Like Herakles, Ino-Leukothea was widely worshiped and she transcended distinctions between mortal and immortal. The sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes (fr. 21 A 13 DK) advised his fellow Eleans that they ought to make up their minds: if Leukothea was a mortal woman, they should not sacrifice (thuein) to her. But if she was a goddess, they should not sing laments. This evidence of Archaic dirges for Leukothea was cited by Farnell to support his interpretation of Ino-Leukothea as a vegetation goddess closely associated with Dionysos, for lamentation is often a part of the worship of deities connected with the ebb and flow of the seasons and the cycle of plant growth and death.16 The myth of Athamas’ angry pursuit and Ino’s leap into the sea indeed parallels the anger of Lykourgos and the leap of Dionysos recounted in the Iliad (6.130-37).
Beneath the myth lies a substrate of ritual, rich in the symbolism of rebirth and transfiguration, which helps us to see how the Theban daughter of Kadmos and the sea-goddess who rescues Odysseus from drowning can be one and the same, an identification already made in Homeric epic (Od. 5.333-35). Ino-Leukothea and her son Melikertes-Palaimon derive their power as sea gods from their own experience of drowning, and their dual names may signal not the blending of two originally separate figures, but a passage from one state of existence to another. Like other Dionysiac women, Ino-Leukothea has an ambivalent relationship to children: sometimes she is the maddened killer who dispatches Melikertes, sometimes she attempts to revive his lifeless body through immersion, and sometimes she is the nurturing foster-mother of the infant Dionysos himself.17
According to Cicero (Nat. D. 3.15), all of Greece worshiped Ino-Leukothea. The evidence for her cults is mostly late, yet they were probably well developed by the Archaic period, given the wide distribution of her worship and her popularity in Archaic poetry. Homer, Alcman (fr. 50b PMG), and Pindar (Pyth. 11.2) speak of her as a sea goddess, and we must presume that she received prayers and sacrifices from anxious mariners. Antiquarian sources note her presence in Thessaly (where inscribed dedications have been found), Boiotia, the Isthmos, and southern Lakonia, but in contrast to the witness of the Archaic poets, there is little or no indication of a marine character in the cults they describe. A festival at Miletos involving a boys’ competition evokes Leukothea’s kourotrophic role.18 Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 267d) mentions her precinct (sekos) in Chaironeia (Boiotia), which was perhaps modeled on the sekos of her sister Semele in Thebes. Near Megara was the Molourian rock from which she leapt, and the Megarians of the Roman period said that her body washed up on their shore, where the two granddaughters of the king found it and laid it to rest, instituting annual sacrifices at the tomb. Whereas the Megarian customs sound like standard heroic cult, we also hear that Ino (like Dionysos at Argos) resided deep in a lake in southern Lakonia. During her annual festival, people threw barley loaves into the water and read omens from the manner in which they sank. Such deep lakes, through which access to the underworld was possible, were the homes of chthonian deities.19
HERO-GODS AND HEROINE-GODDESSES The Dioskouroi and Helen
The cult of the Dioskouroi, “youths of Zeus,” is already attested in the eleventh book of the Odyssey (11.298-304), where we learn that “the lifegiving land holds them, living, who beneath the earth have honors from Zeus. On alternate days they live and again are dead, and they have honor equal to the gods.” This passage appears to “correct” lines in the Iliad (3.243-44) that baldly note the burial of the brothers in Lakedaimon, with no mention of their special status. Together, the passages illustrate a central issue in the cult and myth of the divine twins: the tension between their dual identities as dead heroes and as gods, mortals and immortals. Other poets, including Alcman (fr. 7 PMG) and Pindar (Nem. 10.55-90), celebrated the paradox of the twins alive under the Lakonian earth, and told how the immortal brother, Polydeukes, would not be separated from his mortal sibling Kastor even by death.
