Iris

A swift family

Iris was a messenger of the gods. The early Greek poet Hesiod names her parents as Thaumas and Electra. He also makes them the parents of Aello and Ocypetes, the Harpies, who fly as fast as the winds and the birds. What links the messenger and these snatchers is speed. In character they are not alike.

Iris uses the speed of her family to connect powers that are far apart. A message works only if it arrives whole and in time. In her stories, carrying a message is an action with its own risks and results.

Water from the edge of the world

Sometimes a quarrel breaks out on Olympus, the home of the gods, and one god is accused of lying. Then Zeus does not ask for another speech. He sends Iris far from the gods’ assembly to fetch cold water from Styx in a golden vessel.

Styx is both a goddess and a stream. Hesiod places her in a distant house, roofed with huge rocks and held up by silver columns. The stream that falls there is a tenth part of the water of Ocean, the great river around the world. By it the gods swear their greatest oath. Iris seldom makes this journey. She is sent only when ordinary claims and denials can no longer settle a quarrel among the gods.

The god who pours out the water and swears falsely falls down without breath for a year. In that time he gets neither ambrosia nor nectar, the food and drink of the gods. A further time shut out from the gods follows before he can rejoin them. So Iris carries the means by which even gods who cannot die pay for false words.

Why Apollo’s birth needed a messenger

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an early poem in praise of the god, tells of his birth on the island of Delos. His mother Leto has been in labour for nine days and nights. Goddesses are with her. Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, is still on Olympus and knows nothing, because the goddess Hera has kept the news from her. Without Eileithyia, the labour cannot end.

The goddesses on Delos send Iris in secret. They promise Eileithyia a necklace of golden threads 9 cubits long, and they tell Iris not to let Hera know. Iris persuades Eileithyia to leave. As soon as they set foot on Delos, the pains seize Leto and Apollo is born.

Iris does not deliver the child, yet the birth depends on her. She crosses the barrier Hera has set and brings the missing goddess into the scene. In this story, passing on news is part of the event itself. The birth cannot happen until the right goddess knows and comes.

From a sign in the sky to a road

The link between Iris and the rainbow grew over time. Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, uses the same word for the coloured arc that appears in the sky as a sign. In his poems the messenger goddess is a separate figure. Later writers explained the rainbow as her road, or as the trace of her movement between heaven, sea and earth.

That later idea suits her role, but it does not prove that the goddess began as the rainbow given a human form. A bright bridge between two distant points is a natural picture for a messenger, especially one whose family is known for speed.

The staff and the pitcher

In ancient art Iris carries the tools of both her duties. She may stand in a long tunic, with wings and a herald’s staff, the rod carried by an official messenger. Or she may fly, with wings on her shoulders and her sandals, carrying a pitcher. The staff gives her words authority. The pitcher recalls the water of Styx.

The god Hermes later became the better-known messenger of the gods, but Iris keeps a character of her own. On Delos she breaks a silence that Hera had imposed. Her journey to Styx makes the gods speak the truth. In both cases her message has real effects: a birth begins, or a liar loses the privileges of the immortals.

She moves between powers that cannot meet on their own, and the order of Olympus depends on what she brings back.