part0026

These lines will serve as a text to demonstrate the peculiar workings of poetic thought. They came to me, from nowhere in particular, as the first three lines of a rhyming stanza, in the epigrammatic style of the Welsh englyn, which required two more to complete it. Their manifest meaning is that the white nuns walk in silent prayer in their convent garden, circling the fish pool and circling their rosaries in chaste prayer; the fish swims around inside. The fish, like the nuns, is proverbial for his sexual indifference, and the Mother Superior permits him as a convent pet because he cannot possibly awake any lascivious thoughts in her charges.

A neat piece of observation, but not yet a poem; the truth, but not the whole truth. To tell the whole truth, I had to consider first the phenomenon of nuns, who voluntarily forgo the pleasures of carnal love and motherhood in order to become the Vestal brides of Christ, and then the phenomenon of sacred fish of all sorts and sizes, from the great fish that swallowed Jonah to the little spotted fish in wishing wells that still grant lovers or babies to peasant women in remote parishes; not forgetting the ‘mighty and stainless Fish from the Fountain whom a pure virgin grasped’ in the epitaph of the late second-century bishop Aviricius of the Phrygian Pentapolis. Only when I had asked and answered some scores of teasing questions would the fourth and fifth lines be found, to complete the poem with a simple concentration of difficult meaning.

I began by noting the strange continuance in Christianity of the original pagan title of Chief Pontiff, which the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter the Fisherman, assumed two centuries after Christianity had become the Roman state religion. For the Chief Pontiff, in Republican and early Imperial times, was personally responsible to the Capitoline Trinity (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), for the chaste behaviour of the Vestals, as his successor now is to the Christian Trinity for that of Roman Catholic nuns. Then I threw my mind back in an analeptic trance. I found myself listening to a conversation in Latin, helped out with Greek, which I understood perfectly. Presently I began to distinguish the voices as those of Theophilus, a well-known Syrian-Greek historian and Lucius Sergius Paulus, a Roman Governor-General of Cyprus under the Emperor Claudius.

Paulus was saying rather heavily ‘My learned friend, a festal system of such complexity cannot have been conveyed from country to country among the bales of merchandize that traders carry in barter. It may have been imposed by conquest, yet had there ever been an Empire of Europe which included all the distant parts you mention –’

‘I should also have included Portugal among them,’ interjected Theophilus.

‘– doubtless we should have heard of it. But Alexander’s conquests were all in the East: he dared not challenge the power of Republican Rome.’

Theophilus said: ‘What I mean is this. I postulate a constant emigration, in ancient times, of tribes inhabiting the Southern coast of the Black Sea, a process that has indeed ceased only in the last century or two. The climate was healthy, the people vigorous and well organized, but the coastal strip narrow. Every hundred years or so, as I suppose, the land grew over-populated, and one tribe or another was necessarily sent away to seek its fortune and make room for the rest. Or it may be that they were forced to move by pressure from the East, when wandering hordes from the plains of Asia broke through the Caspian Gates of the Caucasus mountains. Of these tribes, some took the route southward across Asia Minor and ventured through Syria and as far as Egypt – we have the authority of Herodotus for this; some took the route westward across the Bosphorus and Thrace and into Greece, Italy and Gaul and even, as I say, to Spain and Portugal. Some struggled south-eastward into Chaldaea across the Taurus mountains; some moved northward up the Western shore of the Black Sea and then followed the Danube to Istria, continuing their march across Europe until they reached the north-westerly tip of Gaul; whence, it is said, some crossed over into Britain, and from Britain into Ireland. They took the festal system with them.’

‘Yours is a very daring theory,’ said Paulus, ‘but I can recall no authentic tradition that supports it.’

Theophilus smiled. ‘Your Excellency is a true Roman – “no truth unless hallowed by a tradition.” Well, then: tell me, from what land did your hero Aeneas come?’

‘He was a King of Dardanus on the Bosphorus before he settled in Troy.’

‘Good: Dardanus is three-quarters of the way back from Rome to the Black Sea. And, tell me, what was the priceless possession that Aeneas brought with him from Troy? Pray forgive the dialectical method.’

‘You must mean the Palladium, most learned Socrates,’ answered Paulus in ironically academic tones, ‘on the safety of which the fate of Troy once depended; and the fate of Rome depends now.’

‘And what, honoured Alcibiades, is the Palladium?’

