This mountain, its god and their travels lie firmly within the horizon of Euboeans abroad. They lived at the mountain’s foot. They coped with its storms on land and sea. They travelled west to a site on Corcyra where conditions were similar and where we know that the god of the mountain was later transposed, although we cannot yet show that they transposed him westwards in the eighth century BC. There was more to the mountain, however, than storms and winds. It was the ancient seat of the gods and of prolific stories about them. Here, at last, we can follow the Greeks as they encountered these stories in the east and then transferred items in them to new locations across their known world.
On the south side of ‘Mount Hazzi’, clay tablets found at Ugarit (Ras Shamra) give us fragments of ancient Canaanite myths which refer to the exploits of their god of the mountain, the lord Baal. They describe his attempt to establish his palace on the mountain’s peak and the struggles with monsters and cosmic enemies which accompanied his efforts.1 On this same mountain, the Hittites too had praised and paid cult to the established Storm God, Teshub or Tarhunta, in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1350–1200 BC). He, too, had to fight to establish his rule on Mount Hazzi: we know stories of his struggles because they survive in tablets found far away at the great Hittite palace-centre of Boghaz–Koy in central Turkey.2 As time passed, other Levantine cultures within sight of Mount Kasios told yet more tales of the gods in its orbit. There were Phoenician stories too, but our only surviving hints of their contents lie in parts of Philo of Byblos’s book on Phoenician religion. It was not compiled until c. AD 60–80 and it was composed in Greek. Although it is of uncertain authority, it drew on much earlier sources which were grounded in non-Greek traditions.3
Our texts of these Hittite and Canaanite stories date back at least to c. 1200 BC, but the stories are even older than our surviving evidence for them. If Greeks ever picked up these tales it was not by reading them in Near Eastern archives or libraries or by consulting the scribal copies which have preserved them. The scripts and written languages were mysteries to them. They had to learn them from conversation. Historians have continued to wonder about contexts in which these stories would ever have been told in public. If only we could locate one of these tales, it would be so much easier to argue how they filtered sideways, reaching others, including Greeks, on the north Syrian coast.
By a remarkable accident of survival, we have evidence for the formal telling of one group of stories in a specific place. It survives in fragmentary Hittite texts which date back to the late thirteenth century BC. As they are lists of cult-offerings, not mythical narratives, their contents are not familiar to historians of the Greeks overseas.4 They contain lists of offerings which were to be made in honour of Mount Hazzi, the Jebel Aqra. Among the honours were the ‘singing of the song of kingship’ and the ‘singing of the song of the sea’. These songs were not songs about a kingship exerted by Mount Hazzi itself, for which we have no evidence: they were songs of the struggle for the kingship in Heaven, the battles which left the Storm God (the Hittite Tarhunta) supreme on the mountain-top. They were sung in honour of Mount Hazzi and obviously they would be sung on Mount Hazzi itself.
This location is extremely important. Mount Hazzi rises steeply off the beach into which the Orontes river runs and dominates the view south from the two nearby Greek points of settlement by the sea: Sabouni, 3 miles inland, to which Greeks came in the Mycenaean era, and Al Mina, ‘Potamoi Karon’, to which they returned in the early eighth century BC. While they first visited Sabouni, there had been formal public occasions, we now see from these Hittite texts, on which the weather-god’s struggles in heaven were sung on the mountain towering above them. The singing was set to music, as the Hittite word for it shows: these songs were sung as hymns, probably by choirs.5 The persistence of this singing is an important question, but first we need an idea of what these two songs contained. Fortunately, they resemble songs which survive in our best-known Hittite song-sequence, the one which we can reconstruct from fragmentary copies found further north at the Hittite royal capital of Boghaz-Köy.
The ‘song of kingship’ for Mount Hazzi was the very same song about the Storm God’s kingship which we know from these sources. He (Tarhunta) had to survive the aggression of his father Kumarbi, the previous king. He then had to survive Kumarbi’s attempts to dethrone him with at least three monstrous enemies deployed one after the other. The ‘song of kingship’ told of the battles and the ‘song of the sea’ told of a victory by the Storm God when water had once flooded the earth. The god of the sea had to be won over, but in the end the Storm God triumphed over his enemies. The story was set exactly by Mount Hazzi and its accompanying ‘twin peaks’. It was sometimes sung as part of a ritual ‘when the Storm God is brought to the mountains’, no doubt to the mountains in the Jebel Aqra’s range. ‘The singers sing the song of the deeds of the sea, how the Storm God conquered the Sea.’ This song was widely known and is cited by name in other surviving Hittite stories: parts of it have recently been recovered from fragmentary tablets too. In the orbit of Mount Hazzi it was matched by similar songs in the adjoining cultures. Fragmentary tablets from Ras Shamra on the south side of the mountain tell the story of Baal, the Canaanites’ god of the mountain, and his victory over the sea-god too. This Canaanite story, told on the south side, matched the story which the Hittites were telling on the north side. There were offerings, too, to Sapanu, the mountain, just as there were offerings on the other side of it to Hazzi, its other name. They took place in the spring.6 There was a very good reason why such a song and a rite were common to them both. The god on Mount Hazzi, whether Baal or Tarhunta, needed to have mastered the sea which surged directly below his seat.
