius there stands an Θηρίτας Ἐνυάλις from Sparta; in Pausanias III 19, 8 he is called Ares and is derived from his nurse Θηρώ. We shall recognise in Θηρίτας an independent god and refrain from any interpretation.

47. 47. ↩ Xenophon Anabasis I 8, 18 among the mercenaries of Cyrus; Arrian Anabasis I 14, 7 in the Macedonian army. In Hesychius there stands ἐνιηλίζειν· τὴν ἐνάλιον ἑορτὴν ἄγειν. Two emendations introduce Enyalios, but a festival for him is scarcely credible.

48. 48. ↩ For the practice of the Delphic oracle—though not for actual belief or cult—it is characteristic that it instructed the Tenian community about 170 B.C. to sacrifice to the following gods for the victory of the χοινὸν τῶν νησιωτῶν led by Rhodes: Ζεὺς σωτήρ, Ἀθάνα Σώτειρα (the Delphic forms are preserved), Ποσειδὼν ἀσφάλειος, Ἄρτεμις ὀρθωσία, Ἡρακλῆς, Ἄρης, Ἀθάνα ἀρεία, Ἐνυώ, Ἐνυάλιος, Νίχα. The priests must have possessed catalogues of gods; on this occasion they selected all who might have contributed to victory. IG XII 5, 913.

49. 49. ↩ In Cnidus Herodotus I 174 knows of Laconian settlers.

50. 50. ↩ The Tarentines likewise provided themselves with such a monument for their Hyacinthia, and some even called it the tomb of Apollo Hyacinthus. Thus Polybius VIII 30; one should not render the already strange tradition still more incredible by allowing Apollo without an epithet to die.

51. 51. ↩ Already Euripides Helen 1473 is aware of this. Bathycles, however, had still represented Hyacinthus bearded; but in sacred art one should not attach too much weight to this.

52. 52. ↩ Pausanias III 19. Euphorion, Hermes LIX 262. Hesychius: Πολύβοια θεός τις, ὑπʹ ἐνίων μὲν Ἄρτεμις, ὑπʹ ἄλλων δὲ Κόρη

53. 53. ↩ Inscr. Brit. Mus. IV 787, 821. The goddess was also called Ἐπιφανής, and thus—like so many others—experienced an “epiphany” in the third century. Her festival is attested in the Delian inscription Bull. Corr. Hell. VII 485.

54. 54. ↩ Phanodemos (Photios s.v. Ὑαχινθίδες) names the place and identifies the Hyakinthids with the daughters of Erechtheus, whose sacrifice Euripides narrates in the Erechtheus and who are transformed into the Hyades. The place lies ὑπὲρ τῶν Σφενδονίων. This is often emended to Σφενδαλέων after Valckenaer, but wrongly; for Σφενδόναι is a τόπος Ἀθήνησιν (Bekk. Anecd. 202), and the lemma ἀφιδρύματα ἐν ταῖς Σφενδόναις will refer to the Ὑαχινθίδες. For locating the site it is useful that one of the Hyakinthids was named Λουσία, Steph. Byz.; this lay not far west of the city (Arist. and Athen. II 152). In the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus III 212 Meursius has corrected from λυταίαν. There the story is awkwardly connected with Minos’ siege of Athens; the father Hyacinthus is imported from Sparta, clearly because of the name. Phanodemos speaks instead of an incursion from Boeotia. Evidently the local legend did not originally give any definite occasion for the sacrificial death. The daughters of Erechtheus received cult; Philochorus in the scholia to Sophocles OC 100. Euripides therefore invented only the sacrificial act and its linkage with Eumolpus’ attack. As daughters of Erechtheus they could bring rain, just as the daughters of Cecrops brought dew—and thus become Hyades.

55. 55. ↩ The phylē: IG XII 5, 864. The place-name appears repeatedly in 862. The phylai seem to be named partly after places, partly after heroes.