‘A venerable statue of Pallas Athene.’

‘Ah, but who is she?’

‘You suggested this morning, during our visit to the wrestling-school, that she was originally a Sea-goddess like our local Cyprian deity; and mythographers record that she was born by the Lake of Triton in Libya.’

‘So she was. And who or what is Triton, besides being the name of a once extensive lake which is now shrinking into salt marsh?’

‘Triton is a marine deity with a fish’s body who accompanies Poseidon the Sea-god and his wife Amphitrite the Sea-goddess, and blows a conch in their honour. He is said to be their son.’

‘You give me the most helpful answers. But what does Pallas mean?’

‘How long is this cross-examination to last? Would you send me back to school again? Pallas is one of Athene’s titles. I have never accepted Plato’s derivation of the word from pallein, to brandish; he says, you know, that she is called Pallas because she brandishes her aegis, or shield. Plato’s etymology is always suspect. What puzzles me is that Pallas is a man’s name, not a woman’s.’

‘I hope to be able to explain the paradox. But, first, what do you know about men called Pallas?’

‘Pallas? Pallas? There have been many men of the name, from the legendary Pallas the Titan to our present egregious Secretary of State. The Emperor made the Senate snigger the other day by declaring that the Secretary was of the famous Pallas family that gave its name to the Palatine Hill.’

‘I doubt whether the remark was as absurd as it must have sounded. Claudius, for all his eccentric habits, is no mean historian, and as Chief Pontiff has access to ancient religious records denied to others. Come, your Excellency, let us go together through the list of ancient Pallases. There was, as you say, Pallas the Titan, who was brother to Astraeus (“the Starlike”) and Perses (“the Destroyer”) and who married – whatever that means – the River Styx in Arcadia. He was the father of Zelos (“Zeal”), Cratos (“Strength”), Bia (“Force”) and Nicë (“Victory”). Does that not convey his mystical nature to you?’

‘I regret to admit that it does not. Pity me as a stupid, legalistic and practical Roman.’

‘If your Excellency is not careful I shall begin praising your elegiac poem on the Nymph Egeria, a copy of which was lately sent me from Rome by one of our mutual friends. Well, next comes Homer’s Pallas, whom he calls the father of the Moon. And next another Titan, the Pallas who was flayed by Athene; it was this Pallas from whom she is said to have taken her name.’

‘I never heard that story.’

‘It rests on good authority. And then comes Pallas, the founder of Pallantium in Arcadia, a Pelasgian son of the Aegeus who gave his name to the Aegean Sea; now, he is of interest to us because his grandson Evander emigrated to Rome sixty years before the Trojan war and brought your sacred alphabet with him. It was he who founded a new city of Pallantium on the Palatine Hill at Rome, long since incorporated in the City. He also introduced the worship of Nicë, Neptune, (now identified with Poseidon), Pan of Lycos, Demeter and Hercules. Evander had a son named Pallas, and two daughters, Romë (“Strength”) and Dynë (“Power”). And I had almost forgotten still another Pallas, brother of Aegeus and Lycos, and therefore uncle to Evander’s grandfather Pallas.’

‘A fine crop of Pallases. But I am still in the dark.’

‘Well, I do not blame your Excellency. And I hardly know where to shine the lantern. But I appeal to you for patience. Tell me, of what is the Palladium made?’

Paulus considered. ‘I am rather rusty on mythology, my dear Theophilus, but I seem to remember that it is made of the bones of Pelops.’

Theophilus congratulated him. ‘And who was Pelops? What does his name mean?’

‘I was reading Apollonius Rhodius the other day. He says that Pelops came to Phrygia from Enete in Paphlagonia and that the Paphlagonians still call themselves Pelopians. Apollonius was curator of the great Alexandrian Library and his ancient history is as reliable as anyone’s. As for the name “Pelops”, it means dusky-faced. The body of Pelops was served up as a stew by Tantalus, his father, for the Gods; they discovered that it was forbidden food just in time. Only the shoulder had been eaten – by Demeter, was it not? – but some say Rhea, and restitution was made with an ivory shoulder. Pelops was brought back to life.’

‘What do you make of this cannibalistic myth?’

‘Nothing at all, except that we now seem to have traced the Dardanians back to the Black Sea, if the sacred Palladium was made of the bones of their ancestor from Enete.’

‘If I suggest to you that Pelops and Pallas are different titles of Kings of the same early Greek dynasty, will that help your Excellency?’

