DOI Kapitel:
Division A: The Agora and adjacent buildings lying to the west and north of the Acropolis, from the city gate to the Prytaneion
DOI Kapitel:Section V
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61302#0270
98
MYTHOLOGY AND MONUMENTS
DIV. A
chores, where the Eleusinian women first danced and sang songs
to the goddess. And the Rarian plain was the first sown and
the first that produced crops, as it is said ; and this is why custom
prescribes that barley from it should be used to make the cakes
for sacrifices. Here also they show the threshing-floor and the
altar of Triptolemos. But what is inside the sacred enclosure a
dream forbids me to disclose ; for as the uninitiated may not see,
so also they may not hear of the mysteries. And the hero
Eleusis, who gave the city its name, was, according to some, the
son of Hermes and Daira, daughter of Okeanos ; and according
to others, the son of Ogyges.” Pausanias very pertinently adds-
“ For the men of old time, when they had nothing whereon to
build their genealogies, invented fictitious ones, and especially in
the genealogies of heroes.”
In the Homeric hymn to Demeter,182 Triptolemos only appears
as one among the several local chieftains of Eleusis. The hymn,
as is well known, is concerned rather with the mysteries of the
lower world, with the rape of Kore, the sorrowing search of
Demeter, her consolation, her institution of the sacred Eleusinian
rites—in a word, with the fortunes of the “ beautiful-haired the
holy goddess and her slender-ankled daughter”—than with the
grain-giver Triptolemos. The child whom Demeter nurses is, in
the hymn, not Triptolemos but lacchus, and it closes with a
general acknowledgment of the blessings of wealth that come by
favour of the goddess, and not with any specific account of the
sending forth of Triptolemos. “Awe and majesty are upon them.
Very blessed upon the earth is the man to whom those holy ones
incline favourably ; lightly they send Ploutos, who giveth abun-
dance to mortals, to abide beside the hearth in the mansion of
him they love.” Sophocles wrote a play, Triptolemos, but the
fragments that remain are not sufficient to tell us what version
he followed. We can scarcely refrain from supposing that he
brought upon the stage Triptolemos in his winged car, a figure in
his time already so widely popular in Attic art. On a few late black
and countless red-figured vases the scene is depicted. The finest
and most complete representation is the vase of Hieron in the
British Museum, already discussed. Another instance has been
noted in connection with Hippothoon. To these a third may now be
added. The design (fig. 22) is from a very remarkable vase found in
a grave at Cumae, once belonging to the Campana Collection and
now in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.183 It occupies a con-
spicuous place in the centre of the third room, and is certainly one
MYTHOLOGY AND MONUMENTS
DIV. A
chores, where the Eleusinian women first danced and sang songs
to the goddess. And the Rarian plain was the first sown and
the first that produced crops, as it is said ; and this is why custom
prescribes that barley from it should be used to make the cakes
for sacrifices. Here also they show the threshing-floor and the
altar of Triptolemos. But what is inside the sacred enclosure a
dream forbids me to disclose ; for as the uninitiated may not see,
so also they may not hear of the mysteries. And the hero
Eleusis, who gave the city its name, was, according to some, the
son of Hermes and Daira, daughter of Okeanos ; and according
to others, the son of Ogyges.” Pausanias very pertinently adds-
“ For the men of old time, when they had nothing whereon to
build their genealogies, invented fictitious ones, and especially in
the genealogies of heroes.”
In the Homeric hymn to Demeter,182 Triptolemos only appears
as one among the several local chieftains of Eleusis. The hymn,
as is well known, is concerned rather with the mysteries of the
lower world, with the rape of Kore, the sorrowing search of
Demeter, her consolation, her institution of the sacred Eleusinian
rites—in a word, with the fortunes of the “ beautiful-haired the
holy goddess and her slender-ankled daughter”—than with the
grain-giver Triptolemos. The child whom Demeter nurses is, in
the hymn, not Triptolemos but lacchus, and it closes with a
general acknowledgment of the blessings of wealth that come by
favour of the goddess, and not with any specific account of the
sending forth of Triptolemos. “Awe and majesty are upon them.
Very blessed upon the earth is the man to whom those holy ones
incline favourably ; lightly they send Ploutos, who giveth abun-
dance to mortals, to abide beside the hearth in the mansion of
him they love.” Sophocles wrote a play, Triptolemos, but the
fragments that remain are not sufficient to tell us what version
he followed. We can scarcely refrain from supposing that he
brought upon the stage Triptolemos in his winged car, a figure in
his time already so widely popular in Attic art. On a few late black
and countless red-figured vases the scene is depicted. The finest
and most complete representation is the vase of Hieron in the
British Museum, already discussed. Another instance has been
noted in connection with Hippothoon. To these a third may now be
added. The design (fig. 22) is from a very remarkable vase found in
a grave at Cumae, once belonging to the Campana Collection and
now in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.183 It occupies a con-
spicuous place in the centre of the third room, and is certainly one