HERACLES’s Tenth Labour was to fetch the famous cattle of Geryon from Erytheia, an island near the Ocean stream, without either demand or payment. Geryon, a son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoë, a daughter the Titan Oceanus, was the King of Tartessus in Spain, and reputed the strongest man alive. He had been born with three heads, six hands and three bodies joined together at the waist. Geryon’s shambling cattle, beasts of marvellous beauty, were guarded by the herdsman Eurytion, son of Ares, and by the two-headed watchdog Orthrus, formerly Atlas’s property-born of Typhon and Echidne.
b. During his passage through Europe, Heracles destroyed many wild beasts and, when at last he reached Tartessus, erected a pair of pillars facing each other across the straits, one in Europe, one in Africa. Some hold that the two continents were formerly joined together, and that he cut a channel between them, or thrust the cliffs apart; others say that, on the contrary, he narrowed the existing straits to discourage the entry of whales and other sea-monsters.
c. Helius beamed down upon Heracles who, finding it impossible to work in such heat, strung his bow and let fly an arrow at the god. ‘Enough of that!’ cried Helius angrily. Heracles apologized for his ill-temper, and unstrung his bow at once. Not to be outdone in courtesy, Helius lent Heracles his golden goblet, shaped like a water-lily, in which he sailed to Erytheia; but the Titan Oceanus, to try him, made the goblet pitch violently upon the waves. Heracles again drew his bow, which frightened Oceanus into calming the sea. Another account is that Heracles sailed to Erytheia in a brazen urn, using his lion pelt as a sail.
d. On his arrival, he ascended Mount Abas. The dog Orthrus rushed at him, barking, but Heracles’s club struck him lifeless; and Eurytion, Geryon’s herdsman, hurrying to Orthrus’s aid, lied in the same manner. Heracles then proceeded to drive away the cattle. Menoetes, who was pasturing the cattle of Hades near by-but Heracles had left these untouched-took the news to Geryon. Challenged to battle, Heracles ran to Geryon’s flank and shot him sideways through all three bodies with a single arrow; but some say that he stood his ground and let loose a flight of three arrows. As Hera hastened to Geryon’s assistance, Heracles wounded her with an arrow in the right breast, and she fled. Thus he won the cattle, without either demand or payment, and embarked in the golden goblet, which he then sailed across to Tartessus and gratefully returned to Helius. From Geryon’s blood sprang a tree which, at the time of the Pleiades’ rising, bears stoneless cherry-like fruit. Geryon did not, however, die without issue: his daughter Erytheia became by Hermes the mother of Norax, who led a colony to Sardinia, even before the time of Hyllus, and there founded Nora, the oldest city in the island.
e. The whereabouts of Erytheia, also called Erythrea, or Erythria, is disputed. Though some describe it as an island beyond the Ocean stream, others place it off the coast of Lusitania. Still others identify it with the island of Leon, or with an islet near-by, on which the earliest city of Gades was built, and where the pasture is so rich that the milk yields no whey but only curds, and the cattle must be cupped every fifty days, lest they choke for excess of blood. This islet, sacred to Hera, is called either Erytheia, or Aphrodisias. Leon, the island on which present city of Gades stands, used to be called Cotinusa, from its olives, but the Phoenicians renamed it Gadira, or ‘Fenced City’. On western cape stands a temple of Cronus, and the city of Gades; on eastern, a temple of Heracles, remarkable for a spring which ebbs at flood tide, and flows at ebb tide; and Geryon lies buried in the city, equally famed for a secret tree that takes diverse forms.
