Swings

Source: Disorient yourself

This shared meaning emerges through the story of Erigone in the Bibliotheca, that great compilation of myths written by Pseudo-Apollodorus between the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. In it, we learn that the god Dionysus taught Erigone’s father Icarius the art of winemaking, and that he shared what he made with his shepherds.

According to the most widespread version of this legend, the shepherds drank so much they thought they had been poisoned, so they killed Icarius. They attempted to hide his body by burying it at the foot of a tree, but the young Erigone found her father’s corpse. As the story goes, ‘she bewailed her father and hanged herself’, swinging from the same tree where Icarius was buried. It was then that Dionysus, or Erigone herself (according to some versions), cast a spell on the city of Athens, leading its virgins to hang themselves too.

According to Gaius Julius Hyginus, a 1st-century Hispanic Latin writer, the Athenians ended this sad epidemic by instituting the practice of swinging themselves while seated on wooden planks hung from ropes. Their bodies could sway in the wind like Erigone. In these accounts, we find one of the earliest interpretations of the swing’s (mythological) origins: a device of death that became apotropaic, or capable of warding off an evil spell, thus preventing young Athenian girls from hanging themselves. According to Hyginus, the swing began as a magical object, a machine for lifting a curse.