Meliade

In Greek mythology, the melias (Μελιαι) or melíades were the nymphs of the ash trees, which appear mainly in the Theogony from Hesiod. The ash that grows in the mountains of Greece is the flower ash; many species of these trees exude a sugary substance that the ancient Greeks called méli ("honey").

On Hesiod

These "nymphs they call melias on earth" They were engendered by Gaia when she was fertilized by the blood that she flowed from the open wound of Urano, after being castrated by her son Crono from her. The Giants and the Erinyes were also born from this particular fertilization. These three groups of deities could be considered a kind of siblings of Aphrodite, who in the Hesiodic texts was born from the same crime. However, unlike the other groups, Aphrodite was not born from divine blood but from the foam that formed from the severed divine member, which drifted on the sea. Hesiod does not give the number or the individual names of these three divine races, which seem to function rather as a collective lineage that does not need to be defined. It has been wanted to interpret the melias as the collective mothers of the men of the bronze age, by virtue of some verses in the Works and Days: «Zeus Father, made a third generation of mortals, a race of bronze, emerged from the ash trees (meliai)». However this interpretation has been provided by late authors and modern scholars.

In other sources

Melias belong to a class of brotherhoods whose nature is to appear together, and are invoked in the plural. Authors after Hesiod do cite the individual names of the Erinyes and the giants, but there is no record that the same thing happened with the melias. In mythology there are a handful of nymphs with the individual name of Melia, to which the categorization of melias nymphs has been attributed, but this attribution is rarely indicated; rather it seems a conjecture by virtue of the onomastics. Furthermore, in the corpus of Hesiod's work no individual character is mentioned by the name of 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 we are told that the centaur Pholus is the son of Silenus and Melia or a melia nymph; the context depends on the translator who is in charge, and it could even be interpreted as a Malea nymph. her own name or is part of those nymphs; Hyginus, however, imagines her as the daughter of Oceanus.

Apart from the Hesiodic texts, there are two authorities that explicitly tell us about the melian nymphs, and they were none other than the nurses of Zeus. According to Callimachus's Hymn to Zeus, the melias of Mount Dicte helped care for the little god shortly after he was born. The author names them individually as Adrastea, Amalthea and Panacride (whom he refers to as a bee); but he previously cites Neda, Philyra, and Aestyx, who are Oceanid nymphs. Apollodorus is clearly based on Callimachus' text in one of his passages, and in his version he tells us that the Ida nymphs (suggesting an eponymous nymph) and Adrastea, daughters of a certain Meliseus, fed the infant with the milk of Amalthea.