Ion was horrified at the accusation she brought against his lord and master. “It is not true,” he said hotly. “It was some man, and she excused her shame by putting it on the god.”
“No,” Creüsa said positively. “It was Apollo.”
Ion was silent. Then he shook his head. “Even if it were true,” he said, “what you would do is folly. You must not approach the god’s altar to try to prove him a villain.”
Creüsa felt her purpose grow weak and ebb away while the strange boy spoke. “I will not,” she said submissively. “I will do as you say.”
Feelings she did not understand were stirring within her. As the two stood looking at each other Xuthus entered, triumph in his face and bearing. He held out his arms to Ion, who stepped back in cold distaste. But Xuthus managed to enfold him, to his great discomfort.
“You are my son,” he cried. “Apollo has declared it.”
A sense of bitter antagonism stirred in Creüsa’s heart. “Your son?” she questioned clearly. “Who is his mother?”
“I don’t know.” Xuthus was confused. “I think he is my son, but perhaps the god gave him to me. Either way he is mine.”
To this group, Ion icily remote, Xuthus bewildered but happy, Creüsa feeling that she hated men and that she would not put up with having the son of some unknown, low woman foisted on her, there entered the aged priestess, Apollo’s prophetess. In her hands she carried two things that made Creüsa, in all her preoccupation, start and look sharply at them. One was a veil and the other a maiden’s cloak. The holy woman told Xuthus that the priest wished to speak to him, and when he was gone she held out to Ion what she was carrying.
“Dear lad,” she said, “you must take these with you when you go to Athens with your new-found father. They are the clothes you were wrapped in when I found you.”
“Oh,” Ion cried, “my mother must have put them around me. They are a clue to my mother. I will seek her everywhere—through Europe and through Asia.”
But Creüsa had stolen up to him and, before he could draw back offended a second time, she had thrown her arms around his neck; and weeping and pressing her face to his she was calling him, “My son—my son!”
This was too much for Ion. “She must be mad,” he cried.
“No, no,” Creüsa said. “That veil, that cloak, they are mine. I covered you with them when I left you. See. That friend I told you of…. It was no friend, but my own self. Apollo is your father. Oh, do not turn away. I can prove it. Unfold these wrappings. I will tell you all the embroideries on them. I made them with these hands. And look. You will find two little serpents of gold fastened to the cloak. I put them there.”
Ion found the jewels and looked from them to her. “My mother,” he said wonderingly. “But then is the God of Truth false? He said I was Xuthus’ son. O Mother, I am troubled.”
“Apollo did not say you were Xuthus’ own son. He gave you to him as a gift,” Creüsa cried, but she was trembling, too.
A sudden radiance from on high fell on the two and made them look up. Then all their distress was forgotten in awe and wonder. A divine form stood above them, beautiful and majestic beyond compare.
“I am Pallas Athena,” the vision said. “Apollo has sent me to you to tell you that Ion is his son and yours. He had him brought here from the cave where you left him. Take him with you to Athens, Creüsa. He is worthy to rule over my land and city.”
She vanished. The mother and son looked at each other, Ion with perfect joy. But Creüsa? Did Apollo’s late reparation make up to her for all that she had suffered? We can only guess; the story does not say.
Athena appears to Creüsa and Ion.
PART SIX
The Less Important Myths
CHAPTER I
Midas—and Others
The story of Midas is told best by Ovid from whom I have taken it. Pindar is my authority for Aesculapius, whose life he tells in full. These Danaïds are the subject of one of the plays of Aeschylus. Glaucus and Scylla, Pomona and Vertumnus, Erysichthon, all come from Ovid.
MIDAS, whose name has become a synonym for a rich man, had very little profit from his riches. The experience of possessing them lasted for less than a day and it threatened him with speedy death. He was an example of folly being as fatal as sin, for he meant no harm; he merely did not use any intelligence. His story suggests that he had none to use.
