Europa

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Europa is a figure of Greek myth: a Phoenician princess whom Zeus, taking the shape of a tame white bull, carried across the sea to Crete. The story is old and widely told. While Europa gathered flowers by the shore near Tyre or Sidon, the bull knelt among the herd; she climbed onto its back, and it rose and swam out to sea, bearing her to the island. There she bore Zeus three sons — Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon — and the first two became, in later tradition, judges of the dead. From her name the continent of Europe was said to take its own, though the etymology is disputed and probably later than the name itself.

The story and its tellers

The tale belongs to the large class of Greek myths in which a god in animal or disguised form unites with a mortal woman; it is among the oldest of them. Her name stands already in the Iliad, where Zeus, lulling himself before his wife on Mount Ida, recites the women he has loved and lists “the daughter of far-famed Phoinix,” who bore Minos and godlike Rhadamanthys. The fuller narrative belongs to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a genealogical poem of the archaic age surviving now only in fragments, several recovered from the sands of Oxyrhynchus: there Zeus sees the daughter of Phoenix plucking flowers in a meadow, comes down as a bull whose breath is scented with saffron, deceives her into mounting, carries her over the sea, and afterward gives her in marriage to Asterion, king of the Cretans, who rears her sons as his own. The dithyrambic poet Bacchylides took up the crossing in the fifth century; the earliest vase-paintings of the bull and its rider are older still, from the mid-seventh century BCE, and the painted and sculpted image — a woman seated sidewise on a swimming bull, her veil bellying in the wind, one hand at the horn — runs without a break from the archaic metopes of Sicilian Selinunte down through the Roman wall-paintings of Pompeii.

In the systematizing mythographers the story acquires its furniture. The Bibliotheca ascribed to Apollodorus has Zeus convey her through the sea to Crete, lie with her, and beget Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthys; she is then wedded to Asterion, and the god leaves her three marvels — a bronze man, Talos, who circled the island as its guardian; a hound, Laelaps, that never lost its quarry; and a javelin that never missed its mark. The longest ancient version is later and more ornamental: the Hellenistic poet Moschus, writing in the second century BCE, composed a polished short epic of one hundred and sixty-six lines, opening with a dream that troubles the sleeping girl and turning on a long description of the golden basket she carries to the meadow — a basket worked by Hephaestus with scenes that quietly prefigure her own carrying-off. Horace gave her a lament in his Odes; Ovid set the abduction at the close of the second book of the Metamorphoses, the god lowering his dignity into a bull’s body and the princess, all unsuspecting, weaving garlands for her abductor’s horns. Across these tellers the kernel holds and the trappings shift, which is the ordinary life of a Greek myth: a stable scene reworked by each age in its own register.

The three sons and the house of Crete

The issue of the crossing matters more than the crossing in the long run, because through her sons Europa stands at the head of the Cretan royal house and, beyond it, of the Greek imagination of the afterlife. Minos became the great king and lawgiver of Crete, the master of the labyrinth and of the sea-power the Greeks remembered as the first thalassocracy; Rhadamanthys was the just legislator, proverbial for an even hand; Sarpedon, the third, quarrelled with his brothers over a beautiful boy, was driven out, and crossed to Asia Minor, where he founded a line of kings in Lycia and was granted by Zeus a life of three generations. Two of the three did not die as men die. Minos and Rhadamanthys passed into the underworld not as shades but as magistrates: Plato, gathering the older tradition into philosophy, seats them with Aeacus at the dividing of the ways, where the naked souls of the dead are judged and sent to the meadow of the blessed or to the place of payment. In that picture Europa’s two elder sons preside over the very passage their mother made in reverse — she crossing the sea into life and a kingdom, they presiding over the crossing out of it. The Cretan setting thus opens directly onto the Greek landscape of death, and the princess who bore a continent’s name is also, by way of her children, near the root of the Greek doctrine of judgment.

