#busiris

Commission for busiris on twitter of his OC Bu.

I'm on a bit of a Greek mythology kick in my reading, so! Today You Learned about Busiris!

So in Greek mythology, there was this king, in Egypt, named Busiris. Egypt went through a drought, so he asked for advice, and a foreign priest told him that what needed to be done was to sacrifice a foreigner to the gods every year. Busiris started by killing the priest. He went about this business of killing foreigners for a while until.... he tried it on the demigod hero Heracles, who was passing through in between his Labors.

It, uh, didn't go so well for Busiris, as this statue in Vienna shows.

Now, what I find interesting is that it's unclear if anyone in ancient Greece ever actually believed in this guy? I don't know, I feel as if people characterize the ancient Greek pagans as very credulous on these myths, but they had doubts. Wikipedia claims that the earliest version of the story was explicitly a satire, though I don't know how reliable Wikipedia is on that front, as the Theoi page linked above doesn't have that source, and it tends to have all of the ancient quotations imaginable.

It does however, have an excerpt of Herodotus, who is often assumed to be gullible, but he has his own doubts. Herodotus points out that for the most part, the Egyptians don't do a lot of animal sacrifice, outside of special cases; why then, would they ever even consider sacrificing humans? He chalks it up to Greeks being ignorant of Egyptian culture.

There is also a location in Egypt called 'Busiris', and one person theorized that the Greek legend was a warning against that one town's lack of hospitality. Or something.

I don't know. I think it's weird! It's a story about Heracles that many of the ancient Greeks openly admitted might not be true! Our most famous Greek historian straight-up says he thinks it's nonsense. And that's strange.

mythology aesthetics

BUSIRIS