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Concept
Aristaeus
Summary
Aristaeus (ærᵻˈstiːəs; Ἀρισταῖος Aristaios (Aristaîos); lit. “Most Excellent, Most Useful”), was the culture hero credited with the discovery of many rural useful arts and handicrafts, including bee-keeping; he was the son of the huntress Cyrene and Apollo.
Aristeus ("the best") was a cult title in many places: Boeotia, Arcadia, Ceos, Sicily, Sardinia, Thessaly, and Macedonia; consequently a set of "travels" was imposed, connecting his epiphanies in order to account for these widespread manifestations.
If Aristaeus was a minor figure at Athens, he was more prominent in Boeotia, where he was "the pastoral Apollo", and was linked to the founding myth of Thebes by marriage with Autonoë, daughter of Cadmus, the founder. Aristaeus may appear as a winged youth in painted Boeotian pottery, similar to representations of the Boreads, spirits of the North Wind. Besides Actaeon and Macris, he also was said to have fathered Charmus and Callicarpus in Sardinia.
According to Pindar's ninth Pythian Ode and Apollonius' Argonautica (II.522ff), Cyrene despised spinning and other womanly arts and instead spent her days hunting and shepherding, but, in a prophecy he put in the mouth of the wise centaur Chiron, Apollo would spirit her to Libya and make her the foundress of a great city, Cyrene, in a fertile coastal plain. When Aristaeus was born, according to what Pindar sang, Hermes took him to be raised on nectar and ambrosia and to be made immortal by Gaia.
"Aristaios" ("the best") is an epithet rather than a name:For some men to call Zeus and holy Apollo.Agreus and Nomios, and for others Aristaios (Pindar)
Thanks to a vast family-tree and connections, Aristaeus is a god and patron of a wide array of rustic and rural arts, crafts, skills, practices and traditions (handicrafts), some-of-which is overlapped with his many relatives:
From his father, Apollo, the wise Centaur, Chiron and from his aunts, the Muses, Aristaeus learned the arts of prophecy, healing and herblore (similarly like his half-brother, Asclepius).
Official source
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