INO-LEUKOTHEA. the Uncritical Excesses of Those Theorists, Chiefly
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INO-LEUKOTHEA. THE uncritical excesses of those theorists, chiefly German and some English following them blindly, who discerned ' faded gods or goddesses' in most of the leading figures of Greek mythology, has produced a reaction which may be equally uncritical. We ought not to believe in the original divinity of an Agamemnon, an Achilles, or a Diomed. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a small group of personages, who may be called hero-gods or heroine-goddesses, whose godhead is the primary fact and whose humanity is secondary. The usual mark of these is that their legend is hieratic wholly, that they have little or no secular character, not to say ' epic' or ' heroic.' vOf these the most prominent and important is Ino-Leukothea; and the interpretation of her character and personality and the "problem of her origin are among the difficult tasks of the historian of Greek religion. What has been written hitherto on her cult and legend cannot be regarded as satisfying. The name Ino, which is the prior fact, fails to help us; it may be Hellenic or not, but its root-meaning and root-affinities escape us. The first literary notice of her is in Homer's thrilling narrative, where as a kindly sea- fairy she aids the drowning Odysseus. But the poet is aware that this is not her original character, for he describes her as ' Ino-Leukothea of the fair ankles, daughter of Kadmos, who was once a mortal speaking with the tongue of men, but now in the salt sea-waters has received honour at the hands of the gods.'1 For Homer, then, she is merely one of that familiar type, the mortal translated to the divine sphere; and though he remembers her Cadmean origin and parentage, she must before his period have already assumed her. maritime godhead and her name Leukothea, ' White Goddess,' whatever that may mean. Hesiod speaks of her only by her name Ino, in his catalogue of ' glorious children' produced by the union of a mortal with a goddess2; thus from Kadmos and Harmonia sprang Ino, Semele, and Agaue; and while he knows that Semele was raised to the rank of a goddess he does not tell us what he thought of Ino; but there is no reason to suppose that his view of her was different from Homer's. A little later comes the testimony of Alkman3; in a fragment of his verse Ino is called the Queen of the sea (aaXao-crofieBoia-d); similarly, Pindar speaks of Ino-Leuko- thea as ' sharer of the sea-Nereids' bower' *; and a dedicatory epigram in the 1 Od. 5, 333. 2 Theog. 975-6. 3 Fr. 83. 4 Pyth. 11, 1. INO-LEUKOTHEA 37 Greek Anthology associates her and Melikertes with the sea-divinities Glaukos Nereus, Zeus Buthios (the god of the sea-depths), and the Samothracian divinities.5 But her marine character is far less clearly expressed in legend and ritual than her chthonian; and she must be primarily regarded as earth- sprung, as a vegetation heroine-goddess of the Boeotian soil. This explains her close connection with the earth-goddess Semele and the vegetation-god Dionysos, her fosterling,6 whose orgy she traditionally leads, so that even the later Magnesians of the Maeander desire to import Maenads from Thebes 'who are of the race of the Cadmean Ino.'7 Like Dionysos himself in Argolis, she was supposed in South Laconia to live at the bottom of a deep pool, into which a sacrifice of barley cakes was periodically thrown, an offering meet for the earth-mother.8 Like Dionysos she has her mysteries, which in the Greek world are only attached to chthonian powers.9 Like Dionysos she dies, and is honoured, as was Linos, Adonis, and Hyakinthos, with a ritual of sorrow and wailing. There was no motive for bewailing a sea-goddess, for the powers of this element did not die; but to bewail a goddess of fruits and verdure when she decayed was as natural as it was for the women to weep for Tammuz; and this deep-seated instinct of old earth- religion was misunderstood by the philosopher Xenophanes when he gave that memorable and elevated answer to the question of the men of Elea, whether they should sacrifice to Leukothea and bewail her—' If you regard her as a goddess, do not bewail her ; if as a mortal, do not sacrifice.'10 How- ever far she might travel over the sea, she seems never to have lost her chthonian character; for even at Pantikapaion, in the distant waters of the Euxine, she was worshipped as Leukothea ^ovla and grouped with Hermes, Hekate, Plouton, and Persephone in the formula of a curse by which a life was devoted to the nether powers.11 In keeping with this character, she possessed an oracle-seat in South Laconia, where, as in other mantic seats of the earth-powers, the consultant slept on the ground to obtain prophetic dreams.12 And the quaint secular story that she persuaded the women of Boeotia to roast the corn-seeds before sowing them, in order to bring Nephele into trouble, may well have been suggested by the consciousness of her vegetation-powers.13 As pre-eminently an earth-goddess she would be Kovpo- rpo</)O9, interested in the nurture of children, and this would be the hieratic reason for her constant association with the infant or the youth Melikertes, and would explain the institution of a contest of boys in her honour at Miletos.14 This would also explain the votive dedications made to her by Thessalian women, which were evidently not infrequent and which were more 6 Anlh. Pal. Analh. 