The Dioskouroi Tundaridai are both gods and men. The Greeks ponder this contradiction in their myths, and use the story of their birth to pin down their status. In the Iliad, Homer regards them as ordinary human beings, who died and were buried in their homeland; we are told that they have the same mother as Helenē,¹ but nothing about their father. Even if Zeus had fathered them, they would still be mortal, like all the other heroic sons of Zeus. Their sister Helenē looks out from the walls of Troy and wonders why she cannot see them:
So she spoke, but the life-giving earth had already possessed them,
Back in Lakedaimōn (Sparta), in their own dear country.²
Helenē's ignorance of their death makes it all the more poignant; there is no doubt about their mortality. The Iliad is, however, a tragic poem, and part of what makes it so tragic is that Homer emphasizes the humanity of his characters. He is not at all happy with people who cross the line that separates gods from men, and he deliberately makes them stay on the human side of the line.³ Homer studiously avoids mentioning hero-cult or semi-gods;⁴ Helenē is a very beautiful woman, but by no means a goddess; her brothers are fine young men, but definitely mortal; Hēraklēs too is a human being, whose fate is no different from that of Akhilleus.⁵
Things are a little different in the Odyssey. Homer does not quite say that Helenē is a goddess, but he does tell us that she is the daughter of Zeus, and that her husband Menelaos, simply because he is married to her, will not die like other men but will go straight to Ēlusion instead.⁶ Hēraklēs had once been a human, and his ‘image’ (eidōlon) is left behind in the Underworld with the other human ghosts,⁷ but he is now recognized as a god and lives with the goddess Hēbē on Olumpos.⁸ A similar, but very peculiar, compromise is reached with the Tundaridai. This time, we are told the names of both their parents – they are the children of Lēdē and Tundareos.
And I saw Lēdē, the wife of Tundareos,
who gave birth to two strong-minded sons under Tundareos,
horse-taming Kastōr and the great boxer Poludeukēs.⁹
When Homer tells us about their status, however, he starts off with the same expression that the Iliad had used about the life-giving earth possessing their bodies,¹⁰ but then he continues very mysteriously:
The life-giving earth possesses them, but they are both alive:
Even under the earth, having this honour from Zeus,
Every second day they are alive at one time, but at another time again
They are dead: they have gained an honour equal to that of the gods.¹¹
As sons of the mortal Tundareos, it makes sense that they are buried, but they experience mortality and immortality every second day. Zeus bestows this favour upon them, but merely because he respects them; not because he is in any way related to them. It seems that the power he grants them is confined to the grave, and that they stay inside it even on the days they are alive, which would make them local and chthonic powers. Homer does not tell us, unfortunately, whether their power is heroic or divine. He finishes off his evasive account of the Tundaridai with a wonderfully ambiguous formula that catches their essence perfectly, ‘they are honoured just like the gods’. Does he mean that they are identical to gods, that they are gods (at least every second day)? Or does he mean that they are merely honoured as if they were gods, that they are not really gods themselves?¹² In dealing with the Tundaridai, there is no way of evading this ambiguity; the question will always be open.
The first place we see them called Dioskouroi is a text from the beginning of the sixth century. The Homeric Hymn to the Dioskouroi recognizes them as proper Olympian gods,¹³ and describes their birth as follows:
Tell me, glancing-eyed Muses, about the Young Men of Zeus (Dioskouroi),
the Tundaridai, the brilliant children of Lēdē with her beautiful ankles,
horse-taming Kastōr and irreproachable Poludeukēs,
whom she bore under the top of the great mountain, Taügetos,
after mingling in love with the dark-clouded son of Kronos.¹⁴
Both of the Tundaridai are the sons of Zeus and of Lēdē, and they were born in Lakōnia, the Spartan homeland of Tundareos and Helenē.¹⁵ The Dioskouroi are now regular Olympian gods, so they are not confined to their grave in the earth. They can freely travel through the air on their horses, and they appear to sailors in the form of flashing lights. They come to the rescue whenever a ship is in trouble, not just every second day. This new conviction that the Dioskouroi are gods is not just a poetic fancy; a contemporary athlete, who won a discus-throwing competition, dedicated his prize-winning bronze discus to them:
Ekhsoida(s) m’ anetheke Diwos qoroin megaloio
khalkeon, hoi nikase Kephalanas megathumos.
Exoidas dedicated me to the two Young Men of Great Zeus,
a bronze (discus), with which he defeated the great-hearted Kephallenians.¹⁶
The sixth-century Catalogue of Women brings the neglected Tundareos back into the picture by stating that Lēdē had three daughters with him,¹⁷ but Kastōr and Poludeukēs are her sons by Zeus.¹⁸
These myths solve the problem of the Tundaridai–Dioskouroi by explaining that they are mortal (in the Iliad), divine (in the Homeric hymn), or something in between (in the Odyssey).¹⁹ The real problem, however, is that the Tundaridai–Dioskouroi are both human and divine, and the Greek poets have to resort to considerable creativity in order to sort this out.
The sixth-century Greek poet from Italy, Ibycus of Rhegium, told the same story that the locals did in Sparta,²⁰ and said that the Dioskouroi had originally been human, but were then promoted to the status of gods.²¹ Ibycus has separated their mortality and divinity into two consecutive phases of a single career, so that they can have a normal human life and still be worshipped as gods without any misgivings. This is an elegant solution to the problem, which preserves the Homeric tradition that the twins are of equal status. It is not, however, the answer that wins the approval of the Greek world.
The approach that eventually wins general acceptance was first taken by the seventh-century poet, Stasinus of Cyprus. He is the first to separate the two brothers, and instead of dividing their mortality and immortality across time, he divides it between the two brothers. His solution to the problem of their status will become the standard version:
Kastōr is mortal, and he is destined for death,
but Poludeukēs, that branch of Arēs, is immortal.²²
Greek artists sometimes present one of the brothers with a beard and the other brother as beardless; perhaps they too are indicating that the one with the beard is aging, whereas the other is ever young and immortal.²³
It is possible that Stasinus, in order to justify this distinction, made Kastōr the son of Tundareos and Poludeukēs the son of Zeus, but Pindar is the first author we know who explicitly makes this connection. In one of his odes, Pindar tells us that Kastōr has just died and the immortal Poludeukēs is understably upset; Zeus comes along and explains how each of them was born.
