Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece 0520217071, 9780520217072

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Restless Dead Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece

SARAH

ILES

JOHNSTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London; England © 1999 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston~Sarah Uesj19 ;7RestJess dead: encounters between the living and the dead in ancient Greece/ Sarah Ues Johnston. p+ cm. Inc.ludes bibliographical references and index. (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-21707-2

Ghosts-Greece-History. Religion. I. Tide. 1.

Bf147:i.G8J64

2.

Greece-

1999

133.r'09;8-dc21

98-44:;65 C[P

.Nianufactured in the United States of America IT

IO

09

12

II

IO

9

8

7

6

5

4

The paper used in this pubHcation meets the rninimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.4-8-r992 (R 1997) (Penna11enceof Paper}.@>

For Carole E. Newlands, in friendship and admiration.

Contents

Prologue Acknowledgments Frequently Used Terms Abbreviations

xv +.

XVll

.

XXI

PART I. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEAD IN ANCIENT GREECE

1.

Elpenor and Others: Narrative Descriptions of the Dead

3

.z. To Honor and Avert: Rituals Addressed to the Dead 3. Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems: The Origin and Roles of the Goes PART II. RESTLESS DEAD

4. The Unavenged: Dealing with Those Who Die Violently

127

.

Contents

VI

5. Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins: Female Ghosts and Their Victims PART III. DIVINITIES AND THE DEAD

6 .. Hecate and the Dying Maiden: How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title

203

7,. Purging the Polis: Erinyes, Eumenides, and Sernnai Theai

Bibliography

289

General Index

309

Index Locorum

Texts

31 5

Inscriptions

32 9

Prologue The Corinthian tyrant Periander sent his henchmen to the oracle of the dead to ask where he had lost something. The ghost of Periander's dead ,vife, Melissa, was conjured up but she refused to tell them where the object was because she was cold and naked-she said that the clothes buried with her were useless because they had not been burnt properly. To prove who she was, she told the men to tell Periander that he had put his bread into a cold oven. This convinced Periander" who knew that he had made loveto Melissa's corpse after she died+ Periander immediately ordered every woman in Corinth to assemble at the temple of Hera. They all came wearing their best clothes, assuming there was going to be a festival. Periander then told his guards to srrip the women naked and burn their clothes in a pit while he prayed to Melissa. Then Melissa'"s ghost told him where the missing object was.

So goes one of our oldest ghost stories. 1 The Greek historian Herodotus tells it to illustrate the moral flaws of a tyrant: to serve his own purposes, Periander was willing to rob and humiliate all the women in Corinth,, to say nothing of indulging in necrophilia. But at the same time, Herodotus provides a textbook example of how relations between the living and the dead were supposed to work. We learn from the story that the dead demand proper funerals, which ought to include gifts that they can use in the afterlife. This afterlife must be similar to life itself, considering that

clothing is de rigeur~ The living, for their part, can expect the dead,s cooperation, so long as they keep the dead happy. Transactions between the living and the dead can take place on home territory (Periander burns the clothing in Corinth), but special deals may be negotiated at a place such as the oracle of the dead, under the guidance of experts. Even then, t.

Hdt. 5 +9117,slightlyadapted. ,.

vu

,

..

Prologue

VIU

one can't be too careful: to be sure that the ghost who appears is really the right ghost, one ought to have some sort of proof. Melissa's proof not only reveals Periander'"s personal proclivities but shows that she knows what has been happening in the upper world since she died, as does her knowledge of where Periander'"s lost object can be found. Finally, the story shows that dealing with the dead may become a civic concern even if their anger is caused by the act of a single citizen ..It was Periander's failure to send Melissa to Hades with the proper wardrobe that made her mad, but it requires contributions from the whole female population to bring her around. We find each of these ideas in other ancient Greek sources as well, but it is their assemblage that n1akes Herodotus's story fascinating, for it presents a paradox: it acknowledges that a person who once ate and drank and laughed with the rest of us is gone, but it also reflects the vigor with which she continues to inhabit the world of those who knew her. Because the dead remain part of our mental and emotional lives long after they cease to dwell beside us physically, it is easy to assume that they are simply carrying on their existence elsewhere and might occasionally come back to visit us. From this assumption arise a variety of hopes and fears~ Hopes that the dead may aid the living, by revealing hidden information? by bringing illness to enemies, and by a variety of other favors-even by simply visiting those whom they have left behind: "by wandering into my dreams you may bring me joy," Admetus says to his wife, Alcestis, as she lies dying, expressing hope that their love will survive death. 2 Fears that the dead may somehow punish the living for the injuries or neglect they suffered,,by bringing illness, by causing nightmares, or simply by refusing to cooperate when needed, as Melissa did .. The dead are very much like us, driven by the same desires, fears, and angers, seeking the same sorts of rewards and requiring the same sort of care that we do. For this reason, the world of the dead is not only a source of both possible danger and possible help, but a mirror chat reflects our own. The reflection is frequently a distorted one, to be sure: the dead are often credited with remarkable powers, and thus manifest their desires, fears, and angers in ways that go beyond any available to us" But the distortion is not random: through their excesses, the dead reveal, like E.ngerprint powder shaken over a table, where desires., fears, and angers are most acute among the living. 2.

E. Ale. 354-55+

Prologue

' !X

Everydetail in which a culture cloaks its ideas about the dead has the potential to reveal something about the living. The types of misfortune that a culture traces to the anger of the dead often reveal what that cu]ture fears losing-and correspondingly values-the most, for blaming the dead can be a way of avoiding other explanations that would challenge the culture's social coherence or theodicy. If one were to blame the death of one's child on the witchcraft of one's neighbor, for instance, the relationship between one"s own family and the family of the neighbor might be irreparably damaged. If one were to blame it on divine wrath, one would be forced to acknowledge either that one deserved to lose the child or that divinity was morally fickle..Tracing the child's death to the angry dead avoids all of these problems: the dead serve as convenient scapegoats, shouldering burdens of blame too heavy for other agents to carry. To take another example, many cultures believe that death under certain circumstances or before certain milestones of life have been passed will condemn the soul to become a restless ghost. Studying the conditions that produce these ghosts offers insight into what the culture considers, conversely, to constitute a full life and a good death. The models that I have just sketched will be familiar to many reade[s because they are taken from well-known studies published earlier in this century. Anthropologists who did fieldwork with tribal cultures at that time recognized the contribution that analysis of mortuary rituals and eschatological beliefs could make toward constructing a picture of the way that those cultures worked; scholars of other cultures eventually began to apply these models to their own materials as welL 3 There have been few attempts to apply them to materials from ancient Greece, how• ever .. This is all the more unfortunate because Greek literature abounds with incidents in which the Jiving and the dead interact. Already in the Iliad and the Odyssey, ghosts appear to complain of poor treatment and demand that the living help them; tragedy, that most Greek of literary genres, frequently focuses on the dead, their problems, and the obliga-

