Aristæus

Aristæus, an ancient divinity whose worship in the earliest times was widely diffused throughout Greece, but whose myth is remarkably obscure. According to the common tradition, he was the son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, and was born near Cyrene, in Africa. Hermes placed the child under the protection of the Horæ, or of Chiron the Centaur. After Aristæus left Libya, he went to Thebes, in Bœotia, where he was taught by the muses the arts of healing and prophecy, and where he married Autonœ, the daughter of Cadmus, by whom he had several children, including Actæon (q.v.). At Ceos, he liberated the inhabitants from the miseries of a destructive drought. He visited the islands of the Ægean Sea, Sicily, Sardinia, and Magna Græcia, leaving everywhere traces of his divine benignity. In Thrace, he was initiated in the mysteries of Dionysus; and he disappeared from the earth near Mount Hæmus. Aristæus, always a beneficent deity, was especially worshipped as the protector of vine and olive plantations, and of hunters and herdsmen. The great diversities in the legend were probably caused by the fusion into one of separate but similar local divinities.