Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (29 page)

Artemis (Diana)
With ancient origins as a mother goddess and patroness of animals, to the classical Greeks, Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and Apollo’s twin sister. She is the “virgin goddess,” the patron of the hunt, the untamed protector of wild animals. She presides over the rites of passage in which Greek women changed from “wild”
parthenos
(virgin) to fully “tamed”
gyne
(woman). She is also a merciless judge of anyone who breaks her laws, and when any woman dies suddenly, it is believed that she has been struck by the arrows of Artemis.
One of the most famous stories demonstrating Artemis’s swift and cruel justice involves Actaeon, the handsome hunter who accidentally comes upon the goddess as she is bathing naked in a spring. Offended, Artemis turns Actaeon into a stag and then sends his own hunting hounds out to tear their master to pieces. Told by Ovid, this myth has been a favorite subject of artists throughout history—proving, if nothing else, that there has always been a market for naked women and violence.

Athena (Minerva)
The patron of Athens—from whom her name is taken—Athena is the virgin goddess of war and wisdom, as well as the patron of arts and crafts, including building and carpentry. The daughter of Zeus and Metis (a goddess whose name meant “cleverness”), Athena is said to be born from Zeus’s head. According to Hesiod, Zeus fears that one of his children will depose him, as he had done to his own father. To avoid this fate, Zeus swallows the pregnant Metis, hoping to absorb her cleverness and wisdom. When he complains of a severe headache, one of the other gods strikes his head with an ax, and out springs Athena, fully formed and armed, screaming a war cry. In this way, the child who might depose him is never truly “born.”
Ever virginal and masculine in behavior, Athena is almost always depicted in full armor, holding a shield and spear. As patroness of Athens, she represents everything that Greek culture later idealizes—wisdom, the power of intelligence, and reason over unbridled love or passion—making her, in many respects, the opposite of Aphrodite.
She is not perfect, however. One myth illustrates that she can be swift to anger if her supremacy is questioned—especially by a mortal. A young woman named Arachne challenges Athena to a weaving competition. Taking the guise of an old woman, Athena tries to dissuade Arachne from the contest, but the mortal Arachne dismisses the warning. As the two work at their looms, Athena sees that Arachne’s weaving has illustrations that seem to mock the gods by showing all of their deceptions and love affairs. She can also see that the mortal girl’s weaving is better than her own. Snatching the tapestry from the loom, Athena starts to beat the poor mortal girl with a shuttle. In fear, Arachne tries to hang herself with a noose made of thread. As she hangs there, Athena sprinkles the mortal girl with poison and Arachne becomes a spider, which is why, of course, spiders spin webs and are called arachnids.
On a more noble note, the great temple dedicated to Athena in Athens was the Parthenon (“Temple to the Virgin”), which stands on a hill called the Acropolis overlooking the city. Probably the greatest example of classic Greek architecture, the Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BCE as a celebration of Athenian pride during the Golden Age of Pericles, when Athens reigned supreme.
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Demeter (Ceres)
The mother goddess of crops, Demeter plays a featured role in one of the central myths of Greece, the tale of Persephone, her daughter with Zeus. When Persephone is carried off to the underworld by Hades, Demeter is enraged and prevents the crops from growing. To restore the natural order, Zeus arranges his daughter’s release by negotiating a settlement between Demeter and Hades. But Hades had already given Persephone a pomegranate seed, and since she has eaten the food of the underworld, she is compelled to spend one-third of the year there with Hades and the other two-thirds in the world above. (The Greeks thought of the year in terms of only three seasons: spring, summer, and winter.)
This “deal with the devil” was always thought to explain the arrival of spring, which is when Persephone returns to earth. Her subsequent return to the underworld means the end of the growing season and the coming of winter, seen as the time of death. While simple and appealing, this explanation does not accurately fit the Greek growing season, some scholars note.
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Instead, they view the tale of Persephone’s abduction as an allegory explaining the fate of Greek girls who were often turned over to much older men in arranged marriages. Demeter’s grief over the loss of Persephone was typical of the experiences of Greek mothers who gave up their daughters in arranged marriages, usually to an older stranger.

