Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  One day, having lost the scent of an especially noble stag, Actaeon and his fellow huntsmen separated to pick up the trail. Stumbling through some bushes Actaeon happened on a pool where Artemis was bathing. As she was the goddess of his favourite pursuit, hunting, Actaeon should have known better than to stare dumbstruck at her nakedness. She was also the fierce queen of celibacy, chastity and virginity. But so beautiful was she, so much more lovely than any being Actaeon had ever beheld, that he stood rooted to the spot, his mouth open and his eyes – and not only his eyes – bulging.

  It may have been a twig snapping beneath his foot, it may have been the sound of Actaeon’s drool hitting the ground, but something made Artemis turn. She saw a young man standing there ogling, and her blood was fired. The thought of anyone spreading the word that they had seen her naked was so abhorrent to her that she called out.

  ‘You, mortal man! Your staring is a profanity. I forbid you ever to speak. If you utter just one syllable your punishment will be terrible. Indicate to me that you understand.’

  The unhappy youth nodded. Artemis disappeared from view and he was left alone to consider his fate.

  Behind him a halloo started up as his fellow huntsmen announced that they were once more upon the scent. Instinctively Actaeon called out. The moment he did so Artemis’s curse descended and he was changed into a stag.

  Actaeon raised his head, now heavy with antlers, and galloped through the woods until he came to a pool of water. He looked down into the pool, and at the sight of himself he gave what should have been a groan but which came out as a mighty bellow. The bellow was answered by a great baying and yipping. Within seconds his own pack of hounds had streamed into the clearing. They had been trained by Actaeon himself to rip out a stag’s throat and feast on its steaming blood for their reward.fn1 As the yowling and snarling creatures leapt up at him snapping their jaws Actaeon raised his forelegs in the direction of Olympus, as if beseeching the gods for pity. They either did not hear or did not heed. In seconds he was torn to pieces. The hunter hunted!

  Erysichthon

  The goddess Demeter is associated with fruitful abundance and the generous bounty of nature, but if pushed beyond her usual forbearance she could be as vengeful as Artemis, as this tale of her ruthless punishment of ERYSICHTHON, King of Thessaly, clearly shows.

  In need of timber for the construction of new apartments in his palace, the bold, fearless and impatient Erysichthon one day led a party of woodmen out to the forest, where they came upon a flourishing grove of oaks.

  ‘Excellent,’ he cried. ‘Swing your axes, boys.’

  But his men drew back muttering and shaking their heads.

  Erysichthon turned to his foreman. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

  ‘These trees are sacred to Demeter, sire.’

  ‘Nonsense. She has more than she knows what to do with. Bring them down.’

  More muttering.

  Erysichthon snatched the foreman’s whip, which its owner only ever really waved for show, and cracked it menacingly over the heads of the foresters.

  ‘Chop those trees down, or feel its sting!’ he cried.

  With their king cracking the whip and urging them on, the men reluctantly chopped down the trees. But when they came to a giant oak that stood alone at the end of the grove they stopped again.

  ‘Why, this is the tallest and broadest of them all!’ said Erysichthon. ‘That alone will provide the timber for the rafters and columns of my throne room and still leave enough over for a great bed for me.’

  The foreman pointed a trembling finger at the oak’s branches, which were hung with garlands.

  The king was unimpressed. ‘And?’

  ‘My lord,’ whispered the foreman, ‘each wreath stands for a prayer that the goddess has answered.’

  ‘If the prayers have already been answered she will have no need of flower arrangements. Cut it down.’

  But seeing that the foreman and his team were too afraid to proceed, the impetuous Erysichthon snatched up an axe and set about it himself.

  He was a strong man and, like most rulers, he loved to show off his will, skill and sinew. It was not long before the trunk creaked and the mighty oak began to sway. Did Erysichthon hear the plaintive cries of a hamadryad in the boughs? If he did he paid no heed but swung his axe again and again, until down crashed the tree – branches, votive wreaths, garlands, hamadryad and all.

  As the oak died, so died its hamadryad. With her last breath she cursed Erysichthon for his crime.

  Demeter heard of Erysichthon’s sacrilege and sent word to Limos. Limos was one of the vile creatures that had flown from Pandora’s jar. She was a demon of famine who might be regarded as Demeter’s inverse, the goddess’s necessary opposite in the mortal world. One the fecund and bountiful herald of the harvest, the other the mercilessly cruel harbinger of hunger and blight. Since the two existed in an irreconcilable matter–antimatter relationship, they could never meet in person, so Demeter sent a nymph of the mountains as her envoy, to urge Limos to deliver the hamadryad’s curse on Erysichthon, a task the malevolent demon was only too happy to undertake.

