Athamas

ATHAMAS the Aeolian, brother of Sisyphus and Salmoneus, ruled over Boeotia. At Hera’s command, he married Nephele, a phantom whom Zeus created in her likeness when he wished to deceive Ixion the Lapith, and who was now wandering disconsolately about the halls of Olympus. She bore Athamas two sons: Phrixus and Leucon, and a daughter, Helle. But Athamas resented the disdain in which Nephele held him and, falling in love with Ino, daughter of Cadmus, brought her secretly to his palace at the foot of Mount Laphystium, where he begot Learchus and Melicertes on her.
b. Learning about her rival from the palace servants, Nephele turned in a fury to Olympus, complaining to Hera that she had been insulted. Hera took her part, and vowed: ‘My eternal vengeance shall fall upon Athamas and his House!’
c. Nephele thereupon went back to Mount Laphystium, where she publicly reported Hera’s vow, and demanded that Athamas should die. But the men of Boeotia, who feared Athamas more than Hera, would not listen to Nephele; and the women of Boeotia were devoted to Ino, who now persuaded them to parch the seed-corn, without their husbands’ knowledge, so that the harvest would fail. Ino foresaw that when the grain was due to sprout, but no blade appeared, Athamas would send to ask the Delphic Oracle what was amiss. She had already bribed Athamas’s messengers to bring back a false reply: namely, that the land would regain its fertility only if Nephele’s son Phrixus were sacrificed to Zeus on Mount Laphystium.

d. This Phrixus was a handsome young man, with whom his aunt Biadice, Cretheus’s wife, had fallen in love, and whom, when he rebuffed her advances, she accused of trying to ravish her. The men of Boeotia, believing Biadice’s story, applauded Apollo’s wise choice of a sin- offering and demanded that Phrixus should die; whereupon Athamas, loudly weeping, led Phrixus to the mountain top. He was on the point of cutting his throat when Heracles, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, came running up and wrested the sacrificial flint from his hand. ‘My father Zeus,’ Heracles exclaimed, ‘loathes human sacrifices!’ Nevertheless, Phrixus would have perished despite this plea, had not a winged golden ram, supplied by Hermes at Hera’s order-or, some say, by Zeus himself-suddenly flown down to the rescue from Olympus.
‘Climb on my back!’ cried the ram, and Phrixus obeyed.
‘Take me too’ pleaded Helle. ‘Do not leave me to the mercy of my father.’
e. So Phrixus pulled her up behind him, and the ram flew eastwards, making for the land of Colchis, where Helius stables his horses. Before long, Helle felt giddy and lost her hold; she fell into the straits between Europe and Asia, now called the Hellespont in her honour; but Phrixus reached Colchis safely, and there sacrificed the ram to Zeus the Deliverer. Its golden fleece became famous a generation later when the Argonauts came in search of it.
f. Over-awed by the miracle of Mount Laphystium, Athamas’s messengers confessed that they had been bribed by Ino to bring back a false reply from Delphi; and presently all her wiles, and Biadice’s, came to light. Nephele thereupon again demanded that Athamas should die, and the sacrificial fillet, which Phrixus had worn, was placed on his head; only Heracles’s renewed intervention saved him from death.
g. But Hera was incensed with Athamas and drove him mad, not only on Nephele’s account, but because he had connived at Ino’s barbouting of the infant Dionysus, Zeus’s bastard by her sister Semele, who was living in the palace disguised as a girl. Seizing his bow, Athamas suddenly yelled: ‘Look, a white stag! Stand back while I shoot!’ So saying, he transfixed Learchus with an arrow, and proceeded to tear his still-quivering body into pieces.
h. Ino snatched up Melicertes, her younger son, and fled; but would hardly have escaped Athamas’s vengeance, had not the infant Dionysus temporarily blinded him, so that he began to flog a she-goat in mistake for her. Ino ran to the Molurian Rock, where she leaped into the sea and was drowned-this rock afterwards became a place of ill repute, because the savage Sciron used to hurl strangers from it. But Zeus, remembering Ino’s kindness to Dionysus, would not send her ghost down to Tartarus and deified her instead as the Goddess Leucothea. He also deified her son Melicertes as the God Palaemon, and sent him to the Isthmus of Corinth riding on dolphin-back; the Isthmian Games, founded in his honour by Sisyphus, are still celebrated there every fourth year.