56. 56. ↩ Archäologischer Anzeiger XXXVII 310; Valmin, Årsberättelse Lund 1928/29, 146. In Pausanias IV 34, 7 Κόρυδος is miswritten. What is to be made of Κόρυθος, after whom a phylē of Tegea is named, and who also appears as a son of Paris by Helen or Oenone, I do not venture to conjecture.

57. 57. ↩ Athenische Mitteilungen III 164; on Lycophron see Hermes 54, 60.

58. 58. ↩ When Pausanias says Σπάρτη δῆθεν, “naturally from Sparta,” this is exactly like Αἰτωλία δῆθεν at X 18, 7. There too we find his interpretation presented as self-evident; but in neither case does it in any way bind us to agree with him.

59. 59. ↩ The name means “Bearer of the Apple” and is therefore taken from a cult-image; for we find the apple very frequently in the hands of immortal and mortal women alike, and in such a way that it is not even distinctive of this goddess, although she, like everything else that the earth brings forth, bestows fruit upon mankind as well. The name is derived from the Megarian image, which we may readily envisage from the many apple-bearing goddesses among the terracottas.

60. 60. ↩ Πραχτιχά 1908–10. Stählin, Thessalien 71.

61. 61. ↩ Πηριφόνα appears on a helmet from Italian Lokroi. Hesychius has Πηρεφόνεια Λάχωνες; we know of no cult-site there. In IG V 1, 364 she is the daughter of Demeter. The alternation between -φονη and -φασσα shows that the Greeks understood the latter as the feminine of -φοντης, which is linguistically admissible, and in Ἀργειφόντης, Βελλεροφόντης they found “the slayer.” Τεισιφόνη and Γοργοφόνη are formed after Περσεφόνη. In the original language the meaning may have been quite different.

62. 62. ↩ This seemed appropriate to the author of Theogony 956 for the mother of Circe and Aeëtes; Medea then worships Hecate, who in turn is called Perseïs.

63. 63. ↩ So too the vase in Furtwängler, Reichhaltige Sammlung 161.

64. 64. ↩ Euripides, Phaethon 781, 55; Helen 175.

65. 65. ↩ Schwyzer 193, 195. Hesychius Ταλαῖος; IG V 1, 363.

66. 66. ↩ Pausanias III 20, 4. According to Festus (p. 181, October equus), the Laconians burned a horse on Mount Taygetos for the winds; the wind was meant to drive the ashes as widely as possible over the land. This wish will have given rise to an invocation of the winds as in Ψ, even if the horse belonged to Helios. An invocation of the winds such as in the West. On Rhodes, a four-horse chariot was sunk in the sea for Helios (Festus, loc. cit.): this is the same pre-Greek cult.

67. 67. ↩ No one will still speak of an ancient witness to “Ζεὺς Ἥλιος” on Amorgos who looks at IG XII 7, 87. A Ζεὺς Ἥλιος on the Cynthus (Delos XI 119) belongs to the Semitic dedications.

68. 68. ↩ I have not succeeded in finding any evidence for it. That may be due to my own failure; but even in Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie I 252 n. 8, one finds Kedrenos and Tzetzes cited, as though they could prove anything.

69. 69. ↩ Treated in the Appendix under Hellotis.

70. 70. ↩ So too in Pausanias V 25.9, or rather in the interpreter of the votive offerings, who thus learnedly explains a device on a shield.

71. 71. ↩ Pausanias III 26.1. That he inadvertently transfers the dream-oracle to Ino is obvious. The ephor who, in Plutarch’s Cleomenes 7, appeals to a command given him by Pasiphae in a dream was indeed not in Thalamai and is in any case fabricating; but the assumption that she gave instructions in dreams is presupposed. — A dedication to Παἱφᾱ has been preserved in Thalamai, IG V 1, 1317.