  Limos had, according to Ovid, rather let herself go. With sagging, withered breasts, an empty space for a stomach, exposed rotten bowels, sunken eyes, crusted lips, scaly skin, lank, scurfy hair and swollen pustular ankles, the figure and face of Famine presented a haunting and dreadful spectacle. She stole that night into Erysichthon’s bedroom, took the sleeping king in her arms and breathed her foul breath into him. Her poison fumes seeped into his mouth, throat and lungs. Through his veins and into every cell of his body slid the terrible, insatiable worm of hunger.

  Erysichthon awoke from strange dreams feeling very, very peckish. He surprised his kitchen staff with an enormous breakfast order. He consumed every morsel, yet still his appetite was unsated. All day he found that the more he ate the more ravenous he became. As days and then weeks passed, the pangs of hunger gnawed deeper and deeper. No matter how much he consumed he could never be satisfied, nor gain so much as an ounce of weight. Food inside him acted like fuel on a fire, causing the hunger to burn ever more fiercely. For this reason his people began referring to him behind his back as AETHON, which means ‘burning’.

  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.

  This was a more cunning and less barbarous act than perhaps it sounds: the beautiful Mestra had once been a lover of Poseidon’s, who had rewarded her with the ability to alter her shape at will – a power in the especial gift of the god of the ever changing sea. Every week Erysichthon would offer his daughter to a rich suitor and accept the bride-money. Mestra would accompany her fiancé to his home, escape in the shape of one animal or another and return to Erysichthon, ready to be sold again to a fresh gullible suitor.

  Even this arrangement proved insufficient to tamp down the dreadful flames of hunger, and in desperation one day he chewed off his left hand. The arm followed, then his shoulder, feet and hams. Before long, King Erysichthon of Thessaly had eaten himself all up. Demeter and the hamadryad were avenged.

  The Doctor and the Crow

  The Birth of Medicine

  There was once an intensely attractive young princess called CORONIS, who came from the Thessalian kingdom of Phlegyantis. So great was her beauty that she caught the attention of the god Apollo, who took her as a lover. You might think that the companionship and love of the most beautiful of the gods would be enough for anyone, but Coronis – while pregnant with Apollo’s child – fell for the charms of a mortal called ISCHYS and slept with him.

  One of Apollo’s white crows witnessed this act of betrayal and flew back to tell his master all about the insult to his h
onour. Enraged, Apollo asked his sister Artemis to take revenge. Only too willing, she attacked the palace at Phlegyantis with plague arrows – poisoned darts that spread a terrible disease throughout the compound. Many besides Coronis were infected. The crow saw all and returned to give Apollo a full report.

  ‘She’s dying, my lord, dying!’

  ‘Did she say anything? Did she admit her guilt?’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes. “I deserve my fate,” she said. “Tell the great god Apollo that I ask no forgiveness and beg no pity, beg no pity, only save the life of our child. Save the life of our child.” Ha! Ha! Ha!’

  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.fn1

  When Apollo, now filled with remorse, reached plague-stricken Phlegyantis he found Coronis lying dead on her funeral pyre, the flames licking all round her. With a cry of grief he leapt through the flames and from her womb cut out their child who was still living. Apollo raised Coronis to the stars as the constellation Corvus, the Crow.fn2

  The rescued infant boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, was put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Perhaps because he had been delivered by a surgical procedure (albeit a rather violent one), perhaps because while he had been in the womb infection had raged all around him, perhaps because his father was Apollo, god of medicine and mathematics – probably for all these reasons – Asclepius demonstrated early on some very remarkable talents in the field of medicine.

  As the boy grew, it quickly became clear to Chiron that he allied an incisive, logical and curious mind with a natural gift for healing. Chiron, no mean naturalist, herbalist and reasoner himself, took enormous pleasure in training the boy in the medical arts. Besides giving him a thorough grounding in the anatomy of animals and humans, he taught him that knowledge is gained from observation and careful record-keeping rather than from spinning theories. He showed him how to gather medicinal plants, grind them, mix them, heat them, and work them into powders, potions and preparations that could be eaten, drunk or stirred into food. He instructed him how to staunch blood flow, concoct fomented poultices, dress wounds and reset fractured bones. By the time he was fourteen he had saved a soldier’s leg from being amputated, brought a fevered young girl back from the very brink of death, rescued a bear from a trap, saved the population of a village from an epidemic of dysentery and relieved the suffering of a bruised snake by the application of an ointment of his own devising. This last case proved to be invaluable, for the grateful serpent had licked Asclepius’s ear in thanks, whispering as he did so many secrets of the arts of healing that were closed even to Chiron.