‘Not in the least. Pray, give me a hand out of this quaking bog.’

‘Allow me to ask you a riddle: What is it with a dusky face and an ivory shoulder that comes rushing victoriously up a river, as if to a wedding, full of Zeal, Force and Strength, and whose hide is well worth the flaying?’

‘I am good at riddles, though bad at myths. A fish of sorts. I guess the porpoise. The porpoise is not an ordinary fish, for it couples, male with female: and how royally it charges into a river-mouth from the sea! It is pale below and dark above, with a blunt, dusky muzzle. And it has a fine white shoulder-blade – broad like a paddle; and porpoise leather makes the best-wearing shoes procurable.’

‘It is not a fish at all. It is a warm-blooded creature, a cetos, a sea-beast with lungs, not an ichthus, a fish with gills and cold blood. To the sea-beast family, according to Aristotle’s system, belong all whales, seals, porpoises, grampuses and dolphins. Unfortunately in Greece we use the same word delphis indiscriminately for both the beaked dolphin and the blunt-muzzled porpoise; and though Arion’s musical mount is likely to have been a true dolphin, it is uncertain whether Delphi was originally named after the dolphin or the porpoise. “Pallas” in Greek once meant a lusty young man, and I suppose that it became the royal title of Peloponnesian kings, whose sacred beast was the lusty porpoise, when the tribe of Pelops came down into Greece from the Black Sea. Do you remember Homer’s much disputed epithet for Lacedaemon – Cetoessa, which literally means “Of the Sea-beast”?’

‘I will try to think along the lines you lay out for me,’ said Paulus. ‘The Peloponnese is, of course, sometimes called the Land of Poseidon, who is the Achaean god of all sea-beasts and fishes. Arcadia is the centre of the Peloponnese, and Pallas the Sea-beast-god reigned there, and in Lacedaemon too. Let me work this out for myself – yes – Pallas is married to the River Styx, meaning that the porpoise comes rushing up the Crathis towards the Styx in his mating season. (At the mouth of the Crathis is Aegae – I once served in that part of Greece – which explains the connexion with Aegeus. Opposite Aegae, across the Gulf of Corinth, stands Delphi, sacred to Apollo the Dolphin-god or Porpoise-god.) Later, Evander a grandson of Pallas, and with a son of the same name, is driven out of Arcadia, about the time of the great Achaean invasion, and comes to Rome. There he forms an alliance with the people of Aeneas, claiming kinship with them in virtue of a common descent from Pelops. Is that how you read the story?’

‘Exactly. And Evander was probably a Pallas too, but changed his name, after killing his father, to throw the avenging Furies off the scent.’

‘Very well. He introduces the worship of the Sea-god Neptune; of Nicë, the daughter of the original Pallas; of Hercules – why Hercules?’

‘His sexual lustiness commended him, and he was not only a great-grandson of Pelops but an ally of the Enetians, the original Pelopians.’

‘And why Demeter?’

‘To rescue her from Poseidon the god of the Achaeans who, it is said, had raped her. You remember perhaps that she retreated from him up the Crathis to the Styx and there cursed the water. Demeter was old Deo, the barley-planting Mother-goddess of the Danaan Arcadians. That some mythographers call her Rhea proves her Cretan origin. Her famous mare-headed statue at Phigalia, by the River Neda in Western Arcadia, held a porpoise in one hand and in the other a sacred black dove of the sort that is used at the oak-oracle of Dodona.’

‘Why mare-headed?’

‘The horse was sacred to her, and when the Pelopians intermarried with the original Arcadians, this was recorded in myth as a marriage between Pelops and Hippodameia, “the Horse-tamer”, who is also called Danais by some mythographers. And among their children were Chrysippos, “Golden Horse”; Hippalcmos, “Bold Horse”; Nicippe, “Victorious Mare” – new clan-names.’

‘I see. It is not so nonsensical as it sounds. Well, now I can fill out the story. The Mother-goddess was served by the so-called Daughters of Proetus or Proteus, 1 who lived in a cave at Lusi, by the headwaters of the Styx. Her priestesses had a right to the shoulder-blade of the sacred porpoise at a sacrificial feast. Porpoise beef makes very good eating, especially when it has been well hung. And Proteus, according to Homer, became herdsman to Poseidon and tended his sea-beasts. That must have been after Poseidon’s conquest of the Goddess, which he celebrated by calling himself the Mare-tamer. I take Proteus to be another name for Pallas, the Sea-beast: the Achaeans, in fact, enslaved the Pelopians, who were now also styled Danaans, and Poseidon took over the prerogatives and titles of Pallas.’

