With Medea finally consigned to oblivion and Theseus united with his father, King Aegeus of Athens, Ovid’s Metamorphoses rushes on to a little-known group of myths explaining the origins of Minos and the fearsome Myrmidons who were later to fight for Achilles in the war against Troy.
The delight of King Aegeus in meeting his son at last proved short-lived when King Minos of Crete threatened war against Athens. Minos assembled a fleet of ships, and cruised the islands obtaining the allegiance and support of the small kingdoms there. When his fleet came to the island of Aegina, Aeacus its king refused on the grounds of his binding treaties with Athens. As the Cretan fleet sailed, Cephalus arrived from Athens, and was told of Aeacus’ unfailing allegiance. However, he noticed that people and things had changed since his last visit to Aegina.
King Aeacus then takes over the narration, giving his account of the plague that had almost destroyed the people of Aegina. It had arisen because of one of Jupiter’s extramarital affairs, with the nymph of the island, inevitably also named Aegina; Juno’s jealous reprisal against the nymph was largely expressed in a plague sent against the people of the island. Aeacus gives a vivid account of the deadly consequences of an infectious disease which sounds much like one of the many outbreaks of the plague that have struck Europe. In the end, with corpses being piled high unburied or in funeral pyres, Aeacus called on Jupiter either to give him his people back, or to kill him.
Aeacus saw an army of ants hard at work on a sacred oak tree, and asked that Jupiter give him such an army of people. When he slept that night, the king dreamed of those ants being transformed into people. The following morning, his son Telamon woke him, to tell him that overnight the city had been peopled afresh. They hailed Aeacus as king, and immediately went on to labour hard on the land and to become the fearsome band of warriors known as Myrmidons, a name derived from the Greek for ant, μύρμηξ (myrmex).
Later legend tells that the Myrmidons moved to Thessaly, from where Aeacus’ grandson Achilles took them with him to the Trojan War. The word has even entered the English language, although little-used for over a century. It came to mean a loyal and unquestioning follower, much like a worker ant.
The first work of visual art which shows the Myrmidons seems to be Virgil Solis’s engraving for a 1581 edition of Metamorphoses. King Aeacus is shown calling on Jupiter to repopulate the island, as the ants climb the old oak tree, and babies spill out from a cleft in its trunk.
That was followed in the latter half of the eighteenth century by this engraving by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Telemon and Aeacus, showing Telemon taking his father Aeacus out to see the loyal and hard-working Myrmidons at the end of the story. I suspect that this too was made for an illustrated edition of Metamorphoses.
If Aeacus did not make sufficient impression on artists, the figure of Minos did, particularly as he, together with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, was made a judge of the dead in Hades, after his death.
Michelangelo shows Minos in that (Christianised) role in his huge fresco The Last Judgment (1537-41), with his attribute of a snake, which appears to be about to do Minos something of a mischief.
Minos also features in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought him to the attention of two of the greatest illustrators (and fine artists) of the nineteenth century, William Blake and Gustave Doré.
Blake’s watercolour of Minos (1824-27) shows him presiding in judgement over four cavorting couples, in a thoroughly radical vision.
Doré’s version, engraved here by Gaston Monvoisin, is more restrained, and shows Minos’ trademark serpent. Below him are souls queued up for his judgement.
Just as humans have always wanted to fly, the ability has commonly been ascribed to those elevated to the status of god or goddess. While some systems of belief have been happy to award all their deities the power of flight, it was more restricted in those of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations responsible for most of the myths painted in European art.
Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Fury of Achilles from 1737 captures Achilles, wearing his elaborate armour in the centre, as he’s being aided in the war against Troy by Athena on the left and Hephaestus on the right. Further to the right is Scamander, shown traditionally with his large jar gushing water and a wooden paddle in his right hand. Beneath them are the bodies of Trojans, and the river is starting to run red with their blood. In the more distant chariot is Hera with one of her peacocks.
More generally, though, unlimited free flight was confined to Hermes/Mercury, messenger of the gods, Cupid, and those personifying features of the sky, including the winds, heavenly bodies such as rainbows (Iris, another divine messenger), and events like night.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted The Judgement of Paris late in his long career, in 1908-10. Its three slightly soft-focus nudes are shown against a blurry background of countryside. Paris has accepted Aphrodite’s bribe, and is here awarding her the golden apple. Watching on is Hermes, complete with his winged helmet and sandals signifying his flying ability, and his distinctive caduceus.
The sixth painting in Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus series, The Death of Medusa II (1881-2), completes the story of Medusa by showing the hero fleeing from the Gorgons. The headless body of Medusa is left on the ground, and her sisters fly around searching for her assailant. Perseus wears the helmet of Hades to maintain his invisibility, and is flying away with his borrowed winged sandals, while inserting Medusa’s head in his kibisis.
Sandro Botticelli’s huge masterpiece Primavera (Spring) demonstrates this differentiation, in its retelling of the story of Zephyrus and Flora. The west wind (far right, and detail below) abducted and raped the nymph Chloris (to the left of him), who was then transformed into the goddess Flora, who is dressed and decked in flowers, representing the Spring. Only Zephyrus as a wind, and Cupid above, are shown in flight.
Charles William Mitchell’s The Flight of Boreas with Orithyia from 1893 gives a full and classical account of this myth. Orithyia is trying to push the head of her abductor away, and unfasten his right hand from her thigh, but Boreas is just about to take her airborne.
Another deity whose role in mythology depends on her ability to fly is Eris, whose spreading of discord among the goddesses was key to the origin of the war against Troy.
In Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord (1633), the facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, now at the centre of the grasping hands above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Aphrodite, her son Eros at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Hera reaches her hand out for it too.
Flying ability wasn’t evenly distributed in Norse mythology either, but was a skill best developed among valkyries.
Edward Robert Hughes’ first work showing a valkyrie from Norse mythology, Dream Idyll (A Valkyrie) from 1902, depicts a naked and unarmed woman riding a winged horse in the sky over a late Victorian city, perhaps London.
This has perpetuated into more recent myths and legends of fairies and related little creatures.
This Allegorical Scene looks like one of the more extreme faerie works from Victorian Britain, but was painted by Domenicus van Wijnen almost two centuries earlier. At the upper right, hundreds of small putti-like fairies are being ejected from below, flying in an arc over the top of the painting, and coalescing around a goddess lit brightly from behind. Below her is a river, where large numbers of naked bathers are congregated, and they too appear to rise up into the sky in another stream of flying figures.
These have been perpetuated in Christian beliefs in the form of angels, whose wings have more ancient and pre-Christian origins.
Hieronymus Bosch’s panel Ascent of the Blessed is one of the four making up his Visions of the Hereafter (c 1505-15), with particularly original and beautiful winged angels. These wings enable clear distinction to be made between humans and other human-like creatures, and the messengers of God. Being messengers, just as older gods like Eros, Thanatos, and Vanth before them, there’s a feasible rationale for them requiring their wings in order to move swiftly from heaven or the pre-Christian underworld to earth, and in their duties on earth.
There are even a few instances of divine and saintly figures being awarded the gift of flight.
William Blake’s unusual Nativity of 1799-1800 shows Joseph (left) supporting the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers, arms outstretched as if ready for crucifixion, in mid-air. On the right, Mary’s cousin Elisabeth greets the infant, with her own son, John the Baptist, on her lap.
The occasional saint has been awarded their licence to fly, as shown here in the figure of Saint Mark in Tintoretto’s early success Miracle of the Slave from 1548. Here the artist’s intention is not just about motion, but about the act of flying, and the figure’s saintliness or divinity.