72. 72. ↩ Homeric Hymn to Apollo 411. I also maintain my interpretation of Thrinakia as referring to the herds of Helios, for the other explanations name places without a Helios-cult, or Helios-cults without herds. If in Apollonia near Orikos sacred sheep are kept for Helios (Herodotus IX 93), this is done by special command of a god and therefore proves no ancient cult. The god will have had the Odyssey or the Pythian Hymn in mind.

73. 73. ↩ IG V 1, 1179, an honorific inscription of the late second century, concerns a priest of Ζεύς Βουλαῖος, of Helios, and of Selene; here Selene will earlier have been Pasiphae.

74. 74. ↩ Euripides, Phoenissae 175, says Σελήνη θύγατερ Ἁλίου, and the scholion names Aeschylus χαὶ οἱ φυσιχώτεροι as authority for this, fr. 457, unjustly placed among the Dubia, Haupt, Opusc. III 319.

75. 75. ↩ By way of correction I must add that I now regret having accepted a perplexing mention of Pasiphae in Theophrastus (Porphyry, De abstinentia III 16; Pindar fr. 91), as I once did (Pindaros p. 324), although Bergk had already removed it by an excellent emendation.

76. 76. ↩ Pausanias II 4.6; 31.5; 34.10; an altar near Argos, 18.3.

77. 77. ↩ Eumelus made Helios the earliest possessor of Corinth, because he wished to make Medea a Corinthian, and the old Argonautic saga had turned the Colchians into a race of the Sun; Circe belongs to it as well. But in reality the principal god at the Isthmus was Poseidon; hence Eumelus invented that Briareos had adjudged Corinth to Helios when he contended with Poseidon for its possession. That Briareos occurred in Eumelus is certain (Hellenist. Dicht. II 241), which entails the rest.

78. 78. ↩ The love of Selene for Endymion stood in the Hesiodic Catalogues, 11, where he was incorporated into the Aeolid stemma; his father Aethlius bears a name derived from the Olympic games. Here he was allowed to choose the time of his death himself and chose at once eternal sleep in perpetual youthful beauty. The scholion on Apollonius IV 57 is supplemented by the Apollodoran Library, whose better recension stands in the Paris Zenobius III 76, printed in the Göttingen text; what it actually gave is placed beneath. It is on the Catalogues that Endymion appears in Ibycus as king of Elis and that all further fables about children of his by Selene are based. In the μεγάλαι Ἠοῖαι 148 he came to Olympus, offended against Hera like Ixion, and—one does not see how—was brought by Zeus to eternal sleep. The older story is a parallel to the abduction of Tithonus by Eos, attached to different goddesses and different localities. It is by no means certain that Latmos as a locale is later than Elis, for on Latmos he has his cave and his cult. Incidentally, in the scholion on Apollonius IV 57 the lines 487, 1–4 περὶ δὲ τοῦ—πρὸς Ἐνδυμίωνα belong after Ἡράχλεια 486, 25; only then does the learned compilation about Endymion cohere. Σπαρτιάτης 487, 9 is hopelessly corrupt. In Plutarch’s Numa 4, Ἀρχάδες, which would be very troublesome, has been corrected by Valckenaer to Κᾶρες.

79. 79. ↩ IG. XII 3, 189.

80. 80. ↩ IG. IX 1, 5; Pausanias X 36, 5.

81. 81. ↩ Aristophanes, Wasps 368; Frogs 1359; Euripides, Hippolytus 145, where the identification with Artemis is unmistakable.

82. 82. ↩ “In the accounts of Demares (Bull. Corr. Hell. VI 23) there appear on Delos Ἀρτεμίσια Βριταμάρτια, that is, an explicit identification of the two goddesses; whether this festival was a permanent institution may be doubted.

83. 83. ↩ From the same source: Pausanias II 30 and Antoninus Liberalis 40; cf. Pindaros p. 275. From Pausanias III 14, 2 it follows that this same theology also identified the Spartan Ἄρτεμις Ἰσσώρα with Britomartis. From Antoninus, who makes these goddesses daughters of the Erasinos, it follows that there too some local cult was traced back to them.”

