Aganippe

Also Known As: Greek Ἀγανίππη, Aganippê; the Muses are sometimes called the Aganippides after her
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A spring at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses and personified as a naiad, whose water later tradition treated as a source of poetic inspiration.
Role in Mythos: It marks the approach to the Muses’ grove on Helicon and stands beside Hippocrene as one of the two waters the Muses were imagined to own.
Relation to Humans: Worshippers bound for the grove, where the Thespians held their festival and the games called the Museia, passed it on the left of the road. Roman poets named it whenever they wanted the Muses’ own water in a line.

Cold water comes off Helicon in more places than anyone has counted, and the Boeotians gave one of them a name and a father. On the road that climbs from Thespiae toward the grove of the Muses, the spring called Aganippe rose on the traveller’s left hand. Pausanias, whose guide to Greece walks that road in the second century AD, was told that Aganippe had been a daughter of the Termessus, the river that winds around the mountain. That is very nearly the whole of her Greek biography. It was enough to make her one of the most quoted springs in Latin poetry.

She is two things at once, in the ordinary Greek way. The spring is a place: water rising at the foot of the mountain near Thespiae, with the sound of it running off toward the valley floor. The nymph is that spring given a person, a naiad of the kind that belongs to a single fountain rather than to a river or a lake. Later handbooks call her father the Permessus, which is the same river under its other name, and William Smith’s classical dictionary of 1873 records that the Muses were sometimes called the Aganippides after her. The name looks as though it is built from Greek words for gentle and horse. No ancient writer stops to explain it.

The road Pausanias describes was a short procession of monuments. Past the spring, along the straight way to the grove, a relief carved into a stone showed Eupheme, who was said to have nursed the Muses. After her came Linus, set on a small rock worked into the shape of a cave, and every year the people of the place sacrificed to Linus as to a hero before they sacrificed to the Muses. Linus, the story went, was a son of the Muse Urania who sang so well that Apollo killed him as a rival. So a worshipper on festival day walked past Aganippe’s cold water, past the nurse on her rough stone, past the dead singer in his little carved cave, and only then into the grove where the Thespians celebrated the Museia with prizes for music.

About twenty stades above the grove, a climb of something under four kilometres, lay the mountain’s other famous water. Hippocrene, the Horse’s Fountain, was said to have been opened by the hoof of Bellerophon’s horse striking the ground. Pausanias keeps the two firmly apart, one at the grove’s approach and one far above it. The Roman poets did not bother. Ovid, opening the fifth book of his Fasti, calls on the goddesses who haunt the springs of “Aganippian Hippocrene”, folding one water into the other, and Smith read the adjective as meaning little more than Hippocrene, sacred to the Muses.

The one story in which Aganippe changes hands belongs to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Nine sisters, daughters of Pierus of Pella, came through the cities of Greece to Helicon and challenged the Muses to a singing match. They set the stakes out plainly. If the goddesses lost, they would hand over Hippocrene and Boeotian Aganippe; if the sisters lost, they would yield the Emathian plains as far as snowy Paeonia. Nymphs were chosen to judge, swore by their own streams to be fair, and took their seats on benches of natural rock. The challengers lost. They became magpies, and in Ovid’s telling nine of them sat in the branches afterwards, lamenting, still imitating every sound they heard.

The Latin poets kept returning to the spring. Catullus, writing a wedding hymn in the first century BC, summons the marriage god Hymen, son of Urania and dweller on the Heliconian hill, and tells him to leave the Aonian caves of the Thespian rock, over which the nymph Aganippe pours her cooling water. Virgil, in his tenth Eclogue, turns the spring into a reproach. Where were the Naiads, he asks, while his friend Gallus was dying of an unworthy love? The ridges of Parnassus had not held them, nor Pindus, nor Aonian Aganippe. Pliny the Elder, less moved, lists Aganippe among the springs of Boeotia beside Hippocrene, Dirce, Arethusa and Gargaphie, and moves on.

What the spring does is a matter of reputation rather than of any told event. The belief that its water inspired whoever drank it is set down plainly in the nineteenth century dictionaries, and the Roman poets lean on the idea without ever staging it. Pausanias, who stood on the road beside it, says nothing about inspiration at all. Its real power is the Muses’ power by nearness. The water is theirs, it can be wagered in a contest, and a rival who wants the Muses’ place has to demand their springs first. Its limit is the same fact seen from the other side: in no story does Aganippe act. She is never consulted, never angry and never pursued. She never speaks.

Two later attachments to the name should be kept away from the spring. Hyginus names an Aganippe as the wife of Acrisius of Argos and the mother of Danae, although Apollodorus gives Acrisius a wife called Eurydice; that queen shares nothing with the Helicon nymph but the name. A modern claim that Aganippe was a black, mare-headed form of Demeter comes from Barbara G. Walker’s Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, a twentieth-century compendium, and no ancient text gives that figure this name.

The valley is still there. The Region of Central Greece’s GeoMyths guide to the Valley of the Muses marks the sacred spring on the left of the road toward the sanctuary, which is where Pausanias put it. French archaeologists dug the sanctuary in 1890 and uncovered the theatre, the altar of the Muses, a long Ionic stoa and the pedestals of the Muses’ statues, but the excavation was never finished or published and the finds were covered over again. Some of the statues, the same guide says, were carried off to Constantinople on the orders of Constantine the Great. The pedestals that stayed behind are in the museum at Thebes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aganippe in Greek mythology?

Aganippe is a spring on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses, and also the naiad nymph who personified it. Pausanias places the spring on the left of the road to the Muses’ grove and says Aganippe was a daughter of the river Termessus. Later handbooks name that river the Permessus.

Is Aganippe the same as Hippocrene?

No. Pausanias describes Aganippe at the approach to the Muses’ grove and Hippocrene, the Horse’s Fountain opened by the hoof of Bellerophon’s horse, about twenty stades higher up the mountain. Ovid blurs the two in the Fasti with the phrase “Aganippian Hippocrene”.

Did drinking from Aganippe give poetic inspiration?

The belief that Aganippe’s water inspired those who drank it is recorded in nineteenth century reference works such as William Smith’s dictionary of 1873, and Roman poets treat Aganippe as the Muses’ own water. Pausanias, who describes the spring and the road beside it, says nothing about inspiration.

What happens to Aganippe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

The nine daughters of Pierus challenge the Muses to a singing contest and demand Hippocrene and Aganippe as their prize if the Muses lose. Nymphs judge the match, the challengers lose, and they are turned into magpies.

Where is the spring of Aganippe today?

Aganippe is in the Valley of the Muses at the foot of Mount Helicon near Thespiae, beside the road to the ancient Sanctuary of the Muses. The Region of Central Greece’s GeoMyths guide marks it on the left of that road, as Pausanias did. French archaeologists excavated the sanctuary in 1890 but never finished or published the work.