§ 2. Artemis and Hippolytus

I have said that the Arician legends of Orestes and Hippolytus, though worthless as history, have a certain value in so far as they may help us to understand the worship at Nemi better by comparing it with the ritual and myths of other sanctuaries. We must ask ourselves, Why did the authors of these legends pitch upon Orestes and Hippolytus in order to explain Virbius and the King of the Wood? In regard to Orestes, the answer is obvious. He and the image of the Tauric Diana, which could only be appeased with human blood,​[95] were dragged in to render intelligible the murderous rule of succession to the Arician priesthood. In regard to Hippolytus the case is not so plain. The manner of his death suggests readily enough a reason for the exclusion of horses from the grove; but this by itself seems hardly enough to account for the identification. We must try to probe deeper by examining the worship as well as the legend or myth of Hippolytus.

He had a famous sanctuary at his ancestral home of Troezen, situated on that beautiful, almost landlocked bay, where groves of oranges and lemons, with tall cypresses soaring like dark spires above the garden of the Hesperides, now clothe the strip of fertile shore at the foot of the rugged mountains. Across the blue water of the tranquil bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon’s sacred island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this fair coast Hippolytus was worshipped. Within his sanctuary stood a temple with an ancient image. His service was performed by a priest who held office for life: every year a sacrificial festival was held in his honour; and his untimely fate was yearly mourned, with weeping and {p25} doleful chants, by unwedded maids, who also dedicated locks of their hair in his temple before marriage.​[96] His grave existed at Troezen, though the people would not shew it.​[97] It has been suggested, with great plausibility, that in the handsome Hippolytus, beloved of Artemis, cut off in his youthful prime, and yearly mourned by damsels, we have one of those mortal lovers of a goddess who appear so often in ancient religion, and of whom Adonis is the most familiar type. The rivalry of Artemis and Phaedra for the affection of Hippolytus reproduces, it is said, under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite.​[98] Certainly in the Hippolytus of Euripides the tragedy of the hero’s death is traced directly to the anger of Aphrodite at his contempt for her power, and Phaedra is nothing but a tool of the goddess. Moreover, within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there stood a temple of Peeping Aphrodite, which was so named, we are told, because from this spot the amorous Phaedra used to watch Hippolytus at his manly sports. Clearly the name would be still more appropriate if it was Aphrodite herself who peeped. And beside this temple of Aphrodite grew a myrtle-tree with pierced leaves, which the hapless Phaedra, in the pangs of love, had pricked with her bodkin.​[99] Now the myrtle, with its glossy evergreen leaves, its red and white blossom, and its fragrant perfume, was Aphrodite’s own tree, and legend associated it with the birth of Adonis.​[100] At Athens also Hippolytus was intimately associated with Aphrodite, for on the south side of the Acropolis, looking towards Troezen, a barrow or sepulchral mound in his memory was shewn, and beside it stood a temple of Aphrodite, said to have been founded by Phaedra, which bore the name of the temple of Aphrodite at {p26} Hippolytus.​[101] The conjunction, both in Troezen and in Athens, of his grave with a temple of the goddess of love is significant. Later on we shall meet with mounds in which the lovers of the great Asiatic goddess were said to lie buried.

If this view of the relation of Hippolytus to Artemis and Aphrodite is right, it is somewhat remarkable that both his divine mistresses appear to have been associated at Troezen with oaks. For Aphrodite was here worshipped under the title of Askraia, that is, she of the Fruitless Oak;​[102] and Hippolytus was said to have met his death not far from a sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, that is, Artemis of the Hollow Oak, for here the wild olive-tree was shewn in which the reins of his chariot became entangled, and so brought him to the ground.​[103]

It may not be without significance that Orestes, the other mythical hero of Nemi, also appears in the legendary history of Troezen. For at Troezen there was a temple of Wolfish Artemis, said to have been dedicated by Hippolytus, and in front of the temple stood a sacred stone upon which nine men, according to the legend, had cleansed Orestes from the guilt of his mother’s murder. In the solemn rite they made use of water drawn from the Horse’s Fount; and as late as the second century of our era their descendants dined together on certain set days in a building called the Booth of Orestes. Before the building there grew a laurel-tree which was said to have sprung on the spot where the things used in purifying the matricide were buried. The old traveller Pausanias, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of ancient Greece, could not learn why {p27} Hippolytus dedicated a temple to Wolfish Artemis; but he conjectured that it might have been because he extirpated the packs of wolves that used to scour the country.​[104]