tions that the living bear toward them. Students of Greek culture and literature have much to learn from the dead and yet have virtually ignored them. I suspect that this neglect is due to a deep-rooted reluctance to accept the idea that the Greeks believed in the possibility of anything so «irra3. For a review of some of the most prominent workst see Metcalf and Huntington, esp. the introduction and eh. I.

Prologue

X

tional ,, as interaction between the Hving and the dead. This reluctance may seem remarkable, given that substantial advances have been made toward acknowledging and understanding other manifestations of supposed irrationality among the Greeks: the study of Greek magic, most notably, has attracted considerable interest in recent years. But, if one so chooses, magic can be presented as a technology, as sornething approaching our own concept of an ~'applied science," paceJames Frazer.

After aU, it works by certain rules that our ancient sources claim have been "tested" and can be passed from teacher to student. Indeed, the very fact that there are teachers and students lends magic the look of a serious discipline. Moreover, magic is intensely concerned with power: the power of the magician over those whom he enchants and his power to persuade or compel deities and daimones to work his spe11s.And power in aU of its incarnations and from all angles-who wields it, who submits to it, and why-is a topic that has always found a respectable place

in classical studies+ The possibility that the Greeks believed that the dead and the living might interact, in contrast, has seldom even been entertained. A. D .. Nock, an eminent historian of Greek religion of the generation previous to our own, confidently declared that «The Greeks were not dominated by any fear of ghosts" and described their religion as one of ''joyous festivals." 4 Sjmilarly, although Martin P.. Nilsson-probably the single most influential scholar of Greek religion ever-conceded that the Greeks belieYed in such things as the return of the dead, he did so only with regret:

The general opinion is that the Greeks of the classical age were happily free from superstition. I am sorry that I am obliged to refute this opinion. There was a great deal of superstition in Greece, even when Greek culture was at its height and even in the center of that cuh:urc\ Athens.Superstition is very seldom mentioned in the literature of the period simply because great writers found such base things not worth mentioning45

We note how carefuUy Nilsson has distanced such beliefs from great (one suspects he really means "intelligent'') 1ninds.

4. Fro1n A. D. Nock~ ''The Cult of Heroes, H,"' originally published in HThR 37 944}; rpt+ in Nock, 57 5-602.; quotation from p. ; 82. Nock does. concede, in a footnote to the portion quoted, that the Greeks were not completely free of the fear of ghosts,. eidier, but the do1ninanl' tone of the discussion is that of the •'joyous festivaJ."" 5 Nilsson 1940, 1 r T. (I

+

'

Prologue

XI

One wonders whether Nock's dismissal and Nilsson's regret in part reflect the fact that to most European and American ears, the word "ghost" smacks of childish fears at bedtime and the kind of gullibility on which spiritualists prey. E. R. Dodds, another scholar of their generation, l1ad his heart in the right place when he u11dertook to study an• cient ideas about ghosts and related phenomena" but he may have hurt his cause as much as he helped it when he compared ancient testimonies for them to contemporary reports of the same (1936; revised in 1971). By using what happens at modern seances to clariJy what happened during attempts to raise ghosts in antiquity, Dodds implicitly cast upon any Greeks who participated in such activities the same taint of blind credulity that many of us cast l.ipon modern parricjpants. 6 Scholars of our own generation, apparently sharing either Nock's reIuctance or Nilsson's regret, have paid the topic little attention. A fourand-a-half page section on afterlife beliefs in Walter Burkere·s masterly Greek Religion briefly acknowledges the possibility that the dead might return and that their anger was feared, but concentrates on what the soul experiences once it is firmly ensconced in the Underworld itself. Jan Bremmer's The Early Greek Concept of the Soul offers an excellent analysis of funerary rites and the transition of the soul co Hades, but says relatively little about the return of the dead to the upper world or how the living might affect them; most of what he does say focuses on a single festival during which the dead were jnvired back, the Anthesteria. In the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (I 996), Robert Garland ~sarticle on Greek attitudes to death only briefly refers to the possibility that the dead might return, and "'Soul," by Christopher Rowe, merely mentions that by the fifth century, the concept that the soul might survive death was well established. 7 There are no articles entitled « Es... chatology '' or Ghosts." The single voice that breaks this silence is the exception that proves the rule. Erwin Rohde, who in 1894 published Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglau.beder Griechen, was anything but a traditional classicist. A friend of Nietzsche's and adversary of Wilamowitz"s,Rohde K

6. Dodds 1971~ eh. 10. He occasionaHy discusses the return of rhe dead in The Greeks and the Irrational as well, but always in the serviceof other topics. 7. The artide appears under the tttlc ""Dearh,Attitudes co.'" It is co-written by Robert Garland and John Scheid)the latter of whom deals with the Roman evidence.Robert Garlandts 1985 book The Greek Way of Death only briefly discusses the possibility of incer• act1on between the living a.nd the dead.

