IXION, a son of Phlegyas, the Lapith king, agreed to marry Dia, daughter of Eioneus, promising rich bridal gifts and inviting Eioneus to a banquet; but had laid a pitfall in front of the palace, with a great charcoal fire underneath, into which the unsuspecting Eioneus fell and was burned.
b. Though the lesser gods thought this a heinous deed, and refused to purify Ixion, Zeus, having behaved equally ill himself when in love, not only purified him but brought him to eat at his table.
c. Ixion was ungrateful, and planned to seduce Hera who, he guessed, would be glad of a chance to revenge herself on Zeus for his frequent unfaithfulness. Zeus, however, reading Ixion’s intentions, shaped a cloud into a false Hera with whom Ixion, being too far gone in drink to notice the deception, duly took his pleasure. He was surprised in the act by Zeus, who ordered Hermes to scourge him mercilessly until he repeated the words: ‘Benefactors deserve honour’, and then bind him to a fiery wheel which rolled without cease through the sky.
d. The false Hera, afterwards called Nephele, bore Ixion the outcast child Centaurus who, when he grew to manhood, is said to have sired horse-centaurs on Magnesian mares, of whom the most celebrated was the learned Cheiron
1. Ixion’s name, formed from ischys (‘strength’) and io (‘moon’), also suggests ixias (‘mistletoe’). As an oak-king with mistletoe genitals, representing the thunder-god, he ritually married the rain-making Moon-goddess; and was then scourged, so that his blood and sperm would fructify the earth, beheaded with an axe, emasculated, spread-eagled to a tree, and roasted; after which his kinsmen ate him sacramentally. Eion is the Homeric epithet for a river; but Dia’s father is called Deioneus, meaning ‘ravager’, as well as Eioneus. The Moon- goddess of the oak cult was known as Dia (‘of the sky’), a title of the Dodonian Oak-goddess, and therefore of Zeus’s wife Hera. That old-fashioned kings called themselves Zeus and married Dia of the Rain Clouds, naturally displeased the Olympian priests, who misinterpreted the ritual picture of the spread-eagled Lapith king as recording his punishment for impiety, and invented the anecdote of the cloud. On an Etruscan mirror, Ixion is shown spread-eagled to a fire-wheel, with mushroom tinder at his feet; elsewhere, he is bound in the same ‘five-fold bond’ with which the Irish hero Curoi tied Cuchulain-bent backwards into a hoop (Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana), with his ankles, wrists, and neck tied together, like Osiris in the Book of the Dead. This attitude recalls the burning wheels rolled downhill at European midsummer festivities, as a sign that the sun has reached its zenith and must now decline again until the winter solstice. Ixion’s pitfall is unmetaphorical: surrogate victims were needed for the sacred king, such as prisoners taken in battle or, failing these, travellers caught in traps. The myth seems to record a treaty made by Zeus’s Hellenes with the Lapiths, Phlegyans, and Centaurs, which was broken by the ritual murder of Hellenic travellers and the seizure of their womenfolk; the Hellenes demanded, and were given, an official apology.
2. Horses were sacred to the moon, and hobby-horse dances, designed to make rain fall, have apparently given rise to the legend that the Centaurs were half horse, half man. The earliest Greek representation of Centaurs-two men joined at the waist to horses’ bodies-is found on a Mycenaean gem from the Heraeum at Argos; they face each other and are dancing. A similar pair appear on a Cretan bead-seal; but, since there was no native horse cult in Crete, the motif has evidently been imported from the mainland. In archaic art, the satyrs were also pictured as hobby-horse men, but later as goats. Centaurus will have been an oracular hero with a serpent’s tail, and the story of Boreas’s mating with mares is therefore attached to him.
1. This myth records how an Aeolian chief invaded Elis, and accepted the consequences of marrying the Pelasgian Moon-goddess Hera’s representative-the names of Endymion’s wives are all moon-titles-head of a college of fifty water-priestesses. When his reign ended he was duly sacrificed and awarded a hero shrine at Olympia. Pisa, the city to which Olympia belonged, is said to have meant in the Lydian (or Cretan) language ‘private resting-place’: namely, of the Moon (Servius on Virgil).
2. The name Endymion, from endeuein (Latin: inducere), refers to the Moon’s seduction of the king, as though she were one of the Empusae; but the ancients explain it as referring to somnum ei inductum, ‘the sleep put upon him’.
3. Aetolus, like Pelops, will have driven his chariot around the Olympian stadium in impersonation of the sun; and his accidental killing of Apis, which is made to account for the Elean colonization of Aetolia, seems to be deduced from a picture of the annual chariot crash, in which the king’s surrogate died. But the foot race won by Epeius (‘successor’) was the earlier event. The existence of an Endymion sanctuary on Mount Latmus in Caria suggests that an Aeolian colony from Elis settled there. His ritual marriage with Hera, like Ixion’s, will have offended the priests of Zeus.
4. Apis is the noun formed from apios, a Homeric adjective usually meaning ‘far off’ but, when applied to the Peloponnese (Aeschylus: Suppliants), ‘of the pear-tree’.
b. Though the lesser gods thought this a heinous deed, and refused to purify Ixion, Zeus, having behaved equally ill himself when in love, not only purified him but brought him to eat at his table.
d. The false Hera, afterwards called Nephele, bore Ixion the outcast child Centaurus who, when he grew to manhood, is said to have sired horse-centaurs on Magnesian mares, of whom the most celebrated was the learned Cheiron
2. Horses were sacred to the moon, and hobby-horse dances, designed to make rain fall, have apparently given rise to the legend that the Centaurs were half horse, half man. The earliest Greek representation of Centaurs-two men joined at the waist to horses’ bodies-is found on a Mycenaean gem from the Heraeum at Argos; they face each other and are dancing. A similar pair appear on a Cretan bead-seal; but, since there was no native horse cult in Crete, the motif has evidently been imported from the mainland. In archaic art, the satyrs were also pictured as hobby-horse men, but later as goats. Centaurus will have been an oracular hero with a serpent’s tail, and the story of Boreas’s mating with mares is therefore attached to him.
1. This myth records how an Aeolian chief invaded Elis, and accepted the consequences of marrying the Pelasgian Moon-goddess Hera’s representative-the names of Endymion’s wives are all moon-titles-head of a college of fifty water-priestesses. When his reign ended he was duly sacrificed and awarded a hero shrine at Olympia. Pisa, the city to which Olympia belonged, is said to have meant in the Lydian (or Cretan) language ‘private resting-place’: namely, of the Moon (Servius on Virgil).
3. Aetolus, like Pelops, will have driven his chariot around the Olympian stadium in impersonation of the sun; and his accidental killing of Apis, which is made to account for the Elean colonization of Aetolia, seems to be deduced from a picture of the annual chariot crash, in which the king’s surrogate died. But the foot race won by Epeius (‘successor’) was the earlier event. The existence of an Endymion sanctuary on Mount Latmus in Caria suggests that an Aeolian colony from Elis settled there. His ritual marriage with Hera, like Ixion’s, will have offended the priests of Zeus.
4. Apis is the noun formed from apios, a Homeric adjective usually meaning ‘far off’ but, when applied to the Peloponnese (Aeschylus: Suppliants), ‘of the pear-tree’.
Comments
Post a Comment