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350 MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES

MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES.

I.—THE THKEE DAUGHTERS OF CEOROPS.

ANY oiie who investigates the mythology of Athens is confronted first and foremost by the figures of Cecrops and his daughters, Pandrosos, Herse, and Aglauros. Such shadowy personalities as Porphyrion, Kolanios, &c, are obvious interpolations from other local cults, and as such qua, Athens may be disregarded. In visiting the outlying denies Pausanias was told of other kings (P. i. 31, 5) who preceded Cecrops. Well and good for the demes, jealous of their local heroes and anxious to interpolate their names in the genealogical table of the pre-eminent Athens; but for Athens herself, and for the Athenian Apollodorus (Bibl. iii. 13, 8), it is with Cecrops the autoch- thon that the real live mythology of Athens begins—he is a person in art as well as in literary tradition. Above all, for our present purpose he has three famous daughters, whose personalities and activity are considerably more vital than that of their father. In dealing with Athenian local cults (Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, p. xxxiii.), and especially on examining the ceremony of the Hersephoria, I was constantly haunted by the conviction that behind the personalities of these three sisters more was hidden than came to light on the surface. Father and daughters alike seemed to me too personal—if I may be allowed a seeming contradiction—to be mere impersonations. Cecrops we are usually told is the eponymous of the Cecropidae; his three daughters some mythologists hold are impersonations of the dew, a view I hope I have shown is unsatisfactory, if not untenable (op. cit. p. xxxiv.), or else they were incarnations of certain attributes and aspects of Athene, bearing to her much the same relation as Erectheus to . If so, these incarnations are very vivacious, and their activity is strangely independent and even adverse to that of the goddess herself. Such solutions somehow fail to carry conviction. The subject has been so long and so ably investigated that it is with considerable deference I offer for criticism a solution I believe to be wholly novel. The conviction has slowly grown up in my mind that, in seeking for the significance of a mythological figure, the only fruitful method is to examine the cultus. Rites and ceremonies are the facts, and are of amazing perman- ence ; myths are the professed explanation of these facts, and shift and vary MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES. 351 with the mental development of generations of worshippers. I proceed, then, to examine the cults of the three sisters, reserving for the present the cult of the father Cecrops. At the outset one fact strikes us. Aglauros and Pandrosos had regular shrines and precincts known in historical times, Aglauros on the N. slope of the Acropolis (P. i. 18, 2) and Pandrosos to the west of the Erectheion (P. i. 26, 6)—shrines, it should be noticed in passing, quite distinct and apart: that of Pandrosos more intimately connected with the Athene and Erectheus cults on the Acropolis. Of a shrine, precinct, sanctuary of Herse, no mention is made. Ovid {Met. ii. 739), probably feeling the difficulty, places Herse in a middle chamber between Aglauros and Pandrosos. Herse, then, has no recorded shrine. Has she a cult ? At first the answer seems obvious: she has the all-important ceremony of the Hersephoria, to which she gave her name. A glance at facts, however, shows that this is not the case. We can have no better authority than inscriptions, which deal with actual ritual statements and records, not with the often merely poetical fancies of literature. Three inscriptions deal with the Hersephoria as follows : G.I.A. iii. 887, . . . [TTJV kavr&>v\ dvyarepa Na[y\cn6poK; /3. Et'X«#u<;'a[?] iv *Aypais. G.I.A. iii. 319, 'Qp6poi<; /3. [1% ©e/«So?]