homeric hymn to apollo 2.145
Like Doric, Ionic is a style of architecture which has survived the ages – as can be confirmed by a glance at the Ionic columns of many grand buildings, including the British Museum in London and the US Treasury building in Washington.
Achaeus gave his name to the people of the lands west of Athens, notably of the area about Argos and Mycenae – which is why Homer describes those who fought the Trojans as Achaeans. In later years, those who claimed Achaean descent struggled bitterly with the Aetolians, who claimed to be the descendants of Aeolus, another child of Hellen, who settled the lands of southern Thessaly and the far east of Greece.
Hermes steals Io away on a sixth-century BC Greek amphora.
The children of Io
In time beyond memory, Greek culture had already spread over much of the eastern Mediterranean. While today we might put this down to trade routes and wars, the ancient Greeks credited these peregrinations to Io, a beautiful princess from Argos. According to mythology, her children helped shape not just Greece but also many other nearby countries. Her descendants form one of the over-arching family trees of mythology, intimately intertwined with the other two great family trees, which are those of Atlas and Hellen.
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zeus and io
One of the hazards of being a beautiful princess in the early days of the world was that there were not many people yet about, and Zeus was particularly attentive towards beautiful princesses in his mission to make more people. After discreetly covering Argos with a cloud to prevent Hera noticing, Zeus ravished Io. Then, noting that a suspicious Hera was already dissolving the cloud, Zeus swiftly disguised Io as a white heifer.
Hera was not convinced by the deception, and so asked Zeus to present her with the heifer, which Zeus could not refuse to do without giving the game away. Hera set Argus, the monster with a hundred eyes, to guard her new acquisition while she made enquiries as to its provenance. But Zeus had Io stolen away by Hermes, who slew Argus in the process. Hera transferred the eyes of Argus to the tail of her iconic bird, the peacock, and sent an enormous gadfly to torment Io and prevent her from finding any rest.
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After being transformed into a heifer (see box), Io crossed over to Asia Minor by swimming the strait named after that occasion: the ‘cow-crossing’ or Bosporus. Unable to settle in the east, she moved south, where she finally bore the child by Zeus that she had been carrying. Aegyptus, who gave his name to that country, was one of her descendants. (Another descendant of Io, to whom Zeus also took a fancy, was Europa, who gave her name to a continent.)
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the danaids
Danaus, also descended from Io, returned to his ancestral home to become king of the Greek city of Argos. His numerous children were all daughters, so Aegyptus, who had fifty sons, came up with the ingenious plan of marrying his sons to Danaus’ daughters and thus eventually adding the Argolid to his already extensive empire. Danaus pretended to go along with the idea. But at his urging all his daughters killed their husbands on their wedding night (with the single exception of Hypermnestra, who actually liked the man she was paired with). The daughters subsequently married Argive youths, so by the time of the Trojan War, ‘of Danaus’ was synonymous with ‘Argive’. This is why the modern phrase ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ (such as Trojan horses) is in Latin ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, and is more precisely translated as ‘I fear the children of Danaus, even if they carry gifts’.
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Agamemnon, the king of the Argolid at the time of the Trojan War was another descendant of Io, but this time by way of Pelops, an immigrant from Lydia in Asia Minor who went on to give his name to the Peloponnese.
Io also numbered several heroic sons in her line, perhaps the most notable being Perseus and Heracles – the latter being significant in this geographical investigation because a number of towns called Heraclea sprang up in honour of the demigod’s feats. One Roman version of such a town – Herculaneum – was preserved for posterity under a mudslide from Vesuvius at the same time as Pompeii was buried in ash.
Of Troy and Asia
The Titan Atlas, the brother of Prometheus, has given his name to a mountain range and a major mountain in North Africa. It was he who led the assault on Olympus in the battle between gods and Giants. As punishment, Zeus gave him the task of carrying the sky on his shoulders.
Before he took up the heavens, Atlas found time to father several children, including the seven sisters known as the Pleiades and a daughter called Dione. The Pleiad Electra had a descendant called Dardanus, who gave his name to the Roman province of Dardania, and who was in turn the progenitor of Ilus, who founded the city of Ilium, known today as Troy. Some believe that Dardanus also gave his name to the nearby Dardanelles, scene of ferocious fighting during the First World War.
The Farnese Atlas, from Rome.
Since Pelops, ancestor of Agamemnon, was of the line of Dione, it can be seen that the Trojan War was something of a family affair (albeit very distant family). In later ages the Romans traced their ancestry back through Aeneas the Trojan to Dardanus, and ultimately to Atlas. The mother of Atlas was Clymene, or as some accounts have it, Asia, which to the Greeks meant a part of what is now Turkey, but in the modern vocabulary is now the most populous home of mankind.
Part 3
The Human Journey
For the Greeks and Romans, the human spirit, like that of the gods, was immortal and indestructible. The human body, on the other hand, was distressingly mortal. It was prone to decay and eventual death even if the gods did not decree an even more dramatic end. Yet to the ancients, death marked but another step in the development of the spirit. It is with such concepts that ancient myth merges with classical religion, and we realize that the theology of the ancient world embodied a clear and logical belief system as sophisticated as any that exists today. This is nowhere so evident as in the journey of every human from birth to death and far beyond.
Life on Earth
In classical mythology, all living things were at the moment of their creation filled with the spirit of the divine. Virgil, the Roman poet of the first century ad, puts this most clearly in his epic poem the Aeneid:
From the divine essence that moves the universe
all life arises, human beings, animals, birds
and even the monsters which move below the
marbled surface of the ocean deep.
The origins of each mind and spirit have
their beginnings and their power in
the fiery heavens.
aeneid 6.725ff
But though the spirit of man was of the heavens, the body was shaped by Prometheus from earthly clay. And though the body was necessary for a human to experience life on earth, the body also acted as ‘a windowless prison’ for the soul. Held within the body, the soul could only experience external reality through the crude filters of the flesh, and was subject to the rough passions and coarse desires of an earthly existence. As Plato famously put it, our perception of reality is as close to reality’s true nature as the shadows that the outside world throws on to a cave wall. The spirit was tainted in the body, and then slowly purified in the underworld.