He was King of Phrygia, the land of roses, and he had great rose gardens near his palace. Into them once strayed old Silenus, who, intoxicated as always, had wandered off from Bacchus’ train where he belonged and lost his way. The fat old drunkard was found asleep in a bower of roses by some of the servants of the palace. They bound him with rosy garlands, set a flowering wreath on his head, woke him up, and bore him in this ridiculous guise to Midas as a great joke. Midas welcomed him and entertained him for ten days. Then he led him to Bacchus, who, delighted to get him back, told Midas whatever wish he made would come true. Without giving a thought to the inevitable result Midas wished that whatever he touched would turn into gold. Of course Bacchus in granting the favor foresaw what would happen at the next meal, but Midas saw nothing until the food he lifted to his lips became a lump of metal. Dismayed and very hungry and thirsty, he was forced to hurry off to the god and implore him to take his favor back. Bacchus told him to go wash in the source of the river Pactolus and he would lose the fatal gift. He did so, and that was said to be the reason why gold was found in the sands of the river.
Later on, Apollo changed Midas’ ears into those of an ass; but again the punishment was for stupidity, not for any wrongdoing. He was chosen as one of the umpires in a musical contest between Apollo and Pan. The rustic god could play very pleasing tunes on his pipes of reed, but when Apollo struck his silver lyre there was no sound on earth or in heaven that could equal the melody except only the choir of the Muses. Nevertheless, although the umpire, the mountain-god Tmolus, gave the palm to Apollo, Midas, no more intelligent musically than in any other way, honestly preferred Pan. Of course, this was double stupidity on his part. Ordinary prudence would have reminded him that it was dangerous to side against Apollo with Pan, infinitely the less powerful. And so he got his asses’ ears. Apollo said that he was merely giving to ears so dull and dense the proper shape. Midas hid them under a cap especially made for that purpose, but the servant who cut his hair was obliged to see them. He swore a solemn oath never to tell, but the secrecy so weighed upon the man that he finally went and dug a hole in a field and spoke softly into it, “King Midas has asses’ ears.” Then he felt relieved and filled the hole up. But in the spring reeds grew up there, and when stirred by the wind they whispered those buried words—and revealed to men not only the truth of what had happened to the poor, stupid King, but also that when gods are contestants the only safe course is to side with the strongest.
AESCULAPIUS
There was a maiden in Thessaly named Coronis, of beauty so surpassing that Apollo loved her. But strangely enough she did not care long for her divine lover; she preferred a mere mortal. She did not reflect that Apollo, the God of Truth, who never deceived, could not himself be deceived.
The Pythian Lord of Delphi,
He has a comrade he can trust,
Straightforward, never wandering astray.
It is his mind which knows all things,
Which never touches falsehood, which no one
Or god or mortal can outwit. He sees,
Whether the deed is done, or only planned.
Coronis was foolish indeed to hope that he would not learn of her faithlessness. It is said that the news was brought to him by his bird, the raven, then pure white with beautiful snowy plumage, and that Apollo in a fit of furious anger, and with the complete injustice the gods usually showed when they were angry, punished the faithful messenger by turning his feathers black. Of course Coronis was killed. Some say that the god did it himself, others that he got Artemis to shoot one of her unerring arrows at her.
&nbs
p; In spite of his ruthlessness, he felt a pang of grief as he watched the maiden placed on the funeral pyre and the wild flames roar up. “At least I will save my child,” he said to himself; and just as Zeus had done when Semele perished, he snatched away the babe which was very near birth. He took it to Chiron, the wise and kindly old Centaur, to bring up in his cave on Mount Pelion, and told him to call the child Aesculapius. Many notables had given Chiron their sons to rear, but of all his pupils the child of dead Coronis was dearest to him. He was not like other lads, forever running about and bent on sport; he wanted most of all to learn whatever his foster-father could teach him about the art of healing. And that was not a little. Chiron was learned in the use of herbs and gentle incantations and cooling potions. But his pupil surpassed him. He was able to give aid in all manner of maladies. Whoever came to him suffering, whether from wounded limbs or bodies wasting away with disease, even those who were sick unto death, he delivered from their torment.
A gentle craftsman who drove pain away,
Soother of cruel pangs, a joy to men,
Bringing them golden health.
