Minor Mythology: The “Also-Rans” of Legend

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Once upon a time, a mermaid troubled the waters of Beaufort, South Carolina. 

Jason Ryan (“City Council Delays Decision on Waterfront Park Art,” The Beaufort Gazette, January 18, 2006) wrote that controversy erupted in August,2005,  when the city’s Public Arts Commission suggested that a stone statue of a mermaid be placed in the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park, facing the Intracoastal Waterway. A dolphin has now replaced the mermaid, although a number of the mer-folk eventually surfaced as arts installations throughout the city.

From sunny Provence,  France,  comes an even more disruptive piece of public art. In Our France, the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet told of “la Tarasque,” a sort of “tortoise-dragon” that causes the Rhone River to swell and rush in angry floods. Every Saint Martha’s Day, men carry a huge likeness of the monster into the narrow streets of Tarascon, fully meaning to hit everything in their path. No festival is a success, warned Michelet, until “at least one arm has been broken.”

No harm could possibly come from the Astomi, who appear in Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony  (1874).  These wispy creatures, which Flaubert likens to “air bubbles traversed by sunlight,” come to the desert hermit in a vision. Among them are Nisnas (“who have only one eye, one cheek, one leg, half a body, half a heart”), Cynocephales (dog-headed men whose chops drip with blood and milk) and other abominations. Far from threatening Anthony,the Astomi plead their own frailty:

“Do not blow too hard! Raindrops bruise us, harsh sounds grate on us. Made of breezes and perfumes, we roll, we float – a little more than dreams, but not quite beings …”

Such are the “also-rans” of myth and legend, veiled in the shadows of griffins, centaurs, harpies, and trolls. The appeal of imaginary beasts is such that literature abounds in even secondary and tertiary examples.

Speaking of “tertiary,” the Oxford Dictionaries Askoxford.com website lists those also-ran adjectives that follow “tertiary,” starting with the fourth order: quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary. Separate words also exist for “twelfth order” (duodenary) and “twentieth order” (vigenary).

In Greek mythology, the Laestrygonians were man-eating giants descended from the sea god, Poseidon. According to Michael Grant and John Hazel (in Who’s Who in Classical Mythology, their port city of Telepylus was “distinguished by the shortness of its night and the fine haven afforded by its harbor.” The daughter of the giants’ chieftain greeted Odysseus and his crew at the docks and took them straight to the royal hall. Her father was less hospitable and promptly ate one of the Greeks. As the sailors fled, the whole city pursued them, sinking Odysseus’ ships with boulders. The Laestrygonians speared the helpless swimmers and brought them home for supper. Shrewd Odysseus got away only because he had thought to moor his own ship at the entrance of the harbor.

Far smaller and friendlier were the lares of ancient Roman households.  D. M. Field (in Greek and Roman Mythology) wrote that the lares may have originally been the spirits of ancestors.  In time, they became “the guardians of farm boundaries and of crossroads, … protectors of travelers,” and eventually the guardians of individual families. A congenial lar appears onstage in a comedy by Plautus (born around 254 B.C.) and informs the audience that he is the guardian spirit of the family they had just seen. He tells of how the daughter comes to his image each day with incense, garlands, wine and other gifts. By custom, women also left their old toys with the lares before leaving their families to get married.