. One thing is clear: Herse was not the object (so far as the evidence of inscriptions goes) of the Hersephoria. The only sister mentioned, i.e. if Kochler's restoration of G.I.A. iii. 887 be correct, is Pandrosos; her con- nection with Athene, &c, , and , will be noted later. Against the evidence of inscriptions such literary statements as that of Istros (Schol. Aristoph. Lys. 643), TJ) yap "JLparrj iro^irevovcn TJI Ke/cpoTros OvyaTpl, weigh light on the scale; the yap betrays the prejudice of the etymologist. Moreover, to put one literary passage against another, Athenagoras {Leg. c. 1) says, 'AypavXa 'AQ-qvalot ical Te\eTa<; ical fivo-Trjpia dyovai ical HavBpoaqy, where, as the Hersephoria was a typical mystery, the omission of Herse is at least significant. I take it, then, that Herse is a mere etymological eponymous of the festival Hersephoria—a senseless double of Pandrosos put in to make up the sisters to the convenient canonical three of the * Charites; as such, for mythological purposes, she falls out of our investigation. It is worth noting that the Athenian women seem to have held her useless to swear by, another note of unsubstantial personality—Kara yap T»)? ' AypavXov m/ivvov KCLTO, Be Trj<; JlavSpocrov airdvtcoTepov {Schol. Aristoph. Them,. 533). We are left, then, with Pandrosos and Aglauros. These can certainly not be resolved into equivalents; their shrines, their cults, their characters, are all alike diverse, even antagonistic. Take Pandrosos first, and first her cult. The inscription quoted leaves, if it be correctly restored, no doubt that the Hersephnria was in her honour; further, though Pausanias does not distinctly state that there was any connection, he describes the ceremonial of the Hersephoria immediately after his mention (i. 27, 2) of the Pandroseion. 352 MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES. What we know of the Hersephoria can, as I have shown elsewhere {Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, pp. xxxiii. and 102), be supplemented by our knowledge of the analogous Thesmophoria. The scholiast on {Dial. Meretr. 211), and Clement of Alexandria in the Protrepticus (14, 15 P), both distinctly state that the ceremonies of the Thesmophoria, Arretophoria {i.e. Hersephoria) and the (obscure) Skirophoria were substantially the same, and the clue to the meaning of all three is in the words of the scholiast: Kal ayerai, TOV avrbv Xoyov k'^ovaa irepl rr}<; rS>v Kapnr&iv yevecrea><; Kal T»)? TS)V avdpdnrwv crTropa?. My object for the present is not to elucidate the festival, which has indeed, with abunda.nt analogies from the rites of primitive peoples of all parts of the world, been fully expounded by Mr. J. G. Frazer in his Golden Bough, vol. ii. 44-48, but rather to show how the analogy of these festivals lets out the secret of the nature and significance of Pandrosos. Setting aside the Skirophoria, we know that the Thesmophoria was a primi- tive rite carried on by women in honour of the Earth-goddess both at Athens and Megara, and probably at many other places. I say advisedly of the Earth- goddess, because, though it was associated later with the names of Denieter and , it probably preceded the formation of their myth. The women of accounted among their various conservative excellences that ' they kept the Thesmophoria as they always used to do' (Aristoph. Eccl. 223). The meaning of the 'Epo-^opot? /3. Trjs ®e/wSo? thus becomes clear. Pandrosos, goddess of all young things, is none other than a form of Ge Themis, who is but the earlier aspect of Thesinophoros. Ge had, we know, not only a statue on the Acropolis (P. i. 24, 3) as Karpophoros, but also a sanctuary as Kourotrophos just at the entrance to the Acropolis gates (P. i. 22, 3), €ov Kal Ar]firjTpo<; tepbv XXOJJ? ; the goddesses, so near akin—in fact the one but the later form of the other—seem to have had a sanctuary in common. The foundation was of great antiquity, and attributed to Erichthonios. Suidas, sub voc. Kourotrophos, says : Kovporpo^xx; Yrj. ravTrj Be Qvaai aal TO irpoiTov 'Epv^doviov iv 'A/cpoiroXei' Kal {3co/ibv IBpiitracrOai l)(api>v airoBiBovTa rfj Tjj TWV rpofeiwv K.T.X. Pandrosos, as (according to Apollodorus and Paiisanias) faithful keeper of the chest, gains a new significance seen to be one and the same with the actual Earth-mother Ge. She could not violate her own trust—she who was essentially Kouro- trophos. Themis is substantially Earth, earth when cultivated and owned by ordered men, a somewhat later conception than the primitive earth the mother. We observe the same sequence in the precedence of the at — 7rp(orov /lev ev%y Tf}Be Trpeafievw ffecov TTJV TrpforofiavTiv Yalav i/c Be T?)