The Loves Of Minos

MINOS lay with the nymph Paria, whose sons colonized Paros anti were later killed by Heracles; also with Androgeneia, the mother of the senior Asterius, as well as many others; but especially he pursued Britomartis of Gortyna, a daughter of Leto. She invented hunting- nets and was a close companion to Artemis, whose hounds she kept on a leash.
b. Britomartis hid from Minos under thick-leaved oak-saplings in the water meadows, and then for nine months he pursued her over craggy mountains and level plains until, in desperation, she threw herself into the sea, and was hauled to safety by fishermen. Artemis deified Britomartis under the name of Dictynna; but on Aegina she is worshipped as Aphaea, because she vanished; at Sparta as Artemis, surnamed ‘the Lady of the Lake’; and on Cephallonia as Laphria; the Samians, however, use her true name in their invocations.

c. Minos’s many infidelities so enraged Pasiphaë that she put a spell upon him: whenever he lay with another woman, he discharged not seed, but a swarm of noxious serpents, scorpions, and millipedes, which preyed on her vitals. One day Procris, daughter of the Athenian King Erechtheus, whom her husband Cephalus had deserted, visited Crete. Cephalus was provoked to this by Eos, who fell in love with him. When he politely refused her advances, on the ground that he could not deceive Procris, with whom he had exchanged vows of perpetual faithfulness, Eos protested that Procris, whom she knew better than he did, would readily forswear herself for gold. Since Cephalus indignantly denied this, Eos metamorphosed him into the likeness of one Pteleon, and advised him to tempt Procris to his bed by offering her a golden crown. He did so, and, finding that Procris was easily seduced, felt no compunction about lying with Eos, of whom she was painfully jealous.
d. Eos bore Cephalus a son named Phaëthon; but Aphrodite stole him while still a child, to be the night-watchman of her most sacred shrines; and the Cretans call him Adymnus, by which they mean the morning and the evening star.
e. Meanwhile, Procris could not bear to stay in Athens, her desertion being the subject of general gossip, and therefore came to Crete, where Minos found her no more difficult to seduce than had the supposed Pteleon. He bribed her with a hound that never failed to catch his quarry, and a dart that never missed its mark, both of which had been given him by Artemis. Procris, being an ardent huntress, gladly accepted these, but insisted that Minos should take a prophylactic draught-a decoction of magical roots invented by the witch Circe-to prevent him from filling her with reptiles and insects. This draught had the desired effect, but Procris feared that Pasiphaë might bewitch her, and therefore returned hurriedly to Athens, disguised as a handsome boy, having first changed her name to Pterelas. She never saw Minos again.
f. Cephalus, whom she now joined on a hunting expedition, did not recognize her and coveted Laelaps, her hound, and the unerring dart so much, that he offered to buy them, naming a huge sum of silver. But Procris refused to part with either, except for love, and  when he agreed to take her to his bed, tearfully revealed herself as his wife. Thus they were reconciled at last, and Cephalus enjoyed great sport with the and the dart. But Artemis was vexed that her valuable gifts should be bandied from hand to hand by these mercenary adulterers, and plotted revenge. She put it into Procris’s head to suspect that Cephalus was still visiting Eos when he rose two hours after midnight and went off to hunt.

g. One night Procris, wearing a dark tunic, crept out after him in the half light. Presently he heard a rustle in a thicket behind him, Laelaps growled and stiffened, Cephalus let fly with the unerring dart and transfixed Procris. In due course the Areiopagus sentenced him to perpetual banishment for murder.

h. Cephalus retired to Thebes, where King Amphitryon, the supposed father of Heracles, borrowed Laelaps to hunt the Teumessian vixen which was ravaging Cadmeia. This vixen, divinely fated never to be caught, could be appeased only by the monthly sacrifice of a child. But, since Laelaps was divinely fated to catch whatever he pursued, doubt arose in Heaven as to how this contradiction should be resolved: in the end, Zeus angrily settled it by turning  both Laelaps and vixen into stone.
i. Cephalus next assisted Amphitryon in a successful war against Teleboans and Taphians. Before it began, Amphitryon made all his allies swear by Athene and Ares not to hide any of the spoils; only one, Panopeus, broke this oath and was punished by begetting a coward, the notorious Epeius. The Teleboan king was Pterelaus, on whose head Poseidon, being his grandfather, had planted a golden lock of immortality. His daughter Comaetho fell in love with Amphitryon and, wishing to gain his affections, plucked out the golden lock, so that Pterelaus died and Amphitryon swiftly conquered the Teleboans with the help of Cephalus; but he sentenced Comaetho to death for parricide.
j. Cephalus’s share of the Teleboan dominions was the island of Cephallenia, which still bears his name. He never pardoned Minos for having seduced Procris and given her the fatal dart; nor yet could he acquit himself of responsibility. After all, he had been the first to forswear himself, because Procris’s affair with the supposed Pteleon could not be reckoned as a breach of faith; ‘No, no,’ he grieved, ‘I should never have bedded with Eos!’ Though purified of his guilt, he was haunted by Procris’s ghost and, fearing to bring misfortune on his companions, went one day to Cape Leucas, where he had built a temple to Apollo of the White Rock, and plunged into the sea from the cliff top. As he fell he called aloud on the name of Pterelas; for it was under this name that Procris had been most dear to him.