+ •

XU

Prologue

rebelled in this work and many others against mainstream views of the ancient Greeks ..8 Rohde's contribution to our understanding of Greek ideas and practices concerning the dead was immense,, but the century since Psyche's publication has brought not only much new evidencenew inscriptions, new material remains, and even new papyri with new fragments of literature-but also the new anthropological models that I mentioned above and an enhanced understanding of the ways in which the Greeks interacted with their Mediterranean neighbors, trading ideas and ritual techniques. It is high time to look anew at Greek ideas about encounters between the living and the dead. This book does so. By making use .of new materials and adapting models developed by cultural anthropology, I seek to show how eloquently the Greek dead can speak to us about the Greek living. I begin, in the three first chapters, with a historical overview of how Greek ideas about the relationship between the living and the dead evolved in response to changing social and cultural conditions during the archaic and classical ages-most notably changes that are associated with the development of the polis (city-state), such as funerary legislation, and changes due to increased contacts between the Greeks and cultures of the ancient Near East, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt..The first of these chapters focuses on narrative sources, which can be dated with relative ease and thereby provide a rough picture of chronological development. The second chapter deals with non-narrative sources, which help to confirm the picture sketched in chapter 1. I conclude this overview, in chapter 3, by taking a close look at the goes, the Greek practitioner who made interaction with the world of the dead his specialty, and show that his duties were both complex and integral to other aspects of Greek re-

ligious life.. Then I show, in four more closely focused chapters, how stories about the restless, unhappy dead and rituals designed to control them reiterated Greek social values and simultaneously expressed the danger that the dead posed to individuals and cities alike .. As our anthropological models would lead us to expect, the Greek dead frequently served as scapegoats, and even more often served as mirrors, now taking the blame for disasters and now again reflecting the fears and desires of the

8T Several revised editions and translations followed Psyche's original publication, including an English translation Jn 192.5 (Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immor~ tality among the Ancient Greeks).

+.;

Prologue living. The multi-talented

XIU

goes being a sort of combination magi ... was essential to the polis because he possessed 1

cian/undenaker/shaman, skiJls that helped to protect it against the chaos these dead might bring .. The polis also developed institutional methods of controlJing the dead, including civic rituals in which they were prevented from attacking those who were most at risk, such as girls on the brink of marriage. Divinities such as Hecate and the Semnai Theai, who gradually 1netamorphosed during the archaic and classical periods into mediators between the living and the dead, also helped to ease the tension between the two worlds. The book concludes with my reading of one of Greek literature's most famous literary texts about interaction between the living and the dead, Aeschylus's Eumenides◄ Athena, the goddess who emblematizes the well-run polis, takes on a goetic role in this play, employing magical means of controlling the dead in order to establish new rules for their interaction with the Jiving and thus ensure her city's welfare. In doing this, she replicates the actions of the legendary figure Epimenides, who once saved Athens from the wrath of the dead and who thus was one of the earliest Greek versions of the goes himself. A few practical notes~ There are several topics that I have chosen not to discuss in any depth because they have been thoroughly investigated by others: hero cult, oracles of the dead, and mystery religions, for ex ... ample. Although these phenomena are important to the subjects considered in this book, my own views do not differ significantly from the most widely accepted recent opinions and, thus, extensive analyses seem unnecessary. Footnotes guide the reader to fuller treatments. I have transliterated most single Greek words and short phrases; longer phrases that scholars may find important for evaluating my arguments are given in both Greek and English. I use a Latinate system of transliteration for most proper names (e.g., "Cronus," not "Kronos") but a system of trans~ literation that produces a spelling closer to the original Greek for other words (e.g., "katagrapho," not « catagrapho"'). Each of these guidelines is sometimes rejected, however, in favor of retaining commonly used spellings (e.g., "psyche,'' not "psuche;t'' and ''Knossos," not ~·cnossus'' ) ♦ A list of frequently used Greek terms that may be unfamiliar to nonspecialists is offered on page (xvii).

Acknowledgments

Good colleagues are a scholar's greatest resource, and I am fortunate in having had many who were willing to discuss ideas with me at various stages of this book's completion ..First of all, I thank Philippe Borgeaud and David Frankfurter, both of whom critiqued early versions of my theories during a shared semester of fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1995, and who later, in their capacity as referees for the completed manuscript, made suggestions that greatly improved the book's fina] form~ I also thank Richard Beal, Kevin Clinton, Chris Faraone, Fritz Graf, David Jordan, David Leitao, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Timothy McNiven, Kathryn Morgan, Carole Newlands, Richard Seaford, JoAnn Scurlock, Michael Swartz, Wendy Watkins, and Victoria Wohl for their help during the period in which the manuscript was being finished. I am grateful to my editor, Mary Lamprech; to her assistant, Kate Toll; to the University of California Press's internal referee, John Lynch; to the production editor, Cindy Fulton, for suggestions that improved the presentation of my material; to LeRoy Johnston III, for encouragement and practical advice; and to my students Douglas Freebie and Jack Emmert, who proofread the manuscript. The support of several institutions facilitated my work: the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Fondation Hardt, Geneva; and (within The Ohio State University) the Department of Greek and Latin~ the Division of Comparative Studies, the Center for Medieval and Re-

xv

XVI

Acknowledgmencs

naissance Studies, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and the Col1ege of Humanities. I thank HarperCollins Publishers, the University of California Press, and the Associated Press for permission to reprint portions of works to which they hold the copyrights and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for permission to depict a red-figure vase from their collection (inv. 34.,79) on the dust ,iacket.. The vase, which shows Odysseus conversing with the ghost of Elpenor at the entrance to the Underworld W'hileHermes ]ooks on, is attributed to the Lycaon Painter and dated to the mid fifth century B.C ..E.

Frequently Used Terms

I use many transliterated Greek words in this book, translating the term when it first is used but not thereafter. For convenience, here are defini• tions of the most important terms. Plurals follo,v in parenthesest aga/ma (agalmata) anything that

delights a god, including a statue of

the god or a tree or animal sacred to the god

aition (aitia} a myth explaining the origin of something

alastor (a/astores) and elasteros (elasteroi) a vengeful ghost or an agent who works on the ghost's behalf a6ros, a6te {aoroi, a6rai) a man or woman who dies too young ataphos (ataphoi) rites

a dead person whose body has not received funeral

biaiothanatos (biaiothanatoi) a person who died violently choe (choai) a libation poured out to the dead eidolon (eidola) a ghost (literally "image't) epoidelepaoide (ep6idailepaoidai) a chanted or sung spell

erinys (erinyes) a deity who works to avenge the dead, among other things

-~

xvu

Frequently Used Terms

XVUl

gel/6 (gelloudes) a female ghost who attacks women and children (no plural of this word exists in ancient Greek; I had ro adopt the plural form used in some Byzantine Greek sources)

genos (gene) kin (often with political implications) goes (goetes)and goeteia an expert in dealing with disembodied souls and the art that he practices;. hence, also "goetic" goos (gooi) a highly emotional funeral lament

katharos (katharoi) and katharsis an adjective meaning "pure» and noun meaning ''purification,,

katabasis (katabaseis) a journey to the Underworld katadesmos (katadesmoi) a curse tablet

ker (keres) a supernatural agent who brings death or other misfortune kleos g]ory, renown kourotrophos