‘I congratulate your Excellency. You evidently agree with me in dismissing as mistaken the view that Pelops was an Achaean – unless perhaps an earlier Achaean horde had entered Greece many centuries before with the Aeolians; I suppose that the mistake arose from the knowledge that Pelops was once worshipped in the northern province of the Peloponnese now called Achaea. For the enslavement of the Pelopians by the Achaeans is confirmed in another, rather frivolous myth: Poseidon is said to have fallen in love with Pelops, as Zeus with Ganymede, and to have carried him off to be his cup-bearer. Neptune, who emigrated to Italy was, you will agree, also Pallas and must not be identified with Poseidon as the custom is. But I should guess Proteus to be a general name of the god who is the son, lover and victim of the old Mother Goddess; and assumes a variety of shapes. He is not only Pallas, the sea-beast, but Salmoneus the human oak-king, Chrysippos the golden horse, and so forth.’

‘But Pan of Lycos? What had Evander to do with him?’

‘His ancestor Pelops probably brought him from the River Lycos, which flows into the Black Sea not far from Enete. Another lusty god. You will recall that he danced for joy when Pelops was fitted out with his new white shoulder. By the way, do you recall the various stories of Pan’s parentage?’

‘The usual one makes him a son of the nymph Dryope by Hermes.’

‘What does that convey to you?’

‘I have never considered. “Dryope” means a woodpecker of the sort that nests in oaks and makes an extraordinary noise with its bill in the cracks of trees, and climbs spirally up the trunk. It has a barbed tongue and portends rain, as the dolphin and porpoise portend storms by their frisking. And the nymph Dryope is connected with the cult of Hylas, a Phrygian form of Hercules who dies ceremonially every year. And Hermes – he’s the prime phallic god, and also the god of eloquence, and his erotic statues are usually carved from an oak.’

‘The tree of shepherds, the tree of Hercules, the tree of Zeus and Jupiter. But Pan, as the son of an oak-woodpecker, is hatched from an egg.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Paulus. ‘I remember something to the point. Our Latin god Faunus, who is identical with Pan, the god of shepherds, is said to have been a King of Latium who entertained Evander on his arrival. And Faunus was the son of Picus, which is Latin for woodpecker. Evidently another Pelopian tribe had reached Latium from the Black Sea before either Evander or Aeneas. Faunus is worshipped in sacred groves, where he gives oracles; chiefly by voices heard in sleep while the visitant lies on a sacred fleece.’

‘Which establishes the mythical connexion between Pan, the oak, the woodpecker, and sheep. I have read another legend of his birth, too. He is said to have been the son of Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, by Hermes who visited her in the form of a ram. A ram, not a goat. This is odd, because both Arcadian Pan and his Italian counterpart Faunus have goat legs and body. I think I see how that comes about. Pallas the Titan, the royal sea-beast, was the son of Crios (the Ram). This means that the Pelopian settlers from Enete formed an alliance with the primitive Arcadians who worshipped Hermes the Ram, and acknowledged him as the father of their sea-beast King Pallas. Likewise the Aegeans – the goat-tribe – formed an alliance with the same Arcadians and acknowledged Hermes as the father of their Goat-king, Pan, whose mother was Amalthea and who became the He-goat of the Zodiac.’

Paulus said smiling: ‘Neatly argued. That disposes of the other scandalous legend that Pan was the son of Penelope by all her suitors in the absence of Ulysses.’

‘Where did you get that version? It is extraordinarily interesting.’

‘I cannot remember. From some grammarian or other. It makes little sense to me.’

