who rears her children. Minos marries Pasiphae and receives a bull from Poseidon for sacrifice. Enchanted by the bull’s beauty, he decides to keep it and sacrifice another. As a redress for Minos’s betrayal, the god of the sea makes Pasiphae fall in love with the bull, have sexual intercourse with it, and bear the monstrous Minotauros (a man with a bull’s head). Minotauros lives in the Labyrinthos and is fed on human flesh. After the conquest of Athens by Minos the Athenians are compelled to send their children to feed the monster until Theseus comes with them, and with the help of Ariadne, kills it and escapes.
The myth of Europa evokes the stories of figures of the female Greek pantheon who abandon their virginal state by leaving their own land, and through the humiliation of abduction become wives and mothers. Unlike many other women who had had the misfortune of meeting Zeus, Europa’s case is special: while Medea and Elena accept the journey for love of a man consciously, she seems to follow her deep (unconscious) inner impulses. Furthermore, in acquiring regal power and dignity, even the love of a god, not only will she not be killed like many of Zeus’s other lovers, but she will continue to live happily with a regal husband. The story of the Phoenician princess and Zeus represents a foundation myth par excellence—it narrates the foundation of the Cretan dynasty by Minos, the creation of the city of Thebes in Boeotia by Cadmus, the foundation of Phoenicia by Phoenix, and, in Asia Minor, the naming of the land where Cilix settled after the unsuccessful search for Europa, Cilicia. It is a cosmogony myth that unites land, sea, sky, continents, and people and comprises the human, the vegetable, the animal, the male and the female, the conscious and the unconscious (Passerini 2002a: 20).
The story of Europa has had an immense impact on the history of the idea of Europe, becoming “one of the most perennially popular illustrated tales of all time” (Wintle 2004: 13). Since ancient times the Europa myth has been widely represented in fine and applied art. Though it was pushed to the background in the Middle Ages, it regained its popularity during the Renaissance and has maintained its attractive power ever since. The myth has always been used to provide artistic expressions of passion, eroticism, and rivalry (between the Greeks and Persians, between true Europe and Nazi regimes, etc.), but also to define and raise awareness of the qualities and characteristics that have been imputed to the continent of Europe. For Wintle, the reasons why artists throughout centuries have appreciated and used the story lie in the following: its potential for humor; its “suitability” as a subject for decorative purposes; its potential for portraying aesthetic beauty, nobility, and queenliness; its dramatic qualities and sense of kinetic energy, rapid speed, and energetic travel that Europeans could and can enjoy; its treatment of romance and sensuality; its role as a symbol of power (2004: 12, 22, 28).
The tale became a highly charged political symbol for the European Community as well. In the post–World War II period the Phoenician heroine reappeared as the symbolic icon of the noble, united, reinvigorated part of the continent. In political discourse she became the allegory of soft power while the bull more often than not assumed the sinister connotations of the enemy that jeopardized Europe’s future peace, prosperity, and unity. Sometimes inclusionist, sometimes exclusionist interpretations came to the fore: the myth was used to acknowledge Europe’s wider, non-European roots (the Phoenician princess herself is from Asia Minor and is only carried to Europe by the bull), to argue that European citizens were not necessarily European, or to recognize the dark side of European civilization (in the myth Europa is a progenitor of the minotaur, just like European history produced its own monstrosities). When a more rigid interpretation prevailed, queenliness and uniqueness were emphasized; the phantoms of the past and the present were eliminated.
According to Ian Manners (2010) there are at least three different ways of representing this myth in terms of global Europa: the “rape of Europa,” the “seduction of Europa,” and the “transition of Europa.” The version of the “rape of Europa,” in which the bull symbolizes violence, oppression, and the destructive forces of nationalism and Nazism, provides a foundational story of how European integration contributed to defeat extremism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. In the story of the “seduction of Europa” the role of the bull is played by the United States of America, representing the liberator and the savior, the mythical hero who, as a result of his legendary accomplishments, conquers the heart of the princess and marries her. This is the foundational story of a special relationship, the matrimony of a couple where America helped his spouse overcome trauma in order to forget the devastating past and move toward a bright future. Manners interprets the myth of the “transition of Europa” following Judith Barringer (1991), who depicts Europa’s journey as a metaphorical passage, a “critical life transition” both from maiden to woman and from life to death to rebirth (Barringer, 1991: 662, 666). In this sense, Europe’s journey in the 1930s and 1940s could be read in relation to the metamorphosis of the Phoenician princess and seen as a transitional period in which the Europe of nationalism dies and a postnational Europe that is ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first century is reborn (Manners 2010: 69–70).
Every artistic representation of the myth of Europa is unique in terms of time, space, artist, audience, and the spirit of the era. Europa results as an interpreter of a series of affections that vary from surprise to trepidation, fear to sensual abandon. The fact that privileged moments from the mythological narrative vary in accentuation and interpretation as well is not surprising if one considers the communicative effectiveness of the syntactic structure (Cerulo 1993). Syntactic structure that orders and organizes, combines or repeats the various elements of a symbolic construction (in our case the different components of the Europa myth) may emphasize one element over another. While retaining the elements, it can change the symbol’s message, effectiveness, and emotional appeal. To sketch the allegory for a project of peace, prosperity, and unity, EU institutions have frequently revisited the myth’s syntactic structure. The decision to choose an ancient Greek portrayal out of the several artistic representations of the tale to ornament the new euro banknotes reveals what the privileged moments of the story are for the European Central Bank and anticipates how it will seek to use this artistic representation of the myth for its political agenda.
A glance at the new euro banknotes brings us back to antiquity and reinforces the narrative, according to which an umbilical cord links the European Union to ancient Greece. Mario Draghi perhaps shares Husserl’s view that
spiritually Europe has a birthplace. By this I do not mean a geographical place, in some one land, though this too is true. I refer, rather, to a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in certain men or groups of men belonging to this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. In it there grows up a new kind of attitude of individuals toward their environing world. … In the emergence of philosophy in this sense, a sense, that is, which includes all sciences, I see—no matter how paradoxical this may seem—the original phenomenon of spiritual Europe. (Husserl 1965: 158–59)
He might agree with Vaclav Havel, for whom the large set of values at the bases of the European Union has a clear moral foundation and obvious metaphysical roots in antiquity (1994). This choice, this “preference for the primitive,” may have something to do with what the art historian Ernst Gombrich called “Cicero’s Law”:
How much more brilliant, as a rule, in beauty and variety of colouring are new pictures compared to the old ones. But though they captivate us at first sight the pleasure does not last, while the very roughness and crudity of old paintings maintains their hold on us. (Cicero, Dc Oratore III. xxv. 98; cited by Gombrich 2002: 7)
The prophets of palingenetic ultra-Europeanism (quite similar to premodern communities) believe that the power of their community lies in its (imagined) origins. The origin myth, the Europa narrative of the foundation of the Cretan civilization, this image of primordial paradise, assumes outmost importance and regressus ad originem, the restoration of the period of pristine harmony, becomes a key concern for European myth entrepreneurs advocating “rebirth” and “new beginning.” The European Central Bank arrived at the conclusion that it was not enough to bring Europe back to the post–World War II period, when Europe’s “founding fathers” laid down the foundations
