This was the cover painting for my Astronomical Calendar 1981, so the print size was 11 by 15 inches. It was before the time when I could afford color printing, also before digital technology, so the picture has had to be re-scanned from the book. Without color, it may be hard to discern the little storm-smitten ship down at the feet of the cosmic Twins.
In the reeds down by the cool Eurotas river, bride Leda found an adorable swan and let it nestle against her. But, alas, it was the greatest of the gods in this guide to seduce her, and so that night she conceived two eggs. From them hatched two sets of twins – Castor and Polydeuces the blameless and brave, Helen and Clytaemnestra the beautiful, faithless and fateful – though there is much natural confusion as to which combination sprang from which egg, and which from Zeus the immortal lover and which from Tyndareos the mortal but royal husband.
Castor grew up a spearman and horse-tamer, Polydeuces was strong in boxing. Their names, “Beaver” and “Much New Wine,” alluded perhaps to half-forgotten forms of their myth and its re-enactment in yearly festivals. Together they were the Dios-Kouroi, “Zeus’s youths,” inseparable, and identical except for the scars of boxing on the face of mild Polydeuces.
Yet they are only one of countless pairs of twins in the legends – Euneus and Nebrophonus, Nausithous and Nausinous, Helenus and Cassandra; sometimes the twins are co-operators (Amphion and Zethus who built the walls of Thebes, Zetes and Calais who flew through the air in chase of evil spirits, Otus and Ephialtes the giants who stormed Olympus, Eurytus and Cteatus the Siamese twins who worsted Heracles); sometimes they are bitter foes (Pelias and Neleus of Iolcus, Atreus and Thyestes of Mycenae); sometimes they divide or alternate the kingship, starting in harmony and ending in feud (Danaus and Aegyptus, Acrisius and Proetus, Eteocles and Polyneices). And, though they are born of the same mother at the same time, one — the stronger, the true king because he is the one from whom the successors wish to claim descent, Heracles rather than lphicles, Ion rather than Achaeus — “really” has for father the locally pre-eminent god (Zeus, Poseidon, or Apollo); the god has on the wedding-night anticipated the mere king in whose house the twins are reared.
But it was in petty skirmishing with their Messenian cousins that the lives of the Spartan twins passed. For in those early times there was equality in the contest of the twin valleys which lie between the three fingers of mountain at the south end of Greece. Lynceus had such keen eyes, like the lynx, that he could see treasure through the ground and more than stars through the dark; and ldas seems to have been the most robust of the four. When Apollo tried to steal the bride Idas had won, he dueled with the terrible god — who was accustomed to flay his rivals alive and cull whole armies with arrows of pestilence — till Zeus had to part them. And the two sets of cousins quarreled over their mutual cousins, the Leucippide priestesses; but at last joined forces to rustle cattle from the rustic Arcadians. Dividing the spoil, ldas suggested an eating-race; he quartered an ox, bolted his share before the others could even start, helped Lynceus with his, and away they marched with all the plunder.
Heavily Castor and his brother got to their feet and followed; and there are many accounts of the final fight. The Dioscuri hid in ambush inside a hollow oak, but should have known that Lynceus would spy them; ldas cast a spear and Castor died in his hiding-place; Polydeuces rushed out and killed Lynceus, but was half crushed by the headstone which wild ldas tore from the tomb of his own father; whereupon Zeus intervened, settling ldas with a thunderbolt and saving his own son as the only survivor. Polydeuces did not wish to outlive Castor, but was not allowed by fate to die; the partial Zeus arranged that the pair of them should become immortal and divide their time between Olympus and a grotto under Sparta (like Persephone, the twins represent darkness and light, summer and winter, life and death). And as a monument to their brotherly love he set their diptych image among the stars.
Castor, Polydeuces, ldas and Lynceus belonged to the most active generation of the heroic age, just before the siege of Troy (though it was at and after Troy that their sisters Helen and Clytaemnestra played their fatal parts). There were several communal adventures which brought together most of the heroes of that generation: the Calydonian boar-hunt, the war of the Seven Against Thebes, and the quest of the ship Argo to Colchis for the Golden Fleece; so along on them had to go Castor and Polydeuces and, apparently in amity, ldas and Lynceus. On the voyage to Colchis a storm nearly overwhelmed the Argonauts. Orpheus the musician took up his lyre to soothe it; and as the wind slowed and the waterspouts reeled away, Tiphys the helmsman cried out and pointed: over the heads of Castor and Polydeuces, who sat firm on their benches grasping their oars, hovered two gentle lights. The two stars revealed by the scattering clouds seemed to have slid down into the shrouds of the ship. For the first time but not the last, sailors gave thanks to the twins for rescue from the storm.
The heroic age corresponds in archaeology to the Mycenaean civilization of the late Bronze Age. It was brought to an end by new waves of barbarians from the north. In Greece they became the tribe called Dorian. One of the parts they settled was Laconia, whose city was Sparta. And here in historical times they became a military society, rigid, unrefined, conservative. Alone of the Greek states they retained the institution of Kingship. There were always two kings, of the lines of cousins called Agiads and Eurypontids – a curious survival of twinship. Enemies could hoax the Spartans by impersonating their twin heroes: two young Messenians galloped with the confidence of demigods into the Spartan camp and, as the Spartans fell down in worship, slaughtered them..
