In Greek mythology, the Meliae (Μελιαι) or Meliads were the nymphs of ash trees, primarily mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony. The ash tree that grows in the mountains of Greece is the flowering ash; many species of these trees exude a sugary substance that the ancient Greeks called méli (“honey”).
Description
Generally, they are considered ash tree nymphs, as the same Greek word indicating ash is Μελίαι, and the two nurses Ida and Adrastea (who offered food to Zeus) were also considered Meliae. This is because the word Μελί is associated with both ash tree sap and honey from bees, both of which are part of the ambrosial food. Callimachus also writes that the Meliae cared for infant Zeus on Mount Dicte on the island of Crete, where they nourished him with honey and goat’s milk from the goat Amalthea.
However, Callimachus, Nonnus of Panopolis, and Hesiod simply describe the Meliae as tree nymphs without specifying the type of tree they descend from. It is also likely that some mythographers used the word Μελία (Melia) instead of Μελίαι (Meliai) to narrate myths or legends about the deeds of a single nymph that may not belong to the Meliae group.
Pausanias notes the existence of an oceanic Melia (thus the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys) who became the mother of Tenereus and Ismenus by Apollo. Callimachus and Hesiod write that the mother of Tenereus and Ismenus was another nymph (Melia), whom they place in Thebes and specify as a nymph of the land rather than of ash trees.
In Argive mythology, Melia was the wife of the river god Inachus and the mother of Phoroneus and Aegialeus. According to one version, she was loved by Zeus and gave birth to Io.
Genealogy
According to Hesiod, they were born from the blood of Uranus that fell on Gaia after his castration (thus having the same origin as the Erinyes and the Curetes). It is emphasized that they are connected to the birth of humanity, as mythology also speaks of humans being born from ash trees during the Bronze Age.
According to Apollodorus, the nymph Melia, who was the mother of Pholus by Silenus, is a Meliae, a nymph of ash trees.
Mythology
They were the wives of men in the Silver Age and the mothers of those in the Bronze Age (the third generation of humanity). They nursed their children with honey and sap from ash trees and armed them with spears made from the wood of their trees (ash trees).
However, the men of the Bronze Age were too warlike, and Zeus destroyed them with the floods of the Great Flood. According to some authors, as ash wood was used to make spears, arrows, and javelins, the Meliae were goddesses of bloody battle. Callimachus mentions them alongside the Curetes when they defended infant Zeus on Mount Ida, just delivered to him by the Arcadian nymph Neda. According to another legend, they protected abandoned children under the trees.
In Hesiod
These “nymphs called Meliae upon the earth” were engendered by Gaia when she was fertilized by the blood that flowed from the open wound of Uranus after being castrated by his son Cronus. The Giants and the Erinyes were also born from this particular fertilization. These three groups of deities could be considered a kind of siblings to Aphrodite, who, in Hesiodic texts, was born from the same crime.
However, unlike the other groups, Aphrodite did not arise from divine blood but from the foam formed from the severed divine member, which floated adrift in the sea. Hesiod does not provide the number or individual names of these three divine races, which seem to function more as a collective lineage that does not need to be defined. Some verses in the Works and Days have been interpreted as portraying the Meliae as the collective mothers of the men of the Bronze Age: “Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortals, a race of bronze, sprung from the ash trees (Meliai).” However, this interpretation has been proposed by later authors and modern scholars.
Meliae in Other Sources
The Meliae belong to a class of sisterhoods whose nature is to appear together and are invoked in the plural. Authors later than Hesiod do mention the individual names of the Erinyes and the Giants, but there is no record of the same happening with the Meliae. In mythology, there are a handful of nymphs with the individual name Melia, to whom the categorization of Meliae nymphs has been attributed, but this attribution is rarely indicated; rather, it seems like a conjecture based on onomastics.
Moreover, in the corpus of Hesiod’s work, no individual character is mentioned by the name Melia. These individual nymphs with the name Melia include the Oceanid mother of Phoroneus, two lovers of Apollo, and two lovers of Silenus. In most cases, these nymphs are explicitly described as part of the Oceanids or Naiads. In the Library of Apollodorus, it is mentioned that the centaur Pholus is the son of Silenus and Melia or a Melia nymph; the context depends on the translator, and it could even be interpreted as a nymph of Malea. The same occurs with the mother of Amicus, a nymph lover of Poseidon, whom even the commentator refers to as not knowing if Melia is her proper name or part of these nymphs; Higino, however, imagines her as the daughter of Ocean.
Apart from Hesiodic texts, two authorities explicitly tell us about the Meliae nymphs, and they were none other than the nurses of Zeus. According to the Hymn to Zeus by Callimachus, the Meliae of Mount Dicte helped care for the little god shortly after his birth. The author names them individually as Adrastea, Amalthea, and Panacris (whom he refers to as a bee), but he mentions earlier Neda, Philyra, and Styx, who are Oceanid nymphs. Apollodorus clearly relies on Callimachus’s text in one of his passages, and in his version, he says that the nymphs Ida (suggesting an eponymous nymph) and Adrastea, daughters of a certain Melisseus, nourished the infant with the milk of Amalthea.