Hecate, Goddess of Night & the Crossroads | The ENTIRE Story for Sleep

Chapter 1: Barley Cakes on the Aegina Quay ▶ 00:00

# Hecate, Goddess of Night & the Crossroads | The ENTIRE Story for Sleep

## 1. Barley Cakes on the Aegina Quay

Welcome to Old Gods Sleep Stories. Long ago, before the stars had names, the old gods walked the world. Settle in, and let their stories carry you to sleep.

On the island of Aegina, in a low stone house a few steps from the harbour, an old fisherman named Dion is folding a fig leaf around a barley cake still warm from his hearth. Honey has soaked into the crust and browned it at the edges. When he presses the corners of the broad, soft leaf down, it gives off a green, milky smell, and the whole room smells of the last evening of summer.

Tonight we follow Hecate, goddess of night and of the places where roads meet, through the whole of her long story, told slowly and told complete. We begin with her birth among the Titans, as Hesiod tells it in the Theogony, in Hugh Evelyn-White's English translation. We end with her last and quietest forms: the Saviour of the philosophers, and a key carried each year down a white road in procession at Lagina. Nothing will be left hanging, so you may close your eyes whenever you like. If these old nights keep you good company, you are welcome to return to them.

Dion's nephew Nikias sits on the bench by the open door and watches him work. He has been turning a question over since noon, smoothing it in his thoughts as a man smooths a pebble in his pocket, and now he lets it out.

[HERO] Uncle, the little shrine at the crossroads above the harbour has three faces. The old image in Hecate's temple here has only one. Why does she need three up there?

Dion tucks the last corner of leaf under the cake before he answers. He does not hurry. He never has. His words come as the tide comes up the shingle, a little at a time, and always arriving.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] That has a good answer, and a long one. Long enough to fill a hill road, and we have a hill road tonight.

Dion, his household and their supper walk are the storyteller's frame for the night, not ancient record. But the traveller Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, does record that the people of Aegina honoured Hecate above all the gods and held mysteries for her every year. He also wrote down what the islanders told him about where those mysteries came from. Dion has heard that story all his life, and he hands it to his nephew carefully, an heirloom that has been in the family longer than the house.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Our grandfathers said Orpheus himself crossed from Thrace to teach us her rites. A singer, mind you, not a fisherman. The island forgave him that.

Outside the door the evening is very still. The western sky over the water has turned the colour of an old copper pan, and the harbour gives that colour back without a ripple to break it. Eleven fishing boats lie drawn up on the shingle in an uneven row. Their hulls are dark, their oars are stowed, and their nets are folded over the thwarts to dry. No wind comes off the sea. A thread of smoke rises from a chimney three houses down and does not lean at all.

Nikias has been home four days and four nights. For nine years he worked the merchant ships, carrying jars of oil and bolts of cloth between harbours he can now hardly tell apart, and in that time his black curls have been bleached rusty by the sun. He still wears a sailor's linen tunic. Several times a day he catches himself listening for a creak of rigging that is not there. The house is smaller than he remembered and the bench is lower, but the smell of the hearth has not changed at all. A man can sail the whole sea, he is learning, and come home to find his childhood still hanging on its peg by the door, exactly where he left it.

Beside the bench lies Dion's dog, Melas. He is thirteen years old and as black as his name, which simply means black, except for his muzzle, which the years have frosted grey. He is slow on the hills now and sleeps a great deal. Since the barley cake came out of the ashes, though, he has not slept at all. His nose is lifted toward the table, and his eyes follow every turn of Dion's hands.

Nikias reaches down to rub the old dog behind one ear. He speaks to his uncle without looking up.

[HERO] He remembers me from before I sailed. But I think he remembers the honey better.

Dion answers him with the corner of a smile.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] He has loved honey more faithfully than any priest ever loved a goddess. Thirteen years, and he has never once missed a festival.

Dion breaks a crumb from the corner of the cake, where the fig leaf did not quite cover it, and holds it down low. Melas takes it with the soft, slow mouth of a dog who knows exactly how small a gift can be, and how much it is worth. Then he licks his whiskers, folds himself back down onto the cool floor, and lets out a long sigh of contentment.

Tonight is the last evening of the lunar month. The old moon has thinned away to nothing over the past few nights, and tonight no moon will rise at all. In many Greek towns a day like this belonged to two months at once. The Athenians called it hene kai nea, the old and the new, because the old month ended and the new one began inside the same quiet day. It was a hinge in the calendar, and on that hinge many households carried a supper to Hecate at the place where three roads meet.

Dion has kept that supper every month for as long as Nikias can remember. His father kept it before him, and his father's mother before that. Dion does not make much of it. He bakes the cake, gathers what else the house can spare, and walks up the hill after dark. He sets the food at the foot of the three-faced shrine, sits a while, and walks home again.

Nikias watches him set three brown eggs in a row on the table, and asks the plainest question of all.

[HERO] And who eats it, in the end?

Dion lifts one shoulder, as he does when the weather is none of his business.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] The goddess, the old people say. Some months a fox comes after her. And if I am slow on the way home, perhaps a certain black dog.

Melas does not lift his head, but one ear turns toward the table, quietly, like a door left open a crack to hear the rain.

At the hearth the fire that baked the cake has burned down to a low bed of orange coals, and the air above them trembles faintly. Dion takes the iron rake from its hook and draws the coals together into a mound at the back. Then, with the flat of the rake, he lays ash over them until only a faint glow shows through the grey in one or two places. It is the oldest kind of housekeeping in the world. A banked fire is a promise made to the morning. It keeps its heat all night, and at first light a breath and a handful of twigs will wake it again. Nikias has seen his uncle do this ten thousand times. Tonight he finds himself watching as closely as though he had never seen it at all.

On the shelf by the door sits the clay lamp, a plain round thing with a short spout and a handle shaped into a little loop. It is already lit. Dion lit it when the sun touched the water, and its small flame has been waiting in the doorway ever since, a yellow point against the copper sky. He lifts it carefully and tips a slow stream of olive oil into it from the jar on the floor, until the oil shines right up to the rim. The flame bows once, as if in thanks, and stands straight again, small and gold and patient.

The basket comes last. It is woven of split reed, darkened by years of hands, and its lid fits snugly. Into it Dion lays the barley cake in its fig leaf, then two of the eggs, each nested in a twist of straw. Next comes a round cheese wrapped in a cloth, pale and firm, made from the milk of a neighbour's goats. Last of all he adds a little clay flask of oil, its mouth closed with a plug of wax and tied with a cord, so that not a drop will spill on the climb. As he pulls the cord tight, the lamplight falls on his left hand, and Nikias sees the healed net-cut there, a thin pale line across the brown skin, older than Nikias himself.

The third egg does not go into the basket. It never has. Dion carries it out through the door, and Nikias follows him onto the step. In the outside wall, just beside the doorpost and about as high as a man's knee, there is a niche no bigger than a loaf, its edges rounded by years of rain and salt wind. In it stands a little clay Hecate, rough as bread dough and dark with age. She has one face, like the old image in the temple, and she faces the lane, so that anyone coming down from the hill or up from the boats must pass beneath her gaze. At her feet is a shallow dish for offerings, worn smooth inside. Dion bends, slowly, and sets the brown egg in the dish. It rocks once and settles.

Dion explains it to his nephew in the fewest words he can find.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Two go up to the lady of the roads. One stays with the lady of the door. Somebody has to keep the house while we are out.

Nikias looks from the little goddess to the dark lane and back, and asks it softly, as if not to wake her.

[HERO] And the crossroads? What does she keep there?

Dion straightens and looks up the hill, where the path is already losing its colour.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] A crossroads is only a place where a man must choose. She stands there so that nobody has to choose alone.

They go back inside. Dion closes the basket and sets it by the door, beside the lamp, and straightens his back with a soft grunt. He pulls his cloak of undyed wool around his shoulders. The cloak is the colour of oatmeal and smells faintly of the sea.

Nikias rises from the bench. Melas rises too, a little after him, in the slow, careful stages of an old dog getting up, and he comes to stand by the basket. He is not looking at it, not exactly. He is only standing near it, with the deep and patient innocence of a dog who has no intention, none at all, of stealing anything.

The house is quiet now. The copper in the sky has deepened to a dull bronze, and the eleven boats on the shingle have become dark shapes without edges. The neighbour's thread of smoke still rises, fainter now, drawn gently into the evening. Indoors the lamp burns by the door, the basket waits beside it, and the bench holds the last of the day's warmth. Outside, at knee height in the wall, the clay goddess keeps her brown egg in its shallow dish and watches the empty lane.

At the back of the hearth the banked coals lie under their soft grey blanket of ash, glowing a deep, steady red in two places, warm and patient and still.

## 2. Asteria's Daughter, Below the Pistachio Terraces

Above the town the path climbs between terraces of grey stone, and the first thing the hill offers is the smell of drying pistachio husks. The terrace walls are fitted together without mortar. Each one is about as high as a man's waist and holds up a narrow shelf of red earth. The olives stand in rows on the lower shelves, every leaf silver on one side and dark green on the other. Higher up are the pistachio trees, low and spreading, their branches nearly bare now that the harvest is in. Somewhere on these terraces the husks lie drying on reed mats under the open sky. Their smell drifts across the path, faintly resinous and a little sour, like pine sap with a drop of new wine in it.

The last light is leaving the hill. The copper has gone out of the sky, and the blue that follows it deepens by the minute. In the olive trees the cicadas are stopping one at a time. First the chorus thins. Then there are three or four voices, then two, then one dry rasp from a single tree near the wall, and then that one goes quiet too. What remains is the soft scuff of sandals on limestone and a faint breeze coming up from the sea, too light to stir the leaves.

Dion walks in front with the basket of split reed on his arm and the clay lamp in his other hand. The lamp is full to the rim, and its flame rides along with him almost without bending, no taller than a fingertip and as steady as a held breath. Its light falls on the pale stone of the path in a small moving circle. Nikias comes a step behind. Melas comes last, because the path is steep and he is thirteen years old, and at each terrace step he stops to study it before he climbs.

At the first bend Dion waits for the dog to catch up. He looks out over the walls at the darkening water and begins to speak without turning his head. On a walk like this, he says, the goddess's family comes first. He learned it as a boy from a travelling singer who stood on the quay at festival time and recited Hesiod's Theogony, the long poem about where the gods came from. Dion gives the lines as he heard them, slowly, as a man counts out coins he has counted many times before.

The same lines have come down to us, and in Evelyn-White's plain English they read the way Dion says them: a short list of names, set down without hurry.

There was a Titaness called Phoebe, whose name means "bright", and she married Coeus, another of the old Titans. They had two daughters. The elder was Leto, and Hesiod speaks of her very tenderly. He calls her dark-gowned and always mild, kind to men and to the deathless gods, the gentlest in all Olympus. Long afterwards Leto would be the mother of Apollo and Artemis. The younger daughter was Asteria, whose name means "the starry one". Hesiod calls her Asteria of happy name, and he says little more about her than that.

Then comes the line Dion likes best. Perses, Hesiod says, once led Asteria to his great house to be called his dear wife. That is the whole wedding. No feast is described and no omens are sent. There is a door, a threshold, and a bride brought home. Asteria conceived, and she bore Hecate.

That is how the birth arrives in the old poem, without storm or struggle. Some gods in the Theogony are born out of great violence, from a swallowing or a wound. Hecate is not one of them. She is born the way a daughter is born in a quiet house: first a mother and a father, and then a child. Hesiod even counts her for us. Later in the poem he says she was her mother's only child, and he says it twice, as though he wanted it remembered. The goddess who would one day stand at every crossroads in Greece began as the one child at one hearth.

They start climbing again. On the next terrace a pistachio tree leans out over the wall, and a few of its last husks lie split on the path, pinkish and papery in the lamplight. Melas sniffs one, finds nothing inside, and walks on, unsurprised, like a dog who long ago stopped expecting much from husks.

Nikias asks his uncle why Hesiod bothers to say "only child". Dion takes a moment before answering. He moves the basket into the crook of his elbow. When he speaks, the old fisherman's voice is low and amused, and he talks of the family as of a neighbour's, not a goddess's.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] In a fishing family an only child belongs to everyone. Her aunts mend her clothes and the old men teach her knots. The whole quay raises her.

Nikias smiles at that, and then he asks about the other half of the house.

[HERO] And the father, Perses. Who was he?

Dion says that Hesiod tells them this as well, a little earlier in the poem. Perses was the son of the Titan Crius and of Eurybia, a daughter of the sea. One of his brothers was Astraeus, the father of the winds and of the dawn stars. Hesiod gives Perses only one short phrase, but it is a good one. He calls him eminent among all in wisdom.

