Eileithyia

Nine days of labour on Delos

Leto is about to give birth to the god Apollo. She lies beside a palm tree on the island of Delos while goddesses wait with her. Nine days and nights pass, but the child cannot be born. Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, is not there. The goddess Hera has kept her on Olympus, the home of the gods, and hidden the news from her.

The other goddesses send Iris, the messenger of the gods, in secret. They promise Eileithyia a necklace of golden threads 9 cubits long. A cubit was an ancient measure of length.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in praise of the god, gives each step in order. Iris brings her to Delos. Eileithyia steps onto the island. The pains seize Leto, and the birth follows.

Eileithyia’s power shows through her presence and her absence. Without her, labour goes on and does not end. With her, the body can finish what it has begun.

Where did the childbirth goddess come from?

The Greek traveller Pausanias records two local answers. The Athenians said Eileithyia came from the Hyperboreans to help Leto on Delos, and that her name spread from the island through Greece. The Cretans said she was born at Amnisos, near Knossos, and was a daughter of Hera.

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives the better-known family. He names Zeus and Hera as her parents, with Ares and Hebe as her brother and sister.

The two local stories need not be one true birthplace and one mistake. Delos explains Eileithyia through the famous birth she made possible. Crete ties her to a place of worship with much older evidence. Each tradition means something different by where she came from.

Honey for e-re-u-ti-ja

A tablet from Knossos, written in the early script called Linear B, carries the place name a-mi-ni-so. Beside it are the name of a god, e-re-u-ti-ja, and the sign for a vessel of honey. A second line records honey for “all the gods.” This reading links Eileithyia with Amnisos in the Bronze Age, several centuries before Homer’s poems were written down.

The tablet tells no myth and names no parents. It records an offering. What it shows is narrower and firmer. A name clearly connected with Eileithyia was already receiving worship at the place later Greeks called her Cretan birthplace.

The cave named inside a lie

The Odyssey is Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus and his journey home. In it, the cave of Eileithyia comes up in a story that Odysseus makes up about his travels. In disguise, he tells Penelope that ships were driven into the difficult harbour of Amnisos, where the cave stood. The story is false within the poem, but the landmark needed no explanation. Listeners could recognise the harbour by its goddess and its cave.

The site lies east of modern Heraklion and stayed in use for a long time. Inside the cave, archaeologists found an enclosed area around cylindrical stalagmites, columns of rock rising from the floor. There were altars and structures near the entrance. The cave was used from the Neolithic, the late Stone Age, through late Roman times, and worship continued into late antiquity.

Rock forms, offerings of honey and the dangers of a harbour all gather at this one place. None of them alone proves the Cretan birth story. Together they show why Amnisos had a strong claim on Eileithyia.

One goddess or several powers?

Homer’s poems can speak of Eileithyiai in the plural, powers of childbirth who act under Hera. That suits the two sides of labour. The same divine power can bring pains on, hold the birth back or release it. A single family tree does not cover every way the goddess was imagined at work.

Her sanctuaries, the sacred places where she was worshipped, also combine traditions. At Olympia she was Eileithyia Olympian, and she shared a building with Sosipolis, a local protecting god who appeared as a child. At Athens, Pausanias saw three fully draped wooden images of her. Two were said to be gifts from Crete. The oldest had come from Delos.

So Crete and Delos stood side by side in the Athenian temple, and neither cancelled the other. Eileithyia’s myths follow the experience she governs. A birth needs her to arrive, yet her power could be called on in more than one form and claimed by more than one home.