Her own family stood at the meeting-point of two worlds. Her brother in the legend is Cadmus, sent by their father with orders to find her and not return without her; the search failed, and the oracle at Delphi turned him instead toward the founding of Thebes — a story, with its dragon and its sown men and its credited gift of the alphabet, that belongs properly to Cadmus and is told under his name. That Europa and Cadmus are reckoned children of a Phoenician king, carried west into the Aegean, is part of what made the story durable: it preserves, in the shape of a genealogy, a memory of traffic across the eastern Mediterranean — of Levantine goods, gods, and letters moving into Greek lands — that archaeology has since confirmed in outline.

The disputed continent

The Greeks themselves linked her name to the western landmass, and were not sure of the link. Eurṓpē is a name of uncertain origin. The likeliest Greek derivation breaks it into eurys, “broad” or “wide,” and ōps, “face” or “eye,” yielding something like “broad-faced” or “wide-gazing” — an epithet that would suit the moon or the earth better than a girl, and that has been pressed into service for a hypothetical eclipsed goddess. A rival school looks east, to the Semitic root that gives Akkadian erebu, “to go down, to set” — of the sun — and Phoenician ‘ereb, “evening, west,” which would make Europa the “land of sunset,” a mirror of the Latin Occidens. The eastern etymology has the elegance of matching her Phoenician origin to a word for “the west” into which she travels, but it founders on the philology and is now generally judged unlikely; the Greek derivation is itself imperfect, since the expected stem-vowel does not survive cleanly. The honest position is that the name’s root is lost.

What is clearer is that the princess and the continent are probably not one name in two uses but two names that fell together. “Europe” appears as a geographical term already in the archaic Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where it denotes the Greek mainland as against the islands — a sense with no visible connection to a Tyrian girl. By the time the boundaries of the great landmasses were being argued, the doubt was open: the historian Herodotus remarks that no one knows whether Europe took its name from the Tyrian Europa, nor who first drew its limits, nor why a woman of Asia should have lent her name to a third of the world. The continent, in other words, was named first and the heroine attached afterward, by the ordinary Greek habit of finding a person behind a place-name. The eponymy is a folk etymology that the Greeks half-believed and half-doubted from the start — which is why Europe, ever since, has carried her name without holding to a single account of why.

The bull among the stars

Ancient and later readers found more in the bull than a tale of abduction. The Greek and Roman writers on the constellations identified the white bull with Taurus, into whose stars Zeus was said to have set the animal’s likeness — only the forequarters, in most accounts, the bull shown breasting up out of the horizon as if still swimming. The catasterism is given in the handbook ascribed to Eratosthenes and in the Astronomica of Hyginus, and the poets repeat it; on that reading Europa rides a sky-sign, and her myth becomes a fragment of star-lore. The image had a long career in the practice of the heavens. Taurus is one of the twelve houses of the zodiac, and the spring sign of the bull carried, in the technical literature of hellenistic-astrology, the weight of an ancient association — fertility, the plough, the season of increase — that the Europa story dressed in narrative. When astrology read the bull as a ruling power and the princess as the soul it bears aloft, it was reading the same image the catasterists had read, one step further allegorized: the rider carried not across a sea but across the wheel of the year.

A faded Cretan goddess?

The Cretan setting drew the story toward the island’s older religion, with its bull-leaping frescoes, its horned altars, and its long memory of the bull as a sacred animal. Some have seen in Europa a faded form of a Cretan or Minoan goddess wedded to a bull-god, the mortal princess of the myth being the diminished afterlife of a divinity. The case rests on slender threads of cult: at Gortyn and in Crete a festival called the Hellotia honored her, with a great myrtle wreath — the hellotis — carried in procession and said to enclose her bones, and with rites of passage for the island’s young men, for whom she was the heroine on whose presence the city depended. The scholars who built the largest theogonies of Greek religion in the early twentieth century, working outward from such cult-traces, set her among the eclipsed mother- and nature-goddesses of the Aegean, near the West Semitic Astarte of her own Phoenician homeland and not far, in type, from the great Anatolian mother with whom the Titaness Rhea was later merged — a goddess of love and increase carried, like the huntress Diana in other lands, in the wake of a sacred beast. The Bronze Age of Crete kept no scripture and the Linear tablets name no Europa, so any goddess behind the heroine stays out of reach. What the Hellotia does attest is concrete: a Cretan city that kept her bones in a myrtle wreath and staged its young men’s coming-of-age in her name held Europa not as a tale imported from elsewhere but as its own — the Phoenician princess naturalized into the patron of Gortyn, the point where a Levantine goddess of the morning star and a Cretan cult of the bull had become a single civic heroine.