Another point in the myth of Hippolytus which deserves attention is the frequent recurrence of horses in it. His name signifies either “horse-loosed” or “horse-looser”;​[105] he consecrated twenty horses to Aesculapius at Epidaurus;​[106] he was killed by horses; the Horse’s Fount probably flowed not far from the temple which he built for Wolfish Artemis; and horses were sacred to his grandsire Poseidon, who had an ancient sanctuary in the wooded island across the bay, where the ruins of it may still be seen in the pine-forest.​[107] Lastly, Hippolytus’s sanctuary at Troezen was said to have been founded by Diomede, whose mythical connexion both with horses and wolves is attested. For the Veneti, at the head of the Adriatic, were famed for their breed of horses, and they had a sacred grove of Diomede, at the spot where many springs burst forth from the foot of a lofty cliff, forming at once the broad and deep river Timavus (the modern Timao), which flows with a still and tranquil current into the neighbouring sea. Here the Veneti sacrificed a white horse to Diomede; and associated with his grove were two others, sacred to Argive Hera and Aetolian Artemis. In these groves wild beasts were reported to lose their ferocity, and deer to herd with wolves. Moreover, the horses of the district, famed for their speed, were said to have been branded with the mark of a wolf.​[108] Thus Hippolytus was associated with the horse in many ways, and this association may have been used to explain more features of the Arician ritual than the mere exclusion of the animal from the sacred grove.​[109] {p28} To this point we shall return later on. Whether his relation to wolves was also invoked to account for any other aspect of the worship at Nemi we cannot say, since the wolf plays no part in the scanty notices of that worship which have come down to us.​[110] But doubtless, as one of the wild creatures of the wood, the beast would be under the special care of Diana.

The custom observed by Troezenian girls of offering tresses of their hair to Hippolytus before their wedding brings him into a relation with marriage, which at first sight seems out of keeping with his reputation as a confirmed bachelor. According to Lucian, youths as well as maidens at Troezen were forbidden to wed till they had shorn their hair in honour of Hippolytus, and we gather from the context that it was their first beard which the young men thus polled.​[111] However we may explain it, a custom of this sort appears to have prevailed widely both in Greece and the East. Plutarch tells us that formerly it was the wont of boys at puberty to go to Delphi and offer of their hair to Apollo; Theseus, the father of Hippolytus, complied with the custom,​[112] which lasted down into historical times.​[113] Argive maidens, grown to womanhood, dedicated their tresses to Athena before marriage.​[114] On the same occasion Megarian girls poured libations and laid clippings of their hair on the tomb of the maiden Iphinoe.​[115] At the entrance to the temple of Artemis in Delos the grave of two maidens was shewn under an olive-tree. It was said that long ago they had come as pilgrims from a far northern land with offerings to Apollo, and dying in the sacred isle were buried there. The Delian virgins before marriage used to cut off a lock of their hair, wind it on a spindle, and lay it on the maidens’ grave. The young men did the same, except that they twisted the down of their first beard round a wisp of grass or a green shoot.​[116] In some places it was Artemis who {p29} received the offering of a maiden’s hair before marriage.​[117] At Panamara in Caria men dedicated locks of their hair in the temple of Zeus. The locks were enclosed in little stone boxes, some of them fitted with a marble lid or shutter, and the name of the dedicator was engraved on a square sinking in the stone, together with the name of the priest for the time being. Many of these inscribed boxes have been found of late years on the spot. None of them bear the names of women; some of them are inscribed with the names of a father and his sons. All the dedications are to Zeus alone, though Hera was also worshipped with him at Panamara.​[118] At Hierapolis, on the Euphrates, youths offered of their beards and girls of their tresses to the great Syrian goddess, and left the shorn hair in caskets of gold or silver, inscribed with their names, and nailed to the walls of the temple.​[119] The custom of dedicating the first beard seems to have been common at Rome under the Empire.​[120] Thus Nero consecrated his first beard in a golden box, studded with costly pearls, on the Capitol.​[121]

Some light is perhaps thrown on the meaning of these practices by two ancient Oriental customs, the one Egyptian, the other Phoenician. When Egyptian boys or girls had recovered from sickness, their parents used to shave the children’s heads, weigh the hair against gold or silver, and give the precious metal to the keepers of the sacred beasts, who bought food with it for the animals according to their tastes. These tastes varied with the nature of the beast, and the beast varied with the district. Where hawks were worshipped, the keepers chopped up flesh, and calling the birds in a loud voice, flung the gobbets up into the air, till the hawks stooped and caught them. Where cats, or ichneumons, or {p30} fish were the local deities, the keepers crumbled bread in milk and set it before them, or threw it into the Nile. And similarly with the rest of the divine menagery.​[122] Thus in Egypt the offerings of hair went to feed the worshipful animals.