{kourotrophoi)

one who nurtures children

lamia (lamiai) a female ghost who attacks women and children

/ex sacra (leges sacrae)

LATIN:

Jaw concerning religious practices

lithica a work describing magica) stones and their properties n1aschalismos the ritualized act of severing a corpse's extremities

miaros (miaroi) and miasma (miasmata) an adjective meaning polluted and noun meaning pollution morm6 (mormones) a female ghost who attacks women and children

mormolukeion/mormoluke (mormolukeialmormolukai) ghost who attacks women and children

a female

nekuia (nekuiai) an encounter between living and dead individuals, usua IJyinitiated through ritual nekuomanteion (nekuomanteia) an oracle in which the dead prophesy

oikos (oikoi) a household or family palarnnaios (palamnaioi)

either a murderer or a spirit who avenges

murder

parthenos {parthenoi} a woman who has never been married pharmakon (pharmaka) and phar1nakeutrides magical material, especially drugs,, and the female specialists who gather and use them

FrequentlyUsedTerms

XlX

phasma (phasmata) and phantasma (phantasmata) ghosts progonoi progenitors

prostropaios (prostropaioi) either a person (or god) who should be averted or a person (or god) or functions as an averter

psychagogos (psychagogoi) and psychagogia one who invokes souls and the art by which he does so

psyche (psychai)

sou)

psychopontpos (psychopompoi) a leader of souls strix (striges) a female ghost who attacks women and children telete (teletai) rites, especially those associated with mysteries theos (theoi) a god, either male or female; but cf. thea (theai ), goddess theoxenia a meal to which a god is invited

threnos (threnoi) a formal funeral lament, often professionatly composed

xenos (xenoi) and xenia a guest with whom one has a forma] friendship and the friendship itself

Abbreviations

For the abbreviations of Greek and Roman authors and their works, journals, and lexica, I follow the lists in Liddell, Scott, and Jones's A Greek--EnglishLexicon; The Oxford Latin Dictiona:ry,edited by Peter Glare; The Oxford ClassicalDictionary, 3d ed., edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth; and L'Annee Philologique. In ad-

dition, note the foJlowingspecial abbreviations: Cyr..

Cyranides as in D. Kaimaikis, Die Kyraniden {Meisenheim am Gian,, 1976)

DT

A. AudoUent, Defixionum Tabellae (Paris, 1904)

DTA

IG 111.3Appendix: '(Defixionum Tabellae" (Berlin, 1897)

Lith.

Lithica as collected by Halleux and Schamp in Les lapidairesgrecs(Paris, 198 5)

Lith. Dam.-Ev.

The lithica of Damigeron-Evax

Orph. lith.

Orphic lithica

Orph. lith. keryg.

The kerygma of the Orphic lithica

XXJ

PART I

A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

CHAPTER

I

Elpenor and Others Narrative Descriptions of the Dead No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality+

Shirley Jackson,The Haunting of HUIHouse (1959)

So begins one of the most effective ghost stories of the nventieth century" It is an appropriate overture for a tale that explores how human beings cope not only with incursions by the restless dead but also with the uncertainty of whether what they are experiencing is really the work of ghosts or only the creation of their own imaginations. When the main character, Eleanor, is challenged by the other members of a group investigating a haunted house as to whether she has really seen a ghost, she responds, ''I could say 'all three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real,." Eleanor is half joking when she says this., but Dr~ Montague, the professor of anthropology who has organized the investigation, gravely replies that if he thought she were serious, he would send her home immediately,for she would be '4 venturing too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace~"' Dr. Montague-a well-trained academic-wishes to keep what he considers real and what he considers imaginary firmly separated ..By the end of the story, however, we have learned that for Eleanor (and for many other people as well, Shirley Jackson implies), belief in a world beyond the immediately visible one, however unpleasant that other world The quotations from The Haunting of Hill House used here are taken from the 1984 Penguin edit1on, pp. :;, 140.

3

4

A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

may be, is absolutely necessary for the expression of otherwise inexpressib1e fears and desires. Retaining one's sanity, as Jackson's first sentence insists, depends upon occasional vacations from reality. Conversely, as Jackson also knew very well, a ghost story succeeds only when the narrator has managed to persuade her audience to suspend their disbelief, at least temporarily. Of course, this is one variation on a rule that applies to all fiction: the world constructed by the narrator must make enough sense to the audience for them to be able to enter into it without being constantly distracted by internal contradictions. Even if there is little expectation that a story's occurrences could take place in the real world, therefore, a properly constructed story will provide glimpses into the real world ,s systen1 of beliefs because it will adhere to rules that resemble those of the real world. For example, although the vast majority of contemporary Americans who watch a vampire film do not believe that vampires really exist, they are able to suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy watching the story unfold, both because the screenwriter has been careful to construct a fictional universe that follows its own rules and because those rules bear some similarity to rules of the real world. Thus, if a vampire is averted by a crucifix early in the story, then the crucifix must serve as a reliable means of averting vampires throughout the rest of the story, unless some good explanation that nullifies the rule is subsequently offered. Why a crucifix, and not, for instance, a piece of coral, such as some Polynesian cultures use to avert demons? Because the crucifix is a symbol of beneficent power that can be understood by any audience member who has grown up within the predominantly Christian American culture4 Even more interesting are the existential rules of many fictional worlds. As viewers of a vampire movie, we have agreed to believe that there are some corpses that return to life, but not that all corpses do. Vampires may arise from those who die under tragic or abnormal circumstances. This includes suicides, those who are unburied or who are buried improperly, and those who die cursing God. This rule makes a certain kind of sense because the early truncation of a life or the marring of a soul's passage from life to death disrupts what we like to believe is the normal progression from birth to death. People who would laugh at the idea that vampires really exist might still believe that death under such circumstances brings unhappiness to the soul or prevents its postmortem reunion with God .. Witness for example the Orthodox Jewish belief that the entire body, including any severed limbs, must be buried properly if the deceased is to enjoy the eventual resurrection promised