f. According to another account, however, Geryon’s cattle were not pastured in any island, but on the mountain slopes of the farther part of Spain, confronting the Ocean; and ‘Geryon’ was a title of the renowned King Chrysaor, who ruled over the whole land, and whose three strong and courageous sons helped him in the defence of his kingdom, each leading an army recruited from warlike races. To confront these, Heracles assembled a large expedition in Crete, the birthplace of his father Zeus. Before setting out, he was splendidly honoured by Cretans and, in return, rid their island of bears, wolves, serpents, other noxious creatures, from which it is still immune. First, he sailed to Libya, where he killed Antaeus, slaughtered the wild beasts that infested the desert, and gave the country unsurpassed fertility. Then he visited Egypt, where he killed Busiris; then he marched westward across North Africa, annihilating the Gorgons and the Libyan Amazones, as he went, founded the city of Hecatompylus, now Capsa, in southern Numidia, and reached the Ocean near Gades. There he set up pillar on either side of the straits and, ferrying his army across to Spain, fought that the sons of Chrysaor, with their three armies, were encamped in some distance from one another. He conquered and killed them, in turn, and finally drove off Geryon’s famous herds, leaving government of Spain to the most worthy of the surviving inhabitants.
g. The Pillars of Heracles are usually identified with Mount Calpe in Europe, and Abyle, or Abilyx in Africa. Others make them the islets near Gades, of which the larger is sacred to Hera. All Spaniards and Libyans, however, take the word ‘Pillars’ literally, and place them in Gades, where brazen columns are consecrated to Heracles, eight cubits high and inscribed with the cost of their building; here sailors carry sacrifices whenever they return safely from a voyage. According to people of Gades themselves, the King of Tyre was ordered by oracle to found a colony near the Pillars of Heracles, and sent out three successive parties of exploration. The first party, thinking that the oracle had referred to Abyle and Calpe, landed inside the straits, where the city of Exitani now stands; the second sailed about two hundred miles beyond the straits, to an island sacred to Heracles, opposite the Spanish city of Onoba; but both were discouraged by unfavourable omens when they offered sacrifices, and returned home. The third party reached Gades, where they raised a temple to Heracles on the eastern cape and successfully founded the city of Gades on the western.
h. Some, however, deny that it was Heracles who set up these pillars, and assert that Abyle and Calpe were first named ‘The Pillars of Cronus’, and afterwards ‘The Pillars of Briareus’, a giant whose power extended thus far; but that, the memory of Briareus (also called Aegaeon) having faded, they were renamed in honour of Heracles, perhaps because the city of Tartessus, which stands only five miles from Calpe, was founded by him, and used to be known as Heracleia. Vast ancient walls and ship-sheds are still shown there. But it must be remembered that the earliest Heraclides had also been called Briareus. The number of Heracles’s Pillars is usually given as two; but some speak of three, or four. So-called Pillars of Heracles are also reported from the northern coast of Germany; from the Black Sea; from the western extremity of Gaul; and from India.
i. A temple of Heracles stands on the Sacred Promontory in Lusitania, the most westerly point of the world. Visitants are forbidden to enter the precinct by night, the time when the gods take up their abode in it. Perhaps when Heracles set up his pillars to mark the utmost limits of legitimate seafaring, this was the site he chose.
j. How he then drove the cattle to Mycenae is much disputed. Some say that he forced Abyle and Calpe into temporary union and went across the resultant bridge into Libya; but, according to a more probable account he passed through the territory of what is now Abdera, a Phoenician settlement, and then through Spain, leaving behind some of his followers as colonists. In the Pyrenees, he courted and buried the Bebrycan princess Pyrene, from whom this mountain range takes its name; the river Danube is said to have its source there, near a city also named in her honour. He then visited Gaul, where he abolished a barbarous native custom of killing strangers, and won so many hearts by his generous deeds that he was able to found a large city, to which he gave the name Alesia, or ‘Wandering’, in commemoration of his travels. The Gauls to this day honour Alesia as the hearth and mother-city of their whole land-it was unconquered until Caligula’s reign and claim descent from Heracles’s union with a tall princess named Galata, who chose him as her lover and bred that warlike people.
