Chapter VI: The Making of a Goddess (2)

The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in the relief[756] in fig. 74, found during the ‘Enneakrounos’ excavations in the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of the relief is occupied by two figures of _Panes_, with attendant goats; between them an altar. The Panes are twofold, not because they are father and son, but because there were two caves of Pan, and the god is thought of as dwelling in each. After the battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was established in the ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids; by the time of Euripides[757], Pan is thought of as host and they as guests:

‘O seats of Pan and rock hard by
To where the hollow Long Rocks lie,
Where before Pallas’ temple-bound
Agraulos’ daughters three go round
Upon their grassy dancing-ground
To nimble reedy staves,
When thou, O Pan, art piping found
Within thy shepherd caves.’

But Pan was a new-comer; the Agraulids were there from the beginning, as early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy though he is with Pan, the new-comer, the artist cannot, may not forget the triple maidens. He figures them in the upper frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that though three they are one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a threefold goddess, a Hecate[758].

But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more and more forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by Hermes in the dance; by Hermes _Charidotes_, whose worship as the young male god of fertility, of flocks and herds, was so closely allied to that of the Charites.

There is no more frequent type of votive relief[759] than that of which an instance is given in fig. 75. The cave of Pan is the scene, Pan himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, dance. The cave, the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, but the ancient dwellers there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. As a rule the reliefs are not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedication ‘to the Nymphs.’ The personality of the Agraulids has become shadowy, they are merely Maidens or Brides.

The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, paled before the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing attendant maidens; but sometimes, in the myths told of these very Olympians, it is possible to trace the reflection of the older potencies. A very curious instance is to be found in the familiar story[760] of the ‘Judgment of Paris,’ a story whose development and decay are so instructive that it must be examined in some detail.

THE ‘JUDGMENT OF PARIS.’

The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to please the taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar enough to make material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern _opera-bouffe_.

‘Goddesses three to Ida came
Immortal strife to settle there—
Which was the fairest of the three,
And which the prize of beauty should wear.’

The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it was written, ‘Let the fair one take it,’ or, according to some authorities, ‘The apple for the fair one[761].’ The three high goddesses betake them for judgment to the king’s son, the shepherd Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according to this version, a καλλιστεῖον, a beauty-contest.

On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that remain, is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 76 is from a late red-figured krater in the Bibliothèque Nationale[762]. Paris, dressed as a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is telling of his mission. Grouped around, the three goddesses prepare for the beauty-contest in characteristic fashion. Hera needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes well satisfied in a mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a Love-God fastens ‘a bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athene, watched only by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and, clean-hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown about her, and has—a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone when she cries:

‘“O Paris,
Give it to Pallas!” but he heard me not,
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!’

It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a beauty-contest, the apple is absent.

It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds in her hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design in fig. 77, from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum[763]. Fruit and flowers are held indifferently by one or all of the goddesses, and the reason will presently become clear. In the present case Hera holds a fruit, in fig. 81 the two last goddesses hold each a fruit. In fig. 77, against both Aphrodite and Hera, is inscribed Καλή, ‘Beautiful,’ and before the blinding beauty of the goddesses Paris veils his face. The inscription Χαρμίδης enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of the 5th cent. B.C.

Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in fig. 78 from a patera[764] in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. The three goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the centre one only distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow Hermes into the presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest alarm. In the curious design[765] in fig. 79, Hermes actually seizes Paris by the wrist to compel his attendance. There is here clearly no question of voluptuous delight at the beauty of the goddesses. The three maiden figures are scrupulously alike; each carries a wreath. Discrimination would be a hard task. The figures are placed closely together, as in the representation of the Maidens in fig. 73.

Finally, in fig. 80, a design from a black-figured amphora[766], we have the type most frequent of all; Hermes leads the three goddesses, but in the Judgment of Paris _no figure of Paris is present_. Without exaggeration it may be said that in three out of four representations of the ‘Judgment’ in black-figured vase-paintings the protagonist is absent. The scene takes the form of a simple procession, Hermes leading the three goddesses.

