Amalthea (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Amalthea or Amaltheia is the figure most commonly identified as the nurse of Zeus during his infancy. She is described either as a nymph who raises the child on the milk of a goat, or, in some accounts from the Hellenistic period onwards, as the goat itself.
As early as the archaic period, there exist references to the "horn of Amalthea", a magical horn said to be capable of producing endless amounts of any food or drink desired. In a narrative attributed to the mythical poet Musaeus, and dating to around the 4th century BC, Amalthea, a nymph, nurses the infant Zeus and owns a goat which is terrifying in appearance. After Zeus reaches adulthood, he uses the goat's skin as a weapon in his battle against the Titans. Amalthea is first described as a goat by the 3rd-century BC poet Callimachus, who presents a rationalised version of the myth, in which Zeus is fed on Amalthea's milk. Aratus, also writing in the 3rd century BC, identifies Amalthea with the star Capella, and describes her as "Olenian".
There is disagreement among scholars as to when the tale of Zeus's upbringing was first merged with that of the magical horn. The first author to explicitly combine them is the Roman poet Ovid, whose story of Zeus's nursing weaves together elements from multiple earlier accounts. A passage from a scholium on Aratus's account has been taken as evidence that the two myths may have been connected prior to Ovid. Another version of Zeus's childhood is found in the 2nd-century AD Fabulae, in which Amalthea hides the infant in a tree and gathers the Kouretes to dance noisily, so that the child's crying cannot be heard. Other accounts of Zeus's upbringing describe Amalthea as being related to Melisseus, the king of Crete, including an Orphic version of the story.
Among the relatively few surviving representations of Amalthea in ancient art are a 2nd-century AD marble relief which depicts her as a nymph feeding Zeus out of a large cornucopia, and multiple coins and medallions from the Roman Empire. In modern art, she has been the subject of 17th- and 18th-century works by sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pierre Julien and painters such as Jacob Jordaens.
Etymology and origins
The etymology of is unknown. While 19th-century scholars proposed various derivations, these were dismissed in the early 20th century by Alfred Chilton Pearson, who suggested that the name may be related to and . The verb , previously attested only by the Lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria and the Etymologicum Magnum, was thought by Otto Gruppe in 1906 to derive from Amalthea's name; Gruppe's suggestion was refuted by the word's discovery in a fragment, published the following year, from the writings of the 5th-century BC tragedian Sophocles. According to Pearson, the two words should instead be understood as having existed alongside each other, with this notion of "abundance" or "plenty" being embodied in certain mythological figures.In Hesiod's Theogony, an 8th-century BC poem which contains the earliest known account of Zeus's birth, there is no mention of Amalthea. Hesiod, does, however, describe the newborn Zeus as being taken to a cave on "the Aegean mountain" in Crete, which some scholars interpret as meaning "Goat's Mountain", seen as a reference to the story of Amalthea; Richard Wyatt Hutchinson takes this term as possible indication that the tradition in which Amalthea is a goat, though only attested from the Hellenistic period, may have existed earlier than that of her as a nymph. Other scholars, however, including M. L. West, see no reason to view Hesiod's name for the mountain as a reference to Amalthea. According to Lewis Richard Farnell, Amalthea may have been associated, at some point early on, with the Cretan goddess Dictynna, whose name is likely related to Mount Dicte.
Mythology
Horn of Amalthea
The "horn of Amalthea", referred to in Latin literature as the cornucopia, is a magical horn generally described as being able to produce an inexhaustible supply of any food or drink desired. The tale of this horn seems to have originated as an independent tradition to the raising of Zeus, though it is uncertain when the two merged. The "horn of Amalthea" is mentioned as early as the archaic period by poets such as Anacreon and Phocylides, and is commonly referenced in comedies, such as those by Cratinus and Aristophanes. According to the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus, the 5th-century BC mythographer Pherecydes described the horn's ability to provide endless food and drink as desired, and considered it to belong to the nymph Amalthea. In a lost poem by the 5th-century BC poet Pindar, Heracles fought against the river-god Achelous for the hand of Deianeira, and during the fight Heracles pulled off one of Achelous's horns; the god then reclaimed his horn by trading it for the magical horn which he obtained from Amalthea, a daughter of Oceanus. In the same passage in which he cites Pherecydes, Apollodorus retells this story, and describes the nymph Amalthea as the daughter of Haemonius, whose name, meaning "Thessalian", indicates that this Amalthea is separate to the nurse of Zeus. In Apollodorus's account, Amalthea's horn is that of a bull, seemingly a result of confusion with the bull's horn of Achelous, while in other versions of the myth, told by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, the horn of Amalthea is identified with that of Achelous.Nurse of Zeus