So he (Poludeukēs) spoke. Zeus came up to him
and said these words: ‘You are my son;
later, her heroic husband
came to your mother and begat this man as mortal seed.’²⁴
As a special favour to Poludeukēs, Zeus agrees that he may share his immortality with his brother:
‘If you intend to share everything with him equally,
then you could stay breathing under the earth half the time,
and the other half you could be in the golden homes of heaven.’²⁵
Pindar specifies elsewhere that their time under the earth will be spent in Therapnē, and that they will spend every second day in each place.²⁶ This recalls the arrangement in the Odyssey, and Pindar is the first thinker since Homer to face up to the fact that the Dioskouroi are chthonic heroes living under the ground. The Odyssey, however, stated that they were always chthonic beings in Therapnē, dead in their graves one day, alive in their graves the next day. Pindar, in contrast, boldly asserts that they are both chthonic heroes and Olympian gods, dead in their graves at Therapnē one day, alive in heaven the next. Pindar's elaborate compromise became the standard version of the story, but after going to all the trouble of working out this theory, he still calls both Kastōr and Poludeukēs ‘sons of gods’ (huioi theōn)!²⁷
The significant thing about all these solutions to the mystery of the Dioskouroi is their variety itself, and their agreement on one point – the obvious ambiguity in the status of the Dioskouroi. In Burkert's words, the Dioskouroi ‘reach with equal ease in to the heroic-chthonic domain and the domain of the gods, and it is this which gives them their special power.’²⁸
All this speculation ultimately gave rise to the well-known Hellenistic version of the birth of the Dioskouroi. Lēdē sleeps with her husband Tundareos and with the great god Zeus, who appears to her in the form of a swan. As a result of this exciting night, Lēdē lays two eggs from which two sets of twins emerge. One egg contains Kastōr, the mortal son of Tundareos, and Poludeukēs, the immortal son of Zeus; the other contains the divine Helenē and the human Klutaimnēstra.²⁹ From the third century BC onward, Kastōr and Poludeukēs were depicted in Greek art wearing a felt-cap called a pilos,³⁰ and the Hellenistic poet Lycophron identifies these felt-caps as the egg-shells from which they had been born:
The split oval of an egg covers their foreheads,
as protection against a bloody spear.³¹
Two striking features of this story are the metamorphosis of Zeus and the birth from an egg, but they do not appear in the birth-story of the Dioskouroi until the third century BC.³² Originally, Helenē alone was born from an egg, but this is a very different myth, and in this version she is not the daughter of Lēdē. The story first appears in the sixth-century Cypria, which tells us that both of Helenē's parents are gods; she is the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis. Here is how Stasinus of Cyprus tells it:
Nemesis with her beautiful hair gave birth to her, after mingling in love
with Zeus the king of the gods, under brutal force.
She kept trying to escape, she did not want to mingle in love
with father Zeus, the son of Kronos; her mind was torn by embarrassment
and indignation (nemesis); across the land and the black barren water,
she kept running and Zeus kept chasing; in his heart he was longing to take her.
Sometimes in the waves of the loud-crashing sea
she would appear as a fish and churn up lots of sea-water,
sometimes she would go by the river Ocean and the ends of the earth,
and sometimes she would go on the fertile solid earth; she was constantly changing
into the various animals that the solid earth nurtures, so that she might evade him.³³
The rest of the story is recorded by a later Greek author:
The man who wrote the Cypria says that he changed into a gander, chased her, and mingled with her… she produced an egg, from which Helenē was born.³⁴
Nemesis has presumbly changed into a goose herself, and Zeus foils her attempts to evade him by turning into a gander.³⁵ Even though Stasinus of Cyprus is our source for this story about Zeus, Nemesis, and Helenē, it is actually an Athenian myth that was told in the temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous.
So far, the story told by Stasinus has nothing to do with Lēdē, but she comes on to the stage now. Sappho knew about this episode:
They say that Lēdē once discovered
a hyacinth-coloured egg.³⁶
This part of the story was also told by the locals at Rhamnous. It was depicted on the base of the statue of Nemesis, frequently painted on vases, and well known to all Athenians.³⁷ There are no less than 14 Attic vases from the fifth century depicting the story of Helenē's egg.³⁸ The abandoned egg is at the centre of the scene, sitting on an altar. Lēdē has just discovered it and raises her hands in surprise; Tundareos, standing behind her, betrays no emotion; the Dioskouroi are there too, gazing at the egg from the other side of the altar.³⁹ This is the moment described in Sappho's poem, and the comic poet Cratinus tells us how Lēdē has to sit on the egg and keep it warm.⁴⁰ Finally, Helenē hatches out of the egg, a scene that appears on two non-Athenian vases.⁴¹
Lēdē takes the baby, nurses her, and raises her until she reaches adolescence.⁴² The final scene in this story was depicted on the pedestal of the new statue of Nemesis, the one sculpted by Pheidias when the temple was renovated in 430 BC.⁴³ The pedestal showed Lēdē bringing Helenē back to Nemesis, accompanied by Lēdē's immediate family (Tundareos and the Dioskouroi). They were also joined by Helenē's future male relatives through marriage. These men were her brother-in-law Agamemnōn, her husband Menelaos, and her son-in-law Neoptolemos, who happened to be great warriors on the Greek side during the Trojan War. Pheidias, like Stasinus before him, was obviously thinking about the role of Nemesis in causing the Trojan War by bringing Helenē into the world.
At first sight, this story looks like a clumsy attempt to adapt the Athenian myth of Helenē and Nemesis to the Spartan story about Helenē and Lēdē.⁴⁴ The tale of her adoption is remarkably similar, however, to the purely Athenian myth of Erikhthonios and Athēna; it is the feminine counterpart to a very masculine story.
The Athenians told that their ancestor, Erikhthonios, was born when Hēphaistos tried to rape the virgin goddess Athēna. She evades his attentions, and when he ejaculates onto her dress, she rejects his semen and throws it onto the earth. Gaia the earth goddess acts as a surrogate-mother, and when the child, Erikhthonios, is born she hands him over to Athēna.⁴⁵ In this story, the boy's social mother, Athēna, withdraws before he is born, leaving the masculine semen behind her; and Erikhthonios, the first Athenian, is produced from the earth in a masculine birth and he emerges from that semen alone. He has no real mother. Helenē's biological mother, Nemesis, likewise withdraws before Helenē is born, leaving the feminine egg behind her; and Helenē, the goddess of young girls and fertility, is the product of a purely feminine birth from this egg.
The Athenians are very happy with their myth of autochthony, of a masculine birth from semen alone, but they would find the idea of a feminine birth from an egg alone quite disturbing. Aristotle evades this possibility by declaring that even eggs are purely masculine, that they are formed from semen alone!⁴⁶ If we were to follow Aristotle, we would have to conclude that the story of Helenē and the egg of Nemesis is really a story about her birth from the semen of Zeus, so Helenē's birth would therefore be identical with the birth of Erikhthonios from the semen of Hēphaistos. The stories are quite different, however, and the contrasts between them help to define the roles of male and female in Athenian thought. Erikhthonios belongs to his country, he arises from its earth, he is rooted in its land. Paintings of his birth show the upper body of Gaia, only partly rising from the earth, handing him directly to Athēna.⁴⁷ Hēphaistos has fertilized the earth with his semen, Erikhthonios is a product of what is literally his native land, and therefore belongs to the social world of Athēna, who is the goddess of that political unit.⁴⁸ Helenē, in contrast, never touches the earth; even at the moment of her birth, her egg is perched on an altar, removed from the soil. Unlike Erikhthonios, she is not a product of her native land, and therefore she does not have an Athenian identity, she has no citizenship. She never becomes a child of Athēna; instead, she is picked up casually by a foreign family that wants to adopt a baby girl.
Athenian women are only loosely attached to their family and their country as they will be married off and sent away to a husband elsewhere. Like the egg in Helenē's story, they hover above the land without coming into contact with it. This is in striking contrast to their goddess Athēna, who will remain in Athens with Erikhthonios, both of them rooted in the land of Attica. Athēna remains on the Acropolis only because she is a virgin goddess. She will not be married off, she will never leave home, she will never reproduce. Her virginity means that Athēna is masculine, patriotic, and barren. Helenē, however, is overpoweringly feminine, but in exchange for this gift, her presence will always be unreliable, temporary, seasonal.⁴⁹ The autochthonous birth of Erikhthonios guarantees the succession of male Athenian citizens; the strange birth of Helenē symbolizes the disquieting nature of women and of sexual reproduction for the Greeks. Who can predict what might come out of that egg? Who can predict what a woman will give birth to?⁵⁰ The myths of the first king and the young goddess form a natural but quarrelsome pair.
Later, the Greeks become uncomfortable with the contradictory stories about Helenē's birth, so they eliminate Nemesis from her story and make Lēdē her biological mother. Zeus, in the form of a swan, mates with Lēdē, and it is she who lays Helenē's egg.⁵¹ Later still, they have Klutaimnēstra hatching from the same egg, and the Dioskouroi emerging from a second egg, both eggs produced by Lēdē. The result is the erotic Hellenistic fantasy of Lēdē and the Swan, with which we began this section.
