Pygmy

Also Known As: Pygmaei; Greek Pygmaioi, Πυγμαῖοι; from pygmē, “fist,” a measure taken from the elbow to the knuckle
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A tribe of men no taller than a foot and a half, disciplined farmer-warriors who ride rams and goats into battle.
Role in Mythos: They wage an unending seasonal war against the flocks of migrating cranes that descend on their fields.
Relation to Humans: They are themselves a race of diminutive humans, placed by Greek and Roman writers at the farthest edges of the known world. Ancient authorities never agreed on whether they were pure legend or a real remote people glimpsed and exaggerated by travellers.

Every autumn the sky above the marshes went grey with wings, and the little men reached for their spears. The cranes were coming down the length of the world, fleeing the northern cold for the warm mud of the south, and they came in their thousands, calling as they came, a noise that filled the whole bowl of the sky. Where the birds landed, the grain stood ready for the harvest. The men who owned that grain were a foot and a half tall, and they went out to meet the flocks in ranks, in real formation, with real armour scaled to their bodies. A crane is a large bird. Set against a soldier no taller than a man’s forearm, it is a monster with a spear for a face.

The Pygmies took their name from a unit of measurement. A pygme was the distance from the elbow to the knuckle, the length a man could lay along his own forearm, and that was the entire height of them. The oldest accounts give little more than that they were small and dark and lived at the ends of the earth. Later writers, reaching for detail, could not agree on much. Ctesias, reporting from the Persian court about the Pygmies of India, described men with hair to their knees and beards longer still, who wound the whole of it around themselves in place of clothing, snub-nosed and, he adds without kindness, ugly. Their livestock matched them: sheep the size of lambs, oxen and horses no bigger than rams.

No two sources put them in the same country. Homer set them on the banks of Oceanus, the river that circled the world, which is to say nowhere anyone could point to. Others sent them to the marshes where the Nile rises, or to India east of the Ganges, or north into Thrace, where a town called Gerania was said to mark the place the cranes had finally driven them from. Their descent is just as tangled. Hesiod’s catalogue makes them earthborn, children of Epaphus and the wide Earth herself, kin to the Ethiopians and the other far peoples at the world’s rim. A later tradition handed them a founder called Pygmaeus and fitted him into a family tree. What every version keeps is the smallness and the distance. They belonged to the edge of the map, the blank space where a traveller’s tale curdles into a marvel.

The war with the cranes had a beginning, and it was a punishment. Among the Pygmies lived a woman of extraordinary beauty, called Oenoe in one telling and Gerana in another, and her people loved her past all sense. In some versions they made her their queen and gave her the worship owed to gods. She took the honours to heart. She said aloud that she was lovelier than Hera, lovelier than Artemis and Athena and Aphrodite, that the goddesses did not come close. Hera answered the way Hera always answered. She stretched the woman’s neck long, drew her down into feathers, and set her in the air, and the beautiful queen became the first crane.

The change did not cure her of loving her son. Mopsus was still down among the Pygmies, and his mother, now a bird, came back for him, wheeling low over the rooftops and crying out. The Pygmies did not know her. They saw only a crane that had come too close to their homes, and they armed and drove her off, as they would drive off any of her new kind. So the feud was sealed from both ends at once, a mother who cannot stop returning and a people who cannot stop fighting her.

For their size, they were formidable. They farmed in earnest, cutting the grain-stalks down with axes as though they were felling trees, and they guarded the harvest with a discipline no crane could match on its own. Once a year, Pliny reports, the whole nation rode down to the sea on the backs of rams and she-goats, armed with little arrows, and spent three months smashing the cranes’ eggs and killing the chicks in the nest, because a single season’s hatch left unbroken would have been the end of them. They built their houses from mud and feathers and eggshell, the wreckage of the enemy turned into walls. It was a war fought the only way a small people can fight a larger one, by never letting it grow.

Their courage outran their arithmetic. When Heracles crossed Libya and lay down to sleep, fresh from killing the giant Antaeus, the Pygmies decided the giant had been their brother and the debt to avenge him was theirs. They mustered against a sleeping man the size of a hill. One wing of the army fell on his left hand, two companies on his stronger right, slingers and archers laid siege to his feet, and the king himself led the assault on the head, bringing engines of war to bear on the fortress of the hero’s skull. Heracles woke. He looked at the army in his hair, swept the whole invasion together in one motion of his hand, rolled them up in his lion skin, and carried them off to show his master.

That is the shape of every Pygmy story. The thing they face is always bigger, and their only answers are numbers, nerve, and the refusal to quit. It works against the cranes, mostly, year after grinding year. It does not work against a goddess who can conjure a fresh enemy out of one vain woman, and it does not work against a hero who folds their entire army into his coat and tidies it away before breakfast. The ancients themselves could not settle whether the Pygmies were real at all. Aristotle believed there was a genuine tribe of very small people living in caves near the Nile’s source, riding horses scaled to their height, and that the cranes at least were no invention. Everyone else was content to leave them where Homer found them, at the bright rim of the world, forever losing eggs and forever winning just enough to still be there the following autumn.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Pygmies in Greek mythology?

The Pygmies were a legendary tribe of tiny humans in Greek and Roman myth, each only about a foot and a half tall. They lived at the far edges of the world, usually placed in Africa near the source of the Nile or in India, and were best known for their endless war against migrating cranes.

Why do the Pygmies fight the cranes?

The war began as a divine punishment. A beautiful Pygmy woman named Oenoe, or Gerana, boasted that she was lovelier than Hera and the other goddesses, so Hera turned her into a crane. Grieving for her human son, she kept flying back over the Pygmy town, and her former people drove her off, setting off a feud that continues between the Pygmies and all cranes.

How big were the Pygmies?

The Pygmies stood only one “pygme” tall, the measurement from a person’s elbow to their knuckle, roughly a foot and a half. Their sheep, oxen, and horses were shrunk to match, no larger than lambs and rams, which is why they were said to ride goats and rams into battle.

What happened when the Pygmies attacked Heracles?

After Heracles killed the giant Antaeus and fell asleep in Libya, the Pygmies decided Antaeus was their kinsman and swarmed the sleeping hero to avenge him. They laid siege to his hands, feet, and head like an army storming a fortress, but Heracles simply woke, gathered them all up in his hand, wrapped them in his lion skin, and carried them away.

Where did the Pygmies live?

Ancient writers never agreed on a single homeland. Homer placed them on the banks of the world-encircling river Oceanus, while later authors located them at the marshes of the upper Nile, in India east of the Ganges, or in Thrace near a town called Gerania.