Welcome back, friends, to another episode of Scholar Minor!
This week, we’ll be revisiting one of my favorite topics - Greek mythology. And while it may still be spring here in California, temperatures are already in the 90s - that’s in the mid-to-high 30s for you folks that measure in Celsius.
Like many people, after a long and weird year, I’ve already got summer on the brain. And a few days ago I learned the origins of the phrase “the dog days of summer”, which inspired this episode.
The Greeks and Romans referred to late July as the "dog days" because the dog star, Sirius, seemed to rise in the sky right before the sun. This was one of the brightest stars in the sky and became part of the Canis Major constellation. July and August were generally the hottest months of the year and believed to bring catastrophe and general misfortune. Interestingly, these days, Sirius doesn't appear at the same time due to the slow wobble of the Earth on its axis.
If you'd like to hear a more detailed explanation of the gradual shifting of the constellations and the Earth's habit of wiggling around, check out Scholar Minor episode 13, Myths of the Zodiac Part 1.
But summer or not, everyone can agree that dogs are awesome. While I don't have any of my own, I have the pleasure of knowing many wonderful pups via friends and relatives.
So thanks for joining me - and my house full of cats - for Scholar Minor's Greek Myths, Part 2: Dogs.
“Charon, fixing his eyes sternly upon the advancing warrior, demanded by what right he, living and armed, approached that shore. To which the Sibyl replied that they would commit no violence, that Aeneas’s only object was to see his father, and finally exhibited the golden branch, at sight of which Charon’s wrath relaxed, and he made haste to turn his bark to the shore, and receive them on board.
The boat, adapted only to the light freight of bodiless spirits, groaned under the weight of the hero. They were soon conveyed to the opposite shore. There they were encountered by the three-headed dog, Cerberus, with his necks bristling with snakes. He barked with all his three throats till the Sibyl threw him a medicated cake which he eagerly devoured, and then stretched himself out in his den and fell asleep.”
Cerberus is one of the most well-known characters of Greek mythology, probably most widely recognized from his brief appearance in the Harry Potter series as Fluffy, where he guarded the Philosopher’s Stone. The Cerberus of Greek myth is a little less approachable than Fluffy, however.
Most of the time, Cerberus is depicted and described as having three heads. Though the poet Hesiod claimed he had 50 heads, and Pindar claimed he had as many as 100. So while the exact number of heads is up in the air, it was definitely more than typical. Cerberus' body was also covered in snakes: they grew out of his back, his neck, er - necks - and a venomous serpent served as his tail.
Cerberus was born from the union of two monsters - Echidna, a half-snake, half-woman - and Typhon, a giant winged monster with a humanoid top half and snakelike coils below the waist. Echidna and Typhon had many children including the Hydra - a multiheaded serpent whose heads regrew when cut off, and Cerberus was also half-brother to creatures like the sphynx, the chimera, and the nemean lion.
Cerberus was the Guardian of the Underworld, tasked with preventing the escape of condemned souls and keeping unwanted mortals from entering Hades’ realm. While he generally did a pretty good job as a guard dog, he wasn’t without his whoopsies.
In our Greek Myths, Part 1: Love episode - episode 6 of Scholar Minor - we learned the tragic tale of Orpheus and his wife, Eurydice. Orpheus' musical talent was said to be so incredible he could tame any beast, and that even trees and stones were moved by his compositions. When Orpheus began his quest to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld, he played for Cerberus, who was tamed by the music and swayed to allow Orpheus entry.
As Thomas Bulfinch recounted in our opening quotation, Cerberus was outsmarted by the Sibyl of Cumae, a priestess of Apollo. The Sibyl had accompanied the Trojan hero Aeneas to the Underworld where he hoped to visit the spirit of his dead father. To safely pass by Cerberus, the Sibyl threw a honey cake laced with herbal sedatives to the beast, which put him to sleep, leaving the entrance to Hades’ realm unguarded.
One of Cerberus’ most embarrassing moments as a guard dog, however, came from his encounter with Heracles - or Hercules, to the Romans. As one of Heracles’ Twelve Labors, to prove his heroism, he was required to bring Cerberus up to the land of the living from his home in the Underworld. Cerberus' master and lord of the Underworld, Hades, agreed to allow it on the condition that no weapons were used that could harm his faithful hellhound.
“In spite of the monster’s struggling,” writes Bulfinch, “he seized him, held him fast, and carried him to Eurystheus, and afterwards brought him back again.”
While this was certainly rather undignified for Cerberus the watchdog, he at least managed - by many accounts - to bite Heracles with his serpent tail.
“That star Seirios which comes on in the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night’s darkening, the star they give the name of Orion’s Dog, which is brightest among the stars, and yet is wrought as a sign of evil and brings on the great fever for unfortunate mortals.”
As the poet Homer describes, Sirius, the devoted canine companion to the legendary hunter Orion, lends his name to the brightest star in the sky - also called Alpha Canis Majoris. Its radius is almost twice that of our sun, and it's only about 8.6 lightyears away from our solar system, making it one of the closest stars to our own. Sirius is so bright that it can be easily seen without a telescope.
Orion was a mighty hunter, described by Bulfinch as one of the giants, who was said to have driven wild beasts from the island of Chios with the help of his trusty hound, Sirius. The oldest versions of the myth tell us that he was the son of Poseidon, while later ones claim that he was born from a bull hide that had been buried in the earth and urinated on by the gods. Because . . . mythology.