Amalthea is the figure most commonly described as the nurse of Zeus during his infancy, and in this role is often considered to be a nymph. In the account of Zeus's upbringing from the now-lost work Eumolpia, which was attributed in antiquity to the mythical poet Musaeus, Amalthea was the nurse of the young Zeus, and a nymph. According to a summary of the Catasterismi of Eratosthenes, in the account attributed to Musaeus, Zeus's mother Rhea gave him as a newborn child to Themis, who handed him over to the nymph Amalthea, who had the infant nursed by a she-goat. Pseudo-Eratosthenes goes on to relate that this goat was the daughter of Helios, and was so terrifying in appearance that the Titans, out of fear, asked Gaia to hide her in a cave on Crete; Gaia complied, entrusting the goat to Amalthea. After Zeus reaches adulthood, he receives an oracle advising him to use the goat's skin as a weapon in his war against the Titans. According to De astronomia, which similarly recounts the narrative from Musaeus, this weapon which Zeus uses against the Titans is the aegis.Various accounts of Zeus's upbringing rationalise Amalthea as a goat; these versions start appearing in the Hellenistic period. The first author to describe her as a goat seems to have been the 3rd-century BC poet Callimachus, who relates that, after Zeus's birth, the god is taken by the Arcadian nymph Neda to a hidden location in Crete, where he is reared by the nymph Adrasteia, and fed the milk of Amalthea. In his description of Zeus suckling Amalthea's breast, Callimachus employs the word , which typically denotes the breast of a human, thereby, according to Susan Stephens, "call attention to his own rationalizing variant of the myth". According to a scholium on Callimachus's account, from one of Amalthea's horns flows ambrosia, and from the other comes nectar. In the version of Zeus's infancy from Diodorus Siculus, the child is reared by nymphs on the milk of the goat Amalthea, as well as honey, and adds that Amalthea is the source of Zeus's epithet . An account which is largely the same as that given by Pseudo-Eratosthenes is found in a scholium on the Iliad, though the scholiast describes Amalthea herself as the goat which terrifies the Titans.
In Greek works of astral mythology, the tale of the goat who nurses the young Zeus is adapted to provide an aition for certain stars. The 3rd-century BC poet Aratus, in his description of the constellation of the Charioteer and the surrounding stars, explains that the star of the Goat sits above the Charioteer's left shoulder. He identifies this goat with Amalthea, describing it as the goat who suckled the young Zeus; in this passage, he employs the word for the goat's breast, similarly to Callimachus, who may be his source for this information. He also states that the "interpreters of Zeus" refer to her as the Olenian goat, which may be an allusion to a version in which Zeus is reared, by a goat, near Olenos in Achaea, or to the location of the star, on the arm of Auriga; alternatively, it may indicate that the Goat's father is Olenus, an interpretation given by a scholium on the passage. At the end of the account given by Pseudo-Eratosthenes, the text contains a lacuna, where he would have described Zeus placing the goat among the stars; in the Catasterismi, the god would have performed this action for her role in his defeat of the Titans, and her nursing of him during his youth.
Merging of traditions
According to Robert Fowler, the nursing of Zeus by a goat and the originally independent tradition of the magical horn had become "entangled" by the time of Pherecydes; Jan N. Bremmer, however, states that it was not until Ovid that the two tales were brought together. In Ovid's account, presented in his Fasti, Amalthea is once again the owner of the goat, and is described as a naiad who lives on Mount Ida. She hides the young Zeus in Crete, where he is suckled by the she-goat. On one occasion, the goat snaps off one of its horns on a tree, and Amalthea, filling the broken horn with fruit, brings it back to the young Zeus; this tale, an aition for the cornucopia, appears to be the earliest attempt at providing an origin for the object. Zeus later places the goat in the heavens, with the goat becoming the star Capella. Ovid's narrative brings together elements from multiple earlier accounts, which he intertwines in an episode characterised by John Miller as a "miniature masterpiece". His source for the narrative's overall outline appears to be Eratosthenes: he describes Amalthea as a nymph, and seemingly alludes to Zeus's war with the Titans, though he notably departs from the Eratosthenic story by describing the goat as 'beautiful' and possessing majestic horns. Ovid harks back to Aratus's account in the first words of his narrative, which mirror the opening phrase of the Aratean story, as well as through his description of the goat as "Olenian". Barbara Boyd also sees in Ovid's narrative significant influence from the Callimachean account of Zeus's infancy.Though Ovid's Fasti is the first known source to clearly narratively merge the tradition of Zeus's upbringing with that of Amalthea's magical horn, Miller points to a scholium on Aratus as evidence that the two tales may have already been connected by the time of Ovid. The scholiast, who appears to mix two differing versions, one in which Zeus's nurse is an Arcadian woman, and another in which she is a goat, describes the horn of this nurse as being Amalthea's horn, which he associates with the constellation of the Goat; Amalthea's horn here would seem to be the magical horn of plenty, though the two are not explicitly identified. Miller also points, as possible further evidence of a tradition in which the two tales were connected, to the scholium on Callimachus, whose mention of ambrosia and nectar flowing from the goat's horns may have been related to the young Zeus's nourishment, and a 2nd-century AD marble relief, which seems to show Amalthea feeding the young Zeus from a large cornucopia.