Polemics

Polemos ( ancient Greek Πόλεμος Pólemos "fight, war"; Latinized Bellum ) is the personification of war in Greek mythology .

For Pindar , the earliest source of a personified conception of war, he is the father of the Alala , who embodied the battle cry. In the peace of Aristophanes he appears and locks the peace in the form of the goddess of peace Eirene . There he is also the father of Kydoimos , the daimon of hand-to-hand combat, who helps his father as a servant. The Suda , a Byzantine lexicon from the 10th century, knows Deimos and Phobos as further sons . Quintus of Smyrna calls him brother of the Enyo . According to a fable of Aesop that has been handed down by Babrios , Polemus was married to hubris , whom he followed everywhere. Therefore, hubris (“arrogance, presumption”) should not be given a place, because otherwise war would come. In Virgil's description of the entrance to the underworld, he is named as Bellum among the characters who have their place there : the deadly war that threateningly occupies the threshold to the underworld.

literature

• Gertrud Herzog-Hauser : Polemos. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume XXI, 2, Stuttgart 1952, Sp. 1358.
• Otto Höfer : Polemos . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.2, Leipzig 1909, Col. 2607 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Polemos in the Theoi Project (English)

Remarks

1. ↑ Pindar, fragment 78 from the dithyrambs , obtained from Plutarch , De gloria Atheniensium 7.
2. ↑ Suda , keyword Δεῖμος , Adler number: delta 327 , Suda-Online .
3. ↑ Quintus of Smyrna 8,426.
4. ↑ Aesop, Fable 367 of the Pery Index (Babrios 70).
5. ↑ Virgil, Aeneid 6,279.