THE METAMORPHOSES OF ANTONINUS LIBERALIS Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com THE METAMORPHOSES OF ANTONINUS LIBERALIS

A translation with a commentary

Francis Celoria

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"" ""Q, ~., o'-o '"~ Frauc\S london and New York First published 1992 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Taylor and Francis 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Reprinted 2001 Transferred to Digital Printing 2005 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group ©1992 Francis Celoria Typeset in 10 on 12 point Bembo and Optima, Linotron 101 by J&L Composition Ltd, Filey, North Yorkshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Liberalis, Antoninus The metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis. I. Title II. Celoria, Francis 398.20938 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Antoninus Liberalis, 2nd cent. [Metamorphoseon synagoge. English] The metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: a translation with commentary /Francis Celoria. p. em. Includes indexes. 1. Mythology, Greek. 2. Legends--Greece. 3. Metamorphosis. I. Celoria, Francis. II. Title. PA3870.A23 1992 883'.01-dc20 91-27194 ISBN 0-415-{)6896-7 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

THE FORTY-ONE TALES OF ANTONINUS LIBERALIS 1 CTESYLLA 47 Hermochares wins a bride by writing on an apple. But her father forgets his oath and angers a god. Ctesylla dies and becomes a dove. 2 THE MELEAGRIDES 49 Meleager dies because of his mother's curse. His mourning sisters become birds. 3 HIERAX 51 Hierax, though a good man, forgets to sacrifice to Poseidon. His lands are ravaged by a monster and Hierax becomes a hawk, a hated bird. 4 CRAGALEUS 52 Cragaleus, a just man, is asked to adjudicate in a dispute between three gods. Apollo, annoyed by his decision, turns him into a stone

5 AEGYPIUS 54 The son of the mistress of Aegypius traps him into incest. Zeus changes all concerned into birds.

6 PERIPHAS 55 The praise and devotion Periphas receives because of his good works makes Zeus jealous. Periphas and his wife are turned into birds. 7 ANTHUS 56 The children of Autonous have plant-names. They are attacked by horses. The gods change the children into birds with plant-names. Contents 8 LAMIA or SYBARIS 58 A youth left as a sacrifice to a monster is rescued by an admirer who slays the monster. 9 EMATHIDES 60 The daughters of the king of Emathia challenge the Muses to a song contest. For their dreadful and presumptuous performance they are changed into birds.

10 MINYADES 61 The daughters of Minyas at first spurn the revels of Dionysus. Fear makes them into Bacchantes and then they become flying creatures of the night.

11 AEDON or NIGHTINGALE 62 Polytechnus rapes his sister-in-law. The sisters serve him up his son. After the punishment of Polytechnus by insects, all are turned into birds.

12 CYCNUS or SWAN 64 Phylius, faithful to the disdainful Cycnus, is set three hard tasks. He succeeds, to the shame of Cycnus who leaps into a lake and becomes a swan. 13 ASPALIS 66 A tyrant claims a first night from Aspalis, but she hangs herself first. Her brother, dressed as his sister, slays him. Aspalis becomes a deity. 14 MUNICHUS 68 Munichus and his family try to repel corsairs from the defensive towers of their farm. They are overcome but Zeus in pity turns them into birds. 15 MEROPIS 69 A brother and two sisters scorn Athena, Artemis and Hermes, even after these gods politely request respect. The scorners are turned to birds. 16 OENOE 70 Oenoe, Pygmy of great beauty, cares not a fig for Hera and Artemis. Hera turns her into a crane that wars with the Pygmies who fight back. vi Contents 17 LEUCIPPUS 71 Galatea is told to expose an unwanted daughter. But she disguises her as a boy called Leucippus. Leto in pity changes the girl into a boy.

18 EEROPUS or BEE-EATER 73 A boy eats the brain of an animal his father was sacrificing. The boy is felled by the father. Apollo in pity turns the boy into a bee-eater.

19 THE THIEVES 74 Four thieves put on armour to steal honey from the bees at the cave where Zeus was born. Their armour is blown away and they are turned into birds.

20 CLINIS 75 Clinis of Babylon wants to sacrifice asses to Apollo in the manner of the Hyperboreans. The god refuses but two sons disobey. All become birds.

21 POL YPHONTE 77 Polyphonte scorns love; Aphrodite makes her fall in love with a bear. She gives birth to two giants. The gods change them all into birds.

22 CERAMBUS 79 Cerambus sings and pipes to the delight of nymphs. But he becomes so arrogant towards them that they turn him into a beetle.

23 BAITUS 81 Battus asks Hermes, who has stolen the cattle of Apollo, for a bribe to keep silence. Battus fails to do so and Hermes turns him into a rock 24 ASCALABUS 83 The boy Ascalabus laughs at Demeter drinking thirstily. Angrily she pours over him what is left of the drink. This makes him into a gecko.

25 METIOCHE AND MENIPPE 84 When plague strikes Boeotia, an oracle says it will cease if two maidens sacrifice themselves. Metioche and Menippe do so and become comets vii Contents 26 HYLAS 85 Hylas, page of Heracles on the Argo, goes to a spring for water. Nymphs, who fall in love with him, drag him in and turn him into an echo. 27 IPHIGENIA 86 Rescued by Artemis from a sacrifice, Iphigenia became a priestess among the Taurians. Later she goes to the White Isle to partner Achilles. 28 TYPHON 87 Typhon, son of Earth, causes many gods to flee to Egypt in the form of animals. Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt and buries him under Etna. 29 GALINTHIAS 88 Hera makes the Fates halt Heracles' birth. Galinthias, a servant who tricks the Fates so that Alcmene can give birth, is turned into a weasel.

30 BYBLIS 89 Byblis rejects her suitors because she loves her father. She tries to kill herself but nymphs take pity and change her into one of themselves. 31 THE MESSAPIANS 90 Young Messa pian colonists from Illyria boorishly challenge local nymphs to a dancing contest. The youths, defeated, are changed into trees.

32 DRYOPE 91 Apollo, disguised as a tortoise and then as a serpent, seduces Dryope who later gives birth to a son. Dryope is changed into a nymph.

33 ALCMENE 92 When Alcmene, mother of Heracles, dies Hermes steals her body leaving a stone. She goes to the Isles of the Blest as wife of Rhadamanthus.

34 SMYRNA 93 Smyrna lusts after her father and, helped by her old nurse, seduces him. Discovered, she gives birth prematurely to Adonis and becomes a tree. viii Contents 35 THE HERDSMEN 94 Leto, after giving birth to Apollo and Artemis, comes to a spring but is driven off by herdsmen. Later she changes them into frogs. 36 PANDAREUS 95 Pandareus steals a golden dog meant to protect the goat that suckled Zeus. Tantalus, asked to guard the dog, keeps it. All are punished. 37 THE DORIANS 96 After Diomedes dies in Italy, his Dorian followers are slain by a local king and become birds who remain on the isle where Diomedes is buried. 38 WOLF 97 Peleus kills his brother and then accidentally kills the son of Irus. A wolf that eats the cattle paid as compensation is turned to stone. 39 ARCEOPHON 98 Arceophon falls in love with a princess who scorns his lowly status. He hangs himself. She is petrified as she provocatively watches his funeral. 40 BRITOMARTIS 100 Britomartis, arriving in Crete, flees from the lustful Minos, escaping in a boat. At a grove in Aegina, she disappears and becomes a goddess. 41 FOX 101 Procris flees to Crete and receives a magic spear and a wonderful dog which is used to hunt a fearsome fox. Zeus petrifies both fox and dog.

NOTES AND COMMENTARY 103 Index of Names and Places 224 Index of Animals and Plants 234 Index of Things, Topics, Notions and Motifs 239

ix Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com INTRODUCTION

A NEGLECTED COLLECTION OF TALES The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis have been translated into Latin, German and French but not into English - to judge by the catalogue of the British Library. Classical scholars quote from Antoninus Liberalis frequently enough when commenting on other writers or when trying to elucidate a myth or ritual, but the Greekless in lands where English is spoken have no ready way of mulling over these forty-one varied tales in their own language. This translation is not made for the professional scholar but for the 'general reader' who is assumed to have wide interests but not a concentrated training in the culture, history, archaeology, art, literature, language and mythology of ancient Greece. The transla• tion is presented as raw material or raw data for other minds without intruding theory-based comments about structure or sig• nificance or symbolism. It is offered as if by a storeman who takes out something for others and offers it without taking on the mantle of window dresser or exhibition director. Perhaps the only legiti• mate remark a 'storeman' might volunteer is to indicate sometimes where similar material is stored. The notes at the end are intended for a reader who is taken by a particular tale and wishes to learn a little more about some detail or parallel. Or, perhaps, the notes might be seen as hesitant answers to tentative questions that might be put to a storyteller after a tale is ended. Antoninus Liberalis offers startling variants of familiar myths as well as tales not found elsewhere. Some writers have implied that his text is largely derived from the works ofNicander of Colophon (second century Be). But this is wrongheaded because many other writers were quarried by Antoninus so that he recorded material that would otherwise have been lost. Further, the poems of Nicander that have survived intact do not contain the stories told by Antoninus Liberalis. Antoninus Liberalis, despite his Latin-sounding name, wrote in 1 Introduction Greek. His life is as obscure as Homer's but lacks the folkloric accretions that great names acquire. Some have guessed from his combination of names that he was a freed slave who lived during or after the times of the Antonine emperors, but the name Antoninus existed before the first century AD. His dates are a matter of nervous speculation: 'second to third century AD'. This is perhaps the best that can be suggested after centuries of scholarship. He belongs to that stage oflater Greek culture which has been labelled as 'Hellenistic'. The classical world has produced several Metamorphoses to describe the mythological or folkloric processes whereby men and women were changed into animals or stars or plants or such inanimate objects as rocks or mountains or, as with Tiresias, into a person of the opposite sex. Even the immortal gods were known, when it suited them, to change themselves into animals or humans. Ovid and Apollodorus have left the most complete and well-structured accounts of such activities, but much incidental material can be found in writings as varied as those of Aelian, Conon, Herodotus, 'Homer', Hyginus, Lucian, Parthenius, Pausanias, Plutarch and others. Hellenistic writers, some based on Alexandria, produced handbooks on these transformations of which the Heteroioumena of Nicander (second century BC) is among the most frequently mentioned. Though that work is lost, we are told that Ovid - and Antoninus Liberalis - made great use of it. But the use made of Nicander by particular ancient writers is usually arguable at every point. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis consist of forty-one stories, each telling of a change suffered by a person or a group of persons or, in two examples, by animals. The style is grimly simple and we can safely say that Antoninus is rather humourless since he does not very often use particles (such as ge and de), words which the Greeks might use as the equivalent of an ironically or quizzically raised eyebrow to mark something incredible or para• doxical or startling. In fact he uses de only three times and ge not at all. One of the problems with any translation is that one can miss ironies or attempts to be funny, but Antoninus Liberalis is unlikely to be ultimately revealed as a great joker or ironist. Much of his material can be unintentionally funny, but in a Grand Guignol way. H.J. Rose, an authority on classical mythology, pounced critically on one tale (no. 9) which told of Mount Helicon swelling skyward with pleasure at the songs of the Muses. The earthquake god, 2 Introduction Poseidon, soon put a stop to this rare example of the 'pathetic fallacy' in antiquity. The winged horse Pegasus was commanded to rap the mountain smartly with its hooves to stop it growing. Rose said: 'This may be cited as an example of the rubbish which an Alexandrian sometimes produced when he tried to improve on a myth.' In fairness, there is no proof that Antoninus Liberalis perpetrated this about Helicon - and a papyrus text of an earlier writer, Corinna, has preserved some even barmier details about the geological behaviour of Mount Helicon after an artistic defeat. Some of the variants of famous myths provided by Antoninus Liberalis, such as the story of Aegypius who was deceived into becoming an incestuous Oedipus, might have mildly shocked a Freud or startled aJung. Faced with the grisly, arbitrary ethics and sanctions of some of these tales, the twentieth-century mind may boggle or shudder at first, but soon the tragic element is forgotten as one gigglingly wonders at the speed of the equivalents of switchboards on Olympus as various gods promptly intervene to request a merciful variation of a transformation. Surprisingly, quite a few of these metamorphoses were meant to be marks of favour or sympathy. While many of these stories can be found to have possible parallels in volumes of motif indexes of folk tales, they differ perhaps from the tales familiar to us in not having heroes or heroines of humble origin who triumph over disadvantages. One character, Lampros, is of good family but so short of resources that he is unwilling to bring up a female child. Some stories, nos 22, 31 and 35, are about oafish countrymen who offend divine beings. Few of these stories have happy endings. Listeners to storytellers might not always mind about this. But what we lack in this work is a hero or heroine we can identify with and follow hopefully to the end of the tale. The youth, Arceophon, who hanged himself for love of a stony-hearted girl of a higher class, provides a theme too grim for empathy.

