this picture reappears in the tragedians. In a famous fragment from Aeschy-
lus’Danaids (44) Aphrodite describes how, under her influence, Ouranos
and Chthon/Gaia are seized by mutual desire for sexual intercourse; the rain
falls, Earth conceives, and brings forth pasture, cereal crops, and foliage. The
passage is echoed more than once by Euripides (frs. 839, 898, 941). But in
fr. 839 he replaces Ouranos by ∆ι: Α!θ ρ, Zeus’ Air, whom he then calls
‘progenitor of men and gods’, giving Zeus’ title back to the Sky-god; and in
fr. 941 the speaker instructs that the boundless α!θ ρ that holds earth in its
moist embrace is actually identical with Zeus.
If Zeus is not Gaia’s standard consort, he is Demeter’s and Semele’s. We
have seen that both of these are likely to have been in origin manifestations
of the Indo-European Mother Earth, adopted by the Greeks from neigh-
bour peoples. Demeter in union with Zeus gives birth to Persephone, who is
intimately associated with the growth of crops. Semele has a more electrifying
encounter with the Sky-god: she is struck by lightning. Her child, Dionysus,
is again a deity much involved with fertility and growth.
Pherecydes of Syros in his idiosyncratic, half-mythical, half-philosophical
cosmogony described a wedding between two primal deities, Zas and
Chthonie. Chthonie changed her name to Ge when Zas married her and
clothed her in a robe embroidered with a map of the world. ‘Zas’ seems to
be a conflation of Zeus and the Anatolian weather-god Santa or Sandon.
Pherecydes had a father with the Anatolian name of Babys, and he may
perhaps have drawn on Anatolian as well as Greek myth for his inspiration.
The Scythians, according to Herodotus (4. 59), considered Earth to be the
wife of Zeus. Their name for Zeus was Papaios, meaning perhaps ‘Father’ (see
above), and for Earth Apia (variant reading: Api). It would be nice if this
meant ‘Mother’, but we have no ground for thinking so. We can only guess
at its etymology. One possibility may be ‘Kindly One’, a cognate of Vedic a ̄pí-
‘friend’ and Greek @πιο‘gentle, kindly’.
The formal parallelism between the names of the Illyrian Deipaturos and
the Messapic (Illyrian) Damatura may favour their having been a pair, but
evidence of the liaison is lacking.^62
Tellus Mater is invoked together with Jupiter in a consecration-prayer
recorded by Macrobius (3. 9. 11), and for literary purposes by Varro (De
re rustica 1. 1. 5):
Primum (inuocabo), qui omnis fructos agri culturae caelo et terra continent, Iouem
et Tellurem: itaque, quod ii parentes magni dicuntur, Iuppiter pater appellatur, Tellus
{terra} mater.
(^62) Cf. C. de Simone, JIES 4 (1976), 361–6.
182 4. Sky and Earth