Some distinctively Arcadian features can thus be detected in the deities and their cults, but did Arcadia also have, in parallel, a distinctive ‘‘religious imagination?’’
One strand of Arcadian mythology derives from what might be termed the ‘‘common store of Greek mythology’’: these are the myths of divine births (Poseidon, Zeus, Hermes), agrarian myths (when Athena or Demeter deprives the earth of its fruits in her wrath), and stories of raped princesses (Auge, Phialo) or heroic exploits such as those of Heracles. Other myths are more specifically Arcadian in character, namely those which include theriomorphism: the punishment of Lykaon with transformation into a wolf, or the transformation of Poseidon and Demeter into horses.
The tales of divine births stake the claim that Arcadia played a major role in the biographies of the gods. The Arcadians adapted a ‘‘panhellenic’’ myth in order to acclimatize Poseidon to their country. Near the spring of Arne, close to Mantinea, Rhea had told Kronos that she had given birth to a horse and had given him a foal to eat instead of his child, ‘‘as she next gave him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of Zeus’’ (Pausanias 8.8.2). The legend is modeled on the panhellenic legend of the birth of Zeus, but the foal evokes Poseidon’s affinities with the horse.
The birth of Zeus became the subject of official tradition amongst the Arcadians. Zeus was reared, they said, on Mount Lykaion; there was on Lykaion a place called Kretea. According to them it was this place, and not the island of Crete, that witnessed the childhood of the god. ‘‘To the nymphs by whom, as they say, Zeus was reared, they give the names Thiso, Neda and Hagno’’ (Pausanias 8.38.2-3). This legend, which sought to make Arcadia the homeland ofZeus, asserts at once both the country’s antiquity and its particularly sacred character. Callimachus proposed, in his Hymn to Zeus (Hymn 1, lines 10-54) a sort of compromise between Crete and Arcadia: the birth of Zeus was located in Parrhasia, on Mount Lykaion, in a ‘‘place now sacred,’’ whereas his kourotrophia, his rearing, took place in Crete. The precedence is thus given to Arcadia, which is the place in which Zeus came into the world. The existence of the toponym Kretea justified Arcadian claims.
The Arcadians had to compromise with another oftheir local traditions to establish this official version centered on Mount Lykaion, namely that of Zeus’ birth at Methydrion. ‘‘The Methydrion tradition,’’ writes Pausanias (8.36.2-3), ‘‘holds that Rhea, pregnant with Zeus, arrived on Mount Thaumasion and secured an offer of help from Hoplodamos and all the other giants who accompanied him, in case Kronos should come to attack her. The people of Methydrion admit that she gave birth somewhere on Lykaion, but it is in their own territory that they locate the deception of Kronos and the substitution of the child with a stone, in accordance with the myth of the Greeks.’’ Clearly, the people of Methydrion initially located the entire myth in their own land, since it is hardly logical that Rhea should tarry on Mount Thaumasion prior to the birth of Zeus, then give birth without protection on Mount Lykaion, and then give the deceitful stone to her husband on Mount
Thaumasion again. This incoherence is the sign of a compromise. It is tempting to locate the revision of the Methydrion tradition and the focus upon an official version at the time of the creation of the Arcadian League (Jost 1985:241-9, 2002b:380-1). Particularly localized traditions, which held that Zeus had been bathed in the Lousios (Pausanias 8.28.2) and that Rhea had purified herself in the Neda (8.41.2), subsisted in their own right until the time of Pausanias without being subject to modification.
So far as the birth and infancy of Hermes was concerned, an official Arcadian tradition located the god’s education in Parrhasia, at Akakesion. A statue of Hermes Akakesios was preserved there: ‘‘The infant Hermes was reared in this place and Akakos, the son of Lykaon, was his stepfather’’ (Pausanias 8.36.10). The resemblance between the toponymic epithet Akakesios and the Homeric epithet of Hermes akaketa (‘‘he who does no harm’’) must have been the starting point of Arcadian claims about Hermes (Pausanias 8.3.2). This official version, doubtless generated at the time of the creation of the Arcadian League, seems to have prevailed in Arcadia; it relegated the region of Mount Cyllene to a secondary position. The theme of the god’s birth on Mount Cyllene was a literary one in Greece, known above all from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. But when Pausanias visited Pheneos and Cyllene, he recorded no logos, either about the union of Zeus and Maia or about the birth of the young Hermes, in his Periegesis. Two Pheneate traditions alone were recorded, these bearing upon the toponyms of the episodes of the god’s infancy: the Trikrena mountains, with three springs where the nymphs bathed the newborn Hermes (8.16.1) and Mount Chelydorea, where Hermes made a lyre after finding a tortoise (8.17.5). It all seems as if in Arcadia even the god, so often called ‘‘Cyllenian’’ in Greek literature, had been appropriated by the Parrhasians and by Megalopolis, where Hermes Akakesios was worshiped (Jost 1998a:235-6).
