Ananke In Greek mythology, Ananke, also spelled Anangke, Anance, or Anagke (Ancient Greek: Ἀνάγκη, from the common noun ἀνάγκη, "force, constraint, necessity"), was the personification of destiny, necessity and
fate, depicted as holding a spindle. She marks the beginning of the cosmos, along with Chronos. She was seen as the most powerful dictator of all fate and circumstance which meant that mortals, as well as the Gods, respected her and paid homage. Considered as the mother of the Fates according t o one version, she is the only one to have control over their decisions. (www.en.wikipedia.org) ANANKE (or Anance) was the Protogenos (primeval goddess) of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. She emerged self -formed at the very beginning of time--an incorporeal, serpentine being whose outstretched arms encompassed the breadth of the universe. From the time she first appeared Ananke was entwined in the serpentine coils of her mate, the time- god Khronos. Together they surrounded the primal
egg of solid matte r in their constricting coils and split it into its constituent parts (earth, heaven and sea) and so brought about the creation of the ordered universe. uni verse. Ananke and Khronos remained entwined as the cosmic -circling forces of fate and time--driving the rotati on of the heavens and the neverending passage of time. They were far beyond the reach of the younger gods whose fates they were sometimes said to control. Perhaps the only ancient representation of the goddess, the torch -bearing figure is labelled with her name. (Ananke, Athenian red-figure lekythos C5th B.C., Pushkin State Museum, Moscow) Plato, Republic 617c (trans. Shorey) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) : B.C.) :
"And there were another three who sat round about at equal intervals, each one on h er throne, the Moirai (Fates), daughters of Ananke, clad in white vestments with filleted heads, Lakhesis, and Klotho, and Atropos, who sang in unison with the music of the Seirenes, Lakhesis singing the things that were, Klotho the things that are, and Atropos the things t hat are to be . . . Lakhesis, the maiden daughter of
Ananke (Necessity)." Plato, Symposium 197b (trans. Lamb) : Lamb) :
"Mousai in music, Hephaistos in metal -work, Athene in weaving and Zeus `in pilotage of gods and men.' Hence also those dealings of the gods were contrived by Eros (Love) --clearly love of beauty --astir in them, for Eros (Love) has no concern conc ern with ugliness; though aforetime, as I b egan by saying, there were many strange doings among the gods, as l egend tells, because of the dominion of Ananke ( Necessity). But since this god arose, the loving l oving of beautiful things has brought all kinds of benefits both to gods and to men." (www.theoi.com)
Peitho In Greek mythology, Peitho (Ancient Greek: Πειθώ; Eng lish translation: "persuasion") is the goddess who personifies persuasion and seduction. Her Roman name is Suadela. Pausanias reports that after the unification of Athens, Theseus set up a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho on the sou th slope of Acropolis at Athens. Peitho, in her role as an attendant or companion of Aphrodite, was intimately connected to the goddess of love and beauty. Ancient artists and poets explored this connection in their works. The connection is even deeper in the c ontext of Ancient Greek marriage because a s uitor had to negotiate with the father of a young woman for her hand in marriage and offer a bridal price in return for her. The most desirable women drew many prospective suitors, and persuasive skil l often determined their success. Aphrodite and Peitho were sometimes conflated to a certain extent, with the name Peitho appearing in conjunction with, or as an epithet of, Aphrodite's name. This helps to demonstrate how the relationship between persuasion and love (or desire) was i mportant in Greek culture. Peitho's ancestry is somewhat unclear. According to Hesiod in the Theogony, Peitho was the daughter of the Titans Tethys and Oceanus, which would make her an Oceanid and therefore sister of such notable godde sses as Dione, Doris, Metis, and Calypso. However, Hesiod's classification of Peitho as an Oceanid i s contradicted by other sources. She is most commonly considered a daughter of Aphrodite. Peitho was the wife of Hermes, the messenger of the gods. (www.en. Wikipedia.org) A Pompeiian fresco of Peitho (left) taking Eros to Venus and Anteros, 1st century AD: PEITHO was the goddess or spirit (daimona) of persuasion, seduction and charming speech. In combination with forc e (bia) she also represented forceful i nducement and rape (including bridal abduction). Peitho was a close companion of the goddess Aphrodite. Pietho was usually depicted as a woman with her hand lifted in persuasion or fleeing from the scene of a rape. Her attributes sometimes included a white dove and ball of binding twine. (www.theoi.com)
PEITHO (Peithô). 1. The personification of Persuasion (Suada or Suadela among the Romans), was worshipped as a di vinity at Sicyon, where she was honoured with a temple in the agora. (Herod. viii. 11; Paus. ii. 7. § 7.) Peitho also occurs as a surname of other divinities, such as Aphrodite, whose worship was said to have been introduced at Athens by Theseus, when he united the country communities into towns (Paus. i. 22. § 3), and of Artemis (ii. 21. 1). At Athens the statues of Peitho and Aphrodite Pandemos stood closely together, and at Megara, too, the statue of Peitho stood in the temple of Aphrodite (Paus. i. 43. § 6), so that the two divinities must he conceived as closely connected, or the one, perhaps, merely as an attribute of the other. 2. One of the Charites. (Paus. ix. 35. § 1 ; Suid. s. v. Charites.) 3. One of the daughters of Oceants and Thetis. (Hes. Theog. 349.) 4. The wife of Phoronens, and the mot her of Aegialeus and Apia. (Schol. ad Eurip. Orest. 920.) (Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology)
