Hesiod’s Theogony (117) describes Earth as ‘‘the ever-sure foundation of all,’’ a divine progenitor who also plays an instrumental role in bringing about the lasting rule of Zeus. At first portrayed as the enemy of the status quo, she eventually comes to support the hegemony of the Olympians. In the mythic imagination, Earth’s primordial status and uncontrolled powers were necessarily superseded by a male-dominated regime representing order and stability. The same idea is expressed in the myth of Ge’s prominence at Delphi as the ‘‘previous owner’’ of the oracle (Aeschylus, Eumenides 1-4) inherited by Apollo. Scholars disagree on whether there is any historical basis for Ge’s oracle, and the credulous acceptance of the myth as historical fact has been strongly criticized (Sourvinou-Inwood 1991). While she had a temple at Delphi, archaeological evidence is lacking for Ge’s cult there before the fifth century. Yet oracles of Earth are not unknown. At Olympia, there was a similar tradition that Gaea once possessed an oracle at the spot called Gaeus (Pausanias 5.14.10). Her offerings there were made on an ash altar like that of Zeus which was doubtless very old. Pausanias (7.25.8) visited another sanctuary called Gaeus in Aegae, where he saw what he considered a very ancient wooden image of Ge, and noted that the priestess was sworn to chastity. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 28.147) adds that she drank bull’s blood as an aid to prophecy, a practice also attested at Apollo’s Argive oracle.
While the Earth is often named Gaea in poetry, in cult she is usually given the more prosaic name of Ge. Her cults were widespread yet never prominent at the civic level. She is frequently worshiped with Zeus, a combination that reflects the age-old partnership of sky-god and earth-goddess. Ge and Zeus Agoraeus were paired in the agora of Sparta, and a special area was devoted to Ge within the sanctuary of Zeus Olympius at Athens (Pausanias 3.11.9, 1.18.7). Here a small chasm was identified as the place where water drained away after Deucalion’s flood, and honey cakes were tossed into the chasm annually, perhaps during the Anthesteria. At Athens Ge was sometimes identified with Curotrophus (nourisher of youths), a goddess who customarily received preliminary offerings before sacrifice, yet the sacrificial calendars of the deme Erchia and the Marathonian Tetrapolis, inscribed in the fourth century, list Curotrophus and Ge separately. These village calendars provide us a glimpse of the rural contexts in which Ge was typically worshiped. The Erchian calendar specifies that on a certain day the nymphs, Achelous, Alochus (a birth goddess), and Hermes will each receive a sheep, while Ge will receive a pregnant sheep. In the Tetrapolis calendar, Ge is given a pregnant cow ‘‘in the fields’’ and a black ram ‘‘at the oracle [ manteion].’’ The offering of a pregnant animal has obvious symbolism, while a black animal is standard for deities who are associated with the underworld.
Ge was depicted anthropomorphically, but never fit comfortably into the cadre of Olympians or exhibited as distinct a personality as they did. Her dual ontological status as ‘‘Earth’’ and ‘‘Earth goddess’’ hindered such development. Reflecting this uncertainty, vase painters show her as a woman whose head and torso are rising from the ground. In her cosmic aspect as one of the three great domains (heaven, earth, and underworld), she appears in oaths. In the Iliad (3.103, 276-80) she is invoked with Zeus, Helius, the rivers, and the underworld deities to witness the oath attending the single combat of Paris and Menelaus. Two lambs, a white male and a black female, are sacrificed for the Sun and Earth. The group of Zeus, Ge, and Helius as witnesses to oaths and other official business is widely attested in Greek inscriptions.
Although Helius was invoked in oaths, occasionally cited as an ancestor (particularly in myths connected with Corinth) and recognized everywhere as divine, worship of the Sun was limited among the classical Greeks (cf. Chapter 13), who tended to attribute purely astral cults to the barbarians (Aristophanes, Peace 410). Helius began to be syncretized with Apollo as early as the fifth century in Orphic speculation, but the widespread identification of Apollo as sun-god was a later phenomenon. Just as Ge at Delphi was considered a primordial deity who yielded to Apollo, Helius was the original possessor of the Acrocorinthus, the citadel of Corinth, but gave the land to Aphrodite (Pausanias 2.4.7). The scattering of minor cults in the Peloponnese (Sicyon, Argos, Hermione, Epidaurus, Mount Taleton in Laconia) and the holy flocks of Helius at Taenarum mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (410-13) suggest that this worship was deeply rooted in Dorian Greece. Thus it may be that Helius’ cult was carried to Rhodes by Dorian settlers in the seventh century, though other theories hold that the sun worship there was prehellenic in origin. Pindar’s seventh Olympian ode (71-5) conveys the unique relationship between the Rhodians and their patron god, who chose the island for himself and fathered the seven Heliadae to whom the Rhodian elite traced their ancestry. With the founding of Rhodes city in 408 BC, the annual festival of the Heliaea drew athletes and musicians from around the Greek world, and the cult gained even more fame when the 110-foot statue of Helius known as the Colossus of Rhodes was erected in 282 BC.
World History
