A minor god in Greek mythology, attested mainly by Athenian writers, Aristaeus, was the culture hero credited with the discovery of many useful arts, including bee-keeping; he was the son of the huntress Cyrene and Apollo. Aristeus 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.
Pindar's account
According to Pindar's ninth Pythian Ode and Apollonius' Argonautica, 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 centaurChiron, 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" is an epithet rather than a name:
For some men to call Zeus and holy Apollo. Agreus and Nomios, and for others Aristaios
Patronage
Aristaeus is a god and patron of a wide array of rustic and ruralarts, skills and practices; from his father, Apollo, Chiron and the Muses, Aristaeus learned the arts of prophecy, healing and herblore; from his aunt, Artemis, Aristaeus learned how to track, hunt and trap animals, and how to prepare their meat and skins; from his uncle, Dionysus, Aristaeus learned the processes of how to produce alcoholic beverages, such as wine, ale, beer, mead, kumis, absinthe, etc. ; from his great-aunt, Demeter, Aristaeus learned the skills of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry; the Myrtle-nymphs, who raised him on Apollo's behalf, taught him other useful arts and mysteries, such as dairying; how to prepare milk for cream, butter and cheese, how to tame the Goddess's bees and keep them in hives, and how to tame the wildoleaster in order to make it bear olives and process them into olive oil --he is also worshipped as a protector of flocks and shepherds, and of grapevine and olive plantations. Like his mother, Cyrene, his uncle, Hermes, and his cousin, Pan, Aristaeus is also a god/patron of shepherds and herders, as well as shearing; he's also the patron god of cattle and herding, fruit trees & vegetable plants, foraging, hunting & fishing, husbandry & agriculture, the preservation of food, and bee-keeping. He also taught to humans the dairy skills, as well as the use of nets and traps in hunting. In Ceos, Aristaeus is also a god of the Etesian winds, which provided some respite from the heat of their scorching drought-causing midsummers.
Issue
When he was grown, he sailed from Libya to Boeotia, where he was inducted into further mysteries in the cave of Chiron the centaur. In Boeotia, he was married to Autonoë and became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, who inherited the family passion for hunting, to his ruin, and of Macris, who nursed the child Dionysus. According to Pherecydes, Aristaeus fathered Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, crossroads, and the night. Hesiod's Theogony suggests her parents were Perses and Asteria.
Aristaeus in Ceos
Aristaeus' presence in Ceos, attested in the fourth and third centuries BC, was attributed to a Delphic prophecy that counselled Aristaeus to sail to Ceos, where he would be greatly honored. He found the islanders suffering from sickness under the stifling and baneful effects of the Dog-Star Sirius at its first appearance before the sun's rising, in early July. In the foundation legend of a specifically Cean weather-magic ritual, Aristaeus was credited with the double sacrifice that countered the deadly effects of the Dog-Star, a sacrifice at dawn to Zeus Ikmaios, "Rain-making Zeus" at a mountaintop altar, following a pre-dawn chthonic sacrifice to Sirius, the Dog-Star, at its first annual appearance, which brought the annual relief of the cooling Etesian winds. In a development that offered more immediate causality for the myth, Aristaeus discerned that the Ceans' troubles arose from murderers hiding in their midst, the killers of Icarius in fact. When the miscreants were found out and executed, and a shrine erected to Zeus Ikmaios, the great god was propitiated and decreed that henceforth, the Etesian wind should blow and cool all the Aegean for forty days from the baleful rising of Sirius, but the Ceans continued to propitiate the Dog-Star, just before its rising, just to be sure. Aristaeus appears on Cean coins. Then Aristaeus, on his civilizing mission, visited Arcadia, where the winged male figure who appears on ivory tablets in the sanctuary of Ortheia as the consort of the goddess, has been identified as Aristaeus by L. Marangou. Aristaeus settled for a time in the Vale of Tempe. By the time of Virgil's Georgics, the myth has Aristaeus chasing Eurydice when she was bitten by a serpent and died.
Aristaeus and the bees
Soon Aristaeus' bees sickened and began to die. He went to the fountainArethusa and was advised to establish altars, sacrifice cattle, and leave their carcasses. From the carcasses, new swarms of bees rose. A variation of this tale was told in the 2002 novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.
"Aristaeus" as a name
In later times, Aristaios was a familiar Greek name, borne by several archons of Athens and attested in inscriptions.