Dion turns the two parents over in his mind for a few steps, and then the old fisherman gives his verdict.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] So the mother was starlight and the father was good sense. A child could be born to worse.

Nikias lets out a breath that is almost a laugh. Melas looks round at the sound, decides it is nothing to do with him, and goes back to the path.

Here Dion adds something, because he likes to be honest about the old songs. Not every poet gave Hecate the same parents. Tonight they will follow Hesiod's line through Asteria and Perses, because it is the oldest full account anyone knows. But there was a lyric poet called Bacchylides, from the island of Ceos, not far across these same waters, and the islands still pass one of his phrases from mouth to mouth. In it Hecate is the torch-bearer, the daughter of great-bosomed Night.

Dion has only ever heard the phrase spoken, never seen it written. Many centuries later a Cambridge scholar named Jebb gathered the surviving scraps of Bacchylides into English, and that line is among them, kept like a single bead from a broken necklace. Night is not her mother in Hesiod. Even so, the word stayed with her. Over the centuries more and more poets thought of her whenever they thought of the dark, and of the torches people carried through it.

There is one more branch, Dion says, a quieter and earthlier one, and he offers it only as that. A Sicilian named Diodorus wrote a great Library of History in the days of Dion's grandfather's grandfather, and he liked to tell the gods' stories as if they had been the stories of kings. In his telling there is still a father named Perses. But this Perses is a son of the Sun and a king of the Taurians, far away on the northern shore of the Black Sea, and Hecate is his daughter, a mortal princess who knows the herbs of the hills better than anyone. Diodorus himself remembered her as a harsh one, who turned that knowledge of roots towards poisons, and Dion does not pretend otherwise. The gentler picture that follows is his own.

Diodorus does not describe her house, but Dion likes to imagine it, and he says so plainly. A low kitchen in a northern palace, hung from every beam with drying roots, bundles of grey leaf and dark stem turning slowly in the warmth of the hearth. A girl moving between them with a lamp, touching each bundle and knowing its name the way a mother knows her children's breathing in the dark. The smell of it, he says, would be something like these pistachio husks, bitter and green and patient.

In that version she grows up and crosses the water to Colchis, where she marries her uncle Aeetes, the king there. And she becomes the mother of two daughters whose names everyone on these islands knows. One is Circe, who lived among her herbs on an island of her own. The other is Medea, whom the old poets also remember as Hecate's priestess, tending her mistress's fire. Diodorus was setting down what other men told him, Dion says. It is a variant, and they will set it on its own shelf, beside Hesiod's and not on top of it.

Dion shakes his head at the tangle, and the old fisherman's voice comes back into his words.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Two fathers called Perses. It is like two boats with one name in the same harbour. Sooner or later somebody's wife waves at the wrong husband.

The breeze off the sea rises a little and brings a cool breath of salt, then dies away again. The lamp flame leans after it, like a sleeper turning over, and settles.

As he walks, Nikias says the name over to himself: Hecate. He wants to know whether it means anything, as Asteria means "starry" and Phoebe means "bright".

Dion says it is often taken to mean "she who works from afar", or "the far-off one". Hekatos is an old Greek word, and the poets used it of Apollo, the god whose arrows reach a long way. Her name may be the feminine form of it, which would make her, in a way, her cousin's echo. But the men who argue over old words in the schools of Athens do not all agree, he says, and he has never needed them to. A name can lose its first meaning and still be called out, and still be answered.

Scholars in our own time have wondered whether the name is older than Greek, carried over the sea from Caria, on the coast to the east, where Hecate was honoured very early and very faithfully. That part is a guess, and it is offered as one. But the Carians certainly loved her name. One of their rulers was called Hecatomnos, and his name seems to carry hers inside it, as a seed carries the tree. His son was Mausolus, and when Mausolus died his tomb was built so tall and so fine that people still name every great tomb after him. So each time someone says the word mausoleum, a little of Hecate's country is spoken with it. We will come back to Caria later in the night, when the road leads there.

They come to a place where the terrace wall has slumped. A few stones have fallen into the path, and other walkers have pushed them to one side. Dion steps round them, holding the lamp low so Nikias can see where to put his feet. Melas climbs over the low end of the rubble, puffing a little, then sits down on the far side as though he had always meant to sit there.

They let him rest. Dion sets the basket on top of the wall and looks back down the path they have climbed, and Nikias does the same.

Below them the hill falls away in shelves of dark olive and paler pistachio, terrace under terrace, down to the roofs. The sky has gone a deep blue, almost violet in the east, and over the western sea a last line of pale gold lies along the edge of the water, thin as a thread. The town is lighting its lamps. They come on one after another in no particular order: one in a window near the harbour, another in a courtyard higher up, then three together along the street that runs down to the quay. None of them is bright. Each is a warm point of light, softened by the evening air, and now and then one wavers as someone carries it from room to room and sets it down again.

Somewhere among them is their own doorway, where the clay goddess keeps watch from her niche in the outer wall, facing the lane, and the banked coals keep the house warm for their return.

Nikias thinks of Asteria, the starry one, and of the stars that have not yet come out above them. For a moment the town below looks to him like her sky turned upside down and laid out across the hillside, every star a household, every household awake a little longer. Somewhere in that sky, he thinks, a starry mother once had one child, and the child is the one they are climbing to.

Dion says nothing, and neither does Nikias. The breeze has gone. The pistachio husks give off their faint resinous smell in the dark around them, and the full lamp burns on the wall beside the basket, its small flame calm. Melas lowers himself down and stretches out on the warm stone, his eyes half closed and one ear still turned towards the voices.

Down in the town the last lamps are lit and set in their places, and there they stay, small and red-gold and close together, like a handful of barley scattered on a dark cloth and left there to rest for the night.

## 3. The Honours Zeus Did Not Take Away

Halfway up the hill the terraces break for a shelf of level rock, and on that shelf stands the old cistern. The last of the dusk is still in the sky when they reach it. A wooden windlass stands over the mouth, grey with age and rubbed pale where a hundred years of hands have gripped it. The air is cooler up here than on the path. It smells of wet stone and of the wild fennel that grows in a feathery clump against the cistern wall. Dion leans on the handle and the rope creaks dryly round its beam. Far down in the dark the bucket knocks once against the stone, like a neighbour tapping politely at a door.

He turns the handle, and in time with the creak of the rope he begins to recite the family. Phoebe the bright and Coeus, both Titans. Their daughter Leto, and their daughter Asteria. Asteria, who went to the house of Perses and became his wife. And their child, their only one, Hecate.

Then, without a pause and in the same voice, he goes on to his own family. His grandfather Lykos, who owned the blue boat. Lykos's son, Dion's father, who painted that boat blue again every spring. Then Dion himself, then his sister, then her son Nikias, who is standing beside him now with the lamp. He says it all in one long breath while the rope creaks underneath, and it sounds no different from the first list. Gods and fishermen, one rope, one creak, one patient voice.

Dion lets the handle rest a moment, smiles at the dark, and says what his father used to say.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] My father said a man should know his people back five boats. Hesiod knew hers back to the start of the world. That is a long way to row.

Nikias smiles too and sets the lamp on the cistern's rim. The little flame hardly moves. The oil has barely gone down since they left the house.

The bucket comes up out of the dark, tarred leather sewn round a wooden hoop, dripping from every seam. Dion swings it onto the rim beside the lamp. Then he winds the rope tight on its beam, as his father taught him, so that nothing is left hanging over the water. He tips a little into a hollow in the rock for Melas, and the old dog laps at it with his eyes shut. Nikias cups his hands and drinks. The water is very cold and tastes faintly of stone. After nine years of water from ships' casks, it seems to him the best thing he has drunk in a long time, as if the hill had been keeping it for him all along, in the dark, until he came home.

Melas finishes and pushes his nose into the fennel to investigate. He sneezes once, then again, and backs out slowly with his ears flat, as though the plant had said something rude to him. Dion laughs quietly into his beard, a low, warm sound that hardly leaves his chest.

Nikias wipes his hands on his tunic and turns to his uncle with the question he has been carrying since the terraces.

[HERO] You said the Titans lost their war. What became of Hecate when Zeus was king?

Dion settles on the rim beside the bucket and says that this is the part of Hesiod he likes best. He learned it by ear, as island boys learn such things.

The poem is the Theogony. Hesiod is working his way through the long line of the gods' births. When he comes to Hecate he stops, as a traveller stops at a spring, and sings her honours, and he gives her more lines than almost any other goddess. Zeus the son of Cronos, he says, honoured her above all and gave her splendid gifts. Even in Hesiod's own day, whenever a man offered rich sacrifice and prayed for favour, he called upon Hecate. If the goddess received his prayer kindly, great honour came to him easily.

When the old order fell, many of the elder powers lost what they had held. Hesiod is careful to say that Hecate did not. Zeus did her no wrong. He took away nothing of what had been hers among the Titans. She kept her portion as it had been divided at the very beginning: a share of the earth, a share of the unfruitful sea, and honour in the starry heaven. And though she was her mother's only child, Hesiod adds, she was not honoured less for it. She was honoured all the more.

Nikias turns this over while a breath of air comes up the slope and stirs the fennel. A whole world changed hands, he says, and one goddess walked through the change with all three of her portions still in her arms, like a woman crossing a crowded market without spilling a drop. It seems an odd thing for a new king to allow.

Dion answers that Hesiod gives no reason. When the new harbour master came to Aegina, he says, the first thing he did was keep old Philon on as pilot, because Philon knew where every rock lay under the water. Perhaps it was something like that. Or perhaps it was simply kindness. Hesiod leaves it unsaid, and Dion is content to leave it there too.

He looks down at the ground under his sandals, out toward the sea, and up at the sky where the first faint star is waiting to be seen. Then he speaks, counting the words off one by one.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Earth, sea and sky. Everything we stand on, everything we sail on, everything we steer by. Zeus took the throne, but he left her a piece of every road.

After that he tells the rest of her honours in Hesiod's order. She sits beside revered kings when they give judgement. In the assembly, whoever she chooses stands out among the people. When men arm for war she stands beside whichever side she wishes, and Hesiod says no more than that. She is good to have beside horsemen, and good when men strive in the games. The winner carries home his fine prize and brings glory to his parents, and it was she who helped him.

Then Dion's voice warms, because this is the line he has been waiting for. To those whose work is on the grey, restless sea, who pray to Hecate and to the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, the glorious goddess easily gives a great catch. And she easily takes it away again, as soon as it is seen, if so she will.

He says the last of it again, slowly, tasting the salt in it.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Easily gives, and takes away as soon as it is seen. Hesiod has been out in a boat. I once watched a whole shoal of mackerel look at my hull and change their minds.

Nikias points out, gently, that his uncle still climbs this hill every month, and then he says it plainly.

[HERO] And still you take her a supper.

Dion nods, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Of course. Anyone who can take back the catch is someone I like to keep well fed.

A laugh breaks out of Nikias before he can stop it. It goes out over the dark terraces and comes back softer from the wall of the next shelf, and then the night closes gently over it, the way water closes over a dropped pebble.

Hesiod has a few honours left, and Dion gives them one at a time, without hurry. Together with Hermes the goddess makes the stock in the folds increase: the herds of cattle, the wide flocks of goats, the fleecy sheep. She makes many from few, or few from many, as she likes. And Zeus made her a nurse of the young, of all who after her opened their eyes on the light of far-seeing Dawn. So from the beginning, Hesiod says, she has been a nurse of the young, and these are her honours.

Nikias is quiet for a while after that. He is remembering the house by the harbour when he was small: his mother's loom by the door, and a high shelf with a little clay figure on it that he was told never to touch. A woman holding a torch, he thinks now, though he could not have said so then. He has not thought of that shelf in years. It comes back to him whole, all at once. A nurse of the young. Perhaps she was watching over the cradle long before he knew her name, unseen, like a lamp in the next room.

The lamp flame leans and straightens. Below them the cistern breathes up its cool mineral smell, and the fennel gives off its sweetness more strongly as the night cools it. The dusk has gone out of the sky while they talked. Night has come on around them so softly that neither of them saw it arrive.

Dion has one more story for the cistern. It is one the old people tell at festivals, about the war that came long after the Titans, when the Giants, the children of Earth, rose up against the gods of Olympus. The gods won that war. And in the telling Dion knows, Hecate was there, and a Giant named Clytius fell to her, and she fought with torches. That is all. He tells it from a long way off and leaves it there, a flare seen across the water and then gone.