Dionysus
(
Bacchus
) One of the most widely celebrated gods of Greece (and, later, of Rome), Dionysus is not only the god of wine and ecstasy, but also the male life-force, a masculine fertility god. Unmentioned by Hesiod and little-mentioned by Homer, Dionysus is another “foreign import” who arrived in Greece much later than the other gods, a transplant from the ancient Near East. (References to him date to about 1250 BCE, and there is no evidence that he was worshipped before the Archaic Age.) But as god of wine and the sexual life-force, he was clearly a hit with the Greeks, and eventually supplanted Hestia (see below) as one of the twelve Olympians. The festivals in his honor—Dionysia in Greece and Bacchanalia in Rome—were probably the original “toga parties.” And followers of Dionysus might have been some of the ancient world’s biggest “party animals.” These festivals became the occasion for wild dancing in the streets and ecstatic behavior by his devoted followers. Later, in Rome, they acquired even greater notoriety, forcing the Roman Senate to ban the feasts and apparently execute some of the “Dionysians” as a threat to civil order (see below,
What were the Bacchanalia and the Saturnalia?
).
But in Greek myth, Dionysus is depicted as the son of Zeus and a mortal woman Semele, who is burned to a crisp when she asks Zeus to appear to her as he really is. She unfortunately gets what she asks for—she’s zapped by a thunderbolt. The dying Semele’s fetus is saved by the messenger god Hermes, and Zeus sews the unborn child into his right thigh. A few months later, Dionysus is born. Ripped from his mother’s womb and then from Zeus’s leg, Dionysus would be described as “twice born.”
In spite of his “multiple births,” Dionysus is still on the hit list of Zeus’s wife Hera. To save him from Hera’s jealous vengeance, Zeus disguises the infant as a girl and takes him to be raised by his mortal aunt and uncle. Not fooled, Hera makes the child’s mortal guardians go mad. They kill their own children and then commit suicide. But again Dionysus is spared, and Zeus transforms him into a young goat.
The vindictive Hera is not yet done with Zeus’s “love child.” After Dionysus returns to human form, Hera makes him go mad, and Dionysus wanders the Eastern world until he meets a goddess known as Cybele, from Asia Minor, a mother goddess (related to the Mesopotamian Inanna/Ishtar) whose cult followers indulged in ritual orgies and self-castration. Cybele cures Dionysus of his madness and introduces him to all of her secret fertility rites.
One of the most complex gods, Dionysus was sometimes perceived as both man and animal, had male and effeminate qualities, and was seen at times as both young and old. The ancient Greeks associated Dionysus with violent and unpredictable behavior, especially actions caused by drinking too much wine, and many stories about this god of intoxication involve epic sessions of drunken merrymaking. At one of these sessions, Dionysus grants the legendary King Midas his wish that everything he touches turns to gold. In another of those “be careful what you wish for” stories, Midas unfortunately discovers that Dionysus has made his wish literally come true, as his food turns to gold, and even his daughter is turned into a golden statue when he touches her. Dionysus reverses the golden curse by telling Midas to dive into a river, which accounts for the gold that was found in that area for generations. Dionysus’s followers at these epic carousing sessions included nymphs, creatures called satyrs that were half-man and half-horse or goat, and women attendants called maenads.
Dionysus was also at the center of Greek drama, which had its roots in religious celebrations that incorporated song and dance. By the sixth century BCE, the rural celebration of Dionysus as an agricultural god who had brought farming, winemaking, and herding techniques to mankind was transformed in Athens into the Dionysia, a festival in which dancing choruses competed for prizes. At some point, a poet introduced the concept of a masked actor interacting with the chorus.
The playwright Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) took this idea further by adding two actors, each playing different parts. This soon evolved into full-scale plays featuring many actors and a chorus, allowing for more complex plots. Following the defeat of the Persians in 479 BCE, Athens emerged as the Greek superpower, and the annual drama festival, or Dionysia, became both a celebration and a spectacle, lasting four or five days. Thousands of Athenians watched plays in an enormous outdoor theater that could seat 17,000 spectators. At the end of the festival, prizes were awarded to the tragedians. The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek word
tragos
, meaning “goat,” the sacred symbolic animal of Dionysus. Much of the lore of Dionysus is based on
The Bacchae
(c. 407 BCE), a play by Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE), one of the three great writers of Greek tragedy. In
The Bacchae
, he writes,