Aristaeus

HYPSEUS, a high-king of the Lapiths, whom the Naiad Creusa bore to the River-god Peneius, married Chlidanope, another Naiad, and had by her a daughter, Cyrene. Cyrene despised spinning, weaving, and similar household tasks; instead, she would hunt wild beasts on Mount Pelion all day and half the night, explaining that her father’s flocks and herds needed protection. Apollo once watched her wrestling with a powerful lion; he summoned King Cheiron the Centaur to witness the combat (from which Cyrene, as usual, emerged triumphant) asking her name, and whether she would make him a suitable bride. Cheiron laughed. He was aware that Apollo not only knew her name, but had already made up his mind to carry her off, either when he saw her guarding Hypseus’s flocks by the river Peneius, or when she received two hunting dogs from his hands as a prize for winning the foot race at Pelias’s funeral games.

b. Cheiron further prophesied that Apollo would convey Cyrene overseas to the richest garden of Zeus, and make her the queen of a great city, having first gathered an island people about a hill rising from a plain. Welcomed by Ulbya to a golden palace, she would win a queendom equally beneficent to hunters and farmers, and there bear him a son. Hermes would act as man-midwife and carry the child, called Aristeus, or Aristaeus, to the enthroned Hours and Mother Earth, bidding them feed him on nectar and ambrosia. When Aristaeus grew to manhood, he would win the titles of ‘Immortal Zeus’, ‘Pure Apollo’, and ‘Guardian of the Flocks’.

c. Apollo duly took Cyrene away in his golden chariot, to the site of what is now the city of Cyrene; Aphrodite was waiting to greet their arrival, and bedded them without delay in Libya’s golden chamber. That evening Apollo promised Cyrene a long life in which to indulge her passion for hunting and reign over a fertile country. He then left her to the care of certain Myrtle-nymphs, children of Hermes, on the near-by hills, where she bore Aristaeus and, after a second visit from Apollo, Idmon the seer. But she also lay with Ares one night, and bore him the Thracian Diomedes, owner of the man-eating mares.

d. The Myrtle-nymphs, nicknaming Aristaeus ‘Agreus’ and ‘Nomius’, taught him how to curdle milk for cheese, build bee-hives, and make the oleaster yield the cultivated olive. These useful arts he passed on to others, who gratefully paid him divine honours. From Ulbya he sailed to Boeotia, after which Apollo led him to Cheiron’s cave for instruction in certain Mysteries.

e. When Aristaeus had grown to manhood, the Muses married him to Autonoë, by whom he became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, and of Macris, nurse to Dionysus. They also taught him the art of healing and prophecy, and set him to watch over their sheep which grazed across the Athamantian Plain of Phthia, and about Mount Othrys, and in the valley of the river Apidanus. It was here that Aristaeus perfected the art of hunting, taught him by Cyrene.

f. One day he went to consult the Delphic Oracle, and was told to visit the island of Ceos, where he would be greatly honoured. Setting sail at once, Aristaeus found that the scorching Dog-star had caused a plague among the islanders, in vengeance of Icarius whose secret murderers were sheltering among them. Aristaeus summoned the people, raised a great altar in the mountains, and offered sacrifices on it to Zeus, at the same time propitiating the Dog-star by putting the murderers to death. Zeus was gratified and ordered the Etesian Winds, in future, to cool Greece and its adjacent islands for forty days from the Dog-star’s rising. Thus the plague ceased, and the Ceans not only showered Aristaeus with gratitude, but still continue to propitiate the Dog-star every year before its appearance.

g. He then visited Arcadia and, later, settled at Tempe. But there all his bees died and, greatly distressed, he went to a deep pool in the rive Peneius where he knew that Cyrene would be staying with her Naiad sisters. His aunt, Arethusa, heard an imploring voice through the water; put out her head, recognized Aristaeus, and invited him down to the wonderful palace of the Naiads. These washed him with water drawn from a perpetual spring and, after a sacrificial feast, he was advised by Cyrene: ‘Bind my cousin Proteus, and force him to explain why your bees sickened.’

h. Proteus was taking his midday rest in a cave on the island Pharos, sheltering from the heat of the Dog-star, and Aristaeus, having overcome him, despite his changes, learned that the bees’ sickness was his punishment for having caused Eurydice’s death; and it was true  that when he had made love to her on the river-bank near Tempe, she had fled from him and been bitten by a serpent.

i. Aristaeus now returned to the Naiads’ palace, where Cyrene instructed him to raise four altars in the woods to the Dryads, Eurydice’s companions, and sacrifice four young bulls and four heifers; then to pour a libation of blood, leaving the carcasses where they lay and finally to return in the morning, nine days later, bringing poppies of forgetfullness, a fatted calf, and  a black ewe to propitiate the ghost of Orpheus, who had now joined Eurydice below. Aristaeus obeyed and, on the ninth morning, a swarm of bees rose from the rotting carcasses and settled on a tree. He captured the swarm, which he put into a hive; and the Arcadians now honour him as Zeus for having taught them this method of raising new swarms of bees.

