Amalthaea

Amalthaea is the goat who suckled the infant Zeus hidden in a Cretan cave, and whose broken horn became the cornucopia that pours out whatever its holder wishes.

Amalthaea belongs to the Cretan infancy of Zeus, the episode in which the newborn god is hidden from his father Kronos and reared in secret. The sources do not agree on what she was: some make her the she-goat whose milk fed the child, others a nymph who kept such a goat and did the feeding herself. The ancient mythographers record both without settling between them, and the confusion is old rather than a modern muddle.

The detail that travels furthest is the horn. In the usual telling one of the goat's horns is broken off, and it becomes the horn of plenty, filled with or producing an endless supply of whatever its possessor desires; some accounts have Zeus himself break it, others make the breaking accidental. A related strand has Zeus, once grown, take the goat's hide for his aegis in the war against the Titans, so that the creature that sheltered him becomes the shield he fights behind. Where she is a nymph rather than a goat, the horn is transferred to her keeping instead.

Amalthaea's place in the tradition is therefore transitional in a very literal way: she is the source of nourishment at the one point where the chief god is helpless, and every part of her is afterwards converted into something that keeps giving — a horn that never empties, a hide that never fails. She is also, in most tellings, placed among the stars afterwards. The accounts are brief and genealogical rather than narrative; she is a fixture of the story rather than a character in it.

[Generated Content] Read as a personality, Amalthaea comes across as wholly given over to sustaining another, with no visible interest or aim apart from that. The tradition supplies feeding, sheltering, and finally being used up, and nothing at all about wanting, refusing, or choosing, so she reads as steady and unresisting rather than either willing or reluctant — a temperament defined by provision. What little tension the figure carries comes from the fact that her generosity is not entirely voluntary: the horn is broken from her and the hide is taken.