‘I knew that Pan was the son of Penelope, but your version is a great improvement on it. Penelope, you see, is not really Ulysses’ wife except in a manner of speaking; she is a sacred bird, the penelops or purple-striped duck. So again, as in the Dryope version of his parentage, Pan is born from a bird – which explains the legend that he was perfectly developed from birth, as a hatched chicken is. Now to come to the suitors, by what I fear will be a longish argument. I postulate first of all that the Palladium is made from the bones of Pelops, that is to say from the ivory shoulder-blades of porpoises, a suitable and durable material, and that it is a phallic statue, not the statue of a goddess. I support my thesis by the existence, until a few years ago, of another sacred shoulder-blade of Pelops in the precinct which his great-grandson Hercules built in his honour at Olympia. Now, according to the myth, Pelops had only one sacred shoulder-blade, the right one; yet nobody has ever questioned the genuineness either of the relic at Olympia or of the Palladium. The history of the Olympian blade is this. During the siege of Troy the Greeks were told by an oracle that the only offensive counter-magic to the defensive magic of the Palladium preserved in the Citadel of Troy was the shoulder-blade of Pelops which a tribe of Pelopians had taken to Pisa in Italy. So Agamemnon sent for the thing, but the ship that was bringing it to him went down off the coast of Euboea. Generations later, a Euboean fisherman dragged it up in his net and recognized it for what it was – probably by some design carved on it. He brought it to Delphi and the Delphic Oracle awarded it to the people of Olympia, who made the fisherman its pensioned guardian. If the bone was the shoulder-blade of a sacred porpoise, not of a man, the difficulty of Pelops’s having had more than one right shoulder-blade disappears. So does the difficulty of believing that when boiled and eaten by the gods he came alive again – if the fact was that a new sacred porpoise was caught and eaten every year at Lusi by the devotees of Deo. Does all this sound reasonable?’

‘More reasonable, by far, than the usual fantastic story, though cannibalism in ancient Arcadia is not incredible. And that the Palladium is a phallic statue, rather than that of a goddess, may explain why such a mystery has been made of its appearance and why it is hidden out of sight in the Penus of the Temple of Vesta. Yes, though your thesis is startling and even, at first hearing, indecent, it has much to commend it.’

‘Thank you. To continue: you remember that two or three of the early Kings of Rome had no discoverable father?’

‘Yes. I have often wondered how that happened.’

‘You remember, too, that the Kingdom descended in the female line: a man was king only by virtue of marriage to a queen or of descent from a queen’s daughter. The heir to the Kingdom, in fact, was not the king’s son but the son of either his youngest daughter or his youngest sister – which explains the Latin word nepos, meaning both nephew and grandson. The focus of the community life was literally the focus, or hearth-fire, of the royal house, which was tended by the princesses of the royal line, namely the Vestal Virgins. To them the Palladium was delivered for safe-keeping as the fatale pignus imperii, the pledge granted by the Fates for the permanency of the royal line.’

‘They still have it safe. But if you are right about the statue’s obscene nature, the Vestal Virgins seem rather an odd choice of guardians, because they are strictly forbidden to indulge in sexual intercourse!’

Theophilus laid his forefinger along his nose and said: ‘It is the commonplace paradox of religions that nothing is nefas, unlawful, that is not also fas, lawful, on particularly holy occasions. Among the Egyptians the pig is viewed with abhorrence and its very touch held to cause leprosy – indeed, the Egyptian pig as a scavenger and corpse-eater merits this abhorrence – yet the highest-born Egyptians eat its flesh with relish at their midwinter mysteries and fear no untoward consequence. The Jews, it is said, formerly did the same, if they do not do so now. Similarly, the Vestal Virgins cannot always have been debarred from the full natural privileges of their sex, for no barbarous religion enforces permanent sterility on nubile women. My view is that at midsummer during the Alban Holiday, which was a marriage feast of the Oak-queen – your Excellency’s charming nymph Egeria – with the Oak-king of the year, and the occasion of promiscuous love-making, the six Vestals, her kinswomen, coupled with six of the Oak-king’s twelve companions – you will recall Romulus’s twelve shepherds. But silently, in the darkness of a sacred cave so that nobody knew who lay with whom, nor who was the father of any child born. And did the same again with the six other companions at midwinter during the Saturnalia. Then, failing a son of the Oak-queen, the new king was chosen from a child born to a Vestal. So Penelope’s son by six suitors is explained. The Lusty God – call him Hercules or Hermes or Pan or Pallas or Pales or Mamurius or Neptune or Priapus or whatever you please – inspired the young men with erotic vigour when they had first danced around a blazing bonfire presided over by his obscene statue – the Palladium itself. Thus it happened that a king was said to be born of a virgin mother, and either to have no known father, or to be the son of the god.’

‘That is a still more startling notion than the other,’ protested Paulus, ‘and I cannot see either that you have any proof of it, or that you can explain how the Vestals ceased to be love-nymphs and became barren spinsters as now.’

