b. This Omphale, a daughter of Jordanes and, according to some authorities, the mother of Tantalus, had been bequeathed the kingdom by her unfortunate husband Tmolus, son of Ares and Theogone. While out hunting on Mount Carmanorium-so called in honour of Carmanor son of Dionysus and Alexirrhoë, who was killed there by a wild boar-he fell in love with a huntress named Arrhippe, a chaste attendant of Artemis. Arrhippe, deaf to Tmolus’s entreaties, fled to her mistress’s temple where, disregarding its sanctity, he ravished her on the goddess’s own couch. She hanged herself from a beam, after invoking Artemis, who thereupon let loose a mad bull; Tmolus was tossed into the air, fell on pointed stakes and sharp stones and died in torment. Theoclymenus, his son by Omphale, buried him where he lay, renaming the mountain ‘Tmolus’; a city of the same name, built upon its slopes, was destroyed by a great earthquake in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.
c. Among the many bye-works which Heracles performed during this servitude was his capture of the two Ephesian Cercopes, who had constantly robbed him of his sleep. They were twin brothers named either Passalus and Acmon; or Oius and Eurybatus; or Sillus and Triballus-sons of Oceanus by Theia, and the most accomplished cheats and liars known to mankind, who roamed the world, continually practising new deception. Theia had warned them to keep clear of Heracles and her words ‘My little White-bottoms, you have yet to meet the great Black-bottom!’ becoming proverbial, ‘white-bottom’ now means ‘cowardly, or lascivious’. They would buzz around Heracles’s bed in the guise of bluebottles, until one night he grabbed them, forced them to resume their proper shape, and bore them off, dangling head-downwards from a pole which he carried over his shoulder. Now, Heracles’s bottom, which the lion’s pelt did not cover, had been burned as black as an old leather by exposure to sun, and by the fiery breaths of Cacus and of the Cretan bull; and the Cercopes burst into a fit of immoderate laughter to find themselves suspended upside-down, staring at it. Their merriment surprised Heracles, and when he learned its cause, he sat down upon a rock and laughed so heartily himself that they persuaded him to release them. But though we know of an Asian city named Cercopia, the haunts of the Cercopes and a rock called ‘Black Bottom’ are shown at Thermopylae; this incident therefore is likely to have taken place on another occasion.
d. Some say that the Cercopes were eventually turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus; others, that he punished their fraudulence by changing them into apes with long yellow hair, and sending them to the Italian islands named Pithecusae.
e. In a Lydian ravine lived one Syleus, who used to seize passing strangers and force them to dig his vineyard; but Heracles tore up the vines by their roots. Again, when Lydians from Itone began plundering Omphale’s country, Heracles recovered the spoil and razed their city. And at Celaenae lived Lityerses the farmer, a bastard son of King Minos, who would offer hospitality to wayfarers but force them to compete with him in reaping his harvest. If their strength flagged, he would whip them and at evening, when he had won the contest, would behead them and conceal their bodies in sheaves, chanting lugubriously as he did so. Heracles visited Celaenae in order to rescue the shepherd Daphnis, a son of Hermes who, after searching throughout the world for his beloved Pimplea, carried off by pirates, had at last found her among the slave-girls of Lityerses. Daphnis was challenged to the reaping contest, but Heracles taking his place outreaped Lityerses, whom he decapitated with a sickle, throwing the trunk into the river Maeander. Not only did Daphnis win back his Pimplea, but Heracles gave her Lityerses’s palace as a dowry. In honour of Lityerses, Phrygian reapers still sing a harvest dirge closely resembling that raised in honour of Maneros, son of the first Egyptian king, who also died in the harvest field.
f. Finally, beside the Lydian river Sagaris, Heracles shot dead a gigantic serpent which was destroying men and crops; and the grateful Omphale, having at last discovered his identity and parentage, released him and sent him back to Tiryns, laden with gifts; while Zeus contrived the constellation Ophiuchus to commemorate the victory. This river Sagaris, by the way, was named after a son of Myndon and Alexirrhoë who, driven mad by the Mother of the Gods for slighting her Mysteries and insulting her eunuch priests, drowned himself in its waters.
g. Omphale had bought Heracles as a lover rather than a fighter. He fathered on her three sons, namely Lamus; Agelaus, ancestor of a famous King Croesus who tried to immolate himself on a pyre when the Persians captured Sardis; and Laomedon. Some add a fourth, Tyrrhenus, or Tyrsenus, who invented the trumpet and led Lydian emigrants to Etruria, where they took the name Tyrrhenians; but it is more probable that Tyrrhenus was the son of King Atys, and a remote descendant of Heracles and Omphale. By one of Omphale’s women, named Malis, Heracles was already the father of Cleodaeus, or Cleolaus; and of Alcaeus, founder of the Lydian dynasty which King Croesus ousted from the throne of Sardis.
