In Greek mythology, Amalthea or Amaltheia () is the figure most commonly identified as the nurse of Zeus during his infancy. She is described either as a nymph who raises the child on the milk of a goat, or, in some accounts from the Hellenistic period (323–30 BC) onwards, as the goat itself.
From as early as the 6th century BC, there survive references to the "horn of Amalthea" (known in Latin as the cornucopia), a magical horn said to be capable of producing endless amounts of any food or drink desired. In a narrative attributed to the mythical poet Musaeus and dating to around the 4th century BC, Amalthea, a nymph, nurses the infant Zeus and owns a goat which is terrifying in appearance. After Zeus reaches adulthood, he uses the goat's skin as a weapon in his battle against the Titans (the earlier generation of gods). The first known author to describe Amalthea as a goat is the 3rd-century BC poet Callimachus, who presents a rationalised version of the myth in which Zeus is fed on Amalthea's milk. Aratus, also writing in the 3rd century BC, identifies Amalthea with the star Capella, and describes her as "Olenian" (the meaning of which is unclear).
Scholars disagree as to when the tale of Zeus's upbringing was first merged with that of the magical horn. They are explicitly combined by the Roman poet Ovid (1st century BC/AD), whose story of Zeus's nursing weaves together elements from multiple accounts. A passage from a marginal note in a manuscript of Aratus's version has been taken as evidence that the two myths may have been connected prior to Ovid. In the Fabulae, a 2nd-century AD mythological handbook, Amalthea hides the infant in a tree and gathers the Kouretes to dance noisily, so that the child's crying cannot be heard. Other accounts of Zeus's upbringing describe Amalthea as related to Melisseus, the mythical king of Crete, including an Orphic version of the story.
Among the few surviving representations of Amalthea in ancient art is a 2nd-century AD marble relief which represents her as a goat suckling Zeus, behind two dancing Kouretes. She is also depicted on multiple coins and medallions from the Roman Empire. In modern art, she has been the subject of 17th- and 18th-century works by sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pierre Julien, and painters such as Jacob Jordaens.
The etymology of () is unknown. Scholars from the 19th century made various proposals, among them derivations from (, ) and (, ). In 1917, Alfred Chilton Pearson described earlier etymologies as inadequate, suggesting that the name is related to (, ) and (, ). The verb (, ) was thought by Otto Gruppe, writing in 1906, to derive from Amalthea's name. According to Pearson, the two words should instead be understood as having existed alongside each other, with this notion of "abundance" being embodied in certain mythological figures. In 1999, Gerard Mussies derived Amalthea's name from (, ), which he saw as referring to the goat's udder, taut with milk.
There is no mention of Amalthea in Hesiod's Theogony, an 8th-century BC poem containing the earliest known account of Zeus's birth. Hesiod writes that the newborn Zeus is taken to a cave on "Mount Aigaion" on the island of Crete; some scholars interpret this as "Goat's Mountain" (, meaning "goat's"), and thus as related to the story of Amalthea. Other scholars, including Martin Litchfield West, see no reason to view the name for the mountain as referring to a goat. According to Apostolos Athanassakis, elements of the story of Zeus's raising such as Amalthea and the Kouretes (male figures who dance loudly around the child in some versions) have their origins in traditions from Crete.
The "horn of Amalthea", referred to in Latin literature as the cornucopia, is a magical horn generally described as being able to produce an inexhaustible supply of any food or drink desired. The tale of this horn seems to have originated as an independent tradition from that of Zeus's raising, though it is uncertain when the two merged. The "horn of Amalthea" is mentioned as early as the 6th century BC by poets such as Anacreon and Phocylides, and is commonly referenced in comedies, such as those by Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Antiphanes (who date to the 5th or 4th century BC). According to the Bibliotheca – a 1st- or 2nd-century AD mythological compendium by an author referred to as "Apollodorus" – the 5th-century BC mythographer Pherecydes described the horn's ability to provide endless food and drink as desired. Apollodorus also transmits that Pherecydes considered it to belong to Amalthea, a nymph (a type of young, female divinity). In a lost poem by the 5th-century BC poet Pindar, Heracles fought against the river god Achelous (who was in the form of a bull) for the hand of Deianeira, and during the fight Heracles pulled off one of his opponent's horns. Achelous reclaimed this horn from Heracles by trading it for a magical horn obtained from Amalthea, a daughter of Oceanus. In the same passage in which he cites Pherecydes, Apollodorus retells this story; he describes the nymph Amalthea as the daughter of Haemonius, whose name, meaning "Thessalian", indicates that she is separate to the nurse of Zeus. In Apollodorus's account, Amalthea's horn is that of a bull (an element also mentioned by the 4th-to-3rd-century BC comic poet Philemon), seemingly a result of confusion with the bull's horn of Achelous. In the versions of the myth told by Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) and Strabo (1st century BC/AD), the horn of Amalthea is identified with that of Achelous.
