CHAPTER XX - EILEITHYIA

Summary

The figure of Eileithyia, whose worship was ancient and widely prevalent, illustrates the strong tendency in the Greek polytheism towards the multiplicity of personages; for while Hera and Artemis were pre-eminently goddesses of childbirth, the goddess Eileithyia was developed to take special charge of this department, and to play a direct physical part in assisting the processes of birth. She was developed in all probability out of Hera herself, and is identified most frequently with her, though sometimes also with Artemis. The name—whatever its exact original sense may have been—has an adjectival form, and was primarily, we may believe, an epithet of Hera, and then detached from her and treated as the name of a separate divinity. We hear of the worship of Hera Eileithyia in Attica, and there is some reason for believing that it existed in Argos also; a passage in Hesychius seems to explain Εἰλείθυια as the Argive Hera, and Suidas mentions a strange statue of Hera at Argos which represented her with a pair of shears in her hand, an emblem which can scarcely belong to her as an agricultural goddess, and which can only be interpreted as alluding to the cutting of the umbilical cord.

It is true also that the assimilation of the goddess of birth to Artemis seems to have been no less frequent.