In the sanctuary of the great Phoenician goddess Astarte at Byblus the practice was different. Here, at the annual mourning for the dead Adonis, the women had to shave their heads, and such of them as refused to do so were bound to prostitute themselves to strangers and to sacrifice to the goddess with the wages of their shame.​[123] Though Lucian, who mentions the custom, does not say so, there are some grounds for thinking that the women in question were generally maidens, of whom this act of devotion was required as a preliminary to marriage.​[124] In any case, it is clear that the goddess accepted the sacrifice of chastity as a substitute for the sacrifice of hair.​[125] Why? By many people, as we shall afterwards see, the hair is regarded as in a special sense the seat of strength; and at puberty it might well be thought to contain a double portion of vital energy, since at that season it is the outward sign and manifestation of the newly-acquired power of reproducing the species. For that reason, we may suppose, the beard rather than the hair of the head is offered by males on this occasion. Thus the substitution permitted at Byblus becomes intelligible: the women gave of their fecundity to the goddess, whether they offered their hair or their chastity. But why, it may be asked, should they make such an offering to Astarte, who was herself the great goddess of love and fertility? What need had she to receive fecundity from {p31} her worshippers? Was it not rather for her to bestow it on them? Thus put, the question overlooks an important side of polytheism, perhaps we may say of ancient religion in general. The gods stood as much in need of their worshippers as the worshippers in need of them. The benefits conferred were mutual. If the gods made the earth to bring forth abundantly, the flocks and herds to teem, and the human race to multiply, they expected that a portion of their bounty should be returned to them in the shape of tithe or tribute. On this tithe, indeed, they subsisted, and without it they would starve. Their divine bellies had to be filled, and their divine reproductive energies to be recruited; hence men had to give of their meat and drink to them, and to sacrifice for their benefit what is most manly in man and womanly in woman. Sacrifices of the latter kind have too often been overlooked or misunderstood by the historians of religion. Other examples of them will meet us in the course of our enquiry. At the same time it may well be that the women who offered their hair to Astarte hoped to benefit through the sympathetic connexion which they thus established between themselves and the goddess; they may in fact have expected to fecundate themselves by contact with the divine source of fecundity. And it is probable that a similar motive underlay the sacrifice of chastity as well as the sacrifice of hair.

If the sacrifice of hair, especially of hair at puberty, is sometimes intended to strengthen the divine beings to whom it is offered by feeding or fertilising them, we can the better understand, not only the common practice of offering hair to the shadowy dead,​[126] but also the Greek usage of shearing it for rivers, as the Arcadian boys of Phigalia did for the stream that runs in the depths of the tremendous woody glen below the city.​[127] For next perhaps to rain and sunshine, nothing in nature so obviously contributes to fertilise a country as its rivers. Again, this view may set in a clearer light the custom of the Delian youths and maidens, {p32} who offered their hair on the maidens’ tomb under the olive-tree. For at Delos, as at Delphi, one of Apollo’s many functions was to make the crops grow and to fill the husbandman’s barns; hence at the time of harvest tithe-offerings poured in to him from every side in the form of ripe sheaves, or, what was perhaps still more acceptable, golden models of them, which went by the name of the “golden summer.”​[128] The festival at which these first-fruits were dedicated may have been the 6th and 7th of the harvest-month Thargelion, corresponding to the 24th and 25th of May, for these were the birthdays of Artemis and Apollo respectively.​[129] In Hesiod’s day the corn-reaping began at the morning rising of the Pleiades, which then answered to our 9th of May,​[130] and in Greece the wheat is still ripe about that time.​[131] In return for these offerings the god sent out a sacred new fire from both his great sanctuaries at Delos and Delphi, thus radiating from them, as from central suns, the divine blessings of heat and light. A ship brought the new fire every year from Delos to Lemnos, the sacred island of the fire-god Hephaestus, where all fires were put out before its arrival, to be afterwards rekindled at the pure flame.​[132] The fetching of the new fire from Delphi to Athens appears to have been a ceremony of great solemnity and pomp. All the chief Athenian magistrates repaired to Delphi for the purpose. The holy fire blazed or smouldered in a sacred {p33} tripod borne on a chariot and tended by a woman who was called the Fire-bearer. Soldiers, both horse and foot, escorted it; magistrates, priests, and heralds accompanied it; and the procession moved to the music of trumpet and fife.​[133] We do not know on what occasion the fire was thus solemnly sent from Delphi to Athens, but we may conjecture that it was when the Pythaists at Athens, watching from the hearth of Lightning Zeus, saw lightning flash over Harma on Mount Parnes, for then they sent a sacrifice to Delphi and may have received the fire in return.​[134] After the great defeat of the Persians at Plataea, the people of that city extinguished all the fires in the country, deeming them defiled by the presence of the barbarians. Having done so they relit them at a pure new fire fetched by a runner from the altar of the common hearth at Delphi.​[135]