In stories of Zeus's infancy, Amalthea is the figure most commonly described as his nurse, and in this role she is often considered a nymph. She appeared in the account of Zeus's upbringing from the now-lost Eumolpia, probably a composed in or before the second half of the 4th century BC, and attributed in antiquity to the mythical poet Musaeus. This account is described in a summary – written by an author referred to as "Pseudo-Eratosthenes" – of the Catasterismi, a now-lost work of astral mythology attributed to the 3rd-to-2nd-century BC scholar Eratosthenes. According to Pseudo-Eratosthenes, in the version by Musaeus, Zeus's mother Rhea gives him as a newborn to the goddess Themis; he is then handed over to the nymph Amalthea, who has the infant reared by a she-goat. This goat is said to be the offspring of the god Helios; she is so terrifying in appearance that, out of fear, the Titans (the gods from the generation before Zeus) had asked Gaia, their mother, to conceal her in a Cretan cave. Gaia complied, entrusting the goat to Amalthea. After Zeus reaches adulthood, he receives an oracle advising him to use the goat's skin as a weapon in his war against the Titans, because of its terrifying nature. The narrative from Musaeus is also recounted in De astronomia, a work of astral mythology probably composed in the 2nd century AD. De astronomia specifies that this goatskin used against the Titans is the aegis (a divine attribute which varies in form depending on the source).
Various accounts of Zeus's upbringing rationalise Amalthea as a goat; these versions start appearing in the Hellenistic period (323–30 BC). The earliest known author to describe her as a goat is the 3rd-century BC poet Callimachus, in his Hymn to Zeus. He relates that, after Zeus's birth, the god is taken by the Arcadian nymph Neda to a hidden location in Crete, where he is reared by the nymph Adrasteia and fed the milk of Amalthea. In his description of Zeus's suckling of the breast of Amalthea, Callimachus employs the word (), which suggests the breast of a human rather than the teat of a goat; in doing so, Susan Stephens writes that Callimachus "calls attention to his own rationalizing variant of the myth". According to a scholium on Callimachus's account (that is, a marginal note in a manuscript of his text), from one of Amalthea's horns flows ambrosia and from the other comes nectar (the food and drink of the gods, respectively). In the version of Zeus's infancy from Diodorus Siculus, the child is reared by nymphs on the milk of the goat Amalthea, as well as honey; Diodorus Siculus adds that Amalthea is the source of Zeus's epithet (, ). An account which is largely the same as that given by Pseudo-Eratosthenes is found in a scholium on the Iliad, though the scholiast (the scholium's author) describes Amalthea herself as the goat which terrifies the Titans.
In works of astral mythology, the tale of the goat who nurses the young Zeus is adapted to provide an aition (or origin myth) for certain stars. The 3rd-century BC poet Aratus, in his description of the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga), explains that the star of the Goat (Capella) sits on the Charioteer's left shoulder. He identifies this goat with Amalthea, describing it as the goat who suckled Zeus; in this passage, he employs the word for the goat's breast, similarly to Callimachus, who may be his source for this information. He also refers to her as the "Olenian" goat, which may be an allusion to a version in which Zeus is reared (by a goat) near the Achaean city of Olenos, or to the location of the star on the arm (, ) of the Charioteer. Alternatively, it may indicate that the goat's father is Olenus (the son of Hephaestus), an interpretation given by a scholium on the passage. At the end of the account given by Pseudo-Eratosthenes, the text contains a lacuna (or gap), where it has been proposed that Zeus was described as placing the goat among the stars. Emma Gee believes that in the Catasterismi the god would have performed this action for the goat's role in his defeat of the Titans, and her nursing of him during his youth.
