Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  Erato

  ERATO was the Muse of lyric and love poetry. Her name is related to Eros and the erotic and she has sometimes been represented in art with a golden arrow to suggest the connection. Turtle doves and the myrtle are common symbols associated with her, as is the lute.

  Euterpe

  The Muse of music itself, the ‘delightful’ and ‘joyous’ EUTERPE bore, by the river god STRYMON, the Thracian king RHESUS who went on to play a very minor part in the Trojan War. Whether he gave his name to the monkeys that in turn went on to describe types of human blood factor is not agreed upon.

  Melpomene

  The tragic Muse, MELPOMENE (whose name derives from a Greek verb meaning ‘to celebrate with dance and song’) represented originally the chorus and then the whole of tragedy – a very important fusing of music, poetry, drama, mask, dance, song and religious celebration. Tragic actors wore a type of thick-soled boot,fn4 called a ‘buskin’ in English and the cothurnus in Greek; and Melpomene is usually depicted either holding or wearing these, as well as, of course, the famous tragic masque with its unhappy down-curved lips. Along with her sister Terpsichore, she was a mother to the Sirens, whose time will come.

  Polyhymnia

  Hymnos is the Greek for ‘praise’ and POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry and rhetoric as well as – slightly randomly one might think – agriculture, pantomime, geometry and meditation. I suppose today we would call her ‘the Muse of mindfulness’. She is usually portrayed as a rather serious figure, finger held pensively to her mouth in an attitude of solemn rumination. She is another contender, along with Calliope, for mother of the hero Orpheus.

  Terpsichore

  Cheese Shop Owner: Oh, I thought you were complaining about the bouzouki player.

  Customer: Oh, heaven forbid. I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse.

  This dialogue from Monty Python’s immortal ‘Cheese Shop Sketch’ introduced many, myself included, to TERPSICHORE, the Muse of dance.

  Thalia

  The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for ‘to flourish’.fn5 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors’ boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

  Urania

  URANIA derives her name from Ouranos, the primal god of the heavens (and a great-grandfather of the nine sisters); she is the Muse who presides over astronomy and the stars. She is also considered a figure of Universal Love, a kind of Greek version of the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit.

  Threesomes

  The three times three Muses remind me to introduce more triads. Gaia and Ouranos gave birth, as we know, to three Hecatonchires, three Cyclopes and four times three Titans. We have already encountered the three Erinyes, also called the Eumenides – those vengeful Furies who sprang from the blood-soaked earth at the moment of the castration of Ouranos. Three seems to have been a very magic number to the Greeks.

  The Charites

  During the course of the ten-year Titanomachy, apocalyptic as it was, Zeus always found time to fulfil his desires. Perhaps he saw it as discharging his duty to populate the earth. It is certainly the case that Zeus liked to discharge.

  One day Zeus’s eye fell on the most beautiful of all the Oceanids – EURYNOME, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. 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.

  Horai

  The HORAI, or Hours, consisted of two sets of triplet sisters. These daughters of THEMIS (the embodiment of law, justice and custom) originally personified the seasons. There seem to have been two to begin with, summer and winter, AUXESIAfn7 and CARPO. The classical first triad of Horai was made up by the later addition of THALLO (FLORA to the Romans), bringer of flowers and blossoms, the embodiment of spring. The Horai’s most valuable quality derived from their mother: their gift of the propitious moment, the benign relationship between natural law and the unfolding of time – what you might call ‘divine serendipity’.

  The second set of Horai was responsible for a more worldly kind of law and order. They were EUNOMIA, goddess of law and legislation, DIKÉ goddess of justice and the moral order (the Roman equivalent was JUSTITIA) and EIRENE, the goddess of peace (PAX to the Romans).

  Moirai

  The three MOIRAI, or Fates, were named CLOTHO, LACHESIS and ATROPOS. These daughters of Nyx are to be thought of as sitting round a spinning wheel: Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length and Atropos (the relentless, remorseless one, literally the ‘un-turning’) chooses when to shear the thread and cut the life short.fn8 I picture them as sunken-cheeked crones, clothed in black rags, sitting in a cave cackling and nodding as they spin, but many sculptors and poets represented them as pink-cheeked maidens, dressed in white robes and smiling demurely. Their name derives from a word that means ‘portion’ or ‘lot’, in the sense of ‘that which is allotted to you’. ‘It was not her portion to be loved’, or, ‘It was his lot to be unhappy’, are the kinds of phrases Greeks employed to describe attributes or destinies apportioned by the Moirai. Even the gods had to submit themselves to the Fates’ cruel decrees.fn9

  Keres

  These carrion daughters of Nyx were the vile and rapacious spirits of violent death. Like the Valkyries of Norse and Germanic myth they collected the souls of warriors killed in battle. Unlike those benevolent warrior goddesses however, the Keres did not escort their heroic souls to the reward of a Valhalla. They flew from bleeding body to body, greedily sucking up the blood that flowed from them; then, when each corpse was thoroughly drained, they threw it over their shoulders and moved on to the next.

  Gorgons

  The primordial sea god Pontus had by Gaia a son, PHORCYS, and a daughter, CETO. The progeny of this brother and sister were three island-dwelling sisters, the Gorgons STHENO, EURYALE and MEDUSA. With hair of writhing venomous snakes, intense staring eyes, hideous fixed smiles, boar’s tusk teeth, clawed hands of brass and taloned feet, and scaly golden bodies, these monstrous sisters appeared frightful enough to freeze the blood. 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.