  Athena, to whom snakes were sacred, bestowed her thanks too, in the form of a jar of Gorgon’s blood. You might think this a poor gift. Far from it. Sometimes the law of opposites applies. 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.

  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.

  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.

  The youngest son, TELESPHORUS, is usually depicted as being hooded and of very restricted growth. His field of study was rehabilitation and convalescence, the return of a patient to full health.

  All might have gone well had Asclepius kept tightly sealed the jar that Athena presented to him. Tightly sealed. Whether it was the glory of being celebrated as a kind of saint and saviour or whether it was a genuine desire to beat death with his arts we cannot know, but Asclepius used the Gorgon’s blood once to revive the corpse of a dead patient, then a second time, and soon he was using it as liberally and regularly as castor oil.

  Hades began to grumble and fume. Unable to bear it any longer he went so far as to leave the underworld and stand angrily before the throne of his brother Zeus.

  ‘This man is denying me souls. He pulls them back from Thanatos just as they are ready to cross over to us. Something must be done.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Hera. ‘He is subverting the proper order of things. If a person is marked down for death it is quite unacceptable for a mortal to interfere. Your daughter did a very foolish thing in giving him Gorgon’s blood.’

  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.

  The thunderbolt which struck Asclepius was wholly unexpected, as bolts from the blue always are. It killed him stone dead. 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.

  Such astounding rebelliousness was not to be brooked. Zeus was intolerant of any threat to his authority and always moved swiftly to put down the slightest hint of insurrection. Apollo was thrown from Olympus and commanded to serve the Thessalian king ADMETUS in a lowly position for a year and a day. Admetus had earned the approval of Zeus by his exceptionally warm hospitality and kindness to strangers – always a direct route to Zeus’s heart.

  Apollo had been punished when young, you will recall, for slaying the serpent Python. His beauty, splendour and golden charm hid a stubborn will and a hot temper. He submitted to this punishment readily enough, however. Admetus was impossible to dislike and, serving as his cowherd, Apollo ensured that every cow under his care gave birth to twins.fn4 Cattle and twins were special to him.

  Asclepius, meanwhile, was raised to the heavens as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer.

  Later traditions asserted that Zeus restored Asclepius to life and raised him up as a god. It is true that throughout the Mediterranean world he and his wife and daughters were worshipped as divine. Temples to him, known as asclepia, sprang up everywhere, bearing great similarities to modern spas and health clubs. Their officiating priests wore white and bathed, massaged and pampered the paying supplicants with preposterous oils, creams and patent mixtures, just as they do today. Ever sacred to Asclepius, snakes (the non-venomous kind) were encouraged to slither about the treatment rooms and clinics, a sight perhaps less common in our contemporary temples to health. The spirit and mind were as attended to then as they are now. ‘Holistic’ is, after all, a Greek-derived word. Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an ‘incu
bation’) and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

  The Asclepion of Epidaurus was as big a draw as the town’s celebrated theatre is today. Those who visit it can still see records of the illnesses, treatments, diets and cures of the patients who flocked there.

  Crime and Punishment

  The regular appearance, interference and intercourse of the gods with human society, which would be so remarkable, thrilling and troubling to us if it happened today, was sometimes taken for granted by the more foolish and self-important mortals of the Silver Age. Some kings were so puffed up that they ignored the most elementary precepts of the gods and exhibited the most flagrant disrespect towards them. Such blasphemous acts of lese-majesty seldom went unpunished. Like parents admonishing children with gruesome moral fables, or like Dante or Hieronymus Bosch with their cautionary hellscapes, the ancient Greeks seemed to relish the details and delightful aptness of the often elaborate and excruciating tortures that Olympus and Hades reserved for those men and women whose transgressions most aggravated them.

  Ixion

  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.

  His first crime was one of simple greed. We are familiar with the idea of dowries, the practice of families of prospective brides paying to have their daughters taken off their hands. In the very earliest days things were done the other way around: prospective husbands paid the bride’s family for the right to marry their daughter. Ixion wed the beautiful DIA but refused to pay her father, King DEIONEUS of Phocis, the agreed bride-price. In retaliation the affronted Deioneus sent a raiding party to take a herd of Ixion’s best horses. Hiding his vexation beneath a wide smile Ixion invited Deioneus to dinner at his palace in Larissa. When he arrived Ixion pushed him into a fiery pit. 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.