Part 3 of The company Hekate keeps
Part 1 traced Hekate‘s family, and Part 2 her fellow travellers. This final part turns to her stranger company.
Later authors gave Hekate lovers and children, and linked her with some of the most formidable figures in Greek legend, including Circe, Medea, and the monster Scylla. Beyond them lie the restless dead she was believed to command, the torch-bearing nymphs said to light her way, and the dogs whose barking announced her approach. These relationships show Hekate at her most unsettling, and reveal how closely she became tied to magic and the world below.
Hekate's lovers and children
For a goddess of such power, Hekate has surprisingly few romantic entanglements in the surviving myths. Hesiod, the Boeotian poet whose Theogony gives our earliest account of her, calls her an only child and gives her no husband or offspring, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter focuses on her bond with Demeter and Persephone. Later authors were less reticent.
Aietes, Circe, and Medea
Hesiod’s Perses, Hekate’s father, is not the Perses of the Colchian myths, who is a son of the sun god Helios and the brother of King Aietes. In Bibliotheca 1.9.28, from the handbook of Greek myth compiled in the first or second century CE, Medea returns to Colchis to find that this Perses has seized her father’s throne, and she kills him.
The first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus merges the two. Diodorus explained myths as distorted memories of real people, and in his Library of History the gods of legend become human kings and queens. His Perses rules the Tauric Chersonese (modern Crimea), and his daughter Hekate is a mortal woman, bold and lawless, who hunts strangers with her bow and discovers the deadly properties of plants such as aconite. She poisons her father, takes his throne, and founds a temple of Artemis where strangers are sacrificed. She then marries her uncle Aietes, king of Colchis, and bears him two daughters, Circe and Medea, and a son, Aigialeus. Circe inherits her mother’s knowledge of drugs, and Medea learns her arts too, though in Diodorus she turns them against her family’s cruelty by saving the strangers her father would kill. You can read this fantastic story here.
This Hekate is far from Hesiod’s cosmic goddess or the tender-hearted figure of the Hymn to Demeter. The account shows how difficult it is to treat every ancient reference to Hekate as part of one coherent biography. It also shows how firmly she had become associated with poisonous plants, dangerous knowledge, and the great witches of Greek legend. Diodorus’s Tauric temple, where strangers are sacrificed to Artemis, also echoes an older tradition, preserved by the second-century CE travel writer Pausanias, that Artemis turned Iphigeneia into Hekate.
Medea, priestess of Hekate
Even where Medea is not her daughter, the two are closely bound. In the Medea of the Athenian tragedian Euripides, first performed in 431 BCE, Medea swears by Hekate, the mistress she reveres above all others, who dwells in the innermost part of her hearth. In the Argonautica, the third-century BCE epic of Jason’s voyage by Apollonius of Rhodes, Medea is Hekate’s priestess. She prepares the magical ointment that protects Jason in the tasks Aietes sets him and instructs him to make a midnight sacrifice to Hekate. When he does, the goddess rises to receive it, crowned with serpents and oak leaves, surrounded by blazing torches and the baying of her hounds. You can read this story in Book 3 here.
Medea’s relationship with Hekate is devotional, ritual, and mythological. Hekate is the power she honours and calls upon in her herbs, enchantments, and nocturnal rites, and this partnership became one of the most influential links between Hekate and the practice of magic. In the second Idyll of Theocritus, the third-century BCE poet who pioneered pastoral poetry, a young woman named Simaitha casts a love spell and asks Hekate to make her drugs as potent as Circe’s or Medea’s.
Hermes
One of Hekate’s few recorded lovers is Hermes, her fellow traveller between worlds (see Part 2). The Roman poet Propertius, writing in the first century BCE, alludes to a story in which Brimo, a name for Hekate, lay with Mercury, the Roman Hermes, beside the waters of Lake Boebeis in Thessaly. He gives it no more than a couplet, and the story behind it is otherwise lost. You can read the poem in Latin or in English (Book 2, poem 2).
Scylla
Some traditions also make Hekate the mother of Scylla, the monster who haunts the straits opposite the whirlpool Charybdis. In the Odyssey, Homer’s epic of Odysseus’s homecoming, Scylla’s mother is Krataiis, “the mighty one”. In Argonautica 4.828–829, Apollonius takes this as a title and makes Scylla the daughter of Phorkys, the old man of the sea, and of “Hekate, whom they call Krataiis”. Other writers give other parents, so Hekate’s motherhood here is one tradition among several.
