[lit-ideas] Milky Way

  • From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 22:26:27 -0700

(Another msg from Michael Chase -- andreas)
***************************************

On the Milky way

" Milky Way " was said (c. 22) because it is the only visible and
sensible thing on the sphere, everything else being intelligible. With
regard to it, Eratosthenes says, rather mythically, in the
Katasterismos that the Milky Way came about from Hera's milk. For when
Herakles was still an infant and sucking at Hera's breast, he gave it
as especially violent squeeze, and the milk squirted out and became the
Milky Way when it congealed.

The actual text of Eratosthenes reads as follows (Catasterismi, ed. A.
Olivieri, Pseudo-Eratosthenis catasterismi
[Mythographi Graeci 3.1. Leipzig: Teubner, 1897]:

The Milky Way

Thus there comes about in the visible circles the one they say is
called the Milky Way. For it was not possible for the sons of Zeus to
have a share of the heavenly honors unless one of them sucked on Hera's
breast. Therefore they say that Hermes brought Heracles after his birth
and set him to Hera's breast, and he sucked. But when Hera became aware
of this, she shook him off, and this, when the excess milk flowed out,
the Milky Way was formed.

M.C. Writing about eight centuries after Erastosthenes, John
Philoponus (In Aristotelis meteorologicorum librum primum commentarium,
ed. M. Hayduck,  [Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 14.1. Berlin:
Reimer, 1901]  p. 115, 16 ff.) knows a version of the story in which it
is Athena who sets Heracles to Hera's breast while she was asleep,
knowing that he will thereby become immortal. A sharp pain awoke Hera,
who snatched her breast from his lips, and the resulting spurt formed
the Milky Way. Philoponus, as a good hard-headed Aristotelian, rejects
all this as childish mythical nonsense : "for one thing," he says,
"milk does not spurt forth constantly ; and for another it is not the
case that it is always the same number of souls arising and descending,
so that their luminous bodies would always occupy the same space".
Philoponus thus has a perfectly good idea of the Milky Way *really*
is : it's a kind of celestial waiting-room, from which souls, bright
with their luminous astral bodies, descend from the heavens to be
incarnated on earth, and to which they rise once more after the death
of their bodies. This, by the way, is a Pythagorean idea. Another
Pythagorean name for the Milky Way was "the people of dreams" (*dêmos
oneirôn* acording to Homer, Odyssey 24, 12 ; cf. Porphyry, On the Cave
of the Nymphs, 28, quoted byc Proclus, Commentary on the Republic, II,
p. 129, 21 ff. Kroll), and another one "Hades"; and this is why many
people offer milk to the dead, and also why milk is the first food of
the newly born.

By the way, some of you may be concerned about poor Hera. Never fear :
later on, according to Libanius (Progymnasma 2, 8, 1) by crossing her
hands over her knees she stopped up Heracles' rectum, thus giving him a
case of constipation of mythic proportions.

Best, Mike (idly translating obscure Greek texts when I should be
correcting proofs. Don't tell anyone!)


Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France


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