b. Some say that Oenomaus had been begotten by Ares on Harpina, daughter of the River-god Asopus; or on the Pleiad Asteria, or on Asterope; or on Eurythoë, daughter of Danaus; while others call him the son of Alxion; or of Hyperochus.
c. By his wife Sterope, or Euarete, daughter of Acrisius, Oenomaus became the father of Leucippus, Hippodamus, and Dysponteus of Dyspontium; and of one daughter, Hippodameia. Oenomaus was famous for his love of horses, and forbade his subjects under the threat of a curse ever to mate mares with asses. To this day, if Eleans need mules, they must take their mares abroad to mate them.
d. Whether he had been warned by an oracle that his son-in-law would kill him, or whether he had himself fallen in love with Hippodameia is disputed; but Oenomaus devised a new way to prevent her from ever getting married. He challenged each of her suitors in turn to a chariot race, and laid out a long course from Pisa, which lies beside the river Alpheius, opposite Olympia, until Poseidon’s altar on the Isthmus of Corinth. Some say that the chariots were run by four horses; others say, by two. Oenomaus insisted that Hippodameia must ride beside each suitor, thus distracting his attention of the horses-but allowed him a start of half an hour or so earlier, before he himself sacrificed a ram on the altar of Warlike Zeus at Olympia. The chariots would then race towards the Isthmus and if the suitor would be taken, he must die; but should he win the race, Hippodameia would be his, and Oenomaus must die. Since, however, the wind-like mares, Psylla and Harpirma, which Pelops’s father Ares have given him, were immeasurably the best in Greece, being swifter even than North Wind; and since his chariot, skilfully driven by Myrtilus, was especially designed for racing, he had never yet failed to rival and transfixed him with his spear, another gift from Ares.
e. In this manner Oenomaus disposed of twelve or, some say thirteen princes, whose beads and limbs he nailed above the palace, while their trunks were flung barbarously in a heap on the ground. When he killed Marmax, the first suitor, he also butchered his mares, Parthenia and Eripha, and buffed them beside the river Parthenia, where their tomb is still shown. Some say that the second suitor, Alcathous, was buried near the Horse-scarer in the hippodrome at Olympia, and that it is his spiteful ghost which baulks the charioteers.
f. Myrtilus, Oenomaus’s charioteer, was the son of Hermes by Theobule, or Cleobule; or by the Danaid Phaethusa; but others say that he was the son of Zeus and Clymene. He too had fallen in love with Hippodameia, but dared not enter the contest. Meanwhile, the Olympians had decided to intervene and put an end to the daughter, because Oenomaus was boasting that he would one day build a temple of skulls: as Evenus, Diomedes, and Antaeus had done. When therefore Pelops, landing in Elis, begged his lover Poseidon, whom he invoked with a sacrifice on the seashore, either to give him the swiftest chariot in the world for his courtship of Hippodameia, or to stay the rush of Oenomaus’s brazen spear, Poseidon was delighted to be of assistance. Pelops soon found himself the owner of a winged golden chariot, which could race over the sea without wetting the axles, and was drawn by a team of tireless, winged, immortal horses.
g. Having visited Mount Sipylus and dedicated to Temnian Aphrodite an image made of green myrtle-wood, Pelops tested his chariot by driving it across the Aegean Sea. Almost before he had time to glance about him, he had reached Lesbos, where his charioteer Cillus, or Cellas, or Cillas, died because of the swiftness of the flight. Pelops spent the night on Lesbos and, in a dream, saw Cillus’s ghost lamenting his fate, and pleading for heroic honours. At dawn, he burned his body, heaped a barrow over the ashes, and founded the sanctuary of Cillaean Apollo close by. Then he set out again, driving the chariot himself.
h. On coming to Pisa, Pelops was alarmed to see the row of heads nailed above the palace gates, and began to regret his ambition. He therefore promised Myrtilus, if he betrayed his master, half the kingdom and the privilege of spending the bridal night with Hippodameia when she had been won.