k. When Heracles was driving Geryon’s cattle through Liguria, two sons of Poseidon named Ialebion and Dercynus tried to steal them from him, and were both killed. At one stage of his battle with hostile Ligurian forces, Heracles ran out of arrows, and knelt down, in tears, wounded and exhausted. The ground being of soft mould, he could find no stones to throw at the enemy-Ligys, the brother of Ialebion, was their leader-until Zeus, pitying his tears, overshadowed the earth with a cloud, from which a shower of stones hailed down; and with these he put the Ligurians to flight. Zeus set among the stars an image of Heracles fighting the Ligurians, known as the constellation Engonasis. Another memorial of this battle survives on earth: namely the broad, circular plain lying between Marseilles and the mouths of the river Rhodane, about fifteen miles from the sea, called ‘The Stony Plain’, because it is strewn with stones the size of a man’s fist; brine springs are also found there.
l. In his passage over the Ligurian Alps, Heracles carved a road fit for his armies and baggage trains; he also broke up all robber bands that infested the pass, before entering what is now Cis-alpine Gaul and Etruria. Only after wandering down the whole coast of Italy, and crossing into Sicily, did it occur to him: ‘I have taken the wrong road!’ The Romans say that, on reaching the Albula-afterwards called the Tiber-he was welcomed by King Evander, an exile from Arcadia. At evening, he swam across, driving the cattle before him, and lay down to rest on a grassy bed. In a deep cave near by, lived a vast, hideous, three-headed shepherd named Cacus, a son of Hephaestus and Medusa, who was the dread and disgrace of the Aventine Forest, and puffed flames from each of his three mouths. Human skulls and arms hung nailed above the lintels of his cave, and the ground inside gleamed white with the bones of his victims. While Heracles slept, Cacus stole the two finest of his bulls; as well as four heifers, which he dragged backwards by their tails into his lair.
m. At the first streak of dawn, Heracles awoke, and at once noticed that the cattle were missing. After searching for them in vain, he was about to drive the remainder onward, when one of the stolen heifers mewed hungrily. Heracles traced the sound to the cave, but found the entrance barred by a rock which ten yoke of oxen could hardly have moved; nevertheless, he heaved it aside as though it had been a pebble and, undaunted by the smoky flames which Cacus was now belching, grappled with him and battered his face to pulp.
n. Aided by King Evander, Heracles then built an altar to Zeus, at which he sacrificed one of the recovered bulls, and afterwards made arrangements for his own worship. Yet the Romans tell this story in order to glorify themselves; the truth being that it was not Heracles who killed Cacus, and offered sacrifices to Zeus, but a gigantic herdsman named Garanus, or Recaranus, the ally of Heracles.
o. King Evander ruled rather by personal ascendancy than by force: he was particularly reverenced for the knowledge of letters which he had imbibed from his prophetic mother, the Arcadian nymph Nicostrate, or Themis; she was a daughter of the river Ladon, and though already married to Echenus, bore Evander to Hermes. Nicostrate persuaded Evander to murder his supposed father; and, when the Arcadians banished them both, went with him to Italy, accompanied by a body of Pelasgians. There, some sixty years before the Trojan War, they founded the small city of Pallantium, on the hill beside the river Tiber, later called Mount Palatine; the site having been Nicostrate’s choice; and soon there was no more powerful king than Evander in all Italy. Nicostrate, now called Carmenta, adapted the thirteen-consonant Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus had brought back from Egypt, to form the fifteen-consonant Latin one. But some assert that it was Heracles who taught Evander’s people the use of letters, which is why he shares an altar with the Muses.
p. According to the Romans, Heracles freed King Evander from the tribute owed to the Etruscans; killed King Faunus, whose custom was to sacrifice strangers at the altar of his father Hermes; and begot Latinus, the ancestor of the Latins, on Faunus’s widow, or daughter. But the Greeks hold that Latinus was a son of Circe by Odysseus. Heracles, at all events, suppressed the annual Cronian sacrifice of two men, who were flung into the river Tiber, and forced the Romans to use puppets instead; even now, in the month of May, when the moon is full, the chief Vestal Virgin, standing on the oaken-timbered Pons Sublicius, throws whitewashed images of old men, plaited from bulrushes, and called ‘Argives’, into the yellow stream. Heracles is also believed to have founded Pompeii and Herculaneum; to have fought giants on the Phlegraean Plain of Cumae; and to have built a causeway one mile long across the Lucrine Gulf, now called the Heracleian Road, down which he drove Geryon’s cattle.
