Arcadia

Arcadia is the mountainous region at the centre of the Peloponnese. In myth it is the homeland of the god Pan, the birthplace of Hermes on Mount Cyllene, and the kingdom of Lycaon and his descendants. Its early kings, the Arcadian myths of Zeus, and its many springs and flocks made it one of the most storied landscapes of Greece.

The Land of Pan and Hermes

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes opens by addressing the god as “lord of Cyllene and Arcadia rich in flocks”, and Mount Cyllene is the place where Hermes was born to Zeus and the nymph Maia. The Homeric Hymn to Pan describes the same landscape as a land “of many springs and mother of flocks”. There Hermes, tending sheep for a mortal master, married the daughter of Dryops, who bore him Pan, a child with goat’s feet and two horns; Hermes carried him to Olympus, where he delighted all the gods, and so he was called Pan (Homeric Hymn 19). Pausanias (8.36.8) calls Mount Maenalus especially sacred to Pan, and says those who live around it claim to hear him playing his pipes.

Pan’s mother is named differently in different sources. The Homeric Hymn makes her a daughter of Dryops; Apollodorus (1.4.1) mentions a Pan who was a son of Zeus and Hybris (or Thymbris), from whom Apollo learned prophecy; and Herodotus (2.145) reports that the Greeks made Hermes and Penelope the parents of Pan. Around him in the hills lived the nymphs and the other rustic spirits of the region. The Arcadians also claimed Zeus himself for their mountains: Pausanias (8.38.2) says they held that he was reared on Mount Lycaeus, at a place called Cretea.

The First Kings

Pausanias begins his book on Arcadia with Pelasgus, whom he calls the first inhabitant of the land (8.1.4). Pelasgus is said to have taught people to build huts, to wear sheepskins and to eat acorns, and Pausanias recalls an oracle that described the Arcadians as acorn-eaters (8.1.5–6). His son Lycaon founded the city of Lycosura on Mount Lycaeus and began the Lycaean games (8.2.1–2).

Lycaon

Lycaon became the subject of one of the best-known Arcadian stories. According to Pausanias (8.2.3), he brought a human child to the altar of Lycaean Zeus and sacrificed it, and was turned into a wolf. Apollodorus (3.8.1) gives a longer version: Lycaon had fifty sons by many wives, and when Zeus came among them in disguise they served him a human sacrifice. Zeus overturned the table in disgust, at the place afterwards called Trapezus, and destroyed Lycaon and his sons with thunderbolts, sparing only the youngest, Nyctimus, because Gaea caught hold of his hand. In the version the Catasterisms attribute to Hesiod, and in Hyginus, the child served up was Lycaon’s own grandson Arcas, Callisto’s son, whom Zeus put together again and later set among the stars (Hesiod fr. 3; Hyginus, Astronomica 2.4).

Callisto and Arcas

Callisto, a daughter of Lycaon according to Eumelus and Pausanias, though Apollodorus says Hesiod called her a nymph (Apollodorus 3.8.2; Pausanias 8.3.6; the Catasterisms, on the contrary, cite Hesiod for the Lycaon parentage, fr. 3), was a companion of Artemis in the hunt who had chosen to remain a maiden. Zeus fell in love with her and she bore him a son, Arcas. In Apollodorus (3.8.2) Zeus himself changes her into a bear; in Pausanias (8.3.6) it is Hera who turns her into a bear, and Artemis shoots the animal to please Hera. In both accounts Zeus sends Hermes to save the child, and Callisto becomes the constellation of the Bear. In the Hesiodic version it is Artemis who turns her into a bear when she sees her pregnant at the bath, and the bear, captured by goatherds and brought to Lycaon, is later chased by her own son into the forbidden precinct of Zeus Lycaeus, where Zeus saves them both by placing them among the stars as the Bear and the Bear-warden (Hesiod fr. 3; Hyginus, Astronomica 2.1, 2.4). Ovid tells it in the Fasti (2.153–192): Callisto swore maidenhood on Artemis’ bow, was dismissed from her band when her pregnancy showed, was turned into a bear by Hera, and fifteen years later was nearly speared by Arcas before both were taken up to the sky; Hera then asked Tethys never to let the Bear bathe in the ocean, which is why it never sets.

When Nyctimus died, Arcas took the throne. Pausanias says that he taught his people to cultivate crops, bake bread and weave, and that the land was then called Arcadia after him (8.4.1).

Atalanta

Atalanta (Atlanta), the huntress who took part in the hunt of the Calydonian Boar, belongs to Arcadian tradition. Apollodorus (3.9.2) says her father, Iasus, exposed her at birth because he wanted sons; a she-bear suckled her, hunters raised her, and she grew up as a virgin huntress who shot the centaurs Rhoecus and Hylaeus when they tried to force her. In the hunt at Calydon she was the first to wound the boar, shooting it in the back with an arrow, although it was Meleager who killed the animal (Apollodorus 1.8.2). Later she made her suitors race against her, and lost only to Melanion, who dropped golden apples from Aphrodite to slow her down.

Apollodorus notes that Hesiod and others made her a daughter of Schoeneus, and that Euripides called her a daughter of Maenalus and her husband Hippomenes rather than Melanion; by Melanion, or by Ares, she had a son Parthenopaeus, one of the Seven Against Thebes (3.9.2). Apollodorus lists her among the hunters at Calydon as coming from Arcadia (1.8.2).

Arcadia in Greek Myth

Arcadia is thus a country of animals, hunters and herdsmen, ruled by kings who stand close to the gods. Its sacred mountains, Lycaeus, Maenalus and Cyllene, were the settings for the stories of Zeus, Pan and Hermes. Roman poets later made it the home of song and simple shepherd life: Virgil has his lovesick Gallus ask the Arcadians, who “alone have skill to sing”, to sing of his woes on their mountains (Eclogues 10.31–34), and the pastoral Arcadia of later literature grows from that image.

See Also: Pan, Hermes, Zeus, Lycaon, Callisto, Artemis, Calydonian Boar, Meleager