Dioscuri

Summary

The Dioscuri, Greek Διόσκουροι, Dioskouroi, "sons of Zeus", are twin brothers of the Greeks and Romans: Castor the tamer of horses and Polydeuces the boxer, whom the Romans call Pollux. They are the brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra. The poets disagree about their father. The Homeric Hymn says that Leda bore them to Zeus beneath Mount Taygetus; the Odyssey says she bore them to her husband Tyndareus; and Apollodorus says that Zeus came to her in the form of a swan and Tyndareus lay with her the same night, so that she bore Pollux and Helen to Zeus and Castor and Clytemnestra to Tyndareus, "and on account of their manliness they were both called Dioscuri".

Their best-known story is the story of their death. They went with Idas and Lynceus, the sons of Aphareus, on a cattle raid in Arcadia and let Idas divide the booty. He cut a cow in four and said that whoever ate his share first should have half the booty, and whoever ate second the other half; then he swallowed his own share and his brother's and drove off all the cattle. The Dioscuri lay in wait for them; Lynceus, who was keen-sighted, spied Castor in his hiding place, and Idas stabbed him with his spear and killed him. Pollux chased the brothers and killed Lynceus, Lynceus wounded him in the head with a stone, and Zeus struck Idas with a thunderbolt. Pollux wept for his brother and said to Zeus: order me to die too, along with him. Zeus gave him a choice: if you wish to escape death and old age and dwell on Olympus with me, you may; if you wish to share with your brother, you may breathe half the time below the earth and half the time in the golden homes of heaven. He did not hesitate, and chose to share. So, as the Odyssey says, the earth holds them though they are alive; each lives one day in turn and is dead the next, and Zeus gives them honour like that of the gods.

They are the saviours of sailors. The Homeric Hymn says that when a storm rages the sailors go to the prow and vow white lambs to the sons of Zeus, until suddenly the two are seen darting through the air on tawny wings, and at once the winds fall and the waves are stilled. Diodorus tells that a storm caught the ship of the Argonauts; Orpheus prayed to the gods of Samothrace, the wind died down, and two stars fell over the heads of the Dioscuri. Pliny says that lights like stars settle on the yards and other parts of ships; when there are two they are thought auspicious and to foretell a good voyage, and are said to drive away the dreadful meteor called Helena; when single they are mischievous and sink the vessel.

The idea their story turns on is two brothers who will not let death part them. One is of Zeus's seed and immortal, the other of a man's seed and mortal, and the immortal one shares his immortality with his brother, so that immortality becomes half a life, one day above and one day below. Their image comes from this alternation: two lights that appear together, two horsemen who come in the hour of danger, at sea and in battle, and then are gone. That is how they came to Rome as horsemen at the battle of Lake Regillus, then appeared in the Forum watering their horses and announcing the victory, and vanished.

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 the twins. Διόσκουροι has two parts: Διός, Dios, "of Zeus", and kouroi, "boys, sons". The first part is Zeus's own name in the genitive, which the Zeus page reads as Arabic dhū, with the Greek d in place of dh as in the Juthoor table. LSJ writes the second part kor(w)os, "boy, lad; son; a shoot of a tree", whose letters k, r and w are those of Arabic jirw in their order. In Lane jirw is the whelp of the dog, the lion and any beast of prey, and the small of anything, even the young fruit of the pomegranate and the cucumber. On this reading the Dioscuri are "the two young of dhū", the lord's two cubs. Polydeuces is read from its end: Πολυδεύκης, where poly is Greek "much" and deuk has the letters dh and k of Arabic dhakā. In Lane dhakat al-nār is "the fire blazed", dhukāʾ is a name of the sun, and ibn dhukāʾ, "the son of the sun", is the dawn. So he is "the much-blazing", which is what the texts make him: a star and a fire on the masts.

Linguistic Root

Dhū and jirw

Apollodorus says the brothers were both called Dioscuri, sons of Zeus, though one of them was Tyndareus's. The name is a compound of Διός, the genitive of Zeus, and "boys". LSJ gives Ionic kouros and Attic koros as boy, lad, and son with a father's name in the genitive, and a shoot or sprout of a tree; it notes that at Sparta the kouroi were the horsemen, and that the word is probably korwos, of the family of Latin cresco, to grow. In Lane jirw, jurw and jarw is the whelp of the dog, the lion and any beast of prey, and the small of anything, including the young of the colocynth, the melon, the pomegranate and the cucumber; ajrat al-shajara is said of a tree when its small fruits appear. So both words hold the young creature and the young fruit, and the letters k, r, w stand in the order of j, r, w. The weak point is that Greek writes the Arabic jīm, once pronounced g, with k here, where it more usually writes g. Kouros could also be read as Arabic qurra, since a child is his father's qurrat ʿayn, "the coolness of his eye", and one says "God cooled his eye" with offspring, Greek k answering q; but that reading does not keep the w.

