Phalanx () is a minor Attic figure in

Greek mythology Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories conc ...

who features in a lesser-known narrative of the myth of

Arachne Arachne (; from , cognate with Latin ) is the protagonist of a tale in classical mythology known primarily from the version told by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE). In Book Six of his epic poem ''Metamorphoses'', Ovid recounts how ...

, the girl who enraged the goddess

Athena Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek religion, ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft who was later syncretism, syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarde ...

by boasting of being a better weaver than her and was thus transformed into a

spider Spiders (order (biology), order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude spider silk, silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and ran ...

by Athena. In this version of the story, Phalanx is Arachne's brother, and they are both punished by the goddess when they break a societal taboo.

Etymology

In ''

Liddell & Scott Liddell is a surname. Notable people with this name, also Lidell, include: * Alan Liddell (1930–1972), English cricketer, son of Allan Liddell * Alice Liddell (1852–1934), Lewis Carroll's "muse" * Allan Liddell (1908–1970), English cricke ...

'' the ancient Greek feminine noun , usually used to mean the ''

phalanx The phalanx (: phalanxes or phalanges) was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar polearms tightly packed together. The term is particularly used t ...

'' (a clustered mass of infantry), can refer among other things to beams, the bone between joints in fingers and toes, round pieces of wood, trunk or logs and generally beam-shaped objects (like a spider's legs). It is related to the word (''phalángion'', literally 'little phalanx') which is the ancient Greek word for the venomous

barrel A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container with a bulging center, longer than it is wide. They are traditionally made of wooden stave (wood), staves and bound by wooden or metal hoops. The word vat is often used for large containers ...

spider. According to Robert Beekes the ending formation in ''-nx'' (also found in the words , , and ) points to a

pre-Greek The pre-Greek substrate (or substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Greek language or languages (either Pre-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages) spoken in prehistoric Greece prior to the emergence of the Proto-Greek language in the r ...

origin for the word.

Family

Phalanx was the brother of

, thus possibly the son of Arachne's father Idmon, a famous purple dyer from Colophon. Through his sister he had a nephew named Closter ("spinner", the son of spider).

Mythology

In the most known and traditional version of the tale, recorded in

Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...

's ''

Metamorphoses The ''Metamorphoses'' (, , ) is a Latin Narrative poetry, narrative poem from 8 Common Era, CE by the Ancient Rome, Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his ''Masterpiece, magnum opus''. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its Cre ...

'', the

Lydia Lydia (; ) was an Iron Age Monarchy, kingdom situated in western Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey. Later, it became an important province of the Achaemenid Empire and then the Roman Empire. Its capital was Sardis. At some point before 800 BC, ...

n maiden

is the (apparently brotherless) child of Idmon. An exceptional Tyrian purple dyer and weaver, she boasts of being even more talented than

, the goddess of weaving. The goddess challenges the girl to a weaving match, and though Arachne's weaving work is without a flaw, Athena is enraged at its subject, as Arachne wove the male gods seducing and tricking mortal women. Athena rips the work to shreds, and Arachne in distress hangs herself. In pity, Athena changes her into a spider, so she can live again, and still practice her art. But in a much more obscure version, saved by a

scholia Scholia (: scholium or scholion, from , "comment", "interpretation") are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments – original or copied from prior commentaries – which are inserted in the margin of the manuscript of ancient a ...

st on

Nicander Nicander of Colophon (; fl. 2nd century BC) was a Greece, Greek poet, physician, and grammarian. The scattered biographical details in the ancient sources are so contradictory that it was sometimes assumed that there were two Hellenistic authors ...

and attributed to Theophilus, a writer of the school of

Zenodotus Zenodotus () was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, Homeric scholar, and the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria. A native of Ephesus and a pupil of Philitas of Cos, he lived during the reigns of the first two Ptolemies, and was at ...

who lived during the third century BC, Arachne was an Attic maiden instead who had a brother named Phalanx. Athena taught Phalanx the art of war, and Arachne the art of weaving. But when the two siblings engaged in an incestuous relationship and laid with each other, they disgusted Athena, who turned them into 'animals doomed to be eaten by their own young', presumably spiders given the more popular tale and the meaning of Phalanx and Arachne's names. Ovid's original Greek source for this tale remains unknown; it is known that he drew a lot from Nicander's now lost works for his ''Metamorphoses'', but if he had heard of this twist in Arachne's character, he chose to omit it. Perhaps he did so because that particular version of the myth might not have been familiar enough among a predominately Roman audience. That being said, there is no evidence to suggest that Nicander himself knew about this version either.

Interpretation

This tale, typical of the sort of Nicander's myths that

Antoninus Liberalis Antoninus Liberalis () was an Ancient Greek grammarian who probably flourished between the second and third centuries AD. He is known as the author of ''The Metamorphoses'', a collection of tales that offers new variants of already familiar myths ...

collected, explains how a particular animal came to be from a transformed human, but also how some of said animals' most prominent features mirror the behaviour exhibited by the humans before their eventual transformation. The main ''aition'' of this story is the explanation for the old common belief that spiders eat their mothers. Unlike Ovid's telling, which places Arachne in

Asia Minor Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...

, in this version she is given a home in

Attica Attica (, ''Attikḗ'' (Ancient Greek) or , or ), or the Attic Peninsula, is a historical region that encompasses the entire Athens metropolitan area, which consists of the city of Athens, the capital city, capital of Greece and the core cit ...

. This is probably because, while ''phalangion'' was used everywhere to mean 'spider', the non-diminutive form ''phalanx'' was applied to spiders only in Attica. In the story, Phalanx serves as a failed representative of Athenian young men, just as Arachne is a failed representative of Athenian maidens and their potential; weaving and military skills were seen as the proper pursuits for youth of each gender, as was a properly controlled sexual urge. Phalanx and Arachne fail not because of any lack of skill on their parts, but rather because they could not control themselves. The male sibling being taught about the craft of war provides an aetiological connection to the ''phalanx'' (as in the military formation), while the female one being instructed in the art of weaving provides a similar connection to spiders weaving their webs. Salzman-Mitchell suggested that perhaps the moral of this myth is that masculine arts (war) should not be mixed with feminine ones (weaving).

References

Bibliography