84. 84. ↩ On Lemnos, Pliny Nat. hist. 36.86—though this is a confusion with Samos; cf. Buschor, Bericht über die Hundertjahrfeier des Instituts, p. 261.

85. 85. ↩ At Kanea there lies a mass of material, chiefly from Italian excavations on Naxos, but also from Kydonia itself: Deffner, ὁδοιποριχαὶ ἐντυπώσεις ἀπὸ τὴν δυτιχὴν Κρήτην (Athens 1928), p. 5.

86. 86. ↩ The seated naked woman from the Delphic Marmaria (Nilsson p. 262) cannot be called a Cretan goddess.

87. 87. ↩ Among the Eteocretans of Prasos a phallus in an unusual form is found (Mon. ant. VI 183); the date is hard to determine, but it is post-Minoan.

88. 88. ↩ Only the grossest prejudice can recognise Odysseus and Scylla on a sherd (Karo, Bilderatlas 85), where a man on a ship is defending himself against a monster emerging from the sea. Nothing accords with the Odyssey; Scylla indeed takes her name from the dog, but her form is not canine, and whether the painter even intended to depict a dog is more than doubtful.

89. 89. ↩ Hesiod, Theogony 321, describes the monster quite differently from Homer, whose verses have intruded into his text but have long since been removed. Irresponsible arbitrariness attempts to alter the Homeric text. In Boeotia one could very well conceive the monster in another form.

90. 90. ↩ If the chorus of Euripides’ Cretans claims to have been initiates of the Mountain Mother, what we have there is a conflation of different orgiastic cults.

91. 91. ↩ Even at Orthia in Sparta an image of such a god has been found (Annual of the British School XIII, p. 80).

92. 92. ↩ Hesychius records: ἔνδενδρος παρὰ Ῥοδίοις Ζεὺς χαὶ Διόνυσος ἐν Βοιωτοῖς. Ζεὺς ἔνδ Paros (IG XII 5, 1027). An Ἑλένη δενδρῖτις on Rhodes is mentioned by Pausanias (III 19, 10). In Theocritus’ poem (Idyll 18) the sacred plane tree of Helen is clearly recognizable as the very tree in the plane-grove which received cult in her honor; but this does not make it the dwelling-place of a divinity, and to see in Helen herself a “tree-soul” is really inadmissible. Plutarch (Symposiaca 675e) says that in general sacrifice is offered to Dionysos as δενδρίτης (“of the tree”). To the people of that time he will have been the god who makes trees fruitful—fruit trees and vines alike. At first he will have been ἔνδενδρος (or δενδρίτης), but the god himself was never the heaven-fallen log on the citadel of Thebes (Paus. IX 12, 4), nor the piece of wood that miraculously sprouted ivy (Euripides, Antiope fr. 203). One must not forget how young and how foreign Dionysos is.

93. 93. ↩ Hellenistic landscape painting is fond of depicting a rural sanctuary: an altar before a beautiful tree, sometimes also a column upon which something is wont to stand. Without doubt it renders what actually occurred in the countryside and seeks to convey the atmosphere of the place. The cult had remained aniconic; but it is equally clear that it now belonged to one of those rural deities who were invoked under a name familiar to us as well, even if we can no longer guess which. Thus neither the tree—still less the column—is itself the god. How can one leap across the centuries and import a presumed Cretan religion into such scenes?

94. 94. ↩ Nilsson (386, 392) shows that the cult in a cave on Ida came to an end with the minoan period, as did that at Psychro in the extreme east; at the latter (394) Hermes took it over, the χραναῖος, that is, named after a spring—an unusual designation. Since before that clay animals had been dedicated as substitutes for the actual sacrifice, the intervention of the νόμιος is intelligible.

95. 95. ↩ Götterlehre II, 218, rightly acknowledged by Nilsson (462), whose chapter on the divine child is worthy of the great predecessor.

