| Aristaeus | |
|---|---|
 Aristaeus by François Joseph Bosio (1768–1845), (Musée du Louvre) | |
| Abode | Libya |
| Personal information | |
| Parents | Apollo and Cyrene |
| Consort | Autonoë |
| Children | Actaeon and Macris |
| Equivalents | |
| Roman equivalent | Mellona |
Aristaeus (/ærɪˈstiːəs/; Greek: Ἀρισταῖος Aristaios) was the mythological culture hero credited with the discovery of many rural useful arts and handicrafts, including bee-keeping;[1] he was the son of the huntress Cyrene and Apollo.
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]
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 centaur Chiron, 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)
Thanks to a vast family-tree and connections, Aristaeus is a god and patron of a wide array of rustic and rural arts, crafts, skills, practices and traditions (handicrafts)--often associated with smallholdings—some-of-which is overlapped with his many relatives:
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, and of Macris, who nursed the child Dionysus.
According to Pherecydes, Aristaeus fathered Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night.[8] Hesiod's Theogony suggests her parents were Perses and Asteria.
Aristaeus' presence in Ceos, attested in the fourth and third centuries BC,[9] 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,[10] following a pre-dawn chthonic sacrifice to Sirius, the Dog-Star, at its first annual appearance,[11] 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.[12] Aristaeus appears on Cean coins.[13]
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.[14]
Aristaeus settled for a time in the Vale of Tempe. By the time of Virgil's Georgics, the myth has Aristaeus chasing Eurydice when she was bitten by a serpent and died.
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 Auloniad nymphes. 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.
A variation of this tale was told in the 2002 novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.[15]
In later times, Aristaios was a familiar Greek name, borne by several archons of Athens and attested in inscriptions.[16]