Due to her feelings of shame and indignation (nemesis)⁵² at the advances of Zeus, Nemesis, whose very name means ‘indignation’, had tried to evade him by adopting various animal forms. As Burkert points out, ‘here she is very clearly a double of the raging Demeter Erinus’.⁵³ They are both primeval goddesses with similar functions: Nemesis, Indignation, the daughter of Night, is the goddess of moral outrage; Erinus, the Fury, born from the castrated Sky, is the goddesss of vengeance.
The stories of Dēmētēr the Fury (Dēmētēr Erinus) and Nemesis are almost identical too. Nemesis tries to evade Zeus by changing into animal form, and Dēmētēr the Fury tries to escape being raped by Poseidōn the Horse God (Poseidōn Hippios) in the same way.⁵⁴ Pausanias heard this story from the locals who lived near the temple of Dēmētēr the Fury at Thelpousa in Arcadia.
They say that Poseidōn followed Dēmētēr, being full of lust to mate with her. So she changed herself into a mare, and grazed along with the other mares belonging to Onkos.⁵⁵ But Poseidōn realized that he had been tricked, so he changed himself into a stallion and mated with Dēmētēr.
… They say that Dēmētēr bore a daughter to Poseidōn, but they believe it is wrong to reveal her name to the uninitiated, and also a horse, Areiōn. This is why they were the first of the Arcadians to name the god Poseidōn Hippios.⁵⁶
The story lacks the complicated analysis of gender and reproduction that we found in the myths about the births of Helenē and Erikhthonios, but if the experience of Dēmētēr Erinus relives the rape of Nemesis, complete with its animal metamorphoses, other details in the story bring it closer to the birth of Erikhthonios, for they reveal that the horse is likewise a chthonic creature, a product of the earth. Dēmētēr Erinus, in the Arcadian myth, is not the bright, familiar Olympian goddess of grain production and harvest celebrations. She is a dark underworld goddess, with all the characteristics of an Erinus.
In the Boeotian version of this story, the goddess who produces the first horse is simply Erinus herself. The sixth-century Thebais, the epic of Boeotia, tells us that Erinus is raped by Poseidōn near the spring of Tilphousa in Boeotia, and gives birth to the first horse, Areiōn.⁵⁷ Erinus is the darkest and most frightening of all the underworld deities, and her chthonic nature is vividly captured by Homer when he tells the story of Althaia and her son Meleagros. Althaia beats the earth with her hands, and calls upon Hadēs and Persephonē to punish her son, but it is the terrifying Erinus who listens to her cries and emerges from hell to kill Meleagros.⁵⁸ The Boeotians are telling us that horses come from hell.
The very name Dēmētēr Erinus sounds like a contradiction; how can the benevolent Olympian goddess be a Fury of the Underworld? In another part of Arcadia, on one of the mountains surrounding the remote town of Phigalia, the local myth expresses this contradiction by calling the raped goddess Black Dēmētēr (Dēmētēr Melaina). In Phigalia, Black Dēmētēr gives birth to a daughter alone, not to a horse, but this myth is important for our understanding of the goddess Dēmētēr Erinus who did give birth to the first horse. Even though the people of Phigalia do not call Black Dēmētēr a Fury (Erinus), this is what they have in mind, because this goddess shares several features with the Furies. She wears black just like the Furies,⁵⁹ and such black garments distinguish the Furies from the ‘white-robed’ Olympian gods.⁶⁰ It is Dēmētēr's fury that makes her black, and such a ‘black wave of anger’ is an essential aspect of the Furies.⁶¹ Finally, both Black Dēmētēr and the Furies live in caves.⁶²
The Arcadians explain the fury of Black Dēmētēr by saying that it must have arisen because of her rape by Poseidōn, or because of the rape of her daughter, Persephonē, by Hadēs.⁶³ This strangely sensitive analysis explains how a shining Olympian goddess could be so traumatized, and so alienated from her own identity, as to become a black goddess, an underworld demon. The Arcadians are uncomfortable with this Black Dēmētēr, and reassuringly declare that she is not really a Fury, that her alienation is merely temporary. Her story would not, therefore, be so very different from the familiar one of the bright Olympian goddess, Dēmētēr, who temporarily withdraws her gifts from the human race. Black Dēmētēr is a saddened goddess of the upper world rather than a terrifying goddess of the Underworld. This Dēmētēr is soon persuaded by Zeus and the Fates to put aside her wrath, to return to her usual, benevolent self.⁶⁴ And the story told by the Arcadians ends happily… almost: Dēmētēr is once again a beautiful Olympian goddess… but she has the head of a horse, with snakes coming out of her hair!⁶⁵
For the myth of the first horse, however, the important point is that Areiōn is produced by the Underworld, and this chthonic origin is explicit in other versions of the myth. From Thelpousa in Arcadia, there was yet another story about the first horse, which is recorded by the poet Antimachus of Colophon (c. 400 BC):
Adrastos, son of Talaos, descendant of Krētheus,
was the first of the Danaoi to drive his two praiseworthy horses,
swift Kairos and Areiōn from Thelpousa;
near the grove of Apollōn Onkaios,
AUTĒ GAIA sent him up, a wonder for mortals to see.⁶⁶
Dēmētēr the Fury is absent from this version. We could interpret the words AUTĒ GAIA as ‘the Earth Goddess herself (autē Gaia)’, or ‘the earth itself (autē gaia)’, because AUTĒ GAIA could be either. Gaia is the least anthropomorphic of all the gods. She is almost indistinguishable from the earth itself, gaia. In the story of Erikhthonios, Hēphaistos does not sleep with her, as gods usually do with goddesses or mortal women. His semen merely falls onto her, or rather onto it, because it is the physical earth that receives his semen, even though both the earth itself and the Goddess Earth send up his offspring to Athēna. As we have already seen, only the upper body of Gaia appears on paintings of this event; her womb is the earth itself. Erikhthonios himself is a child of the physical earth, the soil (khthōn) of Attica. He is ‘very much a man of the soil’ (Eri-khthon-ios), he is born ‘from the soil itself’ (auto-khthōn). So the GAIA in the lines by Antimachus can be the goddess Gaia as well as the physical soil (khthōn) or earth (gaia) of Arcadia. It is not clear that there was any father in this version, because the word autē could imply that the goddess or soil produced Areiōn all by herself or itself.⁶⁷
In other regions of Greece, the goddess is dispensed with. There is no mother involved, no feminine contribution to the birth of the first horse. It is produced by the god Poseidōn from the physical earth itself. At Horse Hill (Hippios Kolōnos) near Athens, Poseidōn the Horse God (Poseidōn Hippios) merely ejaculates onto the ground, and this is how he produces the horse Skirōnitēs; in Thessaly, Poseidōn the Rock God (Poseidōn Petraios) does the same thing, and from the rock emerges the horse Skuphios.⁶⁸ Thessaly is, of course, a land strongly indebted to the power of Poseidōn as the god of earth-quakes. It lay underneath a lake, until Poseidōn shattered the mountains around it and created the new land of Thessaly.⁶⁹ He opened up the earth to create Thessaly, and opened up Thessaly to create the first horse, so that it comes from underneath the soil of a country that itself came from below the ground. In Attica, Horse Hill was also a gateway to the Underworld. It had a hero-shrine to Peirithoos and Thēseus, to Oidipous, and to Adrastos,⁷⁰ all of whom entered the Underworld while still alive. The horse comes from the very depths of the Underworld.⁷¹
There may be a Mycenean background to these myths. The horse was, after all, a recent arrival into the human world, and had to be assimilated somehow into their culture and religion. When the Egyptians learned how to use horses from their neighbours to the east, they took the easy way out. Instead of trying to find a place for the horse in the Egyptian pantheon, they simply imported the foreign patron gods of the horse, and expected them to look after these strange animals in their new home. The west Asian gods Reshef, Ishtar and Anat were the gods of the horse in Egypt.⁷² In Greece, however, the horse was adopted by local gods, who had to be transformed into horse gods for this purpose. Burkert speculates that Poseidōn may have become a horse god around 1600 BC, when the Mycenean Greeks started using the chariot,⁷³ but there is no evidence for any masculine Mycenean horse god. The Palace at Pylos does have a tablet with the words Potiniya Iqeya (Potnia Hippeia), the Mistress of Horses, which makes it clear that there was already a goddess of horses in Mycenean times.⁷⁴ Athēna was also worshipped in the Mycenaean period as Atana Potiniya (Atana Potnia), the Mistress of Atana.⁷⁵ At some stage, the Greeks must have equated these two goddesses, so Athēna Potnia and Potnia Hippeia became Athēna Hippia. The Mycenean backgrounds of Poseidōn Hippios and Athēna Hippia must remain speculative, but we do know what the later Greeks thought about these two gods.