This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist who has examined the art types of the ‘Judgment.’ It has been variously explained. At a time when vase-paintings were supposed to have had literary sources, it was usual to attempt a literary explanation. Attention was called to the fact that Proklos[767], in his excerpts of the _Kypria_, noted that the goddesses, ‘by command of Zeus were led to Ida by Hermes’; of this leading it was then supposed that the vase-paintings were ‘illustrations.’ Such methods of interpretation are now discredited; no one supposes that the illiterate vase-painter worked with the text of the _Kypria_ before him. Art had its own traditions.

Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. ‘Archaic art,’ we are told, ‘loved processions.’ Archaic art, concerned to fill the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed ‘love processions,’ but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, and it loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In depicting other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story in the terms of an inappropriate procession; it is indeed largely governed by traditional form, but not to the extent of tolerating needless obscurity. The ‘Judgment’ is a situation essentially stationary, with Paris for centre; Hermes is subordinate.

We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain effort of the imagination to conceive of the myth embodied otherwise. But, if we shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the natural lucid way of depicting the myth would be something after this fashion: Paris in the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, to whom he speaks or hands the apple or a crown; behind him, to indicate neglect, the two defeated goddesses; Hermes anywhere, to indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a form does indeed appear later, when the vase-painter thought for himself and shook himself free of the dominant tradition. The procession form, as we have it, _was not made for the myth_, it was merely adapted and taken over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ‘Did not the myth itself in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art form in which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was not?’ That form was the ancient type of _Hermes leading the three Korai or Charites_. In the design in fig. 80, the centre figure Athene is differentiated by her tall helmet and her aegis. Athene is the first of the goddesses to be differentiated—and why? She was not victorious, but the vase-painter is an Athenian, and he is concerned for the glory of ἡ Ἀθηναία Κόρη, the Maiden of Athens.

In the design in fig. 81, from a black-figured amphora in the Berlin Museum[768], the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds a flower, the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. Hermes, their leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep—irrelevant for the herald of the gods on his way to Ida, significant for the leader of the Charites, the god of the increase of flocks and herds. Does the picture represent a ‘Judgment,’ or Hermes and the Charites? Who knows? The doubt is here, as often, more instructive than certainty.

From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, that the ‘Judgment of Paris’[769] is really based on Hermes and the Charites, but literary evidence confirms the view. The Κρίσις, the Decision, of Paris is always as much a Choice as a Judgment; a Choice somewhat like that invented for Heracles by the philosopher Prodicus, though at once more spontaneous and more subtle than that rather obvious effort at edification. The particular decision is associated in legend with the name of a special hero, of one particular ‘young man moving to and fro alone, in an empty hut in the firelight[770].’ It is an anguish of hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest tragedy of Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice was there. The exact elements of the Choice vary in different versions. Athene is sometimes Wisdom and sometimes War. But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur; Athene is Prowess; Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the ‘young man’ to decide? Which of the three is fairest? Or whose gifts he desires the most? It matters not at all, for both are different ways of saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and Roman, degrade the story into a beauty-contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses, vulgar in itself and complicated by bribery still more vulgar. But early versions scarcely distinguish the goddesses from the gifts they bring. There is no difference between them except the difference of their gifts. They are Charites, Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the Greek put it, their gifts are their σημεῖα, their tokens. And Hermes had led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as mere Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little reflection to see that Χάρις often wars against Χάρις, and that if one be chosen, others must be rejected[771].

* * * * *

As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the myth of the daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not rivals; and with them comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is significant. Homer tells the story by the mouth of Penelope[772]:

‘Their father and their mother dear died by the gods’ high doom,
The maidens were left orphans alone within their home;
Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee
And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see,
And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis
Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss
Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s artifice.’

The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer _the_ Maiden above all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus[773]. He puts the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a prayer to Artemis.

