Iris (mythology)

• 1. A Goddess Without a Temple

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  Iris, the Greek personification of the rainbow, has no temple, no shrine and no festival that anyone can name. Yet she turns up everywhere in ancient storytelling. She appears in epic poems, in tragedies, and even in a comedy about birds who plan to overthrow the gods. She runs errands for Zeus and Hera, and she carries a pitcher of water and a staff of messengers. But she has no myth that belongs only to her. So who was Iris, and where did her name come from? What did a servant of the Olympians actually do for them? And how does a goddess who was barely worshipped end up on the Parthenon, in the periodic table, and on the map of the asteroid belt?

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• 2. Name and Family

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  The ancient Greek word Ἶρις meant two things at once: the rainbow, and the halo that sometimes rings the Moon. An inscription from Corinth preserves an older spelling, Ϝῖρις, pronounced Wîris, with a letter called the digamma that later dropped away. The word seems to come from a language spoken in Greece before Greek. Scholars have proposed a Proto-Indo-European origin, but the linguist Beekes finds that idea hard to motivate.

  Hesiod's Theogony makes Iris the daughter of the sea-god Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra. In his account she is also the sister of the Harpies, with Arke and Ocypete named among her siblings. The later poet Nonnus gives her a different brother, the river god Hydaspes.

  Her love life is just as unsettled. Zephyrus, god of the west wind, is often named as her consort, and their son is Pothos. The lyric poet Alcaeus, writing in the sixth century BC, instead made the pair the parents of Eros, although most tellings give Eros to Aphrodite. Of all her siblings, though, it was Arke who would shape Iris's place among the gods.

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• 3. Sisters at War

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  During the Titanomachy, the war between the Olympians and the Titans, two winged messenger sisters began on the same side. Iris and Arke both served the Olympian gods. Arke, whose name means swift or quick, later switched allegiance and became the messenger of the Titans. The sisters ended up facing each other across the battlefield. Iris, in turn, is said to travel along the rainbow when she carries word from the gods to mortals.

  Zeus won the war, and he made Arke pay. He tore off her wings and gave them away as a gift for the wedding of the Nereid Thetis and Peleus. Thetis passed the wings to her son Achilles, who wore them on his feet. That is why Achilles was sometimes called podarkes, meaning feet like the wings of Arke.

  Iris kept her post. She stayed on as messenger of the gods beside Hermes, and she often served Hera personally. That loyalty to Hera sent her on some of the strangest errands in all of Greek myth.

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• 4. Errands for the Gods

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  After Hades abducted Persephone, her mother Demeter withdrew to her temple in Eleusis and left the earth barren. A great famine followed, and mortals stopped making offerings to the gods. Zeus sent Iris to ask Demeter to return to Olympus and lift her curse. Demeter refused, because her daughter had not yet been returned.

  In another story, Leto and her children begged Zeus to release Prometheus from his torment. Zeus relented and sent Iris to command Heracles to free him.

  When Ceyx drowned in a shipwreck, Hera ordered Iris to carry a message to Hypnos, the god of sleep. Iris flew to his cave. Hera wanted Ceyx's wife, Alcyone, to learn of his death through a dream. Iris left the moment she had spoken, because the power of Hypnos was already making her dizzy and sleepy.

  Apollonius Rhodius gives her a gentler task. The Argonauts Zetes and Calais had chased the Harpies as far as the Strophades, whose name means Islands of Turning. The brothers had driven the monsters away from the prophet Phineus. At the request of Iris they stopped short of killing the Harpies, and she promised that Phineus would never be troubled by them again.

  When King Creon of Thebes forbade burial of the Argive soldiers who had attacked the city, Hera told Iris to moisten the dead with dew and ambrosia. She even prepared the bed of Zeus and Hera.

  Her part in the birth of Apollo and Artemis is told two ways. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, every goddess came to Leto's side except Hera and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. On the ninth day of labor, Leto told Iris to bribe Eileithyia, in secret from Hera. Callimachus has her on the other side. There, Iris and Ares, on Hera's orders, told every city to shun the pregnant Leto. Asteria, who had become the island of Delos, defied Hera and took Leto in. Iris then flew back to report the defiance and sat down beside Hera.

  Not every message was so quiet. At Troy, one of them concerned a dead prince's body.

