Aristaeus (; ) was the mythological culture hero credited with the discovery of many rural useful arts and handicrafts, including beekeeping. He was the son of the huntress Cyrene and Apollo.
Aristaeus ("the best") was a cult title in many places: Boeotia, Arcadia, Ceos, Sicily, Sardinia, Thessaly, and Macedonia; consequently a set of "travels" was imposed, connecting his epiphanies in order to account for these widespread manifestations.
If Aristaeus was a minor figure at Athens, he was more prominent in Boeotia, where he was "the pastoral Apollo", and was linked to the founding myth of Thebes by marriage with Autonoë, daughter of Cadmus, the founder. Aristaeus may appear as a winged youth in painted Boeotian pottery, similar to representations of the Boreads, spirits of the North Wind. Besides Actaeon and Macris, he also was said to have fathered Charmus and Callicarpus in Sardinia.
Mythological accounts
Pindar's account
According to Pindar's ninth Pythian Ode and Apollonius' Argonautica (II.522ff), Cyrene despised spinning and other womanly arts and instead spent her days hunting and shepherding, but, in a prophecy he put in the mouth of the wise centaur Chiron, Apollo would spirit her to Libya and make her the foundress of a great city, Cyrene, in a fertile coastal plain. When Aristaeus was born, according to what Pindar sang, Hermes took him to be raised on nectar and ambrosia and to be made immortal by Gaia.
"Aristaios" ("the best") is an epithet rather than a name:<blockquote>For some men to call Zeus and holy Apollo.<br>Agreus and Nomios, and for others Aristaios (Pindar)</blockquote>
Diodorus Siculus' account
According to Diodorus Siculus’ Library Aristaeus was born in Libya and nurtured by Nymphs who gave him the added names Nomius and Agreus and taught him to curdle mild, make bee hives and cultivate olive-trees, which he subsequently taught to humans. As an adult Aristeus went to Boeotia and married Autonoe, daughter of Cadmus, who bore their son Actaeon.
After Acteon’s death at the hand of Artemis, Aristaeus visisted the oracle of his father and was told to move to the island of Ceos. Upon arrival Aristeus successfully stopped a plague by offering a sacrifice in the name of all Greeks and left unnamed descendants on the island. After returning to Libya he travelled to the island of Sardinia with the help of his mother where he cultivated the former barren land. He proceeded to visit multiple different places, namely Sicily, where he was especially honored and Thrace where Dionysus initiated him into his secret rites. Finally he settled on Mount Haemus in northern Thrace and from which point on he ceased appearing to mortals and was revered as a god by both Greek and non-Greek peoples.
Patronage
Aristaeus is the patron god of numerous rustic activities, which he learnt from various teachers:
- From Chiron, the Muses, and his father Apollo, Aristaeus learned the arts of prophecy, healing and herblore. As such, he presided over physic gardens.
- From Artemis and his mother, Cyrene, Aristaeus learned how to track, hunt, and trap animals, how to dress and prepare their meat and skins, and how to use nets and traps.
- From the Thessalian nymphs who raised him, Aristaeus learned other useful arts and mysteries: dairying and how to prepare milk for cream, butter, oxygala and cheese; how to keep chickens for their eggs; how to tame bees and keep them in hives, and how to use honey and beeswax; how to tame and cultivate the wild oleaster in order to make it bear olives and how to process them into olive oil. As such, Aristaeus is a protector of olive trees, of olive orchards, oliviculture and of olive oil presses.
- Aristaeus is also a patron god of shepherds, herding, sheep shearing, and pastoralism, as well as cattle and pastures.
- From Dionysus, Aristaeus learned how to produce alcoholic beverages such as wine and mead. As such, he is worshipped as a protector of grapevines, vineyards, winepresses and of viticulture.
- From Demeter, Aristaeus learned agriculture, horticulture, fungiculture and animal husbandry. As such, he was a protector of gardens, farms, fields, and orchards. Some versions also credit Demeter with teaching him leather-making.
- Aristaeus is also a patron god of fruit trees, herbs, spices, edible flowers, fungi, as well as foraging, hunting, fishing, husbandry, agriculture, food preservation, and condiments.
- From Hestia, Aristaeus learned of cooking and baking. He presided over quern-stones, gristmills, watermills, and ovens.
- From Poseidon, Aristaeus learned fishing and spearfishing.
- From Athena, Aristaeus learned to weave and to card and hand-spin fibres into wool and thread. He is the patron of ropemaking, net-making, basket weaving, and working clay and glass.
- From Hephaestus, Aristaeus learned how to work with metal, stone, clay, glass, and wood. He presides over clay kilns, masonry ovens, and charcoal piles.
- In Ceos, Aristaeus is a god of the Etesian winds. and of Macris, who nursed the child Dionysus.
According to Pherecydes, Aristaeus fathered Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night. Hesiod's Theogony suggests her parents were Perses and Asteria.
Aristaeus in Ceos
Aristaeus' presence in Ceos, attested in the fourth and third centuries BC, was attributed to a Delphic prophecy that counselled Aristaeus to sail to Ceos, where he would be greatly honored. He found the islanders suffering from sickness under the stifling and baneful effects of the Dog-Star Sirius at its first appearance before the sun's rising, in early July. In the foundation legend of a specifically Cean weather-magic ritual, Aristaeus was credited with the double sacrifice that countered the deadly effects of the Dog-Star, a sacrifice at dawn to Zeus Ikmaios, "Rain-making Zeus" at a mountaintop altar, following a pre-dawn chthonic sacrifice to Sirius, the Dog-Star, at its first annual appearance, which brought the annual relief of the cooling Etesian winds.
In a development that offered more immediate causality for the myth, Aristaeus discerned that the Ceans' troubles arose from murderers hiding in their midst, the killers of Icarius in fact. When the miscreants were found out and executed, and a shrine erected to Zeus Ikmaios, the great god was propitiated and decreed that henceforth, the Etesian wind should blow and cool all the Aegean for forty days from the baleful rising of Sirius, but the Ceans continued to propitiate the Dog-Star, just before its rising, just to be sure. Aristaeus appears on Cean coins.
Then Aristaeus, on his civilizing mission, visited Arcadia, where the winged male figure who appears on ivory tablets in the sanctuary of Ortheia as the consort of the goddess, has been identified as Aristaeus by L. Marangou.
Aristaeus settled for a time in the Vale of Tempe. By the time of Virgil's Georgics, the myth has Aristaeus chasing Eurydice when she was bitten by a serpent and died.