Adrasteia
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In Greek mythology, Adrasteia ("inescapable"; also spelled Adrastia, Adrastea, Adrestea, Adastreia) was a nymph who was charged by Rhea to raise the infant Zeus in secret to protect him from his father Cronus (Krónos) in the Dictaean cave.[1] Adrasteia and her sister Ida, the nymph of Mount Ida, who also cared for the infant Zeus, were perhaps the daughters of Melisseus. The sisters fed the infant milk from the goat Amaltheia. The Korybantes, also known as the Curetes[2], whom the scholiast on Callimachus calls her brothers, also watched over the child; they kept Cronus from hearing him crying by beating their swords on their shields, drowning out the sound of the child's cries.
Adrasteia— "she whom none escapes"— is the essential attribute of Nemesis, a primordial Great Goddess of the archaic period,[3] and is also an epithet applied to Rhea herself, to Cybele, and to Ananke. As with Adrasteia, these four were especially associated with the dispensation of rewards and punishments.
Apollonius Rhodius (Argonautica iii. 132ff) relates that she gave to the infant Zeus a beautiful globe (sphaira) to play with, and on some Cretan coins Zeus is represented sitting upon a globe. The ball, which Aphrodite promises to Eros, is described as if it were the Cosmos: "its zones are golden, and two circular joins[4]curve around each of them; the seams are concealed, as a twisting dark blue pattern plays over them. If you throw it up with your hands, it sends a flaming furrow through the sky like a star."[5]
The tragedy Rhesus, no longer attributed to Euripides, makes Adrasteia the daughter of Zeus, rather than his nurse.[6]
At Cirrha, the port that served Delphi, Pausanias noted "a temple of Apollo, Artemis and Leto, with very large images of Attic workmanship. Adrasteia has been set up by the Cirrhaeans in the same place, but she is not so large as the other images."[7]
Lucian of Samosata refers to Adrasteia/Nemesis in his Dialogue of the sea-gods, 9, where Poseidon remarks to a Nereid that Adrasteia is a great deal stronger than Nephele, who was unable to prevent the fall of her daughter Phrixe from the ram of the Golden Fleece.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Bibliotheke, 1.1.6.
- ^ Callimachus, Hymn to Jove, 47
- ^ As a-da-ra-te-ja her name appears in Mycenaean Pylos (Margareta Lindgren, The People of Pylos: Prosopographical and Methodological Studies in the Pylos Archives: part II [Uppsala] 1973.)
- ^ The celestial equator and the ecliptic.
- ^ The furrow is a meteor. Translation by Richard Hunter, Jason and the Golden Fleece, 1993 (Oxford:Clarendon Press), p 69.
- ^ Rhesus 342.
- ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.37.8.
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