The myths about the birth of the horse bring out one essential point: the horse is a chthonic creature, it is born of the earth; and yet it is also a product of sexuality, begotten by a pair of gods.⁷⁶ These dangerous gods, the earth-shaker Poseidōn Enosikhthōn, the rock god Poseidōn Petraios, and the outraged earth Dēmētēr Melaina, Dēmētēr Erinus, or simply Erinus, transform themselves into horse gods and then produce the first horse. For humans, autochthony claims that they belong to the land, and conversely asserts their claim to own that land; but for horses it asserts a derivativion from, and an equation with, the violent and destructive forces of the earth. This dangerous aspect of the horse emerges from other Greek myths.⁷⁷ Poseidōn becomes the father of the winged horse Pēgasos when he sleeps with another terrifying goddess, Medousa.⁷⁸ Pēgasos strikes the earth so violently when he first gallops off that the blow creates the spring Hippokrēnē (Horse Spring),⁷⁹ a miracle that is often repeated by the horse's equally violent father, Poseidōn.⁸⁰ Pēgasos displays his dangerous character again when he throws his owner, the great horseman Bellerophōn, who is a ruined man ever afterwards.⁸¹ The even more terrifying horses of Diomēdēs tear men to pieces and devour them.⁸²
As with the other dangerous forces of the earth, the horse is placed under the control of human technology by the goddess Athēna. Poseidōn may have produced the horse Pēgasos, but Athēna gives Bellerophōn the first bridle, which will allow him to ride Pēgasos.⁸³ In Bellerophōn's homeland, Corinth, she is worshipped as Athēna the Bridle Goddess (Athēna Khalinitis).⁸⁴ Poseidōn may have given men the horses to draw their chariots, but Athēna teaches men how to build the first chariot,⁸⁵ and how to drive it.⁸⁶ She is indeed Athēna the Horse Goddess (Athēna Hippia), but she is a very different kind of horse deity from Poseidōn. Athēna the Horse Goddess represents the technical skill that enables humans to master horses, whether riding them or driving them in a chariot; Poseidōn the Horse God represents the wild unpredictability of the horse, and the strength that we still call ‘horse power’.⁸⁷
The god Poseidōn violates an outraged goddess or the earth itself and produces the first horse. The god Zeus violates a goddess of outrage and produces Helenē. The Dioskouroi will end up being the gods of the horse and the brothers of Helenē, benevolent saviours strangely connected with deeds of primitive savagery by Olympian gods. This connection has very deep roots.
The ugly tale about Poseidōn the Horse God and his rape of the earth is not just an old story of the Greeks; it is also an Indo-European myth. The Greek story told us about a masculine birth of the horse, but the Dioskouroi had nothing to do with it; in the feminine story about Nemesis giving birth to Helenē, the Dioskouroi are not directly involved. They arrive later on the scene to witness the adoption of their new sister. When we turn to the Indian version of this story, the bestial rape and the horse gods are brought together, because that is how the Aśvins are born. As we saw in Chapter 2, this story is recorded in the Great Book of the Gods (the Bṛhaddevatā). The goddess Saraṇyū, daughter of Tvaṣṭar, has married Vivasvant, but after giving birth to the first humans, the twins Yama and Yamī, she gets bored with her mortal husband and decides to leave him:
Without her husband's knowledge,
Saraṇyū created a woman of similar appearance (savarṇā);
she entrusted her two children to this substitute,
became a mare, and departed.
(Bṛhaddevatā 7: 1)
The story of Saraṇyū involves two main episodes: the substitute and the metamorphosis. Both of these elements are found in the story of Helenē, and many scholars (myself included) have been so impressed by these similarities, that they have derived the names Saraṇyū and Helenē from Proto-Indo-European, *Selenā.⁸⁸ Unfortunately, the great names in Indo-European linguistics – Pokorny, Mayrhofer, and Watkins – do not accept this etymological connection between the two goddesses.⁸⁹ In any case, the thematic connections are still quite striking. If the names are, in fact, unrelated, we are dealing with a changed name rather than a new personality, with what Watkins calls ‘lexical substitution’ rather than ‘semantic change’.⁹⁰ Saraṇyū, like Helenē, is married off to a man, produces a family, gets bored with her husband, and disappears. Like Helenē again, she leaves a substitute to cover her absence.⁹¹ Hesiod was the first Greek poet to tell about Helenē's substitute (eidōlon),⁹² but the episode became famous because of what happened to Stesichorus of Himaera. He had written a poem called Helenā telling how she had run away with Paris.⁹³ The goddess Helenē had been insulted and had struck him blind. He wisely wrote some new poems called the Palinodes, in which he retracted his previous statements and declared that Helenē had never gone anywhere with Paris. The Trojan War had been fought over her eidōlon, and Helenē had nothing to do with Paris or Troy.⁹⁴ Impressed by the repentance of Stesichorus, Helenē restored his sight.⁹⁵
In both the Greek and the Indian stories, the substitute leads an adventurous life. Saraṇyū's substitute sleeps with Vivasvant and gives birth to Manu, an alternative ancestor of the human race.⁹⁶ Helenē's substitute runs off with Paris and starts the Trojan War, saving the world from overpopulation.⁹⁷ The episode of the substitute in Saraṇyū's story establishes her identity with Helenē, but the episode of the metamorphosis is more immediately relevant to the birth of Helenē and the birth of the horse in Greece.
In India, a goddess changes into a mare and gives birth to the horse gods. In Greece, one goddess (Dēmētēr Erinus) changes into a mare and gives birth to the first horse, Areiōn; another goddess (Nemesis or Lēdē) changes into a bird and gives birth to Helenē; in a later version of the story,⁹⁸ she gives birth to the horse gods also, as in India.
If we return to the Greek story of the violated earth, we shall find that it shares some further details with the Indian one. Poseidōn the Horse God turns into a stallion and rapes a goddess, or else he ejaculates his semen onto the ground. Both these details are combined in the Bṛhaddevatā. As in Greece, the goddess turns into a mare to escape her male stalker. The stalker sees through the trick, and turns himself into a horse. The Indian and Greek versions run as follows:
When, however, Vivasvant had become aware
that Saraṇyū had departed in the shape of a mare,
he quickly went after the daughter of Tvaṣṭar,
having become a horse of the same type.
(Bṛhaddevatā 7: 3)
But Poseidōn realized that he had been tricked, so he changed himself into a stallion and mated with Dēmētēr.