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• 5. Messages at Troy

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  A lost epic called the Cypria, by Stasinus, gives Iris a role in the cause of the Trojan War. Menelaus had sailed off to Crete. Iris brought him the news from Sparta that his wife Helen had run away with the Trojan prince Paris, and that Helen's brother Castor had died.

  The Iliad, attributed to Homer, mentions her often as a divine messenger. She does not appear in the Odyssey. Like Hermes, she carries a caduceus, a winged staff. At Zeus's command she also bears a ewer of water from the River Styx, which she uses to put to sleep anyone who swears a false oath.

  In Book XXIII, Achilles prays to Boreas and Zephyrus to light the funeral pyre of his friend Patroclus, and Iris carries the prayer to them. In the final book, Zeus sends her to King Priam with instructions. Priam is to go to the Achaean camp alone and ransom the body of his son Hector from Achilles. Iris delivered the message swiftly and returned to Olympus.

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• 6. On Stage and in Verse

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  In Aristophanes's comedy The Birds, the birds build a city in the sky and plan to replace the Olympians. Iris goes to meet them as the gods' messenger. Their leader, an elderly Athenian named Pisetaerus, ridicules and insults her, and then threatens her. She is baffled that he does not know who the gods are or that she is one of them. He tells her that the birds are the gods now, and that humans must sacrifice to them. Iris scolds his language and leaves with a warning that Zeus, whom she calls her father, will make him pay.

  In Euripides's play Heracles Gone Mad, she appears beside Lyssa, the goddess of madness. Together they curse Heracles with the fit in which he kills his three sons and his wife Megara.

  Vase painters showed a rougher side of her. About fifteen black-and-red-figure vases from the fifth century BC show satyrs menacingly advancing on Iris or seizing her as she tries to interfere with a sacrifice. One cup shows them apparently trying to stop her from stealing sacrificial meat from the altar of Dionysus, who is present. Its other side shows satyrs attacking Hera, who stands between Hermes and Heracles. The playwright Achaeus wrote a satyr play called Iris. It is now lost, but it might be the source of these scenes.

  Roman poets put her to work for Juno. In Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, Juno sends her to pluck a lock of hair from the head of Queen Dido, so that Dido can die and enter the Underworld. In Book 5, Iris takes the form of a Trojan woman and urges the other Trojan mothers to burn four of Aeneas's ships, so that the fleet cannot leave Sicily.

  Ovid gives her a kinder task. After Romulus became the god Quirinus, his wife Hersilia begged to be made immortal too. Juno sent Iris, who touched Hersilia with a single finger and made her a goddess. Hersilia flew to Olympus, became one of the Horae, and lived there with her husband forever.

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• 7. A Quiet Cult

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  The island of Delos holds the only trace of her cult that survives. Athenaeus, in Scholars at Dinner, notes that the people of Delos sacrificed to Iris. They offered her cheesecakes called basyniae, made by boiling wheat flour, suet and honey together.

  That is almost all the evidence for worship of her. Unlike Hermes, the other prominent messenger of the Greeks, Iris played little part in religious life. Artists did not ignore her. She is frequently shown on vases and in bas-reliefs, though few statues of her are known from antiquity. A sculpture of her stood on the west pediment of the Parthenon in Athens.

  She may still have mattered to ordinary people in prayer. She was believed to help fulfill human prayers, either by granting them herself or by bringing them to the attention of other deities.

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• 8. Colors and Wings

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  Poets gave Iris a long list of epithets. Chrysopteros means golden winged. Podas ōkea means swift footed, and podēnemos ōkea means swift wind-footed. The Latin roscida means dewy, and aellopus means storm-footed. Thaumantias or Thaumantis means daughter of Thaumas, or the Wondrous One. She also watered the clouds with her pitcher, drawing the water from the sea.

  Artists showed her either as a rainbow or as a beautiful young woman with wings on her shoulders. In some texts she wears a coat of many colors, and that coat is what produces the rainbows themselves. Her wings were said to be so beautiful that they lit up a dark cavern, as in the story of her message to Alcyone. She was associated with communication, messages and new endeavors, and the rainbow was once described as a link between heaven and earth.

  Her name outlived her worship. The flower called the iris was named after her because its blossoms come in such a wide range of colors. The chemical element iridium took its name from her because its salts are colorful. And 7 Iris, a main-belt asteroid, carries her name out into the solar system.

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