THE 'VALUE' OF THE WORK With the continuous interest being shown nowadays in myths and legends of many lands, it is pleasant to be able to introduce a new collection of stories that not only makes little-known material available but also might form a possible introduction to Greek mythology. It offers original materials as they are rather than the 3 Introduction blandly selective re-writings that have been produced in recent years, often with opulent illustrations from great masters of the Renaissance or later. The text is presented here with all warts, gaps and non-sequiturs, just as they are. Antoninus Liberalis does not cover all the myths and legends of Hellas, but a newcomer to the subject might find this book and its commentary to be a reasonably helpful introductory course in miniature. Though fewer and fewer people can read Latin or Greek now• adays, even laboriously with a dictionary, there are many persons of culture who would like to know more about the writings of the ancient world. Such writings contain the roots of present-day philosophy, political theory and dramatic theory as well as the iconology of a great deal of art and poetry. This is well known, but Greek mythology has also proved to be a quarry for psychologists and anthropologists. Freud's use of such Greek myths as that of Oedipus is well known. Jung in his own way also used ancient myths. It must be admitted that these great men were capable of wrong-headed interpretations of mythological motifs. Freud in his work on Leonardo built a little too much on a translation of a term for a bird. Instead of using the German equivalent of 'kite' as a translation, he was led to use 'vulture', which had associations with an Egyptian vulture-headed mother goddess, to produce a wrong interpretation. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis are derived from a multiplicity of sources. Some components are from a crucible which is none other than an ancient scholar's or pedagogue's study while others were concocted by priests or temple officials in support of cults, and some were homely folk tales that might, for all we know, go back to the Bronze Age. Many elements of Greek mythology are to be found in the poems that are labelled by the name 'Homer'. The story of the nightingale's lament and of the adventures and misadventures of Procris are mentioned almost in passing in the Odyssey as though they were familiar to all. The Iliad and the Odyssey were frequently modified before as well as after they were written down, but a large core, with numerous details, is certainly ancient. Some may feel that there is no case for admitting such tales, often cruel and rarely improving, into one's psyche. In fact Coleridge and Wordsworth felt that children might well be stultified by books containing only improving or moral tales. Fairy tales (a misnomer; they are not always about dainty fairies), ghost stories 4 Introduction and other spine-chilling tales were seen as material for gtvmg muscles to the imagination. In the 'Pedlar', which is largely autobiographical, Wordsworth views with grateful complacency some early encounters with old books, illustrated by woodcuts, so tatty that they 'left half-told the preternatural tale, romance of giants, chronicle of fiends'. These woodcuts were Strange and uncouth, dire faces, figures dire, Sharp-kneed, sharp-elbowed, and lean-ankled too, With long and ghostly shanks, forms which once seen Could never be forgotten - things though low, Though low and humble, not to be despised By such as have observed the curious links With which the perishable hours of life Are bound together, and the world of thought Exists and is sustained. The 'curious links' that Wordsworth speaks of may be taken to refer to the associations of unruly ideas and images, whether conscious or unconscious or subconscious, that are an undeniable feature of the lives of young and old. Sometimes they are akin to dreams and nightmares, unpleasant certainly, but a reality that has to be faced. Children are often fascinated by tales of witches who transform characters into animals. This does not prove that there is a 'need' for being told about such transformations, but they often seem to be an almost inevitable undercurrent that helps carry a growing mind forward into life. Incidentally, the sharp-kneed, lean-ankled bogeys referred to by Wordsworth reflect the fondness for grisly descriptive detail to be found in the folk tales of recent times in northern Europe. In Antoninus Liberalis and other ancient writers on myths and legends there is little attempt to build up atmosphere with such details. A village storyteller in England a century ago would say that a spectral dog had eyes as big as saucers and a witch was sure to have a nose that approached her chin. But Antoninus and other Greek mythographers apparently do not indulge in such descriptiveness. This does not mean that it did not exist at peasant level. Some folky features may have been filtered out when ancient mythographers compiled their material. It certainly can be suggested that Antoninus Liberalis might offer new slants on old stories. The story of Aegypius is that of a young man who preferred older women. Today this sort of thing, 5 Introduction approved by Benjamin Franklin, is regarded as unexceptional as perhaps it was at other times in the past. But the ultimate fate of Aegypius in Antoninus Liberalis is based on someone's malice towards the young man. The story is a blunt example or symbol of the ingenuity - and ultimate pointlessness - of human hate. Other varieties can be seen in Charles Morgan's The Judge's Story and in J.I.M. Stewart's Villa in France where a rejected suitor leaves the heroine a villa in France in circumstances designed to lead to her humiliation. That many poets and writers of fiction have made extensive use of classical myths since the Renaissance is not an argument for suggesting that such materials are still an essential intellectual roughage for the nutrition of intending writers. Yet a surprising number of 'modern' poets in this century have used the classical myths as spring-boards or sounding-boards for some of their creative activities. Stevie Smith, to give an example, made exten• sive use (as did Keats) of a classical dictionary to provide a substrate for her thoughts and writings. Ezra Pound recommended young beginners in poetry to use Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses as a quarry. He said it was 'the most beautiful book in the language', praising it not for its 'decorative purposes' but for its narrative quality. John Berryman was another poet who soaked himself in Golding's Ovid. Pound's advice was not archaizing, for the tradition of taking an incident or image from classical mythology has been continued fruitfully from even before the Renaissance to the present. Sometimes the references have a glancing allusiveness as in Gavin Ewart's 'Give me the Daulian bird .. .' which comes from the story of Philomela. Ewart is at the end of a long tradition in this since in the fifth century BC the historian Thucydides wrote that many poets, when mentioning the nightingale, called it the Daulian bird (4.29). The Nightingale or Philomela story (no. 11, Aedon, in Antoninus Liberalis) is extraordinarily pervasive. Normally Greek poets were respectful about the nightingale. A bad poet was said by Phrynichus to be a nightmare-ague for a nightingale. But, inevitably, Aristophanes was able to refer to the bird as the 'Daulian crow and a shaggy bird at that'. Wilfred Owen in 1911 noted that his mother often heard a nightingale. He wrote: 'I crave to hear it, and yet I should almost be afraid lest it should not be as fine as I imagine it.' With T.S. Eliot, allusions to Philomel and Tereus are woven into the dense fabric of 6 Introduction

The Waste Land and need much more annotation than is given at the end of the poem. One hopes, all the same, that Philomela or Procne (for it is not always Philomela) will figure more sparingly in the poetry of the future. S.T. Coleridge supplied the beginnings of a resistance to conventional references to nightingales in poetry. In 'The Nightingale' he pours poetic scorn on the idea that the nightingale is a source of melancholy and declares it to be a 'merry' bird. John Keats, however, brought back the melancholy element finely in his 'Ode to a Nightingale'. One of the better attempts to exorcize the bird from western poetry was carried out in verse by John Crowe Ransom in his poem 'Philomela'. He wrote as one born in America, a second Thrace (where Tereus, husband of Philomela was king). He declared Philomela to be a non-Christian myth that had travelled relent• lessly, the bird being 'gallicized' at Fontainebleau. Then to England 'came Philomela with her pain'. By the time she arrived one night somewhere near Oxford, Ransom was there to hear 'her fairy numbers' issuing forth. But there was no effect. He thought his ears were 'capacious' but 'her classics registered a little flat'. Bluntly this Rhodes Scholar at Oxford declared that he 'venomously spat'. For Ransom this Greek myth represented the old classical traditions of poetry. He could not see such poetry succeeding in America. He asks how possibly could 'her delicate dirge run democratic' when delivered before that 'inordinate race' which was that of his countrymen. Again and again the Philomela story thrusts itself on poets as a symbol of cultural, personal and spiritual dissatisfaction. John Wain, however, is unusual among recent poets in writing a poem about this 'drab brown communicator' who strikes no note of dissatisfaction. In Antoninus the nightingale story is that of Aedon (= 'songstress' and a term for the nightingale). The version in this book contains some startling variants but ends traditionally with the chase by the angry husband of his wife and her sister. The gods intervene to prevent any further family mayhem and most members of the family are changed into birds. One of the scenes depicts the oddly named Polytechnus, owner of an axe presented by Hephaestus, pursuing the sisters. Perhaps the consequent image for the reader might be that of two birds ,high in the sky. This might recall the Willow Pattern, which is not a Chinese legena. Is there an eighteenth-century painting of a version of the Philomela story 7 Introduction with two figures on a bridge being pursued by a third with a weapon, and with two birds in the air? If such a painting were ancestral to the Willow Pattern then the Philomela legend would be even more difficult to excise from our cultural psyche. It is difficult to make a plain and commonsensical case for 'needing' myths and legends in our lives. How cogent would we be if, after encountering the proverbial someone on the top of the Clapham Omnibus, we argued with that hapless listener regarding the necessity of having myths in our lives? A science fiction writer (who also wrote a poem on the Apollo and Daphne theme) said that we need to re-tell myths and, using a phrase of Adrienne Rich, to 're-vision' them. Ursula K. Le Guin also saw myths as a technique for living. Re-telling and re-thinking them, she felt, could help change our points of view. The roll-call of recent poets who have used themes from classical myth or legend as the grains of sand from which to produce their pearls is considerable. At random, from one set of shelves, one might name Dannie Abse ('The Victim of Aulis'), W.H. Auden ('The Shield of Achilles'), George Barker ('Daedalus', 'Narcissus'), Amy Clampitt ('The Nereids of Seriphos' in Archaic Figure), Hart Crane ('Kore'), Lawrence Durrell ('Io', 'Orpheus'), Roy Fuller ('Orpheus Beheaded', 'Arion to the Dolphin'), Geoffrey Grigson ('Eurydice'), Thorn Gunn ('Helen's Rape', 'Moly', 'The Wound'), Robert Graves ('Prometheus'), Seamus Heaney ('Hercules and Antaeus'), John Heath-Stubbs (numerous examples in Collected Poems), Rayner Heppenstall ('Actaeon'), Geoffrey Hill ('Orpheus and Eurydice'), A.D. Hope ('Prometheus Unbound', 'Pasiphae'), Randall Jarrell ('Orestes at Tauris'), Christopher Logue ('From Book XXI of Homer's Iliad'), Edward Lucie-Smith ('Meditations of the Sibyl'), Norman MacCaig ('Daedalus' and many other poems), Thomas Merton ('Ariadne'), Marianne Moore ('Phoebus and Boreas'), Edwin Muir ('Orpheus' Dream', 'The Labyrinth'), Kenneth Patchen ('Niobe'), J.C. Powys ('The Quenched Brand'), Herbert Read ('Daphne', 'The White Isle of Leuce'), James Reeves ('Let None Lament Actaeon', 'Persephone in Hades', as well as Arcadian Ballads based on Ovid), Karl Shapiro ('The Rape of Philomel'), C. H. Sisson ('The Queen of Lydia'), Sacheverell Sitwell ('Cephalus and Procris'), Allen Tate ('Aeneas at New York'), Andrew Young ('A Traveller in Time') and Derek Walcott ('Omeros'). The use that modern poets make of Greek myths varies from a close re-working of a story, much as the Greeks did, to a tenuous 8 Introduction use where a classical name is used in the title in the way a tuning fork is made to provide a note before the start of a performance. Or the allusion is made to stay well behind the scenes. Charles Tomlinson in a poem about a real, observed heron, begins 'Metamorphosed by a god ... '. Poets feel that they have a right not to explain allusions. The Canadian poet, Margaret Atwood, referred without explanation to the picking up of'the sunken bones of the drowned mothers'. She went on to tell of the unexplained tossings of small pebbles randomly over a shoulder, a procedure followed by a mention of the 'first stumbling footsteps of the almost-born'. This is an allusion to the Deucalion and Pyrrha story. After the Flood they were told to throw the stones of their mother over their shoulders. Stones were the bones of Mother Earth. The stones, when thrown, became people. Today it would seem overbearing to suggest: 'You really ought to learn more Greek mythology so that you can understand the classical allusions poets insist on making.' A certain caution is needed when some poetry seemingly attracts elucidation by an allusion from the classics. Seamus Heaney in 'Wolfe Tone' has 'I was the shouldered oar that ended far from the brine'. An over-eager commentator will learnedly point out that this is a reference to the advice of Tiresias to Odysseus, to take an oar and go inland until he finds people who do not know what he is carrying and mistake it for an agricultural implement used for winnowing. The point to be made here is that the story of the oar is far more universal than a mere classical allusion. Many a sailor has said, when tired of the sea, that he will one day put an anchor on his shoulder and travel inland to where people ask him 'What sort of plough is that?' Tales (or call them myths or motifs) of this kind share a special trait in that they tend to recur with great persistence and appeal to a wide range of people, not just poets. This incident in the Odyssey was perhaps one of many recurrences. All the same, it is no exaggeration to say that the thought of metamorphoses very frequently seizes the minds of poets. Roy Fuller in 'Progress of Phoebus' says of Apollo that he may have slowed down in the swelling of 'his tally of metamorphoses'. A. S. Byatt puts in the mouth of a well-fictioned poet in her novel Possession the following: 'Metamorphoses', he said, 'are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world.' 9 Introduction These forty-one stories cannot of course be offered with a gratuitous guarantee of nutritional utility for the minds of every poet and writer of fiction. Yet we can be confident that there is no limit to the range of unlikely sources which imaginative writers are capable of quarrying. In these translations there may well be material for poetry as well as for fantasy fiction and the drama of black humour. In short, we have here an opportunity to assess for the first time a kind of time-capsule containing raw material suitable for many literary and scholarly purposes. There is an interesting story regarding this. In the commentary on the version of the Typhon story by Nonnus it is suggested that some poet might be tempted to re-tell Nonnus in a modern way. The unlikelihood of this was vigorously pointed out to me by a friend. But a few days later just such a story was heard on BBC Radio 4, dramatized in a lively manner. Chased by Typhon, Zeus and Athena hail two dolphins like taxis. Later Athena finds her cowardly father in Egypt where he unconvincingly baas away, claiming to be just a sheep, as his stern daughter calls him to duty.