‘The cessation of the royal love-orgies,’ said Theophilus, ‘follows logically on the historical course that we discussed yesterday – the extension of the kingship in ancient times from one year to four years; from four to eight; from eight to nineteen; until finally it became a life-tenure. Though popular love-orgies might continue – and at Rome continue still – to be held at midsummer and at the close of the year, they ceased to have any significance as occasions for breeding new kings. As we know, children are often born of these holiday unions and are considered lucky and cheerfully legitimized; but they have no claim to the kingship, because their mothers are no longer princesses, as formerly. It seems to have been King Tarquin the Elder who first prescribed for the Vestals what amounts to perpetual virginity, his object being to prevent them from breeding claimants to the throne. It was certainly he who introduced burying alive as a punishment for any Vestal who broke the rule; but even now the prescribed virginity is not perpetual – for after thirty years a Vestal Virgin is, I understand, entitled to unsanctify herself, if she pleases, and marry.’

‘It happens very seldom; after thirty years of illustrious spinsterhood it is hard for a woman to win a husband of any worth, and she soon wearies of the world and usually dies of remorse.’

‘Now, as to the proof that the Virgins were once permitted occasional erotic delights: in the first place the novice, when initiated by the Chief Pontiff on behalf of the God, is addressed as “Amata”, beloved one, and given a head-dress bordered with pure purple, 2 a white woollen fillet and a white linen vestment – the royal marriage garments of the bride of the God. In the second, we know that Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, was a Vestal Virgin of Alba Longa and unexpectedly became the bride of Mamurius or Mars, then a red-faced, erotic Shepherd-god; and was not buried alive as a Vestal would now be if she became pregnant – even though she claimed that a god had forced her.’

‘They drowned Silvia in the River Anio, at all events.’

‘Only in a manner of speaking, I think. After the birth of her twins, whom she laid in the ark of osier and sedge, which is a commonplace in nativity myths of this sort, and consigned to the mercy of the waves, she took much the same baptismal bath in renewal of her virginity as the Priestess of Aphrodite yearly takes here at Paphos 3 in the blue sea, and the nymph Dryope in her fountain at Pegae.’

‘The connexion between Rome and Arcadia is, I grant, very close. The Shepherd-god sends a wolf, lycos, to alarm Silvia and then overpowers her in a cave. And when the twins are born, a wolf and a woodpecker bring them food. By the way, can you explain how Pan comes to have a wolf in his service, if he is a god of shepherds?’

‘It was probably a were-wolf. The Arcadian religious theory is that a man is sent as an envoy to the wolves. He becomes a were-wolf for eight years, and persuades the wolf-packs to leave man’s flocks and children alone during that time. Lycaon the Arcadian initiated the practice, they say, and it is likely that your ancient Guild of Lupercal priests originally provided Rome with her were-wolf too. But to speak again of Silvia. The God not only ravished her in a dark cave overshadowed by a sacred grove, but took advantage of a total eclipse of the sun. He was hiding his true shape, I suppose; which was that of a sea-beast.’

‘You seem to have the whole business worked out. Perhaps you can also explain why the hair of a Vestal is cut at marriage and never allowed to grow?’

‘That must have been King Tarquin’s prudent regulation. Women with their hair cut cannot perform magical spells. Doubtless he feared that they would revenge themselves on him for his severity towards them. Vestal Virgins were under the king’s sole charge in those days. It was he, not the Chief Pontiff, who had the privilege of scourging any Vestal who let the sacred fire go out, and scourging to death any Vestal who took a private lover.’

‘And can you also tell me why they use spring-water mixed with powdered and purified brine in their sacrifices?’

‘Tell me first what are the medical properties of water mixed with brine?’

‘It is a strong emetic and purge.’

‘Suitable for preparing celebrants for the midsummer and midwinter feasts? I had not thought of that supplementary use. What I am suggesting is that when the twelve young shepherds – the leaping priests of Mamurius or Pallas – performed their orgiastic dance for hour after hour around the blazing bonfires they must have sweated terribly and come near to fainting.’

‘I see what you mean. In the harvest-fields countrymen always refresh themselves with brine-water in preference to plain: it restores the salt that has been lost by sweating. Brine-water fetched by Vestals at the midsummer orgy must have restored the vigour of the shepherds like a charm. Still another question, in revenge for all those that you asked me: how does Triton come to be a son of Poseidon?’