i. Athamas, now banished from Boeotia, and childless because his remaining son, Leucon, had sickened and died, enquired from the Delphic Oracle where he should settle, and was told: ‘Wherever wild beasts entertain you to dinner’. Wandering aimlessly northward, without food or drink, he came on a wolf-pack devouring a flock of sheep in a desolate Thessalian plain. The wolves fled at his approach, and he and his starving companions ate what mutton had  been left. Then he recalled the oracle and, having adopted Haliartus and Coronea, his Corinthian grand-nephews, founded a city which he called Alos, from his wanderings, or from his serving-maid Alos; and the country was called Athamania; afterwards he married  Themisto and raised a new family.

j. Others tell the tale differently. Omitting Athamas’s marriage to Nephele, they say that one day, after the birth of Learchus and Melicertes, his wife Ino went out hunting and did not return. Bloodstains on a torn tunic convinced him that she had been killed by wild beasts; but the truth was that a sudden Bacchic frenzy had seized her when she was attacked by a lynx. She had strangled it, flayed it with her teeth and nails, and gone off, dressed only in the pelt, for a prolonged revel on Mount Parnassus. After an interval of mourning, Athamas married Themisto who, a year later, bore him twin sons. Then, to has dismay, he learned that Ino was still alive. He sent for her at once, installed her in the palace nursery, and told Themisto: ‘We have a likely-looking nurse-maid, a captive taken in the recent raid on Mount Cithaeron.’ Themisto, whom her maids soon undeceived, visited the nursery, pretending not to know who Ino was. She told her: ‘Pray, nurse, get ready a set of white woollen garments for my two sons, and a set of mourning garments for those of my unfortunate predecessor Ino. They are to be worn tomorrow.’
k. The following day, Themisto ordered her guards to break into the royal nursery and kill the twins who were dressed in mounting, but spare the other two. Ino, however, guessing  what was in Themisto’s mind, had provided white garments for her own sons, and mourning garments for her rival’s. Thus Themisto’s twins were murdered, and the news sent Athamas mad: he shot Learchus dead, mistaking him for a stag, but Ino escaped with Melicertes,  sprang into the sea, and became immortal.
1. Others, again, say that Phrixus and Helle were Nephele’s children by Ixion. One day, as they wandered in a wood, their mother came upon them in a Bacchic frenzy, leading a golden ram by the horns. ‘Look,’ she babbled, ‘here is a son of your cousin Theophane. She had too many suitors, so Poseidon changed her into a ewe and himself into a ram, and topped her on the Island of Crumissa.’
‘What happened to the suitors, mother?’ asked little Helle.
‘They became wolves,’ Ino answered, ‘and howl for Theophane all night long. Now ask me no more questions, but climb on this ram’s back, both of you, and ride away to the kingdom of Colchis, where Helius’s son Aeëtes reigns. As soon as you arrive, sacrifice it to Ares.’ Phrixus carried out his mother’s strange instructions, and hung up the golden fleece in a temple of Ares at Colchis, where it was guarded by a dragon; and, many years later his son Presbon, or Cytisorus, coming to Orchomenus from Colchis, rescued Athamas as he was being sacrificed for a sin-offering.