Now the maidens on whose grave the Delian youths and damsels laid their shorn locks before marriage, were said to have died in the island after bringing the harvest offering, wrapt in wheaten straw, from the land of the Hyperboreans in the far north.​[136] Thus they were in popular opinion the mythical representatives of those bands of worshippers who bore, year by year, the yellow sheaves with dance and song to Delos. But in fact they had once been much more than this. For an examination of their names, which are commonly given as Hekaerge and Opis, has led modern scholars to conclude, with every appearance of probability, that these maidens were originally mere duplicates of Artemis herself.​[137] Perhaps indeed we may {p34} go a step farther. For sometimes one of this pair of Hyperboreans appears as a male, not a female, under the name of the Far-shooter (Hekaergos), which was a common epithet of Apollo.​[138] This suggests that the two were originally the heavenly twins themselves, Apollo and Artemis, and that the two graves which were shewn at Delos, one before and the other behind the sanctuary of Artemis, may have been at first the tombs of these great deities, who were thus laid to their rest on the spot where they had been born. As the one grave received offerings of hair, so the other received the ashes of the victims which were burned on the altar.​[139] Both sacrifices, if I am right, were designed to strengthen and fertilise the divine powers who made the earth to wave with the golden harvest, and whose mortal remains, like the miracle-working bones of saints in the Middle Ages, brought wealth to their fortunate possessors. Ancient piety was not shocked by the sight of the tomb of a dead god. The grave of Apollo himself was shewn at his other great sanctuary of Delphi,​[140] and this perhaps explains its disappearance at Delos. The priests of the rival shrines may have calculated that one tomb sufficed even for a god, and that two might prove a stumbling-block to any but the most robust faith. Acting on this prudent conviction, they may have adjusted their respective claims to the possession of the holy sepulchre {p35} by leaving Apollo to sleep undisturbed at Delphi, while his grave at Delos was dexterously converted into the tomb of a blessed virgin by the easy grammatical change of Hekaergos into Hekaerge.