‘In the same way as Proteus comes to be his herdsman. Originally Poseidon had nothing to do with the sea. The porpoise of the Crathis, the Delphic dolphin and the Phocian seal all belong to the earlier civilization. Poseidon won them as his own when he seized the Peloponnese and the opposite shores of the Gulf of Corinth and married the Sea-goddess Amphitrite. Triton must have been her son, probably by Hermes; perhaps he ruled at “Lacedaemon of the Sea-beast”. At any rate, Poseidon becomes his foster-father by marrying the Sea-goddess Amphitrite – I take this to be one of Athene’s original titles. (By the way, the ancient Seal-king Phoceus, who gave his name to Phocis, was the son of Ornytion, which means Son of the Chicken – and the Chicken, I suppose, is Pan again who was hatched from a woodpecker’s egg or the egg of a penelope duck.) Of one thing I am sure: unless we recognize Triton and Pallas and Pelops as originally a sea-beast incarnate in a dynasty of ancient kings, we can hope to find no sense in the legends of heroes who rescued maidens from sea-beasts. The heroes are princes who challenge the sea-beast king to combat and kill him, and marry the royal heiress whom he has put under close restraint and reign in his stead by virtue of this marriage. The royal heiress is his daughter, but she is also an incarnation of the Moon; which explains why Homer’s Pallas was the Moon’s father. You find the same story in the marriage of Peleus to the Sea-goddess Thetis after his killing of Phocus, the Seal-king of Aegina. Peleus means “the muddy one” and may be a variant form of Pelops – as Pelias, the name of the king whose former territory Peleus annexed, certainly is. There was a sea-beast at Troy; Hercules, in company with the same Peleus, killed it and rescued the princess Hesionë and made himself master of the city. And clearly the many stories of princes who were saved by dolphins from drowning suggest sacred paintings of these princes riding on dolphin-back in proof of sovereignty. Arion and Icadius and Enalus…’

‘Theseus, of course…’

‘And Coeranus too, and Taras and Phalanthus. The common people always prefer anecdote, however improbable, to myth, however simple: they see a prince pictured astride a dolphin and take this for literal truth and feel obliged to account for his strange choice of steed.’

‘But what you undertook to explain at the beginning of this conversation, and have not yet explained, is why the Goddess Athene has a male name as her principal title.’

‘She has become androgynous: there are many such deities. Sin, for example, the Moon-deity of the Semites, and the Phoenician Baalith, and the Persian Mithras. The Goddess is worshipped first and is all-powerful; presently a God enters into equal power with her, and either they become twins, as happened when Artemis agreed to share Delos with Apollo of Tempe, or else they are joined in a single bi-sexual being. Thus the Orphic hymn celebrates Zeus as both Father and Eternal Virgin. Your own Jupiter is in the same hermaphroditic tradition.’

‘Our own Jupiter? You surprise me.’

And Varro, his rival in learning, writing of the Capitoline Trinity, agreed that together they form a single god: Juno being Nature as matter, Jupiter being Nature as the creative impulse, and Minerva being Nature as the mind which directs the creative impulse. Minerva, as you know, often wields Jupiter’s thunderbolts; therefore if Jupiter is Eternal Virgin, Minerva is equally Eternal Father. And there we are again: Minerva is universally identified with Pallas Athene, who is the Goddess of Wisdom. Athene is to Pallas as Minerva is to Jupiter: his better half.’

‘I am getting confused in my mind between these various goddesses. Are they all the same person?’

‘Originally. She is older than all the gods. Perhaps her most archaic form is the Goddess Libya. If you read Apollonius recently you will recall that she appeared in triad by Lake Triton to Jason, wearing goatskins.’

‘A bi-sexual deity naturally remains chaste, or so I judge from Minerva’s case,’ Paulus commented.

‘Chaste as a fish.’

‘But when Jupiter began he was as unchaste as a sea-beast.’

‘Minerva reformed him.’

‘I daresay that is why she is called his daughter. My daughter Sergia reformed me. All daughters reform their fathers. Or try to. I was a leaping sea-beast as a young man.’

‘So was Apollo before his sister Artemis reformed him: he was a lusty dolphin once. But now chaste sacred fish are kept in his temples at Myra and Hierapolis.’

‘That reminds me of a question on which I am most anxious to be informed: what do you know of sea-beasts and fish in the Jewish religion? I understand that you have read their sacred books with some care.’