j. Later, distressed by the death of his son Actaeon, which arose in him a hatred of Boeotia, he sailed with his followers to Libya, where he asked Cyrene for a fleet in which to emigrate. She gladly complied, and soon he was at sea again, making north-westward. Enchanted by the savage beauty of Sardinia, his first landfall, he began to cultivate it and, having begotten two sons there, was presently joined by Daedalus; but is said to have founded no city there.

k. Aristaeus visited other distant islands, and spent some years in Sicily, where he received divine honours, especially from the olive-growers. Finally he went to Thrace, and supplemented his education by taking part in the Mysteries of Dionysus. After living for a while near Mount Haemus, and founding the city of Aristaeum, he disappeared without trace, and is now worshipped as a god both by the Thracian barbarians and by civilized Greeks

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1. Aristaeus’s origins have been embroidered upon by Pindar, to flatter a descendant of Battus who, in 691 BC led a colony from Thera to Libya, where he founded Cyrene, and was the first king of a long dynasty. The Cyreneans claimed their ancestor Aristaeus-according to Justin, Battus (‘tongue-tied’) was only his nickname as the son of Apollo, because Apollo had been worshipped in Thera; and the port of Cyrene was consequently called Apollonia.  But Cyrene was a mythological figure long before Battus’s time. Her association with the Centaurs shows that she was goddess of a Magnesian horse cult imported to Thera; for Cheiron’s name also appears in early Theran rock inscriptions. The myth of Idmon’s birth from Cyrene and Ares refers to this earlier goddess.

2. Myrtle is originally a death-tree, and the Myrtle-nymphs were therefore prophetesses capable of instructing young Aristaeus; but it became symbolic of colonization, because emigrants took myrtle boughs with them to demonstrate that they had ended an epoch.

3. Aristaeus was a cult-title of Arcadian and Cean Zeus; and elsewhere of Apollo and Hermes. According to Servius Hesiod called Aristaeus ‘a pastoral Apollo’. At Tanagra in Boeotia (Pausanias) Hermes was known as ‘Ram-bearer’, and fish were sacred to him at Pharae in Achaea (Pausanias). Thus a tomb-painting at Cyrene shows ‘Aristaeus’ surrounded by sheep and fish and carrying a ram. His wanderings are offered in explanation of the cult- title Aristaeus, which occurs in Sicily, Sardinia, Ceos, Boeotia, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Arcadia. The Dog-star is the Egyptian god Thoth, identified with Hermes, who was known as Aristaeus by the Ceans.

4. His raising of bees from the carcasses of cattle has been mistold by Virgil. They will have swarmed, rather, from the lion which Cyrene lolled, or which was killed in her honour. This myth, like that of Samson’s bees which swarmed from a lion’s carcass, seems to be deduced from a primitive icon showing a naked woman tussling amorously with a lion, while a bee hovers above the carcass of another lion. The naked woman is the Lion-goddess Cyrene, or Hepatu the Hittite, or Anatha of Syria, or Hera the Lion-goddess of Mycenae, and her partner is the sacred king, who is due to die under the midsummer sign of Leo, emblemized by a knife in the Egyptian Zodiac. Like Theseus or Heracles, he wears a lion mask and skin, and is animated by the spirit of the dead lion, his predecessor, which appears as a bee. This is spring-time, when bees first swarm, but afterwards, as the Midsummer Bee-goddess, she will sting him to death, and emasculate him. The lion which the sacred king himself killed-as did both Heracles and his friend Phylius the Peloponnese; or Cyzicus on Mount Dindymum in the Sea of Marmara; or Samson in Philistia (Judges);or David at Bethlehem (Samuel)-was one of the beasts which challenged him to a ritual combat at his coronation.

5. Virgil’s account of Aristaeus’s visit to the river Peneius illustrates the irresponsible use of myth: Proteus, who lived at Pharos in the Nile Delta, has been dragged into the story by the heels-there was a famous oracle of Apollo at Tempe, which Aristaeus, his son; would naturally have consulted; Arethusa, a Peloponnesian stream, had no business in the Peneius; and Aristaeus is shown different chambers in the Naiads’ palace, where the sources of the Tiber, the Po, the Anio, the Phasis, and other widely separated rivers are kept-a mythologically absurd conception.

6. Export of oil to Sicily will have been more profitable to the Cretans than that of olive- grafts; but once Hellenic colonies had been founded on the southern coast in late Mycenaean times, olive-culture was established there. The Aristaeus who visited Sicily may be identified with Zeus Morius, who was responsible for distributing grafts of the sacred olive-trees descended from the one planted by Athene on the Athenian Acropolis. He may also have introduced the science of bee-keeping which came to Athens from Minoan Crete, where professional beekeepers had a bee and a glove as their trade device, and used terracotta hives. The Greek word for bee-bread, cerinthos, is Cretan; and so must all the related words be- such as cerion, honey-comb, cerinos, waxen, and ceraphis, ‘bee-moth’-a kind of locust. Cer, in fact, whose name (also spelt Car or Q’re) came generally to mean ‘fate’, ‘doom’, or ‘destiny’ multiplied into ceres, ‘spites, plagues, or unseen illnesses’-must have been the Cretan Bee-goddess, a goddess of Death in Life. Thus the Sphinx-goddess of Thebes is called by Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes) ‘the man-snatching Cer’.