The Tyndaridai (sons of Tyndareos), as the Spartans usually called them, appear at first glance to be typical heroes who exert influence from their tombs. While their Lakonian cult is unquestionably chthonian, however, the Spartans always spoke of them as gods and swore “by the two gods.” Other Greeks saw them primarily as divine saviors who rode down from the skies in a blaze of light to give aid in battle or rescue swamped sailors, and their Panhellenic cult developed early in the Archaic period. Already in the seventh century, a hymn of Alcaeus tells how they fly from the Peloponnese to manifest themselves in a ship’s rigging as St. Elmo’s fire, and “easily rescue men from chilling death,” and in the sixth, Poseidon accompanies them on Attic vase paintings. Their Delian cult, established in the seventh or early sixth century, presumably focused on the aid they offered to mariners.20
Scholars agree, though not unanimously, that the Dioskouroi have an Indo-European pedigree. The Vedic Asvins, twin riders who give aid in battle and marry the daughter of the Sun, provide a striking parallel to the Greek twins and their divine sister Helen. Anak(t)es (Lords), a third cult title for the Greek twins used in Attica, Boiotia, and Argos, may signal yet another component in their evolution. It was an Argive who dedicated the famous twin statues of the local heroes Kleobis and Biton, now in the Delphi museum, to the Anakes. Thus several strands of tradition, some plausibly Indo-European in origin, coalesced to form the divine persona of the Dioskouroi.21
The twins played an important role in the civic lives of the Spartans. Although the Spartan kings claimed to be descendants of Herakles, the dual kingship was intimately connected with the cult of the Tyndaridai. When either king left Sparta on campaign, one of the twins accompanied him, most likely in the form of a statue. The Tyndaridai also served as models for the Spartan youths who aspired to full citizenship. The influence of horse-taming Kastor and the boxer Polydeukes was felt in all the spheres of action appropriate to young Spartan males: there was a Kastorian hunting dog, a
Kastorian battle song, and a choral sword dance invented by the pair. They also provided a model for Spartan matrimony through their capture of the daughters of the Messenian king Leukippos (White Horse). These maidens, Hilaeira (Softly Shining) and Phoibe (Radiant), are ideal female counterparts of the brilliant twins. Spartan marriage customs included a ritual kidnapping that must have evoked this myth, an Archaic favorite often illustrated in Lakonian contexts.22
Pindar (Pyth. 11.61-64) and other early poets identify Therapne as the site of the brothers’ joint burial. There, a complex of related sanctuaries included those of Helen and Menelaos, the shrine of Polydeukes, and “the so-called Phoibaion with a temple of the Dioskouroi in it” (Paus. 3.20.2) where Spartan youths sacrificed to the war god Enyalios. The Phoibaion was probably a shrine of the Leukippides. Unfortunately, none of the cult places of the Tyndaridai have been identified, but we have material evidence of their worship in ten votive reliefs of Archaic and Classical date. They depict the nude twins standing in profile, facing each other and holding spears. Their other attributes are two tall amphoras with peaked lids, a pair of snakes, and a curious monument called the dokana (the beams), which consisted of two parallel planks joined by two horizontal crossbars. All of these objects possessed chthonian or sepulchral connotations: the mysterious dokana may have served as a tomb marker, or as a schematic representation of the twins in their shrine. The Spartans exported the Tyndaridai to their colony Taras, most likely when it was founded in the eighth century, though our evidence is limited to an important series of terracotta relief plaques dedicated in the fourth and third centuries. These plaques, pierced for suspension on the walls of a shrine or in a grove, include some motifs that are obviously of Spartan origin (the dokana, twin amphoras, the rape of the Leukippides) and others that are more generalized (chariots, horse heads).23