The same story stands, in a single line, in the Library of Apollodorus, a careful gathering of the old tales set in order, which Frazer put into a patient, plain English. In that long list of Giants and the gods who overcame them, Apollodorus too says only this: Clytius was killed by Hecate with torches.

It is good, Dion says, to hear of the torches again, the same ones the poet Bacchylides gave her. Wherever Hecate goes in the stories, there is light in both her hands. And a goddess who carries light in both hands, he adds, has no hand left over for a sword.

Nikias lifts the lamp from the rim and holds it over the cistern's mouth. Far below, a disc of water catches the flame for a moment, a gold eye opening in the dark, and then the light slides off it. He sets the lamp back in its place beside the bucket.

They stay a while. Dion's legs have earned the rest, and he says so without complaint. He sits on the rim with his cloak drawn round him and his hands on his knees. Nikias leans against the windlass post. Beside the lamp, the basket of split reed waits with its lid closed. Melas has given up on the fennel and stretched out by the hollow where he drank, his flank rising and falling, his grey muzzle on his paws. The town is out of sight now behind the shoulder of the hill. There is no sound but the sea, so far below that it seems to be breathing in its sleep.

The bucket stands on the rim, half full, and the rope is wound tight on its beam above it. When Dion set it down, the water inside rocked from side to side and spilled a few drops over the hoop to darken the stone. Now each sway is shorter than the last, until the water only trembles at the edge, and then it does not move at all. It lies flat and dark, holding a small, steady copy of the lamp flame, and beside the flame the first faint star. It stays that way, perfectly still, in the cool night air.

## 4. Torches at the Three Roads

The herm stands no higher than Dion's knee. It is a squared pillar of grey island stone, worn soft at every edge, and the air around it smells of thyme and warm dust. At its top three small faces are carved back to back, each one turned down a different road. In the dark Nikias can only find them with his fingers: a brow, a straight nose, a mouth closed in patience, and then, around the corner, the same again, and again.

Here, on the ridge above the town, three roads meet. One comes up from the harbour, the road they climbed. One runs on along the spine of the hill toward the inland villages, and one drops away into a hollow of olives where nobody lives at all. There is no moon tonight, and there will be none. The roads show only as paler bands of dust. The sea breeze that followed them up from the harbour has climbed the last terrace with them, and it moves through the thyme along the verge so that the smell rises and drifts, sharp and green. The flat stone at the herm's foot still holds a little of the afternoon sun, a warmth you would miss unless you laid your palm on it. The cooler air is already coming down off the higher slopes and settling over it, slow and grey.

Dion sets the clay lamp at the herm's feet, in the lee of the pillar. The flame bows to the breeze, then straightens and makes a little room of light, just wide enough for the three of them. Now the faces come out of the dark one at a time, each with a touch of gold on its brow, like three watchmen who have been awake all along and only now let themselves be seen.

He kneels, which takes him a while, and lifts the split-reed lid of the basket. He lays the supper out on its fig leaves: the barley cake, still faintly warm at its heart and glossy with honey, and two brown eggs. He unwraps the cheese and sets it beside the cake. He folds the cloth into a neat square and tucks it back into the basket, because cloth is cloth and the goddess has no use for it. He turns each thing to face the herm, as if he were setting a table for a guest who is particular. Then he says, quietly, half to Nikias and half to the stone:

[OLD_FISHERMAN] She stands there so that nobody has to choose alone.

Nikias counts the eggs and remembers the third. It is not in the basket. It is at home, where Dion set it at dusk, in the niche in the outside wall beside their own door, at the feet of the little clay Hecate who faces the lane.

Dion pats the basket lid.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] She has only the one face, the one at home. So she gets the one egg. That is fair, and she has never complained.

Melas has followed every movement with his nose. He sits very straight, as old dogs do when they wish to be thought deserving. Dion looks down at him over the cake.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] The goddess gets the cake. You get the crumb the goddess will not miss.

Dion breaks off a crumb no bigger than a lentil and holds it out on his palm. Melas takes it with the soft lips of a dog who was scolded once, long ago, for teeth. He swallows it before he can taste it, and looks at the cake again.

Nikias smiles into his collar and sits down on the verge, his back to a broad boulder that still keeps the day's heat on its western face.

Dion tells him what this little pillar is. In Athens, he says, there was hardly a house without one. People kept a shrine of Hecate before their doors, a Hekataion, which only means a Hecate-place, so that whoever crossed the threshold passed under her eye, as every road passes under hers. The comic poet Aristophanes makes a joke of it in his Wasps: a household so careful that her shrines stand everywhere in front of the doors.

Nikias turns toward the supper on its leaves.

[HERO] And the supper. Did people really leave her suppers, like this one?

Dion says they did, once a month, at the dark of the moon, at the crossroads. And Aristophanes, who could never leave a thing alone, says in another play, his Wealth, that the poor of Athens knew it very well. The rich send Hecate a supper every month, one of his characters says, and the hungry snatch it away before it is even set down.

Dion rubs his knees and gives his own verdict on that.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Then she feeds the hungry after all. Only she lets them think it was their own idea.

A low, warm sound comes out of Nikias, half a laugh and half a breath, and the breeze carries it off into the olives. Melas looks from one of them to the other, and back at the cake.

Dion settles beside the lamp. They will leave Hesiod for a while, he says, and take up another song: the Hymn to Demeter. It is called Homeric, but it is not by Homer. Poets whose names are lost sang it in Homer's manner. It tells of the grain goddess and her daughter, and in the middle of it, for a little while, Hecate walks beside them.

Its old English words lie underneath ours tonight, the way an old road lies under a new one.

The Hymn begins in a meadow. Persephone, Demeter's daughter, is gathering flowers with the daughters of Ocean on the soft plain of Nysa. There are roses and crocuses and violets, irises and hyacinths, and a narcissus so lovely that the wide sky above it seemed to smile. When she reached for it, the earth opened, and the lord of the dead carried her down in his golden chariot to his house below. That is all the Hymn asks us to know of it.

She called out as she went. Here the Hymn says something Dion likes very much. No one heard her, not the gods, not mortal men, not even the olive trees heavy with fruit. Only two heard. One was Helios, the Sun, bright son of Hyperion, who sees everything from his high road. The other was Hecate, tender-hearted, with her bright headband, the daughter of Perses, who heard it from her cave.

Nikias frowns a little at that.

[HERO] A cave. I always thought of her out on the roads.

Dion nods toward the dark hollow below them.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Everyone has to sleep somewhere. Even the ones who keep the roads.

Nikias pulls his knees up and rests his chin on them.

At last the mother heard it too, the echo of the cry across the hills and the sea, and grief caught at her heart. She tore the covering from her hair, cast her dark cloak from her shoulders, and sped like a wild bird over land and water. For nine days, the Hymn says, queenly Demeter wandered the earth with flaming torches in her hands. In all that time she did not taste ambrosia or sweet nectar, and she did not bathe. She only walked, and held up the light, and looked.

Dion lets that rest a moment. The breeze drops, and the lamp flame rises straight into the quiet. Down in the hollow of olives an owl calls once, very softly, and then lets the silence have the rest of the night.

On the tenth day, as dawn came, Hecate met her. The Hymn puts a light in her hands too, so that the two of them stood face to face in the grey morning, each holding a flame. Hecate spoke first, and Dion gives her words much as the Hymn gives them, a little smoothed for the hour.

Hecate said to her gently:

[GODDESS] Queenly Demeter, bringer of the seasons, giver of good gifts, what god of heaven or what mortal has carried off Persephone and grieved your dear heart?

And then, more plainly, Hecate went on:

[GODDESS] I heard her voice, but I did not see with my eyes who took her. All I know, I tell you truly and in few words.

Nikias says the first part over under his breath, meaning to keep it. I heard her voice. Then he says it is a strange kind of comfort, being told that someone knows almost nothing. Dion shakes his head. It is the best kind, he says. It is the truth, and someone walked a long way in the dark to bring it. Most people would have waited until they knew more. She came with what she had, and what she had was a torch and a few plain words of truth, and that was enough to start a mother walking again.

Demeter did not answer her. The Hymn says only that she went on quickly at Hecate's side, still holding her burning torches. So the two goddesses went together over the waking hills, two lights on one road, the young one and the grieving one. Hecate did not ask anything more. She simply walked at the mother's pace, as you walk beside someone who cannot yet speak. Dew lay grey on the grass of the hillsides, and the cold that comes just before sunrise sat in the hollows. Somewhere a first bird tried a single note and let it go. Behind them the sky turned slowly from ash to pearl, and from pearl to the pale colour of milk, and the flames in their hands grew thinner and paler as the day came up to meet them, until they burned almost unseen, two small lights giving themselves away to the morning.

They came at last to Helios, the watcher of gods and men, and stood before his horses, which stamped and blew in the new light. This time it was the mother herself, the grain goddess, who lifted her face to the Sun.

Demeter said:

[GODDESS] Helios, your beams look down on all the earth and sea. Tell me truly, have you seen who took my child?

Helios answered her kindly. He called her queen Demeter, daughter of lovely-haired Rhea, and said he honoured her and pitied her grief. Then he told her what he had seen. No other god was to blame, he said, only Zeus, who had given the girl to his own brother Hades to be his wife. He asked her to let her anger go, because Hades was no unfitting husband. He was her own brother, of the same stock, and he held a third share of the world as his kingdom. With that Helios called to his horses, and they bore the swift chariot onward, lightly, like long-winged birds.

Nikias lifts his chin from his knees.

[HERO] And Hecate? Did she go on with her?

Dion says the Hymn lets her fall quiet here. She has done what she came to do. She heard, she came with a torch, and she walked the mother to the one who saw. The song turns to Demeter alone, and to a town called Eleusis, and Hecate steps back into the dark for a while, as a lamp-bearer does once the door is found.

Then there is the other telling, because there is always another telling. Ovid, a Roman poet who wrote in Latin some centuries after the Hymn, tells the search in his Metamorphoses. His grain goddess is called Ceres. When night falls on her searching, she lights two pine trees in the fires of Etna, the great mountain of Sicily, and carries them through the frosty dark, one in each hand. Ovid's Ceres walks alone. There is no Hecate beside her, no cave, no word at dawn. Dion has heard this version on the quay from Italian sailors waiting for a wind, and he has his own opinion of it.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Your Roman forgot to look for her, that is all. She was there, holding the light for him too. She does not mind.

It is only Dion's joke, and no scholar would sign it. Still, it suits her. She is used to standing a little outside the light, holding it up for someone else.

They are quiet then. The stone beneath them has given up nearly all its warmth, and the breeze comes and goes over the thyme in long, unhurried waves, smoothing it down and letting it rise again. Nikias pulls the edge of his cloak round his shoulders. Below, beyond the dark shoulder of the hill, the sea makes its long, even sound.

The supper rests on its fig leaves at the herm's feet, the honey shining in the lamplight, the two eggs side by side, the cheese pale as a moon that the sky has not got tonight. The three stone faces look down their three roads, patient as they have been for longer than anyone can say. The oil in the lamp's bowl has sunk a little, a thin finger's width below where it stood at the cistern, and the light is no less for it.

Melas has lain down at last, close to the lamp, curled nose to tail in the dust. Now and then his tongue comes out and finds one more trace of honey in his whiskers, and he licks it away slowly, and sighs, and is still.

## 5. The Maiden Well at Eleusis

Morning at Eleusis smelled of new oil from the presses at the edge of the town, green and peppery, and the air was already warm. This is the morning of the Hymn to Demeter. The sun came in low across the plain and lay gold on the stones of the Maiden Well, where the women of the town came to draw water. Olive trees stood around it and threw a soft, broken shade.

Four sisters came down the path that morning with bronze pitchers on their hips. They were the daughters of Celeus, the lord of the place, and Callidice, the fairest of them, walked in front. In the olive shade beside the well they found an old woman sitting with her hands in her lap, wrapped in a dark cloak, like a nurse in a king's house long past the age of children. Gods are hard for mortals to see, the poet of the Hymn says, and this one did not wish to be seen.

She told them her name was Doso, and that pirates had carried her away from Crete. Then Demeter, the grieving goddess, spoke to the girls, and under the old woman's voice there was something kind and very tired.

[GODDESS] Dear children, may the gods give you good husbands and children of your own. Pity me now, and tell me whose house I might go to, to work as a nurse.

The sisters ran home with their hair streaming behind them like crocus flowers, and then came back and led her up to their mother's hall. There she would not take the fine seat she was offered, and she would not drink the red wine. A serving woman named Iambe set out a plain stool with a white fleece on it, and teased her with many a quip and jest, the Hymn says, until the veiled goddess smiled, and then laughed, and her heart grew lighter. It was the first laugh since the meadow. She asked only for barley meal stirred into water with soft mint, a country drink, and the people of Eleusis would mix it in her honour for a thousand years.

Then the Hymn tells of a long, hard year. Demeter kept the seed hidden in the ground, the oxen dragged the curved ploughs through the furrows for nothing, and gods and mortals alike grew hungry. At last Zeus sent Hermes of the golden wand down into the dark below the earth to bring the maiden home.

Hades did not refuse. The Hymn says he smiled with his brows and let her go, and told her to go back to her dark-robed mother with a gentle heart. Before she went, he gave her a single sweet pomegranate seed, and she ate it. Hermes took the reins of the golden chariot and Persephone climbed up beside him. The immortal horses went up out of the earth so lightly that neither the sea nor the rivers nor the grassy glens nor the mountain peaks held them back.

Demeter was waiting at her temple. When she saw her daughter she rushed out to her like a maenad running down a wooded mountain, and Persephone leapt down from the chariot and ran to her mother. They held each other all that day, the Hymn says, and their hearts were comforted, and each gave the other joy and took joy back.

Then, in lines that are easy to pass over, the Hymn brings back the one who carried a torch at the beginning. Dion has only ever heard these lines in Greek. The English keeps them plain: bright-coated Hecate came near to them, and often did she embrace the daughter of holy Demeter. And from that time the lady Hecate was minister and companion to Persephone.

In the Hymn's grey dawn she had said that she heard the girl's voice but did not see with her eyes who took her. All that long year she had carried that cry with her, the way a shell carries the sea. The poets do not record what she said now, at the end. Perhaps, with her arms still around the girl, she said only this:

[GODDESS] I heard you from my cave, child. Now I see you in the sun.

Heard in the dark, and seen at last in the light. That is the whole of her part in the story, and it is enough.

Then Rhea, the old mother of the gods, came down from Olympus with Zeus's word. Because of the seed, Persephone would spend one third of each turning year in the realm below, and the other two thirds above with her mother and the other gods. Demeter let the fields go free. The whole wide earth grew heavy with leaves and flowers, and before long the plain of Eleusis was waving with long ears of grain, and the ground seemed to let out a breath it had been holding all year.

Up on the ridge above Aegina, the night has gone so still that not one stem of thyme is moving. Dion stops talking for a moment. He listens to the stillness and is pleased with it, as he is pleased with a flat sea at first light.

Nikias has been sitting with his arms around his knees. He asks his uncle whether that is the end, Hecate embracing the girl and then gone again. Dion shakes his head slowly, as he does when someone calls a fish small that he knows to be large, and the old fisherman answers him.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] People think she's finished once the torches go out. She isn't. She's there at the end too, hugging the girl like an aunt at the harbour.

Nikias smiles down into his knees. He was met at the harbour himself four days ago, after nine years away, and he remembers how many times he was hugged on the shingle, and by how many aunts, and how one of them wept into his collar and then scolded him for being thin. Then the young man lifts his head and asks his uncle a question.

[HERO] Then she goes down with her every year? With the torch?

Dion turns his hand over in the lamplight, which is his way of saying that nobody knows. The Hymn says companion and minister, he tells him, and nothing more. It does not say that Hecate walks the dark road down each autumn, or that she climbs back up it each spring. That is left open, and Dion is content to leave it open. A door left ajar, he says, lets the air in.

But painters like to fill the spaces the poets leave. Dion once saw a wine-bowl from an Athenian workshop. On it Persephone is climbing up out of the earth, with Hermes near her and Demeter waiting. Hecate is there as well, a torch in each hand, turned back toward the girl and lighting her up the last steps. Nikias says he likes the painter's version. Dion says he does too, and that liking a version is allowed, as long as you remember which one you are liking.

And since they are speaking of versions, he says, there are others, and they belong to her as well. They are stories from the edges, told by other people in other places, and they do not agree with one another. He lays them out as he lays out shells on the boat's thwart for a child, one at a time, and lets each one lie where it is.

Here the Hymn falls quiet, and the first of them comes from an older shelf. It is the Catalogue of Women, a poem that goes under Hesiod's name and is sung now only in pieces. In that telling the king's daughter Iphigenia, brought to the altar so that the fleet could sail for Troy, is never harmed at all. Artemis lifts her gently away, and by the goddess's will she becomes Hecate, a lady of the roads. Others called her Artemis Einodia, Artemis of the Wayside, and the two names stood close together on the same roadsides, like two lamps in one window.

Pausanias, whom we met at dusk, heard that story at Megara, a short sail across the gulf from where they sit. Jones put his words into English, and they are short: Hesiod represented that Iphigenia was not killed, but by the will of Artemis became Hecate.

The second is only a single line. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, Hera mentions in passing the fearful Scylla of the strait, whom Hecate, who is called Crataeis, bore to Phorcys, the old man of the sea. Crataeis means something like the Strong One. The poet gives nothing more than a name and a mother, set down like an entry in a harbour ledger.

Dion lets that one rest a while before he speaks again.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Every sailor through that strait has cursed Scylla. Not one of them knew whose girl she was. I'd have rowed past more politely.

The last is a city's legend, and Dion had it from a sailor out of Byzantium who once shared a wineskin with him on the quay and swore that every word was true. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander, had come to take Byzantium, the city on the narrow water between two seas. On a dark night his soldiers crept toward the walls while the people inside were asleep. Then the dogs of the city began to bark, and a light rose in the sky above the walls, soft and white, like a lamp lifted at a window. The townsfolk woke and saw it, and the city was kept. Afterwards they honoured Hecate the Light-Bringer, Phosphoros, and set a crescent on their coins.

Centuries on, a chronicler named Hesychius of Miletus wrote the legend into his history of the city. By then that curve of light had travelled farther than anyone on those walls could have dreamed, passed warm from palm to palm in every market where the coins were spent, a little moon that never set.

Nikias does not ask anything more. He sits with the three stories laid out before him, and Dion leaves them there.

Melas has not moved from his place by the lamp. He lies curled against the warm side of it with his chin on his forepaws and his eyes half open. When Dion's voice stops, the dog's tail lifts once and settles again, as if the dogs of Byzantium had been his cousins and he had heard their story many times.

The supper is still on its fig leaves at the feet of the herm: the barley cake with its broken corner, the honey, the little round cheese. Between the three stone faces the flame leans toward the dark by the width of a barley grain and comes back, unhurried. A moth comes out of the night, circles it twice, and drifts away over the terraces.

Below, the town is putting out its lamps. A window goes dark by the harbour, then another up the hill, and as each light goes the sea seems to come a little nearer. Its sound comes up the ridge, wave after wave on the shingle, with the same soft hush each time.

Nikias stands for a moment and looks down past the dark shoulder of the hill. At the bottom of the slope, where the town ends and the water begins, he can just see the beach. The fishing boats lie there in a row where they were drawn up at dusk, dark hulls resting on their sides on the pale stones, their oars shipped and their sails furled, with the quiet water coming in and going out beside them.

He sits down again beside his uncle, pulls his cloak around him, and watches the flame. Beside it Melas lets his eyes fall shut at last. His breathing slows and deepens until it keeps time with the sea, and he sleeps.

The boats lie still on the shingle below, dark against the pale stones, and the sea keeps up its even hush along the shore.

## 6. The Weasel in the Dry-Stone Wall

On the ridge above Aegina town the second watch has come, and the cold has found the backs of the hands. The dry-stone wall beside the crossroads is the oldest thing up here. Men long dead set its grey stones without mortar, and over the years the gaps between them have filled with thyme roots, seed husks and the fine dust of many summers. The stones still hold a little of the day's warmth, and they smell faintly of sun-baked lichen.

From low down in that wall comes a sound. It is a dry, papery rustle, like a page turned by someone in no hurry.

Nikias hears it first and turns his head.

[HERO] There's something in the wall.

Dion does not look round. He listens, then nods, as if the wall has just told him its name.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] A weasel, by the sound of her. She'll have smelled the eggs. Her family has been smelling eggs in these walls since before my father's father.

While they wait to see whether she will show herself, Dion turns to the lamp. It has burned since dusk, up the terraces, past the cistern and all through the long story of the Maiden Well. The flame has sunk close to the clay now, blue at its root and smoking a little at the tip. He reaches into the basket of split reed and brings out the oil flask he filled at his own hearth. Its mouth is closed with a plug of wax, tied down with a cord. He picks the knot loose with his thumbnail, works the wax free and tips the flask over the filling hole. A thin gold thread of olive oil runs in until the little bowl is full again. Then he takes the bronze pin he keeps for the purpose, draws the wick up a fingernail's width, and pinches away the charred end.

The light comes back as a coal does when you breathe on it. First a glow, then a bead of yellow no bigger than a drop of honey, then a tall, steady tongue of flame between the three stone faces of the herm. The smell of warm oil drifts across the crossroads, and for a moment it is stronger than the thyme. Dion presses the wax plug back into the flask's neck, ties the cord around it again, and lays the flask in the basket. The lamp will not need him again before morning.

In the new light, the weasel looks out.

She has come to the mouth of a gap between two grey stones, a hand's height above the ground, and only her head and throat show. Her face is narrow and brown, her throat as white as a fresh-washed cloth. Her eyes are two black beads that take in the lamp, the basket, the two men and the dog, in that order. She does not blink. In the lamplight she looks like a brown thought the wall is having about them.

Melas raises his head. His nostrils work. For a long moment the old dog and the weasel consider each other across three paces of cold stone. Then he lets a breath out through his nose, lays his chin back down, and half closes his eyes. He has weighed the whole matter of weasels and left it to younger dogs.

Nikias leans toward his uncle.

[HERO] He's not going after her?

Dion shakes his head.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] He did once, when he was two. She bit his nose and went home. Thirteen years teach a dog which errands are worth getting up for.

More quietly, Nikias asks why anyone would let a weasel sit so close to a supper laid for Hecate. Dion says it is the other way round. The weasel has more right to be here than either of them, because she belongs to the goddess's own household, and there is a story for it.

We find that story in a Greek book of changes, the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, who gathered old tales of people turned into birds and beasts and stones. He says he took this one from an older poet, Nicander. It happens in Thebes, in the house of Alcmena, on the day her son Heracles was to be born.

Alcmena had a companion in that house, a girl named Galinthias, quick on her feet and kind in her heart, who had grown up beside her. When Alcmena's time came, the birth would not come with it. Hera, Antoninus says, did not want this son of Zeus to be born. So the Fates sat near the door with Eileithyia, the goddess who helps mothers through their labour, and they kept their hands clasped together. While their hands stayed clasped, the child could not arrive. The hours went by. Alcmena grew weary, and the whole house waited with her, like a quay waiting for a late boat, everyone looking at the same patch of water.

Galinthias watched the goddesses, and she understood. She did not argue with them, and she did not try to pull their hands apart. Instead she ran out to them, bright and breathless, and told them that by the will of Zeus a boy had just been born to Alcmena, so there was nothing more for them to do there.

The Fates were startled. Their hands came apart in surprise, and with the hands unclasped the birth was freed. Heracles came into the world, and Alcmena could rest at last.

When the Fates saw that a girl had fooled them, they were not pleased, and they changed her into a weasel, quick and brown, to live in the cracks of walls. Antoninus does not linger on their displeasure. He moves on to what came after, which is the part Dion likes best. Hecate saw the little creature and took her as her own sacred servant, one of the household of the crossroads. And Heracles, when he was grown, remembered the girl who had opened the way for him. He set up an image of her beside his house and brought her offerings. Antoninus says that the Thebans, before their festival for Heracles, still make their first offering to Galinthias.

Nikias is quiet for a while, looking at the gap in the wall where the narrow brown face still shows. Then he says what he has been thinking.

[HERO] So it was a lie that got him born.

Dion answers without hurry.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] She never touched the door. She only told them it was open, and they let go. Half the doors in the world open that way.

The Romans tell it a little differently, Dion says. He had it years ago from a Roman freedman who kept the customs shed at the harbour and paid for his wine in stories. The Roman poet Ovid put it into Latin, in his own Metamorphoses. In Ovid the girl is a servant called Galanthis, with yellow hair. The goddess at the door is Lucina, the Roman name for the one who helps at births, and Ovid gives her a very particular way of sitting. She sits on the altar outside the house with her right knee crossed over her left and her fingers laced together, tight as a knot in wet rope. So long as she sits like that, nothing in the house can come undone.

Galanthis goes out to her and says that whoever she may be, she should wish the mistress joy, because the mistress has been delivered. Lucina springs up in surprise, her knees uncross, her fingers come apart, and the child is born. Then Galanthis laughs out loud at the goddess's face, and Ovid says it was the laugh that earned her the weasel's shape. In his telling, Hecate does not appear at all.

Ovid adds a curious piece of country belief. Because the girl helped a birth along with a falsehood from her mouth, he says, the weasel ever after brings her young into the world through her mouth.

Nikias hides his grin in the fold of his cloak and keeps his eyes on the wall, so as not to startle the face in it. Then he asks his uncle the obvious thing.

[HERO] Is that true?

Dion gives the question the same care he would give the weather.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] My grandmother believed it. She also believed eels came out of the mud by themselves. I never caught a weasel at it, and I never caught an eel being born either.

So there are two tellings, Dion says, the Greek and the Roman, two loaves baked from the same flour in different ovens. They agree on the girl, the clasped hands and the startled goddesses. They part ways on the laugh, and on who was kind afterward. In the Greek book, the one Nicander told first, the kindness comes from Hecate.

Antoninus gives Hecate no words in this story. He says only that she made the weasel her servant. If the goddess of the crossroads spoke when she found the little brown creature among the stones, her words are lost, and these are not ancient ones. An islander keeping her supper on a cold night might imagine her saying only this.

[GODDESS] Come out of the cold, quick one. You opened a door for a child. Now keep my doors, and the roads that meet at them.

Nikias looks from the gap in the wall to the three stone faces, and Dion sees where his eyes have gone.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] My mother used to say every house has a weasel in its wall and a door in its front. The goddess likes to know both are kept.

Doors and roads, Dion says, were always hers together, because every door is a small crossroads, where the house and the world meet. The Romans in the harbour have a name for her that says so. They call her Trivia, which means nothing grander than she of the three ways, from their words for three and for road. A place where paths meet became the name of a goddess.

That little word had a long road of its own ahead of it, far beyond Aegina and its harbour. A trivium was the spot where three roads met, and whatever turned up there was common: the talk of people waiting by a well, the news anyone might pick up at a meeting of paths, the sort of thing nobody thought worth writing down. So the Latin for it came to mean small and ordinary. Many centuries later, the schoolmasters of Europe borrowed the same word for the first three roads of learning every child had to walk: grammar, then speaking well, then reasoning. Those were the trivium, the plain road at the start, before anything grander. And when English speakers call a thing trivial today, they are still standing at Hecate's crossroads without knowing it, with a little of her lamplight on their feet.

On the ridge, Nikias looks at the three stone faces, and at the cake and the cheese and the honey on their leaves, the most ordinary supper in the world, set out for a goddess where the ordinary roads meet. It does not seem small to him.

Somewhere between the Greek telling and the Roman, Melas stopped keeping watch on the wall. His eyes have closed, his breath has lengthened, and his ribs rise and fall slowly under the grey fur. Now he sighs in his sleep, and down in the town a dog answers him with one short bark, and after that there is only the sea. Dion smiles at that. It puts him in mind of a song, he says, that a Syracusan sailor used to sing on the quay when the catch was good and the wine was better.

The song is the second Idyll of Theocritus, the poet of Sicily, and in it a young woman named Simaetha sits up on a moonlit night, alone with her maid and a fire of bay leaves. The Moon is in her song; there is no moon on this ridge tonight. She has lost her heart to a young man who has stopped coming to her door, and she sings to call him back. She sings first to the Moon, and then to Hecate. Andrew Lang put the song into plain English prose, and his words carry it here. She asks the Moon to shine fair, because to her she will sing softly, and to Hecate, at whom even the whelps shiver as she comes through the barrows of the dead. A little later in the song, the dogs begin to bark through the town, and Simaetha hears in it the sign she was waiting for. Hecate, she says, is at the crossroads.

Dion tells it plainly, without the sailor's tune. The girl in the song never sees the goddess. She only hears the dogs of Syracuse lift their voices one after another, street by street, as something passes in the dark that men cannot see, and she knows whose feet are on the road.

Dion nods toward the grey shape at his feet.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Dogs know her better than we do. Look at this one. Not a shiver in him. He knows she's company.

Nikias looks at Melas, who is not shivering in the least. One ear twitches at a dream and lies flat again. It comes to Nikias that the dogs of Syracuse barked for her, and this one only sleeps, and perhaps that is the higher compliment.

The weasel, having heard enough about her mistress's affairs, draws her head back into the gap. There is one more dry rustle further along the wall, then another, fainter, and then nothing. Dion leans over and touches the eggs with one finger. He finds them both where he left them, says nothing, and looks pleased.

The cold settles more firmly over the ridge. Nikias pulls his cloak across his knees. Dion draws his feet in under the edge of his own cloak, but leaves one sandal out on the stone near the lamp, where a little of its warmth reaches.

Melas knows it without waking. The old dog shifts once, groans softly in his chest, and stretches his neck along the ground until his long jaw comes to rest across the worn leather strap of Dion's sandal. He does not open his eyes. His sides rise and fall, long and even, in time with the hush of the sea below.

The lamp burns full and quiet between the three faces of the herm, its new oil glinting in the clay, and in its light the old dog sleeps with his chin on his master's sandal.

## 7. Medea's Hearth and the River Phasis

Along the far eastern shore of the Black Sea, where the oldest maps run out of names, the river Phasis comes down from the mountains and grows wide and brown as it nears the sea. At midnight the reeds along its banks stand wet and black, taller than a man, and they barely stir. The water slides past them without a ripple and smells of silt and cold roots. All evening the frogs in the shallows have been singing, hundreds of them, and now they fall quiet in twos and threes. At last a single frog offers one doubtful croak, waits for an answer that does not come, and leaves the silence to the river.

This is Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, and this is where the story goes next. On the Aegina ridge Dion tells it as the island has always told it, with his old dog's chin still resting on his sandal. The poem behind his telling still survives. It is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the scholar-poet of Alexandria, and we follow it in the old prose English of R. C. Seaton.

In the third book of that poem the king of Colchis has a daughter, Medea, and Apollonius tells us plainly how she spends her days. She is busy in the temple of Hecate from morning on, because she is the goddess's priestess. And Hecate herself taught her, the poet says, to handle herbs with a skill no one else in the country had: roots dug on the mountainside, flowers that open where the snow draws back, juices kept in wooden caskets with tight lids. Medea walks among these things in a dark robe, and the green smell of crushed leaves follows her from room to room, as the smell of bread follows a baker down the lane.

Into this quiet a ship comes up the Phasis. The Argo, with Jason and his companions, moors among the reeds, and Jason asks the king for the Fleece. The king sets him a task no mortal could finish alone: yoke a pair of bronze-footed bulls that breathe fire, and plough a field with them in a single day. Apollonius tells how the gods turn Medea's heart toward the stranger, and how she lies awake through a long night, deciding and undeciding, until the window turns grey. In the morning she has her mules yoked to a light cart and drives out across the plain with her maidens to Hecate's temple, as she would on any ordinary day.

Jason comes to meet her there. Apollonius says he came like Sirius rising out of Ocean at summer's end, bright and lovely to look at, and the girl's heart fell from her breast at the sight. He stands before her empty-handed, as a suppliant stands. The one who speaks now is Jason, the hero of the old poem, not the young man on the ridge, and his plea runs something like this.

[HERO] I come to you a stranger and a suppliant, in the name of Hecate. Help me, and in Hellas I will make your name known, and you will be honoured there.

Medea gives him the herbs, and with them a set of instructions. The voice is the priestess's, a mortal girl's, low and quick. But every step of the rite belongs to the goddess, and if we listen closely we can hear Hecate behind the girl, the way you know a fire is burning in the next room only from the warmth that comes through the wall.

He must wait, Medea tells him, until the night is parted in two. Then he must bathe alone in the flowing river, far from his companions, and put on a dark robe. He must dig a round pit in the earth and make an offering there, by fire. The honey has to be poured from a cup, the hive-stored labour of bees, as Seaton has it, and the name he calls must be the old one: only-begotten Hecate, daughter of Perses. When that is done he is to walk away. And whatever he hears behind him, footsteps or the baying of dogs, he must not look round. If he turns, the rite is spoiled, and he will not come back to his friends as he should.

At this, on the Aegina ridge, Melas twitches in his sleep. One paw paddles twice against the stone, as if somewhere in his dream a dog of his own were answering the goddess's hounds. Then he settles again and lets out a long sigh through his nose, and his jaw sinks a little deeper onto the sandal strap.

Dion looks down at the honeyed barley cake on its fig leaf at the herm's feet, then back at his nephew.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Honey from a cup. That part I understand. The bulls and the princes I leave to the poets.

So Jason does everything he was told. Apollonius takes us to the river at midnight. The hero bathes in the dark water, puts on the dark robe, digs the pit and makes the offering. He pours the honey, and in the firelight it falls like a thread of lamplight from the cup's lip. He calls the goddess by name. Then he turns his back and walks away through the wet grass.

And Hecate comes, called properly with honey and patience, crowned with oak boughs and ringed with torchlight, her hounds hushed at her side, and she takes the offering and lets the rite stand.

Behind him the whole meadow is glowing with her torches, and the light throws his shadow far ahead of him on the grass, long and thin and pointing home. He does not turn. He follows his own shadow, step after step, along a road she has laid down for him in black. That is the picture the poem leaves us with: a young man walking away from a goddess, guided by the light she casts at his back.

In the morning he anoints himself with Medea's ointment and yokes the bulls, and their fire breaks around him like surf around a rock. Apollonius tells the ploughing at length, but for us the outcome is enough. He finishes the task before evening, and the Fleece is won soon after.

Nikias has been listening with his chin on his knees. He lifts it a little and asks his question in a low voice, so as not to wake the dog.

[HERO] So everything rested on not looking back.

Dion nods slowly before he answers, and he answers with the oven, as he answers most things.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Same as a loaf. Open the door to peek, and down it sinks. Some things want you to trust them and walk away.

He lets the words settle and adds nothing, and the lamp goes on burning between them.

Here another poet joins in. Euripides, the Athenian tragedian, wrote his Medea long before Apollonius, and any islander who has sat on the stone seats of a theatre would know it. In it there is a moment when Medea, alone on the stage, swears an oath. As E. P. Coleridge renders it, she swears by the queen she reveres above all others and has chosen to share her work: by Hecate, who dwells within her inmost chamber. The Greek words are homelier still. They put the goddess in the deep corners of the hearth. So in this play Hecate is not on a far riverbank at all. She lives inside the house, where the fire is banked at night and the bread is baked at dawn, close as one of the family.

Dion turns at that and looks back down the hill, toward his own house by the harbour. Inside it the coals he banked before they set out are lying under their ash, keeping their small red heat in the dark. Outside, in the wall beside his door, the little shrine faces the empty lane. He looks for a long moment, and when he speaks it is more to the house than to the boy.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] The far roads are hers, and the hearth is hers. That's fair. Whoever goes out by the door has to come home through it.

Then he turns back to the lamp.

Ovid, the Roman, tells the story differently again, in Latin, a tongue Dion knows only as the noise the officers on the grain ships make. The seventh book of his Metamorphoses comes down to us in the English verse of Brookes More, and there the story has moved to Iolcus in Thessaly, Jason's home country. Here the two poets part ways. Apollonius sent his hero out at midnight with no word about the moon. Ovid's Medea waits for it on purpose. She waits until the moon is full and round, its horns met, its face whole. Then she goes out of the house at midnight, barefoot, her hair loose on her shoulders, her robe ungirdled, alone. Men, birds and beasts are all asleep. The hedges are still, and the air does not move. Only the stars glitter.

She stretches her arms up to them, turns around three times, and three times sprinkles water from a stream over her hair. Then she prays. She calls on Night, keeper of secrets, and on the golden stars, and then on triple Hecate, who knows what she is attempting and helps with her charms. She calls on the Earth that gives up its herbs, and on the breezes, the hills, the lakes and the groves.

It is a fitting country for that prayer. A short walk inland from Iolcus lay the old town of Pherae, and there the Thessalians honoured a goddess they called Enodia, She of the Road. Her coins showed a woman riding out with a torch held high, the way a neighbour comes down the lane with a light when someone is late home. Many Greeks counted Enodia and Hecate as one goddess. So when Ovid's Medea lifted her arms under the full moon, she was praying in a land where the goddess of the roads already had a house, a name and a torch.

Nikias looks up at the sky over Aegina. Tonight there is no moon at all, only stars and the faint glow of the town below. A full moon over Ovid's Thessaly, a dark one over Dion's ridge. The goddess of the crossroads keeps her door open on both kinds of night.

What Ovid's Medea asks for is not a battle. Jason's father, old Aeson, is worn thin with age, and she means to give him back some of his years. Ovid spends nine days and nine nights on her gathering of herbs, from mountains and riverbanks far and wide, and then on the brew she makes in a bronze cauldron. We can let it simmer quietly. When she stirs it with a dry olive branch, the branch turns green, puts out leaves, and soon hangs heavy with young olives. Wherever a drop of the brew spills on the ground, flowers and soft grass spring up, as if the earth had only been waiting to be asked.

When the old man has rested and taken her remedy, his white beard and hair turn dark again. The hollows in his face fill out, the wrinkles smooth away like sand after a wave, and his limbs grow strong. Ovid says Aeson wakes and marvels, remembering that this is how he was forty years before.

The poets go on to tell of Medea's later years, which grew dark and sorrowful. We will leave those years with them, closed in their own books.

The night on the ridge has gone very still. No breeze moves the thyme. The supper rests where Dion set it: the barley cake, the two eggs on their fig leaves, the round cheese. Melas breathes long and even, his chin heavy on his master's sandal. The lamp burns on its new oil, and in the windless air its flame stands straight and unhurried, a small gold tongue of light with nowhere else to be.

Of the three faces of the herm, the one looking straight down the middle road catches the most light. The lamplight lies on its stone brow and in the worn hollows of its eyes. The flame hardly stirs, and the middle face goes on looking down the dark road toward the sleeping town, patient as a house that has kept its hearth warm all night.

## 8. The Dog's Grave and the Gate at Avernus

Below the ridge, the sea changes its voice. All through the first watches it raked the shingle in short, even strokes, one pebble rolling over another and settling. Now each stroke is longer. Each wave reaches a little less far, waits, and slides back with a softer hiss, like a broom drawn across a stone floor. The tide has turned. A light breeze comes in off the sea with it and climbs the terraces from the harbour, carrying the smell of wet weed and cold stone. It stirs the tips of the thyme around the herm. The lamp flame leans once and rights itself.

Dion lifts his head before Nikias has noticed anything. He goes very still, his chin raised toward the water, and listens as another man might read a letter from home.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] There. She's turned. Sixty years on that beach, and I still hear the tide go before I feel the wind.

Nikias listens too, frowning a little, his head tilted to the same side as his uncle's. After a while he gives up and tells the old man the truth.

[HERO] I can't hear any difference. Nine years at sea, and I slept through every tide.

Dion laughs low in his chest. He says that this is why the merchant ships pay their sailors in silver and not in fish. Melas does not wake. His nose stays on Dion's sandal, and his flank rises and falls with his breathing, slow as the water below.

The story crosses the sea now, northward to the coast of Thrace. Here we follow Euripides, in his play Hecuba, as Edward Coleridge translated it. Hecuba was the old queen of Troy. When the city fell she was taken captive with the other Trojan women. On the Thracian shore she learned that the king there, a man called Polymestor, had betrayed the youngest son she had sent to him for safekeeping. She took a hard justice from that king. Euripides tells it, and we will leave it with him.

Before the play ends, the Thracian king speaks a prophecy over her. It is strange, and it is not cruel. He tells her she will become a dog with eyes of fire, and that her tomb will have a name of its own: Cynossema, the dog's grave, a mark for sailors. The name is two words joined. Kynos means "of the dog," and sema is a sign, or a grave mound standing on a headland. Ancient sailors coming down the narrow strait toward the open sea did point to a headland of that name, a low hump of land above the water, brown in summer and green after the rains, and they told each other that the old queen lay there. The poets do not say what the sailors felt as they passed it. If we allow ourselves a small invention, we might say that her grief was set on that coast as a lamp is set in a window, to bring other mothers' sons home.

Dion is pleased by this, and it shows. He rubs the stubble on his jaw with the back of his hand.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] So they steered home by a grave. Well, I've steered by worse. A white goat on the cliff at Perdika, once. Very reliable, until the goat moved.

Nikias smiles into the dark. The breeze brings the smell of weed again, stronger, and goes back down the hill.

Not every poet leaves Hecuba on that headland. Lycophron wrote a dark and riddling poem called the Alexandra, which A. W. Mair carried over into English, and in it she passes into the train of Hecate herself. She becomes one of the goddess's hounds and runs at the side of the torch-bearer on the night roads. The poem is hard to read, full of hidden names and sudden turns, but this part of it is plain enough. An old queen who had lost her city, her husband and nearly all her children is given a place at last, near the goddess of the crossroads. All her life she had walked behind the people she loved, following them to the ships, to the walls, to the graves. Now she runs beside the torches, and no road is dark to her again.

Nikias looks down at Melas for a while, at the white hairs coming in around his eyes and over his paws. Then he reaches over and rests his hand on the dog's warm side. Melas sighs in his sleep, stretches one hind leg, and is still again.

Here the Greek poets fall quiet, and we go west across the water to Italy, to the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, in the plain prose of H. Rushton Fairclough. Aeneas, the Trojan exile, has come ashore at Cumae after his long voyage. His cloak is stiff with salt, and his men are drawing the ships up onto the sand. His father, old Anchises, died on the voyage, in Sicily. Since then he has come to Aeneas in dreams and asked his son to visit him in the world below.

Above the shore at Cumae is a great cave cut into the rock, with a hundred openings, and in it lives the Sibyl, the prophetess of Apollo. Virgil gives her a second duty as well. When Aeneas comes to her, he says that Hecate, not in vain, set her over the groves of Avernus. The woods around the dark lake nearby, and the road down that begins there, are in the Sibyl's keeping, and it was Hecate who gave them to her. Even here, at the far edge of Italy, the key to the lower road is in the hand of our goddess.

Aeneas does not ask for a kingdom, or a victory, or a long life. He stands at the mouth of the cave, a grown man and a father himself, far older than the young sailor on Dion's ridge, and he speaks to the Sibyl quietly. In Fairclough's version, his plea runs something like this.

[HERO] One thing I pray. Here, they say, is the gate of the king below. Let me go to my dear father's face. Teach me the way, and open the holy doors.

Those are Virgil's words, loosened a little in the retelling. The Sibyl does not refuse him. She tells him what he must do first. He must find a golden bough in the forest and carry it as a gift for the queen below, and he must make the old offerings. Aeneas goes into the woods, and two doves, his mother's birds, fly ahead of him from branch to branch, waiting each time for him to catch up. They lead him to the tree. Among the dark leaves of an oak, one branch is gold from end to end. Its leaves are thin gold, and when the wind moves them they rustle with a faint dry ringing, a sound no other tree in that forest makes. The Sibyl had promised that it would come easily if the fates were calling him. Virgil says the bough lingers for a moment, holding back, and then Aeneas, eager, breaks it off, and it comes away in his hand.

The place itself is near the cave: a deep cavern beside a black lake, closed in by dark woods. Virgil says that no bird could fly over that water easily, because of the breath that rose from the dark mouth of the cave toward the sky. For that reason, he says, the Greeks called the place Aornos, the birdless place, and the Latin name Avernus came from that, or was thought to have come from it.

Nikias thinks of the gulls in Aegina harbour, which follow every boat in at dusk, crying and wheeling over the decks as though they owned the catch. A lake that no gull would fly over. He tries to picture water that quiet and cannot, quite. Below the ridge the sea goes on drawing back over the shingle, wave after long wave.

In the last darkness before dawn, Aeneas and the Sibyl make the offerings at the cave mouth. Virgil names the goddess at this moment with care. The Sibyl lifts her voice and calls on Hecate, mighty in heaven and in the world below. Nothing else is said. The torches burn, the woods are dark, and the first grey comes into the eastern sky.

Then, at the first light of the rising sun, the ground begins to murmur under their feet. The wooded ridges stir. Through the half-dark, Virgil says, dogs seemed to howl as the goddess drew near. This is how Hecate comes in the old poems: unseen, at the edges of the light, at the hour when one thing turns into another, when night becomes morning and the world above opens onto the way below. No one sees her at the door. They only hear her, a little before it opens.

On Dion's ridge, Melas does not stir at the mention of dogs. Perhaps he has heard this part before.

The Sibyl goes into the open cave, and Aeneas follows her step for step. Virgil leads them down through the dim halls and over the dark river, and at last into a green valley of soft light, where old Anchises sees his son coming across the grass and holds out both hands. He weeps, and says he knew Aeneas would come, that his son's faithfulness had conquered the hard road. Three times Aeneas tries to put his arms around his father, and three times the shade slips through them, light as the wind and soft as a dream with wings.

All the strength of that gate, the dark lake, the birdless air, the howling at dawn, and it opened for a son who only wanted to see his father's face.

Nikias is quiet for a long while after that. When he speaks, he asks it simply, as a boy asks.

[HERO] Did he get to stay with him? Even a little?

Dion answers him slowly. He says that they talked a long time in that valley, the father and the son, beside a broad and quiet river, and then Aeneas climbed back into the daylight, to his ships and his men waiting on the shore. Then the old man looks out toward the harbour, where the dark water lies.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Nine years I watched that water for one sail. I'd have gone down any cave there is, and paid the goddess in barley cakes all the way.

Nikias does not answer. He moves a little closer on the stone, until his shoulder rests against his uncle's, and the two of them sit like that, saying nothing at all. Sometimes a door opens downward, into the dark, and sometimes it opens up a hill, onto a nephew coming home with salt in his hair.

On the ridge above Aegina, the sea breeze has eased into a slow, faint drift up from the harbour, smelling of salt and weed, already thinning. The lamp burns on its new oil. The supper rests at the feet of the herm. Dion's hands lie open on his knees. Nikias sits with his back against the big boulder, its rough face cool through his tunic, listening for a tide he still cannot hear.

At Avernus, in Virgil's morning, the sun is only just clearing the hills. The woods around the lake stand dark and quiet. No bird crosses the water. Mist lies on the lake in a low white layer, so thin that the dark water shows through it, and so still that it hardly moves at all. The light comes down through the trees and rests on it. The mist stays where it is, lying on the still water, and the morning grows wider around it.

## 9. The Moonless Sky and the Key-Bearer

The darkest hour comes to the ridge with no sign except the dew. It settles first on whatever has cooled the most: the stones of the low wall, the tufts of thyme, the lid of Dion's basket of split reed. When Dion rests his palm on the lid he finds it beaded all over with cold drops, fine as the spray that lifts off an oar. His hand comes away wet and smelling of thyme. Under the lid, the cloth that wrapped the cheese lies folded beside the little flask. The breath of air from the harbour has thinned almost to nothing. It still brings the salt up the slope, but too faintly to stir a leaf.

There is no moon, and there will be none tonight. This is the last night of the month. The old moon has gone and the new one has not yet shown its thin edge in the west, and that is why the supper rests where it does. The honeyed cake, the eggs and the cheese, unwrapped since they came, sit at the feet of the herm in the round of the lamp's light.

Nikias has been looking at the herm for some time. One of its faces looks down the road to the harbour, one looks along the ridge toward the inland villages, and one looks down into the hollow of olives. In the house by the harbour, at dusk, he asked why this little shrine has three faces when the old image in the island's temple has only one. Dion did not answer him then.

Now Nikias leans forward and does what he did when they first reached the herm. He lays his fingertips on the stone and moves them slowly around it, from one face to the next: a brow, a nose worn smooth by other hands, the dew lying cold in the hollows of the eyes, and then another brow, and another, until his hand comes back to where it began. There is no back to her anywhere. Wherever he touches, someone is looking out.

Dion watches him do it. When he answers at last, it is in the slow voice he keeps for pointing out a reef.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Three faces, so that whoever comes up any road in the dark is already being looked for. My father told me that the night I first rowed home alone.

Nikias keeps his hand on the stone a while longer. He thinks of the nights at sea when no one on any shore could have known which way he was coming, and of the harbour lamp that was lit for him all the same.

There are three of them on the ridge tonight, and each came from a different distance: sixty years on the beach, nine years at sea, thirteen years of a dog's life. Dion came up from the harbour, as he does at every dark of the moon. Nikias came from much farther, over the sea, after a long time away. Melas came up from wherever black dogs come from, at his own pace, and lay down as if the place had been kept for him. The herm looks down all three roads at once. All three of them were looked for.

Pausanias, the traveller whose words we heard in the house by the harbour, at dusk, was walking through Greece in these very years and writing down what each town told him. He heard the island's side of this. He wrote that the image in Hecate's temple here was the work of the old master Myron, carved in wood, with one face and one body. It was Alcamenes of Athens, he says, who first made her as three figures joined back to back, and set her on the Acropolis, beside the small temple of Victory.

So the single face is the older way and the three faces the newer one, and both are the same goddess. Pausanias does not say why Alcamenes made three. The scholars have never found a better reason than the one Dion's father gave his son on a dark night long ago, and Nikias, his fingers still cool from the stone, decides that they never will.

Virgil, the Roman poet, calls her threefold Hecate in the Aeneid, and gives her the three faces of the maiden Diana.

She has a hymn of her own as well, one of the Orphic Hymns, sung by people who kept mysteries much like the island's. Dion has heard words of this kind chanted in Greek at the island's rites. Some sixteen hundred years after this night, an Englishman named Thomas Taylor put the hymn into English. It calls her the lady of the roads and the crossways, a goddess of heaven, earth and sea. In Taylor's words she is "sepulchral, in a saffron veil array'd, pleas'd with dark ghosts that wander thro' the shade." She is the daughter of Perses, glad in lonely places, fond of deer and of dogs, a queen of the night whom nothing overcomes. Near its end the hymn calls her the one who holds the keys of the whole world. It is a prayer spoken to her, and she does not answer in it.

Dion murmurs the old words half to himself, and when he reaches the part about dogs, Melas lifts one ear and lets it fall again. He does not open his eyes. Dion lays a wet hand on the dog's side and leaves it there.

[OLD_FISHERMAN] Fond of dogs. Then this one has had the better of us all night. He knew whose road it was before we did.

Nikias looks from the dog to the herm, and in the lamplight the three faces seem a little kinder than before. Then he asks the one thing he still wants to know.

[HERO] Why a key? A torch I understand. What does she open?

Dion takes his time. A key, he says, is for a door, and a door is the place where one room ends and the next begins. Hecate stands at every such place: the threshold of a house, the meeting of three roads, the gate between the daylight and the world below. The key means she can let a traveller through. It also means she can close the door gently behind him once he is safe on the other side. A torch shows you the way, Dion says, but a key is a promise that the way is open.

In later centuries people came to believe that the restless dead walked in her company, the souls who had not been given their proper rest, and that she went with them and quieted them. The belief is later than Hesiod and later than the Hymn to Demeter, and it should be heard as later. Still, it fits the Orphic picture of a goddess at ease among the wandering shades, walking the dark roads with her torches until each of them grows still.

Across the sea to the east, in Caria, the country we promised to come back to, there is a temple of hers at a place called Lagina, in hills where she may have been at home long before the Greeks gave her a place in their songs. The stones found among its ruins remember a procession of the key. Let us walk it as the pilgrims did, unhurried. The stones keep the key, the girl and the boys' song; the rest, the cypresses and the lamps and the opening of the doors, we imagine as they might have seen it.

It is late in the day. The road runs out of the city of Stratonicea between low hills, and it is white, white with the dust of many years of feet, so fine that it rises at every step and settles again on the hems of cloaks and on the backs of hands. The heat of the afternoon is going out of it. The shadows of the cypresses lie long across the road, and the light that comes between them is the colour of honey held up to a window.

At the front walks the key-bearer, a girl of the city chosen for the year. She carries the key of the goddess before her in both hands, held a little away from her body, the way one carries a full bowl. It is a large key, heavy, made of bronze, and the low sun catches along its length so that it seems to carry a light of its own. She does not hurry. She does not look back. She only walks, and the road unrolls in front of her.

Behind her come the pilgrims. Some carry baskets of cakes and figs, some lead a goat, some carry nothing but a lamp, not yet lit, for the evening. The boys of the city have been taught a hymn for the goddess, and they sing it as they walk, not loudly, the same few lines over and over, so that the song goes along the road as water goes along a ditch, low and steady and never quite finished. The older people do not sing. They walk with their hands behind their backs and listen.

The dust lifts and settles. The song goes round and begins again. Far ahead, where the road bends toward the temple, the first lamps are being lit, one by one, points of gold against the darkening hill. A priestess goes along the terrace with a taper, and each wick takes its flame from the one before it, until the whole slope above the road is dotted with light. The key goes on toward them, down the long white road, as it went the year before and as it will go the year after.

At last the road lifts out of the dust, and the pilgrims come up onto the terrace of the temple. The song falls quiet. The lamps burn steadily on either side of the doors, and the stone of the threshold is still warm from the day. The key-bearer stops before the doors, and for a moment no one moves. Then she lifts the bronze key in both hands and sets it in the lock. It turns with a low, familiar sound, and the doors open inward on the stillness within, where the goddess has waited all the year. Every year the door is opened. Every year it closes again, softly, behind the last pilgrim home.

On the ridge above Aegina, Nikias sits so still that the dew has begun to settle on his cloak. He has never seen Caria. But he can see the white road, and the girl with the key, and the lamps along the hill, and he thinks that if the procession went on far enough, across the sea and up the slope, it might end at a lamp in front of a three-faced herm, where two men and a dog are sitting in the dark.

There is one more place her road ran, and it is the quietest of all. When the old cities had become provinces of Rome, a few thinkers came to see her in a new and gentler way. In the verses known as the Chaldean Oracles, written down in the second century after Christ, she stands at the middle of all things, and from her side flows the spring of the soul, a living stream that runs out into the world and gives life to everything that breathes. The philosophers called her Hecate Soteira, the Saviour. To them she had become something close to a mother of souls, watching over the long road every soul must travel, from the spring where it begins to the harbour where it rests.

That is the last of her that the old world knew, and the gentlest. Hesiod sang her as the only daughter of Perses and starry Asteria, who kept her share of earth and sea and sky under Zeus. She lit Demeter's way. She stood beside Medea's hearth and at the gate of Avernus. She ended her long life in two quiet places at once: as a key carried along a white road in Caria, and as a spring of souls in the verses of the philosophers.

And of all the words the poets gave her, the oldest are still the plainest. Dion knows them by heart, as everyone on the island does who has walked behind the torches at the mysteries. They come from the Hymn to Demeter, from that grey dawn on the tenth day of Demeter's searching, when Hecate came to meet her with a light in her hands. She had heard the girl cry out from her cave, and she did not pretend to know more than she knew. Dion says the words softly, toward the herm, as if he were only giving them back to her. And in the old song, Hecate says to Demeter:

[GODDESS] I heard her voice, but I did not see with my eyes who took her.

Nikias says nothing. The line rests on the ridge like the dew, a true thing, and no one adds to it.

On the ridge above Aegina the darkest hour has settled completely. Dew has gathered on every leaf of thyme and every stone of the wall. The lamp flame leans a little toward the sea, then straightens and stands up steady, no taller than a thumb. Melas sleeps curled against Dion's foot, his flank rising and falling slowly. Dion sits with his wet hands folded. Nikias sits beside him, warm under his cloak, his question answered and set down in him like a stone fitted into a wall.

Far below, in the dark house by the harbour, the third egg rests in the niche beside the door, where Dion set it at dusk, keeping watch on the lane until they come home.

At the feet of the herm, in the small circle of light, the supper waits where they set it. The honeyed cake lies on its fig leaves, the eggs rest side by side, and the cheese shows pale against the dark ground. Dew beads on the leaves and darkens them. Above the supper the three faces look down their three roads into the dark, each of them watching for whoever might come. Between them the lamp keeps its small round of gold, and the whole ridge lies still around it.

## 10. Downhill with the Lamp, Past the Cistern

On the ridge the cold before dawn has settled into the stones. It lies in the wall where Dion sits and in the ground under the supper, and it beads on the herm's three faces, so that each one looks washed and left to dry in the dark. The thyme smells sharp and wet. When the night has gone as still as it will go, Dion rises from the wall. He stands a moment with one hand on the cold stone and the other on the handle of the lamp. He bends for the basket of split reed, which is light now. It holds only the little oil flask, its plug of wax tied down with a cord, and beside it the cheese cloth, folded flat. The flask knocks once against the reed, softly, like a knuckle on a door that no one needs to answer. Nikias rises beside him and shakes the dew from the hem of his cloak. Melas gets up last, in two unhurried halves, and stands blinking at the lamp as though it had asked him something. The three of them turn from the herm and its three quiet faces and start down the path they came by. They leave the supper behind them on its fig leaves, at the place where the roads meet. No one looks back. It is not a place you look back at. It is a place you leave things for.

The path goes down gently at first, between low walls of grey stone, and in this last hour of the night every leaf of thyme along its edges carries a bead of dew. When the lamplight passes over them the beads shine for a moment, one after another, a little line of tiny lights that kindles ahead of the walkers and goes out behind them. The hill seems to light their way down and put out the lamps after them. The air smells cool and clean, of wet herbs and wet earth. Nothing stirs in the walls. The cicadas went quiet at the first fall of dusk, and they will not sing again until the sun is high. There is only the soft scuff of sandals, the faint creak of the reed handle, and the dog's slow breathing behind them.

The lamp has hardly wavered since Dion filled it from the flask and trimmed the wick. It lays a single pale oval on the path, just ahead of their feet and no farther, and that is enough. A lamp never shows the whole road. It shows the next step, and then the one after that. Dion has walked this path for most of his life and could walk it with no light at all. He carries the lamp low, at the height of his knee, so that its glow falls on the ground and not in their eyes. On either side the darkness stays deep and soft and whole, and nothing in it asks to be seen.

As they walk, the names of the night go with them, the names the old poets gave the goddess. They come back one at a time, unhurried, each in its turn. She was the one who heard. She was the torch-bearer, who held a flame in each hand and walked beside that mother on the tenth morning of her search. She was the nurse of the young, as Hesiod called her, so that every child born after her was born a little under her care. She was the key-bearer, who held the keys of the gates below and of the whole wide world, as her old hymn sings, and at Lagina her key went up the white road every year with singing behind it. She was the lady of the roads, who stood where three ways meet and looked down all of them at once, and was never lost on any. And last of all, in the songs of the philosophers, she was the Saviour, the gentle keeper of souls, who asked nothing of those who followed her except that they walk behind her key.

The one who heard. Torch-bearer. Nurse of the young. Key-bearer. Lady of the roads. Saviour.

The names go down the hill with them in the dark, and they weigh nothing at all. They are lamps that need no hands to carry them.

Halfway down, the path levels out beside the old cistern, and here they stop for a while without anyone needing to say so. The stone rim is wet with dew. Above it the wooden windlass stands where they left it at dusk, its rope wound tight on the beam, so that nothing hangs over the dark mouth of the shaft. The bucket stands on the rim where Dion set it, half full. The water in it has had all night to grow still, and it is still now. In that small round of water the stars have gathered, a whole handful of them, resting there as if the bucket had been set out on purpose to hold them. When the lamp comes near, the flame settles among them like a guest arriving late and taking the last seat at the table. Far below, in the stone dark of the shaft, the deeper water keeps its own stillness, and no one leans over to disturb it. The smell of wild fennel rises from the damp ground around the rim, sweet and green, stronger now than it was at dusk.

The cistern is the last of the waters of the night, and the plainest. The others lie farther off and older, pools along a long road in the stories. There is the river Phasis, wide and dark under its reeds, where a young man bathed at midnight and called on the only daughter of Perses, and the reeds stood still along the banks. There is the lake of Avernus, grey under its mist at first light, where the gate stood open for a son who only wanted to see his father again. There is the Maiden Well at Eleusis, in the shade of the olives, where an old woman sat by the water on a bright morning and waited for someone to ask her name. And there is this cistern on the hill above Aegina, with its wet rim and its bucket full of stars, holding nothing but the rain of a long winter and asking nothing of anyone who passes.

All of them lie still now, in the stories and on the hill. The lamp moves on. The water in the bucket lets the little flame go, and keeps its stars.

Below the cistern the path grows steeper and the terraces begin. They step down the hillside in long curving shelves, each one held up by its wall of dry stone, and on them the pistachio trees and the olives stand in their rows, darker than the sky behind them. The smell of the drying pistachio husks comes up warm and resinous even in the cool. It is the same smell that met them at the foot of the climb, so that the hill seems to be closing its pages on the place where it was opened. The olive leaves hold the dew too. Once or twice a breath of air moves through them and they let a few cold drops fall onto the path, and the drops make no sound at all in the dust.

Melas walks more easily here than he did on the ridge. He knows this slope from a thousand mornings, and he keeps close at Dion's heel with his nose low, reading the edge of the lamplight as he goes. Now and then he stops to smell a stone he has smelled a hundred times before, to make sure it is still the same stone. Then he hurries a few steps to catch up and settles back into his old, unhurried walk. A faint sweetness of honey still clings to his whiskers, from the crumb of barley cake Dion slipped him at the herm, and every so often he licks his nose to check that it has not gone anywhere.

Nikias walks a step behind his uncle, his cloak drawn close and his hands warm beneath it. He spent the questions he carried up the hill one by one, at the crossroads and on the climb, and his hands are empty now and glad of it. What he carries instead is the whole story, folded small and warm inside him, and it asks nothing of him. He thinks once of the house below, of the low door and the little niche beside it facing the lane, and of his own bed under the rafters, still keeping the shape of him. It is a pleasant thought, like a fire someone else is tending. He watches the path, and the lamp, and the dew on the thyme, and he lets the night carry him down.

Above them there is no moon. On this last night of the month the moon has gone wholly into the dark, and the stars have the sky to themselves, thick and clear above the hill, the bright ones and the faint ones together. The goddess's mother was called Asteria, the starry one, and on a night like this her name is easy to remember, when the stars are the only light overhead and the dark between them is so deep and so kind. The starry one, whose only daughter carried torches. It is as if the mother kept the sky lit for as long as her daughter was out walking, the way a mother leaves a lamp in the window. No one can see the stars move. They hang above the terraces and above the sea, and they will fade only when the morning comes for them, in its own time and not before.

The path makes its last long turn above the town, and below them the harbour lights come into view. There are not many at this hour, a few lamps left burning in doorways and a single glow at the end of the quay, and each of them lies on the black water twice, once shining and once reflected. Beyond them the sea is flat and dark and goes out to the edge of the sky without a ripple. The sea breeze died away in the darkest hour, and the sea's sound has thinned to almost nothing, a slow hush of shingle turning over at the waterline, so faint that the ear has to go all the way down to the shore to find it.

Hush, and turn. Hush, and turn.

On the pale shingle below the quay the eleven boats lie on their sides in a long dark row, just where they were drawn up at dusk, their oars stowed and their nets folded. They rest on the stones, asleep at the edge of the still water, and the dark lies over them like a second sail.

## 11. The Warm Threshold

The lane is paved with flat stones where the path comes down off the last terrace, stones worn smooth by many feet: grandmothers carrying water, boys carrying bait, every slow homecoming this little town has known. The dust of the hill gives way to the cool, clean smell of stone that was swept at evening. Here the houses begin, low and whitewashed, their doors shut and their shutters closed, and the people inside them are asleep. Nothing moves in the lane. The lamp in Dion's hand throws its soft circle ahead of them onto the paving. The circle slides along each wall as they pass and lights it for a moment, then lets it go back into the dark, one white wall after another, gently given back.

The sky over the harbour has begun to change. It is not morning yet, and it will not be morning for a while, but at its eastern edge the black above the sea has thinned into a deep, quiet grey, the grey of ash on a hearth. The stars there have grown fewer and fainter. Overhead they are still bright, and behind the hill they are brighter still, but along that one low edge of the world the night is starting to loosen its hold. It works at the edges and in between, as the goddess of the roads has always worked, without any hurry at all.

Dion's house stands at the end of the lane, the last before the shore, near enough that on a still night the sound of the water reaches its door. It is a plain house, one room and a narrow yard, with a roof of beaten earth and reeds and a wall of rough stone washed white. In that outer wall, beside the door and facing the lane, at the height of a man's knee, is the household shrine of the goddess. It holds a little standing figure of fired clay, worn soft at the edges by years of hands and weather. She has one body and one face, as the old wooden image on the island has, and her small clay hands are folded at her waist. Above her is the black mark of many lamps burned there over many years. Before her is a shallow dish for offerings, and in the dish lies the third egg, the brown one, just where Dion set it at dusk before they climbed the hill. The supper went up to the crossroads, and what is given at the crossroads stays at the crossroads. This one egg stayed home, to keep the goddess company at her own door.

Dion stops before the door. He does not go in at once. He lifts the lamp a little and looks at the clay figure in her niche, an old neighbour he passes every morning and has no need to greet with words. Dion's father kept that shrine, and his father before him, so the family says, and now Dion keeps it.

Far across the water, on the coast of Caria, the people of Lagina carried the goddess's key down the white road every year. It went ahead of them in the evening light, and the dust rose soft and pale around their feet, and they sang as they walked, and the singing went on until the key had come home to her temple. That road is a long way from this lane. But an old man coming down a hill with a lamp, at the end of a night given to the goddess, walks the same kind of road, on a humbler scale. Dion bends, his knees stiff after the long walk, and sets the lamp down on the stone of the threshold, beside the shrine, as the last bearer in a procession sets down what he has carried at the last door. Here the walking ends. Here the light is laid down.

The flame has burned all night since he refilled it at the herm, and the oil is low again. It has gone small and round and very still, a single bead of gold in the grey. There is no wind to stir it. A little light beside a little goddess, at the foot of a white wall, the two of them keeping the threshold together, as they have kept it for longer than anyone remembers.

Dion lifts the wooden latch. There is no lock on this door, and there never has been. The goddess who holds the keys keeps it from outside. He pushes the door open, and the warmth of the house comes out to meet them.

It is the only warmth left in the night. The air of the lane is cold with dew, and the stones are cold, and the walls are cold, and the sea beyond them is cold and grey and flat. But inside the door the hearth that Dion banked at dusk is still alive under its ash. He covered the coals carefully before they left, as he has covered them every evening of his life, heaping the grey over the red so that the fire would sleep and not die. And it has slept. The ash lies smooth and pale on the hearthstone, and here and there, where it is thinnest, a faint red glow shows through, like lamplight behind a closed eyelid. The warmth rises from it without any flame at all, gentle and dry, and fills the room, and smells of olive wood and of the honey cake that was baked there hours ago.

The warmth does not stay in the room. It spills out over the threshold, slow as poured honey, and finds the niche beside the door. The brown egg has lain in the cold all night, and when the warm breath of the house reaches it, its shell takes on a fine bloom of tiny beads, the bloom that comes on a cold jug carried in from the well. The roads were given their supper. The house kept back one brown egg, and now the house has warmed it.

Nikias steps in past his uncle, stands near the hearth and holds out his hands to it. He has spent so many nights on merchant ships, with a wet deck under him and the wind talking in the rigging, and this small banked fire is the warmest thing he has felt in a long while. Four days he has been home, and four nights he has slept under this roof since his ship came in, and this is the first time the house has felt like his. He does not say so. He only stands there with the heat on his palms and his cloak still around his shoulders, and lets it reach him slowly, first the fingers, then the wrists, then somewhere deeper, the place that has been a little cold for years without knowing it.

Up on the hill, in the dark, his uncle told him why the goddess has three faces: so that whoever comes up any road in the dark is already being looked for. Three of them went up the hill tonight, an old man, a young man and an old dog. Three of them have come down. Every one of them was looked for, all the way home.

Dion does not uncover the coals. There is no need. The fire will keep until morning, and in the morning he will rake away the ash and lay new wood on the red, and blow on it softly, and the flame will rise again as it always does. A banked fire is a promise kept in the dark. For now it is enough that it is there, waiting under its grey blanket, keeping the room warm and the house alive.

He lowers himself onto the wooden bench by the wall and sets the basket of split reed down beside him, its lid closed, light now, almost weightless after the long night, with only the little oil flask inside and the cheese cloth folded beneath it. He rests his hands on his knees. His hands are brown and broad and creased, and on the left one, across the thumb, is the pale line of an old cut, healed long ago, carried through more seasons than he can count. He rubs it once with the other thumb, out of an old habit, and his hands go still, as still as the boats drawn up on the shingle.

Melas has not come in.

The old dog has stopped on the threshold, beside the lamp, just where the warmth from the hearth comes out through the open door and meets the cool of the lane. He turns around once, and a second time, as old dogs do before they lie down, and he folds himself onto the stone a little at a time, as an old man settles into a chair, with a long sigh that seems to rise from the bottom of his chest. He curls with his tail tucked around his feet and his chin laid flat on the warm stone. The lamp burns a hand's breadth from his nose. The warmth of the house is at his back, and the grey of the morning is in front of him, and between the two he has found the exact place he wants to be. A dog of the goddess, people say, belongs at the threshold. Melas has never heard them say it, and he belongs there anyway. His eyes close. His ribs rise and fall. There may still be a little sweetness of honey on his whiskers, but he has stopped licking at it. He is asleep.

Dion looks at him from the bench and leaves him there. Nikias looks at him too, and at his uncle, and he sits down on the floor by the hearth with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, and lets his head rest against the cool whitewash. Nobody has had to choose alone tonight.

No one speaks. The night has already said everything in its own way. The supper has been carried and set down. The roads have been honoured. The light has been brought home and laid at the door. The story has been told, all of it, from the starry mother to the quiet Saviour of the philosophers, and it lies banked in the room with the fire, under a soft covering of ash, still glowing.

Through the open door, past the sleeping dog and the lamp, the harbour lies below the end of the lane.

The water is perfectly flat. It is the grey of the sky, so nearly the same grey that it is hard to say where the sea ends and the air begins. There is no ripple on it anywhere. The few lights still burning along the quay lie on its surface without trembling.

The boats rest on the shingle in their long row, just as they were drawn up at dusk. Their hulls are dark against the pale stones. Their oars lie stowed along their sides, and the smell of salt and weed still clings to their planks.

At the edge of the shingle the sea comes in so gently that it hardly comes in at all. A thin line of water slides up over the stones, and pauses, and slides back, and the stones it touches go dark and then pale again.

The sound of it is very soft. A hush over the pebbles, and a long pause, and the hush again.

In the old hymn the goddess sat in her cave and heard a girl's voice far away. She did not see who took her, and still she came with her torch to the grieving mother. She hears in the dark. That was always her gift. Tonight, from her cave, there is nothing for her to hear but the sea, and an old dog breathing, and a young man drifting into sleep against a white wall.

Out past the harbour mouth the sea goes on, grey and still, to the far grey line where the sky lies down on it.

The eastern edge is a little lighter now. Only a little.

The lamp on the threshold burns lower.

The ash on the hearth glows faintly, red beneath the grey.

The water slides up over the stones, and pauses, and slides back.

The boats rest on the shingle.

In her niche beside the door the little clay goddess keeps her one face turned toward the lane. At her feet the brown egg rests in its dish, beaded with the warmth of the house. And below her, on the warm stone of the threshold, at the end of the long road, her dog sleeps beside the last small light.

The harbour is still.

## Sources

- Hesiod, Theogony 404-452 (Hecate's birth and honours), tr. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb, 1914 - Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2) 19-89, 98-211, 438-440, tr. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb, 1914 - Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 3.250-252, 3.528-530, 3.975-1041, 3.1191-1224, tr. R. C. Seaton, Loeb, 1912 - Euripides, Medea 395-397 and Hecuba 1259-1273, tr. E. P. Coleridge, 1891; Lycophron, Alexandra 1174-1188, tr. A. W. Mair, Loeb, 1921 - Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.438-445, 7.179-293, 9.281-323, tr. Brookes More, 1922 - Virgil, Aeneid 4.511, 6.35-39, 6.106-118, 6.237-263, tr. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb, 1916 - Orphic Hymn 1, To Hecate, tr. Thomas Taylor, 1792; Bacchylides fr. (Hecate daughter of Night), tr. R. C. Jebb, 1905; Apollodorus, Library 1.6.2, tr. J. G. Frazer, Loeb, 1921; Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 29 (after Nicander) - Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.30.2, tr. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb, 1918; Aristophanes, Wasps 804 and Wealth 594-597, tr. B. B. Rogers, 1907; Strabo, Geography 14.2.25 (Lagina), tr. H. L. Jones, Loeb, 1929; Chaldean Oracles and Proclus on Hecate, tr. Thomas Taylor, 1790s

Chapter 2: Asteria's Daughter, Below the Pistachio Terraces ▶ 14:46

Chapter 3: The Honours Zeus Did Not Take Away ▶ 32:09

Chapter 4: Torches at the Three Roads ▶ 47:11

Chapter 5: The Maiden Well at Eleusis ▶ 1:04:19

Chapter 6: The Weasel in the Dry-Stone Wall ▶ 1:19:21

Chapter 7: Medea's Hearth and the River Phasis ▶ 1:37:56

Chapter 8: The Dog's Grave and the Gate at Avernus ▶ 1:53:51

Chapter 9: The Moonless Sky and the Key-Bearer ▶ 2:08:51

Chapter 10: Downhill with the Lamp, Past the Cistern ▶ 2:26:09

Chapter 11: The Warm Threshold ▶ 2:39:07