PREHISTORIC
PART
4 –
Ch.XXV
Prehistoric
monuments of metallurgic art in Dacia
Chrysea Mela – Gaea’s gold apples
According to the
ancient Greek traditions, the eleventh work imposed on Hercules by king
Eurystheus of Myceane had been to bring him the gold apples, chrysea mela, from the garden of the gods, which was near Atlas mountain in the country of the Hyperboreans.
The historian Pherecydis from the 5th
century bc writes the following about the traditional origin of these apples:
that at Jove’s wedding with Juno, Gaea, or Terra,
had brought as gift some gold apples with branches, which the goddess Juno,
admiring them very much, had ordered to be planted in the garden of the gods (lib.
Hercules, after
receiving this task from Eurystheus, leaves
Atlas does this and
Hercules takes the apples to Eurystheus.
Now begins though a
new phase in the history of the stealing of these gold apples.
King Eurystheus
realizes at last that by stealing these apples an impious act had been
committed, and gives them to Hercules. Hercules in his turn, having the same
scruples, does not want to keep them for himself, but gives them to Minerva
(Athena), who takes them back to the place from where they had been stolen,
because to take those apples to another place had been a sacrilege, says Apollodorus (Bibl. II. 5. 11).
According to other
traditions, Hercules had left
It was a formal war
expedition, strateia (Strabo,
Geogr. lib. III. 2. 14), exactly as the expedition for the stealing of the
herds of Geryon, and that of the Argonauts for the stealing and taking to
This is in short
the legendary history of the gold apples from the country of the Hyperboreans.
As Pherecydis tells
us, these famous gold apples, which were guarded in a sacred place near Atlas
mountain, had been a nuptial gift of Gaea at the wedding of her grandchildren,
Jove and Juno. So we have here a characteristic act, part of the ancient
Pelasgian wedding ceremony.
The custom of
giving to the bride one or two apples, when she is given away, has still been
preserved to this day with the Romanian people, especially in the lands across
the Carpathians.
Regarding this, the
priest Fl. Marian from
“In other parts of
Trnasylvania, namely towards Maramures, after the wooers (the trusted men of
the young man who desires to get married) firstly approach the girl’s parents
and find out from their words that they wished to marry out their daughter, one
of them brings out from under his coat a wooden bottle of brandy, and the other
an apple, and they put them on the table. The wooden bottle is like any other
wooden bottles, but the apple is much different from other apples. In it are
usually placed two or three regular coins, a few small coins of silver and at
least a gold coin … and each coin
must be new. At the sight of this, all the people of the house are thoroughly
convinced that these guests are wooers. Everybody knows that the apple is the sign of the giving away …
In these parts the giving away is done through an apple. The wooers put in the
hand of the girl an apple endowed with
money (Marianu, Nunta la Romani,
p. 104, 753).
Now the question is
if these apples, to which antiquity had also attributed a strange power, had
really been of gold, precious objects consecrated to the gods, or if they had
been just plain, natural fruits.
Even the history of
the stealing of these three apples by the sending of an expedition headed by
the most famous hero of antiquity, in order to take them; their being taken to
the southern parts of Greece, and finally, their return, put in evidence the
fact that these apples were not some natural fruits, subjected to decay, but
precious objects of art, with ancient traditions and a particular religious
meaning. (The tradition about the two or
three gold apples from the country of the Hyperboreans is not identical
with the legend about the mythological tree which produced gold apples. This
confusion has been also made during classical antiquity).
In traditional
Romanian songs, the custom of the princely
families to give to the bride or groom, in token of entrusting, an apple of
real gold is even today mentioned (Marienescu,
Balade, II, p. 71-72; Tocilescu,
Mater. Folk. I. 180).
The apples given by
Gaea to Juno in those ancient happy Pelasgian times, otherwise called the
golden age, had been therefore also of gold.
The memory of these
gold apples, as a gift from a divinity, has been still preserved to this day in
Romanian traditions.
So, in a Romanian
folk carol, Hercules figures under the name of Troian, as he also does in other traditions from the Carpathians
and the Balkans (see Ch.XVI.8).
After this
Hercules-Troian worships in the morning in front of the icon, God throws in his
lap two gold apples. In another version Troian receives from God the gold apples,
which he then gives to Saint George.
Under the name of Saint George, as protector of agriculture (Georgos),
figures in this carol Eurystheus, the famous king of
These legendary
gold apples had once been objects consecrated in some temple, probably of
Apollo (Helios, Phoebus, Soare) from the country of the Hyperboreans [1].
[1.In one Romanian carol the Mother
of God (Pelasgian Latona, Leto) says to her son:
Be quiet child, stop
crying, Mother shall give you
Two gold apples, to play with them …
(Barseanu, 50
carols, p. 7- Gazeta Transilvaniei nr.268, 1895)
Some folk carols from around
Ramnicul-Sarat are addressed to the “Apple,
little apple of gold”, words by which must be understood not the tree, but a consecrated gold object in
the shape of an apple.
Other Romanian religious carols tell
how
The fame of the
gold apples from the countries of
Today we drink alus, and tomorrow we depart.
We go to the Hungarian country,
Where the rivers are of
wine,
Where the apples are of gold, and the forests are
like gardens.
(Rhesa,
Dainos, oder Litthauische Volkslieder, Berlin, 1843, p. 57)