Epitome 11. Crab
IT would seem that it was placed among the stars by Hera, because when Heracles was trying to kill the hydra* with the assistance of the others, it jumped out of the lake and bit him on the foot, as Panyasis recounts in his Heracleia.* They say that Heracles in a fury crushed it with his foot, and that the crab attained the great honour as a consequence of being numbered among the twelve signs of the zodiac.
Some of the stars in this constellation, known as the Asses, were raised up to the stars by Dionysos. They are marked out by a distinguishing sign, the Manger,* and the following tale is told about them. When the gods were setting out to make war against the Giants, it is said that Dionysos, Hephaistos, and the Satyrs rode out on asses; and when the Giants had not yet caught sight of them, but they were not far away, the asses began to bray, and on hearing that noise, the Giants took fright. For that reason, the asses were granted the honour of being set on the Crab, on the west side of it.
Hyginus
The Constellation
Crab. Divided through the middle by the summer circle, it looks toward the Lion and the east. It is located a short way above the head of the Water-snake, and it rises and sets with the hind part of its body coming first. It has on its shell the two stars called the Asses, which we have already discussed.
It has one faint star on each right foot, two on its left back foot, two faint stars on the second, two on the third, one faint one on the front of the fourth, one on its mouth, three similar stars of no great size on what is known as its right claw, and two similar stars on its left claw. That makes seventeen stars in all.
The Mythology
It is said to have been placed among the constellations by favour of Hera, because while Heracles was confronting the Lernaian hydra, it came out of the marsh to seize him by the foot and bite him; so Heracles was moved to anger and killed it. Hera placed it among the constellations, however, to become one of the twelve signs that the sun passes through principally on its circuit.
In a certain part of this figure, there are the stars known as the Asses, which have been depicted by Dionysos on the shell of the Crab in the form of two stars in all. For Dionysos, after he was sent mad by Hera, is said to have fled through Thesprotia* in a state of frenzy, with the intention of reaching the oracle of Zeus at Dodona* to ask how he might recover his normal state of mind. On arriving at a huge swamp which he was unable to cross over, he encountered two asses, and catching one of them, he managed to get across without getting wet in the slightest degree. And so, when he reached the temple of Dodonian Zeus, he was immediately delivered from his madness, so the story goes, and expressed his gratitude to the asses by placing them among the stars. According to some accounts, he granted a human voice to the ass that had carried him, and it later entered into a contest with Priapos with regard to the size of its sexual organ, and was defeated and killed by him. Taking pity on it for this, Dionysos placed it among the stars; and to make it known that he had done so as a god, rather than as a timorous man fleeing Hera, he placed the Ass on the Crab, which had been fixed in the heavens as a favour from that goddess.
Another tale is also recounted about the Asses. According to Eratosthenes, at the time when Zeus declared war on the Giants and summoned all the gods to attack them, Dionysos, Hephaistos, and the Satyrs and Seilenoi* arrived mounted on asses; and on finding themselves at no great distance from the enemy, the asses, so the story goes, were overcome by panic and brayed very loudly one and all, letting out such a sound as the Giants had never heard, so that the enemy all took flight in response to their braying, and were thus defeated. A similar tale is told about Triton’s horn;* for after hollowing out a seashell that he had found, so we are told, he brought it with him when he came to fight the Giants, and made a noise with the shell such as had never been heard before. Fearing that this was the bellowing of some monstrous beast which had been brought against them by their adversaries, the enemy took flight, and they were thus defeated and fell into the power of their opponents.
Commentary
The Crab
The only crab to appear in Greek myth is that which harassed Heracles while he was confronting the hydra of Lerna (Ap. 2.5.2; a very ancient story, appearing in images by about 700 BC). It was said to have been reared as an adversary for Heracles by Hera (Hes. Theog. 313–15), who resented him as an illegitimate son of Zeus; and she accordingly could be thought to have placed it among the stars. Its intervention justified Heracles in seeking the help of his half-brother Iolaos in his battle against the many-headed hydra, although the narrative in the Epitome seems to imply that he was already receiving help from other people when it appeared (the plural is surprising: the author was perhaps alluding to the presence of Athena as a supporter of Heracles, even if she did not intervene directly).
The Asses
(i) It might seem difficult to explain how these unassuming and even rather comical creatures could have been judged worthy of a place in the heavens. As in the case of Capricorn (see p. 79), a none too serious myth was developed by invoking the notion of panic fear, in which it was claimed that the gods’ victory in their battle against the Giants (Ap. 1.6.1–2) could be ascribed to panic induced by the braying of donkeys, after Dionysos and his retinue, and the lame Hephaistos, had ridden out to battle on them. In vase-paintings from the Classical period, Satyrs, and indeed Maenads, can sometimes be seen confronting the Giants from a safe distance, and the theme doubtless appealed to authors of Satyr plays; but this contribution from the asses may well have been invented by Eratosthenes for his specific purposes.
(ii) The other story, in which an ass comes to the assistance of Dionysos, is attributed to the Alexandrian tragic poet Philiscos (schol. Germ.), and it was presumably derived from a Satyr play. It need not be assumed that asses were said to have been transferred to the stars in his version, and the story is indeed poorly suited for that purpose, because there are two Asses in the sky and only one ass plays any active part in assisting Dionysos to reach his destination. To develop the astral myth, it had to be suggested that the one that carried Dionysos had a companion when he met it, and he thus placed the two of them in the sky.
In Hyginus’s account of the second version, in which the catasterism takes place after the ass has entered into a contest with Priapos, no explanation is offered at all for why there is a second Ass in the sky; but it is stated in the Germanicus scholia that Priapos wanted to kill the ass after the contest, but Dionysos snatched it to safety, substituting another, and then placed both of them in the sky. So the double catasterism was contrived in a no less clumsy fashion than in the other version. Priapos was an ithyphallic fertility god whose cult had originated at Lampsacos; asses, which were regarded as exceptionally lustful creatures, were sacrificed to him in connection with his cult there. The tale of the contest is a parody of the kind of myth in which mortals enter into contests with deities, for instance with regard to musical skill, and come to a bad end when they try to demonstrate their skill; here the contestants have to demonstrate the relative size of their erections.