ANTONINUS LIBERALIS AND HIS WORLD The Metamorphoses are a collection of anciently edited sources put together into one book. 'Books' were smaller in those days, usually in the form of papyrus rolls. The saying that 'a big book is a big evil' may relate to the sheer inconvenience of having to unroll your way through to the reference you were after. The paged book (or codex) as we know it was not much used for pagan literature until the fourth century or later. Books were hard to come by since each volume had to be produced by hand. The famous fourth-century AD rhetorician, Libanius of Antioch, told of how he treasured his compact, easily-carried copy of Thucydides. It was stolen from him. But even he did not have access to many important Greek works. Libanius, greatest orator of his time, was often obliged to use summaries, epitomes, anthologies and digests. He himself compiled collections of tales, commonplaces, topics and other illustrative material. In his Narrations or Diegemata he briefly supplies a variant of the Galinthias story (no. 29), giving her the name of Acalanthis. We may guess that Antoninus Liberalis was well educated, bu~ at some provincial town. He may have been a teacher or an instructor in rhetoric. He had access to some books but not to as many as he 10 Introduction would have liked. He mentions only fourteen authors, Athanadas, Antigonus, Apollonius Rhodius, Areus, Boeus, Didymarchus, Hermesianax, Hesiod, Corinna, Menecrates, Nicander, Pamphilus, Simmias, Pherecydes. Great writers who told of transformations included 'Homer', Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, but Antoninus Liberalis apparently makes no direct use of them. Like Libanius and many other ancient writers, he would have used digests and epitomes. The extent to which he 'cribbed' from them is unknowable. Furthermore we can have little idea about the purpose behind the copy of the book which is the source for this translation. This is the ninth-century Palatine manuscript which may be seen as belonging to a group of books put together in Constantinople under the leadership of some great scholar such as Photius, perhaps. But the copy used to make this manuscript may itself have been a copy at the end of a long sequence of copies. Were such copies to be regarded as 'text-books'? Or were they book-trade publications made 'on spec' for sale? Or are we dealing with a one-off private anthology? It is hard to guess at the compiler's intention. Or is it but a pedagogue's compilation or aide-memoire? Another approach to Antoninus can be made by considering such anciently-established notions as 'topics', 'places' and 'common• places'. Until about the fifth century BC, and decreasingly after that, Greek poets and storytellers were largely oral in their creative techniques. They set store by a good use of the memory and frequently relied on the prop of formulaic presentation to help in a public recitation. Writing was at first an aide-memoire rather than the vehicle of direct composition. There were other forces at work, for in the fifth century BC training courses in speechmaking started to be highly systematic in the hands of sophists and rhetoricians. Good speechmaking required, besides techniques of persuasion, skills in the remembering and mustering of facts and arguments. These methods for arranging arguments and topics in 'places' in the mind were to be developed more elaborately by the Romans and continued as an educational procedure till at least the eighteenth century. Arguments, subjects, topics and loci were regarded as 'common' places because they were general or common to many situations and cases. Hence, perhaps, the seeming misnomer when we choose to put uncommon things into our commonplace books. The notion of 'places' did not have a consistent history and it 11 Introduction played varying roles in each period. It was by the fifth century BC a part of memory technique where one located and recovered facts from an internally pictured topography in the mind. It was also to figure in Aristotle's logical writings, in his Topics as well as in his Rhetoric. The Romans (e.g. Cicero, and the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian) saw places in several ways, as sources for discovering (inventio) arguments and also as vantage points as well as units of information relevant for a purpose. With the Romans, as well as some Greeks before them, a place (locus, topos) could be a niche as well as the material that could be slotted into such a niche. We would not go far astray if we suggested that commonplaces often were 'slottable material' put together for discourse or oratory or literary composition. The allusiveness of much classical literature should serve to remind us that 'slottable material' would have been very useful for a potential author. A twentieth-century mind might not approve of compilations which are derived from epitomes, digests or cribs, but the ancients often produced fine literature in this way. Though Greek myths cannot be defined naively as slottable tales, we can see such materials being deployed in precisely this way in the Wasps of Aristophanes (422 BC). Philocleon, a connoisseur of jury service, is familiar with the topics (based on myths, fables, current scandals, etc.) that a pleader might need to have at his finger tips. But, as his son points out to him, he also needs a stock of anecdotes for use in cultured company. Strangely, the first topic he offers relates to the Lamia story (no. 8), but it is at a vulgar level since all he can think of is a joke about Lamia farting when she was captured. His son hurriedly tells him not to go in for myths and advises him to tell more homely stories. So Philocleon goes off on a different tangent, by starting on an animal fable. His son finds this rather ungentlemanly and tries to direct his father towards some name-dropping political anecdotes. Despite his training in party behaviour Philocleon disgraces himself by drinking too much. The people he offends or assaults are further outraged by his trundling out of stories from Aesop or 'jokes' about a woman from Sybaris who broke a jug. Sybaris was a great subject in those times for heavy or corny jokes. Aristophanes is presenting things anarchically but this should not prevent us remembering that the Greeks (far more than the proverbially clever Chinese) were the inventors of the topic or place as a socio-rhetorical device. From the above paragraphs it can be seen that this compilation 12 Introduction by Antoninus Liberalis is a collection of 'slottable' metamorphoses for use by would-be poets or, perhaps, by students - and not as party pieces. 'Slottable' is a graceless term but it describes things well enough. Though Antoninus is to be valued for preserving tales that would otherwise have been unknown to us, there were superior providers of such compilations. Parthenius, who arrived in Italy in 73 BC, produced a collection of potted stories on the theme of lovers who suffered misfortunes (Erotika Pathemata). He had very distinguished readers. He has been said by Macrobius to have taught Virgil at Naples and is known to have put together his book on the misfortunes of lovers as material for the poet and general Cornelius Gallus to use as a basis for elegiac poems. It has been translated into English and referred to under such titles as 'Romantic Misfortunes' or the 'Sufferings of Lovers'. What may not be commonly known is that Parthenius comes from the same manuscript volume as Antoninus Liberalis, Ms. Palatinus graecus 398. Both authors were saved from oblivion during the same scholarly climate in the ninth century AD. Some other collections of this sort may yet turn up. This is not idle speculation since there arrived at the University of Michigan in 1924 a pathetically scrappy and tatty portion of a papyrus roll (P. Mich. inv. 1447) of the second or third century AD (roughly contemporary with Antoninus). It was not made generally known until the 1970s when Timothy Renner first studied it for a doctoral dissertation. The papyrus is from an alphabetical collection of metamorphoses and has portions of the Actaeon, Arethusa, Aethyiae, Alcyone and Ascalaphus stories. The entries seem to be shortish and dictionary-like. It is comforting to find the same verb for 'tells' as is used by Antoninus when sources or parallels are cited. The papyrus is marginally grander in its sources, containing for example not only a solution of a puzzling feature in Hesiod's Catalogue of Women but also a new word from Aeschylus. This seems to mean 'hating crows', an adjective used of the aithuia or shearwater, yet another ornithological metamorphosis. We know very little about the environment of Antoninus Liberalis. There is not the slightest mention of the Roman world or of any place of origin or residence. Few generalizations can be made about this since Greece and Rome had long been intermeshed in many ways. A possible contemporary, Athenaeus of Naucratis, included Romans in his dialogues while Aelian, who wrote On the Nature of Animals in near-Attic Greek, was an Italian-born Roman. 13 Introduction Despite his name, Antoninus Liberalis may not have known much Latin. Even the reasonable guess that he lived in lands near the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, where most scholars came from in those times, has little evidence to support it. A mention (in story no. 28) of a fish of a kind found in the Nile, or of a vulture to be seen in Egypt or isolated mentions of transformations of the Olympians modelled on Egyptian myths will not prove that Antoninus Liberalis lived and worked in Egypt. Similar details could be gleaned from various writers, starting with Herodotus. Six of the stories mention Crete but, again, this does not show that our man was a Cretan. The Aedon story, his version of the Philomela legend, is set in Asia Minor though in other versions the locale is Thrace. But such speculations are pointless because Antoninus Liberalis quarried freely from many other writers.