After banishing the beasts from Chios, Orion fell in love with the local King’s daughter - Merope - and began to make advances. King Oenopion did not approve of Orion's interest in his daughter, however, and had him blinded and forcibly removed from the island. On the island of Lemnos, Orion encountered the blacksmithing god Hephaestus, who took pity on him and helped him find the sun god Helios who restored the hunter’s eyesight.
In his 1866 poem The Occultation of Orion, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow describes the moon's encounter with Orion in the sky:
"Thus moving on, with silent pace,
And triumph in her sweet, pale face,
She reached the station of Orion.
Aghast he stood in strange alarm!
And suddenly from his outstretched arm
Down fell the red skin of the lion
Into the river at his feet.
His mighty club no longer beat
The forehead of the bull; but he
Reeled as of yore beside the sea,
When, blinded by Oenopion,
He sought the blacksmith at his forge,
And, climbing up the mountain gorge,
Fixed his blank eyes upon the sun."
Orion and the faithful Sirius began accompanying the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, after relocating to Crete. Some versions of the myth say that Artemis and Orion became very close companions, resulting in the jealousy of Artemis’ brother, Apollo. Apollo then tricked Artemis into shooting Orion with an arrow. As Bulfinch describes:
“One day, observing Orion wading through the sea with his head just above the water, Apollo pointed it out to his sister and maintained that she could not hit that black thing on the sea. The archer-goddess discharged a shaft with fatal aim.
The wave rolled the dead body of Orion to the land, and bewailing her fatal error with many tears [she] placed him among the stars, where he appears as a giant, with a girdle, sword, lion’ skin, and club. Sirius, his dog, follows him, and the Pleiads fly before him.”
Other versions say that Orion became cocky, proudly telling Artemis that he would hunt and kill every living animal. Gaea, the goddess of the Earth, overheard this and sent a giant scorpion to kill Orion. After Orion’s death, Zeus placed the scorpion, Orion, and the faithful hunting dog Sirius into the stars.
"And a hound that lay there raised his head and pricked up his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus, of the steadfast heart, whom of old he himself had bred, but had no joy of him, for ere that he went to sacred Ilios. In days past the young men were wont to take the hound to hunt the wild goats, and deer, and hares; but now he lay neglected, his master gone, in the deep dung of mules and cattle, which lay in heaps before the doors, till the slaves of Odyseus should take it away to dung his wide lands.
There lay the hound Argos, full of vermin; yet even now, when he marked Odysseus standing near, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had no longer strength to move. Then Odysseus looked aside and wiped away a tear."
Argos is, without a doubt, the goodest of all good boys. He was the dog of Odysseus, legendary hero and protagonist of the poet Homer’s The Odyssey. The Greek poet Homer wrote the 24 books of the Odyssey in the 9th or 8th centuries BCE, along with another epic, the Iliad - though the Odyssey is a little more well-known.
Very little is known about Homer himself. Through the translation of the poems, most historians believe Homer was probably from Ionia - around present-day Turkey - based on his dialect. Other Greek thinkers began to reference Homer's writings beginning around the 7th century BCE. Through other writers' references to his works, and by using context clues from The Odyssey and the Iliad, historians have been able to put together a rough picture of when and where Homer was writing. But other than that, he remains very much a mystery.
While the Odyssey is well worth checking out if you haven't, we will save the details for another future episode. To greatly simplify the plot for our purposes today, Odysseus left his home in Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War, a conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans sparked by the kidnapping of Helen of Troy. The war raged on for ten long years - before a final contest that ended in victory for the Greeks.
Odysseus constructed a giant wooden horse which was presented at Troy's gates as a peace offering - but it had Greek soldiers inside, who were able to emerge and take the city from within after nightfall. Early on in their journey home, Odysseus and his men - some of the sole survivors of a terrible storm at sea - encountered a cyclops named Polyphemus who captured them after finding them snooping around his island for food and supplies. He captured Odysseus and his men, but they escaped by getting him drunk and blinding him with a stake.
Though they had gotten away, unfortunately Odysseus and company now had an even bigger problem - Polyphemus the cyclops was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. Furious at the injury of his child, Poseidon threw every obstacle he could in Odysseus’ way, and various adventures and misfortunes result in the trip taking an additional ten years.
When Odysseus finally returns home, he discovers that his wife, Penelope, has been overwhelmed with suitors trying to win her attention - though she has remained faithful to him. Because it's been 20 years, no-one recognizes him - with the exception, of course, of the faithful Argos.
According to Homer, Argos waited patiently for his master to return home for two decades, despite mistreatment and neglect from those expected to care for him. When Odysseus returns Argos is very old and frail, and covered in fleas, and too weak to get up and greet his master - though he manages to wag his tail in recognition.
Odysseus, planning to use his newfound anonymity to weed out Penelope’s suitors for later revenge, is unable to break his disguise and greet his dog. Instead, he sheds a tear, asking about the dog’s story.
But Argos’ story ended with Odysseus’ return. Homer concludes the tale of Argos with: “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.”
Thank you, friends, for joining me on another adventure into Greek mythology. It is one of my absolute favorite topics to learn about - if you have any specific myths you’d like to hear about in future - or any particular themes you’d like to hear about for an episode - please reach out to me via email at ursaminorcontact@gmail.com. I’ll put that email in the show notes alongside my website, www.ursaminorcreations.com, and of course my bibliographical references.
Episodes of Scholar Minor are also available on YouTube for your listening and sharing convenience, and soon - when my schedule is a little less bonkers - I will have some proper videos, so stay tuned and subscribe in the meantime.
I hope you enjoyed our discussion today about these goodest boys, and I look forward to talking to you again next Friday.