Aristaeus

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.^[6] 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:

For some men to call Zeus and holy Apollo.
Agreus and Nomios,^[7] and for others Aristaios (Pindar)

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.^{[citation needed]}
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• 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;^[8] 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.^[9]
• Aristaeus is also a patron god of shepherds, herding, sheep shearing, and pastoralism, as well as cattle and pastures.^{[citation needed]}
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• From Hestia, Aristaeus learned of cooking and baking. He presided over quern-stones, gristmills, watermills, and ovens.^{[citation needed]}
• From Poseidon, Aristaeus learned fishing and spearfishing.^{[citation needed]}
• 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.^{[citation needed]}
• From Hephaestus, Aristaeus learned how to work with metal, stone, clay, glass, and wood. He presides over clay kilns, masonry ovens, and charcoal piles.^{[citation needed]}
• In Ceos, Aristaeus is a god of the Etesian winds.^[10]

When he was grown, he sailed from Libya to Boeotia, where he was inducted into further mysteries in the cave of Chiron the centaur. In Boeotia, he was married to Autonoë and became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, who inherited the family passion for hunting, to his ruin,^[11] and of Macris, who nursed the child Dionysus.

According to Pherecydes, Aristaeus fathered Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night.^[12] Hesiod's Theogony suggests her parents were Perses and Asteria.

Aristaeus' presence in Ceos, attested in the fourth and third centuries BC,^[13] 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,^[14] following a pre-dawn chthonic sacrifice to Sirius, the Dog-Star, at its first annual appearance,^[10] 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.^[15] Aristaeus appears on Cean coins.^[16]

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.^[17]

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.^[8]

Soon after Aristaeus' inadvertent hand in the death of Eurydice—whose husband, Orpheus, in one version, is Aristaeus' own half-brother, via Apollo (another version says that her husband, Orpheus, was fathered by Oeagrus)—his bees became sickened and began to die. Seeking counsel, first from his mother, Cyrene, and then from Proteus, Aristaeus learns that the bees' death was a punishment for causing the death of Eurydice, from her nymph sisters. To make amends, Aristaeus needed to sacrifice 12 animals (or four bulls and four cows) to the gods, and in memory of Eurydice, leave the carcasses in the place of sacrifice, and to return three days later. He followed these instructions, establishing sacrificial altars before a fountain, as advised, sacrificed the aforementioned cattle, and left their carcasses. Upon returning there days later, Aristaeus found within one of the carcasses new swarms of bees, which he took back to his apiary. The bees were never again troubled by disease.^[8]

A variation of this tale was told in the 2002 novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.^[18]

In later times, Aristaios was a familiar Greek name, borne by several archons of Athens and attested in inscriptions.^[19]