THE MANUSCRIPT WITH THE METAMORPHOSES Users of translations of Greek and Latin classics have often been conditioned to expect printed texts which are seamless and free of explanatory excrescences. It would be unusual to find footnotes containing frank or nervous admissions by the translator that indicated that he or she was utterly foxed by such-and-such a portion of the original. But the printed Greek text from which a translation has been made may itself be a tidied compromise between numerous manu• scripts. An editor of a classical text may have had to make thousands of decisions and choices about errors, variants, gaps and, even, about spurious insertions. The task of such an editor is to produce a reliable 'reading text', also preferably seamless in presentation. In scholarly editions each page has a massive footnote called the 'textual apparatus' that contains what, it is hoped, is a fair representation of decisions, corrections, emendations and extra• polations, as well as selected mentions of a multiplicity of gratuitous variants from various manuscripts. Though terrifying to the lay person, a printed edition with its 'apparatus' is a tidy thing in comparison with the daunting world of manuscript sources from which a printed text may have been compiled. In the main, manuscripts of Greek texts come either from 'Byzantine' sources or by lucky survival as papyri, mostly found in the sands of Egypt. There are exceptions to this since some texts were carved on stone and others were found at Herculaneum under 14 Introduction volcanic deposits. Wood tablets have occasionally made contribu• tions to literature. But in general the manuscripts we use today are texts written many centuries after the original had been composed. Frequently these texts were anciently edited in various ways, by normalizing spelling or, even, by considerable alteration, shortening or tampering. The result has been that manuscripts may contain not only inevitable errors, omissions and gratuitous com• missions of textual opinions but may also be peppered with side notes and scholarly comments that are of various dates and, sometimes, of genuine importance for understanding the text. Occasionally such notes or glosses have been inadvertently welded into the text. We only know about those that eagle-eyed scholars have detected. Reading what the handwriting of a manuscript says is not the main problem for an editor, for there are greater headaches to be had in establishing a family tree when there are several manuscripts. There exist superb theoretical procedures for producing diagrams showing the relations and descents of manuscripts, but they sometimes founder because of too many gaps so that-one speaks of lost 'archetypes' or, worse, of a 'best' manuscript. The idea of selecting a 'best' manuscript has bedevilled classical scholar• ship for a long time but is now in retreat. With Antoninus Liberalis there are no family tree (or 'stemma') problems. Nor will talk about a 'best' manuscript of Antoninus Liberalis ever be heard: there is only one manuscript. Though limiting, this is a convenience for an editor. All the same, the various editors subsequent to the first printed edition of1568 may have yearned for the stimuli to lateral thinking that might have been produced even by problematic alternative manuscripts. The parchment manuscript that contains the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis is in the university library at Heidelberg (Palatinus graecus 398). Around 1437 it was brought from Constantinople to the Dominican convent at Basel by Cardinal John Stojkovic of Ragusa. In 1553 Hieronymus Froeben gave it (legitimately or otherwise) to Ottheinrich Elector of the Palatinate who donated it to the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. In 1623 the volume was taken to Rome where it remained until 1798 when it was transferred to Paris. In 1816 it was returned to Heidelberg. In 1568 Wilhelm Holzmann (who used a Graecized version ofhis surname, X ylander) published the first edition of the text. Since that time some manuscript folio sheets have disappeared from the 15 Introduction section of the manuscript containing the Metamorphoses so that subsequent editors have had to rely on the printed text ofXylander for the missing portions. The Palatine manuscript might justly be called a ragbag since it is a miscellany containing not only mythology but also medical, geographical and other works. The whole manuscript was copied over several stages by a single scribe or scholar. This took place during the second half of the ninth century AD, in the lifetime of Alfred the Great. The scribe does not appear to have been an ignorant copyist who might be tempted to normalize a strange word into a familiar form. When a word lacked accents or was of doubtful meaning he would show his doubts or scruples either by omitting accentual marks or by using special symbols. One special feature of the manuscript of the Metamorphoses is that it contains fairly systematic notes as to what authors were the 'sources' used by Antoninus Liberalis. There has been much controversy about the origins and authenticity of such notes. In this brief introduction it may be helpful to put the suggestions under two headings: one is that the notes on sources were written by scholars subsequent to the times of Antoninus Liberalis. The other is that they stem from Antoninus Liberalis himself. Cross-variants of these suggestions have been readily suggested by scholars: that they are a mixture of what Antoninus Liberalis wrote with the learned notes and 'scholia' put in by subsequent scholars, or that they are a partial sum of readers' comments across the centuries. One could go on for ever making suggestions of this kind. Nicander is frequently cited as one of these sources, but where we have a Nicander fragment that coincides in subject matter with a tale from Antoninus the treatment is sometimes so different that one hesitates to suggest that Nicander is the source. Sometimes, then, the 'sources' may be but parallels. It is the view of the translator that the notes at the head of the chapters are now as much a part of the text as are the stage directions and character lists in a modern printed edition of an Elizabethan play. The reader who has reached this paragraph will not be misled by such accretions. Three of the forty-one stories (nos 6, 40 and 41) have no source indicated while four (nos 14, 34, 36, 37) are marked with a baffling symbol which is little more than a looped squiggle. In terms of customary abbreviations it might be taken to represent the word ou, 'not' or ouden, 'nothing'. So it might be taken to mean 'no 16 Introduction source' or it might be expanded to mean 'I have not found any sources for this'. One scholar has plausibly suggested that the symbol might be taken as houtos, meaning 'thus'. The h sound in written Greek has usually been a mark placed like an accent rather than a letter of the alphabet so that ou and hou- do not look very different. An expansion of the word houtos might be 'This section is thus, as I found it'. The translation of the symbol in this publication as 'sic' is a cowardly simplification. As long as the reader has read what is written above about the symbol, no intellectual damage or outrage of truth should occur. The Palatine manuscript of the Metamorphoses also includes two contents lists, one of animals that were produced by the metamor-phoses, and one of the humans who suffered changes. It is perhaps unlikely that these lists were by Antoninus Liberalis himself so they have been omitted. In some details they differ from the main text, but not in a significant way.

METAMORPHOSES In most cultures of the world there are stories or myths about people or gods or animals or things that changed shapes. The Greek word we use for this kind of transformation, metamorphosis, is a late one and most examples of the word seem to occur after the establishment of the Roman Empire. Nicander wrote Heteroioumena, a term with much the same meaning, the word being related to the verb heteroo, 'change' or 'become different or other'. Such hand• books must have found a readership, though the precise audience intended is not easy to discern. Each age has been fond of good tales with a touch of the wondrous or miraculous; witness the many medieval books on the Miracles of the Virgin, which offered entertainment and edification in good balance. The 'ordinary' Greek of antiquity will have shared with other peoples a tendency to see a stone or rock of a certain shape as being some sort of petrifaction of what had once been alive. There is also a 'folk-insistency' among many persons - even today - which makes them claim that a stone has a meaningful shape and has been carved or else is a magically induced representation of an animal, and so forth. There were many transformations to be seen in nature; the winter plumage of some birds might be very different from that of summer. The life cycles of insects will have also been recognized by countrymen. They would have observed that a 17 Introduction grub or caterpillar could somehow become a pupa or chrysalis and after that come out as a winged insect or imago. A question that a newcomer to the subject will want to ask is: were there no eagles, herons, hoopoes, nightingales, vultures, woodpeckers and other species before Periphas and other hapless persons were transformed? It is fatuous to press the logic of such matters. In myths and folk beliefs utterly contradictory ideas can exist side by side. Sometimes a story implies that someone is being added to the population of a species, at other times one feels that Hierax is really becoming the first hawk. There is never a mention of a bird-Eve to provide a partner for this bird-Adam. Or is the request of the wife ofPeriphas, to become a bird to keep company with her husband, a groping for consistency? Even so she becomes a different species. Everything is unascertainable. At the end of the eighteenth century an old man in Cornwall told off a youth for aiming at a raven. King Arthur had been turned into a raven, the youth was told. It would not do to kill King Arthur. Was just one bird among all ravens the king? Was every raven King Arthur? Any discussion will end weakly, but the tale of Arthur becoming a raven was strong enough to be mentioned in the story of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Much more difficult is the task of assessing the attitude to the gods of Antoninus Liberalis or, even, of the 'average' Greek. A wordly-wise cynic would suggest that such tales of punitive metamorphoses inflicted by jealous gods were likely to be encouraged by the priests or priestesses of the appropriate deity. If you slack off in your piety towards Artemis or Apollo or Hera, then something awful may happen to you. We would all be nervously credulous in such an environment. But it must not be thought that all Greeks lived in continual fear of making one false, fatal step before a god. In practice they could be quite light-hearted about the gods. In the Frogs of Aristophanes which was performed before the priest of Dionysus, the god is treated with a cheekiness that makes the fate of the Minyades (story no. 10) seem very hard. Present-day mortals who have read the Bacchae of Euripides may still feel a frisson of terror at the inevitability of the fate of Pentheus who resisted the irrationality of Dionysus. But Aristophanes makes Dionysus haggle ineffectually with a corpse to carry his luggage and in another incident, when the god and his servant have changed clothes, the deity receives a painful drubbing. Obstinate defiance of deities and provocative challenges regarding 18 Introduction their powers are common enough in ancient Greece. Meropis and her brother and sister (no. 15) were pointedly offensive to Athena, Artemis and Hermes while the Emathides challenged the Muses in a singing contest. The Minyades, who refused to become Bacchantes, were changed into birds by the intervention of Hermes, not Dionysus. Readers of Ovid's Metamorphoses will recall the boldness with which Arachne challenged Athena to a weaving contest. But to return to Antoninus. If one makes a careful count of the behaviour patterns of the gods in his stories, some fifteen of the tales are about transformations that take place because the gods pitied or favoured a person or wanted to mitigate a disaster. Those who wish to follow up the study of Greek metamorphoses will be fortunate in that in 1990 there appeared P.M.C. Irving's Metamorphosis in Greek Myth. It will be seen that he has made a thorough study of Antoninus and has discussed metamorphoses not in Antoninus. But metamorphoses are only a part of mythology. The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis are far from being entirely about people who were changed since these tales overlap into almost all the divisions of Greek myths. For this reason it may be useful to discuss Greek myths in general.

