Epitome 19. Ram
THIS is the ram that carried away Phrixos and Helle; it was immortal and was given to them by their mother Nephele.* As Hesiod and Pherecydes report,* it had golden fleece. As it was carrying the children over the narrowest strait of the sea, which came to be called the Hellespont after Helle, it let her fall off, but Poseidon came to her rescue, and slept with her, fathering a son by her, Paion* by name. As for Phrixos, the ram carried him safely to the Black Sea, to the land of Aietes.* Removing its golden fleece, the ram gave it to Aietes as a memento, and then ascended to the stars; for that reason, this constellation looks somewhat faint.
Hyginus
The Constellation
The Ram stands on the equator* with its head turned toward the east. It sets feet-first, and rises with its head under the Triangle, as mentioned above. Its feet are almost in contact with the head of the Sea-monster. It has one star on its head, three on its horns, two on its neck, and one on its front foot, four between its shoulder-blades, one on its tail, three under its belly, one on its side, and one on its hind foot. That makes seventeen stars in all.
The Mythology
This is thought to be the ram that carried Phrixos and Helle across the Hellespont. According to Hesiod and Pherecydes, it had a golden fleece; we will speak about that at greater length elsewhere. Helle fell into the Hellespont, was raped by Poseidon, and gave birth to a child who is usually named as Paion, or sometimes as Edonos. Phrixos for his part arrived safely in the land of Aietes, where he sacrificed the ram to Zeus and hung its fleece in the temple; the image of the ram, placed among the constellations by Nephele, marks the time of year when grain is sown, that grain which Ino had previously sown when parched dry, which had been the main cause of the flight [of Phrixos and Helle]. According to Eratosthenes, the ram itself removed its golden fleece and gave it to Phrixos as a memento, and then made its way up to the sky of its own accord; and that is why the constellation, as was remarked above, looks somewhat faint.
According to some accounts, Phrixos was born in the town of Orchomenos in Boeotia; or according to others, he entered the world in the land of the Salonians in Thessaly. Others say that Cretheus and Athamas were sons of Aiolos, along with many others; and some even say that Salmoneus was a son of Athamas and grandson of Aiolos. Cretheus married Demodike,* or in other accounts, Biadike. Seduced by the physical attractions of Phrixos, son of Athamas, she fell in love with him, but could not induce him to respond to her advances; and so, under force of necessity, she made allegations against him to Cretheus, claiming that he had tried to rape her, and making other such charges of the kind that women are accustomed to make. Cretheus was greatly upset by this, as befitted a loving husband and a king, and persuaded Athamas to inflict due punishment on him. But Nephele intervened by snatching away Phrixos and his sister Helle, and placing them on a ram, ordering that they should flee as far as possible across the Hellespont. Helle fell off and paid her debt there to nature, with the result that the Hellespont came to be named after her. Phrixos made his way to Colchis, where, as has already been mentioned, he sacrificed the ram and hung its fleece in a temple. Hermes brought him back to Athamas to convince his father that he had taken flight trusting in his own innocence.
Hermippos recounts, however, that Dionysos, at the time when he was attacking Libya, arrived with his army at a place which is called Ammodes* because there is so much sand there. He thus fell into very grave danger, because he could see that he would have to continue on his way and he was running extremely short of water; as a consequence, the army was falling into a desperate state. As they were considering what they should do, a ram happened to appear in front, roaming around on its own; and at the sight of them, it sought refuge in flight. But the soldiers had noticed it, and even though their progress was made difficult by the dust and heat, they set off in pursuit of the ram, as if trying to snatch booty from the flames, and followed it to the place which would be named after Zeus Ammon after his temple was erected there. When they arrived there, they could find no sign of the ram that they had been following, but they did find what was more to their desire, a plenteous supply of water; and they recovered their strength and immediately reported the matter to Dionysos. At the news, he took his army to that spot* and raised a temple there to Zeus Ammon, with a statue adorned with ram’s horns; and he represented the ram among the constellations, placing it such that when the sun is in that sign, all growing things should acquire new vigour, as comes about in springtime, principally because the flight of the ram had given new strength to the army of Dionysos. And furthermore, he wanted to make this the first of the twelve signs because the ram had been the best of guides for his army.
But Leon,* who wrote a history of Egypt, has the following to say about this statue of Ammon. When Dionysos was ruling over Egypt and the other lands, and was said to have revealed all the arts to the human race, a certain Ammon arrived from Africa and brought him a large flock of sheep, so as to win his favour the more easily and gain a reputation as an inventor. And so Dionysos rewarded him, so it is thought, by granting him a stretch of land lying opposite Egyptian Thebes; and those who make statues of Ammon portray him with a horned head to recall to human memory that he first showed people how to keep sheep. But those who have wished to credit that deed to Dionysos, as something that he did of his own accord without asking it of Ammon, have made horned images of Dionysos, saying that the ram was placed among the constellations in memory of him.*
Commentary
(i) This was usually identified as the famous golden-fleeced ram that carried Phrixos to Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea; the story is recounted at some length by Hyginus (cf. Ap. 1.9.1). Its fleece was hung up in a grove or temple at Colchis, and the fetching of it would provide the motive for the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. Although some scholars have tried to reinterpret the relevant passage in the Epitome, it seems that Eratosthenes said that the ram stripped itself of its glittering fleece before flying up to the heavens, so providing an explanation for the faintness of the constellation. A conceit of that kind does not seem out of place in this playful genre of myth, and the ram itself was a semi-divine creature that might be thought capable of such an action. In this version there is thus no need for a god to intervene to place the ram in the sky, but Hyginus also cites another in which it was placed there by Nephele (Cloud), the mother of Phrixos, who would have been regarded as a minor goddess. The latter version was introduced to explain why this sign of the zodiac marks the coming of spring, when grain is sown, since its presence could be said to commemorate Ino’s parching of the grain, through which she had plotted to cause the death of Nephele’s son (see note to p. 94).
(ii) The Egyptian god Amun, who had an important oracle and cult at the oasis of Siwa, was honoured by the Greeks as Zeus Ammon, who was generally portrayed as having ram’s horns. In accordance with a common motif in foundation myths, a tale of an animal guide was developed to explain the origin of the god’s cult at Siwa and of his horned image. Dionysos represented this guide among the stars as the first and leading sign of the zodiac, and as a spring sign, because the story associated the ram with the bringing of refreshment, in so far as it had guided Dionysos and his army to the oasis; or else Dionysos asked Zeus to place it in the heavens (Hyginus, Mythical Tales 33, and various Latin scholia). Servius (on Aen. 4.196) records a somewhat different version in which Dionysos prayed to his father Zeus for help in the desert, prompting him to send the ram, and the ram first created the spring at Siwa with a stamp of its hoof (just as Pegasos was said to have created Hippocrene: see p. 50).