Such variations show that divine ancestry often served literary purposes. By linking a figure to a particular deity, an author could emphasise qualities, powers, or relationships relevant to the story. Making Hekate the mother of Scylla places her among formidable and dangerous beings, though this version never became the accepted one.
Taken together, these accounts give Hekate a larger family than the early sources suggest, and they show how her identity expanded as she became ever more closely associated with magic and the powers of the underworld.
The restless dead: Hekate's unsettling companions
Hekate’s company extends beyond gods and mortals to ghosts, restless spirits, and other powers connected with the dead.
The Greeks held complex beliefs about the dead and their relationship with the living. Most were imagined dwelling in Hades, but some could return, especially when death came in troubling circumstances. Those who died before their time (the aoroi), those who died by violence (the biaiothanatoi), and those left unburied (the ataphoi) were thought especially likely to wander, unsettled and potentially dangerous. Their restlessness also made them useful. Curse tablets were often buried in the graves of the untimely dead, whose spirits were expected to carry the curse to the powers below.
The classicist Sarah Iles Johnston has shown that Hekate came to be seen as the mistress of these wandering souls, the goddess who could send them against the living or hold them back. Her associations with night, crossroads, and magic brought her into the heart of this unsettling world.
Hekate and the ghosts of the crossroads
Crossroads held particular religious significance in ancient Greece. They were places of movement and uncertainty, where travellers made choices and roads diverged, and natural sites for offerings, protective images, and ritual. Hekate received offerings at crossroads, and her images stood there to mark her presence and protection.
One important observance was the Hekates deipnon, or Hekate’s supper, held at the new moon at the end of each lunar month. Athenians left food for the goddess at the crossroads, and the practice was familiar enough to appear in comedy and the law courts. The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes jokes in his comedy Wealth that the poor snatched the suppers before Hekate could eat them, and the orator Demosthenes, in his speech Against Conon, complains of rowdy young men who did the same. The suppers were also linked with household purification. People carried out and disposed of leftovers from cleansing rites, and sacrificed puppies to the goddess as part of purification.
The relationship between these offerings and the dead needs some care. Many modern accounts, scholarly and devotional, describe the suppers as meals for Hekate and the restless spirits who travel with her, and Johnston argues they kept those spirits appeased. The ancient sources, however, mostly describe the practice without saying who was thought to share in it, so this remains an interpretation, however plausible. What is clear is the cluster of ideas around it: Hekate, the crossroads, purification, and the potentially dangerous presence of spirits.
Hekate as a leader of spirits
By the fifth century BCE, Hekate was already linked with frightening apparitions. A Hippocratic medical treatise of that period, On the Sacred Disease, records that people blamed night terrors and fits of madness on the attacks of Hekate and the assaults of the heroes, the powerful dead. In the Helen of Euripides, the heroine cries out to Hekate, the bringer of light, begging her to send kind phantoms rather than terrifying ones. Hekate could send apparitions, and so she could also be asked to withhold them.
The evidence spans a wide range, from rituals protecting against troublesome spirits to magical attempts to enlist the dead for the practitioner’s own ends. In these contexts, her authority reflects her command of boundaries and her ability to move through regions mortals cannot easily enter. That authority sits alongside her protective and nurturing roles. The same goddess who receives suppers at the crossroads and appears in frightening invocations is honoured by Hesiod as a nurturer of the young and a benefactor of households and communities.
The Lampades: torch-bearing nymphs of the underworld
Among Hekate’s more obscure companions are the Lampades, nymphs associated with torches and the underworld. Nymphs were female divine beings bound to features of the natural world, such as springs, rivers, mountains, and trees, and they ranked below the great Olympian gods. The Lampades take their name from lampas, “torch”.
Modern reference works describe them as torch-bearing attendants who accompany Hekate through the underworld, but the ancient evidence is very thin. It comes from a single note in the ancient commentary on Homer’s Iliad, which says that the seventh-century BCE Spartan poet Alcman listed several kinds of nymphs, among them the Lampades, and glosses these as the nymphs who carry torches and lights with Hekate. The American classicist Timothy Gantz, author of the standard survey of early Greek myth, thought this description was probably the commentator’s own invention rather than Alcman’s. Popular claims that Zeus gave the Lampades to Hekate as a reward for her loyalty in the war against the Titans have no known ancient source.