THE STUDY OF GREEK MYTHS AND LEGENDS In this introduction and in the commentary the word Greece does not necessarily apply to the Greece of modern atlases. Greek settlements of antiquity were more widespread, ranging from southern France, southern Italy and Sicily to Libya, Egypt, Asia Minor and the coasts of the Black Sea. The Greeks called them• selves Hellenes and the lands they came from, Hellas (once the name of a small district in Thessaly). 'Hellas' is used here to speak of Greeks in the widest connotations of the term and in their disper• sions in place and time. The study of Greek myths and legends is complex because this branch of classical studies overlaps with so many other equally complex subjects: the history of religions and the history of art, as well as archaeology and anthropology. Greek mythology is itself but one of many mythologies in the world: There are researchers who apply themselves to 'World Mythology' and produce remark• ably sapient theoretical frameworks of great universality. But 19 Introduction classical scholars are generally cautious about generalizations since they have to spend so much energy on making sense of broken or fragmentary evidence as well as grappling daily with myths seemingly still alive in classical texts which now form a part of the world's greatest literature. The period covered is immense, from the end of the Bronze Age to well into the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity. There was for Hellas, if one omits the common thread of the Homeric pantheon, no central 'religion' or body of beliefs, no religion of a 'Book'. Each district or city had its own deities, temples, rites, customs, oracles, pilgrimages, confraternities, sacrifices, festivals, beliefs, myths and legends. But there was always diffusion between local cultures. Local gods were often re• named as or doubled up with Olympian deities, a tendency that accelerated after the times of Alexander the Great. This mingling of beliefs had earlier roots since many Greek myths and stories can be shown to have links with those of Egypt, the Near East and even those of peoples of the north. At the literary level, many a famous Greek had been on an intellectual 'grand tour' in Egypt. Herodotus, Solon and Plutarch were travellers of this sort while Thales has been thought to have been strongly influenced by Egyptian and Semitic ideas. A serious student of a poet as Greek as Hesiod would need to undergo a preliminary steeping in the myths, religions and literature of the Near East. Any brief glance into a modern scholarly commentary on the Theogony of Hesiod would prove this. Very little can be learned about the beliefs of the 'ordinary' person in ancient Greece. We are obliged to glean what we can from the words of the highly literate persons who usually wrote in conformity with traditional models. Thus though we have examples of formalized 'pastoral' poetry we are not overloaded with records of, for example, an interview with a hairy-whiskered Arcadian shepherd regarding his views on man, animals, plants, the landscape and the gods. Today anthropologists can tape not only folk tales and the songs of rural rhapsodes but even highly methodological interviews of 'ordinary' urban and rural individuals, or they can utilize what amount to frank vernacular diaries and autobiographies as well as the findings of psychologists and sociologists. But we know almost nothing about the way the Greeks might have reacted to tales such as those in Antoninus Liberalis. We cannot always with certainty even tease out the 20 Introduction elements that might have come from 'old wives' tales'. So many stories 'must have been' part of an entirely female tradition. It is obviously a truism that we need to feel humility about our knowledge of the backgrounds and contexts of these tales. This might be better grasped if the reader visualizes some area of Hellas (a part of Thessaly, or Locris or Arcadia, or somewhere near Ephesus, say). Then the reader is asked to think of a corresponding area in Britain or in New England. A folklorist in an English county might gather in a few tales and legends but there would be almost nothing in the way of handed-on myths to bridge the prehistoric period to the medieval period and to link the so-called middle ages to the present. The American folklorist might find some Indian lore that may meld with myths and tales of early settlers and continue past the 'Sleepy Hollow' period to the present. But how different would be the myths and associations of a comparable district of Greece. As a start we might consider the area (not exceptional for Hellas) around Ascra in Boeotia. There a shepherd called Hesiod had, some time before 700 BC, access to more than three centuries of oral 'epic' material as well as the run• of-the-mill tales and legends of his community. He would have been familiar with the yarns of old fellows as well as travellers who stopped for warmth in a smithy. He would also have known a great deal about legends from eastern lands, not from books but orally. This is not far-fetched. No point in Boeotia is that far from the sea while Delphi, a much visited place, was a little over a day's journey away on foot. A single bilingual from Asia Minor or a Phoenician merchant who could tell a tall story in Greek would have been sufficient to pass on a tale that eventually has reached us. Most of this lore, heard and written down much later, went on echoing in the minds of these people, with periodic creative additions for some ten centuries, or until Christianity attained a grip. Several of these tales, legends and myths may have survived in some form as village tales written down only in the twentieth century. Perhaps India and China might claim longer traditions for some of their tales and myths but they did not possess that special function of Greek places where myths were kept alive in the minds oflocals as though on a stage that had its own troupe of permanent ghosts who came to life again and again and re-enacted what they did in the myth-time. However we must not be mesmerized by the magic or imagined numinousness of lone groves of great antiquity or of haunted 21 Introduction woody ravines mentioned in Homer. In Plato's Phaedrus (229a- 230a) is a very illuminating passage about the way some intelligent Greeks may have talked about their local myths. Socrates and Phaedrus are looking for a shady spot by the Ilissus where they can hold a discussion - as well as cooling their feet in the water. Phaedrus asks whether it was not around here that the north wind had snatched away Orithyia. Socrates, drily perhaps, replies 'It's what they say.' Phaedrus, enchanted by the bright limpid stream, feels that it is just right for maidens to be playing beside it. Socrates suggests that the spot might be some two or three furlongs further downstream where, after crossing to a shrine of Artemis, one might come across what might be an altar to the north wind. Caught between Plato and his presentation of the ironic Socrates, one feels that one is. having a leg gently pulled as the dialogue develops. But the next part of the dialogue (too long to repeat here) has Socrates noting that wise men have doubts about such ·legends. He describes the discrepancies to be faced (what a relief that the Greeks too were jarred by discrepancies) since there are not only rationalized versions where a girl was once carried by a gust to rocks below but also the inevitable alternatives such as the one which declares that Orithyia was carried away from the Areopagus. Socrates regards the energies needed for a corrective sorting and editing of such fantasies and portents as a waste of effort, since our main task is to learn about ourselves. All the same, we know that the Greeks readily believed that they might encounter gods in daily life. From literature - epic, drama, lyric, history - we find that a striking stranger or guest might be momentarily taken for a god. Gods were thought to be moving around everywhere as observers, as inspectors almost, keeping an eye on human behaviour. Normally disguised, they sometimes revealed themselves, often in anger and, occasionally, rewarding virtue. Half a dozen of the tales in Antoninus have close encounters of this kind. The readiness with which the Greeks saw gods is not a matter of fancy. We need look no further than the Acts ofthe Apostles (14.11- 15). In Lycaonia Paul and Barnabas were seen as gods. Barnabas, possibly the taller of the two, was called Zeus while Paul who led the dialogue was readily seen as Hermes. These were no effusive courtesies of speech as we can see from the prompt arrival of the priest of the statue of Zeus that stood at the entrance of 22 Introduction the city. The man came bustling up with oxen ready-garlanded for sacrifice to the embarrassed apostles. 'Mythology' is a term which is here taken, in all simplicity, to include three aspects: (1) stories about the major gods and the cosmos, (2) legends about heroes, heroines, places and their cults, (3) folk tales. Hardly any of these forty-one tales sit precisely and exclusively in one of these three divisions. The Greek word muthos had a long history. At first the word referred to no more than speech or talk or a careful relation of something. But already in the Odyssey it was used for a tale or a narrative. By the time of Pindar and Herodotus it would relate to something fictional or legendary or explanatory. There was another word, logos, which in Herodotus and Stesichorus and other writers could refer to a legend or a mythical tale. But the word had a much wider connotation than muthos. Many will recall that Logos is used for the Word of God in StJohn's gospel, but logos is not all that frequently used in the commonest English sense of 'a word'. The meanings of logos range from a financial account to a ratio and from an argument or hypothesis to a rumour or a dialogue or a maxim. These are but a few examples from an hypothetical thesaurus that would require for logos hundreds of headings. Plato put his finger on what might be an essential difference between muthos and logos. He was prepared to use muthos for a legend and logos for a history based on research. A logos has to be worked on by reason or system; there has to be a plan and proper argumentation. A muthos, in contrast, is freer in its utterance or performance. Plato used a verb muthologein when speaking of the framing of an imaginary commonwealth. For him muthologia was a romance or a tale and not so much a system or a subject. Today 'Myth' as a subject covers areas operated by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and historians of ideas or of religions. Modern 'myths' have ranged from Nazi theories about the Aryan race to Cargo Cults. There has been a tendency to refer to some modern myths as 'fictions'. Many of us live under the shield of strange legal, economic and social fictions. Whether they are myths in the sense of Greek myths is debatable. A closer analogue of traditional myths may be found paradoxically in some accounts of the origins of scientific and technological discoveries: Archimedes in his bath shouting 'Eureka', Newton struck by an apple, young Watt or Stephenson watching a steaming kettle. Such dubious tales explain little but are entertaining and 23 Introduction easily grasped. They offer some satisfaction to hearers and fulfil a need in their minds. Myths about modern scientific discoveries have burgeoned forth considerably in recent decades. Many people know, for example, the story of how Sir Alexander Fleming 'discovered' penicillin when, around September 1928, a culture of bacteria in a dish was checked by an air-borne mould. This experiment was not duplicated until 1966 and even then it uncovered environmental queries regarding the circumstances. There are still doubts as to what exactly happened in 1928. We are uncertain as to what the mould spore was and where it came from- a colleague's window on another floor has been suggested. It is quite possible that the effects observed were not caused by penicillin but by autolysis or self-destruction. Fleming himself was honest and straightforward in all he did. The 'villains' behind the myths around Fleming were authors and journalists who created a simpli• fied hero-story about a worthy scientist. Indeed journalists and their editors are the main myth-makers today. They look for or construct 'good stories'. Like their Greek forbears they are adepts at knowing what the public wants to know- often presented as what the public has a 'right to know' or 'demands to know'. For convenience the single word myth will be taken to connote stories, legends and tales as well as all explanatory accounts of gods and the world. Myths are a feature of human 'culture' in the sense with which many anthropologists use the word culture. We all belong to or live within a culture. A culture is the sum total of everything we have learned as we grew up as humans, excluding any genetic input. This partly protects us, one hopes, from the possibility of some people suggesting in all seriousness that myths are in our DNA. Culture may be viewed under three headings: first, artefacts, second, sociofacts and, third, things in the mind for which we might coin the word psychofacts. Some might wish to add two more headings, one relating to place and the other to time. Culture may certainly be seen as a function of place and environ• ment. It may also be considered as a situation at a certain time or, in contrast, as something that develops as time goes by. Myths certainly do vary according to place and time but there is no need to increase headings since all myths can be considered topographically or chronologically under the heading of artefacts, sociofacts and psychofacts. Myths as a part of culture cannot be confined to the heading of psychofacts alone. The story of Britomartis (no. 40) existed in the 24 Introduction minds of Greeks and yet was a sociofact in the community on Aegina where she came to be worshipped. But her temple of Aphaea and her statue were certainly artefacts, as was the statue of her that Augustus had transferred from Calydon to Patras. As sociofacts, myths can reflect or symbolize a society as well as being a function or mechanism of society. Myths can reinforce or maintain institutions and social frameworks, whether living or near fossil. Myths can acknowledge power or supply power; they may describe status or confer it. The myth-models that can affect a society may range from noble ideals to utter lies. Myths have been used to explain or justify or legitimate prece• dents, traditions and codes of behaviour and laws. They can be a 'charter' or authority for much in daily life. Taboos and prohibi• tions as well as much recommended behaviour in society are often associated with myths. Myths often enshrine practical advice in the guise of cautionary tales in the form of fables as well as hero tales that offer models of behaviour. Not all myths have virtuous aims, to judge from the many tales where the trickster or scamp triumphs. Many myths can be given a 'political' interpretation. The Typhon story (no. 28) can be seen to be about kingship, especially when considered in its manifestations in Hesiod, and in Hittite and other Near Eastern literature. Sometimes the kingship theme crops up in a little-known version of a Typhon tale where the monster arrives in Egypt and finds no one there (the gods having scuttled away in animal disguises). Typhon makes himself king and reigns for eighteen days and then the gods emerge and slay him. This took place at Memphis where there arose a custom of electing a mock• king for eighteen days and then ritually putting him to death. Not surprisingly it was Sir James Frazer, author of the Golden Bough, who spotted this. The 'Golden Bough' myth is an extraordinary one about a runaway slave who succeeded the previous priest of the Grove ofDiana at Nemi by killing him. He remained as King of the Grove (Rex Nemorensis) until he was slain by his successor. Myth• based theories about kingship were not only about authority since they were sometimes inextricably enmeshed with a community's need for fertility or prosperity or safety or expiation. A sociofact that is not always obvious is that the gods of the Greeks sometimes closely reflected human society of the time. The high gods of the Greeks were not creators but managers or landlords of the world. Zeus shared out the world to his brothers as 25 Introduction a feudal king giving fiefs to his barons. Homeric gods in some ways reflected the political systems of the Mycenaean world. That the feudal god Zeus could also be a sky or weather god will not surprise readers because most educated people have by cultural osmosis imbibed such ideas from literature or art. So it will be an instructive shock to learn about the weather gods of the bureaucratic Chinese Empire of centuries ago. One was called 'Assistant Secretary of State in the Ministry of Thunder' and the other was called 'Comptroller-General of Crops and Weather'. But there are other political aspects which are simpler. In a comedy there might be a mention of Philomela's Tereus, the king ofThrace. The Athenian audience would see this as an allusion to a current treaty or alliance with a Thracian king. References to the foreign witch Medea in a play might reflect a contemporary anxiety about threats from the East. The brief version of the Iphigenia story in this book (no. 27) is quirkily different in several elements from versions in popular handbooks. She is described as the daughter of Helen instead of Clytaemnestra and, further, she ends her career as the 'companion' of Achilles on the White Isle. The Iphigenia story has mysterious hooks which have caught at the mind of many subsequent writers. Goethe wrote Iphigenie aufTauris and, more mo<;fernly, these hooks picked up poets like Dannie Abse and Randall Jarrell who have written poems on the theme. Variations are interesting enough, but what might be more 'sociofactually' important is to be found in Iphigenia's subsequent career after a goddess has packed her off to Attica to be a priestess at Brauron in charge of initiatory rites for girls. There her fate is to be an Explanatory Function of several myths and cults. An anthropologist or a sociologist might find in her story traces of a Hellenic pattern of socialization which occurred when youths or young females passed from some age stage to another. In 1989 Ken Dowden published Death and the Maiden: Girls' Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology which considers in depth the Iphigenia story, especially for the light it throws on rites of passage. All this certainly belongs to the realm of sociofacts. There are some myths which relate to dislocations of the mind by wine or drugs or some communal madness. Such manifestations as the behaviour of Bacchantes or of the unfortunate Minyades (story no. 10) might seem to belong more to the psychofact end of the spectrum but in practice the community had to use its energies to placate and worship the wine god, Dionysus. By the days of 26 Introduction Antoninus Liberalis Maenads had been 'socialized' in a startling way. An inscription from Physcus in western Locris of the second century AD records that Maenads had to pay subscriptions. There were even gentlemen Maenads (called boukoloi or herdsmen) who had to pay their subs too. One is left to boggle at the fact that disorderliness on the part of Maenads was a matter for a fine. The Minyades, turned into bats and owls for their belated bacchanting in the mountains, would have been set a-flutter if they had read on for further information from this inscription. They would have learned that there was a fine of five drachmas for not joining the others on the Mountain. It is almost as if the Maenadism of Agave who tore her son to pieces, or that of the Maenads who did the same for Orpheus, had been reduced to a Sunday parish service and picnic in the hills. The psychofacts side of myths is a two-way traffic. Myths reflect needs of the human mind and may tell us something of its workings. The traffic goes the other way when psychology is sometimes called in to interpret a myth. Thus the status and career of the lame god Hephaestus has been interpreted in near-Oedipal terms that analysed his relationship with his father, Zeus. But there is an important methodological problem to be faced here if we feel we must assert that we cannot possibly infer what goes on inside the minds of others. Can we say anything 'meaningful' about psychofacts? There is indeed a danger of reading too much into the myths of the past. Some anthropologists have said that myths and, indeed, all activities in a culture, are to be seen in one of two ways. The first, called the 'etic' approach, records all the details of a dance or tale or song by every known recording technique, the more scientific and clinical the better. The second, or 'ernie', approach has the temerity to deduce that the dance is for making rain, even if the dancers aren't quite sure of this. It must be said here that in this book the forty-one tales of Antoninus Liberalis are offered as 'etic' data. There will be readers only too happy to apply 'ernie' interpretations. A myth (or a dream) 'etically' recorded will eventually find 'ernie' interpreters. Pharaoh had some puzzling dreams and asked wise men and magicians for help. But it needed Joseph to supply the 'emics' of Pharaoh's dreams. Often today, when a myth needs interpreting, the wise men who volunteer explanations are currently called Structuralists. One trusts that this emic--etic outlook will not make the reader feel too emetic. This terminology is not far-fetched, as 27 Introduction might be seen from the entries on 'ernie' and 'etic' in the latest edition of the great Oxford English Dictionary. Religious myths are rarely pure psychofacts because they are intimately welded into the life of a community. More often than not religious myths appear as sociofacts in the form of ceremonies or public chants or as artefacts like statues and temples. Admittedly we know little about 'private devotion' in those times. Perhaps beliefs and myths relating to deities, nymphs, ghosts, monsters and similar beings may belong more closely to the realm of psychofacts. Frequently myths live on in the form of artistic creations, as art or drama or poetry or narration. There is again a two-way traffic connected with this since knowledge about myths is sometimes used for interpreting literature. Myth and ritual have not unreason• ably been seen as the origin of all drama. But perhaps the umbilical cord between near-prehistoric drama and the drama of today was cut long ago. The earliest myths were things thought and said. Writing, at first as a memory-aid, helped save a little of ancient myths in the form of poetry. But there came a later stage, which varied in date for different literate cultures, when a myth might be created straight on to paper without the intervention of the traditional storyteller. The forty-one tales of Antoninus Liberalis are at the 'written end' of a long tradition which retained but a few oral elements. Ultimately we reach the time when there is private creation of myths - as with William Blake or C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien and, indeed, most writers of 'fantasy' fiction. Many will argue that such modern creations are 'not exactly myths' since it is thought that 'proper' myths occur spontaneously and grow naturally. An interesting point. Myths, whether spoken or written, have a great potency for survival. This should not make us forget the equally powerful part played by art in the formulation and transmission of myth. One example from the Iphigenia story might be made to illustrate this. Just as Iphigenia was about to be sacrificed (and people looked away) Artemis spirited her away and substituted a deer or some other animal. There is not much logic to be found in any possible discourse about what those present saw. Now the theme was a popular one in art. How could the artist represent the switch of an animal for Iphigenia? One painting showed the deer substituted for Iphigenia as a kind of double-exposure photograph with the protruding head and hooves of the deer behind the girl. This is but 28 Introduction a single instance of the part art played in Greek myth. Vase paintings are a major source of study, as is the Greek sculpture that survives. Wall paintings have survived here and there but little of the visual world of myth painted on the walls of temples and porticos such as are described by the traveller Pausanias. Coins frequently depict the hero or heroine or deity of a community. Totally different from many tales or legends were myths about Nature which have only reached us in the writings of poets and thinkers. Plutarch in his Moralia, when writing about the Festival of Images at Plataea, said, a little fuzzily, In the past, knowledge of Nature among Greeks and non• Greeks was an account [logos] of physical things but mostly wrapped in myths and hidden in riddles and covert meanings, a theology of mystery rites where what is uttered is not so clear for the masses as things we are silent about - and the unsaid is more lofty than the spoken. Myths have been seen as a kind of 'early philosophy' which attempted to tell of the origins of the world and nature, of gods and other supernatural beings, of animals or of institutions. But the philosophers who lived before Socrates can also be seen as thinkers who were trying to free themselves from myths by the use of reason and observation. Ironically, some philosophers, like Plato, found themselves obliged to invent some sophisticated myths as a vehicle for their philosophy. The myth of Atlantis is largely to be derived from the Critias or the Timaeus of Plato. Mythology is also a 'subject' which in the past century has put forth many theories about the origins and functions of myths. Most of these theories strove to find a unitary explanation for the jumble of things that formed the subject matter of mythology. The theories ranged from systems of classification (which were hopefully put forward as explanations) to searches for 'types', symbols, polarities, oppositions and conflicts, as well as socio• logical and psychological analyses. Myths were seen as centred on rituals or on initiation rites or on 'magic' or 'fertility' or kingship. Students of mythology have found it all too easy to fasten on a single human generality that explains myths. A myth, for example, might be seen as a dream which 'resolves conflicts' in an individual or a society. Others might view myths as an expression of humanity's tragic sense of destiny, as intimated by Miguel de Unamuno. More often than not we snag against 29 Introduction some resounding phrase like 'The myth emerges from the uncritical verbalization of hopes and fears'. Understandably there has frequently arisen an urge to find basic mechanisms or 'structures' that could be seen as a common denominator of all myths. The closer an interpretation of a myth could be brought to a simple flow-diagram or an algebra the better were the chances, it was thought, of obtaining a model that applied to all myths. Hence the attraction of theories based on simple oppositions such as the Raw and the Cooked. At the beginning of this introduction it was promised that the production of this translation was but the act of a storeman who might know where similar things might be kept and thus offer a few parallels. And, a few pages back, it was stated that the presentation was 'etic'. The reader might accordingly feel deprived of more profound interpretations by far more profound scholars. Perhaps two quotations from the text of a good scholar's expository text on a myth might show what the 'general reader' might have to face. The quotations are left anonymous since the presentation here might seem cruel: The hierarchic inclusion of four enunciative and semantic levels seems to furnish the contemporary interpreter with unexpected hermeneutic confirmations. It is enough to privilege for explication one of the levels that the narrative proposes in order that the psychoanalyst, the narratologist, the theologian, and the historian may each profit ... or worse, The theme of generation/germination takes upon itself, by turns, figures organized in isotopies: mineral, vegetal, and human; attachment of masculine political legitimacy to an earth-motherland; complementarity of Poseidon, Zeus, and Apollo, and so on. These lines of semantic development assure the coherence and riches of the Pindaric narrative. Guaranteed by the assimilation of the different enunciative voices that carry the narrative, this play of semantic reverbera• tions and reciprocal metaphors recurs in the two other narrative sections ... Unfortunately myths are so varied that it becomes difficult to find a model that applies universally. Some myths, for example, are certainly about 'magic'. This represents 'techniques' for obtaining 30 Introduction power over nature, the environment, crops, fertility, people, animals and things. Many myths have become manifestations of or vehicles for that wish-power which we call magic. So even a silly, punning story might contain elements which reflect some idea of sympathetic magic. Unfortunately myths connected with magic do not quite match all the various unitary theories that have been put forward. If you take a tale, you are quite likely to find astonishing parallels several continents away. This could lead us into the complications that result from the 'Comparative Approach'. Technically the search is not difficult since tales have been classified in systematic works like the Stith Thompson motif index. Thus, using the story of Aedon the weaver and Polytechnus who became a woodpecker (no. 11), we can find partial parallels from India as well as from the Wakweli of West Africa where a weaver bird and a woodpecker quarrel. In the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss there is a tale from South America where linked elements like woodpecker, honey, molested sister-in-law, are paralleled in the Antoninus Liberalis story. Such parallels are seen by some as being somehow culturally connected- or just as coincidences or red herrings. Some argue that such parallels found continents apart indicate diffusion while some see them as culturally programmed independent inventions. Indeed many have been tempted to see such tales or motifs to be as inbuilt in the human psyche as the capability to use language. But we must come down to earth and look for features that would have been understood by the Greeks or 'ordinary' persons. Noticeable was the 'explanatory' function of myths and legends. This ranged from rationalistic explanations to the naivest of folk etymologies. The Greek liked to learn about the causes or origins (aitiai) of customs. He also had a soft spot for folk etymologies and seems to have enjoyed both hearing about such things and, also, inventing them, a tendency still to be found today everywhere both among the uneducated and the allegedly educated. Hence the many explanations in the Metamorphoses as to how a bird got its name or why a god or goddess had a particular title. Such explanations would have been popular at all levels of society. An armchair critic might smile at such naive beliefs but they are not exclusive to people of classical antiquity. A tomb-slab of a medieval priest in a lonely Hebridean graveyard was regarded as the tomb of a very brave chief who had two hearts. This was explained by pointing to a simple chalice carved on the slab. The 31 Introduction upper and lower portions of the outlined chalice were regarded as representing two hearts and no explanation about chalices was found acceptable. In 1873 a folklore collector in Middlesex wrote: 'A policeman at Highway Farm, Harefield, told me that King Charles, going through Hammersmith, heard the sound of blows upon an anvil, "That's a hammer", said he: "It's a smith", said a courtier: so the place was called Hammersmith.' One of the strengths of a storyteller is a straight face that challenges disbelief. A king, one day hunting a stag at Hounslow, said, 'The hound's slow': so the place was named Hounslow. Some of the folk-puns in Antoninus Liberalis are of this sort, a few nearly as excruciating. At the time this introduction was being written, the best study of the 'state of the art' in discussing Greek myths and Greek mythology was the excellent Approaches to Greek Myth- notice the interesting use of the singular 'Myth'- written by several authors with very different standpoints and courageously edited by Lowell Edmunds Oohns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