h. Reports reached Greece that Heracles had discarded his lion pelt and his aspen wreath, and instead wore jewelled necklaces, golden bracelets, a woman’s turban, a purple shawl, and a Maeonian girdle. There he sat-the story went-surrounded by wanton Ionian girls, teasing wool from the polished wool-basket, or spinning the thread; trembling, as he did so, when his mistress scolded him. She would strike him with her golden slipper if ever his clumsy fingers crushed the spindle, and make him recount his past achievements for her amusement; yet apparently he felt no shame. Hence painters show Heracles wearing a yellow petticoat, and letting himself be combed and manicured by Omphale’s maids, while she dresses up in his lion pelt, and wields his club and bow.
i. What, however, had happened was no more than this. One day, when Heracles and Omphale were visiting the vineyards of Tmolus, she in a purple, gold-embroidered gown, with perfumed locks, he gallantly holding a golden parasol over her head, Pan caught sight of them from a high hill. Falling in love with Omphale, he bade farewell to the mountain- goddesses, crying: ‘Henceforth she alone shall be my love!’ Omphale and Heracles reached their destination, a secluded grotto, where it amused them to exchange clothes. She dressed him in a net-work girdle, absurdly small for his waist, and her purple gown. Though she unlaced this to the fullest extent, he split the sleeves; and the ties of her sandals were far too short to meet across his instep.
j. After dinner, they went to sleep on separate couches, having vowed a dawn sacrifice to Dionysus, who requires marital purity from his devotees on such occasions. At midnight, Pan crept into the grotto and, fumbling about in the darkness, found what he thought was Omphale’s couch, because the sleeper was clad in silk. With trembling hands he untucked the bed-clothes from the bottom, and wormed his way in; but Heracles, waking and drawing up one foot, kicked him across the grotto. Hearing a loud crash and a howl, Omphale sprang up and called for lights, and when these came she and Heracles laughed until they cried to see Pan sprawled in a comer, nursing his bruises. Since that day, Pan has abhorred clothes, and summons his officials naked to his rites; it was he who revenged himself on Heracles by spreading the rumour that his whimsical exchange of garments with Omphale was habitual and perverse.
2. The Cercopes, as their various pairs of names show, were ceres, or Spites, coming in the shape of delusive and mischievous dreams, and could be foiled by an appeal to Heracles who, alone, had power over the Nightmare. Though represented at first as simple ghosts, like Cecrops (whose name is another form of cercops), in later works of art they figure as cercopithecoi, ‘apes’, perhaps because of Heracles’s association with Gibraltar, one of his Pillars, from which Carthaginian merchants brought them as pets for rich Greek and Roman ladies. No apes seem to have frequented Ischia and Procida, two islands to the north of the Bay of Naples, which the Greeks called Pithecusae; their name really refers to the pithoi, or jars, manufactured there (Pliny: Natural History).
3. The vine-dressers’ custom of seizing and killing a stranger at the vintage season, in honour of the Vine-spirit, was widespread in Syria and Asia Minor; and a similar harvest sacrifice took place both there and in Europe. Sir James Frazer has discussed this subject exhaustively in his Golden Bough. Heracles is here credited with the abolition of human sacrifice: a social reform on which the Greeks prided themselves, even when their wars grew more and more savage and destructive.
4. Classical writers made Heracles’s servitude to Omphale an allegory of how easily a strong man becomes enslaved by a lecherous and ambitious woman; and that they regarded the navel as the seat of female passion sufficiently explains Omphale’s name in this sense. But the fable refers, rather, to an early stage in the development of the sacred kingship from matriarchy to patriarchy, when the king, as the Queen’s consort, was privileged to deputize for her in ceremonies and sacrifices-but only if he wore her robes. Reveillout has shown that this was the system at Lagash in early Sumerian times, and in several Cretan works of art men are shown wearing female garments for sacrificial purposes-not only the spotted trouser- skirt, as on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, but even, as on a palace-fresco at Cnossus, the flounced skirt. Heracles’s slavery is explained by West African matriarchal native customs: in Loango, Daura, and the Abrons, as Briffault has pointed out, the king is of servile birth and without power; in Agonna, Latuka, Ubemba, and elsewhere, there is only a queen, who does not marry but takes servile lovers. Moreover, a similar system survived until Classical times among the ancient Locrian nobility who had the privilege of sending priestesses to Trojan Athene; they were forced to emigrate in 683 BC from Central Greece to Epizephyrian Locri, on the toe of Italy, ‘because of the scandal caused by their noblewomen’s indiscriminate love affairs with slaves’. These Locrians, who were of non-Hellenic origin and made a virtue of prenuptial promiscuity in the Cretan, Carian, or Amorite style (Clearchus), insisted on strictly matrilineal succession (Dionysius: Description of the Earth; Polybius). The same customs must have been general in pre-Hellenic Greece and Italy, but it is only at Bagnara, near the ruins of Epizephyrian Locri, that the matriarchal tradition is recalled today. The Bagnarotte wear long, pleated skirts, and set off barefoot on their commercial rounds which last for several days, leaving the men to mind the children; they can carry as much as two quintals on their heads. The men take holidays in the spring swordfish season, when they show their skill with the harpoon; and in the summer, when they go to the hills and burn charcoal. Although the official patron of Bagnera is St. Nicholas, no Bagnarotte will acknowledge his existence; and their parish priest complains that they pay far more attention to the Virgin than even to the Son-the Virgin having succeeded Core, the Maid, for whose splendid temple Locri was famous m Classical times.
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