Even so, the association fits the wider imagery surrounding Hekate. Torches appear throughout her mythology and art: she carries a light when she meets Demeter in the Hymn to Demeter, and torch-bearing images of her are common in Greek art from the Classical period onward. The Lampades extend this imagery into a company of lesser divine beings, lighting her way through dark and hidden places, though they live on the margins of the surviving record.
Dogs: Hekate's most familiar companions
No account of Hekate’s companions would be complete without her dogs. They are among her most recognisable sacred animals, appearing in literature, ritual, and art.
The barking of dogs could announce her approach. In Theocritus’s second Idyll, Simaitha pauses her spell when she hears the dogs howling through the town and knows that the goddess is at the crossroads. In the Argonautica, Hekate’s epiphany at Jason’s midnight sacrifice is accompanied by the baying of her hounds. Dogs also played a part in her worship. Besides the puppies sacrificed in purification, Pausanias reports that the people of Kolophon in Asia Minor sacrificed a black puppy to Enodia, the goddess of the roads, a name often identified with Hekate.
Dogs guard entrances, accompany travellers, and protect households, functions that closely match Hekate’s responsibilities at gates, roads, and boundaries. They are also bound up with the dead in Greek myth, most famously through Kerberos, the many-headed hound who guards the entrance to the underworld. Hekate’s dogs therefore belong to a broader network of imagery concerned with protection, passage, and the boundaries between the living and the dead.
The association could also be unsettling. Unseen dogs barking in the dark might herald a divine presence, and dog sacrifice reflects a side of her worship far removed from contemporary devotional practice. For modern devotees, dogs are often affectionate and familiar symbols of Hekate. Ancient worshippers knew the relationship through a wider range of experiences, including protection, fear, sacrifice, and encounters with the unknown.
The company Hekate keeps
Across this series, Hekate’s relationships have revealed a goddess whose presence extends across the Greek divine world. Through her parents, she belongs to the older generations of gods. Through Zeus, she takes her place in the Olympian order while keeping her ancient privileges, and at Stratonikeia and Chalke their partnership survives in stone. Through Demeter and Persephone, she enters the mysteries of death, return, and movement between realms.
Hermes places her among the gods of roads and transitions. Artemis and Selene show how readily her identity could merge with others’. Circe, Medea, and Scylla link her to powerful, dangerous figures whose stories turn on magic and transformation. And her company reaches the margins of human experience, among ghosts, torch-bearing nymphs, and the dogs whose barking announces her approach. These relationships took shape over many centuries, some in the earliest Greek poetry and others in later literature, magic, and the inscriptions of the communities that worshipped her.
For contemporary devotees, these sources open possibilities for practice. Those who honour Hekate may find themselves drawn towards Persephone, Demeter, Hermes, or others in her circle, and studying their shared mythology can deepen our understanding of the traditions in which she was worshipped.
I find her relationship with Persephone particularly compelling. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter gives us a tender-hearted Hekate who hears a cry for help, joins a grieving mother in her search, and becomes the companion of a goddess who must travel between worlds, going before her and following behind. It is a small episode within a much larger mythology, yet it expresses something enduring about her. Hekate is a goddess whose company matters, and when we look beyond the familiar image of the solitary torch-bearer at the crossroads, we find just how wide that company is.
Sources and further reading
Ancient sources
- Alcman, fragments
- Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
- Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica
- Aristophanes, Wealth
- Demosthenes, Against Conon
- Diodorus Siculus, Library of History
- Euripides, Helen and Medea
- Hesiod, Theogony
- Hippocratic Corpus, On the Sacred Disease
- Homer, Iliad, with the ancient scholia, and Odyssey
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Pausanias, Description of Greece
- Propertius, Elegies
- Theocritus, Idylls
Modern works
- Campbell, David A., trans. 1988. Greek Lyric. Vol. 2. Loeb Classical Library 143. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Gantz, Timothy. 1993. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Johnston, Sarah Iles. 1999. Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press.