THE BIRD WORLD OF THE GREEKS Though various quadrupeds (weasel, fox, wolf, etc.) are men• tioned in the Metamorphoses, most of the transformations are of people into birds. Athenaeus, quoting Boeus, an Antoninus source, said that all birds had been humans once. A Greek writer on birds, Alexander of Myndus, is quoted by Aelian as saying that when storks grow old they migrate to the Isles of Ocean and change into human form. Many peoples have held similar beliefs, legends and fancies about birds, but there may be a case for saying that the Hellenes had a special relationship with birds. Several books might be written on the incidents, tales, fancies and oddities that linked the Greeks with the world of birds. Such topics might include the revelation by birds of the murderers of Ibycus and the story of Palamedes who devised new letters of the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes. The regular practice of divination from bird flight or behaviour would have promoted observation. The Purple Coot (Porphyrio porphyrio) was kept as an admired pet or as a temple familiar because of its beautiful colour; it was not eaten (Aelian 3.42). One wonders what The Wren, a lost play by Heniochus, was about. From another writer of comedies, Autocrates, there has survived a scrap of a lyric which tells of 'endearing' Lydian girls 32 Introduction a-dancing before Artemis of Ephesus, waggling hips 'like wagtails'. Though this might indicate bird-watching tastes that were not primarily ornithological there is no doubting that such casual lore was to be reinforced when early scientific writers such as Aristotle founded ornithology in systematic treatises. The Birds, a comedy by Aristophanes, is also clinching evidence about the way birds filled the conscious minds of a people. Even a minor compilation like that of Antoninus Liberalis supports this view. Some sixty different species of birds are mentioned in the Metamorphoses. About a dozen of the names or terms to be found in the text have survived in the scientific names used today. Identifica• tion of some of the birds in this book is not always easy because ancient terminology was not precise. We cannot expect from the Greeks the binomial precision of the Latin terminology of present• day scientific names. Nor can we expect the relative exactitude of such quasi-technical vernacular terms in English as 'Red• crested Pochard' which have been established by generations of ornithologists. Imprecision also arises from the widespread nature of the Greek world. The world of Hellas consisted not only of the circle of places around both sides of the Aegean Sea but also of colonies all round the Mediterranean and on the coasts of the Black Sea. So different species in that area may have competed for the same term. The situation was like that of English-speaking peoples in various continents all using the word robin, but for totally different species. Our ideas about the similarities that produce genera may not have been the same as those of the Greeks. They used the word koloios (hopefully rendered as 'jackdaw' in dictionaries) with qualifying terms for three kinds of 'jackdaw', as well as for a web-footed 'jackdaw' from Asia Minor that may have been the Pygmy Cormorant (Phalacrocorax pygmaeus), a bird that does not look a bit like the Jackdaw (Corvus monedula) of Europe and Asia. Though many modern scholars and ornithologists have worked judiciously to explain Greek terms for birds, many are untranslatable to this day. Confusions in antiquity are still with us. Thus the word for a heron (erodios) and that for a shearwater (aithuia) are distinct enough, as are the birds themselves, but frequently the word for a heron was used for referring to a shearwater. The reader is begged to bring exaggerated caution to bear even for identifications based on experts like Sir D' Arcy Thompson. In fairness, he was often very tentative and cautious. The countryman in Hellas knew precisely what to call a familiar 33 Introduction bird. But the words used will have varied across time as well as across boundaries. How could one expect the terminology used in Greek Massalia (where Marseille is now) to be the same as that around Byzantium? Names could change into misleading forms. An example from Britain will help illustrate this. In Worcestershire and Gloucestershire the hedge sparrow was once called an Isaac. No biblical allusion should be read into this, for the word was a dialect variant of haysuck or hayzick derived from Old English heggesugge or hcegsugga, words for the Hedge Sparrow (Prunella modularis). Today the distributions and movements of birds are well documented. Observation and ringing has enabled detailed distribu• tion maps to be made, though, almost daily, unexpected new facts are revealed about migration. Nowadays amateur observers are highly professional, while the professionals are ultra-scientific in their methodology. There was nothing like this in the ancient world - and we cann~t be sure that the breeding areas of today were the same two millennia ago. We tend to regard the 'rape' of the environment as the cause of a diminution of bird life. It is true that the Sacred Ibis is no longer to be seen in Egypt, but other species have done very well out of the expanding settlements of humans. This all makes it very difficult to identify each bird in Antoninus Liberalis, let alone its associations or distribution. In years to come the laboriously interpreted results from meticulous study of bird bones found in archaeological excavations on Greek sites may offer much more information. Popular knowledge about birds among the Greeks was probably greater than might be expected. Wild birds were sold alive in the Athenian agora for eating, as pets and as gifts, and for peculiar sports such as 'quail-flipping', which were not necessarily cruel. A dramatist called Epicrates pictured for us an old starving eagle on a temple roof keeping an eye on leftovers from sacrifices. A species of small jackdaw was called bomolochos, a word that means a creature that lurks in wait by altars. One can visualize the little fellow darting in during a sacrifice for a titbit, to the annoyance of the priests. In contrast we might recall from the Odyssey (19.537) how Penelope took pleasure in gazing upon her geese. The variety of birds eaten by Greeks may surprise people of other lands and ages. Antiphanes, a writer of comedies of the fourth century nc, lists the following as eatable poultry: 'There's partridges and doves as well as ducks, geese and starlings. Then 34 Introduction there's the jay, the jackdaw, the blackbird, the quail - and the chicken.' The farmers of Attica and of every district of Greece saw birds as weather signs, as messengers of the seasons and as a signal to start sowing or ploughing. The comings and goings of various birds were watched as omens or as portents of good fortune. The countryman knew that birds could steal recently-sowed seeds but was also aware that they did away with insects that attacked crops. Aristophanes tells ofkestrels and owls slaughtering locusts on vines and of squadrons of thrushes mopping up mites that attacked fruit trees. Then the Greeks had, like other peoples, recollections of 'Just-So' stories like that in Aesop which told of how the lark acquired its crest. Of course the Greeks made some mistakes about birds. When male and female differ in size and plumage, it is understandable that Aristotle thought promiscuous miscegenation went on. Aristotle, Plutarch and Aesop believed the cuckoo and the merlin could change into each other. These birds do admittedly show a super• ficial similarity of shape and colour at certain times. It is not possible to suggest that birds were more plentiful in Hellas than they are today, but there were probably more opportunities for them to be seen, for storks and swallows to avail themselves publicly of the architecture of Hellas, and for other birds to sweep confidently over open landscapes. They had enemies of course in the form of fowlers with nets or birdlime, but no men with guns. Statues in the open were given horizontal halos in the form of copper or bronze discs to protect them from the bombing activities of birds. Did such precautions indicate a greater concen• tration of bird activities, or just a practical piety in protecting statues? Impossible to say. Aristotle in his History of Animals has several chapters on the behaviour of certain birds. Perhaps not all these books were by Aristotle; quite a few are rightly referred to as 'spurious'. Certainly the material is sometimes not very critical and may be part of a compilation produced by colleagues or their successors, but it expects the reader to have considerable familiarity with and interest in birds. For a time Aristotle lived on Lemnos, a good place for bird-watching. Aelian, a writer on animals, pulled together some strange lore on associations of birds as well as their 'enmities'. He said that the crow can't stand the owl and that the kite hates the raven. The seagull is said to be an enemy of both the stork and the corncrake. 35 Introduction There is also enmity between the crested lark and the goldfinch, and so on. In contrast there is said to be friendship between the crow and the heron, between the sea maw and the cormorant and between the shearwater and the kite. Not all these associations are imagined. They sometimes may be occasional one-offs. At a Middlesex reservoir a crow was seen by more than one observer flying about with seagulls, imitating their movements, taking off and alighting at the same time. All this was done despite an obvious inability to cope with a watery element. Many books on birds composed in ancient times have been lost irretrievably. Hesiod, for example, wrote Ornithomanteia, 'Divina• tion from Birds'. Another tantalizingly lost work is the Historia Ptenon, 'History of Winged Creatures' (we must remember that historia meant 'enquiry'), by Alexander of Myndus, which was unzoological enough to include the Gorgon. But there has survived a work on fowling and birdliming, the Ixeutica by a certain Dionysius. It is a prose work, derived from a verse original. It has not yet been translated into English. Its descriptions of the behaviour of different birds are partly based on observation but there is also a great deal of folklore. Much of the book is taken up with elaborate information on how to catch birds. Chapter 13 of the third book gives detailed instructions on how to catch blackbirds and the 'sweet-sounding' (euphonios) nightingale. The preparations and arrangements are quite complicated; one needs nets with round rims, ox sinews, sticks, a peg, pieces for the trip-mechanism and varieties of bait (earth and sand worms). The setting has to be where shrubs are dense. The enticed bird has only to touch the trip mechanism and everything swings over to trap the unfortunate. Dionysius also describes a method used by youths which was effective in winter when these birds were short of food. These lads dig a pit and throw in seeds or berries, such as of olives or the laurel. An elaborate gin trap, with a potsherd as the trip, is set up. When the sherd is disturbed the trap falls. Dionysius says that this method also works for thrushes and 'purrhas', the latter being an unknown reddish bird. Indeed Dionysius offers many other untranslatable bird names such as that of the unknown aiginthos, a mysteriously ancient-sounding name. It only occurs in Dionysius. In 414 BC The Birds, a famous comedy by Aristophanes, was first performed. There is less social slapstick in this play than in his others. He mentions over eighty species of birds. Not all of them 36 Introduction are precisely identifiable so that there is still ample room for resean;:h on the birds of ancient Attica. Unfortunately Aristophanes received only second prize for this play. It is a strange mixture of allegorical fantasy with a great deal of poetry and utopian flights. The songs of the chorus in The Birds of Aristophanes indicate a delight in bird sounds which is more than a trotted-out common• place. And his songs are sometimes nearer Fidele than Titwillow. The chorus consists of twenty-four birds who must have presented a brilliantly kaleidoscopic display of coloured feathers and masks. They range from the partridge and the francolin to the merlin and the waxwing. A hoopoe is a major character while many other species have dancing parts. Hoopoes appear to have fascinated weavers of tales in many lands. Recently Salman Rushdie intro• duced into a story a magic coach-driver who later operated as a hoopoe. While The Birds is not an ornithological treatise, it expected its audience to be familiar with many birds and their habitats. Of course one may read too much into the birds mentioned. Some say that woodland birds are not mentioned in one passage while others sagely note that the francolin is mentioned whereas today it is a bird of Asia Minor and not Greece, usefully indicating changes in habitats, or so it is suggested. Then there is birdsong. Will scholarly research be able to prove that in Hellas they responded with more pleasure to the song of birds like the nightingale than, say, in Persia or Italy or England (the nightingale does not spread widely over Scotland, perhaps not liking to compete with the bagpipes)? Literature has conditioned us to regard sunsets as beautiful and the song of the nightingale as utterly delightful or near-magical. We cannot with any precision assess our own reactions to such matters, even less those of ancient Greeks. The nightingale has a remarkable range of highly varied 'notes'. Some have referred to the notes as 'bell-like' or 'limpid' or 'fluting' while many have honestly recorded certain notes as 'coarse' or 'strident'. Some ornithologists have cheerfully declared that they prefer the song of the blackbird. The Greeks did not have the recording apparatus that has enabled us to learn that the nightingale produces some hundred sounds a second. The nightingale is certainly assiduous in its song; one observer, equally assiduous, recorded a bird over twenty-four hours and found that it was silent for an hour and a half out of this period. It might be suggested here that the Greeks did not apparently 37 Introduction think of a bird's song as a tool of territoriality. Yet country folk in many lands have often referred to some woodland spots as a 'corner' belonging to some nightingale. Coleridge said 'I know a grove . . . never elsewhere in one place I knew So many nightingales'. In fact the nightingale gives the impression of not only being ingenious in exploiting an echoing spot, but also in achieving a certain dominance of sound in that the songs of other species are inhibited- or so some ornithologists aver. The imagination may hear nightingales when there are no nightingales. It is possible that the nightingale heard singing in Berkeley Square was just a blackbird! Students of birds in Greek antiquity are to this day greatly indebted to the diligent learning of Sir D' Arcy Thompson whose Glossary of Greek Birds (1936) remains as an impressive reference work. He cites Antoninus Liberalis in the original Greek but does not translate. Many of the entries in the Liddell and Scott Lexicon depend on Thompson. Since his day ornithology has made great advances in terms of classification and in the study of behaviour and distribution. In 1977 John Pollard's Birds in Greek Life and Myth appeared. This is a work scholarly in terms of a knowledge of classical literature and scientific in terms of field observation. Pollard has read his Antoninus Liberalis and has anticipated this publication by translating whole paragraphs. His book is recom• mended for its interest and its scope.

