Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece
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Note: C.1
As for Kronos – the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy – his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual and lonely exile. Every day and hour and minute was his to be marked out, for Zeus doomed Kronos to count infinity itself. We can see him everywhere even today, the gaunt sinister figure with his sickle. Now given the cheap and humiliating nickname ‘Old Father Time’, his sallow, drawn features tell us of the inevitable and merciless ticking of Cosmos’s clock, driving all to their end days. The scythe swings and cuts like a remorseless pendulum.
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Note: Kronos - the time
He envisioned an assembly of twelve major gods – a dodecatheon as he Greekly put it to himself.fn11 So far we have met six, the children of Kronos and Rhea.
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Note: The numer 3,6 and 12
Mother and daughter cried out with joyful surprise when the boy gave his first choking cries. For the hair on his head was not jet black like his sister’s or mother’s, it was blond – an inheritance from his maternal grandmother, the shining Phoebe. Leto named the child APOLLO. ‘Delian Apollo’, he was sometimes called in honour of his birthplace, and ‘Phoebus Apollo’ in deference to his Titaness grandmother and his own radiant, golden beauty, for Phoebus means ‘shining one’.
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Note: Leto - Artemis, Apollo
From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.
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Note: The curse of venus. Tragedy befalls love
Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence. The gods of Greece, if we are archaeological and palaeoanthropological about it all, can be traced back to the sky fathers, moon goddesses and demons of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia – today’s Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians and other civilizations there, which first flourished far earlier than the Greeks, had their creation stories and folk myths which, like the languages that expressed them, could find ancestry in India and thence westwards back to prehistory, Africa and the birth of our species.
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The Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters and heroes.
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Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust.
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Out of Chaos
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It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.
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The Greek word for ‘everything that is the case’, what we could call ‘the universe’, is COSMOS.
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From formless Chaos sprang two creations: EREBUS and NYX. Erebus, he was darkness, and Nyx, she was night. They coupled at once and the flashing fruits of their union were HEMERA, day, and AETHER, light.
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At the same time – because everything must happen simultaneously until Time is there to separate events – Chaos brought forth two more entities: GAIA, the earth, and TARTARUS, the depths and caves beneath the earth.
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What first emerged from Chaos were primal, elemental principles that were devoid of any real colour, character or interest. These were the PRIMORDIAL DEITIES, the First Order of divine beings from whom all the gods, heroes and monsters of Greek myth spring. They brooded over and lay beneath everything … waiting.
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You could say that Gaia was the earth of hills, valleys, caves and mountains yet capable of gathering herself into a form that could walk and talk.
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Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.
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The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky.
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There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.
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What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.
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Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children. ‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’ Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and
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Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children. ‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’ Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.
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A mother’s curse is a terrible thing. We shall see how the children of Iapetus and Clymene, ATLAS, EPIMETHEUS and PROMETHEUS, met their ends.
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If you were to drop a bronze anvil from the heavens it would take nine days to reach the earth. If you were to drop that anvil from the earth it would take another nine days to reach Tartarus. In other words the earth is halfway between the sky and Tartarus. Or you might say Tartarus is as far from the ground as the ground is from the sky. A very deep, abysmal place then, but more than just a place.
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Kronos had been the first to discover that brooding silence is often taken to indicate strength, wisdom and command. The youngest of the twelve, he had always hated his father.
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‘Kronos, my son,’ she said, ‘we must bide our time until Hemera and Aether dive into the waters of the west and Erebus and Nyx prepare to cast the dark –’ ‘You mean we must wait until evening.’ Kronos was impatient and quite lacking in poetry or finer feeling. ‘Yes. Eventide. That is when your father will come to me, as he always does. He likes to –’
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But then Nyx, without Erebus’s help, gave birth to MOROS, or Doom, who was to become the most feared entity in creation. Doom comes to every creature, mortal or immortal, but is always hidden. Even the immortals feared Doom’s all-powerful, all-knowing control over the cosmos.
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Sleep’s brother THANATOS, Death himself, gives us the word ‘euthanasia’, ‘good death’. The Roman’s called him MORS, of mortals, mortuaries and mortification.
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All Cosmos could hear Ouranos’s maddened scream of pain, anguish and rage. Never in creation’s short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid.
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Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words: ‘Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.’
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So no matter how murderous, cruel, rapacious and destructive the character of Ouranos, he had been the ruler of creation after all. For his son to have mutilated and emasculated him constituted a most terrible crime against Cosmos. Perhaps what happened next is not so surprising. Great pools of blood formed around the scene of Ouranos’s castration. From that blood, the blood which fell from the ruined groin of Ouranos, living beings emerged.
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‘No more shall you cover Gaia,’ he said to his father. ‘I banish you to live out eternity beneath the ground, buried deeper even than Tartarus. May you sulk there in your fury, gelded and powerless.’ ‘You have overreached yourself,’ hissed Ouranos. ‘There will be revenge. I curse your life, that it be ground out in slow remorseless perpetuity, its immortal eternity an insufferable burden without end. Your own children will destroy you as –’ ‘As I destroyed you. Yes, I know. You said. We’ll see about that.’ ‘You and your brothers and sisters, I curse you all, your straining ambition will destroy you.’
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The ‘striving, straining one’, or TITAN, is the title we reserve for Kronos, his eleven siblings and (much of) their progeny. Ouranos meant it as an insult, but somehow the name has resounded through the ages with a ring of grandeur. No one, to this very day, would be insulted to be called a Titan.
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In Greek ‘from the foam’ can be rendered as something like APHRODITE, and this is the name of the one who now lifts herself from the spume and spray.
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The Romans called her VENUS, and her birth and arrival on the sands of Cyprus on the scallop shell were never better portrayed than in Botticelli’s exquisite painting, which once seen is never forgotten. We leave Aphrodite making her home on Cyprus and return to Kronos, who is on his way back from the dark caves of Tartarus.
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A deep and terrible rumbling was heard far below. The ground shook beneath Rhea’s feet. The voice of Ouranos came roaring into her ears, but within it she heard too the calmer tones of her mother. Together the three of them hatched a marvellous plan.
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Just as Gaia had recruited her youngest child Kronos in order to take revenge on her son and husband Ouranos, so Rhea vowed she would rear this, her youngest child, to destroy her husband and brother Kronos. The dreadful cycle of bloodlust, greed and killing that marked the birth pangs of the primordial world would
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Just as Gaia had recruited her youngest child Kronos in order to take revenge on her son and husband Ouranos, so Rhea vowed she would rear this, her youngest child, to destroy her husband and brother Kronos. The dreadful cycle of bloodlust, greed and killing that marked the birth pangs of the primordial world would continue into the next generation.
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Zeus was flourishing on Crete. He was growing into the strongest and most striking male in all creation – indeed his radiance had become almost painful to look upon.fn16 The goodness of goat’s milk and the nurturing potency of manna had given him strong bones, a clear complexion, sparkling eyes and glossy hair. He made the journey, to use the Greek terms, from pais (boy) and ephebos (teenager) to kouros (youth) and thence into a fine example of what we might call today a young adult.
