Since Greek doesn’t have Y, either, trying to find a quote to use for today’s Words Crush Wednesday was tricky. I could have found a modern author/translator with a Y-name on the subject of Greek myths, and quoted them, or I could have talked about a concept like Youth or…uh…Young Love, or I could have looked for the ancient equivalent of a “Your Momma” fight. (Thought about doing the latter, actually, but…since the insults in the Iliad tend not to be retorted, especially not succinctly, the closest I could think of was the argument between Teukros and the Atreidai in Sophocles’ Aias, and…it just didn’t feel right. The setting is too terrible and serious for a “Your Momma” fight.) But then I stumbled across a passage in Early Greek Myth by Timothy Gantz that made me say “Yikes!” and I thought, “Hey, I could use that as my Y-word!”
So, there you have it. My Y entry for the April A-to-Z Blogging Challenge is on the theme of “Yikes!” in ancient Greek myth…with a decidedly satyric bent.
We’ll start with the one that inspired the theme, discussing the parentage of the god Pan. (For the purposes of making it a little easier to read, I’ve removed all the parentheses where he makes direct references to the work or fragment that he’s talking about. Most people aren’t going to get much out of things like “1F371: note emendation”, after all. So just keep in mind that every author named below has such a parenthesis behind his name.) After relating the best known version, Homeric Hymn 19, where Hermes fathered Pan on a daughter of Dryops, Gantz goes on to talk about rather different takes on Pan’s origin:
Other references to him in Archaic literature are rare, but it does emerge that his parentage was quite disputed: Hekataios and Pindar apparently make him the son of Apollo and Odysseus’ wife Penelope, while for Herodotos, Cicero, Loukianos, Apollodoros, and Hyginus, he is the son of Hermes and Penelope, and the Theocritean Syrinx makes Odysseus himself the father;
Yep. Some ancient authors had Odysseus cuckolded by a god, resulting in the goat-footed god Pan. And given that one of the potential cuckolders is Odysseus’ great-grandfather…!
We're All Mad Here! 