Flora Unveiled

The “Plantheon” j 201

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judges are divided, leaving it to Athena to cast the deciding vote. Her own birth having been

cited in favor of Orestes’s acquittal, Athena’s verdict comes as no surprise:

It is my task to render final judgment here.

This is a ballot for Orestes I shall cast.

There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,

and, but for marriage, I am always for the male

with all my heart, and strongly on my father’s side.^37

And so it was that Athena, the male- identified Goddess of Justice, was entrusted with

the vindication of Orestes. But the Furies, who represent an even more ancient tradition, do

not accept defeat gracefully. In their rage at the “younger gods,” they hurl deadly threats of

pestilence and agricultural disasters:

Gods, of the younger generation, you have ridden down

the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my hands.

I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger

shall let loose on the land

the vindictive poison

dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground;

this from itself shall breed

cancer, the leafless, the barren

to strike, for the right, their low lands

and drag its smear of moral infection on the ground.^38

Mindful of their power to inflict disaster, Athena offers the Furies a sacred dwelling

where they will be worshipped as guardians of the law, and, with their acquiescence, the

Furies become the Eumenides (“gracious ones”), and the reign of the old female- centered

religion based on nature and agriculture is symbolically ended, thanks to the happy congru-

ence of religion and pseudoscience.

Hermaphrodism and the Goddess Hermaphrodite

Most flowering plants are hermaphroditic, a concept never explicitly applied to plants by

the Greeks. This raises the question of whether or not Greeks were aware of hermaphrodism

in nature, and, if so, what they thought of it.

One of the earliest references to hermaphroditic beings occurs in the poem On Nature writ-

ten by the pre- Socratic philosopher Empedocles. According to Empedocles, humans were first

generated in a sexually undifferentiated state, having neither male nor female qualities:

First there came up from the earth whole- natured outlines

Having a share of both water and heat;

Fire sent them up, wanting to reach its like,

And they did not yet show any lovely frame of limbs,

Nor voice nor again organ specific to men.^39