Europa (consort of Zeus)

• 1. Introduction

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  Europa was a Phoenician princess, and the man who wanted her was the king of the gods. In Greek mythology, Zeus turned himself into a tame white bull and slipped quietly into the herds of her father. She stroked his flanks, climbed onto his back, and then he ran for the sea. He swam to the island of Crete with her clinging to him, and there she became the first queen of the island. Out of that single abduction came a king named Minos, a constellation in the night sky, and eventually the name of a continent. But the story is older and stranger than it first appears. Who was Europa before Zeus, and why does her name now belong to a quarter of the world? Why did a Phoenician city worship her as a goddess of the moon? And how did a tale of a bull and a princess end up on euro banknotes and a moon of Jupiter? The answers run from a temple in Sidon to a rare-earth metal in a laboratory.

• 2. Disputed Bloodlines

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  Sources disagree about who Europa's parents were, yet they all insist she was Phoenician. Her lineage traces back to the princess Io, the nymph beloved of Zeus who was turned into a heifer. She is usually called the daughter of Agenor, the Phoenician King of Tyre. The Syracusan poet Moschus gives her a mother named Telephassa, which means far-shining. Elsewhere her mother is Argiope, the silver-faced. The Iliad takes a different line, making her the daughter of Agenor's son Phoenix, the sun-red. Most accounts agree on two brothers: Cadmus, who brought the alphabet to mainland Greece, and Cilix, who gave his name to Cilicia in Asia Minor. The author of the Bibliotheke adds Phoenix as a third brother. That overlap of names bred confusion. One reading suggests her brother Phoenix gave his own children the names of his siblings, producing a second Europa, a niece also loved by Zeus, whom later writers tangled together. After Crete, Europa bore three sons to Zeus: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon. Minos and Rhadamanthus went on to become judges of the Underworld, joined there by Aeacus of Aegina. In Crete she married Asterion and became mother, or step-mother, to his daughter Crete. The poet Praxilla, as Pausanias reported, even made a son named Carnus hers.

• 3. The White Bull

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  The Dictionary of Classical Mythology frames Zeus as enamoured and bent on seduction or rape, two acts treated as near-equivalent in Greek myth. He disguised himself among the herds, waited while Europa and her helpers gathered flowers, and seized the moment she settled onto his back. Once on Crete he revealed who he truly was. He gave her a necklace forged by Hephaestus, along with three more gifts: the bronze automaton guard Talos, the hound Laelaps who never failed to catch his quarry, and a javelin that never missed. Zeus set the shape of that white bull among the stars, and it became the constellation Taurus. It is not the Cretan Bull that fathered the Minotaur and was captured by Heracles, though the two are easy to confuse. Roman mythology took up the same tale under the name Raptus, the Abduction or Seduction of Europa, swapping in the god Jupiter for Zeus. The story may carry older roots. Some trace it to a sacred union between the Phoenician deities Aštar and Astarte in bovine form. The name Asterion, the king Europa married, doubles as a name for the Minotaur and an epithet of Zeus, and likely descends from the name Aštar.

• 4. Rationalizing The Myth

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  Herodotus opened his account of the Persian-Hellene confrontations with a deflated version of the legend. In his telling Europa was kidnapped not by a god but by Greeks, probably Cretans, who were avenging the earlier abduction of Io from Argos. His variant may have been an attempt to explain away the supernatural, or the myth itself may be a garbled record of a real event: the abduction of a Phoenician aristocrat, which Herodotus then reported plainly. Palaephatus offered a similar fix, claiming a Cretan named Tauros waged war around Tyre and carried off many girls, Europa among them. He then explained the Minotaur the same way, as merely a man whose father was named Tauros, reusing one trick twice. John Tzetzes, in his commentary on Lycophron's Alexandra, gathered several versions. In one, Europa was taken from Phoenicia to Crete aboard a bull-shaped ship. In another, a Cretan general named Taurus, meaning Bull, was sent by Asterius, also called Minos, to abduct her. Lycophron called Europa Saraptian, and Tzetzes traced that epithet to the Phoenician city of Saraptia, also called Sareptia, sitting between Sidon and Tyre.

• 5. A Goddess In Phoenicia

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  Lucian of Samosata, writing in the 2nd century AD, was told a striking thing in the territory of Phoenician Sidon. The Sidonians owned a great temple they called the temple of Astarte, whom Lucian equated with the moon-goddess. One priest insisted the temple was instead sacred to Europa, the sister of Cadmus and daughter of Agenor. According to that legend, after Europa vanished from Earth the Phoenicians honoured her with a temple and a sacred story. Lucian noted that Sidonian coinage bore the effigy of Europa sitting upon a bull. The paradox, as he saw it, dissolves if Europa is simply Astarte in her guise as the full, broad-faced moon. Europa was barely venerated directly anywhere in classical Greece. The exception came at Lebadaea in Boeotia, where Pausanias recorded in the 2nd century AD that Europa served as an epithet of Demeter. There, seekers at the cave sanctuary of Trophonios of Orchomenus addressed Demeter Europa, the nurse of Trophonios, by the river Herkyna. The festival of Hellotia in Crete was held in her honour. Centuries later, in 2012, an archaeological mission of the British Museum led by the Lebanese archaeologist Claude Doumet-Serhal dug at the old American school in Sidon and found currency showing Europa riding the bull with her veil flying like a bow.

• 6. The Princess In Art

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  Moschus, a bucolic poet born at Syracuse and a friend of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace, built a brief Hellenistic epic around Europa in the mid-2nd century BCE. Ovid painted Jupiter's seduction in Book II of his Metamorphoses. Across the surviving images, the mood is calm rather than fearful. Whether Europa straddles the bull as in archaic vase-paintings or the ruined metope fragment from Sikyon, or sits sidesaddle as in a mosaic from North Africa, there is no trace of fear. She often steadies herself by touching one of the bull's horns, acquiescing. Her tale resurfaces in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, in a story titled Dragon's Teeth that mostly follows Cadmus but opens with a softened version of her abduction. She appears as a poem and a film in the Enderby novels of Anthony Burgess. The Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio remembered her in De Mulieribus Claris, composed between 1361 and 1362, the first collection in Western literature devoted entirely to biographies of women. The earliest reference of all sits in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women found at Oxyrhynchus, and the earliest vase-painting securely identified as Europa dates to the mid-7th century BC.

• 7. From Princess To Continent

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  The name Europe began as a far smaller thing than a continent. Ancient Greek geographers like Strabo used it for part of Thrace below the Balkan Mountains, and under the Roman Empire it named a Thracian province. In mythology Thrace was the sister of a water nymph also called Europa, and Europa stood as a surname for the earth mother goddess Demeter. The word itself may come from eurus, meaning wide or broad, joined with ops, meaning eye or face. Broad was an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion. The geographic Europe spread from the Greek Eurōpē into the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, and Uralic languages, surfacing as Hungarian Európa, Finnish Eurooppa, and Estonian Euroopa. In the 8th century, churchmen began using Europa for the imperium of Charlemagne, which seeded the modern term. The word Europenses, for the Christian peoples of the western continent, first appeared in the Hispanic Latin Chronicle of 754, written around the time of the Battle of Tours against Muslim forces. The European Union later adopted Europa as a symbol of pan-Europeanism, naming its web portal after her and stamping her on the Greek two-euro coin. She first appeared on postage stamps for the Council of Europe in 1956, and the second series of euro banknotes carries her likeness in the watermark and hologram. Her reach did not stop at the map. The rare-earth metal europium was named after the continent in 1901, and the smallest of Jupiter's Galilean moons carries her name in the sky.