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subsequent birds, none of which as Ëggeloj told anything to questing
Demeter (ll. 44—45). He believes these plants and animals to
be representatives of “nature", a third realm besides those of “gods"
and “men" mentioned just before them. 10 We, however, we may
find the association of goddess, olive-trees, and messenger bird suggestive
of something else, or rather someone else: Athena. Moreover,
Demeter's daughter Persephone is proprietor of another species
of tree, the aÄgeiroj (“black poplar"), which makes up her barren
grove at Od. 9.509—510, with Athena. Athena has a grove of
them on Scheria (6.291—292), like her they are associated with
fresh-water springs (9.141 and 17.204—211), and the flickering movement
of weavers' shuttles under that goddess' guidance is compared
to “her" fluttering poplar leaves (7.105—111). 11
The Odyssey-poet, doubtless like some local or regional tradition
behind him, and like the Athenians whom we know from later
times, makes Athena insistently the “owner", as it were, of everything
olive, against alternative belief systems such as what Hymn
No. 2 suggests, and connects her repeatedly with sign-giving birds
(1.320, 3.372, and 22.239—240). Only once in the Iliad, together
with hawkish Apollo, does she take an avian form — and there
directly from their divine form, invisibly to mortals and therefore
neither signs nor messengers (7.58—61). 12 This shows the cultural
specificity of the Odyssey. 13 That epic, like Athenian vase painting
of the following century or two, and even more than the Iliad, amplifies
the role of “Her of Athens" from a time before the eventual
conciliation and coordination of Eleusinian and Athenian cults was
established, giving all three deities, “the two goddesses" and “the
goddess", complementary places in the post-synoecism Attic pantheon
and state worship.
Two other Hymns, though not addressed to Demeter under that
name, are related to her universal as distinct from her local functions.
Brief No. 14 in its central three verses associates the Mother
of Gods with noisy, recognizably Dionysian rites (l. 3: the øax0 of
drums and castanets), with dangerous animals (l. 4: the klagg0 of
wolves and lions), and with resounding mountains (l. 5). This appears
to be a particular development of the same original fertility
goddess who was elsewhere identifies with goddesses as diverse in
the end as Artemi and Aphrodite. One variant was Semele, a divine
female demoted to mortal princess in the mainstream myth of Dionysus:
she and Demeter are parallel, both alike being mothers of
dying divinities, different though they are in experience/non-experience
of death themselves. 14 There is a deep structural correspondence
here to the story of Odysseus and his late mother Anticleia.
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