Antaeus

Summary

Antaeus is a giant of Libya in Greek myth, Libya being the Greek name for the whole of North Africa. He is the son of Poseidon, and in most accounts of Earth, Gaia; he wrestled the strangers who passed through his land and killed them, and he could not be beaten while his body touched the ground, until Heracles lifted him off it and killed him in the air.

The earliest to mention him is Pindar, in the fifth century BCE. In his fourth Isthmian ode a hero short of stature but unflinching in spirit goes from Thebes to the house of Antaeus in grain-bearing Libya, to stop him roofing Poseidon's temple with the skulls of strangers. In the Library ascribed to Apollodorus, Heracles crosses Libya on his way to the apples of the Hesperides. Antaeus, son of Poseidon, rules it and kills strangers by forcing them to wrestle. Heracles wrestles him, hugs him, lifts him aloft, breaks him and kills him, for whenever Antaeus touched the earth he grew stronger, which is why some called him a son of Earth. Lucan tells it at length through a local man. Earth, after bearing the giants, conceived him in the caves of Libya, and his strength came back whenever his limbs touched his mother. He lived in a cave under a high rock, ate the lions he caught, slept on the bare ground without a bed, and killed the farmers of Libya and the men the sea cast on its shore. Heracles came; each threw off his lion's skin; Heracles oiled his limbs as wrestlers do at Olympia, while Antaeus poured hot sand over his own to stay joined to his mother. Antaeus kept falling on purpose and rising stronger, and when Heracles understood, he said: you will stay standing, and you will fall only onto my chest; he lifted him off the ground and held him to himself until his body went cold, and did not trust him to the earth again.

Antaeus later had a tomb that people visited in the far west. Plutarch tells how the Roman general Sertorius took Tangier, where the Libyans said Antaeus was buried. He had the tomb dug open because he did not believe what was said of its size, found a body sixty cubits long, was dumbfounded, offered a sacrifice, filled the tomb in again and joined in honouring its traditions. The people of Tangier said that after Antaeus died his widow Tinge lay with Heracles and bore him Sophax, who became king of the country and founded a city named after his mother. The historian Gabriel Camps identifies the tomb with the great mound of Mzora south of Tangier, about fifty-six metres across, ringed by standing stones unlike anything else in North Africa; sixty cubits is about twenty-seven metres. Pliny says Antaeus founded Tangier, and that at Lixus on the Atlantic were his palace, the place of his fight with Heracles, and the gardens of the Hesperides.

The idea the story turns on is that Antaeus's strength comes from his land: while his foot is on the soil that bore him he cannot be beaten, and the stranger overcomes him only by cutting him off from it. Heracles in the story is the stranger who comes to Libya and stays. Diodorus of Sicily says that after killing Antaeus he subdued Libya, which was full of wild beasts, and turned it into ploughed fields, vineyards and olive groves, and Plutarch says the ancestors of Juba, the history-loving king of Mauretania, were said to descend from his son by Antaeus's widow. So the giant stands for the land's first owner, and it is the people of the country who say he is buried among them and make him the source of their kings. In Diodorus's Egyptian version, Osiris appoints Antaeus governor of the lands bordering Ethiopia and Libya, with Heracles as his general. Arrian says Heracles consulted the oracle of Ammon at Siwa when he went against Antaeus.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read Antaeus. The Greek is Ἀνταῖος, Antaios; the -os is the nominative ending, leaving two consonants, n and t, after an opening vowel. In the Juthoor table of Greek correspondences Arabic ʿ drops at the start of a word or becomes a vowel, so we read the opening vowel as a dropped ʿ, giving ʿanat. In Lane, ʿanat is falling into hardship and distress; aʿnatahu is to bring someone into hardship, and later came to mean to destroy him; and ʿanita al-ʿaẓm is said of a bone that broke after it had been set and had knit. That is what the story makes him: a giant who brings strangers into hardship and then destroys them, and a body that comes back whole whenever it touches the ground, until Heracles lifts it and breaks it. Beside ʿanat in meaning stands ʿānada, to oppose and go against, and ʿanad, the side, which is close to the Greek adjective ἀνταῖος, "set over against".