An aspect of the Panhellenic cult of the Dioskouroi, reflected both in popular legend and in individual devotions, was the belief that the twins gave aid in battle and sometimes appeared on the actual battlefield. Two inscribed spear butts, appropriate gifts for the spear-wielding Dioskouroi, were separately dedicated as battle spoils in Classical Attica and Arkadia.24 Partisans of Sparta, the Tyndaridai were said to have thwarted Aristomenes, Sparta’s great antagonist in the Second Messenian War, on at least two occasions. After they miraculously appeared on their white horses during a clash between Lokroi Epizephyrioi and Kroton beside the Sagra river (c. 600), the victorious Lokrians set up altars to them. Over a century later, Simonides elegized the Battle of Plataiai with a description of the Dioskouroi and Menelaos accompanying the Spartans as they rode out to battle against the Persians.25
The core ritual in the worship of the Dioskouroi was their reception as guests at a meal. Scholars often refer to the practice as theoxenia, but this technical term is only rarely attested. Usually the ritual is described in the same terms used for the entertainment of mortal guests: the hosts receive (dechesthai) them or provide hospitality (xenia); couches are strewn and tables are set out with food and drink. Herakles, Asklepios, and many other heroes and gods were recipients of such meals, which were often shared with “parasites” in special dining rooms, or as was more often the practice for the Dioskouroi during the Archaic period, set out in private households. According to Pindar (Ol. 3.36-40, Nem. 10.49-51), the family of Theron of Akragas was favored by the Tyndaridai because “of all mortals they attend them with the most tables of welcome” and Herodotus (6.127) tells of an Arkadian who became famed for his hospitality after he received the Dioskouroi.26
Like her siblings the Dioskouroi, Helen was prone to miraculous interventions. Legend had it that she blinded the poet Stesichorus for singing of her adultery at Troy, and then restored his sight when he wrote a recantation denying that she ever traveled there.27 Herodotus (6.61) says that the nurse of a rich but ugly young Spartan girl took her regularly to the sanctuary of Helen at Therapne and placed her before the cult statue. One day a woman appeared from the shrine and predicted that the child would grow to be the most beautiful woman in Sparta. From that day, her looks improved so dramatically that she ended up marrying one of the Spartan kings. This anecdote illustrates Helen’s important role in the lives of Spartan girls and women as a paradigm of female beauty and grace. Like the Dioskouroi, Helen was worshiped both in Sparta proper and in Therapne. The urban cult seems to have involved a girls’ footrace or dance on the banks of the Eurotas, and the placing of wreaths on a plane tree sacred to Helen, acts in celebration of Helen’s wedding. These rituals were performed at the Dromos and the Planes, the same areas where Spartan youths experienced a separate rite of passage under the protection of Herakles.28
Therapne was an important Bronze Age site, revived in the late Geometric period under the impetus of Spartan military victories. Excavations there revealed an enclosure and a small white limestone shrine, begun as early as 700, where statues of Helen and Menelaos probably stood, plus a rich store of votive offerings including jewelry, plentiful bronzes, terracottas, lead figurines, and pottery. A seventh century bronze vase inscribed to “Helen, wife of Menelaos” attests that the royal pair were worshiped together, and other objects are dedicated separately to Menelaos or Helen. The site was centered on a rocky outcropping, hinting at the worship of a prehistoric goddess, a predecessor of the epic Helen. The disappearance and return of a goddess is a familiar motif in Greek religion and presumably gave rise to the myths of Helen’s abductions.29
Outside of Lakonia, Helen was usually worshiped only in connection with the Dioskouroi. As early as Euripides (Or. 1635-43, 1688; Hel. 1667-70), we hear of the belief that Helen was a celestial savior of mariners along with her brothers, and that the three received libations and xenia (ritual hospitality) as a group. Attica, where Kastor and Polydeukes were worshiped as the Anakes, had its own local traditions of Helen’s birth at Rhamnous, her kidnapping by Theseus and her rescue by the Dioskouroi. This rich lore was reflected in various minor cults, such as the sacrifices to the Anakes and Helen recorded in the Thorikos deme calendar.30
World History