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unaware of his own strength, Zeus accidentally snapped off one of her horns.fn18 By virtue of his already prodigious divine powers, this broken horn instantly filled itself with the most delicious food – fresh bread, vegetables, fruit, cured meats and smoked fish – a supply that never gave out no matter how much was taken from it. Thus originated the celebrated Horn of Plenty, the CORNUCOPIA.
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Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.
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Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order … They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves ‘Titans’. They would be gods. And not just gods, but the gods.
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The bloody, violent and destructive conflict that followed is known to historians as the TITANOMACHY.fn1 While most of the details of this ten-year war may be lost to us, we do know that the heat and fury, the explosive power and colossal energy released by the battling Titans, gods and monsters caused mountains to bellow fire and the ground itself to quake and crack.
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All but Clymene’s sons Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with Kronos, far outnumbering the small group of self-styled gods ranged against them under Zeus’s generalship. But just as Ouranos had paid dearly for his crime of imprisoning the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires inside Gaia, so Kronos was about to pay for the blunder of imprisoning them in the caverns of Tartarus.
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In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form and what you might call resolution. High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being.
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One of the original Titans, Mnemosyne (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed.
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Hidden in a cave while the battle roared outside, Eurynome bore Zeus three ravishing daughters, AGLAEA (which means ‘splendour’), EUPHROSYNE also known as EUTHYMIA (glee, merriment, mirth) and THALIAfn6 (cheerfulness). Together they were known as the CHARITES or, to the Romans, the GRATIAE. We call them the Three Graces, favoured throughout history by sculptors and painters seeking an excuse to render perfect female nudes. Their sweetness of nature gave the world something to counteract the horrible malice and cruelty of the Erinyes.
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But anyone who caught a Gorgon’s eye – exchanged looks with her for just one fleeting second – would quite literally be turned instantly to stone. The word for that is ‘petrified’, which has come to mean scared stiff.
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The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.
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Atlas had been at the centre of every battle, rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity. This killed two birds with one stone. Zeus’s predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy.
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To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named ‘the Atlantic’ after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished.
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The Romans gave this saturnine, sallow husk of a defeated Titan the name SATURN. He hangs in the sky between his father Uranus and his son Jupiter.
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Atlas’s brother Prometheus was chief amongst those who had had the prescience to fight for the gods against their own kind.fn16 Zeus rewarded him with his companionship, taking ever more delight in the young Titan’s presence until one day which was to have massive consequences for humankind, consequences we feel even now. The story of that friendship and its tragic end will be told soon. During
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To the victors, the spoils. Like a chief executive who has just completed a hostile takeover, Zeus wanted the old management out and his people in. He allotted each of his siblings their own domain, their areas of divine responsibility. The President of the Immortals chose his cabinet. For himself, he assumed overall command as supreme leader and emperor, lord of the firmament, master of weather and storms: King of the Gods, Sky Father, Cloud-Gatherer. Thunder and lightning were his to command. The eagle and the oak were his emblems, symbols then as now of fierce grace and unopposable might. His word was law, his power formidably great. But he was not perfect. He was very, very far from being perfect.
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Hestia is usually depicted in a plain gown offering up flame in a bowl or sitting on a coarse woollen cushion on a simple wooden throne. It was the custom in Greece to say a grace to her before every meal. The Romans, whose name for her was VESTA, considered her so important that they had a school of priestesses devoted to her, the celebrated Vestal Virgins. Their responsibility, aside from life-long celibacy, was to make sure that the flame representing her was never extinguished. They were the original guardians of the sacred flame.
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‘That means – yes!’ cried Hades with a mighty fist-pump. ‘That means I have the underworld. Ha ha!’ Secretly, inside, he was sickened. Gods are such children. Hades This was the last time Hades was ever seen to laugh. From that moment on, any merriment or sense of fun deserted him. Perhaps the duties of King of the Underworld slowly ground away any youthful zest or lightness of touch that may once have been his.
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The Romans called him PLUTO and words like ‘plutocrat’ and ‘plutonium’ tell of this great opulence and power.
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Under Hades’ personal command came Erebus and Nyx and their son Thanatos (Death himself). A system of river deities, too dark and dreadful to flow in the open air, wound their way through this underworld. The principal was Styx (hate), a daughter of Tethys and Oceanus whose name and ‘stygian’ attributes are invoked to this day whenever we want to describe something dark, menacing and gloomy, something hellishly black and brooding. Into her seeped PHLEGETHON, the flaming river of fire, ACHERON, the river of woe, LETHE, the waters of forgetfulness, and COCYTUS, the stream of lamentation and wailing. Styx’s brother Charon was appointed ferryman, and for the time being he waited, leaning on his pole, by the banks of the Styx. He had dreamed that one day souls by the thousand would come to the shores of the river and pay him the price of transport across. One day soon.
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In time Hades acquired a pet, a gigantic snake-tailed, three-headed dog, offspring of those monstrous children of Gaia and Tartarus, Echidna and Typhon. His name was KERBEROS (although he answered to his Roman name, CERBERUS, too). He was the original hound of hell, the fearsome and tireless watchdog and guardian of the underworld.
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At Lerna, a lake that could be used as one of the entrances to the underworld, Hades posted HYDRA, another child of Tartarus and Gaia. I mentioned before the frightening mutations possible when monsters mate, and the difference between Cerberus and his sister Hydra offers a striking example. On the one hand, a dog with a more or less manageable three heads and an elegantly snaky tail to wag; and on the other, his sister, a many-headed water-beast who was almost impossible to kill. Chop off one of her heads and she could grow back ten more in its place.
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He always kept an eager, avaricious eye on the youngest of his brothers, the one who now called himself ‘eldest’ and ‘king’. Should the great Zeus make too many mistakes, Poseidon would be there to topple him from his throne.
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The Cyclopes, just as they had forged thunderbolts for Zeus, now created a great weapon for Poseidon too – a trident. This massive three-pronged fishing spear could be used to stir up tidal waves and whirlpools – even to make the earth tremble with earthquakes, which gave Poseidon the soubriquet ‘Earth Shaker’.
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Poseidon’s Roman equivalent was NEPTUNE, whose giant planet is surrounded by moons that include Thalassa, Triton, Naiadfn4 and Proteus.
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By Zeus she had a daughter, PERSEPHONE, whose story comes along later.
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Zeus gave Demeter responsibility for the harvest and with it sovereignty over growth, fertility and the seasons. Her Roman name was CERES, from which we get our word ‘cereal’.
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art and common reference she is often saddled with the extra indignity of three upsetting ‘-esques’: statuesque, Rubenesque and – courtesy of her Roman appellation – Junoesque.
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Fate and posterity have been unkind to the Queen of Heaven. Unlike Aphrodite or Gaia she has no planet named in her honour,fn9 and she must bear the burden of a reputation that portrays her as more reactive than active – reactive always to the errant infidelities of her husband-brother Zeus.
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She gave the gods gravity, heft and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritis. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground. Her special province was marriage; the animals associated with her were the peacock and the cow.
