[lit-ideas] The Milky Way
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:02:55 -0700
(Posted for 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!)
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