The crossing read as the soul’s descent

A second afterlife of the story is philosophical. The allegorists of late antiquity, who read the loves of the gods as veiled physics and metaphysics, and the Renaissance mythographers who inherited their method, took the crossing of the sea as a figure for the soul. In the neoplatonism of the late schools the sea was a standing image for matter and for genesis, the realm of becoming into which the soul descends when it falls from its native height into a body; the gods who carry mortals down into the world of generation enact, on this reading, the descent of intellect into flesh. Europa borne from the eastern shore across the deep to an island kingdom became, so read, an emblem of that descent — the soul drawn out of its homeland into the body and the world,. Proclus, the most systematic of the Neoplatonic readers of myth, insisted that the divine stories are symbols veiling truths too high for plain speech, and under such a lens the bull is no longer a disguise of lust but the vehicle of a metaphysical event. Marsilio Ficino’s circle and the mythographers who followed — collecting and moralizing the loves of Jupiter for a Christian-Platonist age — carried the reading forward; in the moralized commentaries that accompanied Renaissance translations of Ovid, the seized princess could stand for the soul ravished by divine love, or for the mind borne off by the senses, depending on whether the abduction was read as ascent or fall.

These later readings are interpretation laid over a story that, in its earliest forms, asks to be taken simply as it stands. What the myth offers the history of ideas is less a doctrine than an image: a woman borne over the sea on the back of a god. The Greeks kept returning to it, and so did Europe, which carried her name without ever quite agreeing on what it meant.

Sources and scholarship

The primary witnesses are scattered and old. The earliest is the Iliad (14.321–322), where Europa is one entry in Zeus’s catalog of loves; the narrative core is the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (frr. 140–141 in the standard numbering), whose Europa fragments survive on papyrus and are translated in Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s public-domain Loeb Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (1914), with the Greek and English conveniently gathered in the Theoi Classical Texts compilation of the Catalogue fragments. The mythographic backbone — the three sons, the marriage to Asterion, the bronze Talos and the unerring hound and spear — comes from the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus (3.1.1–2), readable in Theoi’s text of Apollodorus Book 3. The fullest poetic treatment is Moschus’s epyllion Europa, the standard modern commentary on which is Winfried Bühler, Die Europa des Moschos (Hermes Einzelschriften 13, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1960); the poem’s celebrated basket-ekphrasis has drawn sustained attention, for instance in the study of erotic ekphrasis and narrative in Moschus’s Europa. For the constellation tradition, the catasterism is set out in the handbook ascribed to Eratosthenes and in Hyginus’s Astronomica; Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales account of Taurus collects the ancient sources.

For the modern study of the figure the indispensable handbook is Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), which lays out the sources for Europa and her sons; the textual reconstruction of the Catalogue belongs to Martin L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure, and Origins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), and the etymology of the name is treated, with a verdict of “uncertain,” in Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), s.v. Eurṓpē. The Cretan cult of Europa and the Hellotia, on which the “faded goddess” speculation leans, are examined in the archaeological study of votives and veneration of Athena, Hellotis, and Europa at Gortyna. The allegorical readings of the crossing belong to the wider tradition of Neoplatonic mythography; the descent-of-the-soul interpretation of myths of abduction is a commonplace of the late schools and their Renaissance heirs, traceable through the catalogs of the loves of the gods in Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae and into the moralized Ovids of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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