i. Before entering the race-the scene is carved on the front gable of Zeus’s temple at Olympia-Pelops sacrificed to Cydonian Athene. Some say that Cillus’s ghost appeared and undertook to help him; others, that Sphaerus was his charioteer; but it is more generally believed that he drove his own team, Hippodameia standing beside him
j. Meanwhile, Hippodameia had fallen in love with Pelops and, from hindering his progress, had herself offered to reward Myrtilus generously, if her father’s course could by some means be checked. Myrtilus therefore removed the lynch-pins from the axles of Oenomaus’s chariot, and replaced them with others made of wax. As chariots reached the neck of the Isthmus and Oenomaus, in hot pursue was poising his spear, about to transfix Pelops’s back, the wheels of chariot flew off, he fell entangled in the wreckage and was dragged to death. His ghost still haunts at the statue of Horse-scarer at Olympia. There are some, however, who say that the swiftness of Poseidon’s win chariot and horses easily enabled Pelops to outdistance Oenomaus and reach the Isthmus first; whereupon Oenomaus either killed himself in despair, or was killed by Pelops at the winning-post. According to others, the contest took place in the Hippodrome at Olympia, Amphion gave Pelops a magic object which he buried by the Horse-scarer, so that Oenomaus’s team bolted and wrecked his chariot. But all agree that Oenomaus, before he died, laid a curse on Myrtilus, pray that he might perish at the hands of Pelops.
l. Hermes set Myrtilus’s image among the stars as the constellation of the Charioteer; but his corpse was washed ashore on the coast Euboea and buried in Arcadian Pheneus, behind the temple of Hermes; once a year nocturnal sacrifices are offered him there as a hero. The Myrtoan Sea, which stretches from Euboea, past Helene, to the Aegean Sea is generally believed to take its name from Myrtilus rather than, as Euboeans insist, from the nymph Myrto.
m. Pelops drove on, until he reached the western stream of Oceanus, where he was cleansed of blood guilt by Hephaestus; afterwards he came back to Pisa, and succeeded to the throne of Oenomaus. He soon subjugated nearly the whole of what was then known as Apia, or Pelasgiotis, and renamed it the Peloponnese, meaning ‘the island of Pelops’, after himself. His courage, wisdom, wealth, and numerous children, earned him the envy and veneration of all Greece
n. From King Epeius, Pelops took Olympia, and added it to his kingdom of Pisa; but being unable to defeat King Stymphalus of Arcadia by force of arms, he invited him to a friendly debate, cut him into pieces, and scattered his limbs far and wide; a crime which caused a famine throughout Greece. But his celebration of the Olympian Games in honour of Zeus, about a generation after that of Endymion, was more splendid than any before.
p. Over the tomb of Hippodameia’s unsuccessful suitors, on the farthest side of the river Alpheius, Pelops raised a tall barrow, paying them heroic honours too; and about a furlong away stands the sanctuary of Artemis Cordax, so called because Pelops’s followers here celebrated his victories by dancing the Rope Dance, which they had brought from Lydia.
q. Pelops’s sanctuary, where his bones are preserved in a brazen chest, was dedicated by Tirynthian Heracles, his grandson, when he came to celebrate the Olympian Games; and the Elean magistrates still offer Pelops the annual sacrifice of a black ram, roasted on a fire of white poplar-wood. Those who partake of this victim are forbidden to enter Zeus’s temple until they have bathed, and the neck is the traditional perquisite of his forester. The sanctuary is thronged with visitors every year, when young men scourge themselves at Pelops’s altar, offering him a libation of their blood. His chariot is shown on the roof of the Anactorium in Hiasia; the Sicyonians keep his gold-hilted sword in their treasury at Olympia; and his spear- shaped sceptre, at Chaeronea, is perhaps the only genuine work of Hephaestus still extant. Zeus sent it to Pelops by the hand of Hermes, and Pelops bequeathed it to King Atreus.
r. Pelops is also styled ‘Cronian One’, or ‘Horse-beater’; and the Achaeans claim him as their ancestor.
2. The horse, which had been a sacred animal in Pelasgian Greece long before the cult of the Sun-chariot, was a native European pony dedicated to the Moon, not the Sun. The larger Trans-Caspian horse came to Egypt with the Hyksos invaders in 1850 BC-horse chariotry displaced ass chariotry in the Egyptian armed forces about the year 1500 BC-and had reached Crete before Cnossus fell a century later. Oenomaus’s religious ban on mules should perhaps be associated with the death of Cillus: in Greece, as at Rome, the ass cult was suppressed when the sun-chariot became the symbol of royalty. Much the same religious reformation took place at Jerusalem (Kings), where a tradition survived in Josephus’s time of an earlier ass cult (Josephus: Against Apion). Helius of the Sun-chariot, an Achaean deity, was then identified in different cities with solar Zeus or solar Poseidon, but the ass became the beast of Cronus, whom Zeus and Poseidon had dethroned, or of Pan, Silenus, and other old-fashioned Pelasgian godlings. There was also a solar Apollo; since his hatred of asses is mentioned by Pindar, it will have been Cillaean Apollo to whom hecatombs of asses were offered by the Hyperboreans (Pindar: Pythian Odes.).