It is curious and significant that the early vase-painter, in dealing with the story of the daughters of Pandareos, knows of three goddesses only. The design in fig. 82 is from the lid of a pyxis, of early black-figured style, in a private collection at Athens[774]. The vase-painter is concerned mainly with the story of the theft of the great golden dog of Crete. He makes the dog of supernatural size, with a splendid high-curled tail. Pandareos has stolen it, and the theft has been discovered by Hermes, who comes hurriedly up to seize the prize. Pandareos[775] is just making off in eager haste. His two daughters, quaintly enveloped in one cloak to show their close relationship, stand by. Behind Hermes, with his huge kerykeion, come in familiar procession the three ancient maidens—Aphrodite with a wreath, her hair arrayed in a quaint twisted pigtail; Hera with a ram-headed sceptre; Athene with a helmet nearly as big as herself. The goddesses have come a little proleptically; Pandareos is still there, the maidens are not yet ‘alone within their home,’ but the vase-painter wants to tell all he knows, and, not being inspired by Homer, he is faithful to the old three goddesses. Artemis is—nowhere[776].

But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he represented, the figure of Artemis waxes more and more dominant, and this especially by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, Aphrodite. In the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides they are set face to face in their eternal enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue of two moral ideals, but the human drama is played out against the shadowy background of an ancient racial theomachy, the passion of the South against the cold purity of the North.

Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the figure of Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of the ancient maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, clean strength. An epigram[777] to her honour in the _Anthology_ is worth noting, because it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the maidenhood of the worshipper mirrors itself in the worship of a maiden, whether of the South or of the North:

‘Maid of the Mere, Timaretè here brings,
Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball
To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings,
Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all,
Hold, Leto’s Child, above Timaretè
Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.’

* * * * *

It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable task to take each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess assumed and examine it in turn, to enquire into the rise and development of each local Kore, of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, of Hecate, of Bendis and the like. Instead it will be necessary to confine ourselves to the three great dominant Korai of the ‘Judgment,’ Hera, Athene and Aphrodite.

ATHENE.

The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader’s mind, whether two of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim to the title maiden. Happily in the case of Athene no such difficulty arises. She is _the_ Parthenos, _the_ maiden; her temple is the maiden-chamber, the Parthenon; natural motherhood she steadfastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of heroes after the old matriarchal fashion; Ge, the real mother, bears Erichthonios, and Athene nurtures him to manhood; she bears the like relationship to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles (Ἡρακλέους κόρη[778]).

Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form of her name _Athenaia_ is purely adjectival[779], she is the Athenian one, the Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato[780] in the _Laws_ sees clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the incarnation of Athens, though, after the fashion of his day, he inverts cause and effect; he makes the worshipper in the image of the worshipped. Speaking of the armed Athene, he says, ‘and methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells among us, joying her in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play with empty hands, but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished her dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens should imitate her.’ It was she who imitated her youths and maidens, she who was the very incarnation of their life and being, dancing in armour as they danced, fighting when they fought, born of her father’s head when they were reborn as the children of Reason and Light.

Athene’s other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is the Kore of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of the clan of the Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus; later their male eponym was Pallas[781]:

‘Pallas had for lot
The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears
A brood of giants.’

The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the maiden. Suidas in defining the word says, ‘a great maiden, and it is an epithet of Athene.’ More expressly Strabo[782], in discussing the cults of Egyptian Thebes, says, ‘To Zeus, whom they worship above all other divinities, a maiden of peculiar beauty and illustrious family is dedicated; _such maidens the Greeks call Pallades_.’ This local Pallas had for her dominion the ancient court of the Palladium; her image as Pallas, not as Athene, was carried in procession by the epheboi[783]; but with the subjection of her clan her figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia. Pallas became a mere adjectival _praenomen_ to Athene, as Phoebus to Apollo. It may be conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was resident on the Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably of sacred association to a local clan long before the dominance of the Acropolis; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae[784] hail the goddess:

‘I welcome Pallas’ fellowship.’

In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though unconsciously, true to fact.