Elpenor and Others

5

to the faithful. Even when they cannot articulate precise reasons that proper burial is necessary,survivors usually feel compelled to provide it; the importance placed on the recovery of bodies from battlefields or ac .. at great expense and risk to those undertaking cident sites-sometimes the recovery-attests to this. At least one of the rules governing vampire stories, then, indirectly reflects the values of those who listen to them .. What would be impossible to accept, even within the artificially constructed confines of a vampire story,,is that a pious person who died of natural causes at an advanced age, and whose funeral was conducted properly, could become a vampire. Effective ghost stories, like effective vampire stories~ reflect the values of the culture in which they developed. There are further problems to be considered before we use them as evidence for real beliefs,however, par ... ticularlywhen we are studying a culture like that of ancient Greece,,where few people would have understood, much less accepted, Dr. Montague's assumption that a clear line can be drawn between what we caU the nat .... ural and the supernatural worlds ..Although a good narrator will not incorporate into a story elements that his audience will reject as "illogical'" or "anachronistic," a good narrator may incorporate elements that mislead us-his distant audience-because they provide only part of a bigger picture .. Part of our interpretive task, therefore, whenever we use narrative sources as evidence for real belief, is to recreate, as best we can,, the situation in which the narrative was originally presented. When we are dealing with narrative presentations of the dead and the after Iife, with ghosts, the journey to the Underworld, its geography, and the rules by which it works, this can become complicated, for the factor that constrains narrative treatments of civic rites such as the Panathenaia-realization that the audience can compare the narrative construction to what they see and hear in real life- is no longer fu1lyoperative4 We can probably assume that no one who listened to the story of Odysseus's journey to the Underworld believed that they themselves had also traveled to Hades. Few people ,vho watched the Erinyes pursue their victim in Aeschylus,s Eumenides thought that they had ever seen one of these monstrous creatures themselves~ The ''reality'' against which Homer's or Aeschylus's presentations of these phenomena were evaluated by an ancient audience, therefore, consisted of other things that they had heard-of other constructions of a world beyond the normal sensory perceptions provided over the course of their lives by their friends, their parents~ by other narrators of stories, and by the visual artists who created vase paintings, wall paintings, and temple decor.

6

A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

The situation is made even more difficult by the fact that beliefs existing under no official societal sanction or control" which includes most of those concerning the afterlife, tend to be fluid, changing easily from time to time~ from locale to locale, from neighbor to neighbor, and even from one statement to the next during a single conversation with a given individual. This is particularly so for beliefs about the dead because they arise in response to death itself, a phenomenon that, although inevitable and ubiquitous, is unpredictable,, poorly understood, and cloaked in conflicting emotions. As the feeling of grief or guilt about another's death shifts to resignation or relief, as fear concerning one's own inevitable end shifts to hope for postmortem bliss or back again, the ways in which the afterlife and the passage into death are pictured shift as well. A contemporary American man or woman may take flowers to the grave of a loved one, perhaps in the assumption that the departed soul somehow needs or appreciates the gifts of survivors and can receive them at the location where his corpse was deposited .. And yet that survivor might simultaneously believe that the departed soul dwells in a Heaven cut off from the physical world, where all needs are met and neither flowers nor anything else of a material nature has any relevance.

Even if the beliefs of an individual are fluid and sometimes contradictory, however, each of them has its place within a range of culturally acceptable beliefs. The example I just gave reflects the fact that contemporary American views of the dead admit both the idea that the soul lingers near the grave and the idea that the soul completely escapes the earthly realm◄ The Greeks held similarlycontradictory views about the disembodied soul, imagining it now in Hades and again at the tomb. Similarly, beliefs about such things as the way the dead look can shift from one extreme to another: the Greeks tended to describe ghosts as being either sooty black or transparently pale. These descriptions reflect, on the one hand, the grim and threatening nature of many ghosts and, on the other, the washed-out, lifeless appearance of a corpse~ Incle• pendently, either representation works well, even if they do not work well together. 1 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has discussed a similar phenomenon, namely, the way that new beliefs concerning death and the I. SeeWinkler, I s9-65, on ghosts, and compare the eloquent statement made by Bottero at the end of his discussion of Mesopotamian ideas about death and the afterlife (p. 2.86): "The typical aspect of aUmythological thought, jn contrast to logical thought_ is that it provides different answers to the same ques1ion, even opposing answers, because the answers arc imaginary,exact,,and cakulared, tottes qtlotiesl without concern for coherence. ,~

Elpenor and Others

7

afterlife can enter into a culture without completely displacing the old ones. As the needs of a situation demand, now the new beliefs and now the old ones are called upon to serve. 2 These methodological problems do not imply that ,ve should ignore narrative sources when we study ancient beliefs concerning the deadas noted, narrative texts can in fact be exceUent sources of information when handled sensitively.With due caution, let us now proceed on our survey, examining narrative sources grouped chronologicallyand by genre ..At the end of each section, I shall pause to consider what general conclusions might be derived from the evidence. I shall not, however, offer detailed analyses of most of the material; that is the job of later chapters,. HOMER The Homeric poems 3 are about the spectacular exploits of vigorous heroes. And yet, they leave us with no doubt that death is the inevitable end to life, except for a few extraordinary individuals such as Menelaus, who escape by virtue of their special relationship to the gods. What came after this end? Homeric descriptions of funerary cult and mourning imply that the recently dead were able at least to hear the living and receive their offerings. The nekuia of Odyssey I r, however, suggests that in the long run, the dead were capable of very little interaction with the living. Although they looked just as they did while alive, and could be held at bay by Odysseus's sword,, they were unable to converse

2.~ Sourvinou-lnwood 199 5 uses this model passim, applying it to different issues as they arise, but stating it most explicitly in the methodological appendix {e+g.,416-17). 3. I shou]d note that I am i.ngeneral agreement with most current scholars in assuming that the Homeric poems reached more or Jess their present form in the mid to late

eighth century,, after several centuries of development, but that changes continued to be made until the late seventh or early sixth century; see, e.g~,Nagy r992., 51; 1990~ 17- r 8 (but cf. Kirk 1-1 o; M~ L. West 1:995}. For a good treatment of the relationship betw'een

vase paintings and the problem of dating rhe poems, see Lowenstam,v.rhoalso provides an extensive bibliography of earlier scholars.hip. For a distussion of the implications of this dating for interpreting the poems and the societal forms that they reflect, see Seaford 1994, 1- r o, 14 4 - 4. I shou Id also note here, however, that it is my view that the absence from

s

the poems of phenomena that are well attested in later sources must be understood to reflect an absence of those phenomena in the societies in which the poems developed, unless other cogent explanations for their absence can be found within the thematic concerns of the poet, for example; this vjew governs my analysis of Homeric ide·as and practices regarding the dead. I shall discuss thJs approach in some depth at the end of this chapter but for now wiU proceed on the assumption that if the poems do not mention ideas about the dead that are amply attesred in later sources, this is because rhe ideas were not available at the time that poems underwent their main development.