(Pausanias 8: 25, 5)
The stallion (Vivasvant) ejaculates his semen onto the ground, as Poseidōn does in some Greek versions, but Saraṇyū artificially inseminates herself with it.
When Saraṇyū recognized Vivasvant
in the form of a stallion,
she approached him for sexual intercourse,
and he mated with her there.
Then in their excitement,
the semen fell on the ground,
and the mared sniffed up that semen,
in her desire to become pregnant.
(Bṛhaddevatā 7: 4–5)
Such artifical insemination is a common narrative device in Indian stories, but in Greek myth it is not necessary.⁹⁹ If semen falls onto the ground in Greece, there is no need for a woman to act as a surrogate mother; the earth itself is fertilized by the semen and produces a horse like Areiōn, a man like Erikhthonios.¹⁰⁰ The only case of anything resembling artificial insemination or surrogate motherhood in the myths of Ancient Greece involves a male god, Zeus himself. He gives birth to Athēna from his head, to Dionusos from his thigh. In Greek myth, the male reproduction dreamt of by Hippolutos is a real possibility, and women can be eliminated from the reproductive process.¹⁰¹ In Indian stories, however, reproduction is nearly always sexual, so a surrogate mother has to come to the rescue and inseminate herself (Saraṇyū, Adrikā).¹⁰² These are, however, unusual procedures, only to be used in an emergency. Usually, there is no need to resort to the pregnant earth of Greece or the rented wombs of India.¹⁰³
In the case of Saraṇyū, we seem to have a conflation of two stories: her escape from Vivasvant is overdetermined. The metamorphosis is quite unnecessary, because she has already managed to get rid of Vivasvant through the more convenient device of a surrogate (same type, savarṇā, and same appearance, sadṛśī). Helenē had left a similar surrogate at Troy for Paris to play with, and back in Sparta ‘her ghost ruled the home’, and Menelaos was left with ‘beautiful statues’.¹⁰⁴ These goddesses can easily slip out of a man's arms, leaving him with nothing but his fantasies. The Ṛgveda describes Saraṇyū's disappearance as follows:
The mother of Yama, being married,
the wife of great Vivasvant, disappeared.
They (the gods) hid the immortal woman from the mortals,
and creating a similar (savarṇā) woman, they gave her to Vivasvant.
She gave birth to the Aśvins when this happened.
Saraṇyū abandoned her two twin children.
(RV 10: 17, 1–2)
Saraṇyū is married, she is the mother of Yama and Yamī, but she abandons her twin children and disappears. She is remarkably similar to Helenē, not just in the clever trick of the surrogate, but also in her behaviour and character. The Helenē described by Aeschylus and Sappho is a Greek version of Saraṇyū:
She walked lightly through the gates,
daring an undareable deed.
(Aeschylus, Agamemnon 407–408)
Leaving behind the best of men,
she went and sailed off to Troy,
she did not think at all
about her child or dear parents.
(Sappho, fr. 16 Campbell, 8–11)
Helenē is married, she is the mother of Hermionē, but she abandons her child and disappears without a care in the world. These light-hearted, free-spirited goddesses never settle down.
Saraṇyū's sexuality and fertility were temporarily placed at the disposal of Vivasvant, and she becomes the ancestor of the human race through her twin children, Yama and Yamī. This is the sole purpose of her marriage, and once it has been accomplished she feels free to leave. Her own daughter, Yamī, calls Saraṇyū ‘the young girl (yoṣā) of the waters’,¹⁰⁵ implicitly comparing her with one of the Apsarasas, the water nymphs who spend all their time playing music, dancing, and sleeping around. Helenē's beauty was sold twice over: she was set up as a prize for the most prestigious suitor in Greece, she was awarded to Paris as a fee for his judgement, and so she became, through no fault of her own, ‘a woman of many men’.¹⁰⁶ Her main function in life is to cause a war and relieve the earth of its excess population.¹⁰⁷ Once the war has started, she is irrelevant to the gods, so she reverts to her carefree manner.¹⁰⁸ The nonchalance that is an essential aspect of her characterization is best seen when Homer shows her casually making a tapestry of the war, fought, as he remarks, ‘on account of her’.¹⁰⁹ Saraṇyū's beauty and fecundity are utilized to create the human race; Helenē's saves the human race from its own excessive fertility. Even though these goddesses are perpetually young and immature, they are forced to play a vital role in the future of the human race, a role that is imposed on them by their overpowering fathers: by the laws (vratāni) of Saraṇyū's father Tvaṣṭar; by the plan (boulē) of Helenē's father Zeus.¹¹⁰
When Saraṇyū had done her duty by producing the first human couple, Yama and Yamī, ‘the gods hid this immortal woman from mortals’, as the Ṛgveda tells us. The gods did a fairly good job of it, because apart from the episode in which she mates with Vivasvant and gives birth to the Aśvins, nothing more is known about her. There is more to Helenē, however, than ‘Helen of Troy’, the woman who carried out the plan of Zeus by starting the Trojan war. She is also a goddess who is honoured in Athens and Sparta, and she forms a trinity with the Dioskouroi, just as Sūryā does with the Aśvins in Indian myth. Her abduction to Troy was probably modelled on the local stories of her disappearance from Attica and Laconia. I would like to start with the abduction that is not so well known, the Athenian story.¹¹¹
Helenē was regarded by the Athenians as one of their own goddesses, born from the egg of Nemesis at Rhamnous on the north coast of Attica, and worshipped at the ancient Mycenaean site of Thorikos, on the southern tip of the state.¹¹² According to the Athenian myth, Thēseus the king of the land marries Helenē, the beautiful young goddess. They have a daughter together, and her name is Iphigeneia.
The story is first mentioned by Stesichorus (632–566 BC), who tells us that Iphigeneia was the daughter of Thēseus.¹¹³ At Troizen in the Argolid, the mythical birthplace of Thēseus, there was a sanctuary of Aphroditē the Bride (Aphroditē Numphia), and according to Pausanias, ‘Thēseus built it when he made Helenē his wife’.¹¹⁴ There is only one vase-painting that presents the Athenian version of Helenē's marriage to Thēseus. It shows Thēseus and Peirithoos standing at an altar, while Helenē stands beside them with her mother, Lēdē, who presumably approves of this marriage with Thēseus. There are two young men present as well, who might be the Dioskouroi; if so, they are also giving their blessing to the marriage of Thēseus and Helenē.¹¹⁵
As a king, Thēseus is responsible for the fertility of his land, and he should guarantee this by his own correct behaviour, which in Homer and Hesiod means honouring the gods and upholding justice.¹¹⁶ By marrying Helenē, a young goddess of earthly and human fertility, Thēseus is taking a short cut to produce the desired result. Their marriage is, of course, fruitful and their daughter is the ‘mighty birth’ Iphigeneia.¹¹⁷ Her name resembles that of Kalligeneia, ‘beautiful birth’, the new-born goddess worshipped at the Athenian fertility festival of the Thesmophoria.¹¹⁸ For Thēseus and Helenē and Athens, Iphigeneia represents the new, life-giving fertility of the land.
Iphigeneia was worshipped under several names throughout the Greek world: as Artemis Iphigeneia in Hermione near Troizen;¹¹⁹ as Artemis or as Iphigeneia in the Temple of Artemis at Aigeira, in Achaea;¹²⁰ and according to the Catalogue of Women, she was honoured as Artemis of the Cross Roads (Artemis Enodiē),¹²¹ and also as Hekatē.¹²² Iphigeneia, Artemis Iphigeneia, Artemis of the Cross-Roads, and Hekatē are all forms of Artemis in her chthonic aspect. Her titles once again show that Iphigeneia, like Kalligeneia, is a young goddess of the earth who guarantees its fertility.
