Greek Mythology, page 5
Hadrian enhanced the site. Pausanias was warned in a dream against writing about its buildings. And after Costoboc tribesmen plundered and destroyed much of the sanctuary in AD 170, it was immediately restored by Rome’s emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Mysteries were eventually banned by the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius in AD 392. Four years later Alaric the Goth ransacked Eleusis, and the town went into gradual decline.
By the late eighteenth century, Eleusis was once more on the map, a magnet for antiquarians and looters. Early the next century, Edward Dodwell recorded:
The present inhabitants lament the loss of Ceres [Demeter]; whose colossal bust was removed in 1802, by Dr. [Edward] Clarke. In my first journey to Greece this protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the centre of a threshing floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The villagers were impressed with a persuasion, that their rich harvests were the effect of her bounty; and since her removal, their abundance, as they assured me, has disappeared.
Eleusis
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
C15th BC
Signs of habitation at Eleusis.
late C7th BC
Homeric Hymn to Demeter written down.
early C6th BC
Eleusis annexed by Athens.
mid-C6th BC
Peisistratus makes the Mysteries an international festival.
480 BC
Persians sack Eleusis.
post-449 BC
Pericles rebuilds sanctuary.
c. 360 BC
Further protective walls built by the Athenians under Lycurgus.
AD 170
Eleusis sacked by Costobocs, but rebuilt by Marcus Aurelius.
AD 392
Theodosius bans the Mysteries.
AD 396
Alaric sacks Eleusis.
AD 1875
First factory (Harilaos Soaps) built at Eleusis.
Surrounded by modern factories, but ringed, too, by pleasant cafés, Eleusis (also signposted Elefsina) is a curious oasis of tranquillity, especially in spring, when wild flowers grow among the ruins. From the entrance, the path leads to the Greater Propylaion, a second-century AD gateway built into the fifth-century BC circuit wall, containing Demeter’s well. Next comes the first-century BC Lesser Propylaion, leading to the sanctuary itself. Right is the Plutonion, the cave sacred to Haides (or Pluto), where Persephone was believed to have returned from the underworld. Ahead are the somewhat confusing remains of various phases of the Telesterion, which in its heyday accommodated 3,000 initiates.
On the rocky outcrop above the site, the Museum contains objects relating to the Mysteries, including a marble votive piglet, a kernos or ceremonial vessel, and the celebrated ‘Fleeing Kore’, a representation of Persephone attempting to escape Haides’ clutches. Another headless statue is of Demeter, while the torso-less head of a caryatid from the Lesser Propylaion may represent the goddess wearing a crown containing corn, poppies and a kernos. There is also a copy of the marble relief showing Demeter, Persephone and Triptolemus – the original is in Athens’ Archaeological Museum. A second caryatid (Dodwell’s ‘colossal bust’ of Demeter) can be seen in England at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
4
Delos: Sacred Island of Leto, Artemis & Apollo
Queen Leto came to Delos and, addressing wingèd words, she asked: ‘Delos, might you wish to be the seat of my son, Phoebus Apollo, and house him in a rich temple? Surely you can see that no one else would want you! You’ll never be blessed with rich herds of cattle or flocks of sheep or goats. You’ll never produce lush grapes or harvests of abundant crops. But if you have a temple to Apollo, who shoots from afar, all men will flock here with their offerings, and the heady scent of fatty sacrifice will coil into the air for ever, and you will feed all those who live here from the hands of others, since your own soil is infertile.’
So Leto spoke, and Delos rejoiced and said in reply: ‘Leto, most honoured daughter of great Coeus, I shall gladly welcome your son, the lord who shoots from afar. For now my name brings no pleasure to mankind, but then I would be honoured beyond measure.’
Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, 49–65
At first sight, Delos is a scraggy island. Low in the sea, it crouches, the surf slapping hard against the crumbling jetty of its once Sacred Harbour, its thin soil dun and dull, the salt breeze rattling its scrawny shrubs, stones skittering unexpectedly as clacking quails take fright and scurry off, affronted, up the hillside. Follow them up the low (if strenuous) rise of Mount Cynthus, and the view from the top is unforgettable – an arc of islands: Tinos to the north; then sweeping clockwise, Mykonos; Paros; Naxos to the south; and to the west beyond low-lying Rhenea, Syros, with its narrow streets and bustling port. All are members of the Cyclades, that great wheel of more than two hundred isles and islets, which from the fourth millennium BC developed a distinctive art and civilization, and at whose hub is Delos. For Greeks of the Classical age, it was one of the most sacred sites on earth, for it was here that the goddess Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis.
The Delivery of Leto
Leto was a Titan, whose sister Asteria, a goddess of oracles and dreams, had once borne Hecate (goddess of ghosts and necromancy, to whom dogs were sacrificed at crossroads). Asteria attracted Zeus’ roving eye, but rather than succumb to him she turned herself into a quail and leapt into the sea – at which she was transformed once more, this time into the floating island of Ortygia (Quail Island). Thwarted, Zeus transferred his attentions to Leto, according to Hesiod ‘the gentlest of all goddesses on Olympus’. He found her more compliant than her sister, and soon she was expecting twins. But Hera, angry at her husband’s philandering, made Leto’s pregnancy as painful and protracted as possible.
Issuing a stern command to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, not to go to Leto’s aid, Hera ordered Ares and Iris to ensure that nowhere on earth would offer Leto refuge. So, driven from mainland Greece, pursued by a savage Python, and in increasing discomfort, Leto fled to the Asiatic coast. In Lycia, as she slaked her thirst at a bubbling spring, shepherds tried to drive her off. In anger, she turned them into frogs – today the now partially flooded sanctuary of Letoön (near Xanthus in modern Turkey) pulsates with their descendants’ croaking. At last, despairing, Leto turned to Ortygia, the floating island which had once been her sister Asteria. Being unattached to the earth, it was not subject to Hera’s injunction. Besides, Hera respected Asteria for having rebuffed Zeus.
So by a circular lake on Ortygia Leto crouched, clutching a palm tree, in agonizing childbirth. After almost endless torment she was delivered of a daughter, Artemis, soon to be worshipped as the goddess not only of wild beasts and the hunt, but also of midwifery. For, being divine, no sooner was she born than Artemis was helping to deliver her twin brother, Apollo, god of light. As she did so, a flock of swans rose high from the Asiatic River Pactolus to ‘circle [the island] seven times, singing as the god was born, the Muses’ birds, most musical of any bird that flies … while the island’s nymphs reverberating far and wide intoned the hymn of childbirth. At once the blazing sky echoed the resounding chant, and Hera felt no rancour, for Zeus had assuaged her anger. And at that moment the [island’s] bedrock turned to gold, the round lake flowed with gold, the palm tree’s leaves were gold, and the swirling Inopus gushed a golden flood.’
From then, too, the island changed its name. Now firmly anchored to the ocean’s floor, it became known as Delos (‘Clearly Seen’).
At least two other places claimed to be the site of Leto’s birthing: the Paximadia islands (known in antiquity as the Letoai), off southern Crete; and the city of Buto on Egypt’s Nile Delta. According to Herodotus a floating island still existed there in the fifth century BC. It was not Egypt’s only connection to Delos. The ‘swirling Inopus’ (in fact a desultory stream, which no longer flows) on the island was believed to derive from a subterranean branch of the Nile, its waters increasing at the same time as its Egyptian cousin was in flood. Perhaps more convincing is the evidence for Leto’s own cross-cultural connections – in the Near East, Lat (or Allat) was a great mother goddess, while in Lycian ‘Leto’ means simply ‘Lady’.
But it was on Delos, by the shore of the sacred lake, that Leto was most devoutly worshipped. Here she shared a temple with her twins, Artemis and Apollo. In mythology, too, the family was tight-knit.