A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

8

with him in any meaningful way until they had drunk the blood that he provided~ Teiresias does speak briefly to Odysseus before drinking the blood, in order to demand access to it, but he does not speak "knoYlledgeab]y" or "clearly" (nemertea) until afterwards ..He later tells Odysseus that the same is true for all of the souls-Odysseus can learn nothing profitable from them until they drink. The souls of Agamemnon and Odysseus's mother, Anticleia, do not even recognize him until after consuming the blood. 4 It seems, therefore, that although the dead are not completely sense• less in their natural state-after all, they swarm up to the blood as soon as it is poured, like instinct-driven animals-they exist in a sort of twi• light state, incapable of any meaningful interaction with the Iiving. They are, in a word, aphradeisj lacking all those qualities expressed by that complex notion phradeand its cognates that make converse between intelligent creatures possible: wit, reflection, and compJexity of expression. 5 It is only by means of the blood-a striking emblem of the vigorous life they have 1eft behind forever-that they temporarily become capable of normal human converse. Even after they have drunk the blood, the souls of the dead remain physically insubstantial, unable to embrace, much less affect, those who are still alive, as Odysseus's futile attempt to hug his mother illustrates; his arms close upon the air ..This insubsrantialness is also reflected in Homeric descriptions of the dead as ''flitting like shadows" and being "smokelike" or «dreamlike""6 The Homeric Underworld, then, is 6Hed with ghosts who must be specially nourished before they can interact with even those members of the living world who arrive at their own doorstep. There is no indication that these ghosts can return to the land of the living .. Indeed, Anticleia expressly claims that the opposite is true: she tells her son that terrible rivers form an uncrossable barrier between the two worlds~ Odysseus has traveled to the bitter edge of the upper world in order to make his sacrifice and speak with the dead. 7 It is only at this special 4. Sword ho)ds dead at bay: Od. t r.48-50 (et the interesting twist on this scene at B. 5f68-84). Teiresias speaks clearly: 11.96. Teiresias explains, the system: 11.r46-49 (but cf. 10.49 2..-9 5, where it is said Teiresias can speak dearly because Persephone granted him the specia] boon of a dear mind even after death). Odysseus's mother: 11..140-4: ◄, I 52-54. Agamemnon: 1 r.385-90. Aphradeis: e.g., Od. 11.4 76. This idea is expressed as well by Circe's description of aU of the dead except for Teiresias as being without intelligence at 10.492-9 5. 6+ Odysseus attempts to hug his inocher: Od. 11+206-24. Shadows, smoke, and dreams: e.g.~ Od. 10.495; Od. I 1.107; ll. 23.100-101 7+ Od+ 11+155-59.

s.

r

Elpenor and Others

9

place,,carefully designated by the goddess Circe, that any interaction betv.reen those who inhabit the upper and lower worlds is possible. 8 Homer knows of some members of the dead, however, who are able to interact with the liYingprecisely because they have not yet crossed the river that Anticleia n1entions. The dead Patroclus reappears to AchiHes and complains that he cannot cross the river and find peace because he has not yet received burial rites. Similarly, the ghost of Odysseus's companion Elpenor, who is among the first to arrive at the pit, and who is able to recognize and speak ,vith Odysseus even without drinking the blood, has not yet been admitted into the Underworld because his body has not yet received funerary rites. 9 The myth of Sisyphus, to which Homer alludes, and for which Alcaeus, Theognis, and Pherecydes already offer full details, 10 plays with this idea, for it was by instructing his wife not to give his body funeral rites that Sisyphus ensured he would not really ''die." His soul 1 excluded from the Underworld because his body was unburied, was given permission by the gods to return to the upper world long enough to ask for funeral rites, and once there it took advantage of the situation by repossessing his body. Sisyphus, the ultimate trickster, made what most people feared work to his own advantage. This idea, that the dead are not admitted to the Underworld until

their physical remains are ceremonially honored and disposed of in the upper world, is extremely common throughout the wor]d. Many cultures believe that until the body is properly removed from the presence of the living, the soul of a dead person must wander restlessly betwixt and between the two worlds, no longer allowed to share in the society of the living and yet not admitted amongst the dead either. 11 This belief 8. On Circc:>s significancein this role, see Marinatos~ 9. II. 23.65-74; Od. II.7I-78. In other passages, however, Homer describes the unburied dead as making a ''squeakingn or «hissing" noise (trizo}! It 13.101:; Od~Z4+5t 9. This see1ns to align with an alternative beHefthat the dead in general, rather than being completely voiceless, made inarticulate sounds: see Soph. fr. 879; D.L+8:ti:; Bremmer I98 .3,,8 5. It is uncertain "\vhetherthe phrase "uncanny cry,'" tbespesiii iachei, used of the dead at we shall explore some of the reasons for, and some further ramifications of, this development.