According to Robert Fowler, the nursing of Zeus by a goat and the originally independent tradition of the magical horn had become "entangled" by the time of Pherecydes. Jan N. Bremmer writes that the Roman poet Ovid (active around the beginning of the 1st century AD) was the first to bring the two tales together. In Ovid's account, presented in his Fasti, Amalthea is once again the goat's owner, and is a naiad (or water nymph) who lives on Mount Ida. She hides the young Zeus in Crete (away from his father, Cronus), where he is suckled by the she-goat. On one occasion, the goat snaps off one of its horns on a tree, and Amalthea, filling the broken horn with fruit, brings it back to Zeus; this tale, an aition for the cornucopia, appears to be the earliest attempt at providing an origin for the object. Zeus later places the goat (and perhaps her broken-off horn) in the heavens, the goat becoming the star Capella. Ovid's narrative brings together elements from multiple earlier accounts, which he intertwines in an episode characterised by John F. Miller as a "miniature masterpiece". His source for the narrative's overall outline appears to be Eratosthenes: he describes Amalthea as a nymph, and seemingly alludes to Zeus's war with the Titans. He notably departs from the Eratosthenic story by describing the goat as 'beautiful' () and as having majestic horns. Ovid harks back to Aratus in the first words of his narrative, which mirror the opening phrase of Aratus's poem, and by describing the goat as "Olenian". Barbara Boyd also sees in Ovid's narrative considerable influence from the Callimachean account of Zeus's infancy.
Miller points to a garbled scholium on Aratus's account as evidence that the story of Zeus's upbringing and that of Amalthea's magical horn may have already been connected by the time of Ovid. Two variants appear to be mixed in this scholium: Zeus's nurse is an Arcadian woman in the first, and a goat in the second. The scholiast describes the horn of this nurse as Amalthea's horn, which he associates with the constellation of the Goat; Amalthea's horn would seem here to be the magical horn of plenty, though the two are not explicitly identified. Miller also points, as possible further evidence of a tradition in which the two tales were connected, to the scholiast on Callimachus, whose mention of ambrosia and nectar flowing from the goat's horns may have been related to the young Zeus's nourishment.
An account of Zeus's infancy appears in the Fabulae, a mythological handbook which has been attributed to Gaius Julius Hyginus and was probably composed in the 2nd century AD. In this version, unlike in Hesiod's Theogony, Zeus's elder siblings (or some of them) are not swallowed, though Rhea still gives Cronus a stone in place of Zeus, which he consumes. Upon realising the deception, Cronus scours the earth for his son, while Zeus's sister Hera carries the infant to Crete, where she entrusts him to Amalthea, a nymph in this account. To keep Zeus from his father, Amalthea hides him in a cradle, which she places in a tree, so that he "could not be found in the sky, on earth, or on the sea". To prevent Cronus from hearing the child's cries, Amalthea gathers the Kouretes and supplies them with shields and spears, which she instructs them to clang noisily around the child. According to Martin Nilsson, this account is not fully a creation of the poet, and probably has some basis in a connection between the young Zeus and tree worship. Later in the work, Hyginus mentions , who has been interpreted as Amalthea; he calls this figure one of the daughters of Ocean (that is, the Titan Oceanus), alongside Adrasteia and Ida. He adds that these three are alternatively considered daughters of Melisseus, the mythical king of Crete, and nurses of Zeus.
Other versions of Zeus's upbringing also describe Amalthea as related to Melisseus. In the account given by the late-1st-century BC writer Didymus, the infant Zeus is raised by the nymphs Amalthea and Melissa, the daughters of Melisseus, who feed him honey and the milk of a goat. In Apollodorus's version of Zeus's infancy, the god is born in a cave on Mount Dicte in Crete, where he is fed the milk of Amalthea. He is raised by the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida, the daughters of Melisseus, and protected by the Kouretes, who noisily clang their spears and shields.
Amalthea also seems to have appeared in the now-lost Orphic Rhapsodies, a 1st-century BC or 1st-century AD theogony attributed to the mythical poet Orpheus in antiquity. Luc Brisson and West believe that in the poem Amalthea was the wife of Melisseus (a detail transmitted by the 5th-century AD Neoplatonist philosopher Hermias) and that her daughters by him, the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida, raised Zeus in the cave of the goddess Night while the Kouretes guarded its entrance. According to the reconstruction of the poem by , Zeus was raised by the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida (still the daughters of Melisseus), and fed the milk of Amalthea, whom Bernabé describes as a "goat-nymph". An Orphic work may have been the source for the version of Zeus's upbringing told by Apollodorus.