Iphigeneia is also visualized as a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman. The Temple of Artemis at Brauron was the place where little girls served the goddess as ‘Bears’ before returning home to face puberty and marriage; it was Iphigeneia who had brought the cult-statue of Artemis to Brauron.¹²³ The Temple of Artemis Orthia at Sparta played the same role for young Spartan girls, and once again it was Iphigeneia who had brought the cult-statue of Artemis Orthia to the temple.¹²⁴ According to the Spartan myth, Helenē had danced at the Temple of Artemis Orthia when she was a girl, and it was from this temple that Thēseus had abducted her, brutally forcing her into the world of women.¹²⁵ Iphigeneia, in contrast, has nothing to do with human fecundity or reproduction. She always remains a young girl; she never becomes an adult woman.¹²⁶
The Athenians rarely depicted their side of the story, because it was the Spartan version that prevailed. According to the Spartans, Helenē was a Spartan goddess, so she belongs to their king and country. An interesting compromise between the two stories appears in Argos, half-way between the two states. At Argos, there was a sanctuary of the birth-goddess Eileithuia, founded by Helenē: ‘they say that she was pregnant and gave birth in Argos; she then built the sanctuary of Eileithuia, and gave her new-born girl to Klutaimnēstra.’¹²⁷ Helenē has borne Thēseus a daughter, as if they were in a serious relationship (as in the Athenian story), but she leaves him and her daughter behind, and comes back home to Sparta, as if it had only been a temporary affair (as in the Spartan version). She gives birth to Iphigeneia neither in Attica nor in Sparta, but in Argos, so even if her reproductive powers are derived from Sparta and are activated by an abduction to Athens, her fertility benefits the land of Argos because she gives birth there, and her child will be raised in Argos by the queen of the land, Klutaimnēstra.
In Sparta, it is naturally their own king, Menelaos, who marries the adolescent fertility goddess of his land, Helenā. This Spartan story became part of the Panhellenic tradition, and their wedding is celebrated in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. This marriage was also accepted by Athenian artists. An archaic wedding vase from Attica shows Helenē standing on a chariot with an unidentified husband, and removing her veil. The Dioskouroi are there too, standing on a second chariot.¹²⁸ It was they, after all, and not her parents, who had arranged the marriage of Helenē, inviting suitors from all over Greece, and finally choosing Menelaos.¹²⁹
The wedding-night of Helenā and Menelaos is celebrated in the eighteenth Idyll of Theocritus, where a group of adolescent girls sing outside Helenā's bridal-chamber, and wish that she could remain a girl and play with them.¹³⁰ The marriage takes place in the spring,¹³¹ the trees in the meadows have put out their leaves,¹³² and the young girls feel like new-born lambs.¹³³ They commemorate Helenā's marriage by putting a garland on a plane-tree, pouring oil on its base, and writing on it, ‘Worship me: I am Helenā's tree’.¹³⁴ They are the first girls to do this,¹³⁵ and Spartan girls will maintain the custom every year.¹³⁶ Clearly, this is not just an ordinary wedding, but the marriage of a king with his fertile land. Their marriage is, of course, fertile, but their daughter Hermionē is just a normal human being, who dutifully produces a male heir to the throne of Sparta a generation later.¹³⁷
As we saw on the Attic wedding vase, the Dioskouroi take care to attend the ceremony. And with good reason. For the Spartan goddess Helenā has a tendency to disappear. Her youthful fertility is a transient thing, and she is a local Spartan version of the vanishing fertility goddess, Persephonē. Just as Persephonē disappears to the Underworld with Hadēs every winter and the earth refuses to produce food in her absence, so Helenā disappears and abandons the land of Sparta. Helenā follows the sun to the east, abducted by Thēseus to Attica¹³⁸ and by Paris to Troy;¹³⁹ or else she follows the sun to the south and ends up in Egypt, brought there by Paris or Menelaos,¹⁴⁰ or simply removed there by order of the gods.¹⁴¹ If her marriage to the king of the land represents its continuing productivity, her disappearance represents the loss of its life-giving force. This explains why her relationship with Thēseus is viewed from completely opposite perspectives in Athens and Sparta. For the Athenians, it is a marriage and a blessing to their land. For the Spartans it is an abduction, a loss that must be recuperated. So the Dioskouroi go off to rescue their sister, to bring Helenā back from the east. The Dioskouroi invade Attica, and find their sister in Aphidna, in the north-east of the country. They punish Thēseus for his crime by attacking Athens itself, enslaving his mother, Aithra, and replacing him as king of Athens with Menestheus.
This story of Thēseus and Helenē, viewed from a Spartan perspective, is a very old and famous one, and it became part of the Panhellenic epic tradition. Homer knew it, because Aithra is still Helenē's slave in the Iliad;¹⁴² it also appears in the Cypria of Stasinus, who tells us that Helenē was carried off to Aphidna and that the Dioskouroi plundered Athens.¹⁴³ Arctinus must have known the story too, because he tells us in the Sack of Ilion that the sons of Thēseus joined the war against Troy with the specific purpose of securing their grandmother's release.¹⁴⁴ At the Panhellenic sanctuary of Olympia, the Kupselos Chest depicted the Dioskouroi bringing Helenē back home to Sparta. They have enslaved Aithra, who is ‘thrown to the ground under Helenē's feet’. An inscription written in Doric Greek explained what was going on:
The Tundaridai are bringing Helenā away and they are dragging Aithra from Athens.¹⁴⁵
Alcman, being a Spartan poet, knew the whole story and recorded it in his poetry.¹⁴⁶ The Athenians naturally were not too fond of it, because it presented their king and hero, Thēseus, in such a bad light.¹⁴⁷ Only one vase survives that possibly depicts the Dioskouroi rescuing Helenē, and it is in fragments (its date is around 520 BC). One piece shows a chariot driven by Phorbas (the charioteer of Thēseus); another fragment has an unidentified young man in armour; a third one has the Dioskouroi. The only story that unites Thēseus and the Dioskouroi is the abduction of Helenē, so Köhne feels confident in identifying this as the theme of the vase.¹⁴⁸
Even the Athenians were eventually forced to accept the common opinion of the Greeks, and the abduction of Helenē appears in the first history of Athens, the Atthis of Hellanicus, written around 400 BC. Historians at this time were rigidly applying the new science of chronology to Greek myths, and since Thēseus belonged to the ancient generation of the Lapiths and Centaurs whereas Helenē was still a young woman during the Trojan War, Hellanicus concluded with cold mathematical logic that Thēseus must have been 50 and Helenē only seven at the time of her abduction.¹⁴⁹ This is, of course, a particularly absurd age for a Spartan girl, since they married ‘not when they were small and unready for marriage, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it’,¹⁵⁰ which was around 18 to 20 years old.¹⁵¹ The goals of Hellanicus were purely antiquarian, but through this difference in their ages, Thēseus becomes merely a force of old age and decay that is snatching youth and brightness away from the world. His role is identical to that of Hadēs in abducting the young Persephonē to the realm of the dead,¹⁵² and there was, in fact, another myth where Thēseus tried to replace Hadēs. He went down to the Underworld with his friend Peirithoos and they attempted to abduct Persephonē herself.¹⁵³
The significance of Helenē's abduction by Thēseus is clear, and in rescuing her the Dioskouroi are not only bringing their sister back home; they are also bringing back life and growth to the land. Helenē's story is Indo-European, because it is also found in the Baltic lands and in India.¹⁵⁴ In Latvia, the Dieva dēlī, the two Sons of the sky god Dievs, elope with a goddess called the Maiden of the Sun (Saules Meita), who is the daughter of the sun goddess, Saule.¹⁵⁵ In Indian myth, we again find a sun-goddess who is called simply Sūryā (Sun Goddess) or the Daughter of the Sun (Sūryasya Duhitā), and the Aśvins elope with her during the middle of her wedding to another god. Finally, we have Helenē herself, who once again runs away with the horse gods, but this time they are her brothers and they are rescuing her, not eloping with her. Their role as husbands is taken over by the brothers Agamemnōn and Menelaos,¹⁵⁶ who rescue her for the last time after the death of her brothers.