But how, it may be asked, does all this apply to Hippolytus? Why attempt to fertilise the grave of a bachelor who paid all his devotions to a barren virgin? What seed could take root and spring up in so stony a soil? The question implies the popular modern notion of Diana or Artemis as the pattern of a straight-laced maiden lady with a taste for hunting. No notion could well be further from the truth. To the ancients, on the contrary, she was the ideal and embodiment of the wild life of nature—the life of plants, of animals, and of men—in all its exuberant fertility and profusion. As a recent German writer has admirably put it: “From of old a great goddess of nature was everywhere worshipped in Greece. She was revered on the mountain heights as in the swampy lowlands, in the rustling woods and by the murmuring spring. To the Greek her hand was everywhere apparent. He saw her gracious blessing in the sprouting meadow, in the ripening corn, in the healthful vigour of all living things on earth, whether the wild creatures of the wood and the fell, or the cattle which man has tamed to his service, or man’s own offspring from the cradle upward. Her destroying anger he perceived in the blight of vegetation, in the inroads of wild beasts on his fields and orchards, as well as in the last mysterious end of life, in death. No empty personification, like the earth conceived as a goddess, was this deity, for such abstractions are foreign to every primitive religion; she was an all-embracing power of nature, everywhere the object of a similar faith, however her names differed with the place in which she was believed to abide, with the emphasis laid on her gloomy or kindly aspect, or with the particular side of her energy which was specially revered. And as the Greek divided everything in animated nature into male and female, he could not imagine this female power of nature without her male counterpart. Hence in a number of her older worships we find Artemis associated with a nature-god of similar character, to whom tradition assigned {p36} different names in different places. In Laconia, for instance, she was mated with the old Peloponnesian god Karneios, in Arcadia more than once with Poseidon, elsewhere with Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus, and so on.”​[141] The truth is, that the word parthenos applied to Artemis, which we commonly translate virgin, means no more than an unmarried woman,​[142] and in early days the two things were by no means the same. With the growth of a purer morality among men a stricter code of ethics is imposed by them upon their gods; the stories of the cruelty, deceit, and lust of these divine beings are glossed lightly over or flatly rejected as blasphemies, and the old ruffians are set to guard the laws which before they broke. In regard to Artemis, even the ambiguous parthenos seems to have been merely a popular epithet, not an official title. As Dr. Farnell has well pointed out, there was no public worship of Artemis the chaste; so far as her sacred titles bear on the relation of the sexes, they shew that, on the contrary, she was, like Diana in Italy, specially concerned with the {p37} loss of virginity and with child-bearing, and that she not only assisted but encouraged women to be fruitful and multiply; indeed, if we may take Euripides’s word for it, in her capacity of midwife she would not even speak to childless women. Further, it is highly significant that while her titles and the allusions to her functions mark her out clearly as the patroness of childbirth, we find none that recognise her distinctly as a deity of marriage.​[143] Nothing, however, sets the true character of Artemis as a goddess of fecundity, though not of wedlock, in a clearer light than her constant identification with the unmarried, but not chaste, Asiatic goddesses of love and fertility, who were worshipped with rites of notorious profligacy at their popular sanctuaries.​[144] At Ephesus, the most celebrated of all the seats of her worship,​[145] her universal motherhood was set forth unmistakably in her sacred image. Copies of it have come down to us which agree in their main features, though they differ from each other in some details. They represent the goddess with a multitude of protruding breasts; the heads of animals of many kinds, both wild and tame, spring from the front of her body in a series of bands that extend from the breasts to the feet; bees, roses, {p38} and sometimes butterflies, decorate her sides from the hips downward. The animals that thus appear to issue from her person vary in the different copies of the statue; they include lions, bulls, stags, horses, goats, and rams. Moreover, lions rest on her upper arms; in at least one copy, serpents twine round her lower arms; her bosom is festooned with a wreath of blossoms, and she wears a necklace of acorns. In one of the statues the breast of her robe is decorated with two winged male figures, who hold sheaves in both hands.​[146] It would be hard to devise a more expressive symbol of exuberant fertility, of prolific maternity, than these remarkable images. No doubt the Ephesian Artemis, with her eunuch priests and virgin priestesses,​[147] was an Oriental, whose worship the Greek colonists took over from the aborigines.​[148] But that they should have adopted it and identified the goddess with their own Artemis is proof enough that the Grecian divinity, like her Asiatic sister, was at bottom a personification of the teeming life of nature.

To return now to Troezen, we shall probably be doing no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis if we suppose that the relation between them was once of a tenderer nature {p39} than appears in classical literature. We may conjecture that if he spurned the love of women, it was because he enjoyed the love of a goddess.​[149] On the principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort. If I am right, Hippolytus was the consort of Artemis at Troezen, and the shorn tresses offered to him by the Troezenian youths and maidens before marriage were designed to strengthen his union with the goddess, and so to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of mankind. It is some confirmation of this view that within the precinct of Hippolytus at Troezen there were worshipped two female powers named Damia and Auxesia, whose connexion with the fertility of the ground is unquestionable. When Epidaurus suffered from a dearth, the people, in obedience to an oracle, carved images of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again. Moreover, at Troezen itself, and apparently within the precinct of Hippolytus, a curious festival of stone-throwing was held in honour of these maidens, as the Troezenians called them; and it is easy to show that similar customs have been practised in many lands for the express purpose of ensuring good crops.​[150] In the story of the tragic death of the youthful Hippolytus we may discern an analogy with similar tales of other fair but mortal youths who paid with their lives for the brief rapture of the love of an immortal goddess. These hapless lovers were probably not always mere myths, and the legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush of the rose were no idle poetic emblems of youth and beauty {p40} fleeting as the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper philosophy of the relation of the life of man to the life of nature—a sad philosophy which gave birth to a tragic practice. What that philosophy and that practice were we shall learn later on.