Achelous

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Achelous was often reduced to a bearded mask, an inspiration for the medieval Green Man. Floor mosaic, Zeugma Turkey.

For the river, see Acheloos River.

In Greek mythology, Achelous (English /ækə'loʊəs/ Greek: Ἀχελῷος) was the patron deity of the "silver-swirling" Acheloos River, which is the largest river of Greece, and thus the chief of all river deities, every river having its own river spirit. His name translates as "he who washes away care". Some sources^{[citation needed]} say that Achelous was the son of Poseidon, others that he was the son of Gaia and Helios, of Earth and Sun, or Earth and Oceanus^[1]. However, ancient Greeks generally believed with Hesiod^[2] that Tethys and Oceanus were the parents of all river gods, but Homer^[3] placed Achelous above all, the origin of all the world's fresh water.

Achelous was a suitor for Deianeira, daughter of Oeneus king of Calydon, but was defeated by Heracles, who wed her himself. Sophocles pictures a mortal woman's terror at being courted by a chthonic river god:

'My suitor was the river Achelóüs,

who took three forms to ask me of my father:

a rambling bull once, then a writhing snake

of gleaming colors, then again a man

with ox-like face: and from his beard's dark shadows

stream upon stream of water tumbled down.

Such was my suitor.' (Sophocles, Trachiniae)

The sacred bull the serpent and the Minotaur are all creatures associated with the Earth Goddess Gaia. Achelous was most often depicted as a gray-haired old man or a vigorous bearded man in his prime, with a horned head and a serpent-like body. When he battled Heracles over the river nymph Deianeira, Achelous turned himself into a bull. Heracles tore off one of his horns and forced the god to surrender. Achelous had to trade the goat horn of Amalthea to get it back. Heracles gave it to the Naiads, who transformed it into the cornucopia. Achelous relates the bitter episoode afterwards to Theseus in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, 1-88.^[4]

Achelous was sometimes the father of the Sirens by Terpsichore, or in a later version, they are from the blood he shed where Heracles broke off his horn.^[5]

The mouth of the Achelous river was the spot where Alcmaeon finally found peace from the Erinyes. Achelous offered him Callirhoe, his daughter, in marriage if Alcmaeon would retrieve the clothing and jewelry his mother, Eriphyle, had been wearing when she sent her husband, Amphiaraus to his death. Alcmaeon had to retrieve the clothes from King Phegeus, who sent his sons to kill Alcmaeon.

Ovid in his Metamorphoses, VIII, 547ff provided a descriptive interlude when Theseus is the guest of Achelous, waiting for the river's raging flood to subside: "He entered the dark building, made of spongy pumice, and rough tufa. The floor was moist with soft moss, and the ceiling banded with freshwater mussel and oyster shells." In sixteenth-century Italy, an aspect of the revival of Antiquity was the desire to recreate Classical spaces as extensions of the revived villa. Ovid's description of the cave of Achelous provided some specific inspiration to patrons in France as well as Italy for the Mannerist garden grotto, with its cool dampness, tufa vaulting and shellwork walls. The banquet served by Ovid's Achelous offered a prototype for Italian midday feasts in the fountain-cooled shade of garden grottoes.

At the mouth of the Achelous River lie the Echinades Islands. According to Ovid's pretty myth-making in the same Metamorphoses episode, the Echinades Islands were once five nymphs. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to honor Achelous in their festivities, and the god was so angry about this slight that he turned them into the islands.

Achelous also figures in Metamorphoses X, 87.

In another mythic context, the Achelous was said to be formed by the tears of Niobe, who fled to Mount Sipylon after the deaths of her husband and children.

In Hellenistic and Roman contexts, the river god was often reduced to a mask and used decoratively as an emblem of water, "his uncut hair wreathed with reeds"^[6] His bearded face appears in a mosaic floor at Zeugma Turkey (illustration, above right). The feature survived in Romanesque carved details and flowered duruing the Middle Ages as one of the Classical prototypes of the Green Man.

[edit] Notes

^ Alcaeus, fragment, a quote
^ Hesiod, Theogony 340.
^ Homer, Iliad21,194.
^ [http://www.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/Metamorph9.htm Metamorphoses X: on-line text.
^ Kerenyi 1951:56; Georg Kaibel, Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Berlin) 1899, noted in Kerenyi: 1959:199.
^ Ovid, Metamorphoses ix.

[edit] References

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Achelous

Andrews, Tamra. A Dictionary of Nature Myths, 1998. ISBN # 0-19-513677-2
Kerenyi, Karl, 1959. The Heroes of the Greeks (New York and London: Thames and Hudson)
Kerenyi, Karl, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks (New York and London: Thames and Hudson)
March, Jenny. Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology, 2001. ISBN # 0-304-35788-X