The Hittite ‘song of kingship’ begins with some gruesome episodes, but they are not as bizarre as they seem when read in isolation. In many cultures throughout the world, the prehistory of the gods is described in terms of an act of separation and a struggle for the succession to power. In these stories the first gods are Heaven and Earth and they are believed to have been joined so tightly that all was shrouded in darkness.7 Their joining is often described as sexual and during it there appear other gods whom they procreate. Copulating Heaven and Earth have, then, to be separated so that light can come between them. After they are separated the gods whom they have created then challenge each other in a series of family struggles. These stories are widespread across the world because mortals tend to imagine the society of the gods as a grander version of the society of rulers on earth. In kingdoms, therefore, including those of the Near East, the gods are imagined as members of a court. Their king has struggled to depose a previous king and then has to fight to retain power: the reason, ultimately, for these stories is that kings, courtiers and usurpers are recurrent items in earthly Near Eastern history. In their struggles, gods, like rulers, can be defeated, but unlike human usurpers, they can never die. As a result the tales of their succession-struggles end with the imprisonment or neutering of the losers, but never with their killing.
We can see the explanatory value of these types of story. The tales of separation explain how heaven was placed above the earth and how light originated from darkness. The tales of succession bring the gods into a hierarchy and emphasize the power of the victor, the ruling god, in the tellers’ own times. Both these types of story are known to us from fragmentary Hittite texts although the separation of Heaven and Earth is less well known because it survives only in a passing reference in the few texts which we have. Once upon a time, we learn, Heaven and Earth had been cut apart with a ‘copper cutter’, probably a toothed saw, which was then preserved in an ancestral storehouse. Later, the Storm God and the other gods were reminded of this ancient weapon’s existence when they took refuge on Mount Hazzi, the Jebel Aqra, during a crisis. They were being threatened by a fast-growing monster of stone and they used the ‘copper cutter’ to destroy it beside the Jebel Aqra’s seashore.8
The struggles for succession in the Hittite heaven are known in more detail through fragmentary texts whose scope and sequence continue to be clarified by modern scholarship. Four gods succeeded each other, the fourth of whom was Tarhunta the Storm God, the reigning lord on Mount Hazzi. The Storm God then had to preserve his rule against various challengers whom his predecessor, Kumarbi, fathered against him. Kumarbi had been the third ruler in the Hittite series: he was the son of the first ruling god and had served the second, Anu (Heaven), as a cupbearer at court. Kumarbi’s own succession had been a grim occasion.9 He had fought Anu and after a long struggle he had forced him to take flight: as Anu flew up to the sky, Kumarbi pulled him down and bit off his private parts with his teeth. Anu warned him that his mouthful of manhood would impregnate him with three dreadful gods: Kumarbi spat out as much as he could, but he could not expel everything. Anu’s sperm became ‘mixed in his stomach, just as bronze (is mixed) from copper and tin’. So a child was conceived inside him and began to try to come out. Kumarbi asked for this child to be given to him so that he could destroy it: the text is fragmentary, but we know that Kumarbi says: ‘Give me my [so]n, I will eat [h]im.’ This child is Tarhunta the Storm God: frag-mentarily, we read, ‘…Tarhunta, I want to eat; I will crush (him)’. Kumarbi takes up something ‘to eat’, but it is a hard stone which hurts his teeth. He begins to cry out. The stone is then set aside and is to be given a name (which we cannot translate) and to be paid cult, one sort of cult for the rich, another for the poor. Then, and only then, does the Storm God, his son, emerge from inside him.
The surviving words of this part of Kumarbi’s song are so important for Greek historians because they resemble a very famous episode in Greek myth. It is first known to us in the elegant poem the Theogony, which Hesiod composed c. 715–705 BC. As Hesiod tells it, the story combines elements of both a separation and a succession.10 The Greek Heaven and Earth are the first generation of gods, but father Heaven persists in making love to mother Earth and refuses to allow any of her children to be born. In pain, Earth contrives to make a great sickle and then calls on her unborn sons for help. One of them, Cronos’, volunteers.
In Hesiod’s poem, the union of Heaven and Earth is not continuous and so daytime already exists in the intervals while the pair are apart: the separation has begun, but it is not total. When Heaven next ‘came to mother Earth, bringing dark night’ as Hesiod skilfully expresses it, he lay on her and began his all-night sexual marathon. But Cronos was waiting in ambush and when Heaven was in place, he took the sharp-toothed sickle in his hand and swiped from behind at his father’s sexual parts. He ‘mowed them off vigorously’ and threw them away behind him. Furies, Giants and nymphs sprounted from the drops of blood which hit the ground, but the parts themselves were thrown into the sea. White foam, or aphros, spread out from them and gave birth to the Greek goddess of love, aphrodite. She was spawned from Heaven’s foaming DNA.