Nous Nous, sometimes equated to intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classi cal philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, similar in meaning to intuition. The three commonly used philosophical terms are from Greek, νοῦς or νόος, and Latin intellectus and int elligentia respectively. In philosophy, common English translations include "understanding" and "mind"; or s ometimes "thought" or "reason" (in the sense of that which reasons, not the activity of reasoning). It is also often described as something equivalent to perception except that it works within the mind ("the mind's eye"). It has been suggested that the basic meaning is something like "awareness". To describe the activity of this faculty, apart from v erbs based on "understanding", the word "intellection" is sometim es used in philosophical contexts, and the Greek words noēsis and noein are sometimes also used. In colloquial British English, nous also denotes "good sense", which is close to one everyday meaning it had in Ancient Greece. Plato used the word nous in many ways which were not unusual in the everyday Greek of the time, and
often simply meant "good sense" or "awareness". On the other hand, in some of his dialogues it is described by key characters in a higher sense, which was apparently already common. In his Philebus 28c he has Socrates say that "all philosophers agree—whereby they really exalt themselves—that mind (nous) is king of heaven and earth. Perhaps they are right." and later st ates that the ensuing discussion "confirms the utterances of those who declared of old that mi nd (nous) always rules the universe". In his Cratylus, Plato gives the etymology of Athena's name, the goddess of wisdom, from Atheonóa ( Ἀθεονόα) meaning "god's (theos) mind (nous)". In his Phaedo, Plato's teacher Socrates is made to say
just before dying that his discovery of Anaxagoras' concept of a cosmic nous as the cause of the order of things, was an important turning point for him. But he also expressed disagreement with Anaxagoras' understanding of the implications of his own doctrine, because of Anaxagoras' materialist understanding of causation. Socrates said that Anaxagoras would "give voice and air and hearing and countless other things of the sort as causes for our talking with each other, and should fail to mention the r eal causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that i t was best to condemn me". On the other hand Socrates seems to suggest that he also failed to develop a fully satisfactory teleological and dualistic understanding of a mind of nature, whose aims represent the good things which all par ts of nature aim at. Concerning the nous which is the source of understanding of individuals, Plato is widely understood to have used ideas from Parmenides in addition to A naxagoras. Like Parmenides, Plato argued that re lying on sense perception can never lead to true knowledge, only opinion. Instead, Plato's more philosophical characters argue that nous must somehow perceive truth directly in the ways gods and daimons perceive. What our mind sees directly in order to really understand things must not be the constantly changing material things, but unchanging enti ties that exist in a different way, the so-called "forms" or "ideas". However he knew that contemporary philosophers often argued (as in modern science) that nous and perception are just two aspects of o ne physical activity, and that perception is the source of
knowledge and understanding (not the other way around).
Just exactly how Plato believed that the nous of people lets them come to understand thing s in any way which improves upon sense perception and the kind of thinki ng which animals have, is a subject of long running discussion and debate. On the one h and, in the Republic Plato's Socrates, i n the so -called "metaphor of the sun", and "allegory of the c ave" describes people as being able to perceive more clearly because of something from outside themselves, something like when the sun s hines, helping eyesight. The source of this illumination for the intellect is referred to as the Form of the Good. On the other hand, in the Meno for example, Plato's Socrates explains the theory of anamnesis whereby people are born with ideas already in their soul, which they somehow remember from previous lives. Both
theories were to become highly influential. As in Xenophon, Plato's Socrates frequently describes the soul in a political way, with ruling parts, and parts which are by nature meant to be ruled. Nous is associated with the rational (logistikon) part of the individual human soul, which by nature should rule. In his Republic, in the so -called "analogy of the divided line", it has a special function within this rational part. Plato tended to treat nous as the only immortal part of the soul. Concerning the cosmos, in the Timaeus, the title character also tells a "likely story" in which nous is responsible for the creative work of the demiurge or maker who brought rational order to our universe. This craftsman imitated what he perceived in the world of eternal Forms. In the Philebus Socrates argues that nous in individual humans must share in a cosmic nous, in the same way that human bodies are made up of small parts of the elements found in the rest of the universe. And this nous must be in the genos of being a cause of all particular things as particular things.
(www.en.wikipedia.org)
