Contemporary Mythic Anthropology

Rea, seeing her husband Cronos devouring all her children at birth, decided to hide her last son, Zeus, on Mount Ida on the island of Crete. There the nymph Amalthea sheltered him; bees made the sweetest honey for the infant and the goats nourished him with their milk. Ovid tells us that one day the nanny-goat from which Zeus suckled broke a horn; Amalthea filled this with flowers and fruit and offered it to Zeus, who in his gratitude turned both the nymph and the goat into stars (the constellation of Capricorn).

When Zeus was fighting against the Titans he made a shield from the goat’s hide, the Aegis. In other versions of the myth, the name Amalthea does not correspond to the nymph but to the goat itself. (R. Martín, Mitología griega y romana, Espasa).

In this context, for the team 'Amalthea' means the infancy of the god, through antonomasia, saved by the feminine care of the nymph or the goat’s milk; in any case, a promising cornucopia for our mythocritical research.