Greek Mythology, page 4
In late summer 480 BC Sunium witnessed Greece’s rapidly changing fortunes, when its still-unfinished temple was burned by the Persians under Xerxes. Within weeks, however, the Greek fleet defeated Persia’s navy at the Battle of Salamis. In thanks the victors dedicated three enemy triremes: one on Salamis, a second at the sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia and the third at Sunium, where it was hauled in triumph on to the headland and displayed in the ruins of the temple.
In 444 BC, as part of Pericles’ programme to restore Attica’s destroyed sanctuaries, building began at Sunium. Four years later the Temple of Poseidon was complete. Although only its ruins can be seen today, its original form can be gauged from the almost identical and still complete Temple of Hephaestus in Athens’ Agora. It was not the only temple built at Sunium. A Temple of Athene was constructed on the low hill to the north, whose precinct may have included a hero-shrine to Menelaus’ helmsman, Phrontis.
In 412 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, the promontory of Sunium was fortified. It remained in use as a military base throughout the Hellenistic period, when ship-sheds were built at sea level beneath the temple. Under Rome, Sunium declined. In the first century AD, Athene’s temple was dismantled and re-erected in the Athenian Agora. (Two of its Ionic capitals are displayed in Athens’ Agora Museum.) A hundred years later, Pausanias began his Description of Greece with the observation that: ‘Cape Sunium is on the mainland of Greece, jutting out from Attica towards the Aegean and the Cyclades. When you have sailed round the promontory you see a harbour and – on top of the promontory – the Temple of Athene of Sunium.’ He meant of course the Temple of Poseidon. It is an unfortunate beginning to an otherwise excellent book.
By the late fourth century AD (when the Byzantine emperor Arcadius ordered ‘any temples still intact to be demolished discretely and without ado’) the majestic Temple of Poseidon was abandoned. The promontory became the haunt of pirates. When Lord Byron visited in 1810, he wrote of ‘five and twenty Mainnotes (pirates) … in the caves at the foot of the cliff with some Greek boatmen their prisoners’. Their presence did not prevent him from carving his name on one of the temple’s columns or eulogizing the site in his poem ‘Don Juan’:
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep…
Sunium
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
C8th BC
Signs of occupation at Sunium.
c. 500 BC
Tufa temple begun.
490 BC
Athenian sacred ship bound for Sunium attacked by Aiginetans.
480 BC
Unfinished temple destroyed by Persians; Persian trireme consecrated to Poseidon after Salamis.
444 BC
Work begun on new temples of Poseidon and Athene.
412 BC
Fortification walls built around promontory.
C1st AD
Temple of Athene dismantled and rebuilt in Athens.
C2nd AD
Pausanias misidentifies Temple of Poseidon.
C4th AD
Temple of Poseidon closed down.
AD 1810
Lord Byron visits Sunium.
An easy excursion from Athens, Sunium is popular with coach parties, especially in the evening when sunsets can be stunning. As a result, the compact site is often overrun. Out of season, however, its romantic isolation can still be appreciated.
From the car park and conveniently placed restaurant (with good views of the temple), a path leads from the ticket booth, from where it is possible to look across the access road to the foundations of the Temple of Athene (no access). Steps lead up past fortification walls to the Temple of Poseidon (no access to interior). Another path leads west down towards the bay, with a view to the ship-sheds below. From the restaurant, it is possible to walk to the end of the promontory, from where the view towards the temple and out to sea is breathtaking. Care should be taken as the cliffs are sheer and unfenced.
3
Eleusis & the Mysteries of Demeter & Persephone
Haides, who rules so many, harnessed his immortal horses to the golden chariot. Persephone climbed on board and beside her Hermes took up reins and goad, and they galloped out of the courtyard. Swiftly they came to the end of the long road. Neither sea nor rivers nor tall-grassed valleys held back the deathless horses – no, nor high mountains either – but they cleared them all on their path through the soaring air. [Reaching Eleusis,] Hermes reined in the horses near the temple, fragrant with incense, where fair-garlanded Demeter was living. When she saw them, she ran out as a maenad runs through dappled woodland on the mountainside. And when Persephone saw her mother’s lovely eyes, she leapt down from the chariot and ran towards her, throwing her arms around her neck, embracing her.… And at Eleusis, the life-bringing bosom of the earth … soon in the springtime wheat fields would rustle with long ears of corn and the fertile furrows would be thick with wheat-ears to be bound tight-close in sheaves.
