The Infancy of Zeus by Jacob Jordaens
In Greek mythology, Amalthea is the most mentioned goat or nymph who took care of the infant Zeus. As a nymph, she is most likely an Oceanid.
Etymology[]
Amalthea means "tender goddess", referencing her tender and soft ways of taking care of people.
In Greek mythology[]
Nurse of Zeus[]
There were distinctive conventions with respect to Amalthea. Amalthea is some of the time spoken to as the goat who suckled the baby Zeus in a cave in the Mount Aigaion ("Goat Mountain"), residing on Crete, now and then as a goat-tending sprite of questionable parentage (the girl of Oceanus, Helios, Haemonius, or—according to Lactantius—Melisseus), who brought him up on the drain of her goat. Other names, like Adrasteia, Ide, the sprite of Mount Ida, or Adamanthea, which show up in mythology handbooks, are basically copies of Amalthea.
Within the convention spoken to by Hesiod's Theogony, Cronus gulped all of his children promptly after birth. The mother goddess Rhea, Zeus' mother, hoodwinked her brother-consort Cronus by giving him a stone wrapped to look like a infant rather than Zeus. Since she instep gave the newborn child Zeus to Adamanthea to nurture in a cave on a mountain in Crete, it is obvious that Adamanthea may be a doublet of Amalthea. In numerous scholarly references, the Greek convention relates that in arrange that Cronus ought to not listen the moaning of the newborn child, Amalthea assembled the Kuretes or the Korybantes to move, yell, and clash their lances against their shields.
The Aegis[]
In some myths, the skin of Amalthea or the skin of her goat was used as part of the Aegis shield.
As a constellation[]
Amaltheia was set among the stars as the constellation Capra—the gather of stars encompassing Capella on the arm (ôlenê) of Auriga the Charioteer."[15] Capra essentially implies "she-goat" and the star-name Capella is the "small goat", but a few present day perusers befuddle her with the male sea-goat of the Zodiac, Capricorn, who bears no connection to Amalthea, no association in a Greek or Latin scholarly source nor any custom or engraving to connect the two.