The Vengeance of Apollo & Artemis
When Niobe, queen of Thebes, was heard boasting of her superiority to Leto – because she had borne twelve (in some versions fourteen) children, the goddess only two – Apollo and Artemis were quick to act. Nocking poisoned arrows, they let fly a fusillade of death, Apollo mowing down the sons, Artemis the daughters. Homer tells how, leaving her children ‘lying nine days in their own blood’, Niobe fled east to Lydia. There on Mount Sipylus she sat and wept so long she melded with the mountainside, ‘brooding on the pain gods gave her’. As the ‘Weeping Rock’ near Manisa in Turkey she can still be seen today.
Like Artemis (sometimes called Cynthia after Delos’ Mount Cynthus), Apollo, ever young, athletic, golden haired, was highly strung. Both were masters of the bow; Apollo, in addition, was virtuosic on the lyre, which had seven strings because at his birth the swans had circled Delos seven times. But like the taut-stretched bow- or lyre-string, the twin divinities could suddenly snap, and when they did they brought destruction – especially when honour was at stake.
In Phrygia on the mainland east of Delos, when the satyr Marsyas boasted of his prowess on the aulos (an oboe-like wind instrument) Apollo challenged him to a competition. As both were consummate musicians, the lyrist Apollo could win only by suggesting that each should sing while playing. For Marsyas this was impossible, and, triumphant, Apollo had the satyr flayed alive. Marginally more fortunate was Midas, the king who famously changed all that he touched to gold: when he expressed his preference for Pan’s piping, Apollo gave Midas ass’ ears as punishment.
Artemis and Apollo unleash a deadly volley of arrows against the children of Niobe. (Athenian red figure vase painting, fifth century BC.)
Apollo’s rage could also be unleashed against mankind through plague. At Troy, at the opening of the Iliad, Apollo, angered because his priest has been insulted by the Greeks ‘descended from Olympus, his bow and quiver at his back, and, as the god swooped down in fury like the night, his arrows clattered at his shoulder. There by the ships he stood and fired, and his silver bow sang chillingly. He first shot mules, then dogs, then men. And well-packed pyres burned constantly.’
Like many gods, Apollo embodied a unity of opposites. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, when Thebes is ravaged by a mysterious plague (provoked in part by a misunderstanding of the god’s oracle at Delphi), the citizens call on the ‘Healer from Delos’, Apollo, to cure it. Indeed, one of the most common hymn-forms sung to Apollo (whose name the Greeks linked to the word apollumi, ‘I destroy’) was the paean, literally the ‘cure song’.
Apollo’s Festivals on Delos
On Delos, Apollo was the focus of worship especially by Ionian Greeks, who flocked here from Athens and many of the islands and the coastal cities of west Asia to take part in two festivals: the four-yearly Delia and the annual Lesser Delia. For the latter, Athenians garlanded their sacred trireme with Apollo’s laurel leaves and sent it to Delos, where sacrifices were made, while Athens itself was purified. (Meanwhile no executions could take place – in 399 BC, the condemned Socrates had to wait until the ship’s return before drinking the hemlock that would kill him.)
The quadrennial Delia were spectacular. Addressing the god, the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo proclaims:
Your greatest joy is Delos. Here, to honour you, Ionians in long flowing robes assemble with their children and their modest wives; in boxing and in dancing and in song they call you to their minds, delighting you in contests. To see the Ionians thronged there, you would think them ageless and immortal, gazing on their beauty, delighting in the men and the deep-bosomed women, in their sleek ships and in all their treasures. And another marvel, too, whose fame will never die – the girls of Delos, handmaids of Apollo, who shoots from afar! When they have first sung praise-songs to Apollo and to Leto and the archer-goddess Artemis, they recall the deeds of men and women long ago in praise-songs to delight the throngs, imitating every voice and accent of all regions so that each man would believe that he himself was singing: so cleverly is their praise-song conceived.
In the music and dances of the Delian festival, Apollo’s role as Mousagetes (leader of the Muses) was supreme. From the sixth century BC onwards (the beginning of Delos’ heyday), artists often showed Apollo holding his lyre in the company of two or more musician Muses, while at the Delia the dancing girls in some way may have represented the Muses themselves, uniting the Greek-speaking world in songs written and performed in a multiplicity of regional accents and dialects.
