Cyrene

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On the slopes of Pelion a girl wrestles a lion with her bare hands, and a god, passing overhead, stops to watch. She has no loom-work to show, no place among the women weaving in her father’s hall; she keeps the herds against the wolves, runs down wild things with javelin and sword, and the lion under her grip is not the first beast she has overmatched. This is Cyrene, and the logic of her whole story is fixed in that single image — the wild matched against the wild, strength spent on no domestic end — before the settled world she will found has any name. She belongs to Greek myth as a Thessalian huntress whom Apollo loved and bore away across the sea to North Africa, where she became the eponymous heroine of the Greek colony of Cyrene and the mother, by the god, of Aristaeus. She stands among the large class of mythological women whose names are also place-names — the ancestral figure a city points back to when it explains how it came to be.

The huntress of Pelion

The defining tension is between the wild and the settled, and Cyrene begins wholly on the wild side of it. Her father is Hypseus, a king of the Lapiths, the mountain people of Thessaly; her mother in the older account is the naiad Chlidanope, and behind Hypseus stands the river Peneus, so that water and the high country meet in her ancestry. A variant tradition strips out the human king altogether and makes her directly a daughter of Peneus, a river-nymph from the first; Apollonius of Rhodes gives her a sister, Larissa, a name that is also a Thessalian city, which only sharpens how thoroughly this family is a map of the land turned into kin. The genealogies do not agree, and were never reconciled — the usual condition of such figures, where every teller fits the ancestry to the point being made.

She refused the indoor occupations expected of a king’s daughter. She would not pace at the loom, and took no pleasure in the banquets and gatherings of girls her age; instead she armed herself and guarded the cattle of her father on the heights, killing the predators that came down on the herds. The detail matters because it is not a maiden’s flight from a pursuer but a contest of equals: when Apollo first sees her she is not running but fighting, alone and unafraid, locked with a lion. The contrast with the more common pattern is exact. Where a figure like the Theban Antiope is approached, overpowered, and left to a long aftermath of shame and flight — the abducted woman as victim of a god’s desire — Cyrene is desired precisely for the force in her, and is carried off not from a position of weakness but at the height of a victory over a beast. Her strength is not incidental to the tale. It is the thing the god responds to, and the whole arc of the myth is the channeling of that wild force into the order of a founded place.

Pindar’s Ninth Pythian

The fullest early account is Pindar’s Ninth Pythian Ode, composed for Telesicrates of Cyrene on his victory in the race in armor at the Pythian Games, and dated to 474 BCE. It is the only one of Pindar’s odes written for a winner of that armored footrace, and the poet folds the city’s founding legend into the praise of its athlete. There Cyrene is the daughter of Hypseus, scornful of the loom and the company of women, and Apollo — coming upon her as she grapples the lion bare-handed on Pelion — is seized at once. What follows is the ode’s center: the god, rather than simply taking her, turns aside to consult the wise centaur Chiron, whose cave is on that same mountain. The pause is deliberate and a little comic. Apollo, who knows all things, asks who the girl is and whether it would be right to lay his hand on her; Chiron, smiling at a god of prophecy seeking counsel about what he already foresees, tells him to marvel at her spirit and her strength, and foretells the rest. In the Diane Arnson Svarlien translation hosted on Perseus, the centaur is summoned from his cave, Apollo bidding Chiron, son of Philyra, marvel at the woman’s spirit and great strength — a line that makes her power, not her beauty, the object of the god’s wonder.

Chiron foretells the union and the voyage. Apollo will carry her over the sea to Libya, to the garden of Zeus, and there make her queen of a fertile land and ruler of a city gathered around a hill — the city that will bear her name. The prophecy is the hinge on which the wild girl of Thessaly becomes the founding queen of an African kingdom. From the union is born Aristaeus, whom Pindar’s tale sends back, fittingly, to be reared among the centaur and the nymphs. The ode is thus a charter as much as a love story: by binding Telesicrates’ victory to the moment a god chose the country and named its capital, Pindar fastens the ruling families of the colony to a divine founding, and makes the athlete’s running a late echo of the heroine’s.

The charter of a colony

A Greek colony needed a story of sanction, and Cyrene supplied it in concentrated form. The historical city was a real and prosperous foundation: emigrants from the island of Thera, led by Battus, settled the site around 631 BCE under the guidance of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, founding the long-lived Battiad dynasty that ruled for some eight generations. The site itself was rich — well watered by a great spring, set on a high plateau above the Libyan coast, and commanding the trade in silphium, the now-extinct medicinal plant whose image the city stamped on its coins, together with a grain surplus that made it one of the wealthier Greek states of the western Mediterranean. The colony’s whole self-understanding ran through Apollo — it was his oracle that ordered the settlement, his name the colonists carried west, and his great festival the Carneia they kept — and the nymph completed the picture by making the country itself the god’s gift and his bride’s dominion. To say that Cyrene the woman became queen of Cyrene the land was to say that the place had been Apollo’s from the first, chosen and consecrated before any ship sailed. In this the figure works exactly as the oracle worked, as a guarantee of divine authorship; the two are different organs of the same claim, the spoken sanction of the Delphic shrine and the genealogical sanction of the eponymous queen. The pairing was no accident of this one colony. Across the Greek world the great oracular seats — Delphi above all, but also the older oak-oracle of Zeus at Dodona — were the recognized authorities for sending out settlements, so that a city’s claim to its ground was routinely doubled: a god commanded the founding through his prophets, and a heroine embodied the founding in her body and her name. Cyrene holds both sanctions at once, the command of Apollo’s oracle and the descent from Apollo’s bride. The Greeks furnished such heroines for their cities as a matter of course, and the device belongs to a much wider habit of binding institutions to gods by descent — one current in the long syncretism that fused divine genealogies across the Mediterranean world, attaching new populations to old powers through invented kinship.