He was a universal benefactor. And yet he too drew down on himself the anger of the gods and by the sin the gods never forgave. He thought “thoughts too great for man.” He was once given a large fee to raise one from the dead, and he did so. It is said by many that the man called back to life was Hippolytus, Theseus’ son who died so unjustly, and that he never again fell under the power of death, but lived in Italy, immortal forever, where he was called Virbius and worshiped as a god.
However, the great physician who had delivered him from Hades had no such happy fate. Zeus would not allow a mortal to have power over the dead and he struck Aesculapius with his thunderbolt and slew him. Apollo, in great anger at his son’s death, went to Etna, where the Cyclopes forged the thunderbolts; and killed with his arrows, some say the Cyclopes themselves, some say their sons. Zeus, greatly angered in his turn, condemned Apollo to serve King Admetus as a slave—for a period which is differently given as one or nine years. It was this Admetus whose wife, Alcestis, Hercules rescued from Hades.
But Aesculapius, even though he had so displeased the King of Gods and Men, was honored on earth as no other mortal. For hundreds of years after his death the sick and the maimed and the blind came for healing to his temples. There they would pray and sacrifice, and after that go to sleep. Then in their dreams the good physician would reveal to them how they could be cured. Snakes played some part in the cure, just what is not known, but they were held to be the sacred servants of Aesculapius.
It is certain that thousands upon thousands of sick people through the centuries believed that he had freed them from their pain and restored them to health.
THE DANAÏDS
These maidens are famous—far more so than anyone reading their story would expect. They are often referred to by the poets and they are among the most prominent sufferers in the hell of mythology, where they must forever try to carry water in leaking jars. Yet except for one of them, Hypermnestra, they did only what the Argonauts found the women of Lemnos had done: they killed their husbands. Nevertheless, the Lemnians are hardly ever mentioned, while everyone who knows even a little about mythology has heard of the Danaïds.
There were fifty of them, all of them daughters of Danaüs, one of Io’s descendants, who dwelt by the Nile. Their fifty cousins, sons of Danaüs’ brother Aegyptus, wanted to marry them, which for some unexplained reason they were absolutely opposed to doing. They fled with their father by ship to Argos, where they found sanctuary. The Argives voted unanimously to maintain the right of the suppliant. When the sons of Aegyptus arrived ready to fight to gain their brides, the city repulsed them. They would allow no woman to be forced to marry against her will they told the newcomers, nor would they surrender any suppliant, no matter how feeble, and no matter how powerful the pursuer.
At this point there is a break in the story. When it is resumed, in the next chapter, so to speak, the maidens are being married to their cousins and their father is presiding at the marriage feast. There is no explanation of how this came about, but at once it is clear that it was not through any change of mind in either Danaüs or his daughters, because at the feast he is represented as giving each girl a dagger. As the event shows, all of them had been told what to do and had agreed. After the marriage, in the dead of night, they killed their bridegrooms—everyone except Hypermnestra. She alone was moved by pity. She looked at the strong young man lying motionless in sleep beside her, and she could not strike with her dagger to change that glowing vigor into cold death. Her promise to her father and her sisters was forgotten. She was, the Latin poet Horace says, splendidly false. She woke the youth,—his name was Lynceus,—told him all, and helped him to flee.
Her father threw her into prison for her treachery to him. One story says that she and Lynceus came together again and lived at last in happiness, and that their son was Abas, the great-grandfather of Perseus. The other stories end with the fatal wedding night and her imprisonment.
All of them, however, tell of the unending futility of the task the forty-nine Danaïds were compelled to pursue in the lower world as a punishment for murdering their husbands. At the river’s edge they filled forever jars riddled with holes, so that the water poured away and they must return to fill them again, and again see them drained dry.
GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA
Glaucus was a fisherman who was fishing one day from a green meadow which sloped down to the sea. He had spread his catch out on the grass and was counting the fish when he saw them all begin to stir and then, moving toward the water, slip into it and swim away. He was utterly amazed. Had a god done this or was there some strange power in the grass? He picked a handful and ate it. At once an irresistible longing for the sea took possession of him. There was no denying it. He ran and leaped into the waves. The sea-gods received him kindly and called on Ocean and Tethys to purge his mortal nature away and make him one of them. A hundred rivers were summoned to pour their waters upon him. He lost consciousness in the rushing flood. When he recovered he was a sea-god with hair green like the sea and a body ending in a fish’s tail, to the dwellers in the water a fine and familiar form, but strange and repellent to the dwellers on earth. So he seemed to the lovely nymph Scylla when she was bathing in a little bay and caught sight of him rising from the sea. She fled from him until she stood on a lofty promontory where she could safely watch him, wondering at the half-man, half-fish. Glaucus called up to her, “Maiden, I am no monster. I am a god with power over the waters—and I love you.” But Scylla turned from him and hastening inland was lost to his sight.
Glaucus and Scylla
Glaucus was in despair, for he was madly in love; and he determined to go to Circe, the enchantress, and beg her for a love-potion to melt Scylla’s hard heart. But as he told her his tale of love and implored her help Circe fell in love with him. She wooed him with her sweetest words and looks, but Glaucus would have none of her. “Trees will cover the sea bottom and seaweed the mountain tops before I cease to love Scylla,” he told her. Circe was furiously angry, but with Scylla, not Glaucus. She prepared a vial of very powerful poison and, going to the bay where Scylla bathed, she poured into it the baleful liquid. As soon as Scylla entered the water she was changed into a frightful monster. Out from her body grew serpents’ and fierce dogs’ heads. The beastly forms were part of her; she could not fly from them or push them away. She stood there rooted to a rock, in her unutterable misery hating and destroying everything that came within her reach, a peril to all sailors who passed near her, as Jason and Odysseus and Aeneas found out.
ERYSICHTHON
One woman had power given her to assume different shapes, power as great as Proteus had. She used it, strangely enough, to procure food for her starving father. Her story is the only one in which the good goddess, Ceres, appears cruel and vindictive. Erysichthon had the wicked audacity to cut down the tallest oak in a grove sacred to Ceres.
His servants shrank from the sacrilege when he ordered them to fell it; whereupon he seized an ax himself and attacked the mighty trunk around which the dryads used to hold their dances. Blood flowed from the tree when he struck it and a voice came from within warning him that Ceres would surely punish his crime. But these marvels did not check his fury; he struck again and again until the great oak crashed to the ground. The dryads hastened to Ceres to tell her what had happened, and the goddess, deeply offended, told them she would punish the criminal in a way never known before. She sent one of them in her car to the bleak region where Famine dwells to order her to take possession of Erysichthon. “Bid her see to it,” Ceres said, “that no abundance shall ever satisfy him. He shall starve in the very act of devouring food.”
Famine obeyed the command. She entered Erysichthon’s room where he slept and she wrapped her skinny arms around him. Holding him in her foul embrace she filled him with herself and planted hunger within him. He woke with a raging desire for food and called for something to eat. But the more he ate the more he wanted. Even as he crammed meat down his throat he starved. He spent all his wealth on vast supplies of food which never gave him a moment’s satisfaction. At last he had nothing left except his daughter. He sold her too. On the seashore, where her owner’s ship lay, she prayed to Poseidon to save her from slavery and the god heard her prayer. He changed her into a fisherman. Her master, who had been but a little behind her, saw on the long stretch of beach only the figure of a man busy with his fishing lines. He called to him, “Where has that girl gone who was here a moment ago? Here are her footprints and they suddenly stop.” The supposed fisherman answered, “I swear by the God of the Sea that no man except myself has come to this shore, and no woman either.” When the other, completely bewildered, had gone off in his boat, the girl returned to her own shape. She went back to her father and delighted him by telling him what had happened. He saw an endless opportunity of making money by her. He sold her again and again. Each time Poseidon changed her, now into a mare, now into a bird, and so on. Each time she escaped from her owner and came back to her father. But at last, when the money she thus earned for him was not enough for his needs, he turned upon his own body and devoured it until he killed himself.