Sophocles that links amber to Meleager, the famous hero of the Calydonian boar hunt.92 According to one version of the myth, Meleager’s sisters, who were changed into birds (meleagrides, perhaps guinea fowl) by Artemis when he died, migrated yearly from Greece to the lands beyond India and wept tears of amber for their brother. Artemis’s role is a critical one in this story, considering the number of amber carvings that might be associated with her. While one Late Antique author places the Meleagrides on the island of Leros, opposite Miletos, Strabo sets the transformed birds at the mouth of the Po or south of Istria—locations of great interest, considering the number of seventh-century ambers in the form of birds excavated from sanctuaries and graves in both Greece and Italy. Another amber-origin story, recounted by Pseudo- Aristotle in On Marvellous Things Heard, offers an intriguing hint of connections among amber, sun myths, and metalworking, and of the presence of figured amber and Greek artists at the mouth of the Po.93 Ever present in these accounts is the sadness of a youth’s early death, and this version involves Icarus, who was burned by flying too close to the sun. According to Pseudo-Aristotle, Icarus’s father, the master craftsman Daidalos, visited the Elektrides (“amber islands”), which were formed by the silting-up of the Eridanus River, in the gulf of the Adriatic. There he came upon the hot, fetid lake where Phaethon Figure 23 Fall of Phaethon, engraving by Thomas de Leu after a painting by fell, and where the black poplars on its banks oozed Antoine Caron. FromLes images ou tableaux de platte peinture des deux amber that the natives collected for trade with the Greeks. Philostrates sophistes grecs, et Les statues de Callistrate (Paris, 1615), p. 90. During his stay on these islands, Daidalos erected two Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Library, A. W. Mellon New Century statues, one of tin and one of bronze, in the likenesses of Fund. himself and of his lost son. Like the Celtic myth about Apollo mourning Asclepius, There are recurring themes in all these myths: the death Phaethon’s tale is one of a young life tragically cut short. of divine or heroic youths, the mourning of the young, the When Diodorus Siculus tells the Phaethon story in his sun (which was responsible for Icarus’s death as well as Library of History, he ends by pointing out that amber “is Phaethon’s), and the sea. Many Greek and early Roman commonly used in connection with the mourning stories about amber place its origin in the far north, and it attending the death of the young.”91 But as well as is likely that the earliest myths incorporated knowledge of reminding us of amber’s role in mourning, the poplars the northern solar cults and the medicinal and magical dropping tears into the river are evidence that there were properties of amber. theories connecting amber to tree resin as early as the fifth century (which marks the first extant occurrence of Not only was amber connected to the sun, it also came to the Phaethon myth). The link between resin drops and be immortalized in the stars. It was characteristic of all tears is a natural one; myrrh, for instance, is explained in precious stones in antiquity to have a planetary or myth as the tears of Myrrha, who was changed into a tree celestial association, and by the third century B.C. at least, for her crimes—indeed, the Greek word for tear, dakruon, the Eridanus was thought to have been transformed into a can also mean “sap” or “gum.” constellation, the eponymic Eridanus, or River. Late Antique sources recount how Phaethon became the A broader trend in mythology (in many cultures besides constellation Auriga, the Heliades became the Hyades, the Greco-Roman) connects precious stones generally to and the Ligurian king became the Swan.94 In Late tears, and mythological accounts of amber’s origin do not Antiquity, Claudian described the river god Eridanus in a always involve trees. Pliny refers to a (now lost) play by manner no doubt long imagined: “On his dripping Ancient Literary Sources, Origins 33