q. It is further said that he lay down to rest near the frontier of Rhegium and Epizephyrian Locris and, being much disturbed by cicadas, begged the gods to silence them. His prayer was immediately granted; and cicadas have never been heard since on the Rhegian side of the river Alece, although they sing lustily on the Locrian side. One day a bull broke away from the herd and, plunging into the sea, swam over to Sicily. Heracles, going in pursuit, found it concealed among herds of Eryx, King of the Elymnians, a son of Aphrodite by Butes. Eryx, who was a wrestler and a boxer, challenged him to a fighting contest. Heracles accepted the challenge, on condition that Eryx’ stake his kingdom against the runaway bull, and won the first events; finally, in the wrestling match, he lifted Eryx high into the air and dashed him to the ground and killed him-which taught the Sicilians that not everyone born of a goddess is necessarily immortal. In this manner, Heracles won Eryx’s kingdom, which he left the inhabitants to enjoy until one of his own descendants should come to claim it.
r. Some say that Eryx-whose wrestling-ground is still shown-had a daughter named Psophis, who bore Heracles two sons: Echephron and Promachus. Having been reared in Erymanthus, they renamed it Psophis after their mother; and there built a shrine to Erycinian Aphrodite, of which today only the ruins remain. The hero-shrines of Echephron and Promachus have long since lost their importance, and Psophis is usually regarded as a daughter of Xanthus, the grandson of Arcas.
s. Continuing on his way through Sicily, Heracles came to a plain where now stands the city of Syracuse; there he offered sacrifice and instituted the annual festival beside the sacred chasm of Cyane, through which Hades snatched Core to the Underworld. To those who honoured Heracles in the Plain of Leontini, he left undying memorial of his visit. Close to the city of Agyrium, the hoof marks of his cattle has been found imprinted on a stony road, as though in wax; and, regarded as an intimation of his own immortality, Heracles accepted from inhabitants those divine honours which he had hitherto consistently refused. Then, in acknowledgement of their favours, he dug a lake of four furlongs in circumference outside the city walls, and established sanctuaries of Iolaus and Geryon.
t. Returning to Italy in search of another route to Greece, He drove his cattle up the eastern coast, to the Lacinian Promontory, where the ruler, King Lacinius, was afterwards able to boast that he had put Heracles to flight; this he did merely by building a temple to Hera, at the sight of which Heracles departed in disgust. Six miles farther on, Heracles accidentally killed one Croton, buried him with every honour, and prophesied that, in time to come, a great city would rise, called by his name. This prophecy Heracles made good after his deification: he appeared in a dream to one of his descendants, the Argive Myscelus, threatening him with terrible punishments if he did not lead a party of colonists to Sicily and found the city; and when the Argives were about to condemn Myscelus to death for defying their embargo on emigration, he miraculously turned every black voting-pebble into a white one.
u. Heracles then proposed to drive Geryon’s cattle through Istria into Epirus, and thence to the Peloponnese by way of the Isthmus. But at the head of the Adriatic Gulf Hera sent a gadfly, which stampeded the cows, driving them across Thrace and into the Scythian desert. There Heracles pursued them, and one cold, stormy night drew the lion pelt about him and fell fast asleep on a rocky hillside. When he awoke, he found that his chariot-mares, which he had unharnessed and put out to graze, were likewise missing. He wandered far and wide in search of them until he reached the wooded district called Hylaea, where a strange being, half woman, half serpent, shouted at him from a cave. She had his mares, she said, but would give them back to him only if he became her lover. Heracles agreed, though with a certain reluctance, and kissed her thrice; whereupon the serpent-tailed woman embraced him passionately, and when, at last, he was free to go, asked him: ‘What of the three sons whom I now carry in my womb? When they grow to manhood, shall I settle them here where I am mistress, or shall I send them to you?’
