PART
SIX
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
These two were Roman divinities, not Greek. Pomona was the
only nymph who did not love the wild woodland. She cared for fruits and orchards
and that was all she cared for. Her delight was in pruning and grafting and
everything that belongs to the gardener’s art. She shut herself away from men,
alone with her beloved trees, and let no wooer come near her. Of all that sought
her Vertumnus was the most ardent, but he could make no headway. Often he was
able to enter her presence in disguise, now as a rude reaper bringing her a
basket of barley-ears, now as a clumsy herdsman, or a vine-pruner. At such times
he had the joy of looking at her, but also the wretchedness of knowing she would
never look at such a one as he seemed to be. At last, however, he made a better
plan. He came to her disguised as a very old woman, so that it did not seem
strange to Pomona when after admiring her fruit he said to her, “But you are far
more beautiful,” and kissed her. Still, he kept on kissing her as no old woman
would have done, and Pomona was startled. Perceiving this he let her go and sat
down opposite an elm tree over which grew a vine loaded with purple grapes. He
said softly, “How lovely they are together, and how different they would be
apart, the tree useless and the vine flat on the ground unable to bear fruit.
Are not you like such a vine? You turn from all who
desire you. You will try to stand alone. And yet there is one—listen to an old
woman who loves you more than you know—you would do well not to reject,
Vertumnus. You are his first love and will be his last. And he too cares for the
orchard and the garden. He would work by your side.” Then, speaking with great
seriousness, he pointed out to her how Venus had shown many a time that she
hated hard-hearted maidens; and he told her the sad story of Anaxarete, who had
disdained her suitor Iphis, until in despair he hanged himself from her
gate-post, whereupon Venus turned the heartless girl into a stone image. “Be
warned,” he begged, “and yield to your true lover.” With this, he dropped his
disguise and stood before her a radiant youth. Pomona yielded to such beauty
joined to such eloquence, and henceforward her orchards had two gardeners.
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