The myths of divine birth testify to the various sanctuaries’ desire to assert precedence. But in this we are not dealing with a uniquely Arcadian phenomenon. Other myths have a more indigenous resonance: these are the myths that underline the precariousness of the boundaries between animals, men, and gods. Such is the myth of Lykaon’s transformation into a wolf, or that of Demeter’s metamorphosis into a mare and Poseidon’s into a stallion.
Lykaon, the second mythical king of Arcadia after Pelasgos, became the subject of a tale of metamorphosis in the Mount Lykaion sanctuary, and this is recorded by Pausanias (8.2.3). ‘‘He laid a newborn human on the altar of Zeus Lykaios, sacrificed the baby, and smeared the blood over the altar; and it is said that immediately after the sacrifice, he became a wolf instead of a man.’’ According to other versions (Jost 1985:261 nn.6-7, 262 nn.1-12) the transformation of Lykaon (and/or that of his sons) into a wolf resulted from a sacrilegious feast: in order to test whether they were in the presence of a god, Lykaon and/or his sons set human flesh before Zeus. The responsibility for this action was attributed sometimes to Lykaon, sometimes, in a version that absolves the king and presents him as a pious man, to his sons, the Lykaonids. The victim was, according to the sources, a guest of Lykaon, a Molossian hostage he was keeping at his court, or, more often, a child, sometimes even one of Lykaon’s own sons or his grandson, Arkas. Zeus, enraged, overturned the banqueting table, bringing a dramatic end to the commensality of men and gods. He inflicted, besides, punishment on those responsible: sometimes Lykaon is transformed into a wolf, sometimes he is struck by a thunderbolt, or he sees his house struck as he changes into a wolf; the Lykaonids for their part are struck at the same time as he is, or else some of them are struck while others are transformed into wolves. Several sources add that, to punish the human race, Zeus sent a devastating flood. Amongst the retributions inflicted on Lykaon and his sons, it should be noted that metamorphosis into a wolf is presented as a punishment equivalent to the thunderbolt or flooding.
The theme of Lykaon’s metamorphosis into a wolf and the werewolf traditions of Mount Lykaion have been subject to diverse interpretations (Jost forthcoming (b)). First it was considered to be the etiological myth of a cult of a men-wolves who worshiped a wolf-god or that of a brotherhood of men-wolves who had a wolf for token (e. g., Jeanmaire 1939:558-65). Then explanations began to focus on the notion that metamorphosis into a wolf was equivalent to a symbolic death in a rite of tribal initiation (e. g., Bonnechere 1994:85-96; Burkert 1983:84-93). The most recent explanations turn on the idea of bestiality. Lykaon is an ambivalent character: a civilizing hero, he ‘‘founded the city of Lykosoura on Mount Lykaion, he gave Zeus the epithet Lykaios and instituted the Lykaia games’’ (Pausanias 8.2.3). The human sacrifice he offers to Zeus Lykaios has a double significance: holy, it founds a rite; sacrilegious, it incurs punishment. Zeus chooses to punish Lykaon’s impiety by turning him into an animal that similarly symbolizes wildness. The bestiality into which Lykaon is plunged illustrates the contrast between the civilization that he had established and the wild world to which his action brings him. Lykaon the king is the first civilized man and Lykaon the wolf is an animal, a wolf, the symbol of the world of the animals in contrast to mankind and its institutions. In the figure of Lykaon human behavior and animal behavior contrast with each other in succession. Henceforth, the gods refuse commensality with men and Lykaon’s ‘‘transgression’’ is punished by a ‘‘regression’’ into the condition of a wild animal, the wolf (e. g., Forbes Irving 1990:90-5; Jost forthcoming (b)).