  Spirits of Air, Earth and Water

  These threesomes were not the only significant beings to spring into life at this time. All over the world, as the Titanomachy raged around them, nature sprites and spirits of all kinds began to multiply and claim their areas of sovereignty. One pictures them scampering for shelter and trembling behind bushes while the rocks and thunderbolts fly through the air and the earth shakes with the violence of war. Somehow these often fragile beings survived and thrived, to enrich the world with their beauty, dedication and charm.

  Perhaps the best known of them are the NYMPHS, a major class of minor female deities, divided into clans or subspecies according to their habitats. The OREADS held court in the mountains, hills and grottoes of Greece and its islands, while the Nereids (like the Oceanids from whom they descended) were denizens of the deep. NAIADS, their freshwater counterparts, were found in lakes and streams of running water, or in the reeds that fringed them and on riverbanks. Over time some water nymphs began to associate themselves with ever more specific realms. Soon there were PEGAEAE, who looked after natural springs, and POTAMEIDES, who dwelt in and around rivers.fn10 On land the AULONIADES kept
to pastures and groves, while the LEIMAKIDES lived in meadows. Woodland spirits included light-winged DRYADS and the HAMADRYADS, sylvan nymphs whose lives were tied to the trees they made their home. When their tree died or was cut down, they died too. More specialist wood nymphs populated just apple trees or laurels. The Meliae, nymphs of the sweet manna-bearing ash tree, we have already met.

  The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.

  And so, while the natural world ripened, rippled and replicated in this prodigiously bravura manner, seeding itself with ever more marvellous demigods and immortals, the earth trembled and shook with the violence and terror of war. But this proliferation ensured that, when the smoke and dust of battle at last cleared, the victors would rule a world filled with life, colour and character. The triumphant Zeus was set to inherit an earth, sea and sky infinitely richer than the ones into which he had been born.

  Disposer Supreme and Judge of the Earth

  Zeus now moved to make sure the defeated Titans could never rise again to threaten his order. His strongest and most violent opponent in the war had not been Kronos but ATLAS, the brutally powerful eldest son of Iapetus and Clymene.fn11 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. At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him. Legs braced, muscles bunched, his mighty body contorted itself with this supreme and agonizing effort. For aeons he groaned there like a Bulgarian weightlifter. In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day. His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honour we still call ‘atlases’.fn12 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.

  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. All mortal flesh is as grass beneath the cruel sweep of its mowing blade. We find Kronos in all things ‘chronic’ or ‘synchronized’, in ‘chronometers’, ‘chronographs’ and ‘chronicles’.fn13 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.fn14

  Not all the Titans were banished or punished. To many Zeus showed magnanimity and mercy, while on those few who had sided with him in the war he showered favours.fn15 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 the war, the Cyclopes had, as mentioned, given Zeus in respectful homage the weapon with which he is always associated: the thunderbolt. Their brothers the Hecatonchires, whose tremendous strength had secured victory, were rewarded by being sent back to Tartarus – not as prisoners this time, but as guardians of the gates to those imponderable depths. The Cyclopes’ reward was to be appointed by Zeus his personal artificers, armourers and smiths.

  The Third Order

  The shattered world was still smoking from the savagery of war. Zeus saw that it needed to heal and he knew that his own generation, the Third Order of divine beings, must manage better than the first two had done. It was time for a new order, an order purged of the wasteful bloodlust and elemental brutality that had marked earlier times.

  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.

  Hestia

  Of all the gods, Hestia – ‘First to be devoured and the last to be yielded up again’ – is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus in his wisdom apportioned to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of ‘hearth and home’. Our word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart’, just as the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart’. In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like ‘economics’ and ‘ecology’. The Latin for hearth is focus – which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of words for a fireplace we have spun ‘cardiologist’, ‘deep focus’ and ‘eco-warrior’. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

  Refusing offers of marriage from the other gods, Hestia devoted herself to perpetual maidenhood. Placid, contented, kind, hospitable and domestic, she tended to stay away from the everyday power struggles and political machinations of the other gods.fn1 A modest divinity, 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.

  You can imagine then that there are not many great stories about this gentle and endearing goddess. I only know one, which we will hear before long. Naturally she comes out of it very well.

  The Lottery

  Zeus turned next to his dark and troublesome brothers, Hades and Poseidon. They had acquitted themselves with equal skill, bravery and cunning in the war against the Titans and he thought it only fair that they should draw lots for the two most important unassigned provinces – the sea and the underworld.

  You will recall that Kronos had wrested control of all things in, under and over the sea from Thalassa, Pontus, Oceanus and Tethys. Now, Kronos was gone and the saltwater realm was in Zeus’s gift. As for the underworld – which included Tartarus, the mysterious Meadows of Asphod
el (of which more later) and the subterranean darkness controlled by Erebus – it was time for those also to be subject to a sole presiding deity, one of Zeus’s generation.

  Hades and Poseidon had no love for each other, and when Zeus put his hands behind his back and brought them out before him in closed fists, they hesitated. In cases of fraternal dislike each brother will usually want what the other wants.

  ‘Does Hades hope for the sea or the underworld?’ Poseidon wondered. ‘If he wants the underworld then I want that too, just to infuriate him.’

  Hades thought along the same lines. ‘Whichever I choose,’ he said to himself, ‘I will shout in triumph, just to annoy that prick Poseidon.’

  In each of Zeus’s outstretched fists lay concealed a precious stone: a sapphire as blue as the sea in one and a piece of jet as black as Erebus in the other. Poseidon did a jig of delight when he touched the back of Zeus’s right hand and saw it open to reveal the winking blue sapphire. ‘The oceans are mine!’ he roared.

  ‘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.