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 374–89; 450–56
For most of its history, the plain around Eleusis has been luxuriant. From the rocky outcrop rising low above the sanctuary, the pure air loud with birdsong and the shrilling of insects, a visitor could once gaze across the sparkling bay towards the pale blue hills of Salamis, and far away the Peloponnese, its jagged mountains shimmering in haze. Inland, gold wheat fields stretched from the surrounding mountains to the sea, while by rutted farm tracks crocuses, anemones and irises splashed a raucous dance of colour.
No longer. Today the environs of Eleusis are an industrial inferno. Choking fumes rise from chemical factory chimneys, and flames from the burn-off of oil refineries; container ships and tankers loll at anchor in the bay; unlovely modern warehouses and showrooms, offices and houses sprawl across the concrete plain; and a constant whine of traffic screams from the motorway to Athens. Yet somehow the sanctuary still manages to preserve some vestige of its dignity, its sense of wonder, its lost identity as the site of perhaps the most transcendental of all rituals of the ancient world, the Eleusinian Mysteries, inexorably linked with the myth of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone.
Demeter & Persephone
Demeter was the archetypal mother goddess. (Even her name proclaimed her status: ‘meter’ means ‘mother’, while the prefix ‘de–’ may be connected either to the Cretan word for barley (dea) or to dē, the Doric word for ‘earth’.) Hers was the fertile plough-land, which, so Greeks believed, the sky-god Zeus impregnated with his rain to help produce rich crops or flowers. Zeus impregnated his sister Demeter more conventionally, too, and to them was born a daughter, Persephone (‘Death-Bearer’), whose name was so taboo that many called her simply ‘Korē’, ‘Girl’.
Haides, god of the Underworld, was not discouraged by his close blood relationship with Persephone (he was doubly her uncle) and he resolved to abduct and marry her; he even persuaded Zeus to help him. Their plans came to fruition one dewy morning as Persephone: ‘leaving her mother … played with Ocean’s daughters, picking flowers across a springy meadow – roses, crocuses, delightful violets; and irises, and hyacinths. And narcissus, too.…’
It was this narcissus, placed there by Zeus and with a hundred scented heads, that was her downfall. As Persephone leant down to pluck it, the earth gaped open. Haides in his golden chariot rose up; he snatched the girl and, as she piteously called on Zeus to save her, galloped with her back into the Underworld.
For nine days and nights, in which she neither ate nor drank, Demeter wandered the earth searching for her daughter, demented, a flaming torch in each hand. At last she learned what had happened from Helios and stormed out of Olympus: ‘to wander the cities and fine works of men, tearing her cheeks incessantly. No man who saw her recognized her, nor any deep-bosomed woman, until she came to the house of wise Celeus, who ruled Eleusis, fragrant with incense.’
Hermes runs beside the chariot as Haides abducts Persephone, in a mosaic recently found in a Hellenistic tomb at Amphipolis.
It is here at Eleusis that the rest of the myth is set. Disguised as an old woman, Demeter sat grieving by a well until Celeus’ daughters saw her, pitied her and brought her to the palace. While their servant, Iambe, cheered her up with bawdy jokes, they placed her on a chair draped with a sheepskin and persuaded her to drink a kykeon, a heady cocktail of fermented barley and pennyroyal. Uplifted, Demeter agreed to work for Celeus’ household as nurse to his young son, Demophoön. She even tried to make the boy immortal. By day she anointed him with ambrosia, breathing her divine spirit into him, while each night, to secure her magic, she thrust the child into a blazing fire. When his mother witnessed this, she cried out in distress – at which Demeter, offended, renounced her duties and revealed her true identity. Then she ordered the people of Eleusis to build her a temple.