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1. Athamas’s name is connected in the myth with Athamania, the city which he is said to have founded in the Thessalian wilderness; but seems formed, rather, from Ath (‘high’), and amaein (‘to reap’)-meaning ‘the king dedicated to the Reaper on High’, namely the Goddess of the Harvest Moon. The conflict between his rival wives Ino and Nephele was probably one between early Ionian settlers in Boeotia, who had adopted the worship of the Corn-goddess Ino, and the pastoral Aeolian invaders. An attempt to make over the agricultural rites of the Ionian goddess Ino to the Aeolian thunder-god and his wife Nephele, the raincloud, seems to have been foiled by the priestesses’ parching of the seed-corn.
2. The myth of Athamas and Phrixus records the annual mountain sacrifice of the king, or of the king’s surrogate-first a boy dressed in a ram’s fleece, and later a ram-during the New Year rain-inducing festival which shepherds celebrated at the Spring Equinox. Zeus’s ram-sacrifice on the summit of Mount Pelion, not far from Laphystium, took place in April when, according to the Zodiac, the Ram was in the ascendant; the chief men of the district used to struggle up, wearing white sheep-skins (Dicearchus), and the rite still survives there today in the mock-sacrifice and resurrection of an old man who wears a black sheep’s mask. The mourning garments, ordered for the children sentenced to death, suggest that a black fleece was worn by the victim, and white ones by the priest and the spectators. Biadice’s love for Phrixus recalls Potiphar’s wife’s love for Joseph, a companion myth from Canaan; much the same story is also told of Anteia and Bellerophon, Cretheis and Peleus, Phaedra and Hippolytus, Phylonome and Tenes.
3. That Nephele (‘cloud’) was Hera’s gift to Athamas and created in her own image, suggests that in the original version Athamas the Aeolian king himself represented the thunder-god, like his predecessor Ixion, and his brother Salmoneus; and that, when he married Themisto (who, in Euripides’s version of the myth, is Ino’s rival), she took the part of the thunder-god’s wife.
4. Ino was Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess ‘, and proved her identity with the Triple Muse by revelling on Mount Parnassus. Her name (‘she who makes sinewy’) suggests ithyphallic orgies, and the sturdy growl of corn; boys will have been bloodily sacrificed to her before eve of winter sowing. Zeus is himself credited with having defied Ino in gratitude for her kindness to Dionysus, and Athamas bears an agricultural name in her honour; in other words, the Ionian farmers settled the religious differences with the Aeolian shepherds to their own advantage.
5. The myth, however, is a medley of early cult elements. The sacramental Zagreus cult, which became that of Dionysus the Kid is suggested when Athamas takes Ino for a she-goat; the sacrament Actaeon cult is suggested when he takes Learchus for a stag, shoots and tears him in pieces. Ino’s younger son Melicertes is the Canaanite Heracles Melkarth (‘protector of the city’), alias Moloch as the new-born solar king, comes riding on dolphin-back towards the isthmus; and whose death, at the close of his four years’ reign, was celebrated at the Isthmian Funeral Games. Infants were sacrificed to Melicertes on the Island of Tenedos, and probably also at Corinth, as they were to Moloch at Jerusalem (Leviticus and Kings).
6. Only when Zeus became god of the clear sky and usurped the goddess’s solar attributes did the fleece become golden-thus the First Vatican Mythographer says that it was ‘the fleece in which Zeus ascended the sky’-but while he was inducer of the thunderstorm it had been purple-black (Simonides).
7. In one version of the myth (Hippias: Fragment, Ino is called Gorgopis (‘grim-faced’), a title of Athene’s; and savage Sciron who hurled travellers over the cliff, took his name from the white parasol, or more properly a paralune-carried in Athene’s processions. The Molurian Rock was evidently the cliff from which the sacred king, or his surrogates, were thrown into the sea in honour of the Moon-goddess Athene, or Ino, while parasol being apparently used to break the fall.
8. Helle’s drowning parallels Ino’s. Both are Moon-goddesses, and the myth is ambivalent: it represents the nightly setting of the Moon and, the same time, the abandonment of Helle’s lunar cult in favour of Zeus’ solar one. Both are equally Sea-goddesses: Helle gave her name to the junction of two seas, Ino-Leucothea appeared to Odysseus in the guise a seamew and rescued him from drowning.
9. Athamas’s tribe is more likely to have migrated from Boeotian Mount Laphystium and Athamania to Thessalian Mount Laphystius and Athamania, than contrariwise; he had a strong connection with Corinth, the kingdom of his brother Sisyphus, and is said to have founded the city of Acraephia to the east of Lake Copais, where there was a ‘Field of Athamas’ (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Acraephia). Several of his sons are also credited with the foundation of Boeotian cities. He is indeed plausibly described as a son of Minyas, and King of Orchomenus, which would have given him power over the Copaic Plain and Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius) and allied him with Corinth against the intervening states of Athens and Thebes. The probable reason for the Athamanians’  northward wanderings into Thessaly was the disastrous war fought between Orchomenus and Thebes, recorded in the Heracles cycle. Nephele’s ragings on the mountain recall the daughters of Minyas who are said to have been overtaken by a Bacchic frenzy on Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Lycophron’s Alexandra); the alleged origin of the Agrionia festival at Orchomenus.