v. ‘When they grow up, watch carefully!’ Heracles replied. ‘And if ever one of them bends this bow-thus, as I now bend it-and girds himself with this belt’-thus, as I now gird myself-choose him as the ruler of your country.’ So saying, he gave her one of his two bows, and his girdle which had a golden goblet hanging from its clasp; then went on his way. She named her triplets Agathyrsus, Gelonus, and Scythes. The eldest two were unequal to the tasks that their father had set, and she drove them away; but Scythes succeeded in both and was allowed to remain, thus becoming the ancestor of all royal Scythian kings who, to this day, wear golden goblets on their girdles. Others, however, say that it was Zeus, not Heracles, who lay with the serpent-tailed woman, and that, when his three sons by her were still ruling the land, there fell from the sky four golden implements: a plough, a yoke, a battle axe, and a cup. Agathyrsus first ran to recover them, but as he came close, the gold flamed up and burned his hands. Gelonus was similarly rejected. However, when Scythes, the youngest, approached, the fire died down at once; whereupon he carried home the four golden treasures and the elder brothers agreed to yield him the kingdom.
w. Heracles, having recovered his mares and most of the strayed cattle, drove them back across the river Strymon, which he clammed with stones for the purpose, and encountered no further adventures until the giant herdsman Alcyoneus, having taken possession of the Corinthian Isthmus, hurled a rock at the army which once more followed Heracles, crushing no less than twelve chariots and double that number of horsemen. This was the same Alcyoneus who twice stole Helius’s sacred cattle: from Erytheia, and from the citadel of Corinth. He now ran forward, picked up the rock again, and this time hurled it at Heracles, who bandied it back with his club and so killed the giant; the very rock is still shown on the Isthmus.
2. Pre-Phoenician Greek colonies planted in Spain, Gaul, and Italy under Heracles’s protection have contributed to the myth; and, in the geographical sense, the Pillars of Heracles-at which one band of settlers arrived about the year 1100 BC-are Ceuta and Gibraltar.
3. In a mystical Celto-Iberian sense, however, the Pillars are alphabetical abstractions. Marwnad Ercwlf, an ancient Welsh poem in the Red Book of Hergest, treats of the Celtic Heracles-whom the Irish called ‘Ogma Sunface’ and Lucian, ‘Ogmius’-and records how Ercwlf raised ‘four columns of equal height capped with red gold,’ apparently the four columns of five letters each, which formed the twenty-lettered Bardic alphabet known as the Boibel-Loth (White Goddess). It seems that, about the year 400 BC, this new alphabet, the Greek letter-names of which referred to Celestial Heracles’s journey in the sun-goblet, his death on Mount Oeta, and his powers as city-founder and judge (White Goddess), displaced the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet, the letter-names of which referred to the murderous sacrifice of Cronus by the wild women (White Goddess). Since the Gorgons had a grove on Erytheia-’Red Island’, identified by Pherecydes with the island of Gades-and since ‘trees’ in all Celtic languages means ‘letters’, I read ‘the tree that takes diverse forms’ as meaning the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet, whose secret the Gorgons guarded in their sacred grove until Heracles ‘annihilated’ them. In this sense, Heracles’s raid on Erytheia, where he killed Geryon and the dog Orthrus-the Dog-star Sirius-refers to the suppression of the Cronus- alphabet by the Heracles-alphabet.
