Epitome 21. Fishes
THESE are the offspring of the large Fish,* whose story we will recount in detail when we get to it. Each lies apart from the other in a different part of the sky, one being known as the Northern Fish and the other as the Southern. They are joined together by a knot which stretches toward the front foot of the Ram.
Hyginus
The Constellation
One of these is called the southern and the other the northern, because only one of them, the northern, is situated between the equator and the summer tropic, under the arm of Andromeda looking toward the arctic pole, while the other is situated on the edge of the zodiac under the shoulder-blades of the Horse, not far from the equator and looking toward the west. These Fishes are linked together by a series of stars resembling a ribbon, running from the front foot of the Ram. The lower of the two Fishes can be seen to set and rise first. That Fish has seventeen stars, while the northern one has twelve in all.
The connection between them has three stars running north, three on the other side, three toward the east, and three on the knot, making twelve in all. The point where they run together, which can be seen by the front foot of the Ram, is called by Aratus in Greek the syndesmos hypouranios, or by Cicero the celestial knot: both want to indicate that it is not only that of the Fishes, but also that of the entire sphere. For at the place in question at the foot of the Ram, the circle of the meridian which indicates the middle of the day, is located just where the meridian joins and cuts across the equator, and at that very point, at the intersection of the two circles, the knot of the Fishes is to be found. And so this can rightly be called not only the knot of the Fishes, but also the celestial knot.
The Mythology
According to Diognetos of Erythraia, Aphrodite once visited Syria with her son Eros and arrived beside the river Euphrates. All of a sudden, Typhon, whom we mentioned above,* appeared at that very place; Aphrodite hurled herself into the river along with her son, and there they turned themselves into fishes, and so delivered themselves from danger. As a consequence the Syrians who live in the neighbouring regions abstained thereafter from eating fishes, being afraid to catch them lest, in similar circumstances, they might seem to be breaching the refuges of the gods, or might capture them in person. According to Eratosthenes, these fishes are offspring of the fish that we will talk about later.
Commentary
(i) Since fishes played almost no part at all in Greek myth and cult, it was necessary to look to the East to find an explanation for the two constellations in which they appear. It was known that the mother goddess Derceto, known to the Greeks as the Syrian goddess, had pools containing sacred fish near her temple at Bambyke (Hierapolis), and that the local people honoured cultic images of fishes, and abstained from eating them. Indeed, the goddess was sometimes portrayed as half-piscine in form. All the myths offered for these Fishes and the Southern Fish relate to that goddess (who was known under different names in different parts of the Near East).
We will start with the joint myth that Eratosthenes provided to explain the origin of all three Fishes, as recounted in connection with the Southern Fish. When Derceto fell into the lake mentioned above, she was rescued by a fish, which was placed in the heavens as a consequence as the Southern Fish, along with these two others which were its offspring. The story (i.e. the basic story without the catasterism) is ascribed to Ctesias, a physician of the fifth century who wrote books about India and Persia, but Eratosthenes may have altered it quite drastically; it has been plausibly argued that a very different narrative recorded by Diodorus (3.4.2–6), in which Derceto throws herself into the lake and is turned into a fish, may hold more closely to Ctesias’s account.
(ii) According to a well-known myth that was also adapted to explain the origin of Capricorn (see p. 80), the gods transformed themselves into different beasts to escape from the monstrous Typhon. While the standard myth is set in Egypt and involves all the main gods, Hyginus recounts a tale in connection with the Fishes in which Typhon appears to Aphrodite and Eros while they are beside the Euphrates, and they jump into the river and turn themselves into fishes, hence the origin of the local taboos with regard to fishes, and evidently of the present constellation also, although we are not told how the images of the fishes came to be placed in the sky. Aphrodite is appointed to be the heroine of the tale because she could be identified with the Syrian goddess, and her son Eros is included in the story too because there are two Fishes in the constellation. Ovid (Fasti 2.451 ff.) offers a hybrid version in which they jump into the river and are rescued by fishes, much as Derceto is said to have been rescued in the preceding tale.
(iii) A further tale, derived from Nigidius, is recorded in the Germanicus scholia. Two fishes discovered an egg of enormous size in the Euphrates and rolled it ashore, where it was brooded by doves until the Syrian goddess hatched out a few days later; at her request, Zeus rewarded the fishes by placing them in the heavens. Doves were also associated with the cult of the Syrian goddess, and they play an important role in the myth recounted about her by Diodorus.