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He and his gods would be known as the OLYMPIANS and they would rule as no
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As the Titans had made Othrys their mountain home, so Zeus now chose for his headquarters Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest peak. He and his gods would be known as the OLYMPIANS and they would rule as no divine beings ruled before or since.
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ARES, for so she called him, was from the beginning a pugnacious, violent and aggressive boy. He picked quarrels with everyone and thought of nothing but the clash of arms and horses, chariots, spears and martial arts. It was natural that Zeus, who disliked him from the first, should appoint him god of war. Ares – MARS to the Romans – was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid.
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Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.
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Hephaestus – god of fire, and of blacksmiths, artisans, sculptors and metalworkers – was home. His Roman name is VULCAN, which lives on in volcanoes and vulcanized rubber.fn14
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But first the marriages took place. Aphrodite and Hephaestus were wed, then Hera and Zeus. The service was conducted with charming simplicity by Hestia, who anointed each of the four with aromatic oils, wafting perfumed smoke and singing in a low musical voice hymns to companionship, service and mutual respect. Family and guests looked on, many of them sniffing and blinking back tears. A faun who made the tactless error of declaring between gulping sobs that Aphrodite and Hephaestus made a lovely couple was given a swift and violent kick in the backside by a glowering Ares.
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Melissa’s wings pricked up perkily. ‘But,’ Zeus continued, ‘while it will bring a sharp pain to the one you sting, it is to you and your kind that it will bring death. So let it be.’ Another rumble of thunder and the sky began to clear.
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Meliss is still the Greek word for the honeybee, and it is true that its sting is a suicide weapon of last resort. If it should try to fly away after the barb has lodged in the pierced skin of its victim, a bee will tug out its own insides in the effort of freeing itself. The much less useful and diligent wasp has no such barb and can administer its sting as many times as it likes without danger to itself. But wasps, annoying as they are, never made selfish, hubristic demands of the gods.
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It is also true that science calls the order of insects to which the honeybee belongs Hymenoptera, which is Greek for ‘wedding wings’.
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The Greek for ‘immortal’ is ambrotos and ‘immortality’ itself is AMBROSIA, which became the name of the specially blessed honey. Its fermented drinkable form, a kind of mead, they called NECTAR in honour of the flowers whose sweet gift it was.
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Afterwards, as playful pillow talk, they fell into a conversation on the subject of transformations – metamorphoses as they are called in Greek. How a god or Titan might be able to turn others, or themselves, into animals, plants and even solid objects, just as Zeus had done as he had chased Metis. She congratulated him on his skill at this art. ‘Yes,’ said Zeus, with some self-satisfaction. ‘I pursued you as bull, bear, lion and eagle, but it was as a snake that I captured you. You have a reputation for cunning and guile, Metis, but I outsmarted you. Admit it.’
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In a twinkle Zeus transformed himself into a lizard and with a quick flick of a long sticky tongue Metis (along with any possible child of Zeus’s that even now might be forming in her womb) had been safely transferred to his interior. His father Kronos’s unkind habit of eating anyone prophesied to conquer him seemed to have been passed down to Zeus.
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Gods may be immune from death, ageing and many of the other horrors that afflict and affright mortals, but they are not immune from pain.
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Zeus muttered something about the trouble with being the King of the Gods was that there was no one higher to pray to, but he dropped obediently to his knees and awaited his fate.
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Equipped with plated armour, shield, spear and plumed helmet, she gazed at her father with eyes of a matchless and wonderful grey. A grey that seemed to radiate one quality above all others – infinite wisdom. From one of the pines that fringed the shoreline an owl flew out and perched on the shining she-warrior’s shoulder. From the dunes an emerald and amethyst snake slid forward and coiled itself about her feet. With a slightly unpleasant slurping sound Zeus’s head closed up its wound and healed itself.
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The qualities that ATHENAfn19 embodied were ones that would become the paramount virtues and accomplishments of the great city state that would bear her name: Athens. Wisdom and insight were inherited from her mother, Metis. Handicraft, warcraft and statecraft were hers. Law and justice too. She took a share in what had been uniquely Aphrodite’s domains of love and beauty. Athena’s kind of beauty was expressed in aesthetics, in the apprehension of its ideal in art, representation, thought and character, rather than in the more physical, obvious and perhaps superficial kinds that would always be the business of Aphrodite. The love that Athena stood for had a less heated and physical emphasis too; it was the kind that would later become known as ‘Platonic’.
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In later years Athena and Poseidon would vie for the special patronage of the city of Cecropia. He struck his trident into the high rock on which they stood and produced a spring of seawater; an impressive trick, but its saltiness rendered it more or less useless as anything more than a picturesque public fountain. Athena’s simple gift was the first olive tree. The citizens of Cecropia in their wisdom saw the manifold benefits of its fruit, oil and wood and chose her as their presiding deity and protectress, changing the name of their city to Athens in her honour.
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In Rome she was worshipped as MINERVA, but without really that special personal connection that the Greeks felt for her.
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Besides, if you crossed Athena, you crossed Zeus. He was besotted with his daughter and she could do no wrong in his eyes. Ares, his least favourite child, made an interesting contrast to his new half-sister. They were both gods of war, but Athena’s interests lay in planning, tactics, strategy and the intelligent art of war, while Ares was a god of battles, combat and all forms of fighting. He understood only violence, force, aggression, conquest and coercion. It is distressing but essential to recognize that neither was as powerful when not allied with the other.
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Athena, like Demeter, remained untouched by man.fn22 Her childless, single life and her youthful relationship with Pallas have led some to maintain that she should stand as a symbol of feminine same-sex love.
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Those who speak truth to power usually end up in chains or an early grave, but inside Zeus’s head Metis could never be silenced. She would be a prudent check on the reckless excesses and headlong passions that often threatened to get the god of thunder into trouble. His storms of temper, lust and jealousy needed to be balanced by her calm voice, a voice that could urge his instincts into more rational and enlightened channels.
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In fact so much a part of him did Metis become that Homer sometimes referred to Zeus as Metieta – ‘wise counsellor’.
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An unshowy Titaness, Leto (LATONA to the Romans) was later worshipped as a goddess of motherhood as well as a paragon of modesty. Probably this was in honour of a pregnancy which, once Zeus had finished with her, turned out to be a most courageous triumph over adversity.
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but, as King of the Gods, his authority rested on accepting and endorsing the other gods’ right to rule their own spheres and exercise their own will. He could not interfere and countermand Hera’s edict or undo her awful spell.
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Leaders, kings and emperors always complain that they are the least free of their subjects, and there is some truth to this. Certainly Zeus, for all his might and majesty, was always constrained by the cabinet government principles of consensus and collective responsibility that allowed him to rule.
Page: 95, Location: 1448-1450
a glorious twin brother. Mother and daughter cried out with joyful surprise when the boy gave his first choking cries. For the hair on his head was not jet black like his sister’s or mother’s, it was blond – an inheritance from his maternal
Page: 96, Location: 1464-1466
Goddess of the chase and the chaste, of the untutored and the untamed, of hounds and hinds, of midwives and the moon, Artemis duly became. The queen of archers and huntresses grew to value her independence and her celibacy above all things. The kindness with which she expressed her sympathy for women in childbirth was countered by the ferocity with which she pursued game and punished any man who presumed to come too near. Feared, admired and adored across the ancient world, she was sometimes known, in honour of the mountainside of her birth, as CYNTHIA. The Romans called her DIANA. Her special tree was the cypress. Inasmuch as Athena was goddess of things cultivated, made, crafted and thought through, Artemis – in her dominion over the natural, instinctive and wild – stood as her opposite.