4. Hesiod (Theogony) calls Geryon tricephalon, ‘three-headed’; another reading of which is tricarenon, meaning the same thing. ‘Tricarenon’ recalls Torvos Trigaranus, the Celtic god with two left hands, shown in the company of cranes and a bull on the Paris Altar, felling a willow-tree. Geryon, a meaningless word in Greek, seems to be a worn-down form of Trigaranus. Since alike in Greek and Irish tradition cranes are associated with alphabetical secrets, and with poets, Geryon appears to be the Goddess’s guardian of the earlier alphabet: in fact, Cronus accompanied by the Dactyls. At the sepulchral island of Erytheia, Cronus- Geryon, who was once a sun-hero of the Heracles-Briareus type, had become a god of the dead, with Orthrus as his Cerberus; and the Tenth Labour, therefore, has been confused with the Twelfth, Menoetes figuring in both. Though the ‘stoneless cherry-like fruit’ sprung from Geryon’s blood may have been arbutus-berries, native to Spain, the story has been influenced by the sacredness to Cronus-Saturn of the early-fruiting cornel-cherry (White Goddess), which yields a red dye like the kern-berry. Chrysaor’s part in the story is important. His name means ‘golden falchion’, the weapon associated with the Cronus cult, and he was said to be the Gorgon Medusa’s son.
5. Norax, Geryon’s grandson by Erytheia and Hermes-Hermes is recorded to have brought the tree-alphabet from Greece to Egypt, and back again-seems to be a miswriting of Norops, the Greek word for ‘Sun-face’. This genealogy has been turned inside-out by the Irish mythographers: they record that their own Geryon, whose three persons were known as Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba-a form of Mitra, Varuna, and Indra-had Ogma for a grandfather, not a grandson, and that his son was the Celt-Iberian Sun-god Lugh, Llew, or Lugos. They also insisted that the alphabet had come to them from Greece by way of Spain. Cronus’s crow was sacred to Lugos, according to Plutarch who records (On Ricers and Mountains) that ‘Lugdunum’-Lyons, the fortress of Lugos-‘was so called because an auspice of crows suggested the choice of its site; lug meaning a crow in the Allobrigian dialect.’
6. Verrius Flaccus seems to have been misreported by Servius; he is more likely to have said that ‘three-headed Garanus (Geryon), not Cacus, was the name of Heracles’s victim, and Evander aided Heracles.’ This would fit in with the account of how Evander’s mother Carmenta suppressed the thirteen-consonant alphabet, Cronus’s Beth-Luis-Nion, in favour of Heracles-Ogma’s fifteen-consonant Boibel-Loth (White Goddess). King Juba, whom Plutarch quotes as saying that Heracles taught Evander’s people the use of letters, was an honorary magistrate of Gades, and must have known a good deal of local alphabetic lore. In this Evander story, Heracles is plainly described as an enemy of the Cronus cult, since he abolishes human sacrifice. His circumambulation of Italy and Sicily has been invented to account for the many temples there raised to him; his five-fold contest with Eryx, to justify the sixth century colonizing expeditions which Peniathlus of Cnidos, the Heraclid, and Dorieus the Spartan, led to the Eryx region. The Heracles honoured at Agyrium, a Sicel city, may have been an ancestor who led the Sicels across the straits from Italy about the year 1050 BC (Thucydides). He was also made to visit Scythia; the Greek colonists on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea incorporated a Scythian Heracles, an archer hero, in the omniumgatherum Tenth Labour. His bride, the serpent-tailed woman, was an Earth-goddess, mother of the three principal Scythian tribes mentioned by Herodotus; in another version of the myth, represented by the English ballad of The Laidley Worm, when he has kissed her three times, she turns into ‘the fairest woman you ever did see.’
7. The Alcyoneus anecdote seems to have become detached from the myth of the Giants’ assault on Olympus and their defeat at Heracles’s hands. But Alcyoneus’s theft of Helius’s cattle from Erytheia, and again from the citadel of Corinth, is an older version of Heracles’s theft of Geryon’s cattle; their owner being an active solar consort of the Moon- goddess, not a banished and enfeebled god of the Dead.
8. The arrow which Heracles shot at the noon-day sun will have been one discharged at the zenith during his coronation ceremony.
Comments
Post a Comment