To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the history of the city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they can be severed, its political rather than its religious developement. At first the maiden of the elder stratum, she has to contend for supremacy with a god of that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the late Mr R. A. Neil[785] has shown, was the god of the ancient aristocracy of Athens, an aristocracy based, as they claimed descent from Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The rising democracy not unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore, but in reviving her they strangely altered her being and reft from her much of her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos of Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she remains manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in fact, the Tyche, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, ‘immortal mistress of a band of lovers[786]’:

‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown
But a head-band to wear
Of violets one-hued with her hair,
For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair
And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births
they bear,’

a city,

‘Based on a crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.’

Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct from Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brain of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour:

‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s
head,’

but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn[787] writer surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressiveness, yet it never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him Reason, Light and Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun:

‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed
His galloping steeds for a space.’

The event is of cosmic import:

‘High Olympus reeled
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side
Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted
With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide
Suddenly.’

Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus is glad,’ but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, theatrical show, and through it all we feel and resent the theological intent. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang; always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial[788]:

‘There is no mother bore me for her child,
I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage),
Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’

Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into a non-human, unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the art of the simple conservative vase-painter remembered humbler beginnings. The design in fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron in the Museum at Breslau[789]. In the centre of the design, Herakles is engaged in slaying a Hydra with an unusually large number of heads. Iolaos comes up from the right to engage some of the heads, the charioteer of Iolaos, Lapythos, waits in the chariot. Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the beginning of the 6th century B.C. ‘Athena,’ the Maiden of Herakles, has also come up (to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just behind her, perched on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had there been no inscription we should at once have named it a ‘decorative Siren,’ but against the woman-headed bird is clearly written Ϝοῦς. At first sight the inscription does not seem to help much, but happily the lexicographers enable us to explain the word[790]. The _Etymologicon Magnum_ tells us that by πώυγγες are meant αἴθυιαι, and that another form of the word was βοῦγγες. Hesychius merely states that the πῶυξ is ‘a kind of bird,’ and refers us to Aristotle[791] ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form φῶυξ. It seems clear that the Ϝοῦς of the Corinthian vase is a variant form of a name given to the Diver-bird.

The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth is not far remote from Megara. Pausanias[792], in discussing the genealogies of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to Megara. There he fell sick and died, and by the sea in the territory of Megara is his tomb, on a cliff which is called the cliff of Athene Aithuia, i.e. Athene the Diver-bird. Bird myths haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela, Itys and Tereus[793] all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a regular cult at his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared, and the story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting a grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he makes Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of Ajax and her own empty prayers[794]:

‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’

Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman-headed bird in fig. 83, the conclusion seems inevitable that we have in her an early local form of Athene. The vase-painter had advanced to an anthropomorphic conception of the goddess, so he draws her in full human form as Athene, but he is haunted by the remembrance of the Megarian Diver, Aithuia, so he adds her figure, half as the double of Athene (hence the parallelism of attitude), half as attendant, and calls her Ϝοῦς. Athene on the Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that still at evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of the Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable would naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her vehicle and later her attribute: at seaside Megara the diver, at Athens the owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as Megara, and adds for completeness a little owl.

The design in fig. 84 is from a black-figured lekythos in a private collection in Sicily[795]. The scene represents Cassandra flying from Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To the left stands old King Priam, in helpless anguish. The notable point about the scene is that Athene, who, statue though she be, is apparently about to move to the rescue, has sent as her advance guard her sacred animal, a great snake. The snake is clearly regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the goddess. Just such a snake did Chryse, another local Kore, send out against the intruder Philoctetes[796], and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles expressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. This ‘house-guarding snake,’ we may conjecture, was the earliest form of every earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine statue of Pheidias, it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition said it was the earth-born hero Erichthonios, fostered by the goddess. But almost certainly this guardian snake was primarily the guardian genius and fate of the city, before that genius or fate emerged to the status of godhead. When the Persians besieged the citadel, Herodotus[797] says, the guardian snake left the honey cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and, ‘when the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had abandoned the citadel.’