After this act of castration Cronos ruled as King Cronos in place of his neutered father.11 He married his sister Rhea and he too fathered children. He devoured each one, fearing the warning of his parents that one of them would one day rule in his place: it was this episode in the story that stood on the bowl which was ingeniously faked for Phalaris in Sicily and falsely inscribed to suggest it was Daedalus’ work. The story was indeed a very old one. Eventually Rhea contrived to hide her youngest son, Zeus, and gave Cronos a stone to swallow instead of the child. Cronos vomited the stone, but Zeus grew up in safe keeping at a distance. Zeus then released the Titans, who had been born to Heaven and Earth before Heaven’s castration. With the Titans’ help he deposed Cronos and began to rule in heaven.
The story we meet in Hesiod’s poem has an evident resemblance to the old Hittite story of kingship, although the correspondence is not complete. In the Greek story, there are three successive generations of gods (Heaven, Cronos, Zeus), whereas the Hittite songs tell of four. In the Hittite story, but not the Greek, these successors in heaven are from two separate branches of the family line. In the Greek story there is not the same emphasis on a succession of kings, which the Hittite songs describe as happening every ‘nine years’. In the Greek story, Cronos swipes with a sickle and parts Heaven and Earth. In the Hittite stories, Heaven and Earth were parted with a ‘copper cutter’ but Kumarbi is not said to have done the cutting himself. Instead he attacks Anu (Heaven) later and castrates him with his teeth. He impregnates himself in the process. In the Greek story, Cronos does not bite Heaven: he castrates him with a sickle and is the first to be called a king. A goddess, Aphrodite, is born from Heaven’s sperm and Cronos then has children by impregnating his wife Rhea in the usual way. However, the three gods in the Greek story of succession match the second, third and fourth gods in the Hittite sequence and there are at least eight other conspicuous similarities between the two stories, including the substitution of a stone for an unborn son. When the Hittite tablets began to be studied in the 1930s, a resemblance was already evident. Improved knowledge of the Hittite texts has made the resemblance very much stronger: no specialist who has kept up with the subject would now contest it.12
The case for the stories’ relationship does not depend on our two surviving written sources, as if one of them must have been the direct source of the other. More than five hundred years separate Hesiod from our texts of the Hittite song and in neither case are we reading the one and only version of the myth. Hesiod was telling a story which was already older in Greek than his own adornment of it, and our text of the Hittite song had itself been copied from an older tablet. Our single surviving text of it cannot have defined every subsequent Hittite telling of the story, either in 1200 BC or later: Hittites, indeed, did not treat texts which they borrowed from others as canonical, or allow them to inhibit their own versions of the story. There will have been other Greek and Hittite versions, now lost to us, and they may have been even closer to each other. As time passed they may also have amalgamated more details from similar stories in neighbouring cultures. If we work backwards from the Greek story which had taken shape by c. 710 BC, ‘we begin to hear a many-voiced interplay…’, as a great connoisseur has suggested, ‘all of which seems to have some connection with Hesiod’.13
Behind this ‘many-voiced interplay’, however, one human fact is certain: at some point, somewhere, particular Greeks talked to people in the Levant, heard their stories and wove them into their own stories of their gods. This ‘interplay’ had several phases, and both parties to it should be allowed to contribute. Greeks surely did not arrive in the east in the Mycenaean age with empty minds on these topics. Tales of a separation of Heaven and Earth are widespread in many cultures, including cultures which cannot have influenced each other directly. The Greeks, then, may have had their own independent stories of a succession of gods in heaven and may already have believed that Heaven ruled, then Cronos, then Zeus. On arriving in the east they would realize that there was a fortuitous convergence between their existing stories and the stories of people they met there. Greeks did not adopt the cruel story of castration in order to fill a vacuum: they took it over because it amplified their existing stories of the gods’ struggles. We can even suspect how some of this amplification took root. When Greeks heard the Hittite stories about Kumarbi, they heard (almost certainly) that he was a god of corn and the corn-harvest.14 So, in their own stories, was Cronos, one of whose roles was to be a god of the harvest.15 It was easier, then, for them to credit Cronos with deeds which their foreign informants ascribed to Kumarbi. One of these deeds was the emasculation of Heaven with a bite of the teeth. However, there was also a Hittite story of the parting of Heaven from Earth with a ‘cutter’, a weapon fit for the Greek Cronos.16 The castration was therefore ascribed by Greeks to a cutting swipe with a sickle, not a crude bite. As a harvester, Cronos was sometimes imagined to carry a cutter for reaping. How better for him to have separated his father Heaven from mother Earth than by castrating him with his personal type of cutter, a harvest-sickle?
