Apate (Greek Ἀπάτη, “Deceit”; Latin Fraus)

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the personified spirit of deceit, fraud and guile, whose Cretan girdle is said to contain every bewitchment humans practise on one another.
Role in Mythos: She is one of the banes born of Night without a father, and in the surviving stories she never deceives on her own account but equips the deceiver.
Relation to Humans: Every person alive has drunk from her cup, according to the philosophers who used her as an image, some deeply and some barely, and none of them can find the road afterwards. She is acknowledged rather than worshipped: no Greek city gave her a temple, an altar, or a festival.

At the gate of Life a woman sits on a chair with a cup in her hand. She has been painted to look charming, and it works. The crowd waiting to be born files past her, and she leans out with the cup, and every one of them drinks. Some take a swallow. Some drain it. What is in the cup is Error and Ignorance, and once it is down they walk through the gate into the world already unable to find the road.

That scene comes from a short Greek dialogue of the first century, the Tablet of Cebes, in which an old man in a precinct of Cronus explains a painted panel hanging among the votive offerings. The seated woman with the cup is Apate, and the explanation of what she does takes the old man about four lines. She gives a drink of her own faculty to those who enter Life. All of them drink it. Then everything that follows in the painting, the wandering, the flattering women, the whip and the rags, is downstream of that one swallow.

Her actual beginning is thinner than the allegory that borrowed her. It is a single word in a list. Hesiod, cataloguing what the dark produces, has Night bear Doom and black Ker and Death, then Sleep and the whole tribe of Dreams, and then, lying with nobody at all, Blame and painful Misery and the Hesperides, the Fates, the merciless Keres, Nemesis to afflict mortal men, and after her Deceit, and Friendship, and hateful Old Age, and hard-hearted Strife. That is the whole of Apate’s birth. No father, no consort, no infancy, no story. She arrives fully grown, already named, already a problem, item eleven or so in a list of things that ruin people.

Nobody ever built her a temple.

The Greeks were perfectly capable of giving an abstraction a cult. Nemesis had a sanctuary at Rhamnous, Peace had an altar in Athens, and the deified virtues were real enough to their worshippers to be worth a sacrifice. Deceit got none of that. She was acknowledged and left alone, a force conceded rather than courted, and she stayed a name that a poet could reach for and a philosopher could paint. When Roman antiquarians took over the family tree, Cicero listed her among the children of Erebus and Night in her Latin dress, Fraus, filed between Favour and Obstinacy, still on a list, still without a shrine.

Which makes the one place she comes alive worth the trip.

In the eighth book of the Dionysiaca, Hera is beside herself about Semele, and she goes looking for Deceit. She storms through a heaven spangled with stars, she crosses innumerable cities on foot, and she finds her on Crete, on the hills above the water of the Amnisos under Corybantian Dicte. Apate is fond of the Cretans, the poem says, because they are always liars, and she likes to spend her time beside the false tomb of Zeus. Consider that as an address. A god who is not dead, in a grave that is a lie, and Deceit loitering there in the thyme and the limestone glare because the company suits her.

About her hips is a Cydonian girdle, and everything the sources will ever tell us about her appearance is in that band of cloth. It contains all the cunning bewitchments of mankind, trickery with its many shifts, cajoling seduction, every shape of guile, and perjury itself, which flies on the winds of heaven. Hera opens with flattery, because she knows her audience. Good greeting, lady of wily mind and wily snares. Not even Hermes could outdo you at plausible talk. Lend me the girdle of many colours, the one Rhea wore when she deceived her husband. Apate does not haggle and does not ask what it is for. She unfastens the belt and hands it over, and offers one line of self-assessment on the way out: this one puts to shame the heart-bewitching girdle of the Paphian. Then she is gone under the wind on a flying shoe, and Hera goes down to Thebes wearing borrowed guile, in the shape of an old nurse, to talk a pregnant girl into asking her lover to appear as he truly is. Semele burned. Zeus salvaged the child from the ash and carried him in his own thigh.

Apate was not there. She never is.

The same absent-presence turns up in the most famous picture she was ever in, which no longer exists. Apelles, slandered to Ptolemy and nearly killed for a conspiracy he had never heard of, took his revenge in paint, and Lucian described the result centuries later. On the right, a judge with the long ears of Midas, flanked by Ignorance and Assumption. Approaching from the left, Slander, beautiful and overheated, a torch in her left hand, dragging a boy by the hair while he lifts his palms to the gods. Envy walks ahead of her, pale and shrunken. And behind her, two women fuss over her like tiring-women, straightening her, improving her, adding touches to her beauty. One is Treachery. The other is Deceit. She is not accusing anyone. She is doing Slander’s hair. Botticelli reconstructed the whole scene from Lucian’s paragraph in the 1490s, which means the best-known image of Apate in the world is a Renaissance painter’s reading of a Greek satirist’s memory of a lost Greek painting, and there is something entirely appropriate about that.

Her power, then, is not force. She has no bolt, no bow, no monster on a chain. She lends, she pours, she adjusts a hem, and the crime is always committed by somebody else’s hand. That is what gives her a reach none of her siblings can match. Old Age comes for you late and Death comes for you once, but the cup at the gate is offered to everyone, and everyone accepts it. Her girdle works on gods. Her drink works on infants. She does not need to be believed in, only used.

The limits are built into the same design. She owns nothing that she does not immediately hand away, and she has never once been the protagonist of her own story. Set her against her opposite and she thins out fast: in the Tablet, the purge that True Education gives to the arriving pupil is a specific emetic, and the first things it expels are the Ignorance and Error that came out of Deceit’s cup. In Apelles’ picture, Truth is walking slowly toward the tribunal from the far side, and Repentance has already turned to look at her, weeping. Deceit lasts precisely as long as nobody checks. She is painted a little to the side of the main figure in every version of the scene, and she is never still there when the thing goes wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Apate in Greek mythology?

Apate is the personified spirit of deceit, deception and fraud. In Hesiod’s Theogony she is one of the children born to Nyx, the goddess of Night, without a father, alongside Death, Strife, Old Age and Nemesis. The Romans knew her as Fraus, and Cicero lists her among the offspring of Erebus and Night.

Did the Greeks worship Apate?

No. There is no record of a temple, altar, priesthood or festival for Apate anywhere in the Greek world. She was a force the Greeks named and acknowledged rather than a deity they approached with sacrifice, which is why she survives in poetry, philosophy and allegorical painting instead of in cult.

What is Apate’s girdle?

In Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, Apate wears a Cydonian girdle about her hips that contains every human bewitchment: trickery, cajoling seduction, all the shapes of guile, and perjury. Hera borrows it in order to deceive Semele, and Apate claims it puts Aphrodite’s own famous girdle to shame. It is the only physical attribute any source gives her.

What did Apate do to Semele?

Apate did nothing to Semele directly. She lent Hera the girdle of guile, and Hera used it to disguise herself as Semele’s old nurse and persuade the pregnant girl to ask Zeus to reveal himself in his true form, which killed her. This is the pattern with Apate: she supplies the means and someone else commits the act.

Who is the opposite of Apate?

Aletheia, the spirit of truth, is her opposite, and her male counterpart is Dolos, the daimon of trickery. In the allegorical painting of Slander described by Lucian, Apate helps adorn Slander while Truth approaches slowly from the other side of the scene, an arrangement that captures the relationship exactly.