The Alkyonian Lake

The road reaches water at Lerna

The Alkyonian Lake was a small lake at Lerna, in the Argolid, the country around the city of Argos. The ancient travel writer Pausanias came to Lerna through a stretch of rivers, springs and sacred ground.

Before he entered the sacred grove, he passed a stone enclosure. People said that the god Pluto had gone below the earth there with Kore. Within the grove stood Demeter and Dionysus, and rites called the Lernaia belonged to the place. A rite is a fixed act of worship. The lake came late in this walk, after the spring of Amphiaraus.

Dionysus goes down for Semele

Pausanias calls the lake Alkyonia. The Argives, the people of Argos, told him a story about it. The god Dionysus went down through this water to Hades, the world of the dead, to bring back Semele, his mother. A man named Polymnus showed him the way.

Pausanias does not turn this local story into a map of the underworld for all Greeks. He says whose tradition it is, and he ties it to one small body of water.

Ancient Lerna lies on the western side of the Argolid Gulf, at the modern village of Myloi. Excavation there uncovered a prehistoric settlement, which is a separate matter from the later myths told about the ground. The bottomless Alkyonian Lake belongs to those myths, and it is identified in the village today. The lake survives as one specific part of Lerna, and not as another name for Hades itself.

Nero tries to find the bottom

The story of Nero is the most physical test in Pausanias’s description. The emperor had ropes made many stadia long. A stade was an ancient Greek measure of length. He had the ropes fastened together and weighted with lead. They never reached a limit. Pausanias says he knew of no device by which anyone had found the bottom of the lake.

This is a report of a failure, and it does not measure an endless depth. Pausanias’s own words say only that the lake had no known bottom. His next figures make the visible lake surprisingly small. Its circumference was about one-third of a stade, with grass and reeds around the banks.

So a small, enclosed pool could be imagined as having no floor at all. Cape Tainaron, another way to the underworld, has a cave whose road below Pausanias doubts. Alkyonia has open water whose bottom no human equipment could reach.

A calm surface that does not release swimmers

Pausanias adds another report about how the lake looked and what it could do. The surface seemed calm and gentle. Yet anyone who dared to swim across it was said to be seized, carried down and never released. Pausanias does not claim to have tested this himself.

The warning makes the journey of Dionysus an exception. A god goes through and comes back with Semele. A swimmer is taken and does not come back. The same water is a road in a story about a god, and a deadly edge for a human body.

The reeds keep the scene ordinary at its edge. Nothing in the description needs a grand entrance or a built doorway. The lake’s claim rests on a depth hidden under a calm surface, at a spot where the ground shows no sign of a road.

What Pausanias leaves unwritten

The lake had a place in worship as well as in story. Pausanias says that rites for Dionysus were performed there every year at night. At that point he stops. He writes that it would not be proper to make them public.

His silence sets the limit of what is known. The text confirms a local rite that came back every year, its god, its place and its time of day. It does not say what the worshippers did. No later explanation can turn that silence into evidence.

Lerna holds more than one way below, and keeps them apart. Pluto’s enclosure belongs to the carrying off of Kore. Alkyonia belongs to Dionysus and his return with Semele. The lake stands beside Tainaron because ancient writers tied a different descent to different ground, and recorded how that ground could not be measured.