With nothing to distract her, Demeter gave herself over once again to longing for Persephone. The Homeric Hymn describes her:
Growing weak with yearning for her deep-bosomed daughter. And for mankind she brought a cruel distressing year across the all-sustaining earth: the soil refused to send forth grain, for richly garlanded Demeter kept it concealed. In vain the oxen pulled the curved ploughs in the field; in vain was the white barley sown. She would have exterminated all the peoples of the earth with painful famine and robbed all the Olympian gods of the honour of man’s sacrificial offerings, had not Zeus noticed and acknowledged it in his heart.
Moved by self-interest, Zeus persuaded Haides to return Persephone, but, before he did, the god of the Underworld enticed her to eat a pomegranate seed ‘with the sweetness of honey’. It was a ruse, and one which Demeter suspected, for no sooner had she and Persephone been reunited than she asked her daughter:
My child, when you were beneath the ground, did you eat anything? … If you did not, then, now that you’ve returned from vile Hades, you can stay with me and your father, Zeus the storm-gatherer, whom all the immortals honour. But if you did eat, you must return into the depths of earth to live there for a third part of each year, and with me and the other gods for two thirds. Whenever the earth blossoms with all species of sweet-scented flowers, you shall rise up once more from gloomy darkness, a miracle for gods and mortal men.
And so it was, and so it has been ever since: in the Greek summer the scorched earth lies barren, only returning to life with the coming of September. In gratitude to the Eleusinians, Demeter taught their prince, Triptolemus (whom she had also nursed), the art of ploughing, and initiated Celeus and his sons into her Mysteries, ‘which must not be infringed or disregarded or divulged, because the greatest piety before the gods restrains the tongue. Blessed is that mortal living on the earth, who has witnessed them; but for the uninitiated another fate entirely waits, withering in gloomy darkness.’
The Eleusinian Mysteries
What happened at the Mysteries (which in Greek means ‘initiation rites’) is itself mysterious. Because the mystes (initiate) was forbidden on pain of death from revealing what went on, no first-hand account survives, so we must reconstruct the rituals and their meaning from oblique references in literature and representations in art.
The Mysteries were open to men and women, free and slaves. There were two stages of initiation. The first, the Lesser Mysteries, were held in spring in the month of the Anthesteria (‘Feast of Flowers’, roughly February/March), originally at Eleusis but from the fifth century BC at Athens. These were said to have been inaugurated by Demeter especially for Heracles, to purify him from his blood-guilt after massacring the Centaurs. At them, neophytes each sacrificed a piglet to Demeter and Persephone and ritually cleansed themselves in the River Ilissus. The subsequent rituals, a mixture of hymns, dances and instruction, helped to make sense of what would be experienced eighteen months later in the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis (it being forbidden to be initiated into both in the same year).
The Greater Mysteries took place over nine days in September and were marked by a sacred truce, which allowed participants to make the pilgrimage to Eleusis in relative safety. First, priests accompanied by young Athenian men, newly enlisted in the army, carried sacred objects in procession from Eleusis to Athens, where they were temporarily housed in the Agora in a building called the Eleusinion. The next day, participants flocked down to the sea, purified themselves by washing in the water, and each sacrificed a piglet – perhaps in the belief that the creature would absorb their sins. Three days later, initiates clothed in sumptuous robes, their heads crowned with myrtle leaves, processed from Athens the 22 km (14 miles) to Eleusis. Many danced, told ribald jokes (recalling the jokes that Iambe told Demeter) or sang hymns to Iacchus, whose wooden statue was carried in front of the procession. Iacchus was an embodiment of Dionysus, god of the grape, who already by the early fifth century BC shared the Mysteries with Demeter and Persephone. The sacred communion of bread and wine has a lengthy pedigree.
