Ní Mheallaigh, K., 2020, The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy, 13-5.
The image of the celestial deities Helios and Selene traversing the sky either on horseback (usually Selene) or driving a horse-drawn chariot (usually Helios) was ubiquitous in ancient visual culture. Their mobility –they are always in transit– emphasized their inseparable connection withthe passage of time. The most conspicuous of the images that survive, arguably, are Pheidias’ sculptures of the birth of Athena on the eastern pediment of the Parthenon in Athens (428BC–432BC), which showed Helios’ chariot springing up over the eastern horizon, while on the otherside Selene’s tired horses sank over the west. This traditional imagery also infiltrated private spaces on cups and jars, objects whose circular shape androtation could re-enact the motions of the celestial deities, as Squire has argued for Tabula 4N. Although never regarded as one of the major Greek gods, Selene was identified with other goddesses such as Artemis and Hecate and Aphrodite of the Heavens. She was also worshipped in more intimate, domestic settings, on which level her importance was probably pervasive.
The Moon’s phases were critical markers for religious worship of many different sorts. Religious festivals tended to cluster around the full Moon, no doubt in order to avail of the light it offered for nocturnal celebrations; in the eighteenth century, similarly, the learned society of the ‘Lunar Men’would hold their monthly meetings on the same evening in order to take advantage of precisely these conditions. It is for this reason that a Greek epigrammatist hails the Moon as‘Selene, friend of all-night festivals’, and a fragment of Sappho’s poetry describes women gathering around an altar at full Moon (‘the Moon appeared full,/ and they stood around an altar...’). As we shall shortly see, this was likely to have been the occasion for the ritual that was celebrated in one of Alcman’s enigmatic Spartan songs as well. The new Moon was also important for a variety of purposes, e.g. the collection of debts, while both new and full Moon were considered propitious for weddings: in the case of the full Moon, probably because of the implications of fertility, while the new Moon was significant for marking the transition from an old cycle to the new. These associations conspired to make the‘old and new Moon’in theOdyssey a particularly ominous time for the return of Odysseus to his household, bringing with him the exaction of debts, the transition from the old regimeto the new and the reunion of husband and wife.
Ní Mheallaigh, K., 2020, The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
