Being able to pass freely between Olympus, the Underworld, and the mortal realm, Hermes fulfilled an important role in Greek mythology as the messenger god. However, the Angelos Athanatôn, or “messenger of the gods,” was not the only emissary for the Olympians. The goddess Iris, a descendant of Titans and dedicated to Hera, also fulfilled an important role in Greek mythology as an emissary for the Olympians. Although not as prominent in mythology as Hermes, Iris is a colorful, striking part of Classical culture.
Titans, Gods, and Monsters: The Family of Iris
The story of the goddess Iris begins with the Titans, the forebears of the Olympian gods who reigned over the heavens and earth in Greek mythology. Writing around 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod produced his Theogony, which narrates the origins of the gods. This is one of the oldest pieces of literature to have survived from the ancient Mediterranean, alongside Homer’s epic. Hesiod describes how Iris was the daughter of Thaumas and Electra. Thaumas was a god of the sea and a son of Pontus and Gaia. An Oceanid, Electra was similarly related to the Titans, being the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys.
According to Hesiod, the marriage of Thaumas and Electra, two deities of the sea, produced several offspring, including the Harpies. Half-bird, half-human, these monstrous creatures featured prominently in ancient Greek and Roman culture as wind spirits and agents of vengeance and punishment. Alongside these monstrous offspring, about whom Virgil says existed, “no worse monsters than these… clawed hands and faces always thin with hunger,” Thaumas and Electra had two other daughters, Iris and Arke. The two daughters would both become messengers: Iris to the Olympian gods and Arke to the Titans.
Iris would also have a family of her own. Often, her partner is said to be Zephyrus, the god and personification of the west wind. Different literary traditions identify different offspring for the divine pair. Fragmentary poetry of Alcaeus of Mytilene (6th century BCE) claims Iris and Zephyrus were the parents of Eros, the god of desire. Nonnus, a poet from 5th century CE Egypt, described the two as the parents of Pothos, another love deity, in his Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic that detailed the life of Dionysus (and is the longest surviving poem from antiquity!).
Divine Purpose: Messenger Goddess
The two daughters of Thaumas and Electra had, for a time, a shared purpose in life. They were both messengers for the gods, flitting between the immortal and mortal realms carrying messages to humans. Things soon soured, however, with the advent of the Titanomachy. This is the great battle that was fought between the Olympian gods and the Titans (the older generation of gods). The war between the gods of Mount Olympus and the Titans of Mount Othrys was fought for control over the universe. During the conflict, Arke betrayed the Olympians and joined the side of the Titans, for whom she would serve as a messenger.
The war would eventually be won by the Olympians, and this was bad news for Arke. Her punishment at the hands of Zeus was severe. The ruler of the gods tore off Arke’s wings and offered them as a gift to Thetis, the nereid, to celebrate her wedding to Peleus. The wings would, in turn, be bestowed to Thetis’ son, Achilles, who took to wearing the wings on his feet. For this rather grisly decision, Achilles would sometimes be known by the name Podarkes, which meant “feet like the wings of Arke.” While one-half of Thaumas and Electra’s duo of messenger daughters suffered, Iris flourished. She continued to serve the gods as a messenger alongside Hermes, often serving as the personal messenger of Hera, the wife of Zeus.
War and Madness: Iris in Epic, Drama, and Comedy
Although she may not have been as influential or prominent as other gods and goddesses in Greco-Roman mythology, Iris nevertheless remains a conspicuous figure. Her role as the messenger of the gods ensures that she fulfills an important narratological function, bridging the mortal and divine characters together.
Perhaps Iris’ most famous narrative appearance is in the myth of Persephone. Having been abducted by Hades, ruler of the underworld, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, withdrew in mourning to her temple at Eleusis. The earth suffered immeasurably, quickly becoming barren and a place of deprivation. Starving mortals soon began to perish in the resulting famine caused by Demeter’s retreat to her sanctuary. Desperate, the humans soon stopped offering sacrifices to the gods. This roused the gods into action, and Zeus dispatched Iris to Demeter, pleading with the goddess of agriculture to return to Olympus and restore some semblance of normality to the world.