3

CHAPTER

Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems The Origin and Roles of the Goes Martha's knees gave under her~She sank down ..... She looked up and saw the wizard standing before her, a book in one hand and a silverwand in the other. The upper part of his face was hidden, but she saw his pale lips move and presently he spoke, in a deep husky tone that vibrated solemnly in the dim room:

"w

El µe:v')'ctp,n6XEµov

1T€TTOV,

pt TOV6E cf>uy6vTE

TT€

at,e:l617 11EAAOLµEv ay~pw T' a8avaTW TE EOCJEU0'OUTE KEV QUTOS ivl trpWTOLOl µaxo( 11n11; OUTE

KEO'E (jTEAAOlµtuaxnv€S KtP6tdlJELpav • '!t +

+

Dorothy L .. Sayers, ''The Incredible Elopement of Lord PeterWimsey

»

Masquerading as a wizard in order to rescue a woman held captive in the Basque region of Spain, Lord Peter Wimsey constructs himself to match what his audience would expect of such a man. A book of spells, a wand, and, most important, obscure incantations spoken in a foreign tongue. In the popu1ar imagination of many cultures, the wizard is someone who comes from without to work his magic in a language in-

accessible to other people. In this chapter, I construct my own portrait of one type of Greek wizard who had a special attachment to the world of the dead: the goes. When he entered Greece during the late archaic age, the goes, like Wimsey'swizard, had some foreign elements in h.ismakeup, but more imporThe quotation from Sayers is taken from a collection of her short stories compiled by

James Sandoe under the title Lord Peter(New York: Harper & Row, 1972.),, 32.0, reprinted here with the kind permission of HarperCo Uins,Inc+

Magical Solutions to DeadlyProblems

rant, and also like Wimsey"swizard, the goes was responding to homegrown needs and incorporating native ideas. Before we can move on to the goes, however, we need first to reiterate and build upon some conclusions from the information presented in chapters I and 2 and then examine the milieu into which the goes en ... tered. Foreign elements, however attractive, are not accepted by cultures without good reason. If the Greeks adopted practitioners who specialized in communicating with the dead, there must have been changes in their own culture that made those specialists attractive, even necessary.

CHANGING

CONCEPTS

In chapters 1 and 2, I sketched models of Greek beliefs in the ability of the dead to interact with the living ..I suggested that at the earliest stage, the Greeks presumed that most of the dead were feebleand unable to affect the living. I a1so noted, however, that in some passages of the Home-

ric poems, we already encounter the idea that those souls whose bodies had not received funeral rites were both capable and desirous of returning to inflict harm on the living, particularly on those responsible for their plights. This beliefprobably rested on the assumption that the soul could not pass over into the Underworld and find rest until the funeral rites were completed, and also on the correlative assumption chat the unburied dead were not restrained by its physical boundaries. There is also a trace, in two episodes of the Odyssey, of the idea that those who died before accomplishing whatever was considered to mark success in life were excluded from the Underworld, too, and might return to harm the living. AU of these beliefs, both the earlier and the later, are to be found in other ancient Mediterranean cultures as well; in fact they are common throughout both the ancient and modern worlds. 1 The first idea-that the dead are feeble-arises naturally from the sight of a corpse. The second-that the soul may not enter the Underworld until its body is buried-also makes sense; the dead but unburied individual is neither fully a member of the land of the living nor fully separated from it. He 1. The bibliography on this topic is vast; here I cite on]y the works most likely to be of interest to students of the ancient Mediterranean (and omitting,,by and large, those that address the Greek beliefs this chapter seeks to study): Schmidt 1994; Obaya:shi{particularly the essays by Coope'r, Mumame,. North, and Mendenhall); Baines;Alster (panicular]y the essays by Astour and Margalit}; Bottero,eh. 15 (which previously appeared as pan of Alster in French); Heidel; and 3IJthe works by Scurlock listed in the bibliography.

A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece

or she is out of place and,, like all things out of place, potentially troublesome. The third idea-that those who die unfuJfiHedbecome unhappy ghosts-expresses the poignant feeling that a life has been cut off prematurely, but also reflects the idea (familiar from adolescent initiation rites as well) that one cannot pass successfully into a new stage of existence until the previous stage has been completed. In cultures where roles in life are closely determined by gender, class, or other qualities that the individual cannot change, the standards for success in life tend to be sharply circumscribed (a woman must bear children if her life is to be considered successful, for example) ..Thus, more people die in a state that is viewed as ''incomplete" and the accompanying fear is liable to carry greater weight; the implications of these beliefs are discussed further in chapter 4. But it was not only the unhappy dead who were imagined to travel back and forth between the upper and lower worlds ..From earJy times, myths suggest that truly extraordinary men might do so as well, even while they were still alive. Our earliest Greek text about such a journey is the Odyssey, but given that Odysseus alludes to the fact that Heracles had already visited Hades, we must assume that the Greeks had been telling stories of heroic katabaseis for some time. Indeed, journeys to the land of the dead have been part of the hero's repertoire at least since Enkidu descended in the Epic of Gilganiesh. We should not forget, however, that Odysseus, Heracles, and Enkidu are extraordinary figures; although these tales certainly imply that the boundaries between the two worlds were not perceivedas impermeable, surely no normal person be .. lieved that he might enter Hades and emerge alive again any more than that he could kill the Lernean hydra or lshtar's Bull of Heaven. That is the point: the ability to enter and then return from Hades is part of Vt7hat made these men heroic. Eventually, the heroic ideal was distantly imitated in the real world~ The nekuomanteion (oracle of the dead) at Ephyra, which began operations around the time when the nekuia of the Odyssey took its final form, offered the average person an opportunity to ask questions of the dead. We do not know whether the dead were imagined to appear to the questioners or the questioners were imagined to descend to them, but either way, encounters between the living and the dead occurred. lt is important to remember, nonetheless, that at Ephyra and elsewhere, nekuomanteia were built at what were believed to be entrances to the Underworld, places where the upper and ]ower worlds were closer together than normal. Whichever way the travel ran, it only worked at

