Britomartis

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Minos and Britomartis. Limoges around 1600

The nymph Britomartis ( Greek  Βριτόμαρτις , sweet virgin ) is a figure in Greek mythology . She was a daughter of Zeus and Karme (daughter of Eubuleus ) on the island of Crete . Sometimes she was also called Diktynna or Aphaia .

Mythology and history

King Minos - also a child of Zeus - fell in love with her and chased the wild girl through the mountains of Crete for nine months. When he was almost able to take hold of her on a steep cliff in the Dikte Mountains, her dress caught on a myrtle branch; she saved herself by jumping into the sea and landed in the nets of fishermen who brought her to safety. Her name "Diktynna" is reminiscent of δίκτυον, diktyon ("network"). Artemis later elevated her to the rank of goddess; Diktynna served her and protected mountains, coasts, nets and ports. However, the name Diktynna was also an epithet of Artemis himself.

In addition to fishing nets, Diodor's name is traced back to hunting nets, and Strabo to the Cretan mountain Dikte. In modern research, all of these derivations are highly controversial.

According to another tradition, she came to the island of Aigina in the boat of a fisherman named Andromedes . She hid from his stalking in the forest of a mountain on which her sanctuary stands today. There she was revered as Aphaia in Mycenaean times ( aphanes = hidden, invisible).

A temple on Aigina was later dedicated to Athena Aphaia. Another of their temples also stood in a suburb of Athens .

In Minoan art on coins, and on seals and rings in ancient Greece, Britomartis was depicted with monsters. She carried a two-handed ax and was accompanied by wild animals.

Most scholars think that Britomartis was actually a Minoan deity, and the separation of the two figures Aphaia in Aigina and Diktynna in western Crete happened later.

As Diktynna , she was also associated with Mount Dikte, one of the traditional birthplaces of Zeus. Although her temples were also located in Athens, Sparta and Las , she was at first a local deity that was only significant in western Crete, for example in Lisos or western Kydonia . According to mythology, their temples were protected by diabolical dogs that were stronger than bears.

The beautiful blond Britomart puts on her guns. Stained glass window in Cheltenham Ladies' College based on a design by Frederic Shields (ca.1880)

Literary adaptation

Britomart is a character in Edmund Spenser's verse epic The Faerie Queene , a virgin knight who symbolizes chastity. She also portrays military might as a virtue of England : her name can be understood as a play on words, as a combination of Brit (ain), Britannia, and Mars , the Roman god of war. Spenser dedicates an entire book to her in his epic verse. The broad story in which he embroils her also includes compromising homoerotic situations that the heroine gets into.

Northrop Frye and others see her as a symbol for the then English Queen Elizabeth I with the difference that Britomart, as the legendary ancestor of Elizabeth, cannot remain a virgin all her life, but has to open up to love for a man in order to become a mother.

In her essay “The Faerie Queene - Spenser and Apollon”, Camille Paglia calls Spenser's Britomart one of the most sexually complex female figures in literature ... a dazzling Apollonian androgynous with the figure of a boy. But she, who beats one male main character after the other ... renounces the athletic and combative in favor of motherhood. This idealization of strong, free female figures is typical of the English Renaissance , while women, for example, had to play a subordinate, expressionless role in the art of the Italian Renaissance.

literature

Web links

Commons : Britomartis (nymph)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Pausanias 2,30,3
  2. a b Callimachos , Hymnos 3 (An Artemis), 189-200; Karl Kerényi , The Mythology of the Greeks , Vol. 1, ISBN 3-423-01345-1 , p. 117.
  3. Wilhelm Gemoll, Greek-German School and Handbook . G. Freytag Verlag / Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Munich / Vienna 1965.
  4. Diod. 5, 76, 3-4.
  5. ^ Strabo: Geographika . tape 10 , 4.12.