Linguistic Root

The Greek lexicon derives the adjective ἀνταῖος from ἄντα, "face to face", and gives it the sense "set over against, right opposite", as in a blow taken full in the chest. The giant stands in the way of everyone who comes, so in Greek the name is close to "the one who faces you". The Arabic reading takes the same n and t, and reads the opening vowel as a dropped ʿ, as ʿanbar lost its ʿ when it became Greek ἄμβαρ. In the Juthoor table of prefixes Arabic ʿan answers the Latin and English prefixes in- and un-, so an Arabic opening ʿ-n appears in the western languages as a vowel and n. On ʿanat every consonant is read in order; on ʿanad, d answers t, a difference of one letter.

Lane gives ʿanat senses that touch the whole story: hardship and distress, destruction, a sin deserving punishment; taʿannatahu, he harmed him and sought to bring him into hardship; ʿanitat ad-dābbah, the beast went lame from a load it could not bear; and ʿanita al-ʿaẓm, the bone broke after it had been set. Under ʿ-n-d: ʿanada ʿan aṭ-ṭarīq, he turned aside from the road; ʿānadahu, he opposed him; ʿanīd, one who rejects the truth while knowing it; ʿanad, the side. The reading's limit is that the Greek word is an ordinary one with its own Greek origin, and no ancient spelling of the name shows an ʿ. Camps suggests the name may be Egyptian, from a god whose name is read "Antiwey". The Egyptian dictionary does list a god Ꜥnt.j, "Anti", written with ʿ, attested once in the Pyramid Texts, in Utterance 484, where King Pepi is parted from "Anti, his brother" and joined to "Afti", another brother. And Diodorus of Sicily names a village in Egypt "now known as Antaeus", on the Arabian side of the Nile, after the Antaeus whom Heracles punished in the time of Osiris. So the name has an old Egyptian spelling beginning with ʿ, just what the reading assumes when it takes the opening Greek vowel for a dropped ʿ, and the story has a home in Egypt. What remains is that the god of that district, the falcon lord of Tjebu, the town the Greeks called Antaiopolis, is read today Nmt.j, Nemti, so it is not yet shown that the Greek name was taken from Ꜥnt.j.

Key Mythic Narratives

Antaeus's daughter at Irasa

In the ninth Pythian ode Pindar names a Libyan Antaeus in the city of Irasa near Cyrene, whose beautiful-haired daughter was sought by many kinsmen and strangers. He did as Danaus had done at Argos with his daughters: he set her at the end of the course and said that whoever ran first and touched her robe would take her home. Alexidamus won, took her by the hand and led her through the Nomad horsemen, who showered him with leaves and garlands. Camps notes that Pindar does not say Antaeus lived at Irasa.

Where did Heracles wrestle Antaeus?

The storytellers disagreed about where Antaeus lived, as they disagreed about Atlas and the garden of the Hesperides. Lucan puts his realm in the hills by the river Bagradas, the Medjerda in Tunisia, where Scipio camped when he invaded Africa; Pliny puts it at Lixus on the Atlantic; Plutarch puts his tomb at Tangier. Camps thinks Tangier the best attested, and links Heracles's place there with the cult of the Phoenician Melqart, whom the Greeks called Heracles; he notes that Pomponius Mela speaks of a huge shield of elephant hide at Tangier said to be Antaeus's.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Amazigh tradition people have lived in Ifri, the cave, since the earliest times, and Lucan says Antaeus's home was a cave under a high rock; Antaeus eats lions, and in the Amazigh essay Izem, the lion, guards the springs. In the North, Ymir is the first giant, killed so that the earth is made from his body, while Antaeus is born of the earth and dies when cut off from it: the one becomes the land, the other cannot live away from it. In the East, the Tyrian Heracles, that is Melqart, holds the sea road to the west, and Tangier and Cádiz are among its stations.