Mount Ida

Rhea hides the child on Ida

Mount Ida is a mountain in Crete, and its story begins with a birth. Rhea has given birth to Zeus, and the god Kronos threatens to swallow the child, as he has swallowed others. In the Cretan account of the historian Diodorus, Rhea hides Zeus on Ida. She gives him to the Curetes, a group who live near the mountain.

The Curetes carry the baby into a cave. There Nymphs, minor goddesses, feed him honey and the milk of Amalthea. The cave is the Idaean Cave, and it has an entry of its own. This entry is about the mountain around it: its ridges, the divine groups said to live there, and the argument over what the word “Idaean” meant.

The mountain around the cave

The child’s safety depends on the whole mountain, as well as the hollow in it. Diodorus says the cave becomes sacred to Zeus. He then says that the meadows around it on Ida’s ridges were made sacred to the god too.

Those heights are hard country. Fierce winds and heavy snow cross them. Even the story of the bees that feed the child is fitted to that weather. Zeus changes the colour of the bees and protects them from the winter.

So the mountain and the cave are different things. The cave is one opening, with its offerings and its claim to the infant. The mountain is the wider ground of ridges and meadows that Diodorus also treats as holy.

Ida, Dicte or Arcadia

Ancient writers did not agree that Zeus began his life on Ida alone. The poet Callimachus opens his Hymn to Zeus by asking whether the god was born on Ida or in Arcadia, a region of the Greek mainland. He chooses Arcadia. He then brings the child to Crete and places the armed Curetes around him on Ida’s hills.

Apollodorus, who collected the Greek myths, chooses a cave on Dicte instead. Dicte is a different Cretan mountain. Diodorus keeps both Cretan places in view. Rhea hides Zeus on Ida, but the grown god founds a city at Dicte, where, Diodorus says, the myth placed the birth.

These two names do not mean the same spot. Dicte and Ida are separate landscapes in Crete, and each has its own cave claim. Ida has a strong tradition, but not the only one. Diodorus gives the mountain a cave, sacred meadows, the Curetes and the Nymphs. Callimachus rejects Ida as the birthplace but still gives its hills a place in the child’s upbringing.

The Idaean Dactyls

The mountain had other divine residents, and they are harder to place. Diodorus says the earliest gods remembered in Crete made their home around Mount Ida. They were called the Idaean Dactyls. One account counted a hundred of them. Another made them ten, matching the fingers of two hands.

Diodorus then records a different origin. The historian Ephorus and others made the Dactyls natives of another Mount Ida, in Phrygia, and said they crossed from there into Europe. Diodorus does not choose between the accounts. He goes on to describe a Cretan group of Dactyls who discovered fire and learned to work copper and iron near Aptera.

What Strabo adds

The geographer Strabo keeps still more explanations of the name. In one, the Dactyls were the people of Ida’s lower slopes, the mountain’s “feet”. In another, they were ten siblings named after their number.

Strabo also says that the outer edges of Ida were sacred to the Mother of the Gods. These accounts show that ancient writers disputed what “Idaean” meant. For them it named more than an address on the mountain.

What came out of the cave

The objects that survive from the mountain come from the Idaean Cave. The Archaeological Museum of Heraklion holds bronze shields and a bronze tympanon, a kind of round drum, that were left there with other offerings. The tympanon dates to 730 to 680 BC. On it a bearded figure stands over a bull and holds a lion. Winged figures with drum-like discs stand on either side.

Modern scholars read the scene as Zeus and the Curetes, whose clashing weapons hid the baby’s cries. They also see Assyrian, Minoan and Doric elements in it. They leave open whether the object was brought in from abroad or made locally under eastern influence.

These finds belong to the cave. Their meaning reaches the mountain Diodorus describes, the protected ground around the hidden child and the disputed home of the Dactyls.