Iris’ entreaties were in vain. Without the return of her daughter, Demeter remained resolute. It took Zeus’ intervention to return Persephone to her mother, this time sending Hermes as his messenger. Even then, it was only for two-thirds of the year. While captive in the underworld, Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds, which was a ploy of Hades. Because Persephone had eaten the fruit of the underworld, she would be obliged to spend at least one-third of the year in his realm. These months are the winter season when Demeter laments Persephone’s absence.
Alongside her role in the mythology of the seasons, Iris also features across the broad spectrum of ancient literature, from epic and tragedy to the bawdy comedy of Aristophanes. In his 5th-century The Birds, which focuses on the attempt of a group of birds to build a city in the sky to replace the Olympians, Iris goes to meet with the avian schemers. Upon meeting them, however, she is ridiculed, insulted, and subjected to vile threats by Pisetaerus, an elderly Athenian man and the leader of the birds.
Elsewhere on stage, Iris features in Herackles Gone Mad, by Euripides. First performed in 416 BCE, the tragedy concerns the madness of the demi-god, which results in the death of his wife and children at his own hand. In the play, Iris appears alongside the goddess Lysa, the divinity of madness and insanity, at the moment when Herakles is cursed.
In addition to the stage productions of the Athenian Golden Age, Iris is a prominent character in the epics that focus on the Trojan War. Curiously, she does not appear at all in the Odyssey, where Hermes is the only messenger god employed by the Olympians. In one version of the famous story of Troy, Iris appears to Menelaus to break the news of his being cuckolded. While sailing to Crete, Iris informs the Spartan king that his wife has eloped with the Trojan Prince, Paris.
Elsewhere in the story, Iris reprises her role as messenger, most notably bringing Achilles’s prayer to her husband, Zephyrus, to light the funeral pyre of Achilles’ beloved comrade, Patroclus. Zeus also sends Iris to visit the Trojan king, Priam, where she delivers to him the instructions to sneak into the Greek camp and beg for the body of his son, Hector, who was slain by Achilles in vengeance for the death of Patroclus.
Cult and Iconography: Representing the Goddess Iris
Like her counterpart messenger divinity, Iris is sometimes depicted in ancient artworks bearing a caduceus. This is the distinctive staff topped by wings, which may or may not also be entwined by two serpents. She may also be associated with rainbows, of which she was the personification, and also a pitcher; Iris was said to water the clouds with seawater from a jug.
Although she shared certain iconographic similarities with other gods, such as Hermes, Iris was comparatively small-scale in the ancient religious collective conscience. She apparently received no significant cult worship in the ancient Greek world. This means that, although she may have featured as part of the ornamentation of ancient temples, such as on the Parthenon’s pedimental sculpture, there were, so far as we know, no temples, sanctuaries, or shrines dedicated to the messenger goddess. The only known passing reference to a cult of Iris is from the Deipnosophistae, or “Dinner Sophists,” of Athenaeus, an early 3rd-century work. According to Athenaeus, the people of the island of Delos, famous for its sanctuary of Apollo, sacrificed a type of cake, called basyniae, to the goddess.
Plants and Paintings: Afterlife of the Goddess Iris
Despite the lack of notable cult worship, Iris has nevertheless enjoyed an especially colorful nachleben or afterlife. The association of the goddess with rainbows led to a genus of particularly colorful plants being named after her: the Iris. There are 310 species of this plant found all over the world. Their color has also inspired artists of all different styles throughout the centuries, most notably Vincent Van Gogh in the late 19th century. Elsewhere in art, the meaning of Iris was taken to a more abstract degree. Given the role of the goddess as the messenger of the gods, the flower of the same name could be used to symbolize a warning to be heeded. This is the case for the painting Broken Vows (1856) by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter Philip Hermogene Calderon. Now on display in London, it means that Iris, the divine messenger goddess, has moved over the course of the millennia from the realm of the Titans to the Tate!