Diodorus Siculus, in a euhemerist reworking of Amalthea's myth, describes her as an especially beautiful young woman, who is wed to Ammon, the king of Libya. Ammon gives her a region of great fertility which is shaped like a bull's horn, and which, taking its name from her, comes to be known as "Amalthea's horn". Diodorus Siculus adds that this name is thus used by later generations to refer to any exceptionally fertile and fruitful piece of land. In this version, Amalthea and Ammon are also the parents of the god Dionysus. The location of Amalthea's rearing of Zeus was evoked in the 1st century BC by an belonging to Atticus, a friend of the Roman statesman Cicero. The form of this is unknown, although believes that it included a cave and a gallery housing portraits of distinguished Romans. In the version of the myth from the 2nd-century AD Greek writer Zenobius, when Zeus places the goat from his childhood among the stars, he sets aside one of her horns, which he gives to the nymphs who raised him, imbuing it with its magical abilities. De astronomia, which presents an account of the goat Amalthea's nursing of Jupiter (the equivalent of Zeus in Latin literature), later states that Amalthea also raises Aegipan, a figure who is in some sources indistinct from the rustic god Pan. Nonnus, a 5th-century AD Greek writer, describes Pan as the shepherd of the goat Amalthea.
Amalthea's extant iconography in ancient Greek and Roman art is limited. She is represented either as a nymph or a goat, the latter the more common form, and her most notable attribute is the cornucopia. On a Campana relief (a type of Roman terracotta relief) dating to the late 1st century BC or early 1st century AD, she is shown nursing Zeus (who sits in her lap) without the presence of a goat; two Kouretes carry swords and shields, one on each side of her. As a goat, Amalthea is often shown suckling Zeus, or with the child mounted upon her back. A 2nd-century AD marble relief depicts her as a goat giving the child her milk, behind two dancing Kouretes who clang their swords on their shields. Amalthea is also depicted on coins and medallions from the Roman Empire, including those from the reigns of Titus (79–81 AD) and Gallienus (253–268 AD).
Amalthea was the subject of a sculpture attributed to the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, among his first works, produced before 1615. It depicts Amalthea as a goat, with the infant Jupiter drinking her milk, accompanied by a miniature satyr; it diverges from the ancient artistic tradition by having Jupiter feed himself. The realism of the statue's surface is reminiscent of Hellenistic sculpture, and it was once thought to have been produced in antiquity. It was under the ownership of Scipione Borghese by 1615, and may have been seen as containing a political meaning: Amalthea, embodying abundance, may have symbolised the "Golden Age" ushered in under the of Pope Paul V (who was also part of the Borghese family).
The myth of the goat Amalthea was a favourite subject of the Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens. Around 1630 to 1635, he created a painting in which Amalthea is being milked by Adrasteia beside a young, bawling Jupiter, bottle in hand. A print after this painting by the Frisian engraver Schelte a Bolswert is accompanied by a Latin inscription which presents a moral interpretation of the myth: it explains that Jupiter's adulterous proclivities are unsurprising given he is raised amongst satyrs, on the milk of a goat. Jordaens's other paintings of Amalthea include elements such as a satyr playing a flute or tambourine, and a nymph holding a milk pitcher while looking at the audience. Around 1636 to 1637, the French painter Nicolas Poussin created a painting of the myth of Amalthea after an engraving by the 16th-century artist Giulio Bonasone. Poussin's second painting of the scene, dating to around 1639, portrays Amalthea as a woman holding a valuable receptacle containing goat's milk, from which the child drinks.
In 1787, the French sculptor Pierre Julien completed a white marble statue depicting Amalthea as a nymph, seated on a rock, with her hand grasping the lead of her goat. Julien's Amalthea is a young, nude woman endowed with full hips, her pose echoing the Venus de' Medici. The sculpture was the central element of the dairy at Rambouillet, which Louis XVI had commissioned for his wife Marie Antoinette. Installed in 1787, the statue was situated in a grotto within the building, a placement Meredith Martin sees as indicating that the dairy was an allusion to the cave from the myth of Jupiter's upbringing; this grotto included artificial rocks, flowing water, and a skylight. Along the walls of the room that contained the grotto were two friezes, one of which depicted Amalthea as a goat, nursing Jupiter.