The afterlife of the tale

The story was retold and elaborated for centuries, and as it traveled it shifted register from the wild to the cultivated. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, recalls how Cyrene once tended sheep by the marsh-meadow of Peneus before Apollo bore her from Thessaly and set her among the nymphs of Libya near the Myrtosian height, where she bore Aristaeus and was made a long-lived huntress-nymph — and where the infant was given to Chiron’s cave to be raised. Apollonius and the later mythographers name that son as the rustic deity credited with beekeeping, the cultivation of the olive, the curdling of cheese: the patient arts of the settled countryside, born, fittingly, from a heroine of the wilderness and a god of music and order. Some sources give Cyrene a second son, Idmon, the seer who sailed with the Argonauts. The movement of the myth across her two children is the movement of the whole story in miniature — from the lion on the mountain to the hive in the field.

Through Aristaeus she enters Latin literature and her richest later scene. In the fourth book of Virgil’s Georgics, written in the first century BCE, Aristaeus has lost his bees to disease and death and goes down to his mother to learn the cause. Virgil sets the encounter beneath the water: Cyrene sits enthroned in the halls of her river-father, the nymphs around her on their crystal seats spinning fleeces while one of them, the naiad Arethusa, lifts her golden head above the wave to see who is crying at the stream. The huntress of the open mountain has become a presiding power of the deep current, and from that submerged court she instructs her grieving son how to recover what he has lost. The passage made her a familiar name to every reader of Latin long after her cult had faded, and it is through Virgil more than through Pindar that the later European tradition knew her — a mother in her river, consoling a son whose bees have died. A few sources, Justin among them, even fold mother and son together, naming Aristaeus himself the founder honored at Cyrene.

Reading the figure

Whether anything historical underlies the woman is doubtful, and the order of derivation is most likely the reverse of the myth’s own. The city came first. A Greek foundation of the seventh century BCE, prospering on its grain and its silphium, furnished itself — as colonies did — with an eponymous heroine and a tale of divine appointment, and the nymph is best read as a personified genealogy, the country imagined as a queen so that its possession by Apollo could be told as a marriage. Cyrene the figure is thus the city wearing a face: a way of saying that the place was the god’s gift, projected backward into the heroic age and given the biography of a bride. Standard treatments take her this way — Timothy Gantz’s survey of the early sources sets out the genealogies and their variants, and the scholarship on Pindar’s ode reads the heroine as at once a maiden and a productive land, queen and motherland in one figure.

Read so, her two faces resolve into one. The huntress on the mountain and the seated mother in the river are not a contradiction but the before and after of a settled country: the wild force that has to be present at the origin, and the ordered fertility into which that force is married. Apollo, who is at once the god of the bow and of the lyre, of prophecy and of the founded city, is the right suitor for such a bride, because his own domain spans the same distance she travels — from the wild thing struck down to the law-bound community raised up. That a country could be told as the offspring of so charged a union is the whole economy of the myth. The huntress supplies the vitality, the god supplies the order and the sanction, and the silphium-rich plateau above the sea is the issue of the marriage.

Sources and scholarship

The myth’s anchor is Pindar’s Ninth Pythian, surviving in full and available in the public-domain Svarlien translation on the Perseus Digital Library, which gives the lion, the dialogue with Chiron, and the prophecy of Libya. Anne Carson’s study “Wedding at Noon in Pindar’s Ninth Pythian,” in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies reads the ode’s marriage imagery and the noon timing of the encounter, treating Cyrene as bride and conquered land at once. Nancy Felson’s “Over There, Back Then: The Land of Cyrene in Pindar’s Pythian 9” examines how Pindar’s deixis keeps the African country at a poetic distance from the festival where the ode was sung, mapping the gap between Thessalian origin and Libyan destination. For the comparative source-record, Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) gathers the genealogies, the lion, and the descent to Aristaeus across Pindar, Apollonius, and the mythographers; the work is itself the subject of a standard review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. The later receptions run through Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and the fourth Georgic of Virgil, where the underwater audience with the mother became the scene that fixed her name in the European imagination.

The huntress who would not weave is the whole of her. A god of order and prophecy, looking down on a girl who answered violence with violence and feared nothing, came to earth for exactly that — and the colony that grew from the meeting kept her as its founding name, the wild strength on the mountain remembered as the reason a country was given.

→ Related: Antiope · Apollo · Aristaeus · Chiron · Dodona · Syncretism