These thematic parallels are supported by an alternative etymology of Helenē's name, which derives it from the root *swel, ‘to burn, smoulder’. Helenē could, therefore, be a conflation of Helenē and Whelenē,¹⁵⁷ of ‘swift’ *Selenā and ‘sunny’ *Swelenā, of Saraṇyū and Sūryā. Helenē's sunny name identifies her with the Sun Goddess Sūryā-Saule, who is found in the company of the same twin horse gods, the Young Men of Zeus (Dios kouroi), the Grandsons of Dyaus (Divo napātā), the Sons of Dievs (Dieva dēl?). Their relationship may be explained in different ways – they can appear as siblings, friends, or spouses – but the trinity formed by the Twin Horse Gods and the Sun Goddess is an Indo-European theme that has survived in Greece, India, and the Baltics.
The stories told in Greece and India about the birth of the horse gods or their adventures with a goddess may preserve Indo-European elements, but the later career of the Dioskouroi is purely Greek. When Hesiod describes the age of heroes, he says that they died ‘for the sheep of Oidipous’,¹⁵⁸ and ‘for Helenē with her beautiful hair’.¹⁵⁹ Raiding livestock and abducting women are the main achievements of a Greek hero, so it is not surprising that the heroic Tundaridai abduct their future wives, the Leukippides. Twins can be viewed either as one person appearing twice, or as two different individuals. The first is clearly the case in the myths of the Indians, where the horse gods do not have separate names or identities. They are simply called the Aśvins or the Nāsatyas. It is only natural, therefore, that they would share one wife between them, the Sun Maiden, Sūryā. The Greek twin gods, however, are regarded as separate people. Even in Homer, the Dioskouroi already have their own individual personalities and names: Kastōr is an expert in horses, and Poludeukēs is an athlete,¹⁶⁰ or more specifically a boxer:
Kastōr the tamer of horses and Poludeukēs the great boxer.¹⁶¹
Each of the Dioskouroi will inevitably have his own individual wife with her own particular name. Their wives are called the Leukippides, which means ‘daughters of Leukippos’ (White Horse),¹⁶² though the Cypria makes them daughters of Apollōn instead.¹⁶³ The Spartan poet Alcman mentions their abduction in one of his poems.¹⁶⁴ He gives their names as Phoibē and Hilaeira, and he probably thought of Apollōn as their father.¹⁶⁵
The story of their abduction was well known in Sparta by the sixth century, since it is depicted on two of the most important sacred monuments in the land, the Temple of Athēna of the Bronze House, on the acropolis of Sparta, and the Throne of Apollōn at Amuklai.¹⁶⁶ As we saw in the previous chapter, however, these two White Horse Goddesses (Leukippides) are worshipped by the White Horse Girls (Leukippides), and these girls are under the authority of the Priest of the Tundaridai and the Leukippides. This priest is therefore responsible for the devotion of unmarried girls to the Girls of Leukippos, and of unmarried boys to the Boys of Tundareos.
This connection between the Leukippides and girlhood can be seen in a poem called ‘The Leukippides’. It was written by the fifth-century poet, Bacchylides of Ceos, and it starts off as follows:
We are performing a beautiful dance
and a new song
for violet-eyed Kupris.¹⁶⁷
These lines describe the moment when adolescent girls have taken their leave of Artemis, the goddess of the wildnerness, and have entered the new world of Kupris (Aphroditē).¹⁶⁸ While they are still in the realm of Artemis, they are viewed as wild and untamed. In Attica, they are the Bear Girls (Arktoi); in Sparta, they are the White Horse Girls (Leukippides). We find the same image of horse girls in a poem by Anacreon, where a girl is visualized as an untamed foal (pōlos) who must be subjected to bridle and reins.¹⁶⁹ This use of the metaphors ‘tame’ and ‘yoke’ for marriage is commonplace in Greek. Spartan girls are wild horses who must be tamed to bear the yoke of marriage, just as Spartan boys are wild foxes who must be tamed by the yoke of war.¹⁷⁰
The abduction of the Leukippides by the Dioskouroi is a popular theme in vase paintings.¹⁷¹ In Greek myth, girls are usually abducted from the dancing chorus of the virgin goddess Artemis, but two of the vase paintings that depict the abduction of the Leukippides show the girls being taken away from a temple of Aphroditē.¹⁷² As in the poem of Bacchylides, the Leukippides have already left Artemis behind; they are dancing and singing for Aphroditē. Many of these paintings show the two goddesses being carried off on chariots by the Dioskouroi in elaborate scenes crowded with figures. Some include gods, who look on with approval at this forced marriage.
The use of the chariot in these paintings implies that the abductors intend to marry their victims; when men run after women on foot, they want to rape them.¹⁷³ On one mixing-bowl, the abduction of the Leukippides in chariots on the upper panel of a vase is explicitly contrasted with a scene of Satyrs running after Maenads on the lower panel, where the goal is immediate sex rather than any long-term relationship.¹⁷⁴ On other vases, however, the violent and sexual nature of the abduction is brought to the fore, and the Dioskouroi, armed with spears, pursue the Leukippides on foot, as in a rape scene. In one particularly violent example, a Son of Zeus drags one of the Leukippides by the hair,¹⁷⁵ a form of violence against women that is otherwise only depicted on battle-scenes where Greeks are killing Amazons.¹⁷⁶
This violent ‘initiation’ into marriage is typical of heroic society. Helenē is abducted from the temple of Artemis, the Leukippides are abducted from the temple of Aphroditē. At Sparta, however, it had a special significance, because even in historical times it was normal for a Spartan man to abduct his bride.¹⁷⁷ It was yet another of the archaic institutions that Sparta alone had preserved. Spartan boys and Spartan girls receive a brutal and violent initiation into the adult world. Whether they are human or divine, the young women are always abducted, the White Horse Girls by Spartan men, the White Horse Goddesses by the Dioskouroi. Their story is equally at home in heroic myth and in Spartan reality.
The second great activity of the heroic world, according to Hesiod, is cattle-raiding. Such a cattle-raid forms the last episode in the mythical biography of the Dioskouroi. Idas and Lunkeus were the Apharētidai, the sons of Aphareus, and they lived in Messenia, the neighbouring state and traditional enemy of Sparta. The sons of Aphareus and the sons of Tundareos join forces for a cattle-raid. This story was known throughout the Greek world, and the Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi (570–550 BC) shows the four of them using their spears to drive the cattle home.¹⁷⁸
After this victory, the two sets of twins start to fight over the cattle they have won. The Dioskouroi hide in a hollow oak tree, hoping to ambush Idas and Lunkeus and kill them when they pass by. Unfortunately for them, Lunkeus happens to possess the magic gift of being able to see everything, no matter how distant it may be. He and his brother go up to the oak tree and attack the Dioskouroi. Poludeukēs kills Lunkeus, Idas kills Kastōr, and Zeus blasts Idas with a thunderbolt, leaving Poludeukēs as the sole survivor. In later times, visitors to Sparta could see the tombs of the Apharētidai¹⁷⁹ and the trophy erected by Poludeukēs to celebrate his victory.¹⁸⁰ The story of their combat was obviously well-known in Sparta,¹⁸¹ and it became a part of the Panhellenic tradition, since it appears in the sixth-century Cypria.