Page: 98, Location: 1503-1509
Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony. The idea that the base material world and its ordinary objects had divine properties and could resonate with the heavens, this was Apollonian, whether expressed in the magical properties of squares, circles and spheres or in the perfect modulation and rhythms of a voice or a chain of reasoning.
Page: 99, Location: 1515-1518
Unusually for a god he was worshipped by the Romans under his Greek name without any alterations. Apollo was Apollo wherever you went in the ancient world.
Page: 100, Location: 1523-1524
You might think Apollo had every justification to protect his sister, his mother and himself from such a deadly creature, but Python was chthonic – he sprang from the earth – making him a child of Gaia and as such under divine protection. Zeus knew that he must punish Apollo for the slaying of the serpent or lose all authority. In truth, the punishment he chose for Apollo was not so very harsh.
Page: 101, Location: 1541-1544
You might think Apollo had every justification to protect his sister, his mother and himself from such a deadly creature, but Python was chthonic – he sprang from the earth – making him a child of Gaia and as such under divine protection. Zeus knew that he must punish Apollo for the slaying of the serpent or lose all authority.
Page: 101, Location: 1541-1543
Apollo was tasked with organizing a regular athletics tournament there. The Pythian Games were duly held every four years, two either side of the Olympic meeting.fn28
Page: 101, Location: 1545-1547
To atone for his grievous assault on the proper way of things and to allow the slain Pytho to sleep the eternal sleep of death in the arms of his mother Gaia, Zeus finally fixed the serpent’s resting-place, the island of Delos, to the earth. While it no longer floats free, those who visit the island can testify to this day that it is tough to sail to, being beset by violent Etesian winds and treacherous meltemi currents. Anyone who travels there is likely to suffer the most awful sea-sickness. It is as if Hera has still not forgiven Delos for the part it played in the birth of the LETOIDES, the glorious twins Artemis and Apollo.
Page: 102, Location: 1560-1565
Zeus sat on the throne, with Hera at his side, that’s two. Around them were ranged Hestia, Poseidon (who liked to come inland and keep an eye on Zeus), Demeter, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Ares, Athena, Artemis and Apollo – that’s eleven. Hades doesn’t count because he spent all his time in the underworld and had no interest in taking a seat in the dodecatheon. Eleven. One more then, before Olympus reaches its quorum of twelve.
Page: 103, Location: 1567-1570
‘The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,’ he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of ‘-phobia’ words as he spoke. ‘I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there’s a good mother.’
Page: 104, Location: 1587-1589
What were to be this god’s duties? His fleetness of mind and foot suggested one immediate answer – he should become the messenger of the gods. To make Hermes even faster, Hephaestus fashioned what would become his signature footwear, the talaria – a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to zip from one place to another more swiftly than an eagle. Hermes was so unaffectedly delighted with them, and clasped Hephaestus to him with such warm and grateful affection, that the god of fire and forges immediately limped back to his workshop and, after a day and a night’s furious work, returned with a winged helmet with a low crown and a flexible brim to go with the talaria.
Page: 111, Location: 1702-1708
Aside from the staff, hat and winged sandals that Hephaestus fashioned for Hermes, his symbols included the tortoise, the lyre and the cockerel. The Romans called him MERCURY and worshipped him with almost as much fervour as the Greeks.
Page: 113, Location: 1722-1723
‘Excuse me,’ said Zeus, ‘there is every need to bow. We are their gods and they are not to forget it.’
Page: 126, Location: 1927-1927
Zeus’s roar was answered by a great rumble of thunder in the sky. ‘You can befriend them as much as you like, Prometheus, and I have no doubt that Athena and all the other gods will do so too. But one thing they are not to have. Ever. And that is fire.’
Page: 126, Location: 1931-1933
And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.
Page: 127, Location: 1947-1950
It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.
Page: 128, Location: 1959-1961
Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice.
Page: 129, Location: 1977-1979
You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place.
Page: 131, Location: 1998-2001
Nor did he need to be told who was responsible. His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage. Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible.
Page: 131, Location: 2008-2011
The intensity of his rage was in no way dimmed, but rather it was now focussed, channelled into clearer lines of retribution. He would leave Prometheus for the time being and unleash his cosmic fury upon man, puny impudent man, the creature he had taken such delight in and for whom now he felt nothing but resentment and cold contempt. For
Page: 132, Location: 2018-2021
Since each of the gods had conferred upon her a notable talent or accomplishment, she was to be called ‘All-Gifted’, which in Greek is PANDORA.
Page: 133, Location: 2036-2038
Epimetheus, who always acted first and considered the consequences later, promised to obey his more perspicacious brother. Nothing could prepare him for Zeus’s gift, however.
Page: 134, Location: 2052-2054
For the next week she was as gay and skittish and happy as a person had ever been. Epimetheus fell even more in love with her and invited their friends over to feast and hear a song he had written in her honour. It was a happy and successful party. The last festival that the Golden Age was ever to know.
Page: 136, Location: 2085-2088
And what were they, these shapes? They were mutant descendants of the dark and evil children of both Nyx and Erebus. They were born of Apate, Deceit; Geras, Old Age; Oizys, Misery; Momos, Blame; Keres, Violent Death. They were the offshoots of Ate, Ruin, and Eris, Discord. These were their names: PONOS, Hardship; LIMOS, Starvation; ALGOS, Pain; DYSNOMIA, Anarchy; PSEUDEA, Lies; NEIKEA, Quarrels; AMPHILOGIAI, Disputes; MAKHAI, Wars; HYSMINAI, Battles; ANDROKTASIAI and PHONOI, Manslaughters and Murders.
Page: 138, Location: 2103-2110
Illness, Violence, Deceit, Misery and Want had arrived. They would never leave the earth. What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.
Page: 138, Location: 2110-2113
So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora and – most importantly of course – from Gaia.fn7 And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.
Page: 142, Location: 2173-2177
Hermes was assigned a new role – that of Arch Psychopomp, or ‘chief conductor of souls’ – a duty he discharged with his customary sprightliness and puckish humour. Though, as the human population grew, only the most important dead were granted the honour of a personal escort by Hermes, the rest were taken by Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.
Page: 143, Location: 2189-2191
The heroes and those deemed exceedingly righteous (as well as the dead who had some divine blood in them) found themselves transported to the Elysian Fields, which lay somewhere on the archipelago known as the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed. There is no real agreement as to where this might actually be. Perhaps they are what we now call the Canaries, perhaps the Azores, the Lesser Antilles or even Bermuda.fn11 Later descriptions place the Elysian Fields within the kingdom of Hades itself.fn12 In these accounts souls who reincarnated three times, on each occasion leading a heroic, just and virtuous life, then earned themselves a transfer from Elysium to the Isles of the Blessed.
