Thaleia, nymph of Aetna

Thaleia (Latin Thalia), a naiad-nymph of Mount Etna and daughter of Hephaestus, is the mother of the Palici. Aeschylus dramatised her story in his lost Sicilian tragedy the Women of Aetna (Aetnaeae); Macrobius and Servius preserve the myth: caught in the embrace of Zeus and dreading the anger of Hera, she begged the earth to swallow her, and in due season the ground opened and gave up her twin sons, the Palici, at the sulphur-springs of the Palagonia plain. A parallel Sicilian tradition names the mother of the Palici not Thaleia but Aetna, the goddess of the mountain herself, who (according to Simonides) once arbitrated between Hephaestus and Demeter for possession of Sicily; the two figures are closely linked and sometimes conflated. An indigenous account recorded by Hesychius makes her consort the Sikel fire-god Adranus rather than Zeus.

Children

• The Palici

Domains

• volcanic fertility of etna
• springs and naiad waters

Powers

• to be received into the earth and to send her children back from it

Epithets

• ΑἴτνηScholia on Theocritus, Idyll 1.65 (citing Simonides), in J. H. Croon, 'The Palici: An Autochthonous Cult in Ancient Sicily', Mnemosyne 5.2 (1952), pp. 116-129 (secondary)

Relations

• lover: AdranusIn the indigenous tradition reported by Hesychius, the nymph Thaleia bore the Palici to the Sikel fire-god Adranus, rather than to Zeus.Hesychius of Alexandria, Lexicon, s.v. Palikoi (ed. K. Latte / P. A. Hansen, Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon, Berlin: De Gruyter) (secondary)

Sources

• Thaleia (also identified with the mountain-goddess Aetna) is the nymph mother of the Palici, daughter of Hephaestus, who hid in the earth from Hera and sent the twin gods back up from the ground.: Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.19.18-19 (ed./trans. R. A. Kaster, Loeb Classical Library 512, Harvard University Press, 2011) (secondary); Servius, Commentary on Vergil's Aeneid 9.581 (9.584) (ed. G. Thilo & H. Hagen, Leipzig: Teubner, 1881-1887) (secondary)