A departure today from our usual subjects. But a couple of facts took me quite by surprise. You may well have known them already; I, for my part, made a discovery.
Do you know what is in the photograph? Agaves in bloom. Yes—so that is how they flower. Those towering trees are the agave’s flower spikes. They can reach eight metres(!) in height.
What is more, the genus Agave—American by origin, and the source, in its homeland, of the alcoholic drinks pulque, mezcal, and tequila—turns out to belong to the asparagus family (along with lily of the valley, dracaena, hyacinth, and yucca). Some asparagus they grow in Mexico.
Etymology and Mythology: Four Agaves
And one last thing. The name given to the agave turns out to be Greek: ἀγαυός ‘noble, illustrious.’ In Greek mythology, several figures bore the name Agave. It belonged to:
- One of the fifty Nereids—sea nymphs, daughters of Nereus, granddaughters of Pontus (the sea) and Gaia (the earth);
- One of the fifty Danaïds—daughters of the Libyan king Danaus, who murdered their husbands on their wedding night and were condemned for it to labour eternally and pointlessly at filling a leaking vessel with water;
- One of the Amazons (nobody ever counted them);
- The daughter of the Phoenician Cadmus—founder of Boeotian Thebes and brother of the Europa carried off by Zeus—and of the goddess Harmonia. This is the Agave who, in a Bacchic frenzy, tore her own son Pentheus limb from limb and paraded his head about in the belief that it was a lion’s—which, for a plant that goes on to be distilled into tequila, must count as an uncommonly fitting namesake.
Wikipedia asserts, without troubling to cite a source, that the plant is named after the last of these. What do you think?