Page: 144, Location: 2206-2213
Hades was the most jealous of all his jealous family. Not one soul could he bear to lose from his kingdom. Cerberus the three-headed dog patrolled the gates. Few, very few, heroes circumvented or duped Thanatos and Cerberus and managed to visit Hades’ realm and return alive to the world above.
Page: 146, Location: 2226-2228
No one, not even the King of the Gods, could interfere with the will of Gaia. She represented an older, deeper, more permanent order than that of the Olympians and Zeus knew that he was powerless to prevent the repopulation of the world. But he could at least turn his attention to Prometheus.
Page: 146, Location: 2233-2235
Along the journey Zeus had wanted to say something, had longed to take his friend by the shoulder and embrace him. A weeping apology might have allowed him to forgive and make up. But Prometheus remained silent. Zeus’s stinging sense of being wronged and ill-used flared up anew. ‘Besides,’ the god told himself, ‘great rulers cannot be seen to exhibit weakness, especially when it comes to betrayal by those close to them.’
Page: 147, Location: 2249-2253
Prometheus, mankind’s chief creator, advocate and friend, taught us, stole for us and sacrificed himself for us. We all possess our share of Promethean fire, without it we would not be human. It is right to pity and admire him but, unlike the jealous and selfish gods he would never ask to be worshipped, praised and adored.
Page: 149, Location: 2271-2273
Demeter had a daughter, Persephone, by her brother Zeus. So beautiful and pure and lovely was she that the gods took to calling her KORE, or CORA, which means simply ‘the maiden’. The Romans called her PROSERPINA.
Page: 150, Location: 2285-2288
Persephone was forced to return to the underworld. Demeter’s distress at this parting caused the trees to shed their leaves and a dead time to creep over the world. Another six months passed, Persephone emerged from Hades’ domain and the cycle of birth, renewal and growth began again. In this way the seasons came about, the autumn and winter of Demeter’s grieving for the absence of her daughter and the spring and summer of her jubilation at Persephone’s return.
Page: 154, Location: 2351-2354
No longer the naiad Salmacis and the youth Hermaphroditus, but now intersex, male and female coexisting in one form. Although the Romans were to regard this state of being as a disorder that threatened the strict militaristic norms of their society, the more open-minded Greeks prized, celebrated and even worshipped the hermaphrodite gender. Statuary and representations on pottery and temple friezes show us that what the Romans feared, the Greeks seemed to find admirable.
Page: 156, Location: 2381-2385
ANTEROS – the youthful patron of selfless unconditional love.fn1 EROS – the leader of the Erotes, god of physical love and sexual desire. HEDYLOGOS – the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentine cards, love-letters and romantic fiction. HERMAPHRODITUS – the protector of effeminate males, mannish females and those of what we would now call a more fluid gender. HIMEROS – the embodiment of desperate, impetuous love, love that is impatient to be fulfilled and ready to burst. HYMENAIOS – the guardian of the bridal-chamber and wedding music. POTHOS – the personification of languorous longing, of love for the absent and the departed.
Page: 157, Location: 2403-2413
Under his Roman name of CUPID he is usually represented as a laughing winged child about to shoot an arrow from his silver bow, a very recognizable image to this day, making Eros perhaps the most instantly identifiable of all the gods of classical antiquity.
Page: 158, Location: 2417-2419
The Greeks had at least four words for love: AGAPE – this was the great and generous kind that we would describe as ‘charity’ and which could refer to any holy kind of love, such as parents for their children or the love of worshippers for their god.
Page: 159, Location: 2424-2426
EROS – the strain of love named after the god, or after whom the god is named. The kind that gets us into most trouble. So much more than affectionate, so much less than spiritual, eros and the erotic can lead us to glory and to disgrace, to the highest pitch of happiness and the deepest pit of despair. PHILIA – the form of love applied to friendship, partiality and fondness. We see its traces in words like ‘francophile’, ‘necrophilia’ and ‘philanthropy’. STORGE – the love and loyalty someone might have for their country or their sports team could be regarded
Page: 159, Location: 2428-2433
Eros, meanwhile, lay in a secret chamber, racked by the agony of the wound on his shoulder. You and I could endure with ease the slight nuisance of a lamp-oil burn, but for Eros, immortal though he was, this was a hurt inflicted by the one he loved. Such wounds take a very long time to heal, if indeed they ever do.
Page: 183, Location: 2801-2803
It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress. Hera, to whom cows were sacred, and who possessed therefore a keen, expert eye for the species, noticed the animal and suspected its true identity straight away.
Page: 189, Location: 2890-2891
As the very hundredth eye at last winked shut Hermes lowered his pipes, stole forward and stabbed Argus in the heart. All the gods were capable of great cruelty – Hermes could be as vicious as any of them.
Page: 191, Location: 2918-2920
Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant, Hera took Argus’s hundred bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl, transforming it into what we know today as the peacock – which is how the now proud, colourful and haughty bird came for ever to be associated with the goddess.
Page: 191, Location: 2923-2925
If you visit the Acropolis in Athens today you can still see, just to the north of the Parthenon, the beautiful temple called the Erechtheum. Its famous porch of caryatid columns in the form of draped maidens is one of the great architectural treasures of the world. Shrines were erected not far away to poor Aglauros and Herse too, which is only fitting.
Page: 194, Location: 2961-2964
Phaeton knew all about Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She was called rhododaktylos – the ‘rosy-fingered one’ – and admired everywhere for her sweetness and soft beauty.
Page: 201, Location: 3080-3081
As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched.
Page: 205, Location: 3144-3146
Phoebus Apollo was not a good or affectionate father, but the death of his son hit him very hard. He vowed never again to drive the chariot of the sun, passing the duty on to the grateful and enthusiastic Helios, who for ever after became the sun’s sole charioteer.
Page: 207, Location: 3162-3164
In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton
Page: 207, Location: 3169-3169
Apollo struck him dumb and finally, out of pity and remorse for the youth’s ceaseless but now silent and inconsolable suffering, transformed him into a beautiful swan. This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honour of Cygnus the young of all swans are called ‘cygnets’.
Page: 207, Location: 3167-3171
The American classicist and teacher Edith Hamilton offered this as Phaeton’s epitaph: Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.
Page: 208, Location: 3181-3184
Loud was the lamentation and great the recrimination.
Page: 210, Location: 3216-3216
The journey was so remarkable that the whole landmass to the west of her homeland has been called Europe in her honour ever since. They didn’t stop until they reached the island of Crete where the bull revealed himself to be … … who else but Zeus?
Page: 210, Location: 3219-3221
Whether it was Hera’s transformation of Io into a heifer that inspired him to take the shape of a bull we cannot know, but the trick seems to have worked, for Europa stayed happily on Crete for the rest of her life. She was to bear Zeus three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon – who went on after their deaths, you may recall, to become the Judges of the Underworld, weighing the lives of dead souls and allotting them their punishments and rewards accordingly.