? &efiiv. Aesch. Hum. 1, 2, where Themis is clearly but the later form of . We know from Clement of Alexandria that the imopp^Ta rr)<; ®e/u.iBot were of the same significance as those of the Thesmophoria {Protrcp. 86). The 'Epo-rjcfropot*; /3. ElXeidvias iv "Ay/jew? has a less obvious connection; but in the old primitive days, MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES. 353 when every god was a god of all work, that Pandrosos-Ge-Kourotrophos- Karpophoros should also be Eileithyia would present no difficulties. I fancy that the Eileithyia, so consistently present at the birth of Athene, was no mere late impersonation, but this early Earth-goddess. The figure of Ge-Pandrosos-Themis was bit by bit effaced by the more splendid personality of her later double Demeter. With Ge Pandrosos had also faded the image of her old original husband , god of fertility-— not however without leaving some, if dim, traces on the Areopagos (P. i. 28, 6) Kelrai 8e ical UXovrav teal 'Ep//,?}? iccu F% ayaXfia. Still more important is the ancient image (kept in the temple of Athene Polias) of wood, entirely concealed by myrtle boughs, and said to be the offering of Cecrops (P. i. 27,1). A statue so ancient and so carefully preserved must have been of very early and very great ritual importance; I hazard the conjecture—a mere conjecture —that the other ancient image of the Acropolis, later associated with the name of the dominant Athene, may have been the familiar correlative of Hermes, this very Ge Pandrosos. It is curious that Tertullian says (Ap. 16) ' et tamen quanto distinguitur a crucis stipite Attica et Raria quae sine etiigie nidi palo ct informi liguo prostat.' Literary tradition leaves us with another curious reminiscence of some link between Hermes arid a Cecrops' daughter. In the story as told by Ovid, a story to which, when we come to Agraulos, I shall have occasion to return, Hermes woos Herse; but by another tradition (Ptolemaios in Schol. II. A 334 and Pollux, viii. 103) Pandrosos was his bride, and his son by her was Keryx, the eponymous ancestor of the priestly /etfpvice'i of —a tradition which again brings Pandrosos very appropriately into contact with the Demeter cycle. It is true that tradition here, as constantly, with reference to the sisters is very confused, and each sister is in turn given indifferently to Hermes; but as Herse has been shown to be non-existent, and as Aglauros will shortly be shown to have had a very different husband, only Pandrosos remains. Very possibly the similarity in name—Herse, Hermes—led to their being linked together ; as again, when conjointly they are given as parents to Kephalos, a perfectly unmeaning piece of genealogy.

I pass to the third sister, Aglauros, considering first her cult, which throws, as in the case of Pandrosos, a curious light on her special attitude in the myths told of her, which at once are proved to be purely aetiological. No author, no inscription, connects the name of Agraulos with the Hersephoria ; her festival was of widely different significance, and this festival was the Plynteria. Hesychius says : YlXvvTrjpia- eoprr) 'Adtfpyaiv, rjp eVi rfj AypavXov T»?9 Ke/c/>o7ros 0vyarpb<; rifif) djovaiv ; and Photius, Lex. p. 127 : ra /xev TlXwrripid a€? Oeol "AypavXos 'EiwaXto? *Apr)<; Zevs ®aXXa> Avljoa 'Hyefiovrj: the oath was taken actually in the Agraulion (Dem. xix. 303 TOP iv rw T?)? 'AyXavpov r&v ecfrtffiap opKov). Why one of the dew-sisters should head the list, and her name be immedidiately followed by that of Enyalios, has long been a problem to mythologists. We may note here that oaths were frequently taken by underworld gods whose character was known to be avenging. A further sinister light is thrown on the nature of Agraulos by a chance reference to her worship at Salamis in Cyprus. Porphyry (De Abst. ii. 54) in enumerating instances of human sacrifice, says: iv Be TJ} PVP SaXafuvi, irporepov Be K.oppoBi(riq) idvero rfj 'AypavXai rfj Ke*;/9O7ro? KOX pv/j,r]<; ' AypavXiBo?. ical Bie/Meve y T5>V AiofirjBovs %p6v(i>v elra fj,eri/3aXev &cne TO3 Aio/jbrjBei TOP avOpairov dveaOai v' eva Be TreplfioXop o Te r?)? 'A0r)vae&)? icai 6 T»?9 'AypavXov ical Ato/ij/Sov?. 6 Be (rayia%6//,epo<; viro TWP i(f>rj/3a>v ayofievos rpl