Another animal transformation is that of Demeter and Poseidon, who of their own volition temporarily took on the form of horses. The story took place at Thelpusa and at Phigalia, but its impact extended beyond this region and spread across the whole of Arcadia. ‘‘The people of Thelpusa were the first of the Arcadians by whom Poseidon was surnamed Hippios,’’ recalls Pausanias (8.25.7), as we have seen. Accordingly, the Thelpusa story served as an etiology for the naming of Poseidon Hippios throughout Arcadia.
The myth was localized beside the Ladon: ‘‘When Demeter was wandering,’’ Pausanias records (8.25.5-7):
As she searched for her daughter, Poseidon, if we may believe the tale, pursued her, seized with a desire to have sex with her; and so she transformed herself into a mare and began to graze, mingling herself with the mares of Onkos, but Poseidon understood that he was being tricked and had sex with Demeter after having himself taken on the form of a stallion. At the time Demeter had been enraged by what had happened. But in due course she had wanted, it is said, to lay aside her anger and take a bath in the Ladon. Following this, the goddess received her epithets: because of her anger, that of‘‘Erinys’’ (since ‘‘to cherish one’s anger’’ is termed erinuein in Arcadian), and then that of ‘‘Lousia’’ because she ‘‘bathed’’ [louein] herself in the Ladon... Demeter, as it is told, bore to Poseidon a daughter, whose name it is not customary to utter to the uninitiated, and the horse Arion.
Demeter’s quest for her daughter exhibits Eleusinian influence, but it has no impact on the remainder of the narrative. This is centered rather on the union of Demeter-as-mare with Poseidon, on the anger of the goddess that offers explanation of her two epithets, and on the fruit of the union of the two deities: a daughter and the horse Arion.
The birth of the horse Arion shows that the transformation into horses is not there just to make a good story. It conveys the profound affinity between the world of the gods and that of the animals. It is to Poseidon that the horse is linked and not Demeter, even if, in Arcadia, the goddess took the initiative in changing herselfinto a mare. In the Thebaid (Pausanias 8.25.8) Arion’s mane bears the same epithet, kuanochaites (‘‘blue-black’’), that was often used to characterize Poseidon. Poseidon is repeatedly portrayed as the father of a horse in Greek myth. One thinks of Pegasus, born in Corinth from the god’s union with Medusa, or of Skyphios, the Thessalian horse born of the earth. Poseidon is the constant factor in these various cases. It is to him, not to his partner, that the horse is linked, and in fact we find the name of Poseidon’s partners varying between mythographers in the case of the same child (Jost 1985:307 and n.). Thus Arion is sometimes given Erinys as his mother, sometimes Gaia, sometimes a Harpy, or even the Gorgon Medusa. Other partners of Poseidon took on the form of mares in order to give themselves to him. Medusa is sometimes represented with a horse’s tail. Euripides put Melanippe, with the evocative name of‘‘black horse’’ on stage in one of his lost tragedies: from her union with Poseidon were born Boiotos and Aiolos (Bregli-Pulci Doria 1986:112). It was inevitably therefore to Poseidon that Demeter had to bear the horse Arion. Poseidon was, besides, worshiped with the epithet Hippios in no less than five regions of Arcadia: Mantinea (Pausanias 8.10.5), Pheneos (8.14.2), Thelpusa (8.25.7), Methydrion (8.36.2), and Lykosoura (8.37.10). It should be recalled that it was in worship of Poseidon that the Arcadians threw horses into the spring of Dine (Pausanias 8.7.2). But the Thelpusan episode - perhaps initially associated with the old goddess Erinys - was a surprisingly unconventional one for Demeter, a goddess so widely regarded as the mother of a daughter. Hence the legend of Demeter's transformation into a horse and her theriomorphic union with Poseidon. For Demeter, the equine form is only temporary and is found nowhere else.
At Phigalia, the story of the union of Poseidon and Demeter was the same as at Thelpusa: ‘‘However, the being borne by Demeter, according to the Phigalians, was not a horse, but the deity the Arcadians call Despoina’’ (Pausanias 8.42.1). The transformation of Poseidon and Demeter does not find expression here in the birth of a horse, but it is echoed in the semi-theriomorphic wooden statue of the goddess that was described to Pausanias (8.42.4): it was a woman sitting on a rock, who had ‘‘the head and mane of a horse, and images of snakes and other wild animals were attached to her head.'' Poseidon had no cult, and it was upon Demeter that the theriomorphism was concentrated. But the origin of this theriomorphism was, nonetheless, still to be found in her union with Poseidon, transformed into a horse.