Dhukāʾ

Poly in Polydeuces is Greek "much", and deukēs remains; its end is the Greek noun ending, and when it is removed deuk remains: d, a vowel, k. Greek d answers Arabic dh in the Juthoor table, as in Διός and dhū. In Lane dhakat al-nār is "the fire blazed, burned brightly or fiercely", dhakā al-misk is "the musk gave forth its fragrance", dhukāʾ is the sun, a proper name that takes no article, and ibn dhukāʾ is the dawn, "because it is from the light of the sun". In the texts Polydeuces is the brother with immortality in his blood, and the star that appears on the mast. It is a reading proposed on the method, resting on two letters and leaving poly to its Greek sense.

Qāsir

The Homeric Hymn calls Castor "the tamer of horses". On the method Κάστωρ is Arabic qāsir: Greek k answers q, s is s and r is r. In Lane qasarahu ʿalā al-amr is to force him to the thing against his will, and qasarahu and iqtasarahu are to overpower and subdue him. So Castor is the one who subdues the unbroken horse until it yields. The t between s and r in the Greek name remains without a counterpart; it belongs to the Greek agent ending -tōr.

Key Mythic Narratives

Rescuing Helen and the daughters of Leucippus

Apollodorus tells that Theseus carried off Helen as a girl to Aphidnae; while Theseus was in Hades her brothers marched on the city, took it, brought her back and led away Theseus's mother Aethra as a captive. Later they carried off the daughters of Leucippus from Messene and married them. In the Iliad Helen looks from the wall of Troy for her brothers among the Greek captains and cannot see them; she supposes they stayed away for shame at her disgrace, but they were already held by the earth in their homeland, Lacedaemon.

With the Argonauts

They sailed with Jason on the Argo, and when they reached the land of the Bebryces, whose king Amycus, son of Poseidon, forced strangers to box and so killed them, Pollux came out against him and killed him with one blow.

Lake Regillus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that at the battle of Lake Regillus two horsemen, far beyond human beauty and stature and just growing their first beard, appeared to the dictator Postumius, led the Roman horse and struck down the Latins until they fled. That evening two youths appeared in the Roman Forum in military dress, with the look of men from a battle and their horses all in a sweat; they watered and washed the horses at the spring that rises near the temple of Vesta, told the people of the victory, and were not seen again. The Romans concluded that they were Castor and Pollux, built them a temple in the Forum by the spring, and set a yearly sacrifice on the Ides of Quintilis, the day of the victory, with a procession of those who held a public horse.

The Lavinium tablet

In 1959 excavators at Pratica di Mare, the site of ancient Lavinium, found by the eighth of a row of thirteen altars a small bronze tablet, twenty-nine centimetres long and written from right to left, with a dedication to Castor and Pollux under their Greek title, the kouroi, "the youths". Castagnoli assigned it to the fifth century BCE. So the brothers were worshipped in Latium under their Greek name before Rome's history was written down.

Symbolic Reading

The project's essays do not read the Dioscuri. The Greek rereading essay reads another divine pair of twins, Apollo and Artemis, as the sun and the moon. The Troy dossier links Helen and her brothers through the word ἑλένη, the torch and the fire seen on ships' masts, making the whole family a family of light.

The texts themselves make the brothers lights before they are symbols: two stars falling on their heads in the storm in Diodorus, two lights on the masts in Pliny. The Babylonian star compendium MUL.APIN calls the two bright stars of Gemini, α and β, "the Great Twins", Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea, who in other texts are the twin guardians of the door of the netherworld; they are the same two stars the Greeks call Castor and Pollux.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The closest story to the Dioscuri in India is that of the Aśvins: twin horsemen, called "sons of Heaven", who come in the storm and save the drowning, as they carried Bhujyu across the sea in a flying ship, and who drive a chariot that the daughter of the Sun mounted. In India and Greece the twins are rescuing horsemen who appear in the hour of danger, and both pairs are guests at the gods' table in their stories: the Aśvins are kept from the soma until they are given their share, and Pollux shares immortality with his brother.

Sharing immortality day by day answers the story of Geshtinanna in Sumer: when the demons of the netherworld took Dumuzi in place of Inanna, Inanna decreed that he should stay half the year in the netherworld and his sister Geshtinanna the other half, so that death holds only one of them at a time.

The two stars the Greeks call Castor and Pollux are, for the Babylonians, Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea, the twins associated with Nergal who guarded doors. At Ugarit there is another pair of twins, Shahar and Shalim, dawn and dusk; at Rome Romulus and Remus; among the Etruscans the "sons of Tin", in the divine twins. The brother who lives one day and dies the next is a form of the descent to the underworld, and immortality shared is a form of the food of immortality: Pollux refuses an immortality his brother cannot share, as Adapa refuses the bread of life.