Introduction 19

Thebes.30 Such beings incarnate the dangerous disorder of unregulated nature,

which gods and heroes render safe and orderly, replacing wildness with an em-
blem of civilization: a splendid temple or town, a little cosmos where once
there was found only the dangerous chaos of wilderness. A combat between god
or hero and monster leading to the establishment of a new order is a cosmogony
on a larger or smaller scale.
The farther one moves away from the center of the earth, the more ex-
traordinary the places and inhabitants are. To the east of the Greeks dwell the
Amazons, a nation of female warriors.31 Some distant communities are so
lovely that they appear to be survivors of the Golden Age, preserving the par-
adisal conditions of life that the world has otherwise lost. In the far north
dwell the Hyperboreans, the people beyond Boreas, which is to say beyond
the north wind, beyond the cold in a wondrous northerly place where the cli-
mate is springlike. Beloved of the gods, the Hyperboreans spend their time
feasting and dancing.32 In the far west the Hesperides, or Daughters of Evening,
live in a garden where they pass their time dancing and singing while also
guarding the precious golden apples, a wedding gift from Earth to Zeus on the
occasion of his marriage to Hera. The poet Hesiod says that the Hesperides live
beyond Okeanos, at the edge of the world, near Night, where the monstrous
Gorgons dwell.33 At the edges of the world the monstrous and the lovely can
be neighbors.
Another fabulous group is the Ethiopians (Aithiopes, Burnt People). They
live beside the River Ocean in two groups, half of them in the east where the
sun rises and half in the west where it sets. They are dear to the gods, who visit
them often and feast with them.34 This tradition implies that white is the de-
fault skin color for humans and that dark skin is a consequence of proximity to
the sun. The same notion underlies the myth of Phaethon, who once drove the
chariot of the Sun so close to the earth that Ethiopians acquired a dark com-
plexion.35 In contrast to the sunny Ethiopians, the Kimmerians live on the
banks of Okeanos in misty darkness, eternal night, since Helios never shines
there.36 In the extreme west, on the banks of Okeanos, lies another dark place,
Erebos, the realm of the dead. It is thither that the hero Odysseus once sailed in
order to consult with the ghost of the seer Teiresias.37
Greek tradition tells of the existence of black dwarves less than two feet
tall, Pygmies, who dwell beside the streams of the River Ocean.38 Whether the
tradition was inspired by actual knowledge of the Congolese people of small
stature known to us as Pygmies and to themselves as BaMbuti is not known,
but Europeans applied the Greek name to the BaMbuti in the belief that they
were the Pygmies of ancient lore.
20 Handbook of Classical Mythology

O K E A N OS
Hyperboreans

i
Erebos elph
D
Eastern
Amazons
Hesperides Ethiopians

Gorgons
Western
Ethiopians
Nile

Pygmies

OKEANOS
Figure 1.3. Map of the Earth with Select Peoples and Sites.

Sky

The early Greeks thought of the visible world as being much like a big house in
which the earth serves as the floor and the sky as the ceiling or roof. Homer and
other narrators describe the sky as made of bronze or iron, because these metals
are strong and bright.39 In shape the sky is a vaulted dome. This cosmic house is
basically the kind of structure called by the Greeks a tholos, a round building
with a conical roof (Brown 1968, 45).
Like any other roof, the sky requires support. In Greek cosmology the god
Atlas, or Bearer, holds it up with his head or shoulders and tireless hands or, al-
ternatively, holds pillars that keep the earth and the sky apart.40 The image of
Atlas as the supporter of the sky was so familiar that the Greeks called architec-
tural columns in the form of male figures atlases (atlantes), like the columns in
the form of females known as caryatids.41 Atlas stands at the ends of the earth