Apollo & Phaethon
As time went on, Apollo, in his role of Phoebus (‘The Shining’), god of light from ‘clear-seen’ Delos, was increasingly identified with the sun-god Helios until the two became almost indistinguishable. In his Metamorphoses, the Roman Ovid conflated the two, making Phoebus the father of doomed Phaethon (‘Fiery’), the young man who begged to drive the chariot of the sun. Taking the reins, Phaethon could not control his horses, which plunged dangerously low to earth, scorching much of Africa so that it became desert, turning the skin of Ethiopians black and threatening to evaporate the seas until Zeus (Jupiter in Ovid’s poem) struck the chariot with a thunderbolt. Phaethon fell into the River Eridanus (identified by Romans with the Po), where his sisters, the Heliades, transformed into black poplars, wept tears of amber in sorrow.
Delos in History & Today
As the site of Apollo’s birth (Artemis’ birthplace was sometimes debated), Delos possessed tremendous sanctity. In the late seventh century BC, the Ionian islanders of Naxos dedicated a sculptural group of between nine and twelve marble lions (perhaps inspired by Egyptian avenues of sphinxes, such as those linking Luxor and Karnak) on a terrace overlooking the sacred lake.
Six or seven decades later, Peisistratus, bolstering Athens’ claim to lead the Ionian Greeks, purified the area around the sacred lake, disinterring remains from a nearby graveyard and reburying them on the far side of Delos. He also began building a temple to Apollo, facing the Sacred Harbour, its inner sanctuary dominated by a massive statue of the god. Meanwhile Polycrates, the tyrannos of Samos, dedicated the nearby (and much larger) island of Rhenea to Apollo, linking it to Delos with a chain, through which divine ‘energy’ could flow.
During the Persian invasion of 490 BC, Hippias (Peisistratus’ son, now a Persian collaborator) made lavish sacrifices at Delos to win Apollo’s favour for his traitorous cause. He failed. After Persia’s defeat, Delos became the site of the assembly and treasury of the Greek – or Delian – League (478 BC). In a solemn ceremony at the Sacred Harbour, Ionian ambassadors swore allegiance to Athens, dropping red-hot iron bars into the sea to seal their pledge.
A colonnaded temple to Apollo was begun just south of that built by Peisistratus, facing a colossal statue of the god (9 m/30 ft tall) dedicated by the Naxians in the seventh century BC. It was not completed until the end of the fourth century BC. When the League’s headquarters were transferred to Athens in 454 BC, Athens continued to stake a claim to Delos. In 426/425 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, it removed all graves from the island to Rhenea, proclaiming that henceforth no one might give birth, die or keep a dog on Delos. Athenians also built a third temple to Apollo between the existing two.
In the early Roman era, Delos, now a bustling free port and sizeable community with over twenty thousand inhabitants, hosted a thriving slave market and attracted worshippers of many other gods. Temples were built to Isis and Ba’al, as well as the oldest surviving Jewish synagogue. But Delos’ isolation left it vulnerable to attack. By the end of the first century BC its fortunes were already in decline. In time, thanks to its lack of agricultural land, it was abandoned.
Serene yet implacable, Apollo orders an end to fighting on the west pediment of the fifth-century BC Temple of Zeus at Olympia.
Today Delos’ only permanent inhabitants are lizards, insects – and quails, which bustle busily about the marble ruins. Although the foundations of its Classical temples and some columns still survive, together with remains of its fine Hellenistic theatre, Roman and Egyptian shrines and Roman houses (some still with wall paintings and mosaics), much of the ancient splendour of the island must be imagined. The sacred lake has now been drained – mosquitoes once danced low over its waters, like Apollo’s arrows the bringers of disease – though a solitary palm tree still stands near its parched and fissured shore, while replicas of five Naxian lions keep watch above it. And above them all, Apollo, god of light, stares down unblinkingly.
Delos
SOME IMPORTANT DATES & REMAINS
pre-1200 BC
Delos is a centre of Bronze Age worship.
C7th BC
Delos becomes an Ionian cult centre; Naxians dedicate lion terrace and colossal statue of Apollo.
post-546 BC
Peisistratus purifies Delos and builds first temple.