***

1. Minos’s seduction of nymphs in the style of Zeus doubtless records the Cnossian king’s ritual marriage to Moon-priestesses of various city states in his empire.
2. The Moon-goddess was called Britomartis in Eastern Crete. Hence the Greeks identified her with Artemis (Diodorus Siculus; Euripides; Hesychius), and with Hecate (Euripides). In Western Crete she was Dictynna, as Virgil knew: ‘They called the Moon Dictynna after your name’. Dictynna is connected in the myth with dictyon, which means a net, of the sort used for hunting or fishing; and Dicte is apparently a worn-down form-dictynnaeon-‘Dictynna’s place’. After the introduction of the system a murderous chase of the sacred king by the goddess armed with a net was converted into a love chase of the goddess by the sacred king. Both chases occur frequently in European folklore. Minos’s pursuit of Britomartis, which is paralleled in Philistia by Moxus’s, or Mopsus’s, chase of Derceto, begins when the oaks are in full leaf-probably in the Dog Days, which was when Set pursued Isis and the Child Horus in the water meadows of the Nile Delta-and ends nine months later, on May Eve. Zeus’s seduction of Europe was also a May Eve event.

3. To judge from the ritual of the Celtic North, where the goddess is called Goda (‘the Good’)-Neanthes translates the syllable brito as ‘good’ (Greek Historical Fragments)-she originally rode on a goat, naked except for a net, with an apple in one hand, and accompanied by a hare and a raven, to her annual love-feast. The carved miserere seat in Coventry Cathedral, where she was thus portrayed, recorded the Christian May Eve ceremonies at Southam and Coventry, from the legend of Lady Godiva has been piously evolved. In Celtic Germany, Scandinavia, and probably England too, Goda had ritual connection with the goat, or with a man dressed in goat-skins-the sacred king who later became the Devil of the witch cult. Her apple is a token of the kin approaching death; the hare symbolizes the chase, during which she transforms herself into a greyhound; her net will catch him when he becomes a fish the raven will give oracles from his tomb.
4. It seems that, in Crete, the goat-cult preceded the bull-cult, and that Pasiphaë originally married a goat-king. Laphria (‘she who wins booty’), Dictynna’s title in Aegina, was also a title of the goat-goddess Athene, who is said to have been assaulted by the goatish Pallas, whose skin she flayed and converted into her aegis). ‘Laphria’ suggests that the goddess was the pursuer, not the pursued. Inscriptions from Aegina show that the great temple of Artemis belonged to Artemis Aphaea (‘not dark’, to distinguish her from Hecate); in the myth, Aphaea is taken to mean aphanes, ‘disappearing’.
5. The story of Minos and Procris has passed from myth into anecdote, and from anecdote into street-corner romance, recalling some of the tales in the Golden Ass. Being linked with Minos’s war against Athens, and the eventual downfall of Cnossus, it records perhaps the Cretan king’s demand for a ritual marriage with the High-priestess of Athens, which the Athenians resented. Pteleon (‘elm-grove’), the name of Procris’s seducer, may refer to the vine-cult which spread from Crete in the time of Minos, since vines were trained on elms; but it may also be derived from ptelos, ‘wild-boar’. In that case, Cephalus and Pteleon will have originally been the sacred king and his tanist, disguised as a wild boar. Pasiphaë’s witchcrafts are characteristic of an angry Moon-goddess; and Procris counters them with the witchcrafts of Circe, another title of the same goddess.
6. Cephalus’s leap from the white rock at Cape Leucas rightly reminds Strabo that the Leucadians used every year to fling a man, provided with wings to break his fall, and even with live birds corded to his body, over the cliff into the sea. The victim, a pharmacos, or scapegoat, whose removal freed the island from guilt, seems also to have carried a white sunshade as a parachute. Boats were waiting to pick him up if he survived, and convey him to some other island.
7. The myth of Comaetho and Pterelaus refers to the cutting of the solar king’s hair before his death; but the name Pterelaus suggests that the winged pharmacos flung to his death was originally the king. The syllable elaos, or elaios, stands for the wild olive which, like the birch in Italy and North-western Europe, was used for the expulsion of evil spirits; and in the Rhodian dialect elaios meant simply pharmacos. But the fates of Pterelaus and Cephalus are mythically linked by Procris’s adoption of the name Pterelas, and this suggests that she was really the priestess of Athene, who launched the leathered Cephalus to his death.
8. The fox was the emblem of Messene (Apollodorus); probably because the Aeolians worshipped the Moon-goddess as a vixen; and the myth of the Teumessian vixen may record Aeolian raids on Cadmeia in search of child sacrifices, to which the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans put an end.
9. Phaëthon and Adymnus (from a-dyomenos, ‘he who does not set’) are both allegorical names for the planet Venus. But Phaëthon, son of Eos and Cephalus, has been confused by Normus with Phaëthon, son of Helius, who drove the sun-chariot and was drowned; and with Atymnius (from atos and hymnos, ‘insatiate of heroic praise’), a sun-hero worshipped by the Milesians.
10. Epeius, who built the wooden horse, appears in early legends as an outstandingly courageous warrior; but his name was ironically applied to boasters, until it became synonymous with cowardice (Hesychius sub Epeius).