Horns Aplenty: The Ancient Greek Origins of the Cornucopia

The cornerstone of Thanksgiving decor is the not-so-humble cornucopia: a horn whose broad opening overflows with the fruits of a bountiful harvest. Today the symbol may seem as American as, well, Thanksgiving—but it didn’t start out that way.

Baby Zeus’s Big Break

In Greek mythology, the Titan ruler Kronos fears that his children will usurp him, so he eats each baby soon after their birth. His wife (and sister) Rhea saves their son Zeus from this fate by enlisting Amalthea to raise him secretly in Crete.

Amalthea is either a goat or a water nymph with access to goats, depending on which version of the story you’re reading; in any case, baby Zeus grows up on goat’s milk. At some point, Zeus either breaks off one of the goat’s horns to give to the goat, or the goat snaps off her own horn to give to Zeus. The horn is then filled with fruit (and flowers or herbs), either by Zeus’s godly power or manually by Amalthea. In some accounts, Zeus’s power guarantees that the horn will never run empty. Suffice it to say that most of the details of this tale are up for debate—but the main point is that Zeus was directly or indirectly behind the creation of the inaugural horn of plenty, which came from a goat.

According to that legend, at least. Ancient Romans had their own origin story involving Hercules. In Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the river god Achelous describes transforming into a bull during a battle with Hercules, who then tears off one of his horns. “Grasping one of my horns in his brutal hand, he broke it, tough as it was, and tore it away from my forehead, leaving me maimed,” Achelous says. “The horn was filled by the naiads with fruit and with fragrant flowers and, thus made holy, enriches the Spirit of Plenty.”

After Achelous finishes his story, one of his nymph servants appears, Ovid wrote, “displaying the Horn of Plenty and carrying all the choicest fruits of the autumn to serve the guests for the second course.” It’s from Latin that we get the word cornucopia: Cornū cōpiae means “horn of plenty.”

The cornucopia didn’t stay confined to either originator. Various deities representing agriculture or prosperity have been depicted with it, including the Greek goddess of harvest, Demeter (Zeus’s sister) and her Roman counterpart, Ceres; and the Greek goddess of chance, Tyche, and her Roman counterpart, Fortuna. 

Eventually, Americans co-opted it, too.

A Cornucopia of Cornucopias

It’s unclear who first featured a cornucopia in their Thanksgiving decor; mentions of them date at least as far back as the 1870s.

“Below the speaker’s stand was an immense cornucopia, from whose open mouth rolled melons, apples, peaches, pears, oranges, lemons, limes and olives,” one newspaper correspondent wrote of a Presbyterian service in Santa Barbara, California, on Thanksgiving in 1875. “This great ‘Horn of Plenty’ was backed by sheaves of grain, interspersed with feathery pampas grass.”

Early-20th-century columnists penned instructions for DIY cornucopia centerpieces made from wire covered with linen, wrapping paper, and even silk. “The cornucopia, or horn of fruitfulness and abundance, always used by the Greeks and Romans as the symbol of plenty, is an apt expression of the sentiment that prevails on Thanksgiving day,” Vermont’s St. Johnsbury Republican wrote in 1913. “The contents should be arranged so that the cornucopia is overflowing, the fruits and flowers running out of the horn and over the table.”

By the 1930s, the cornucopia’s association with Thanksgiving was solid enough that people started thinking outside the box. In 1930, for example, the Chronicle Tribune of Marion, Indiana, printed a recipe for “cornucopia sandwiches” that required rolling “fan-shaped pieces” of de-crusted bread and smoked sturgeon into cones and tucking “small sprigs of parsley” into each opening. “Other fillings such as creamed mushrooms, olive and cheese, creamed chicken or lobster, in fact any tasteful moist filling makes the Cornucopia sandwich a delight,” the recipe’s creator wrote. Another widely published recipe from 1940 involved rolling pastry dough into cones, baking them, and then filling the diminutive horns with candied cranberries. 

The mid-20th century saw gargantuan cornucopias stuffed with gargantuan fake fruit (“The bananas are six feet long and the apples are two and a half feet in diameter!”); smaller edible ones formed from “chilled leaves of lettuce”; and all manner of the centerpiece variety, from wicker to gold ceramic. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has done a lot to keep the trend of massive cornucopias alive in the modern era; and directions for making cornucopia appetizers from, say, ice cream cones and candy are now just a quick internet search away.

In short, Americans have been trying to outdo themselves in the cornucopia department for decades—but it’s hard to compete with gods.

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