THIS TRANSLATION There have been some felicitous translations from many languages but, all the same, when one reads a translation one cannot enter into the same relationship with the text as one does when reading it in the original. All translations are compromises or acts of linguistic gallantry. Many words or phrases in one language have no equivalents in another. To understand a translated work one frequently needs some commentary and discussion concerning the way the original was written and what sense the words had in the original. Notes or explanations are nearly always essential. We cannot rely on existing translations for ever - usages change and advancing scholarship makes us look at things differently. What is Antoninus Liberalis like to translate? To say 'easy' is misleading for Greek is often, despite having a different alphabet, a deceptively simple-looking language, often literally 'laconic' in its 38 Introduction brevity. With its definite articles and its sentence structure it frequently matches comfortably the linguistic make-up of English. Latin, which makes much use of a range of basic words like res, ago and the like, often gives the translator a tougher wrestling bout. A sentence taken at random from Antoninus Liberalis, from the Meropis story (no. 15), illustrates both the 'easiness' of the language and the difficulty of translating faithfully, without gauche inappropriateness: kai oikoun Kon ten Meropida neson, he ge pleiston and they dwelled in Cos the Meropid island, the earth much autois exephere karpon, hoti monen theon for them bore produce because she alone of the gods etimon kai epimelos auten ergazonto they honoured and diligently it/her they worked

