Aristaeus ("the best") was a cult title in many places:
Boeotia,
Arcadia,
Ceos,
Sicily,
Sardinia,
Thessaly, and
Macedonia; consequently a set of "travels" was imposed, connecting his
epiphanies in order to account for these widespread manifestations.
If Aristaeus was a minor figure at Athens, he was more prominent in
Boeotia, where he was "the pastoral Apollo",[2] and was linked to the
founding myth of
Thebes by marriage with
Autonoë, daughter of
Cadmus, the founder.[3] Aristaeus may appear as a winged youth in painted Boeotian pottery,[4] similar to representations of the
Boreads, spirits of the North Wind. Besides Actaeon and Macris, he also was said to have fathered Charmus and Callicarpus in
Sardinia.[5]
Pindar's account
According to
Pindar's ninth Pythian Ode and Apollonius' Argonautica (II.522ff), Cyrene despised spinning and other womanly arts and instead spent her days hunting and
shepherding, but, in a prophecy he put in the mouth of the wise
centaurChiron, Apollo would spirit her to
Libya and make her the foundress of a great city,
Cyrene, in a fertile coastal plain.[6] When Aristaeus was born, according to what Pindar sang,
Hermes took him to be raised on
nectar and
ambrosia and to be made immortal by
Gaia.
"Aristaios" ("the best") is an
epithet rather than a name:
For some men to call
Zeus and holy
Apollo. Agreus and Nomios,[7] and for others Aristaios (
Pindar)
From his father, Apollo, the wise Centaur,
Chiron and from his aunts, the
Muses, Aristaeus learned the arts of prophecy, healing and
herblore (similarly like his half-brother,
Asclepius).
From his aunt,
Artemis and from his mother, Cyrene (who was also a companion of his aunt, Artemis, either as a nymph or as
a mortal princess-turned-nymph), Aristaeus learned how to track, hunt and trap animals, and how to
dress and prepare their meat (
Butchering) and skins (
Leather making), as well as the use of
nets and
traps in hunting.
From the
Myrtle-
nymphs (being, either
Dryads or
Oreads)—or the
Thriae—who raised him on Apollo's behalf, Aristaeus learned other useful arts and mysteries, such as
dairying; how to prepare milk for
cream,
butter,
oxygala (similar to
yogurt) and
cheese(
making); how to keep
chickens for their
eggs; how to tame the Goddess's
bees and
keep them in hives (the bees either belonging to the Myrtle nymphs themselves or the
Thriae), to harness supplies of
honey and
beeswax, etc.[8]; how to tame and cultivate the wild
oleaster in order to make it bear
olives and how to process them into
olive oil (like his aunt,
Athena); as such, Aristaeus is a protector of olive trees, of olive
orchards/
plantations, olive
cultivation and of olive oil presses (whereas Athena is the goddess of olives, of olive oil and of olive-oil-making).
Like his father, Apollo, his mother, Cyrene (a huntress and a shepherdess), his uncle,
Hermes, and his cousin(?),
Pan, Aristaeus is also a patron god and a protector of
shepherds/
herders and of
herding, patron of the art of
Sheep shearing, as well as the patron god of
pastoralism; of the
cattle and their herds and flocks, and protector of
pastures.
From his uncle,
Dionysus, Aristaeus learned the processes of how to produce
alcoholic beverages, such as
wine,
ale,
beer,
kykeon,
mead,
kumis,
absinthe, etc. (although an alternate account states that he was the one who taught Dionysus, having served as a surrogate father to him on the island of
Euboia (as opposed to Dionysus learning about winemaking from the wise old
Satyr,
Silenus); as such, Aristaeus is worshipped as a protector of
grapevines and of
vineyards, and of
viticulture, while Dionysus is the god of wine and of wine-making.
In
Ceos, Aristaeus is also a god of the
Etesian winds, which provided some respite from the intense heat of their scorching,
drought-causing midsummers weather/climate.[9]
Issue
When he was grown, he sailed from Libya to
Boeotia, where he was inducted into further mysteries in the cave of
Chiron the centaur. In Boeotia, he was married to
Autonoë and became the father of the ill-fated
Actaeon, who inherited the family passion for hunting, to his ruin,[10] and of
Macris, who nursed the child
Dionysus.
According to Pherecydes, Aristaeus fathered
Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night.[11]Hesiod's Theogony suggests her parents were Perses and Asteria.