Some have wished to find the memory of a horse-god in Poseidon’s transformation into a horse. Farnell (1896-1909:4.15) speaks of a ‘‘horse-god’’ and, according to
F. Schachermeyr (1950), the Greeks had originally worshiped a horse-god (Hippos) before reassigning his cult to Poseidon Hippios. He had originally been conceived of, between 1900 and 1600 BC, from a ‘‘peasant’’ perspective, as a fertility and water deity; then between 1600 and 1200 BC a developing ‘‘feudal’’ concept had gradually transformed the horse-god Hippos into the god Hippios, ‘‘master of the horses,’’ under the influence of the role now played by the harness. The hypothesis essentially rests on texts that express a fundamental link between Poseidon and the horse. I once sought to support this theory with a Mycenaean tablet in which L. R. Palmer explained i-qo as the name of a god (Jost 1985:283-4). But it seems that this is rather the name of a man (Lejeune 1958:289). In any case, there is nothing to license the existence of a horse-god. I had also drawn support for this position, following others, from the Mantinean legend on the birth of Poseidon: ‘‘When Rhea had given birth to Poseidon, she laid him down amongst a flock so that he could live with the sheep; the spring Arne drew its name from the fact that sheep [arnes] surrounded it. Rhea told Kronos that she had given birth to a horse and gave him a foal to eat in place of her child [anti tou paidos], as she next gave him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes’’ (Pausanias 8.8.2).
Fougeres (1898:227) spoke of the ‘‘so-called horse borne by Rhea and the foal presented to Kronos.’’ Thus, in interpreting Rhea’s ruse, he understood that Poseidon had been born in the form of a horse. He concluded that Poseidon had ‘‘the body of a horse’’ and that we were dealing with ‘‘an animal cult of the horse.’’ Along similar lines Festugiere (1944:38) wrote on the births of Zeus and Poseidon: ‘‘These two parallel cases invite the same explanation: if Zeus replaces a sacred stone, Poseidon was in origin a horse.’’ If the two cases are parallel, the parallelism consists rather in the fact that Rhea both times gave birth to a child, pais, that she hid sometimes in a cave and sometimes among a flock. The ruse consisting of giving Kronos a stone or a foal takes place later. It cannot be denied, in Poseidon’s case, that the ruse indicates a very strong bond between Poseidon and the horse, but it does not imply the existence of a horse-god. The ruse explains the epithet Hippios that the god bore at Mantinea, without necessarily being linked to an ‘‘archaic’’ conception of the god. The tale’s degree of antiquity, like its origin (Arcadian or Boeotian?) cannot be determined. Whatever it was, Arcadian gods were not animals in origin, any more than Zeus was a sacred stone: like the wolf-god of Mount Lykaion, or Artemis the bear (Jost, forthcoming (b)), Poseidon the horse should be forgotten.
Let us return to the Thelpusa tale. The metamorphoses of Poseidon and Demeter are ruses employed by these deities. This is not the token of a divine essence: the metamorphosis is temporary (in Demeter’s case we think of the metamorphoses of Thetis when she wanted to escape Peleus and, in Poseidon’s case, of the metamorphoses of Zeus when pursuing his beloveds). It illustrates a very strong bond, as we have said, between Poseidon and the horse. Besides, metamorphosis into a horse is particularly appropriate to the theme of the violent relationship between Poseidon and Demeter, as A. Avagianou has stressed (1991:145-63). It is not a matter of a ‘‘sacred marriage’’ (hieros gamos) between two deities, but of a rape. The god accomplishes his will through constraint. The horse offers an appropriate image for the wild character of this union. A tempestuous and impulsive character was also attributed to Pegasus, who made the spring of Hippocrene gush forth with a blow of his hoof (Strabo C379). For Poseidon, the violence he displays reflects the wild forces of the chthonic god. For Demeter, the myth reveals two contradictory but complementary aspects. Her wild nature is embodied by the Poseidonian mare and by her anger, which inflicts sterility upon the land of Phigalia. Once she is appeased and purified of her anger (Lousia), she is - explicitly at Phigalia at any rate - the goddess of grain and the life of cultivation, who presides over the vegetation and the fertility of the land. At Thelpusa the ambivalence of Demeter, angered then reconciled, hostile then beneficent in turn, is underlined by the splitting of the goddess into two, with her two epithets, Erinys and Lousia.
World History