And Lunkeus quickly
went up to Taügetos, relying on his swift feet.
Going up to the very top, he looked throughout the entire Island
of Pelops son of Tantalos, and the glorious hero soon saw
with his amazing eyes the two of them inside the hollow oak tree,
horse-taming Kastōr and the champion athlete Poludeukēs.
Going right up to the huge oak tree, he stuck his spear through it…¹⁸²
That is as far as our quotation from the Cypria goes, but the ending of the story is recorded by a later author:
The poet who composed the Cypria wrote that Kastōr was speared to death by Idas, son of Aphareus.¹⁸³
The full story is given by Pindar, who tells us that Poludeukēs agreed to share his immortality with Kastōr, who was then raised from the dead by Zeus. They spend one day alive under the earth, and the next day ‘in the golden homes of heaven’.¹⁸⁴ And that marks the end of their earthly biography. The Sons of Tundareos die as local heroes after a very ordinary cattle-raid.
Even though they were the brothers of Helenē, the Dioskouroi were regarded as belonging to the generation before the Trojan War, and they participated in two of its great Panhellenic adventures, the voyage of the Argō and the boar-hunt of Calydon.
The Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi (570–550 BC) gives us an idea of how the Dioskouroi were viewed by Greeks in general. It shows the Dioskouroi on horseback in front of the Argō;¹⁸⁵ even on a sea voyage they remain horse gods. From Greek vase paintings, we see that the Dioskouroi only play a minor, supporting role in the story of the Argō. One of the Dioskouroi holds the hand of King Phineus, while Iasōn cures him of blindness.¹⁸⁶ The Dioskouroi pinion the giant Talōs, so that Mēdeia can kill him without interference.¹⁸⁷ At the funeral games for King Pelias, Kastōr comes second in the chariot-race on a Corinthian vase,¹⁸⁸ but on the Kupselos Chest at Olympia, it is Poludeukēs who competes in this chariot-race.¹⁸⁹ The Homeric formula that makes Kastōr the horse-tamer must not have been universally accepted, but the tradition of the Argō story does know that Poludeukēs is a great boxer. The only significant achievement by either of the Dioskouroi is when he defeats the barbarian king Amukos of the Bebrukes in a boxing-match.¹⁹⁰ So the Dioskouroi are relatively minor figures in the story of the Argō saga. Their participation was, however, well-established, because the Spartans believed that their statue of Arēs Thēritas had been brought back from Kolkhis by the Dioskouroi.¹⁹¹
The other Panhellenic adventure they took part in was the boar-hunt of Calydon, where they simply go along with all the other hunters.¹⁹² Since the Greek elites enjoyed boar-hunting, the Calydonian hunt was a popular theme on Greek vases.¹⁹³ In both of these Panhellenic expeditions, there is little to distinguish the Dioskouroi from the general mass of heroes, or to suggest that they are gods.
As sons of king Tundareos, the Dioskouroi also play a small, secondary role in the mythical history of Sparta itself. When their wicked uncle Hippokoōn drove Tundareos from the throne, Hēraklēs helped them to restore their father.¹⁹⁴ Other versions of the story attributed the restoration of Tundareos to Hēraklēs alone.¹⁹⁵ In Athens, the Dioskouroi deposed Thēseus to punish him for his abduction of Helenē, and made Menestheus king instead. It seems fitting that their role was to help others reach the throne rather than become kings themselves: they remain adolescents.
The most striking feature about the young horse gods in Greece is their ambiguity: they have two names, Tundaridai and Dioskouroi; they have two natures, chthonic heroes and Olympian gods. Some of the stories about their earthly existence treat them as generic heroes – the voyage of the Argō, the boar-hunt of Calydon. It does not matter much that they are the sons of Tundareos, it only matters that they are heroes of some kind. Other stories treat them as very specific heroes, the sons of Tundareos, who belong to a particular place, Sparta, and show them deeply immersed in its local mythology – the abduction of the Leukippides, the final battle with the Apharētidai. These deeds could only have been carried out by local Spartan heroes. And some let us glimpse their divinity – the story of their birth, the rescue of Helenē. In these stories, they are neither heroes nor Spartans. They associate with other gods, they are playing a divine role, but one that is unique to them.
The gap between the two sides of their nature comes out most clearly at the points where they must meet, at birth and in death. The Greeks try to eliminate this gap by dividing their double nature between them, assigning all the chthonic heroic mortality to Kastōr, and all the Olympian divine immortality to Poludeukēs; but instead of removing the problem, this solution creates a new one. We may have solved the mystery of the twins, but we now have to face the even greater mystery of Poludeukēs. The Greeks are familiar with the births of gods, but what does it mean for the god Poludeukēs to be born as a human being, and to go through life without ever knowing that he is a god? Zeus only reveals this to him when his brother Kastōr dies. And what happens to Poludeukēs after Kastōr dies? The Greeks are silent on this point, but he must have died in some sense or other, because he ends up being buried with his brother. This is quite different both from the apotheosis of a human being like Hēraklēs, and from the usual temporary human disguises that the gods adopt, a trick of theirs that exasperated Plato.¹⁹⁶ Poludeukēs is more than a human being who becomes a god, and more than a human form that is adopted by a god; he is neither simply a human being nor simply a god.
When it comes to the cult of the Dioskouroi, however, the Greeks definitely err on the side of divinity. The Dioskouroi do indeed possess a tomb, but they are worshipped as Olympian gods. In their story that the Dioskouroi led normal human lives, and were then worshipped as gods 40 years after their deaths, the Spartans are merely expressing a metaphysical gap in terms of a time gap. They are trying to build a bridge between the life of two heroes and the worship of two gods. The essence of the Dioskouroi, however, lies in those 40 years, in that gap between mortality and divinity.
It is easier to talk about their function. They are male adolescents (Kouroi), that bridge of ten years or so between boys and men. They are horsemen, that necessary bridge beween warlords in chariots and ordinary soldiers on foot. They are Saviours (Sōtēres), that mysterious bridge between gods and men. These functions all mesh together – their rescues, their service, their youth. In Greece, as in India, a god who focuses so much on rescuing mankind is something less than a god. In India, he is a god who does not deserve to drink soma with the other gods; in Greece, he is a part-time god – one day god, one day dead. These young horse gods do not ride out in glory like cavaliers; they are only fit to be sent on errands. They do not carry out their missions in dignified grandeur, like Hermēs or Iris; they obey instantly, rescuing a shipload of sailors, saving an army of soldiers, putting a king on a throne, escorting a goddess back home. And all of this is an aspect of their youth. For in Greece as in India, adolescence is a time of poverty and obedience, a time when a young man is an outlaw and almost a slave.¹⁹⁷ They come from Sparta, a land where this ancient conception of adolescence was maintained for longer and in a more extreme form than in any other Greek state,¹⁹⁸ and it defines the Dioskouroi. They never grow up; they remain Tundaridai, the sons of Tundareos, and Dioskouroi, the young men of Zeus.
It is hard to grasp these gods; they are ambiguous and, as Plato says about all ambiguity, they summon thought and awaken the understanding.¹⁹⁹ It is even hard to think of them as gods, for Plato has told us that the eternal should be absolute,²⁰⁰ but the very essence of the Dioskouroi is their relativity. They are divine in relationship to men, and earthly in relationship to the Olympians; they are heroic adventurers in comparison to childish boys, and immature tricksters in comparison to heroes; to their human worshippers, they are Dioskouroi; to the gods, they are Tundaridai.