96. 96. ↩ One recognizes from this that Hesiod inserts the Cretan hiding-place, which is unnecessary for the story of Kronos. Verses 481–83 are an intrusive addition, rejected by Guietus; cf. Isyllos 109. To deny Hesiod all Cretan material I cannot consider justified.

97. 97. ↩ Hesychius records a ‘Ὑνναρεὺς Ζεύς’, named after a mountain of the same name, and the name is connected with ὑννάς αἴξ; the word (also ἴννος γίννος, hinnulus) denotes no specific animal. Whoever supposes that Hesiod renders the Cretan Ὑννάριον by Αἰγεῖον credits him with an astonishing linguistic knowledge.

98. 98. ↩ In truth she is the nymph of the Trojan mountain, for she is associated with Adrasteia (Plutarch, Symp. qu. 657 e and elsewhere), whom Callimachus alone names. To her, however, belongs the πεδίον Ἀδραστείας in the Troad, and she is a Thracian goddess, since in Athens she is worshipped together with Bendis (IG. I 310, 207). The eponymous Ἄδρηστος appears in Homer Ζ 37; the Adrastos of Argos has nothing to do with him. The nursing by nymphs is transferred in the Orphica 105 to Phanes.

99. 99. ↩ These are the eldest nymphs according to Hesiod, Theog. 187, corresponding to the πρωτίστη γενεή in Callimachus, v. 36.

100. 100. ↩ Accordingly Apollonius also makes the Argonauts overcome Talos on the Dictaean coast (IV 1640). When Callimachus composed the Hymn to Zeus, Itanos will not yet have been occupied. Agathocles, whom I shall soon cite as our best authority for the Dictaean Zeus, was a pupil of Zenodotus and thus belongs to precisely these decades.

101. 101. ↩ Gr. Verskunst 499. Latte, De saltat. 47. Nilsson 475.

102. 102. ↩ I had earlier preferred the meaning “the shorn ones,” which for the tribal name of the Kouretes was not only proposed already in antiquity but is unmistakable in contrast to the Ἄβαντες ὄπιθεν χομόωντες (Β 542) and the χάρη χομόωντες Ἀχαιοί. What also guided me was the otherwise unknown Cretan seer Κομήτης in Clement, Strom. I 399 P. (I cite Clement only after Potter; the many numbers introduced by Stählin are too impractical); he will not be different from Theocritus’ Κομάτας (7.83). But the hymn leaves no doubt, and Κορύβαντες is not Greek, and therefore has nothing to do with the χορυφή (“helmet crest”). A Phrygian flute-tune, which Alcman (fr. 97 D.) calls Κερβήσιον, must not be referred to the Korybantes.

103. 103. ↩ If in Kydonia and Elyros the nurturing of children should have been transferred to heroes (for Kydon this is not attested), the transfer from the god is in any case clear.

104. 104. ↩ Agathokles and Neanthes, Ath. 375 f., mention a sacrifice offered by the Prasians to the sow, which was therefore itself a divine being, and then also conceived in human form, however that mediation was effected.

105. 105. ↩ In Callimachus it is a bee, and hence also on the coins of Prasos. The μέλισσαι of Ephesus and the μέλισσαι of Paros must not be adduced at once in comparison: here it is the honey, the food of the gods, that is at issue.

106. 106. ↩ Matz, Naturpersonifikationen in der griechischen Kunst, pp. 95 ff. The collection of evidence leads to the conclusion that Acheloos lays claim to the horn, that is, that he did not receive it by transfer from elsewhere. A relief from the sanctuary of Herakles Χάροψ at Koroneia (Pappadakis, Δελτίον ἀρχ. II 251) shows Herakles receiving the horn from Ploutos; this is a transformation, certainly, but not a valueless one: the lord of the subterranean treasures rewards the hero who has had the power to penetrate into his realm.

107. 107. ↩ The same Αἴξ with her kids appears in Winter, Typenkatalog I 164, 2.

108. 108. ↩ By this means the Κρητιχά are placed after the adoption of the Babylonian zodiac, and thus belong to the fifth century.