Aristaeus in Ceos
Aristaeus' presence in Ceos, attested in the fourth and third centuries BC,[12] was attributed to a Delphic prophecy that counselled Aristaeus to sail to
Ceos, where he would be greatly honored. He found the islanders suffering from sickness under the stifling and baneful effects of the Dog-Star
Sirius at its first appearance before the sun's rising, in early July. In the foundation legend of a specifically Cean weather-magic ritual, Aristaeus was credited with the double sacrifice that countered the deadly effects of the Dog-Star, a sacrifice at dawn to Zeus Ikmaios, "Rain-making Zeus" at a mountaintop altar,[13] following a pre-dawn
chthonic sacrifice to Sirius, the Dog-Star, at its first annual appearance,[9] which brought the annual relief of the cooling
Etesian winds.
In a development that offered more immediate causality for the myth, Aristaeus discerned that the Ceans' troubles arose from murderers hiding in their midst, the killers of
Icarius in fact. When the miscreants were found out and executed, and a shrine erected to Zeus Ikmaios, the great god was propitiated and decreed that henceforth, the
Etesian wind should blow and cool all the Aegean for forty days from the baleful rising of Sirius, but the Ceans continued to propitiate the Dog-Star, just before its rising, just to be sure.[14] Aristaeus appears on Cean coins.[15]
Then Aristaeus, on his civilizing mission, visited Arcadia, where the winged male figure who appears on ivory tablets in the sanctuary of
Ortheia as the consort of the goddess, has been identified as Aristaeus by L. Marangou.[16]
Soon after Aristaeus' inadvertent hand in the death of
Eurydice—whose husband, Orpheus, in one version, is Aristaeus' own half-brother, via Apollo (another version says that her husband, Orpheus, was fathered by
Oeagrus)—his bees became sickened and began to die. Seeking council, first from his mother, Cyrene, and then from
Proteus, Aristaeus learns that the bees' death was a punishment for causing the death of Eurydice, from her sisters, the
Auloniadnymphes. To
make amends, Aristaeus needed to sacrifice 12 animals (or four bulls and four cows) to the gods, and in memory of Eurydice, leave the carcasses in the place of sacrifice, and to return 3-days later. He followed these instructions, establishing sacrificial alters before a fountain, as advised, sacrificed the aforementioned cattle, and left their carcasses. Upon returning 3-days later, Aristaeus found within one of the carcasses new swarms of bees, which he took back to his
apiary. The bees were never again troubled by disease.[8]
^His inventions of apicultural apparatus, such as the linen gauze bee-keeper's mask and the technique of smoking the hive, were elaborated by
Nonnus in his Dionysiaca, V.214ff.
^An expression credited to
Hesiod in
Servius' commentary on Virgil's Georgics, I.14; cf. William J. Slater, Lexicon to Pindar (Berlin: de Gruyter) 1969, s.v. ""Nomios". When "pastoral Apollo" appears in lines of
Theocritus (Idyll XXV) and
Callimachus (Ode to Apollo, 47) the expression blurs the effective domaines of the two figures.
^As on a Boeotian tripod-kothon at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated and discussed in Brian F. Cook, "Aristaios" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin New Series, 21.1 (Summer 1962), pp. 31-36; there Aristaeus hastens with a mattock and a one-handled amphora, which Cook interprets as filled with seed-corn.
^Theophrastus, Of the winds 14, and other testimony noted in
Walter Burkert, Homo Necans (1972), translated by Peter Bing ((University of California Press) 1983), p. 109 note 1; Burkert notes that Aristaeus is already mentioned in a
Hesiodic fragment.
^Charikleia Papageorgiadou-Banis, The Coinage of Kea (Paris) 1997.
^Marangou, Aristaios" AM8772), pp77-83, noted by Jane Burr Carter, "The Masks of Ortheia" American Journal of Archaeology91.3 (July 1987:355-383) p. 382f.
^Eugene Vanderpool, "Two Inscriptions Near Athens", Hesperia14.2, The American Excavations in the Athenian Agora: Twenty-Sixth Report (April 1945), pp. 147-149; Susan I. Rotroff, "An Athenian Archon List of the Late Second Century after Christ" Hesperia44.4 (October 1975), pp. 402-408; Sterling Dow, "Archons of the Period after Sulla", Hesperia Supplements8 Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear (1949), pp. 116–125, 451, etc.