The influence of Near Eastern stories on the Greek story in Hesiod is evident, but the date of this influence remains very controversial. Scholars have tended to pose a choice, either an influence in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC) or one in the eighth century BC, much nearer to Hesiod’s own time. The early date has a decided aptness. The Hittites’ ‘song of kingship’ was indeed being sung c. 1200 BC in honour of Mount Hazzi and it could have been encountered then by Greek visitors from Crete or Cyprus or further afield when they visited the coastline near that very mountain and settled at Sabouni just opposite it on the Orontes river. However, we need not think of only one contact behind what we now read in Hesiod’s Greek and we should not polarize the question as if only the thirteenth or the eighth century BC is possible. An earlier contact in the thirteenth century may have left its mark on Greek stories about the gods which then lived on for the next three or four hundred years, passed on by word of mouth. These half-remembered tales were then greatly confirmed when Greeks returned and settled once again on the Levantine coast at Al Mina beside Mount Hazzi. This settlement was an eighth-century event, not far from Hesiod’s lifetime. Although Euboean goods, and probably Euboean Greeks too, had been finding their way to the Levant since the tenth century BC, a knowledge of the struggles on the mountain required Greeks to be living directly beside it and wanting to understand its gods’ stories. During the first phase of Greek visiting, not settlement, we have suggested that the coast of Unqi and the Orontes river were not a main destination of Cypriot Greeks or Phoenicians. We should think, rather, of an initial Bronze Age encounter, confirmed by Greeks from Euboea when they established a firm presence on the north side of Mount Hazzi. That establishment, our Al Mina, occurred in the early eighth century BC.
At that date Mount Hazzi still soared above the plain and, as we have seen in some detail, a neo-Hittite culture persisted in the north Syrian kingdom of Patina (Unqi) and its capital of Kinalua (Tell Tayinat) inland. So, surely, did the singing of the ‘song of kingship’ in the mountain’s honour, on the mountain itself. After all, the mountain was still the same potent and dominating force in people’s lives. Whether or not any Greeks went up onto its slopes to hear such songs and to ask what they meant, their neighbours, not least their local women, would know about these performances and could pass on the ancient stories to their enquiring Greek visitors on the beach below. They were sure to be asked, because the gods of the mountain affected everyone, whatever language they spoke. When tremendous thunder rolled off the mountain, the lightning flashed and the sea began to swell off Al Mina’s beach, any Greek would wish to know the divinities of the place. They would ask their neighbours, their co-residents and sometimes their bed-mates and learn the stories which the landscape and songs ‘of the sea’ and ‘of kingship’ on Mount Hazzi had kept alive. Our two channels of transmission of genuine Near Eastern knowledge, women and the landscape, here combine as one.
Can we add further arguments for the date when Greeks’ stories about the gods’ struggles were intensified by this sort of contact? The story which we now read in Hesiod contains two particular hints. In Homer’s epics and Hesiod’s poem, Cronos is called by the epithet ankulomētēs, a word which means ‘crooked-counselling’. In fact, Cronos was not characterized by acts which were particularly devious. It looks as if his adjective has changed from the older and apt ankulamētēs, meaning the ‘crooked reaper’ with a crooked sickle.17 This older word for ‘reaping’ contained the meaning around which the Near Eastern story of Kumarbi had converged with the Greeks’ stories about Cronos, but it had started to fade from memory for poets in Hesiod’s active lifetime. The convergence, then, between Cronos and Kumarbi has to have occurred some while before c. 720 BC.
There is a second hint which points to a date after c. 1200 BC, perhaps c. 900–780, involving a separate Greek zone from the Euboean presence at Al Mina. Unlike the Hittite story, Hesiod’s story brings in the goddess of sexual love, Aphrodite, and describes how she was born, a ‘birth of Venus’, from Heaven’s scattered male parts. Why ever was Aphrodite brought into the older succession story at all? She had an important cult at Paphos on Cyprus, where her worship may even have originated for the Greeks.18 She had another cult on the island of Cythera off southern Greece. According to Hesiod, the male ‘foam’ from which she was born floated first to Cythera, then eastwards to Paphos on Cyprus. He was imagining its progress from a vantage-point in Greece, whereas in real life Aphrodite may have travelled from the eastern ‘triangle’ westwards to the Greek mainland. Nonetheless Hesiod assumes that it was on the west coast of Cyprus, at or near Paphos, that Aphrodite first emerged onto the land and ‘grass grew beneath her slender feet’.19
Perhaps, then, Greeks who worshipped Aphrodite at Paphos in Cyprus first attached their goddess’s birth to an older ‘succession’ tale of the gods which was known to them from north Syria’s coast. At Paphos, Aphrodite’s cult was directly connected with the Near East: the historian Herodotus inferred that it derived from worship of the goddess Astarte at Ascalon on the Levantine coast.20 Had, then, Astarte’s Phoenicians also picked up the old Hittite ‘song of kingship’ on this coastline and attached their own goddess to its tale of castration too? The one surviving source for Phoenician interest in the story is the late Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos. He tells in Greek how the Phoenician god El ‘ambushed his father Heaven and castrated him near the spring and rivers…and the blood from his genitals dripped into the spring and waters of the rivers, and until this day the place is shown’.21 In Philo’s history, El (Cronos) was the founder of the ‘first city’, Byblos. As a man of Byblos, Philo would not omit a chance to emphasize his city’s antiquity. But the ‘red rivers’, once again, are the Nahr Ibrahim and its tributaries in Byblos’s hinterland. We do not know how far back this location of the dreadful deed went (it might have been invented long after Hesiod’s time), but it does at least show that a tale of castration was not impossible in Phoenician storytelling.