But gradually the Spartans enslaved the Messenians, and became feared throughout Greece as invincible, though, fortunately, cautious. And it was because of this power that their twins, rather than the twins of Messenia, Tiryns, Elis or lolcus, became The Twins. Stars and stories associated with other twins since the beginning of time accreted to them. Their popularity grew beyond Greece, till they culminated as protecting divinities of Rome. For at Lake Regillus, when the infant empire could have been smothered by her Latin sisters, the two silently appeared and turned the tide of battle. Then they brought the news to the city, washed their horses at the fountain, and sprang back to heaven, leaving a magic hoofprint in the rock; and the people stood dumbfounded, till the pontiff spoke (in the words of Macaulay):
“The gods who live forever
Have fought for Home today!
These be the Great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray.
Back comes the Chief in triumph
Who, in the hour of fight,
Hath seen the Great Twin Brethren
In harness on his right.
Safe comes the ship to haven,
Through billows and through gales,
If once the Great Twin Brethren
Sit shining on the sails…”
The Romans curtly referred to the twins and their great temple as “Castores“ and “Castor”, and perhaps for lack of practice or because they thought it should mean “much light” they garbled the name of the other brother to “Pollux”; and swore by them (“O Gemini!”, which can still be heard in English as “By Jiminy!”). ln all the manifestations of the Castors there are motifs of whiteness and of floating, fairy-like, a few feet off the ground: they wear white tunics and egg-shell caps (the halves of the egg of the white swan) and appear on horseback (white, of course) or sitting in the boughs of a pear-tree (with its white blossoms) or among the white sails of a ship.
In mild stages of a storm, there may still be enough friction on the air from rain, sleet, spray, waves, other layers of air, or the ship itself, to cause a static electrical field: electrons separate from their atoms, which thus become ions. The wind has weakened enough that it does not carry this field away, and the sailors’ struggle has eased enough for them to notice what now happens. The electrons want to rush to ground, that is, to the region which has the opposite charge — the sea — and they find a route through any elongated object which is preferably wet or metallic and has a narrow tip; it need not be needle-like, but can be cylindrical with a sharp shoulder, like the electrode of a spark-plug or the sawn-off end of a spar. Instead of an enormous current built in a short time and discharging suddenly from afar, as with a lightning-stroke from a thundercloud thousands of feet up, there is a slow bleed of current from the local air: electrons in relatively small numbers shower in on the tipped object, colliding on the way with air atoms and making them incandesce and emit bluish light; hence the concentration of the glow. It has a sparkling brushy look, because at any instant it consists of the miniature lightning-threads of electrons streaming inward; and their miniature thunderclaps blend in a fizzing sound. Church spires and cows‘ horns attract the discharge too, and it is stimulated by the wingtips and propellers of airplanes.
In the Mediterranean world it has been known as “Castor and Pollux”, as the Corpusant or Composant (Corpo Santo, “holy body”), and most familiarly as St. Elmo’s Fire. The name of Elmo appears in so many variants — St. Ermo, St. Hermo, St. Eremo, San Telmo, St. Telmes, St. Helmes — that it could be ascribed to Hermes or Thermus or almost anything; scholars trace it to the martyr Erasmus (or Anselmus) of Naples, a patron of sailors, but there is a popular wish to identify it with “Saint” Helen. Other saints — Nicholas and Clare — borrowed the lights; and St. Peter Gonzalez, a thirteenth-century Dominican who ministered to the mariners of Spain, was nicknamed by them St. Elmo.
St. Elmo’s Fire, a controlled form of the thunderbolt, set Ray Dandl on the track of inventing what he calls the Elmo Bumpy Torus, which may prove the breakthrough to controlled nuclear fusion.
Pliny says, at the end of the astronomical section which opens his huge collection of hearsay, the Natural History: “Stars appear [not only in the air but] also on sea and land. I have seen them clinging in a form like summer- lightnings to the spears of soldiers on night watch before the ramparts, and they alight on the yards and other parts of traveling ships with a sound like a voice, hopping like birds from perch to perch; they are heavy, when they come singly, foundering the vessels, and if they fall into the depths of the holds they burn them through. But if double [geminae] they are salutary and foretell a prosperous course, and it is held that by their coming that dire and menacing one called Helen is put to flight; and for this reason the names of Pollux and Castor are assigned to them, and men at sea invoke those gods. Furthermore they gleam around people‘s heads in the evening hours, a great presage – all which things are of uncertain reason and plunged in the majesty of nature.”
During the storm itself came the single, the evil flash: the stroke of lightning that split the mast, or the ball lightning that rolled into the hold. As the storm relented came the two, the hopeful lights, which took their protective stations at the two ends of the yard. Contrary to Pliny, the two were first named Castor and Pollux, because they were so often two. (This was how the land power of Sparta, instead of the sea power, Athens, gave gods for seamen to call on; also perhaps how spearman Castor and boxer Pollux got new characters of kindliness.) Then the one was named Helen, because she was their sister and because she was the death of heroes – the “face that launched a thousand ships” went on to sink them.