Magical Solutions to Deadly Problems

these speciaJlocations. Indeed, even Heracles had entered Hades through a special cave, and Odysseus (if in fact he actually entered the Under,vorld at all) did so by sailing to a particular place to which Circe had carefully directed him, at the utter edge of the upper world. At first, then, it was assumed that if interaction with the dead were possible at aH, it was only under certain circu1nstances. One could not do it just anywhere at any time. Somewhat later than the Odyssey, in the epic Nostoi, the ghost of Achillesreturns from Hades to advise the departing Achaeans, which implies that these rules were loosening up: the souls of heroes, at least, could apparently flout the rules now and return to the world of the living even after they had been properly buried, wherever and whenever they wished .. We saw an allusion to the belief that souls could be "led up" from Hades in an epigram of Simonides",dated to shortly after 479, and in a reference to Empedocles p£acticing goeteia from approximately the same date. We found a fully developed ritual of psychag6gia in Aeschy... lus's Persians,dated to 472, and know that Aeschylus also wrote a play called Psychagogoi (now lost) .. Heracles refers to professionals called psychag6goi in Euripides' Alcestis! and we meet one of them by name in an oracular tablet from Dodona inscribed a few decades later. These and other references to psychagogia probably reflect, as I shall discuss below, the introduction of new beliefs and technology from Eastern cultures, as well as changes in native Greek attitudes toward the deads emissaries, Lucina or Eileithyia and the ~toirai,. without any mortal help (Pau:s. 9 ..11.2}+ Cicero tells of how a pregnant woman secretly was given ,..-enenum in order to deprive her husband of an heir (CJ.u.3 r), and Ammianus teUs us that Constantine!los wife repeatedly caused her sister-in-Jaw to abort in the san1e way ( 16+1o. 18)+ 1

190

Restless Dead

To begin with, the context in which reproductive problems occurred differed from those in which injurious magic usually was used in ancient Greece: to win a race, a lawsuit, or a lover, for example. The latter are all contexts in which a zero-sum, agonistic situation openly exists. 82 There could be only a single winner in these situations, who gained at the expense of the loser or losers. When a child died in infancy or a won1an died in labor, in contrast, in most cases no specific person beneficedfrom the death ..It is possible to imagine scenarios that were exceptions to this rule. A young man might have desired his rich uncle to remain childless so that he himself would be adopted as the uncle's heir. The members of a Athenian man's anchisteia (extended family) might hope that his infant son would die so that his property would revert to them after his death (the two Roman cases cited in note 81 work on this same principle). A well-born concubine might hope that a legal wife would remain sterile so that her own child would stand a chance of being adopted as the legal heir (as in the case of Andromache and Hermione) or, in a monarchic situation such as existed in Eleusis of the Homeric Hymn, powerful families might hope that the king would remain without a son to whom he could pass on the reign. But these are extreme and unusual situations.

The general rule still stands: childbirth did not take place in a zero-sum environment in ancient Greece. Far. the contrary: a mother and child usually were surrounded by people who desired their continued health. There is, however, another powerful motivation that drives people to attack one another even when no logical reason to do so exists: envy. Envy thrives outside of such overtly agonistic arenas as the racetrack

and courtroom just as well as it does within them, because the envier desires not so much to obtain what someone else has, as to deprive the possessor of it. Indeed, quite frequently, there is no reaJ way in which the envier can obtain the object of his envy: one woman cannot steal the beauty of another, one man cannot take over as his own the kleos (glory) of another. Satisfaction of many types of envy, therefore, comes only from ensuring that no one else possesseswhat you cannot possess. Legend tells of how the envious women of Thessaly stoned lais to death because they could not bear to look upon her beauty any longer, for example. 83 There is no doubt that the Greeks recognized the power of envy, and feared the effects that it could have on both the envied and envier, on 82 .. Cf+Faraone 1991a .. 83 .. Plu+Amat+ 768a~ C[ his remarks in De inu+ et od~~esp~ 536e-537~ and 538e.

ChildlessMothers and BlightedVirgins

both individuals and communities.

84

Epinician poets sang of its destruc-tive The burning, gnawing pain of the envier was vividly portrayed in ancient art, 86 and was described in 1iterature by verbs such as ''bite," "devour,'' and "wear away." 87 Numerous myths tell of how envy infected even the gods, leading them to smite men and women of accomplishment. That reproductive success was amo,ng the things envied is illustrated clearly by myths. For example" it is Leto's envy, as well as Niobe's hubris, that leads Apollo and Artemis to kill Niobe's fourteen children. Niobe is on the receiving end of reproductive envy in another myth, too, although she fared better there. According to Antoninus Liberalis, Aedon was Niobe's sister, and killed her own son accidentally while attempting to kill one of Niobe's: it was envy of her sister's greater reproductive success that drove Aedon to her desperate act. In another myth, Hera, jealous of Aphrodite"spregnancy, touched her belly with a curse, and caused Aphrodite's child, Priapus, to be born deformed. 88 Envy will tear apart the family or any other group that it infects. The envious may attack the envied by any of various methods, both physicaJ and social, which will lead, in the long run, to divisiveness within the group as a whole ..The suspicion of envy, moreover, may lead a victim of misfortune to accuse another in the group of having enviously attacked him, perhaps by magical means. This, too, often works to divide the group,. particularly when the injury is of a serious nature,, for supporters rally to either side. In some cases, envy within a group can be stopped from developing in the first place by equalizing desirable commodities or qualities so far as is possible-in some societies, no man owns many more pigs than another of his rank, no woman allows herself to weave much faster than the average weaver, and those who are better endowed than others with beauty or health learn not to display those gifts coneffects ..85

84. Throughout this discussion, I use "envy~ to refer only to destructive envy; the Greeks, of course, recognized that some types of envy couJd be positive, 1not1vat1ngjndividuals to higher achievements~ Oftent zelosand its cognates refer to the ugood" envy and pl,tbonos and its cognates lo the bad ♦ The distinction and interplay bet°"reen bad and good envy are expJored by many scholars with reference to specificworks of literature; for an overview of the topic, see Walcot. Also usefu] is McCarthy.

8 s See, most recently~Bulman.twith bibliography;also Kirkwood. 86. See the discussion in Dunbabin and Dickie~ 87. E.g. Plu. Aud. s (39e) (6ciKvEu,);Bas.it hom. 1 I.J (Ka--rea0tELv);Joh. Chrys. in r CoTa horn. 31.4 = PG 61.1.64 t:6uJTPWYELv); Theocr+ 5..12 (T~KEtll). Further examples and discussion in Dun ba bin and Dickie. 88~ Leto and Niobe: II. 2.-4~60:J.-17, and frequendy thereafter+ Aedon and Niobe: '-i\nc. Lih. 11~ 2.-5. Hera and Aphrodite: schol. A.R. r .932; Suda .. s.11. Priapos IH; EM, s.v. Abarnida;Tz. Lycophr. 831. R. LuUies,«Priapos/' RE XXII.2..,coL 1917, chinksthe s1ory was known at least as early as the second