109. 109. ↩ Treated in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie 1921, p. 738. In Photius, under οὐρανία αἴξ, stands the interpretation as Selene, the customary false theology of the Stoics.

110. 110. ↩ Hellenist. Dicht. II 5 where more is said on this matter.

111. 111. ↩ Pausanias VIII 25, 11. The Asklepian child nourished by a goat at Epidaurus is, as we now know, a very late invention, just as Pindar’s birth-story of the god is modelled upon that of Dionysus.

112. 112. ↩ Agathokles, Etymologicum Magnum s.v. Δίχτη; the note is now separated from Agathokles’ statement by an intrusive parenthesis, but rightly this has not been allowed to cause disturbance. Velchanos, according to information from E. Sittig, also occurs in Cyprus; to identify him with Vulcanus is indeed tempting, but for the present it can be entertained only as a possibility marked by a large question-mark.

113. 113. ↩ A modern act of violence invents a vegetation-god Iasion. Of him we learn from Ω 125 that Demeter lay with him in a thrice-ploughed field, that is, before the sowing, and that Zeus struck him with the lightning. Making use of this passage, the appendix to the Theogony (970) says that the union took place in Crete and that Demeter bore Ploutos, Wealth. Her lover there is called Iasios; his death is not mentioned. Otherwise he appears only in Hellanikos (fr. 23) as brother of Dardanos; at the same time he is called Eetion (presumably the king of Thebes, Andromache’s father), struck by lightning because he laid hands upon a statue of Demeter—if that belongs here. Vergil, Aeneid III 168, goes back to this genealogy when a Delian oracle addresses Aeneas with Dardanus Iasiusque pater. The scholion on the Odyssey also appeals to Hellanikos; but from him one must not ascribe more than the parentage. What follows, that Iasion alone after the Flood possessed seed-corn, does not fit fr. 23. From this state of the evidence one can conclude only that Iasion was not a god. For anything further the scanty and contradictory notices in Homer and Hesiod do not suffice.

114. 114. ↩ It is not demonstrable earlier than Callimachus; cf. Hellenistische Dichter II, 3, who is the sole witness.

115. 115. ↩ Cretan mercenary runners already exist; of Cretan piracy one hears nothing. Only once do the Athenians attempt to gain a footing on the island, Thucydides II 85, at Kydonia, that is, in the west, which always stands apart and lags behind in culture.

116. 116. ↩ We know of Karmanor only through Pausanias. X 16 preserves a Cretan tradition, transmitted in the description of a goat dedicated by the Cretan city of Elyros, which is said to have suckled twins whom Apollo had begotten at Tarrha in the house of Karmanor. Tarrha lies not far from Elyros. In the forged Pythian Chronicle he is made the father of the first victor in song, Chrysothemis (originally probably Krisothemis), and here the expiation of the god appears, but as an addition, looking back to II 7, 7, where it is rather presupposed than narrated in the author’s manner; it belongs to the account of a Sicyonian rite of expiation. At II 30, 3 Karmanor stands in the genealogy of Aphaia, his origin is certain from theological erudition. He thus occurs in several stories. Anything precise is unattainable.

117. 117. ↩ Besides the gods who go to Karmanor, so too does Sostratos in the legend of the Buphonia in Theophrastus, Porphyry De abstinentia II 29, and the murderers of Hesiod in the Certamen 14.

118. 118. ↩ Pausanias VIII 37, 6 contradicts the identification, but conceals his reasons.

119. 119. ↩ Strange indeed is the aberration which seeks the Isles of the Blessed, or Scheria—which is no island at all—in Crete. The island lay neither in heroic nor in Homeric times beyond the bounds of the known world, and neither Minoan nor Dorian Crete could have served as a model for the city of the Phaeacians. Poets, in their inventions, are bound by the conditions of their own age, all the more so when they are reshaping older tales. And what sense can there be in any case in attempting to locate mythical lands upon the map?