Page: 211, Location: 3222-3225
The marks on the page or screen that you are interpreting as you read now derive from that Phoenician alphabet. And it was Cadmus who would take his people’s marvellous invention to Greece in the course of his long search for Europa.
Page: 211, Location: 3235-3236
Cadmus is often called ‘the First Hero’. If you care to do the arithmetic you will see that he was a fifth-generation being, of equally human and divine parentage. He could trace his line back to the very beginnings of life through his paternal grandfather Poseidon, whose father was Kronos, son of Ouranos. Through his grandmother Libya he was descended from Inachus, adding a quantity of royal human blood to course through his veins. He had the restlessness and wanderlust that marks the hero, as well as the required measures of courage, confidence and self-belief.
Page: 212, Location: 3247-3251
is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favoured you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you. And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favourites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn’t mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others.
Page: 219, Location: 3349-3355
‘What is the name of this place?’ Cadmus asked. ‘Does anyone here know?’ A voice spoke up, the voice of the man who had warned that the Ismenian Dragon was sacred to Ares. ‘I’m from hereabouts,’ he said. ‘We call this “the plain of Thebes”.’ ‘Then on this plain shall I build a great city. From now on we are not Tyrians, but Thebans’ – a great cheer went up – ‘and these five Spartoi shall be my Theban lords.’
Page: 222, Location: 3399-3402
The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who – if you remember – nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed.
Page: 224, Location: 3429-3432
The pairing of Cadmus and Harmony seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing and trade represented by Cadmus – his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means ‘of the east’ – can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both.
Page: 225, Location: 3436-3439
‘For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth
Page: 226, Location: 3462-3463
Once there, Cadmus suddenly fell weary and was filled with an insupportable dread. He called up to the skies. ‘For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth as a snake. If it will calm him and bring more peace to my troubled life then let me end my life sliding through the dust. Let it be so.’
Page: 226, Location: 3461-3464
The pair lived out their days in the shadows of a temple sacred to Athena, only showing themselves when they needed to heat their blood in the noonday sun. When the end came, Zeus returned them to their human shapes in time to die. Their bodies were taken to be buried with great ceremony in Thebes, and Zeus sent two great serpents to guard their tombs for eternity.
Page: 227, Location: 3475-3477
Zeus gazed down at her. The eruption of lust he had felt was all over, but he was surprised to feel the stirrings of something deeper, glowing like embers in his heart. A god who operated in vertical moments with no real thought for consequences along the line, he really did experience just then a great wellspring of love for the beautiful Semele, and he told her so.
Page: 229, Location: 3512-3515
Zeus meant well. Those three words so often presaged disaster for some poor demigod, nymph or mortal. The King of the Gods did love Semele and he really meant to do his best by her. In the fervour of his new infatuation he managed conveniently to forget the torments Io had endured, maddened by the gadfly sent by his vengeful wife.
Page: 230, Location: 3521-3524
Above him, around him, inside him, Zeus heard the triumphant laughter of his wife. Of course. He might have known. Somehow Hera had tricked this poor girl into forcing the awful promise from him. Well, she would not get their child. With a peal of thunder Zeus returned to flesh and blood and plucked the foetus from Semele’s belly. It was too young to breathe the air, so Zeus took a knife and sliced open his thigh and tucked the embryo inside. Holding it tight within this makeshift womb Zeus knelt down to sew the child safely into his warm flesh.
Page: 236, Location: 3612-3616
make wine from grapes. It is possible that CHIRON
Page: 237, Location: 3626-3626
Dionysus rushed to the dying youth’s mangled side, but he could not save him.fn9 Instead he caused the dead and twisted body to transform magically into a winding, writhing climbing plant, while the drops of blood solidified and swelled into luscious berries whose skin shone with the bloom and lustre the god had so admired. His lover had become a vine (which is still called ampelos in Greece to this day). From it Dionysus produced the first vintage and drank the first draught of wine. This witchcraft, as it were, of turning the blood of Ampelos into wine became the god’s gift to the world.
Page: 237, Location: 3633-3638
Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. ‘Methylated spirits’ and ‘methane’ take their names from Methe. Botrytis, the ‘noble rot’ that benignly affects grapes on the vine, lending premium dessert wines their incomparable (and shatteringly
Page: 238, Location: 3646-3650
Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. ‘Methylated spirits’ and ‘methane’ take their names from Methe. Botrytis, the ‘noble rot’ that benignly affects grapes on the vine, lending premium dessert wines their incomparable (and shatteringly expensive) bouquet, owes its name to Botrys.
Page: 238, Location: 3646-3650
Dionysus was soon established as the god of wine, revelry, delirious intoxication, uninhibited dissipation and ‘the orgastic future’. The Romans called him by the name BACCHUS and worshipped him quite as devotedly as did the Greeks.
Page: 239, Location: 3654-3656
The vine leaf, the thyrsus – a staff topped with a pine cone – a chariot drawn by leopards or other exotic beasts, depraved attendants sporting roaring erections, jars flowing with wine – the Dionysiac Idea added much to the world. The importance of this new god was such that he simply had to be welcomed into Olympus.
Page: 239, Location: 3663-3666
Nonetheless, whether Hera liked it or not, Dionysus the Twice Born, the only god to have a mortal human parent, rose to take his place now as a full member of the finally fixed Olympian Twelve.
Page: 241, Location: 3681-3683
He was perhaps the first man ever to eat himself out of house and home. One by one all his treasure and possessions, and even his palace, were sold off to buy food. But still this wasn’t enough, for nothing could appease his colossal appetite. At last, he was reduced to selling his daughter MESTRA to raise money to quieten the remorseless demands of his unassuageable appetite.
Page: 245, Location: 3755-3758
With such malicious glee did the crow crow, that Apollo lost his temper and turned it black. All crows, ravens and rooks ever since have been that colour.
Page: 247, Location: 3781-3782
A single drop of the silvery-gold ichor that keeps the gods immortal is fatal for humans to touch or taste. The blood of a creature as deadly and dangerous as a serpent-haired Gorgon, on the other hand, has the power to bring the dead back to life.
Page: 248, Location: 3801-3803
By the time he was twenty Asclepius had mastered all the arts of surgery and medicine. He embraced his teacher Chiron in a fond farewell and left to set up on his own as the world’s first physician, apothecary and healer. His fame spread around the Mediterranean with great speed. The sick, lame and unhappy flocked to his surgery, outside which he hung a sign – a wooden staff with a snake twined round it, seen to this day on many ambulances, clinics and (often disreputable) medical websites.fn3 He married EPIONE, whose name means ‘soothing’ or ‘relief from pain’. Together they had three sons and four daughters. Asclepius trained his girls as rigorously as Chiron had trained him. The eldest, HYGIEIA, he taught the practices of cleanliness, diet and physical exercise that are today named ‘hygiene’ after her. To PANACEA he revealed the arts of universal health, of medicinal preparation and the production of remedies and treatments that could heal anything – which is what her name means: ‘cure all’. ACESO he instructed in the healing process itself, including what we would now call immunology.