The design in fig. 85 is from a late red-figured lekythos in the National Museum at Athens[798]. The scene represented is a reminiscence of the Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is present, Athene, and by her side, equal in height and majesty, a great snake. The artist seems dimly conscious that the snake is somehow the double of Athene[799]. To the left is the figure of a woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring the little xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen.

Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase-paintings she still appears with wings. On the obverse of the black-figured cup[800] in fig. 86 the artist gives her wings: but for her helmet we might have called her an Erinys. In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene is specially concerned to slough off all traces of primitive origin, she lays suspicious emphasis on the fact that she can _fly without wings_[801]:

‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings,
Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’

On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art type of a divinity might remain in flux.

APHRODITE.

The next of the three ‘Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. A doubt perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore she is in her eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She is rather _Nymphe_ the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order; she is never wife, never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. In the lovely Homeric hymn it is clear that her will is for love, not marriage. Admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt foolish and futile is made to attach her to one husband, the craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her other name as his bride is Charis[802]. She is the Charis of physical beauty incarnate.

In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, barely tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like the other alien, Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. Her Homeric titles, Kypris and Kythereia, show that originally and locally she is goddess of the island South, never really at home in the cold austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell. She has about her too much of the physical joy of life ever to find an abiding home far from the sunshine.

Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is in Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human passion. The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they tend to be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the influence of literature conjointly bring together a number of local divinities, perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide functions and attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who locally was Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one element; Hermes, who at home had dominion over flocks and herds and all life and growth, becomes merely a herald.

Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may suspect, gone on in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It would be rash to assert that she was primarily an earth-goddess, but certain traits in her cult and character show clearly that she had analogies with the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Fertile animals belong to her, especially the dove and the goat, the dove probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine recently discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses, a quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears on her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand years B.C., may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the cylindrical bodies of other similar figures snakes are coiled, as though to mark an earth-goddess. In those early days differentiation was not sharply marked, and as yet we dare not give to these early divinities Olympian names.

At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the charming relief in fig. 87[803], a relief which from its style must date about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. A goddess is seated Demeter-like upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as Queen. Worshippers approach, man and wife and children. The offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove, mark the goddess as Aphrodite.

* * * * *

The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably took its rise in part from a popular and dubious etymology—seems, at first sight, to sever Aphrodite wholly from the company of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even here, when we come to examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once manifest that the Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted.

The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria[804] now in the museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle of the 5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance of the birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the picture a goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, but whether from sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not concerned to express. Had he wished to utter his meaning more precisely nothing would have been easier than to represent the sea by the curved lines that in his day were the conventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I think significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia with which he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood and his presence at once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we are bound to remember that on the Ashmolean amphora already discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of Pandora, not of Aphrodite, that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia. Moreover, it must also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69) a Love-god greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or Semele[805].

So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa hydria we have the Anodos of _a_ goddess greeted by Eros. But to the right of the picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another figure, a woman, and she holds out a piece of drapery with which she is about to clothe the rising goddess. This is a new element in the Anodos type and it is this element that inclines me, with certain reservations and qualifications, to call the goddess Aphrodite, though I am by no means sure that the vase-painter conceives her as _rising from the sea_.

On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is received and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites or Horae, on her Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in Paphos. Of the Bath we hear in the lay of Demodocus[806]. He tells how after the joy and terror of her marriage with Ares she uprose

‘And fast away fled she,
Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea,
To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone,
Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon,
Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old,
And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.’

Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn[807]:

‘For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly
And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea
In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold
Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold
Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.’

The two events, the ritual Bath and the Sea-birth, are not I think clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their counterpart in the making and decking of Pandora, The ritual bath[808] Aphrodite shared with the two other Korai, Athene and Hera. Callimachus devotes a Hymn to the ‘Bath of Pallas.’ Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for the prize of beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled unguents; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she must renew her virginity by the bath in the river Inachus. The renewal of virginity is no fancy. Pausanias[809] saw at Nauplia a spring called Canathus and the Argives told him that every year Hera bathed in it and became a virgin. He adds significantly, ‘this story is of the mysteries and is their explanation of a rite which they celebrate to Hera.’ Virginity was to these ancients in their wisdom a grace not lost but perennially renewed, hence the immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite.