3. Oenomaus, who represented Zeus as the incarnate Sun, is therefore called a son of Asterië, who ruled Heaven, rather than a similarly named Pleiad; and Queen Hippodameia, by marriage to whom he was enroyalled, represented Hera as the incarnate Moon. Descent remained matrilineal in the Peloponnese, which assured the good-will of the conservative peasantry. Nor might the King’s reign be prolonged Beyond a Great Year of one hundred months, in the last of which the solar and lunar calendars coincided; he was then fated to be destroyed by horses. As a further concession to the older cult at Pisa, where Zeus’s representative had been killed by his tanist each mid-summer, Oenomaus agreed to die a mock death at seven successive mid-winters, on each occasion appointing a surrogate to take his place for twenty-four hours and ride in the sun-chariot beside the Queen. At the close of this day, the surrogate was killed in a chariot crash, and the King stepped out from the tomb where he had been lurking, to resume his reign. This explains the myth of Oenomaus and the suitors, another version of which appears in that of Evenus. The mythographers must be mistaken when they mention ‘twelve or thirteen’ suitors. These numbers properly refer to the lunations-alternately twelve and thirteen-of a solar year, not to the surrogates; thus in the chariot race at Olympia twelve circuits of the stadium were made in honour of the Moon- goddess. Pelops is a type of lucky eighth prince, spared the chariot crash and able to despatch the old king with his own sceptre-spear.
5. In the second half of the myth, Myrtilus has been confused with the surrogate. As interrex, the surrogate was entitled to ride beside the Queen in the sun-chariot, and to sleep with her during the single night of his reign; but, at dawn on the following day, the old King destroyed him and, metaphorically, rode on in his sun-chariot to the extreme west, where he was purified in the Ocean stream. Myrtilus’s fall from the chariot into the sea is a telescoping of myths: a few miles to the east of the Hippodrome, where the Isthmian Games took place, the surrogate ‘Melicertes’, in whose honour they had been founded, was flung over a cliff and an identical ceremony was probably performed at Geraestus, where Myrtilus died. Horse- scarers are also reported from Thebes and Iolcus, which suggests that there, too, chariot crashes were staged in the hippodromes. But since the Olympian Hippodrome, sacred to solar Zeus, and the Isthmian Hippodrome, sacred to solar Poseidon, were both associated with the legend of Pelops, the mythographers have presented the contest as a cross-country race between them. Lesbos enters the story perhaps because ‘Oenomaus’ was a Lesbian dynastic title.
6. Amphion’s entry into this myth, though a Theban, is explained by his being also a native of Sicyon on the Isthmus. ‘Myrto’ will have been a title of the Sea-goddess as destroyer, the first syllable standing for ‘sea’, as in Myrtea, ‘sea-goddess’; Myrtoessa, a longer form of Myrto, was one of Aphrodite’s titles. Thus Myrtilus may originally mean ‘phallus of the sea’: myr-tylos.
7. Pelops hacks Stymphalus in pieces, as he himself is said to have been treated by Tantalus; this more ancient form of the royal sacrifice has been rightly reported from Arcadia. The Pelopids appear indeed to have patronized several local cults, beside that of the Sun- chariot: namely the Arcadian shepherd cult of oak and ram, attested by Pelops’s connection with Tantalus and his sacrifice of a black ram at Olympia; the partridge cult of Crete, Troy, and Palestine, attested by the cordax dance; the Titan cult, attested by Pelops’s title of ‘Cronian’; the porpoise cult; and the cult of the ass-god, in so far as Cillus’s ghost assisted him in the race.
8. The butchering of Marmax’s mares may refer to Oenomaus’s coronation ceremony, which involved mare-sacrifice. A ‘Cydonian apple’, or quince, will have been in the hand of the Death-goddess Athene, to whom Pelops sacrificed, as his safe-conduct to the Elysian Fields; and the white poplar, used in his heroic rites at Olympia, symbolized the hope of reincarnation after he had been hacked in pieces-because those who went to Elysium were granted the prerogative of rebirth. A close parallel to the bloodshed at Pelops’s Olympic altar is the scourging of young Spartans who were bound to the image of Upright Artemis. Pelops was, in fact, the victim, and suffered in honour of the goddess Hippodameia.
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