Initiation ceremonies took place two days later. Having fasted, sacrificed and purified themselves, neophytes, dressed in new clothes, entered the Telesterion, the Hall of Mysteries, a huge, many columned building, which underwent several major enlargements throughout its history. What happened next we cannot tell, but it is likely that initiates first drank Demeter’s kykeon (the cocktail of fermented barley and pennyroyal), to enhance suggestibility and produce hallucinations. Lit by torches, and enlivened by lavish costumes designed by the theatrical impresario Aeschylus (born at Eleusis in 525 BC), the ceremony probably involved a sacred drama (based on the events in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) in which initiates participated. It may have begun with a re-enactment of the search for Persephone, a great gong reverberating each time she was invoked by name, and ended with the goddess’ epiphany, when the inner sanctum’s doors were opened to reveal her bathed in blazing light. Plutarch reveals something of the atmosphere:
Initiates into the Mysteries crowd together at the start in a pandemonium of jostling and shouting; but when the sacred ritual is being performed and the time comes for the revelation, they are at once rapt in silent attention. The same is true of philosophy. In the early stages, you will see a great multitude, much talk, much confidence, as some people roughly and aggressively compete for the good reputation it accords; but whoever has reached his goal and seen a great light – as if the sanctum had been opened – takes on another demeanour entirely, one of silence and awe.
The goddesses of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Demeter and Persephone, flank the young prince Triptolemus on a marble relief from Eleusis, c. 440 BC.
Elsewhere, he writes of how initiation closely resembles death. At first there is confusion, then terror, shivering and trembling, before, at the blazing of a wondrous light, the traveller arrives in lush pastures, where dances are performed and sacred revelations seen.
The most sacred revelation seems to have involved raising a casket containing sheaves of corn from beneath the earth. Although cut, and therefore dead, they contained the seeds of new life. As the accompanying liturgy may have proclaimed, the initiate, who through his or her experience had passed on to a higher spiritual plane, would similarly be reborn after death. This made the Mysteries extremely potent, and many Greeks, including philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato, believed in the transmigration of souls into many bodies, both human and animal. In John’s Gospel, Christ uses the same Eleusinian metaphor to foreshadow his own forthcoming death and resurrection to ‘certain Greeks’ in Jerusalem for the Passover: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Initiates spent the final day feasting and performing rites in honour of the dead. Then they returned home, reflecting perhaps – in the words of an inscription discovered at Eleusis – that ‘the blessed gods have bestowed on us a beautiful mystery. For mortals death is to be feared no more: rather, it is a blessing.’
Eleusis in History & Today
The site of Eleusis dates to at least the fifteenth century BC, and by the seventh century BC, when the Homeric Hymn was written down, the Mysteries enjoyed local prestige. By the mid-sixth century BC Eleusis was annexed by Athens. Although control of the Mysteries remained in the hands of Eleusinian priests, the Athenian tyrannos (sole ruler) Peisistratus, striving for international recognition, encouraged initiates to attend from the wider Greek world.
In 480 BC the Persians burned the sanctuaries of Attica. Eleusis was no exception. However, days later the Greeks defeated the Persian navy in the Bay of Salamis, directly opposite Eleusis – probably on the very day on which the Mysteries should have been performed. Herodotus records how before the battle ‘a cloud of dust [was seen], like a cloud raised by 30,000 marching men, coming from Eleusis … and the sound of voices like the hymn to Iacchus, sung at the Mysteries.… The dust-cloud rose into the sky and drifted across to Salamis, where the Greek fleet was stationed.’
When the Athenians rebuilt their temples, they incorporated a talismanic band of Eleusinian limestone into the bastions flanking the entrance to the Acropolis and the frieze of the Temple of Athene Polias (Protector of the City). They also proclaimed the Eleusinian message of rebirth in the Parthenon frieze. Meanwhile, at Eleusis they enlarged the Telesterion and built a wall around the sanctuary.
The Mysteries thrived. In the fourth century BC, the courtesan Phryne caused a stir by bathing naked in the sea during the purification rites. Under the Romans, initiation became de rigeur among intellectuals and the upper classes. Cicero proclaimed them the best and most sacred of all ‘Athenian’ institutions, declaring that ‘from them we have gained the ability not only to live contentedly but to die with greater hope’.