On Cyprus, priests and worshippers of Aphrodite–Astarte linked their goddess with the ‘song of kingship’ as sung on Mount Hazzi, the Jebel Aqra. Whether Phoenicians had already made this connection in their own homeland we cannot now say, but at Cythera and Paphos the story was told in a milieu where the two peoples, Greek and Phoenician, met. This meeting was not obviously one in the Bronze Age when Aphrodite and her cult were formed. It sits better in the eleventh to early eighth centuries, when Phoenicians were visiting Old Paphos and then settling on Cyprus and when Cypriots were aware of the seat of the stories, Mount Hazzi and its surrounding region, which they visited by sea. Their own great goddess Aphrodite could be worked into the story, which gained from the Cypriots’ ingenious retelling. Their version is a mythical pair to the fine ‘black-on-red’ glazed jugs and pottery which were innovations of this same fertile period in Cypriot history. In Greek the story was retold with a well-omened pun: aphros (‘male foam’) caused Aphrodite’s birth.
In the early eighth century Euboeans below Mount Hazzi encountered the local story afresh for themselves, probably without the ‘birth of Venus’: that part of the story flourished on Cyprus, where, as casual visitors, some of them might have heard it too. What mattered, first of all, was the basic story of succession in heaven. Scholarly concern to establish one date for the Greeks’ appropriation of the Hittite story has caused a simpler question to be ignored: whatever became of the story’s main agent, the sickle? It was, after all, the most memorable item in the story which the Greeks developed. Inquisitive Greek minds might well wonder about its whereabouts. We happen to know that in the oldest Hittite story, the cutter was kept respectfully near the mountain after the parting of Heaven and Earth, and was available for use in a second round of battles. This repeated use of it did not pass into the Greek story as told by Hesiod. Since antiquity the question of the sickle’s whereabouts has not been posed, but enough survives in later, localized Greek texts to give exact answers. The main answer is an eighth-century one, confirming that the story of the god’s castration was particularly fresh and lively at that time.
On the fully developed Greek map, various promontories became known as Drepanon, the Greek word for a sickle.22 They had a distinctive, hooked outline, and among them there was one on the west coast of Cyprus, another on the south shore of the Sea of Marmara (south-east of modern Istanbul), another on the coast of Achaea, overlooking the Gulf of Corinth, another in north-western Sicily where the ancient name Drepanon survives as the modern Trapani. The attachment of myths to place names continued to exercise authors throughout antiquity and so it might seem impossible to trace such locations back into the eighth century BC. At one sickle-shaped site, however, the connections between place and object are impeccably early.
By the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, Greeks settled on what is nowadays the Sicilian site of Messina at a date probably c. 730–720 BC. Our most authoritative source for this settlement is the historian Thucydides (writing about it c. 410 BC), who tells us that the place was at first called ‘Zancle’ after its existing name among the Sicels who lived there. In the Sicels’ language zancle meant a ‘sickle’, a name with an obvious relevance. The settlement lay beside a natural harbour which was defended by a hooked, sickle-shaped promontory. We meet this aspect of the site on the coins which Greeks later struck for their settlement: on them the harbour appears with a dolphin and the caption ‘DANK(LE)’.23 At the site itself the vista from its sickle-shaped point still runs east across the narrows to Italy: ‘Messina now is a modern city with a few medieval buildings surviving,’ wrote Sicily’s historian, E. A. Freeman, even before the earthquake of 1908 destroyed the town. ‘The Greek lives only in the witness which the view still gives to his skill in choosing the position of his cities.’24
At this sickle-shaped settlement there was something more. We know it from the poetry of the learned Alexandrian Callimachus (c. 270 BC) in which he set out to answer a curious fact about the city’s origins: why was no individual founder bidden by name to attend the ‘founder’s feast’ at Zancle? In the second book of his famous erudite poem On Origins he remarked, in brilliant verse, how all the cities in Sicily had feasts for named founders: he purported to put the peculiar problem of Zancle to one of the Muses herself. Clio, the Muse of history, answered him and ‘amazed’ him: Zancle had had two founders, who had quarrelled while founding their city.25 They had asked Apollo (presumably at Delphi) which of them should be the true founder, but they were told that neither of them could be. So on the days of Zancle’s ‘founder’s feast’ the presiding magistrates invite no founder by name. In the course of this dazzling answer Callimachus’ Muse of history evoked the first Greek founders of Zancle and their actions on the site: ‘The founders placed wooden towers,’ the Muse tells us, ‘strengthened with battlements, around the sickle of Cronos for, there, the sickle with which he sheared off his father’s parts has been hidden in a hollow under the ground.’ Callimachus’ local knowledge was very well founded. As elsewhere, it was based on the researches of Aristotle and his pupils, who probably included a ‘Constitution of the Zancleans’ among the 158 local ‘constitutions’ which they compiled c. 330 BC.26 These works were based on local evidence and in this case they would reflect what the people of Zancle themselves affirmed. Their city’s special relationship with Cronos can be confirmed from neglected evidence which is much earlier than Aristotle’s writings. In 648 BC Zancle founded a secondary settlement at Himera, to the west of their own, on the coast of Sicily below Monte San Calogero. Alone of the Greek settlements in Sicily, Himera showed the god Cronos on its silver coinage, a fact which is known to us from surviving coins struck c. 410 BC.27 Cronos is not usually worshipped in a Greek city’s cults and his prominence on Himera’s coinage is exceptional. The reason for it is simple: the cult had derived from Himera’s mother-city Zancle, so closely connected with Cronos. The coinage allows us to take this connection back to the mid-seventh century BC when Himera was first founded from Zancle. Zancle was already a ‘Cronos-centre’, because of the discovery which local tradition later passed to Aristotle’s pupils and thence to Callimachus. The awesome ‘sickle of Cronos’ was to be found on the site.
The exact date of Zancle’s own foundation in the eight century BC is not given by Thucydides, our one reliable textual source. It is disputed nowadays between archaeologists and historians.28 Archaeologists point to contemporary evidence, to a very few fragments of Greek pottery on the site which match eighth-century pottery from Pithecussae. Zancle, they argue, was founded from Ischia–Pithecussae and as its site on the straits between Sicily and Italy was so strategic for Greek travellers, it might even have been founded c. 770–760 BC, soon after the settlement on Ischia itself. According to Thucydides, however, the settlement began with ‘robber-pirates’ from Italian Cumae, the Greek settlement opposite Ischia which had been founded from that island perhaps c. 750 BC.29 ‘Later’ they were joined by a ‘crowd from Chalcis and the rest of Euboea’ who shared in the land. As a result the site had two founders, Perieres from Cumae (specifically, the Italian Cumae) and Crataemenes from Chalcis. He seems to mean that Perieres had led the ‘robber-pirates’, whereas Crataemenes led the crowd who ‘came later’. We cannot square him with our archaeologists’ dating from pottery and their proposal that the settlement was made from Ischia.
Thucydides does not consider Zancle to be the first Greek settlement in Sicily, an event he places in 735 BC: he cannot, therefore, have thought of Zancle as founded c. 760. Either we believe him or we believe an interpretation of a tiny proportion of the pottery on the site: his detailed authority is preferable, but the decision is not crucial for the trail we are tracing. On either view Zancle was founded by Euboean Greeks, whether as early as 770–760 or else, much more probably, c. 730–720.
With the help of Callimachus’ poem we can enter into these Euboeans’ supreme discovery. Their founders put ‘towers, strengthened with battlements, around the sickle of Cronos’, either around its revered site or more probably as walls round the city or its central point. Within them the sickle lay beneath the ground: symbols of these towers, four of them, have even been detected on the city’s later coinage. To my eye they are not obviously towers, but the rest of the story is specific. ‘There’, Callimachus’ speaker, the Muse Clio, tells us, ‘it has been hidden in a “hollow” (gypē) under the ground.’30 The rare Greek word gypē means a hollow, but not necessarily a natural cave. Who, then, had ‘hidden’ it there ? Surely the founders themselves: they must have seen the object in order to identify it, because the locals, the non-Greek Sicels, would never have mentioned Cronos, a Greek god, and identified the sickle as his. Sicels, I suggest, showed to the Euboean founders a revered ancient sickle, one of the historic relics on their site: the founding Euboeans then put it in a special ‘hollow’, perhaps a specially dug pit, within the city’s inner wall. It was an ancient sickle, perhaps one which some Sicels (or even the Euboean founders) had recently dug up. Did it show any signs of bloodstains and, as Hesiod’s poetry later claimed, was it a right-handed sickle with very sharp teeth? It was so very venerable that perhaps it had come to the site as an import from far away. Here there is a fine possibility: was it one of those bronze sickles with tube-shaped handles which reached the west Mediterranean and are best known to us on Sardinia, although their ultimate origin was the distant British Isles?31 Was the sickle which was believed to have castrated Heaven in fact a sickle from Britain, perhaps specifically one from East Anglia or an Essex sickle ‘with sharp teeth’? Whatever the object’s origins, the Euboean founders interpreted it, like archaeologists, in terms of knowledge which they already had. They had talked a little to the Sicels and had established, perhaps with difficulty, that the name of their site meant ‘sickle’. They then saw a special sickle and linked it with their stories of the gods. It seemed like a heaven-sent omen: they had found the Great Castrator. They laid it respectfully in their new city’s centre beneath the ground.
These Greek settlers at Zancle were exactly the right people to detect Cronos’ hand on an ancient sickle’s handle. If we believe the archaeologists, they were Euboeans straight from Ischia: if we prefer Thucydides, Perieres and his men from Cumae were Euboeans by descent, settlers who had moved to Cumae c. 750 BC from the Euboeans’ first settlement at Pithecussae. As we know from the goods which continued to reach Ischia and be placed in its settlers’ graves, they and their families included Euboeans who had close contacts with the Near East, with Cilicia, north Syria and the Levant. As for the co-founder Crataemenes, he and his fellow-Euboeans came from the homeland of these pioneers, the island of Euboea, whose goods and persons had been reaching Cyprus and Tarsus, Al Mina and points on the coast of the Levant since the tenth century BC. In this Near Eastern milieu, on Cyprus and below Mount Hazzi, Euboeans, our travelling heroes, had encountered the stories of Heaven’s emasculation and the ancient ‘cutter’ which had separated Heaven and Earth: they had heard, too, from Cypriots here and on Cyprus of the birth of Aphrodite from the scattered DNA of the god. These stories, therefore, were very vivid in their minds. When they and their kinsmen travelled westwards they took these stories with them, singing them just as their neighbours and bed-mates in Unqi had sung the ‘song of kingship in heaven’ on Mount Hazzi itself. In the west they were ripe for yet more evidence, and on the straits at Zancle they found it: the very sickle itself. These Euboeans beautifully conform to our hopes of them: they found in the west something which they had learned about so vividly through their recent contacts with the east: unlike Io or Cadmus, Adonis, Mopsus or Zeus Kasios, the ‘sickle of Cronos’ is an incontestable example of a story which travelled from east to west with our travelling heroes, Euboean Greeks. It travelled in the eighth century, either in 770–760 BC when Al Mina was still young or (following Thucydides’ belief) in c. 730–720 when the eastern links with the west were still strong, as proven by the objects laid then in Euboeans’ contemporary graves on Ischia.
The discovery at Zancle requires us to look more closely at some of the other sites which are connected with a sickle on the Greek map. Only a few of them are linked to myths of the gods in our surviving Greek evidence, which includes many localized texts and images on coins. On the southern coastline of the Sea of Marmara, on the Gulf of Izmit, there is an appropriately shaped promontory near modern Hersek which for Greeks became the site of Drepanon, a sickle. Nowadays the promontory is a deserted stretch of marshland but in antiquity it was a natural landmark for sailors, a crossing-point for the gulf and a marker for the river-route, now silted, which ran inland. This ‘Drepanon’ did lie on sea-routes of early Greek visitors but there was no association with Cronos here and his castrator.32
On the sea-route from mainland Greece to the west, two sickle-shaped points are more suggestive. Near Argyra on the coast of Achaea, the cape near Bolina was known to the traveller Pausanias (c. AD 150) as the site from which ‘Cronos’ sickle’ was thrown into the sea.33 The cape is a natural landmark for sea-travellers in the Gulf of Corinth and it may well be that the connection between the sickle-cape and Cronos occurred to early Euboean travellers as they headed west along the gulf as early as the eighth century BC. If the sickle had entered the sea here, was it ever washed up and if so where was it? They travelled westwards, wondering about these questions: on their coastal route to the west lay an island with very strong sickle-connections, Corcyra, the modern Corfu.
7. Cronos’ sickle (italicized), Typhon and the Giants (asterisked): east
8. Cronos’ sickle (italicized), Typhon and the Giants (asterisked): west
Like Zancle, Corcyra had a suggestive pre-Greek name whose root krk underlay the Greek ‘Kerkura’. It has been explained as meaning a sickle, no less, in the local pre-Greek language.34 In due course a sickle was indeed believed to have been buried beneath the island. It was mentioned by Aristotle and his researchers who were drawing on local information, but for them it was the ‘sickle of Demeter’, goddess of the harvest. The island was exceptionally fertile and this explanation did it justice. As the Aristotelians had located the sickle of Cronos at Zancle further west, they had to make the ‘sickle’ of Corcyra into something else, Demeter’s relic.35
Their theory was not the only one. According to the historian Timaeus (active c. 320–265 BC) Corcyra’s sickle was nothing less than the ‘sickle of Cronos’ itself.36 He was a scholarly man, but there were local reasons which might have distorted his view here. Timaeus was a citizen of Tauromenium in Sicily (the modern Taormina), the neighbouring Greek city to Zancle. As a matter of civic rivalry he might have denied his neighbours’ greatest treasure and located it across the sea on Corcyra instead. However, he had good grounds for his Corcyran location. In the wake of Homer’s Odyssey the people of Corcyra claimed that their island was the legendary Phaeacia which Odysseus had visited. By 500 BC, we know that one Greek writer on myths was claiming that the Phaeacians, so ‘close to the gods’, had been born from the very blood which had spurted from Heaven’s castration.37 The Corcyraeans, therefore, were the children of Cronos’ ‘mowing’ with his sickle and no doubt they would like to claim that they owned the tool, too.
Might the sickle have had two early addresses, thereby justifying both Aristotle’s and Timaeus’ statements? By c. 750 BC Greeks had settled on Corcyra: here, too, they were Euboeans. Like the Euboeans who settled at Zancle, they learned from the locals that their island-location was called ‘sickle’. Corcyra’s settlers were Euboeans from Eretria, whereas Zancle’s settlers included Euboeans from Chalcis, Eretria’s neighbour and intensely hostile rival. The men of Chalcis claimed to have found Cronos’ sickle at Zancle, but the sickle may already have been claimed by their enemies, the men of Eretria on Corcyra. Euboean Greeks, however, were not the only people travelling the Mediterranean who knew a story of castration in heaven. Phoenicians knew it too, people who lived and travelled in Mount Hazzi’s orbit, and they too journeyed west from the same Levantine coast. While Euboeans claimed that they had found the sickle in the west, did Phoenician travellers, perhaps, claim that they had found it themselves?
Like these travellers we should begin by visiting Cyprus. On the western coastline of the island lies a promontory known in antiquity as Drepanon which juts, sickle-shaped, into the sea.38 Some 30 miles to the south-east of it, also near this coast, lies Old Paphos, the seat of the famous cult of Aphrodite whom the Phoenicians worshipped as Astarte. As Hesiod charmingly reminds us, she first set foot on land near Paphos, and the archaeologist J. L. Myres has described how he witnessed an ‘emergence’ here in progress in the winter of 1913. The south-west wind, he saw, forced two breakers to collide off the coast: ‘When the angle of impact is about 90°,’ he wrote, ‘the “break” is both concentrated within a small width of swell, and very violent, so that the breaker shoots up in a column like a water-spout, 10–15 feet high, and falls back in an outward cascade of foam which may be carried some feet to leeward by the wind. It looks exactly like a human figure literally “rising from the sea” and spreading long hair and dripping arms. In December 1913 Mr. Markides and I watched this effect recurring every few minutes, for over half an hour…’39 It still recurs on this same coast, as it surely recurred in the years from 1200 to 750 BC: priests of Astarte–Aphrodite in her nearby shrine at Paphos would have observed the same phenomenon. Here was the goddess’s approach-route: might they also claim that the emasculating instrument, the sickle of Cronos, which caused her birth from father Heaven had been cast into the sea at Drepanon (Sickle), the aptly named promontory which lies only some 30 miles up the Cypriot coast?
On Phoenician routes to the west this sickle had a further site. In north-west Sicily near modern Trapani, Astarte–Aphrodite had a cult-site as famous as Paphos, ancient Eryx (now Erice), whose steep cliff was graced by her distinctive temple. Here, Phoenician settlers founded a cult of Astarte which Greeks understood in due course as a cult of their own Aphrodite, perhaps adding a cult for Adonis too. In antiquity, modern Trapani was ancient Drepanon, a place with another sickle-shaped harbour which earned it its name. Not until the 270s BC do we happen to have evidence of anything more, but it is preserved for us by the erudite Greek poet Lycophron.40 He refers at Eryx to the ‘leap of Cronos’ sickle’: he must be referring to the ‘leap’ of the sickle as it was thrown from the cliff of Eryx into the sea which lies off Drepanon’s sickle-shaped promontory exactly below the cliff. Like all the learning in Lycophron’s cryptic poem this ‘leap’ is likely to go back to very much older Greek sources than Lycophron himself: behind them, in turn, may lie a story begun by Phoenicians. They, too, had adapted the legend of the separation of Heaven and Earth from their neighbours in the Levant. In the west, the Phoenician priests of the goddess Astarte at Eryx may have capitalized on the existence of a sickle-shaped settlement, Drepanon, which lay on the seashore beneath their goddess’s shrine. In their separate sphere they may have started a story which Euboean Greeks had also started in theirs.
At Trapani or on Cyprus, there is a risk of ascribing too great an antiquity to later antiquarians’ stories. At Zancle, however, the finding of Cronos’ sickle is firmly fixed as an event of the later eighth century. It allows us to correct a subsequent Greek’s perplexity. In the second century AD the traveller Pausanias remarked about the legends of Cronos that ‘long ago those Greeks who were thought to be wise spoke their saying in riddling allegories and not directly at face value: I therefore inferred that the things said about Cronos were a sort of wisdom of the ancient Greeks’.41 Pausanias was mistaken. The stories were not allegories: they were imports, taken into Greek culture by Greeks’ contacts with specific places and other cultures. They were not taken up in connection with a cult or a religious ritual nor were they wisdom acquired from ‘migrant Eastern charismatics’ coming to Greece. They were acquired because they amplified stories which Greek visitors already knew and because they made sense of specific landscapes in which Greeks came to live. From Mount Hazzi to the Straits of Messina, the myth travelled specifically with Euboean Greeks in the eighth century who applied it to new objects and new places which it seemed to explain. These Euboeans applied what they heard in the east to what they encountered in the west, true travelling heroes in the age of Homer. But Homer’s epic poems do not even mention these myths and locations which were so much to the forefront of Euboeans’ minds.
Nowadays, our ‘Birth of Aphrodite’ is imagined through Botticelli’s image of a goddess drifting to the seashore among a swirl of roses. The painter derived this image from vernacular Italian sources, not directly from the ancient Greek stories of Cronos’ vigorous, right-handed swipe.42 But the sea still foams in an ‘outward cascade’ off the coast below Cypriot Paphos and stands in crests on the straits by Messina where Cronos’ sickle was reverently buried beneath the ground. Further north, beyond the classical world, stories of the separation of Heaven and Earth continued to be told far and wide, even among the distant Eskimos. In the polar regions darkness envelops the earth in winter with only the briefest chink of daylight. When Captain Peary discovered the Greenland Eskimos, they were amazed to meet a stranger from the world beyond. The rest of the world, they told him, is lying in darkness and only here, in our fragment of winter daylight, has human life survived. In their northern darkness, Heaven’s separation from Earth seems far from complete, as if Cronos did not cut quite enough from his father before the sickle was thrown away.