‘Not recently. But I remember that there is a partial taboo on fish in the Jewish Torah, or Law; which suggests Egyptian influence. But not on scaled fish, only on the unscaled, and that would point to their having once held sea-beasts, such as the porpoise and dolphin, in reverence. Moreover, their sacred Ark – now lost – was covered with sea-beast skins; that is important. The Jews were tributary once to the Philistines, whose God was a sea-beast of many changes named Dagon – the Philistines are originally immigrants of Cretan Stock, despite their Semitic language. As I remember the story, the Philistines conquered the Jews and laid up the Ark in Dagon’s temple before his phallic statue, but the God enclosed in the Ark wrestled with Dagon and broke his statue into pieces. Yes, and the legendary hero who led the Jews into Judaea was called Jeshua, son of the Fish.’

‘Ha! That is exactly what I wanted to know. You see, a curious thing happened the other day. A written report reached me that a Jew named Barnabas was preaching some new mystical doctrine in a Jewish synagogue at the other end of the island; it was described by my informant, a Syrian Greek from Antioch with a Jewish mother, as a doctrine endangering the peace of the island. I sent for Barnabas and the other fellow and heard what both had to say. I forget his original name, but he had become a Roman citizen and asked my permission to call himself Paulus, to which I had weakly assented. I will not go into the story in detail: suffice it to say that Barnabas was preaching a new demigod, so far as I can make out a recent reincarnation of this heroic Jeshua. I did not know until you mentioned it just now that Jeshua was son of the Fish; perhaps this explains the mystery. At all events, my Oriental Secretary, a harmless little man called Manahem, took Barnabas’s part warmly, rather too warmly, and sent the other fellow about his business with a fierceness of which I should never have believed him capable.’

‘I know Manahem; he came to you from the Court of Antipas of Galilee, did he not?’

‘That’s the man. He is now away on leave in Alexandria. Well, when the case was settled and Barnabas and the other fellow had both been sent out of the island with a warning never to return, I called Manahem to my private room and gave him a piece of my mind. I am not naturally observant, but long experience as a magistrate has taught me to use my eyes in court, and I had caught Manahem surreptitiously signalling to Barnabas to leave the case in his hands. He was making a secret sign with his foot, the outline of a fish traced on the pavement. I gave Manahem the fright of his life – threatened to put him to the torture unless he explained that fish to me. He confessed at once, and begged me to forgive him. The fish sign, it appears, is the pass-word of Barnabas’s society which cultivates a sort of universal pacifism under the guidance of a demi-god named Jeshua – Jesus in Greek – who has the title of the Anointed One. The pass-word is for use among Greek-speaking Jews and stands, Manahem says, for Jesus Ch ristos Th eos which are, of course, the first letters of ichthus, fish. But there is more to it than that, I believe.’

‘I have heard of the society. They celebrate a weekly love-feast with fish, wine and bread, but tend to Pythagorean asceticism. You may be sure that Jeshua the Fish is of the chaster sort. The Jeshua who founded it was executed under Tiberius; and oddly enough his mother was a Temple Virgin at Jerusalem, and there was a mystery about his birth.’

‘Yes, Manahem revealed it under an oath of secrecy. You are right about this God’s chastity. Erotic religion is going out of fashion everywhere; it is inconsistent with modern social stability, except of course among the peasantry. Do you know, Theophilus, a picture rises in my mind, almost a vision. I see the white-clad Vestal Virgins in their Temple grounds offering up little prayers to chaste Jupiter, Father and Virgin, whom they serve. I see them devoutly circling the fish-pool which the sacred fish also mystically circles – the cool, pale-faced fish, as chaste as they –’

Theophilus interrupted: ‘– Who was dark-faced and hot in Silvia’s day,’

‘And in his pool drowns each unspoken wish,’ Paulus agreed.

Theophilus was wrong to suggest that the hero rescues the chained virgin from a male sea-beast. The sea-beast is female – the Goddess Tiamat or Rahab – and the God Bel or Marduk, who wounds her mortally and usurps her authority, has himself chained her in female form to the rock to keep her from mischief. When the myth reaches Greece, Bellerophon and Hercules are more chivalrously represented as rescuing her from the monster. It has even been suggested that in the original icon, the Goddess’s chains were really necklaces, bracelets and anklets, while the sea-beast was her emanation.