Page: 249, Location: 3803-3815
The youngest girl IASO specialized in recovery and recuperation. The elder boys, MACHAON and PODALIRIUS, became prototypes of the army doctor. Their later service in the Trojan War was recorded by Homer.
Page: 249, Location: 3816-3818
Zeus frowned. There was no denying the truth of what they said. He was disappointed in Athena. She had not betrayed him in so flagrant and unforgivable a manner as Prometheus, but there were points of similarity that troubled him. Mortals were mortal and that was that. Allowing them access to potions that gave them ascendancy over death was quite wrong.
Page: 250, Location: 3829-3832
All of Greece lamented the loss of their beloved and valued physician and healer, but Apollo did more than mourn the passing of his son. He raged. As soon as he heard the news he took himself off to the workshop of Hephaestus and with three swift arrows shot dead Brontes, Steropes and Arges, the Cyclopes whose eternal task and pleasure it was to manufacture the Sky Father’s thunderbolts.
Page: 250, Location: 3833-3835
There was no graver sin in Zeus’s eyes than the betrayal of xenia, the sacred duty of hosts towards guests, and guests towards hosts. Few mortals showed more contempt for its principles than Ixion, King of the Lapiths, an ancient tribe from Thessaly.
Page: 253, Location: 3865-3867
This flagrant breach of the rules of hospitality was trumped by the even grosser sin of blood killing. The slaying of a family member was considered a taboo of the most heinous kind. With this action Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad.
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The Hera-Cloud was given the name NEPHELE. Her union with Ixion produced a son, CENTAUROS, an ugly and misshapen boy who grew into a lonely and unhappy man who took his pleasure, not with humans, but with the wild mares of Mount Pelion, where he liked to roam. The untameable and savage progeny of this unnatural union between man and horse were named, after him, ‘centaurs’.
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The Wheel of Ixion became a popular subject for artists and sculptors and the phrase ‘a wheel of fire’ is sometimes used to describe an agonizing burden, punishment or duty.fn3 The expression ‘to pile Pelion on Ossa’ is seen too, meaning to add difficulty to difficulty.
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Tantalus himself was despatched straight to Tartarus and punished in a manner befitting one who dared tempt the gods into feasting on the flesh of the victim of a blood crime. He was placed in a pool of water up to his waist. Above his head waved the bough of a tree from which hung luscious and appetizing fruits. Hunger and thirst raged within him, but every time he stretched up to take a bite, the branch would swing out of his reach. Every time he stooped to drink, the waters of the pool would shrink back to deny him. He could not move away, for above him, threatening to crush him if he dared try to escape, hovered a great stone of the hard glaucus element that would one day be called ‘tantalum’.fn7 There Tantalus stands to this day, agonizingly close to satisfaction, but always denied it, enacting the tortured frustration that bears his name – tantalized, but never satisfied, until the end of time.
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Deucalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of the Great Flood, had had a son named HELLEN, after whom the Greeks to this day call themselves Hellenes.
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Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free.
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Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief.
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Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.
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To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods’, who are too jealous, petty and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them.
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The ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ became a favourite subject for painters, poets and sculptors. For some his tale echoes the fate of Prometheus: a symbol of the artist-creator’s struggle to match the gods, or of the gods’ refusal to accept that mortal artists can outdo the divine.
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This is how the first spider – the first arachnid – came into being. It was not a punishment as some would have it, but a prize for winning a great competition, a reward for a great artist. The right to work and weave masterpieces in perpetuity.
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She mewed and cried so plaintively after him that she was turned into a gull. Such was the humour of the gods that at the same time her father Nisus was transformed into a sea-eagle. In revenge he has relentlessly harried his daughter across the oceans ever since.
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Some years later Arcas, now a youth, was hunting in the forest when he came upon a great she-bear. He was just about to launch his javelin at her when Zeus intervened to prevent an inadvertent matricide and raised them up into the heavens as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the constellations of the Great Bear and the Little Bear. Hera, still angry, cursed these constellations so that they would never share the same waters which (I am told) explains their permanently opposing circumpolar positions.
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He was being transformed into a hoopoe bird, and his yells of pain and fury began to sound like forlorn whoops. At the same time, Procne was changed into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. Although nightingales are famous for the melodious beauty of their song, it is only the male of the species that sings. The females, like tongueless Philomela, remain mute.fn6 Many species of swallow are named after Procne to this day and the hoopoe bird still wears a kingly crown.
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Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus.
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But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai ‘gladdening’ and medon ‘prince’ and/or medeon ‘genitals’. ‘Ganymede’, the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word ‘catamite’. Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless. When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.
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The ensuing debacle reveals a marvellous quality of the Greek mind: their fascination with paradox. What happens when an uncatchable fox is set upon by an inescapable hound? This is akin to the problem of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Round and round dashed the Cadmean Vixen, while hot on her tail flew Lailaps, from whom no prey could escape. They would still be caught in that logic loop now I suppose, if Zeus hadn’t done something about
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At length, even this locked state seemed to him to challenge common sense, so he catasterized them – removed them to the heavens – where they became the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.
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Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy. This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures and positions which allowed
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Endymion stayed just where he was, locked in eternal slumber. Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy. This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures and positions which allowed that. An odd relationship, but one which worked and made Selene happy.
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‘Immortal Sky Father, Lord of Olympus, Cloud-Gatherer, Storm-Bringer, King of all the …’ ‘Yes, yes, yes. What do you want?’ ‘I crave a boon, great Zeus.’ ‘Of course you crave a boon. None of my family visits me for any other reason. It’s always boons. Boons, boons, boons and nothing but boons. What is it this time? Something to do with that Trojan boy, I suppose?’
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The Greek for flower is anthos – so what follows is, quite literally, a romantic anthology.
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At the very least it’s necessary for us to know that Adonis was lovely enough to attract, as no other mortal ever had, the one who had done so much to bring about his birth: the goddess of love and beauty herself, Aphrodite.
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They became lovers. It had been a wild and tortuous path to this coupling: the goddess, in a spirit of malicious revenge, had caused a father to commit a forbidden act with his daughter which brought forth a child whom Aphrodite loved perhaps more completely than any other being. A lifetime of therapy could surely not clear up such a psychic mess as that.
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The two most celebrated seers of Greek myth were CASSANDRA and TIRESIAS. Cassandra was a Trojan prophetess whose curse was to be entirely accurate in her prognostications yet always just as entirely disbelieved. The Theban Tiresias underwent an equally stressed existence. Born male, he was turned female by Hera as a punishment for striking two mating snakes with a stick, something which annoyed her greatly at the time, for reasons best known to herself. After seven years of serving Hera as a priestess, Tiresias was returned to his original male form, only to be struck blind by Athena for looking on her naked while she bathed in the river.
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‘I know enough of the gods,’ continued Liriope, ‘to fear that such beauty might be more curse than blessing. The world knows what happened to Ganymede, to Adonis, Tithonus, Hyacinth and all those other boys far less beautiful than my son. So I would have you tell me, great seer, if Narcissus will live a long and happy life.
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‘I command your wicked, lying powers of speech to be still. From this moment you will be mute unless spoken to. You will have no power to reply except to repeat the last thing that has been said to you. None can undo this curse. Only I can. Understand?’ ‘…. can understand!’ cried Echo. ‘That’s what happens when you disobey the gods.’ ‘… obey the gods!’ ‘I do not forgive. No mercy.’ ‘… give no mercy!’
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The voice that had got Echo into all that trouble in the first place, the voice that was doomed to repeat and repeat. Nothing more was left of the once beautiful nymph, just the answering voice. You can hear Echo still, returning your last few words when you call out near caves, canyons, cliffs, hills, streets, squares, temples, monuments, ruins and empty rooms.
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You can choose to think of the characteristics these doomed young people have bequeathed us and our language as common human traits or as problematic afflictions. Narcissistic personality disorder and echolalia (the apparently mindless repetition of what is said) are both classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which medically and legally defines mental illnesses.
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‘You took my beloved Thisbe away before we could be united for the short span of our lives,’ Pyramus cries to the heavens, ‘so let us be one in the endless night of eternal death!’ With these noble words he expires upon the ground.fn2 Enter Thisbe. In the dead hands of Pyramus she sees her own veil, smeared and spattered with blood. She sees the lion’s paw prints and reads all too clearly the story written there. ‘Oh gods, can you have been so jealous of our love that you could not grant us even one short moment of happiness?’ she cries.
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She sees Pyramus’s sword. It is still hot and wet with his blood. She throws herself upon it, plunging it deep into her belly with a cry of triumph and ecstasy in one of the most Freudian suicides ever.
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As for their spirits – well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes. Moreover, in honour of the couple’s love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the colour of their passion and their blood.
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For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became sacred to him and its wreath thenceforward crowned the brow, as I have said, of the winners of his Pythian Games at Delphi. To this day the winner of a great prize is still called a laureate.
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Nine times the moon changes before the union of this happy pair is blessed with the birth of a child, a boy they call PAPHOS, and whose name will be given to the town in which Pygmalion and Galatea live out the remainder of their loving and contented lives. Just once or twice in Greek myth mortal lovers are granted a felicitous ending. It is that hope, perhaps, that spurs us on to believe that our quest for happiness will not be futile.
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On and on they went, chasing the never-nearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed.
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At the end of the musician’s long and successful life, Apollo, to whom dolphins and music were sacred, set Arion and his rescuer amongst the stars between Sagittarius and Aquarius as the constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin. From their position in the heavens, Arion and his rescuer could aid navigators below and remind all of us of the strange and marvellous kinship that exists between mankind and dolphins. Philemon and Baucis, or Hospitality Rewarded In the hills of eastern Phrygia, in Asia Minor, an oak and a linden grow side by side, their branches touching.
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At the end of the musician’s long and successful life, Apollo, to whom dolphins and music were sacred, set Arion and his rescuer amongst the stars between Sagittarius and Aquarius as the constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin. From their position in the heavens, Arion and his rescuer could aid navigators below and remind all of us of the strange and marvellous kinship that exists between mankind and dolphins.
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They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden. For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims.
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The Greeks loved to mythologize the founders of towns and cities. Athena’s gift of the olive to the people of Athens and her raising of Erechtheus (the issue of Hephaestus and the semen-soaked fillet, you will recall) to be the founder of the city seems to have helped foster the Athenian sense of self. The story of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth did the same for Thebans. Sometimes, as is the case with the founding of the city of Gordium, elements of the story can move from myth to legend to actual, identifiable history.
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The great Gordian knot lay unsolved for more than a thousand years until a reckless and brilliant young Macedonian conqueror and king called Alexander rode with his army into town. When told of the legend he took one look at the great tangle of rope, raised his sword and swept it down, cutting the Gordian knot and earning the delighted praise of his own and future generations.fn2 Meanwhile, back in time, Gordias’s son Prince MIDAS grew up to be a friendly, merry young man, loved and admired by all who knew him.
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The sight of his beloved roses dropping their heavy heads caused his own to bow in misery. Everything around him glinted and glittered, gleamed and glimmered with a gorgeous gaudy golden glow but his heart was as grim and grey as granite. And the hunger and thirst! After three days of food and drink turning to inedible gold the moment it touched him, Midas felt ready for death.
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After this, the waters of the Pactolus, which wind around the foothills of Mount Tmolus, became the single greatest source of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, in all the Aegean.
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You would think that Midas had learned his lesson by now. The lesson that repeats and repeats throughout the story of man. Don’t mess with the gods. Don’t trust the gods. Don’t anger the gods. Don’t barter with the gods. Don’t compete with the gods. Leave the gods well alone. Treat all blessings as a curse and all promises as a trap. Above all, never insult a god. Ever.
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He did not cause Midas even the slightest amount of pain but just said softly, ‘You honestly think Pan played better than me?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Well, in that case,’ said Apollo, with a laugh, ‘you must have the ears of an ass.’ No sooner were these words out of the god’s mouth than Midas felt something strange and warm and rough going on in his scalp.
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But secrets are terrible things to have to keep. Especially such juicy ones as that to which the royal barber was privy. Every day he would wake up and feel that the knowledge was writhing and swelling inside him.
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No unmilked cow with swollen udders, no mother of overdue twins, no gut-stuffed gastronome straining on the privy, could ever feel such a desperate need for relief from their agonies than this poor barber.
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Poor Midas. His name will always mean someone fortunate and rich, but truly he was unlucky and poor. If only he had kept to his roses. Green fingers are better than gold.
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Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth.
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That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.
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Prayer, ritual and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things. At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion. It moves from stories told around the fire to a systematized set of beliefs to which obedience is owed. Priestly castes arose who ordained how people should behave. How myths become codified into scriptures, liturgies and theologies is a subject for another book and quite beyond my scope. We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur’an. There were ‘mysteries’ and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons.
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Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. ‘Know thyself’ was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people – if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings – they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim.
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Towering above them all is the Roman poet ovid (43 bc–ad 17), whose Metamorphoses (Transformations) tells of those mortals, nymphs and others who were changed by the gods into animals, plants, rivers or even stones as a punishment or out of pity. His other works, principally the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Heroides (Heroines) also contain recastings of Greek myth, using always the Latin names for the gods – ‘Jove’ or ‘Jupiter’ for Zeus, ‘Diana’ for Artemis, ‘Cupid’ or ‘Amor’ for Eros. and so on.
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Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, ‘forethought’. Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say: The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant … True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date … the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future. This is perhaps a way of suggesting that Prometheus is father of our civilization in a way more subtle than as the provider of fire, whether real or symbolic. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being from hunter-gatherers to
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The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought – which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.
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Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us.
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Others have maintained that Elpis means more than ‘hope’, it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death and ultimate failure that looms over us all.
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Nietzsche looked at it in yet another, slightly different way. For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man’s existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration.
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The early nineteenth-century philologist Friedrich von Schlegel first noticed this ‘Great Fricative Shift’, which subsequently became part of Grimms’ Law – so named in honour of the Brothers Grimm, who were the ones who really put in the work and showed how most of the languages of Europe and the Middle East could be traced all the way back to India and their notional Proto-Indo-European ancestor.
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