The artist of the Genoa hydria _probably_ knew of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea, he _certainly_ knew of her reception by Eros; but that he remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, clear from the fact that the scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated in the vase-painter’s fashion by the altar and sacred palm-tree standing to the right just below the handle. Probably the sanctuary at Paphos is intended.

The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to the understanding of another monument, earlier and far more beautiful.

The design in fig. 89 is from a sculptured slab[810], one of three that served to decorate the so-called ‘Ludovisi Throne’ now in the Boncompagni collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. Again we have manifestly an Anodos, again the like uncertainty as to who the goddess is and whence she uprises. The two women who support her, and to whom in her uprising she clings, stand on a sloping bank of shingle. Between the edges of the banks is no indication of the sea, simply a straight line. Is the goddess rising from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath? Archaeologists offer explanations apparently the most diverse, and it is this doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at the lesser mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No one, so far as I am aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as it were halting between, reminiscences of each and all. Or rather the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth are as yet undifferentiated. By their articulation and separation we have immeasurably lost.

One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no Eros. The relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, the delicate over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of the lovely breasts, all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the severe style; they belong to the last bloom of archaism just before the perfect utterance of Pheidias. Pheidias[811] on the pedestal of the image of Zeus at Olympia sculptured ‘Eros receiving Aphrodite as she rises from the sea and Peitho crowning Aphrodite.’ Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric tradition, hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. The artist of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, but the drapery held by Peitho, the altar and the palm-tree, recall rather the Bath than the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief embodies a tradition more theological, less mythological, than either Pheidias or the vase-painter. He is inspired by the Anodos[812] and the Bath, which was but one of its ritual humanized forms, and a form that we may venture to call matriarchal. What he is concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of Aphrodite, Aphrodite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure of a Trinity of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens.

Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, but a poet remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the air, she is of earth also:

‘We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, O Love,
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove;
Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea,
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.’

* * * * *

Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an island Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes Ourania, the Heavenly One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing through heaven on her great swan[813]. She is the only goddess who in passing to the upper air yet kept life and reality. Artemis becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity; Athene, as we have seen, becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus, is but a lovely metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control over nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, remained, intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence Aphrodite keeps her godhead to the end. For a while, owing to special social conditions, and, as will be seen, owing to the impulse of Orphism, her figure is effaced by that of her son Eros, but effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity as Mother rather than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix[814] we have the old radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by Ourania, by Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and every various form of the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven:

‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure,
Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs
Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land
Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing
Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun.

Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds
And thine approach; for thee the daedal earth
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile,
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased.

Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world
Nor without thee can any living thing
Win to the shores of light and joy and love,
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land
The works of furious war quieted cease.’

HERA.

The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, not maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen in Olympus by virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred Marriage is the prototype of all human wedlock. This is true for Homeric theology, but a moment’s reflection on the facts of local cultus and myth shows that this marriage was not from the beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic legend is queen in Thessaly and patron of the hero Jason is of the old matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, where Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the ancient Heraion where Hera was worshipped alone long predates the temple of Zeus. At Argos the early votive terra-cottas[815] are of a woman goddess, and the very name of the sanctuary, the Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos, at the curious festival of the _Tonea_[816], it is the image of a woman goddess that is carried out of the town and bound among the bushes, and Strabo[817] tells us that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the island of the Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias[818] says that Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a girl she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete or Full-Grown (τελεία), separated from Zeus and returned to Stymphalus she was called Chera (Widow). Long before her connection with Zeus, the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s life; Teleia, full-grown, does not necessarily imply patriarchal marriage.

Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days when Hera was no wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, unless the poet was the lowest of low comedians, what means her ceaseless turbulence and the unending unseemly strife between the Father of Gods and Men and the woman he cannot even beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny over Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric days in her own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been forcibly married, but she is never really wife, and a wife’s submission she leaves to the shadowy double of Zeus, who echoed his nature and (significant fact) took his name, she who was the real Achaean patriarchal double—Dione[819].

Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one Altar (ὁμοβώμιοι), and against the conjunction the older women divinities are but too often powerless. In the designs[820] in figs. 90 and 91 we have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in which the Olympian pair extrude the objects of an ancient local cult. In fig. 90 we have a votive relief to the Nymphs of the familiar type: three maiden figures linked together. That the figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is the inscription, ‘To the Mistress Nymphs (Κυρίαις Νύμφαις).’ The relief, one of a large series found together at Orochák and now in the local Museum at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 91 shows a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large stature to mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront; they hold each an expectant _phiale_ for libations; to them only is sacrifice to be made. It is they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the background, minished and all but effaced, are the three ancient Maidens. The local peasant is conservative[821], and we may hope they too had their meed of offering.

The intrusion of Zeus[822] and Hera on the local cultus of the Nymphs brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius[823] in his Life of Epimenides. Theopompus in his ‘Wonderful Things’ told how when Epimenides was preparing the sanctuary of the Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven saying, ‘Epimenides, not of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.’ Perhaps Epimenides went further than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the matter of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen (p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the Semnae; he introduced ceremonies of purification brought from Crete, and wholly alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus to reassert himself.

The conflict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in the design in fig. 92, from a votive relief[824] found at Eleusis and now in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the design, which belongs to the class known in English as ‘Funeral Banquets,’ will be discussed more in detail later, when we come to hero-worship. For the present it is enough to note that on the left side of the relief we have the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the old matriarchal couple, seated side by side as equals, on the right a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the man reclining at the banquet and holding a great _rhyton_, the wife submissively seated by his side. In naming them it is safest at present not to go beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their heads the non-committal words, ‘To the God,’ and ‘To the Goddess.’

It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously took over to himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth-Maidens. Even more marked is the triumph of the Olympian Son, Apollo[825]. The design in fig. 93 is from a rather late red-figured amphora in the Naples Museum[826]. A wayfarer, possibly Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult the god; he finds him seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the laurel and the lyre in his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to the _Ion_ of Euripides[827]:

‘To Delphi, where
Phoebus, on earth’s mid navel o’er the world
Enthronèd, weaveth in eternal song
The sooth of all that is or is to be.’

The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess who utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred tripod, and he paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head and the sacred taenia in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo is by this time Lord of All.

In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, where the contest is between the old angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits of the blood feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies are at least in part with the new-comer. But even here, so stately and yet so pitiful are the ancient goddesses that our hearts are sore for the outrage on their order. And on the vase-painting, when we remember that the omphalos is the very seat and symbol of the Earth-Mother[828], that hers was the oracle and hers the holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion is hard to bear.

The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly presented in the design in fig. 94, from a votive relief[829] in the local Museum at Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the omphalos on a low basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At either side of it are perched new guardians, the great eagles of Olympian Zeus. The story[830] said that starting from either end of the world they met at Pytho, at the omphalos. The birds were variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither swans nor eagles have anything to do with the Earth-goddess; they are Ouranian eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the omphalos, they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering over the omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He holds out a cup, and libation to him is poured by his sister Artemis. The Olympian victory is complete.

* * * * *

So far we have dealt with the _Making of a goddess_; we have seen one woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, as duality and trinity; we have seen these shapes crystallize into Olympian divinities as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it were resume themselves again into the great monotheistic figure of Venus Genetrix. We have noted evidence, very scattered and fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the goddess as bird and snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak point in the argument is just this transitional phase. The goddesses, when they first come into our ken, _are_ goddesses, fully human and lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and beautified by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. In a word links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake or bogey to goddess. Two reasons may be suggested. The full development of the women divinities seems to have been earlier accomplished, the sublimation earlier complete, and hence the early phases of that development are more effaced; and next these goddess figures became more completely material for poetic treatment. In the _Making of a god_ we catch in some figures the process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the passage from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest.