Hermione Is Not Only A British Witch, But Also A Greek Mythological Figure And An Ancient City

Most people in the modern English-speaking world may think of J. K. Rowling’s intelligent witch when they think of the word “Hermione.” Yet, there was also a woman from the age of the Trojan War with the name of Hermione, and there was a prominent city in the Peloponnesus that created a kingdom, allegedly named in her honor.

According to mythology, Menelaus of Sparta and Helen (whose capture caused the famous Trojan War) had a daughter named Hermione. Her story is short and scant, but complex. In the myths, two men were promised Hermione’s hand in marriage. In every story, Menelaus, the father of Hermione, always promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to a man named Neoptolemus, the son of the great warrior, Achilles. In other versions, Hermione had already been married (or engaged) to another man named Orestes, with the blessing and encouragement of Hermione’s grandfather, Tyndareus. In that telling of the myth, Hermione ran away with (or was kidnapped by) Orestes and abandoned Neoptolemus. Though the two men would continue to fight over Hermione for the duration of this myth, Orestes eventually emerged victorious and kept Menelaus’s daughter as his bride.

  (Orestes announcing the death of Neoptolemus to Hermione, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin  (1774–1833), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Mythology also provided an origin story for the real ancient Greek city of Hermione. According to Herodotus, the Dryopian people, who would later found the city of Hermione, originally lived near Mount Oeta, in the ancient land of Doris, in central Greece. They were forced to flee their home after an attack carried out by the Malians and the legendary Greek hero, Heracles. After being chased from central Greece, the refugees (allegedly led by a hero named Ermionas) settled in the Argolid Peninsula and began to build the city of Hermione.

By the 6th century BCE, the settlement of Hermione had grown to become a large city. With growing wealth from agriculture, shipbuilding, fishing and dye production, the city transitioned into a kingdom. The Hermionis Kingdom that extended out from the city of Hermione into the interior of the Argolid Peninsula is said to have matched reasonably well with the modern Greek municipality of Ermionida.

As a major Greek city, Hermione was not exempt from the politics and wars that entangled all of the other population centers of ancient Greece. Generally, Hermione sided with the great militant power of Sparta. During the Greco-Persian Wars, Hermione joined in the Greek coalition that fought against Persia. In that conflict, sources such as Herodotus claimed that Hermione contributed 3 warships to the Battle of Salamis around 480 BCE, as well as a further band of three hundred hoplite infantry that fought against the Persians in the 479 BCE Battle of Plataea.

After the Greeks won the Greco-Persian War, a power struggle broke out between the powerful seaborne Athenian Empire and the renowned infantry might of Sparta. With the Athenians controlling the Delian League and the Spartans heading the Peloponnesian League, virtually all of the Greek communities had to choose, or were forced into, a side in the bloody conflict.  In this Peloponnesian War, a series of brutal military campaigns and truces spanning 431-404 BCE, the city of Hermione sided with Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Although Hermione’s side was ultimately victorious in the war, the city was one of the many regions of Greece left damaged by the decades of fighting. Nevertheless, as numerous empires grew and fell around the city, Hermione rebuilt and survived, and is now known as the modern Greek city of Ermioni.

  (Photograph of Ermioni, Greece, taken by RANIC, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Uppermost picture attribution: (Athena, Zeus and Ares flee Heracles, pottery by Nikosthenes, c. 6th century BCE, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and revised by John Marincola. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. 
• http://www.ermioni.info/things-to-know/history-ermioni 
• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0064:entry=hermione-geo 
• http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/H/Hermione.html 
• https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Hermione/hermione.html 
• https://www.britannica.com/event/Peloponnesian-War  

The Japanese Master Duelist, Miyamoto Musashi, Killed A Twelve-Year-Old Boy

(Miyamoto Musashi fighting Tsukahara Bokuden (cropped), painted by Yoshitoshi  (1839–1892), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

The undefeated Japanese duelist, Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584-1645), triumphed in more than sixty duels during his lifetime, many of which ended in the deaths of his opponents. His first duel (and kill) occurred in 1596, when a wandering samurai named Arima Kihei entered the region of Hirafuku, where a thirteen-year-old Musashi was living with his uncle. Kihei posted a notice that he would duel with whomever was brave enough to meet his challenge. Musashi, though only a boy with a stick, answered the challenge and faced the wandering samurai in combat. Despite all odds, the young Miyamoto Musashi knocked Arima Kihei off his feet and bludgeoned the surprised samurai to death with his stick. Musashi continued his lethal duels until 1612, when he faced the masterful nodachi swordsman, Sasaki Kojiro. After Miyamoto Musashi slew Kojiro with a long wooden sword (bokuto) that was shaped from a large oar, the great duelist immediately regretted killing such a skilled warrior. He continued dueling, but he never again dueled to the death.

Between Miyamoto Musashi’s debut as a duelist in 1596 and his refusal to participate in lethal duels in 1612, Musashi unsurprisingly fought in a lot of duels. One of the more famous (or infamous) of his fights occurred in 1604, when Musashi traveled to Kyoto to challenge the elite Yoshioka school of martial arts. The head of the Yoshioka family, Yoshioka Seijuro, agreed to meet the youthful duelist in combat. After arriving frustratingly late to the duel, it only took Musashi one devastating blow with his wooden sword to irreparably damage his opponent’s shoulder and arm. Injured in body and spirit, Seijuro resigned from his position as head of the Yoshioka family and became a monk. With Seijuro gone, the leadership of the Yoshioka family and school fell to Denshichiro. To regain the lost honor of his family, Yoshioka Denshichiro challenged Miyamoto Musashi to a duel to the death. Despite Denshichiro being a master of the staff, Musashi (who arrived late, once again) is said to have killed the man in a single blow to the head.

With Seijuro living as a monk, and Denshiciro dead at the hands of Musashi, the next heir of the Yoshioka family was Matasichiro, a boy of only twelve years. Like his predecessor, Denshichiro, Matasichiro also felt obligated to regain his family’s honor and consequentially challenged Musashi to a duel. This time, however, the Yoshioka family was furious and did not plan to fight fair. Remembering that Miyamoto Musashi had been arriving late to the duels, the Yoshioka family began to plan an ambush for the young duelist. With treachery on his mind, Matasichiro arranged for the duel to be held at night, in a private location, and when the time for the duel neared, the boy marched to the place of the fight with a small army in tow.

Miyamoto Musashi, however, rarely did the same thing twice, when it came to combat. Even though he had arrived at the other two duels strategically late, this time the duelist snuck to the location of the duel early. As a result, Musashi was already observing the area when the Yoshioka forces arrived and began setting up for their ambush.

With the intentions of the Yoshioka laid clear before his eyes, the duelist leapt from the shadows and charged at Matasichiro. Dodging through startled mercenaries, Miyamoto Musashi found, and killed, the twelve-year-old leader of the Yoshioka family. After Matasichiro was dead, the victorious duelist fought his way out of the mob of Yoshioka soldiers and fled to Nara, where he would be safe to return to his life as a traveling swordsman.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Read our full biography on the action-packed life of Miyamoto Musashi, HERE.

Sources:

• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, translated by Lord Majesty Productions, 2005.  
• http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Miyamoto_Musashi 
• http://www.biography.com/people/miyamoto-musashi-38201  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miyamoto-Musashi-Japanese-soldier-artist 
• http://www.musashi-miyamoto.com/musashi-duel-years.html  
• http://www.kampaibudokai.org/MusashiArt.htm

The Psylli: An Ancient Libyan Tribe That Fought the Wind And Sand—And Lost

(Desert Storm and Tree, [Public Domain] via pxhere.com)

Around the turn of the 5th century BCE, the Psylli tribe, a people located somewhere along the coast of the Gulf of Sirte (or the Great Syrte), mysteriously disappeared after suffering a major drought. The catastrophic natural disaster virtually wiped the Psylli civilization off the face of the earth—leaving only a scattering of Psylli tribesmen (oddly associated with snake charming and healing) that would sporadically surface, here and there, for many more centuries. Yet, their tribe, as a sovereign whole, was considered destroyed.

When Herodotus, the father of history, was born within the city of Halicarnassus in 490 BCE, the Psylli tribe would have just recently disappeared. During his travels and research for his great work, The Histories, Herodotus clamed to have interviewed Libyans about the downfall of the Psylli tribe. The resulting quasi-historical tale, which he recorded in his history, was one of the more mysterious and baffling entries in Herodotus’ collection of strange stories from folklore and myth.

Herodotus wrote that a terrible, hot and dry wind swept out from the southern deserts and flowed over the lands of the Psylli, drying up all of the tribe’s vital water. The destruction caused by the wind was total—the tribe’s tanks of stockpiled water evaporated and the rivers that had long kept the tribe alive suddenly disappeared.

With the people shocked and unsure of what to do, the elders called together a council of the Psylli tribe. The council, according to Herodotus, declared that the attack carried out by the wind was nothing less than an act of war against the Psylli people. To seek vengeance, the Psylli tribe then declared war against the southern wind. The people of the tribe gathered their weapons, and whatever supplies they had left, and marched into the desert to do battle with the wind.

Herodotous (and his supposed Libyan sources) claimed that the Psylli tribe, indeed, had their battle with the wind. Yet, the battle was a massacre. As the story goes, the wind lifted a massive sandstorm from the desert dunes and buried and killed the Psylli people under a torrent of sand.

At some point, the lands of the Psylli became, once more, sustainable to human life. Fairly quickly after the members of the doomed tribe marched to their death in the southern desert, one of the neighboring rivals of the Psylli opportunistically swooped in and seized the abandoned land.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and revised by John Marincola. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.  
• https://linguistics.osu.edu/herodotos/ethnonym/africa/psyllians 
• http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/psylli-e1012690 

The Myths And Legends Behind Ireland’s Lack Of Snakes

(Left: Bede illustrated by James Doyle Penrose (1862-1932), center: Common snake depicted in the book of M. C. Cooke (Mordecai Cubitt), c. 1893, right: St. Patrick from the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows, all [Public Domain] via Creative Commons and Flickr)

An interesting fact about Ireland is that it has no native snake population, besides those found in zoos or kept as pets. From what scientists have determined, the lack of snakes in Ireland dates back before the end of the last major Ice Age around 8,000 BCE. During the Ice Age, the climate in Ireland was deadly to snakes, and by the time the temperature became more hospitable, snakes still had not been able to migrate to the Emerald Isle before rising water (caused by glacial shifts and melts at the end of the Ice Age) separated it from the rest of Britain around 6,500 BCE. England is said to have been connected to mainland Europe for a few extra thousand years (until around 4,500 BCE), allowing it to be populated by species such as grass snakes, smooth snakes and adders. Ireland, however, remained snakeless, without even a hint of fossil evidence to be found, suggesting that no native snake species have ever lived in Ireland.

Science, even though it has the facts in this case, definitely does not have the special flair present in the folklore, myth and legend that was developed by ancient and medieval people to explain the absence of snakes in Ireland. The more popular of the tales is the miraculous feat attributed to the 5th-century apostle to Ireland, St. Patrick. As the story goes, St. Patrick managed to corral all of the snakes of Ireland together and drive them entirely off a cliff into the depths of the ocean.

The story of St. Patrick clearing Ireland of snakes was probably not known to another important clergyman of the British Isles, named Bede (673-735 CE). Venerable Bede made no mention of St. Patrick in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People—instead, he thought a man named Palladius was the most important missionary to Ireland. As a result, Bede included his own theories (containing nothing to do with St. Patrick) as to why Ireland has no snakes. Some readers of Bede’s history think he wrote the passage with a sense of sarcasm, which he, indeed, was known to use on occasion. Yet, the statements are still up for interpretation. This is the peculiar passage in Bede’s History that suggests that Ireland has a mystical resistance to snakes and all things poisonous.

“There are no reptiles, and no snake can exist there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling” (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Chapter 1).

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (and relevant letters), translated by Leo Sherley-Pride, R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.  
• http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080313-snakes-ireland_2.html 
• https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/the-real-reason-why-there-arent-any-snakes-in-ireland-sorry-st-patrick  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Patrick

Did Xerxes Of Persia Bury Alive 18 Greek Youths?

(Xerxes at the Hellespont, by Adrien Guignet  (1816–1854), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Xerxes I (or Khshayarsa) was the son of Darius I and the grandson of Cyrus the Great. With two great kings as his predecessors and ancestors, Xerxes would need to be bold and ambitious to be seen as an equal among the likes of his forefathers. When Xerxes’ reign began around 486 BCE, his immediate action was to crush rebellion and dissent in his empire. Only after putting down rebellions in Egypt and Babylonia, did Xerxes hesitantly begin to amass an army for an invasion of Greece.

Xerxes’ father, Darius I, had launched his own campaign against the Greeks, but was thwarted after a major defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. After that, until the day he died in 486 BCE, Darius I continuously prepared for another invasion of Greece to seek revenge and to regain lost face. Although Darius was never able to lead this invasion, his son eventually carried out the plan.

Xerxes apparently never had much enthusiasm for the invasion of Greece, yet pressure from his courtiers and a series of mystical dreams convinced him to go forward with the campaign. He mustered an army more than 300,000 men strong, inflated by Herodotus to be in the millions. The Persian forces crossed from Asia into Europe across the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles), using rows of ships as a bridge. According to Herodotus, Xerxes marched through Greece to make camp at Thessalonica, in the modern region of Saloniki.

One particularly horrifying event stands out in Herodotus’ account of the Persian army’s voyage from the Hellespont to Thessalonica. In his usual style, Herodotus included folklore and popular hearsay in his description of the Persian movements. There is no way to know if the following story really occurred, but Herodotus and many of his contemporary Greeks believed in the tale and thought that the Persians were capable and willing enough to carrying out the atrocity.

The story took place when Xerxes was near Mt. Pangaeum and the Strymon River. He needed to cross the river, and found his crossing point in the territory of the Edoni. The place he chose to bridge the Strymon was apparently named Nine Ways, a title that would cause the deaths of numerous local inhabitants.

Upon reaching Nine Ways, Herodotus wrote that Xerxes was suddenly inspired to make a sacrifice. Perhaps, he was worried about crossing the river. An earlier storm had momentarily thwarted his crossing at the Hellespont, for which he allegedly had the water whipped for its impudence. Whatever the cause, Herodotus wrote that Xerxes wanted divine support for the crossing at Nine Ways.

Xerxes had his priests, the Magi, conduct rituals and sacrifice horses in honor of the river, but there was one more action the Persians would take before leaving the region. Inspired by the name, Nine Ways, Xerxes supposedly was struck by a horrendous idea. According to Herodotus, the Persians rounded up nine boys and nine girls from the local inhabitants of Nine Ways, and buried them all under the earth while they were still alive. With eighteen youths left suffocating in the ground, Xerxes continued on his march to Thessalonica and his ultimately destructive, but unsuccessful, invasion of Greece.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

Sources:

• The Histories by Herodotus, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and revised by John Marincola. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.  
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Xerxes-I 
• http://www.ancient.eu/Xerxes_I/ 

Dionysius and Bede—The Monks Who Created The B.C. And A.D. Style Of Dating Years

(Homilary, Portrait of the Venerable Bede, Walters Manuscript W.148, fol. 3vHomilary, Portrait of the Venerable Bede, Walters Manuscript W.148, fol. 3v, [Public Domain] via Flickr)

Ancient and medieval Christian clergy had a dire problem that they needed to solve—the churches of different regions could not decide on how to calculate the date of their holy day of Easter. It was only around 525 A.D./CE, when a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (470-544 A.D./CE) proposed a dating system that could be standardized throughout the various regional churches. He argued that dates after the birth of Jesus should be labeled as Anno Domini, or “In the year of our/the Lord.” Using scripture and other sources he had available to him, Dionysius basically made an educated guess as to where 1 A.D. should be placed on the timeline. Dionysius never claimed that his designation of 1 A.D. was precisely the year that Jesus was born (and the date of Jesus’ birth remains highly debated), but Dionysius kept with his system and started what would become a Western tradition.

Even though Dionysius began the use of A.D. for the years after Jesus’ birth, he did not develop the use of B.C. for the years prior to Jesus—in fact, Dionysius rather wanted to exclude Roman figures like Julius Caesar and Nero from his timeline. It would take another monk with an obsession for finding a standardized date for Easter to bring the use of B.C. into the Western world.

This monk’s name was Bede. He was born near the monastery of Wearmouth in 673 A.D./CE, and spent almost his entire life as a monk. Like Dionysius, he was desperate to unite the different divisions of Christianity under a single system of dating. Bede, sometimes called “the Father of English History,” used Dionysius’ A.D. to designate dates after the birth of Jesus, and began referring to dates that occurred before the birth of Jesus as “B.C.” (Before Christ). Bede’s highly acclaimed achievement, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 A.D./CE), was very influential in spreading the use of B.C. and A.D. in history, both secular and non-secular. By the reign of Charlemagne, the dating style of Dionysius and Bede had become fairly common in Europe, but it would take until the 15th and 16th centuries for the use of A.D. and B.C. to be truly adopted into calendars. Dionysius and Bede’s system of dating remains in use to this day, either as the original B.C. and A.D., or as the more universally used BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).

Written by C. Keith Hansley

Sources:

• From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (and relevant letters), translated by Leo Sherley-Pride, R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.  
• http://www.ancient.eu/article/1041/ 
• http://www.historytoday.com/michael-ostling/bcad-dating-year-whose-lord