Not all of Antoninus Liberalis is as 'simple' as this. Sometimes he uses 'difficult' compound verbs and on occasions he uses a word (e.g. sumpaiktra, 'playmate') three times and is the only surviving writer to have done so, apparently. There are also some weird poetic usages. In story no. 12 a lion is overcome by the use of wine. But, if we can trust the manuscript reading, the animal is not intoxicated by the wine but 'staked' or 'corralled' by it. Antoninus was not a conscious stylist. He was rendering into prose what was originally largely in verse. His book is a digest mostly of the post• classical Hellenistic period, though some classical and pre-classical terms were included. His language is thus later Hellenistic Greek or the koini of the Roman Empire peppered with archaisms coming from very ancient sources. Sometimes the vocabulary contains a difficult and complex word instead of a simple one. Clearly it would be fatuous to try and render all these variants by using jumpily different English. It was decided to translate Antoninus Liberalis into as simple a modern English as was possible, avoiding folktale diction as well as twentieth-century conversational raciness. Regrettably the very simplicity of some of the phrases produces translationese. But the main problem for a translator of Antoninus Liberalis is that the work is full of folk etymology. Hierax is changed into a hierax, equivalent to 'Hawk became a hawk'. Occasionally there is a tenuous semantic connection at which the reader can guess. Thus Polytechnus is turned into a woodpecker 39 Introduction because he is a carpenter and because he possessed an axe. Occasionally there is the luck of a similarity of words that applies in both English and Greek. This allows such awful translations as in story no. 7: 'he called the eldest son Erodius, because his land had been eroded.' But, as the notes explain very frankly, this takes advantage of a faulty reading in the text where pages of the manuscript are missing and we have to rely on a printed edition of 1568. The above translation does not allow for the name Erodius being like the Greek word for a heron, erodios. This translation is made from an eclectic text compiled from the editions of E. Martini (1896), I. Cazzaniga (1962) and M. Papathomopoulos (1968). One stands on the shoulders of giants and sees a little further.

FOLLOWING UP THE MYTHOLOGICAL ASPECTS The test of a serious modern book on Greek mythology is whether it is willing to spoil a straightforward tale by mentioning alternative versions for a myth, untidy variants which the Greeks were able to take in their stride. A secondary test is whether or not it primly bowdlerizes away some trivial details such as why Heracles had a black bottom. One cannot study Greek mythology without grappling with untidiness and inconsistencies and grotesqueries. On both sides of the Atlantic some excellent dictionaries of classical mythology have been published in recent decades. Several of these are of French origin. But such dictionaries may be expensive and restricted to reference sections of libraries. Those who wish to study Greek myths for themselves, without using copiously-illustrated coffee-table books or traditional popular handbooks like those of Thomas Bulfinch or later compilers, are recommended to start with a translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, a Roman's compilation admittedly, but one based on Greek sources, a work that offers an intellectual voyage as complex and detailed as Dante's pilgrimage. Ovid is sometimes discursive and sometimes all too epigrammatically brief, but reading the Metamorphoses is both an experience and an adventure. He is also memorable, as Shakespeare knew. The next work to be recommended is The Library, said to be by Apollodorus of Athens. He was born around 180 BC but his book on the gods and heroes of Greece seems to have been subbed and summarized in the first or second century AD. What has come 40 Introduction down to us does not show the critical scholarliness of one who had won fame at Alexandria, Pergamum and Athens, but anyone who masters its contents will have received a good start. Sir James Frazer's well-annotated Loeb edition with both Greek and English (1921 and subsequent reprints in the UK and the US) is a nice thing to own. Its availability for the general reader is uncertain. Some six weeks elapsed before a test reservation at the library of a large city produced a loan copy. At the time of writing the publication of a new translation was announced. There are many other authors that offer a lower yield perhaps but some nuggets also. The Latin-language tales in Hyginus were published in English in 1960 in the US. By a peculiar coincidence there was another Hyginus who wrote on the mythology of those who were changed into constellations. This handbook supplying astronomy for poets is not available in a scholarly modern English translation, only in French. A newcomer is also recommended to read plain, modern, prose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey of 'Homer' to acquire a soaking in myths that have been the educational lot of Greeks for over twenty-five cen~uries. One should add the works of Hesiod who wrote his poems after the original composition of the Homeric poems. He lived some time before 700 BC. He wrote on the genealogies and origins of the gods as well as about country life. In some ways he tells us more about the 'ordinary' Greek than later writers of Hellas. Hesiod was a practical farmer at Ascra near Mount Helicon. He said he began as a poet when he was herding lambs under the shadow of Helicon (perhaps the only poet to have done so in reality). There the the Muses taught him how to be a poet. There were others in more recent times who learned to become poets as they tended flocks. These, like Hesiod and young James Hogg in Ettrick, were themselves at the end of a long line of myths, tales and legends heard at the smithy or by the fireside of a grandparent. Hesiod, with his feet rooted in the soil and with his mind ranging through the origins of the gods, is thus in some ways a combination of a Burns and and a Milton. If he had only told us more about how myths had fermented in his mind he would have added W ordsworthian qualities to those of a Burns and a Milton. A newcomer to Hesiod might be surprised to see how differently he treats the Pandora story from those versions in popular manuals of mythology. It is almost a duty to mention that the plays of Aeschylus, 41 Introduction Sophocles and Euripides are largely based on the myths of Hellas. They should not be approached with the nervous awe which afflicts would-be readers of classics from any language. A browse through one or two plays of Euripides until the gears of the imagination engage might provide the start which could lead to Sophocles and Aeschylus. One other writer might be mentioned for follow-up reading in mythology: Callimachus, a scholar and poet from Alexandria. He wrote, to give an example, a convoluted version of the Acontius and Cydippe story, something much more complex than the similar Ctesylla story in Antoninus Liberalis. For those who masochistically enjoy difficult mythological allusions there is the impossible Alexandria of Lycophron (?third or second century BC). An example is a reference to a corncrake, an ill-omen for marriages. This appears as 'the twice-raped corncrake'. The allusir_,n is to Helen of Troy who was carried away by Theseus before she was snatched away by Paris. But there is an even stranger source book on mythology that might take the fancy of an adventurous reader who can get hold of a translation. This is the Dionysiaca ofNonnus. This work which is largely about Dionysus also has two books with a startling alternative version of the Typhon story (no. 28). Nonnus reminds us how long is the tradition of Greek mythography, for he lived in the fifth century AD. He wrote the Dionysiaca in 'Homeric' Greek, and even used this kind of Greek for his strange paraphrase of StJohn's gospel. A survey of some public libraries shows that the most easily available handbook on classical mythology is H.J. Rose's A Hand• book of Classical Mythology. The sixth edition of 1958 was issued in 1964 as a paperback. V cry learned and condensed, but still useful and always readable. In the US one is more likely to find Classical Mythology by M.P.O. Morford and R.J. Lenardon (1977). Another handbook still to be found in some libraries and among second• hand paperbacks in bookshops is Robert Graves' The Greek Myths (1955). This has been criticized by learned nitpickers, but it is a copious compilation which will not greatly harm your mind or psyche. An example of the touches that will irritate critics is his mention of the mark left on Helicon by the hoof of the winged horse Pegasus. Graves declared that this mark was moon-shaped, betraying his sometimes fervent views about the Moon Goddess. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (second edition, 1970) con• tains compact and well-documented articles on people, places, institutions and gods and is recommended for serious browsing. A 42 Introduction random choice might include: Agentes in Rebus (the Roman secret services), bee-keeping, Cephalus, Dionysus, gestures, hero-cults, Isis, magic, nymphs, ostracism, Ovid, pets, Poseidon, sacrifice, Zeus, etc. One might mention as an ultimate scholarly longstop for mytho• logical references a multi-volume German-language encyclopaedia on classical antiquity, the Pauly-Wissowa Realenzyklopiidie der klassischen Altertumswissenscha.ft. Following up this translation is difficult for a newcomer. In the nineteenth century there were several learned editions of Antoninus as well as monographs, most of them from Germany and written in Latin. There was a relative lull for over half a century and then came I. Cazzaniga's edition (Milan/Varese 1962), followed exactly four centuries after Xylander's 1568 edition by M. Papathomopoulos' excellent Bude edition, Antoninus Liberalis: Les Metamorphoses (Paris 1968). His commentary (in French) is splendidly detailed in its references to publications derived from a range of countries that includes Bulgaria and the USA. His coverage is impressive in its depth and breadth. He tries to find every possible parallel from the east or elsewhere. The only aspect of Antoninus Liberalis that he does not cover in intense detail is the linguistic one. On the whole textual editors tended to add bits rather school• masterishly to produce texts closer to an Attic ideal. They forgot that the Greek of Antoninus' day was more loose-limbed gram• matically as well as being stylistically rough or elliptic. Only in recent decades have scholars been able to apply a wider under• standing of the grammar of the Hellenistic period and of the common Greek (koini) of the second or third century AD than was possessed by nineteenth-century scholars. This has resulted in fewer attempts to correct the text and in the acceptance of seeming anomalies or apparent grammatical solecisms because good evidence has been accumulated about such usages. An example of this new realistic but grammatically well-based approach to Antoninus is to be found in an important paper published in Spain by Giuseppe Giangrande. This is cited in note 84 on p. 126.

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