164 (Cults, 1, p. 149, • 10 Aristot. p. 1400b, 6. Plutarch, p. 228 v. K. 40d). tells the same story of the Thebans. e Paus. 3, 24, 3; Eur. Bacch. 683. u Arch. Am. 1907, p. 127 (Cults, 5, p. 65, ' Kern, Inschrift. von Magnesia, 215; Cults R. 19d). of the Greek States, 5, p. 298, R. 68a. K Paus. 3, 26, 1. 8 Paus. 3, 23, 8. ls Zenob. Adag. 4, 38, s.v. 'II ' Libanius, 2, p. 110 (R. p. 448). " Konon 33 38 . LEWIS R. FARNELL probably prompted by the experiences of child-bearing than of sea-travel15; and we can thus understand the doubtful designation of her once famous and wealthy temple at Pyrgoi, near Caere, which Aristotle assigns to Leukothea, Strabo to Eileithyia, the goddess of travail.16 In fact, we have scarcely any attestation in the domain of cult proper of the maritime character of Ino-Leukothea, except a somewhat doubtfully recorded inscription from the Athenian theatre mentioning ' Leukothea the Saviour, the Harbour-Goddess.'17 There is no reason to suppose from her very name that Leukothea must originally have belonged to the sea, as if none but a goddess of the foam could be called the ' White Goddess.' We need not be affected by the record that Myrsilos, a late writer of Lesbos, applied the name Leukothea to all Nereids,18 for he may have only been following the literary tradition of Homer, Alkman, and Pindar. The name is embedded in the inland cults of Boeotia at Thebes and Chaironeia, where the earthly and chthonian character of the goddess is manifest. Nevertheless, the full religious account of Ino-Leukothea ought to answer the question why Homer and the other poets present her maritime character so prominently, and in answering will have to consider the probable >ethnic origin or origins of the goddess with the double name. We must consider for a moment the Boeotian and Megarian legend, which has many points of hieratic interest. Ino, the second or first wife of Athamas, king of the Minyan Orchomenos, plots against the children of his other wife, Nephele; the plot fails, and Athamas is smitten with a madness, that is given a Bacchic colouring in some of the versions. He kills his son Learchos, and Ino escapes with the other, Melikertes, and leaps with him over a cliff into the sea.19 The Megarians claimed that she sprang from the rock called Molouris in their territory, and in its locality was a space called ' the running-course of the Fair one ' (Ka\^? Spofios).20 And the view appears to have prevailed in antiquity that the name Leukothea was a later accretion and was affixed to Ino after her leap into the sea, the Megarians claiming that they were the first to affix to her this name. We are tempted to explain these cult-phenomena by the hypothesis that Ino was the aboriginal earth-goddess who became accidentally contaminated with an independent maritime goddess called Leukothea, who belonged to a different, perhaps an earlier, ethnic stratum. But this hypothesis lacks reality; there is no trace of an original Leukothea apart from Ino; and, as we have seen from the evidences of cult, one name had as little maritime association as the other; we note also that Leukothea seems to have been 15 Pherai, I.G. ix.2 No. 422 (inscr. third ls Et. Mag. p. 56, s.v. Aeu/cofle'a. cf. Miiller, century B.C.); Larissa, Eph. Arch. 1910, pp. F.H.O. iv. p. 458; Hesycli. s.v. AevKoBtar 378, 379. Ttaaai etf ttovriai. 16 Aristot. p. 1349, B 33 ; Strab. p. 226. " Vide Schol. Pind. 6iro0. Icrfy.; Apollod. " I.G. iii. 368, [A€wKo]flf'os [2]<«T^pos (sic) 3, 4, 3. ™ Paus. 1, 42, 7 ; Plut. p. 675 E. INO-LEUKOTHEA 39 the official name used in the inland Boeotian cults of Thebes and Chaironeia.21 Wo may also affirm with some certainty that the leap from the rock into the sea was a hieratic legend which could easily transform itself into a secular- romantic one; it is told of divinities, Dionysos, Aphrodite, or ' heroic' personages with divine names, such as Molpadias (or Hemithea) and Parthenos of Caria, Diktynna-Britomartis of Crete22; and none of these are primarily sea-divinities, but vegetation-powers, and the ritual is vegetative, not marine, to be interpreted as the casting-out of the decaying image of the vegetation- deity so that it might be refreshed by the quickening waters and brought back to land with renewed powers.