The Nameless Horror

      One striking feature of classical myth that just about every character, no matter how insignificant, is assigned a name by some author or other. Achilles’ horse has a name. Actaeon’s hunting dogs all have names. The Minotaur, that abomination of a child nobody wanted, was given a proper Greek name before his parents threw him into an inescapable prison. When the hero Bellerophon decided to transgress the limits of humanity and offend the gods by attempting to climb Mount Olympus, not only did the horse he was riding have a name, but even the fly that the gods sent to bite the horse and knock Bellerophon off the mountain had a name. So it is a shocking rarity to report that the character I want to describe here doesn’t have a name. (I’m reminded of the Lord of the Rings, in which every character imaginable is equipped with a name--sometimes several names--as well as a lineage running back to the arrival of the Maiar…but there’s one character, ‘the Mouth of Sauron,’ who is singled out for not having a name, and it’s all part of his lengthy and intensely evil backstory. This is something similar.)

      This story is related in Statius’ Thebaid, when some strangers have wandered into a new town, and the inhabitants of the town are explaining why they make extra offerings to Apollo. It starts out like a typical hero-origin story, in which a god sleeps with a mortal woman and they have a child. The bastard is not accepted into his mother’s royal home and is secretly given to a shepherd to raise, the same sort of thing that happens to heroes like Perseus, Romulus and Remus, Aesculapius, Ion, plenty of people. But then this typical Raglan hero story takes an abrupt left turn when the infant is inexplicably mauled to death by dogs. The baby’s mother finds out and gives her secret away by going into a (quite justified) screaming fit. As punishment for having a bastard child, her father condemns her to death. The only one left to handle the aftermath of this episode is Apollo, who is incensed that his child has been killed and decides to wreak revenge upon the offending mortal. Apollo dredges up from the underworld a demon: a savage, grotesque-looking woman with iron claws and a snake growing out of her forehead, someone who devours the children of others to avenge Apollo’s dead child. Eventually a hero steps forward to banish the demon and offer himself as a sacrifice. Apollo responds with mercy uncharacteristic of the typically petty and implacable gods: he lets the hero go unharmed. But until that hero steps forward, the demon terrorizes the city by feeding on children. She has no name.

      Or perhaps she has many names. There is a well established tradition in Greek folklore of a child-killing demon who goes by various names: Lamia, Mormo, Strix, and others. Typically her backstory describes her as a woman who lost a young child, or possibly killed her own children in a moment of temporary insanity, and who now, as a supernatural being, jealously deprives other parents of their children. She embodies anxieties--very common in societies with high infant mortality rates--that parents won’t get to see their children grow up, possibly due to some cause that is poorly understood. But generally references to this demon are confined to folklore and don’t bleed over into highbrow literature, which is why it’s odd to see Statius describe her, and possibly why she isn’t given a name.

      Incidentally, the hero who defeats the demon does have a name: Coroebus. He’s not the most famous hero in the world, but he does have a role in that masterpiece of Latin literature, the Aeneid: he’s come to Troy as a suitor for Cassandra, and is devotedly in love with his prospective bride (fairly common in ancient literature, but probably pretty unusual in the real-life Greek world of arranged marriages). Cassandra, you may know, had her own run-in with Apollo: in one of the extremely rare instances when Apollo attempted to persuade a woman to have sex with him rather than directly raping her, he offered Cassandra the ability to see the future in exchange for sleeping with him. They shook on it, he gave her the gift of prophecy, she refused to sleep with him after all, and he cursed her to always be disbelieved. (You’d think she might have foreseen that problem before she backed out of the deal--unless sleeping with Apollo is so unpleasant that the alternative string of catastrophes looked more appealing.) So she went through life suffering terrible catastrophes but being unable to avert them (because she’s a princess, her identity has political capital used by powerful people who control her life and she doesn’t make any meaningful decisions about what happens to her. Even if she knows that her hometown is about to be overrun by an invading army, she doesn’t have the option to just leave). What with all the terrible things that happen to her, I still can’t believe that ‘Cassandra’ ever caught on as a popular name in the modern world.

      Anyway, after Cassandra has her unpleasant run-in with Apollo, she has a doomed love affair with Coroebus, that hero who had his own unpleasant run-in with Apollo. I guess they had lots in common, plenty to talk about before they each died their very painful and tragic deaths. Coroebus, I would say, got the better deal, since he was killed off quickly in battle during the Trojan War, trying to defend Cassadra from some invading enemies. Cassandra survived the city’s fall, was sold into slavery, and almost certainly raped before she was murdered by her owner’s wife--and spent the entire time knowing what would happen and trying vainly to change the future. With all those grim horrors completed, I hope Apollo was satisfied with the level of cruelty he achieved against his enemies.