Cornucopia

The ancient writers disagree about whose horn it was. Sir James Frazer’s notes to Apollodorus collect the versions. In one, Amalthea is the goat whose milk fed the infant Zeus, hidden on Crete from his father Cronus, and ambrosia flowed from one of her horns and nectar from the other. In another, Amalthea is the nymph who owned the goat. A third says Zeus, grateful for the milk, set the goat among the stars and gave one of its horns to the nymphs who had reared him, ordaining that it should produce whatever they asked for.

Apollodorus himself tells a different story. Heracles wrestled the river god Achelous, who had taken the shape of a bull, for the hand of Deianira and broke off one of his horns; Achelous got it back by giving Heracles the horn of Amalthea in exchange. In this telling Amalthea is a daughter of Haemonius with a bull’s horn that, according to Pherecydes, could supply “meat or drink in abundance, whatever one might wish”. Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes the horn of plenty Achelous’s own. The river god tells how the Naiads took up his broken horn and filled it with fruit and fragrant flowers, “and the bounteous Goddess, Plenty, is enriched by my horn”; in Henry Riley’s translation the Naiads fill it “with the variety of fruits which Autumn affords”. Riley’s notes add an old reading of the myth as engineering: according to Strabo, breaking the horn meant that Heracles brought both branches of the river into one channel, and the horn of plenty, Riley explains, was the fertile ground the river left behind.