Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him. The King of the Gods, though, was in a surprisingly forgiving mood. The people of Thessaly had acted quickly to show their revulsion at Ixion’s double crime of xenia abuse and kin-slaying. Zeus was minded to be merciful. He not only released Ixion from his torment but went so far as to invite him to a banquet on Olympus.

  Such an honour was rare for mortals. The glamour and grandeur of an Olympian feast were beyond anything Ixion would have seen before. He was especially bowled over by the queenly beauty of Hera. Whether it was the intoxicating effects of the great occasion or the wine, nobody could afterwards decide – perhaps it was nothing more than congenital boorish idiocy – but far from behaving with the modest gratitude you might expect of any mortal invited to the immortal dinner table, Ixion committed the catastrophic error of trying to seduce the Queen of Heaven. He blew Hera kisses, winked at her, tried to nibble her ear, whispered lewd remarks and made concerted grabs at her breasts. He not only insulted the most dignified and proper of the Olympians but he once more transgressed the laws of xenia. Failing in the duties as a guest was considered as heinous as failing in the duties of a host.

  After Ixion had staggered down from Olympus, slapping backs and belching out thanks, an offended Hera told Zeus of the outrage upon her honour. Zeus was equally incensed. He decided to lay a trap for Ixion. The Cloud Gatherer gathered a cloud and sculpted it into an anatomically exact and fully working likeness of Hera. He blew on it, animating it into life and sent it down to a meadow outside Larissa, where he had seen Ixion sprawled asleep on the grass, snoring off the effects of the banquet.

  When Ixion awoke to find Hera beside him, he rolled over and coupled with her there and then. At the sight of this unspeakable blasphemy Zeus sent down a thunderbolt and a fiery wheel. The thunderbolt blasted Ixion into the air and pinned him to the wheel, which Zeus sent spinning across the heavens. In time the firmament was deemed too good for him and Ixion, bound to his wheel of fire, was sent down to Tartarus, where he revolves, spread-eagled and roasting in agony to this very day.

  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’.fn1

  Consequences

  Many of the Greek myths lead to cascades of consequences. As we have already seen, leading figures in one story will go on to marry and found dynasties from whom are born yet more legendary heroes. And there are plenty of subsidiary myths that spin off from the Wheel of Ixion.

  While on the subject of Mount Pelion, for example, it is worth mentioning the story of IPHIMEDIA, who was so in love with Poseidon that she would regularly sit by the shore, scooping up seawater and pouring it over her breasts and into her lap. Poseidon was touched by this show of adoration and swept out of the ocean in an embracing wave to conjoin with her. Twin sons were born, OTUS and EPHIALTES. They were true giants in our modern sense: as boys they grew by the breadth of a human hand every month. It was clear that when they reached manhood they would be the largest beings alive.

  As you will recall, the jealous and ambitious Poseidon had always kept in mind the possibility that one day his younger brother Zeus might slip up and be toppled from his throne. The sea god put in the heads of his fast-growing boys the idea of challenging heaven by creating their own mountain from which to rule the world. Their plan was to pull up Mount Ossa and heap it on Olympus. On top of Ossa they would pile Mount Pelion. But before the twins had grown to the full height and strength necessary to achieve this, word reached Zeus of the possibility of their rebellion and Apollo was sent to fell them with arrows. Their punishment in the underworld was to be bound to pillars with writhing snakes.

  Just to run the thread of the narrative right through to one of its conclusions (and as a further example of how one story could lead on to other, even more significant and far-reaching, myths), you should know that Nephele, the cloud image of Hera, went on to marry a Boeotian king called ATHAMAS,fn2 by whom she bore two sons, PHRIXUS and HELLE. Nephele had cause to save the life of Phrixus – an Isaac to his father’s Abraham – when Athamas tied his son to the ground and made to sacrifice him. Just as the Hebrew god revealed a ram in a thicket to Abraham and saved Isaac’s life, so Nephele sent a golden ram to rescue her son Phrixus. The golden fleece of that ram gave rise to the great quest of Jason and his Argonauts. All on account of a drunken degenerate king who had the temerity to make eyes at Hera.

  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.

  Tantalus

  Perhaps the best-known torment the gods ever devised is that which was dreamed up for the wicked King Tantalus. The consequences of his crimes had ramifications that rang down through the years. The curse upon his house was not lifted until the very end of the mythic age.

  Tantalus ruled the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor, the region later known as the Turkish province of Anatolia. Mineral deposits from nearby Mount Sipylus had yielded him enormous riches, from which he established a prosperous city that he immodestly called Tantalis. He married DIONE (one of the Hyades, or rain nymphs, who had suckled the infant Dionysus) and by her had a son, PELOPS, and a daughter, NIOBE.fn4

  Either there was a kink in Tantalus’s personality or his power and wealth had fooled him into believing himself equal to the gods. Like Ixion before him he made the mistake of abusing Zeus’s hospitality, in his case by returning from a banquet on Olympus with stolen ambrosia and nectar in his pockets. He also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip.

  But then he committed a blood murder, one even worse than Ixion’s crime of casting his father-in-law into a pit of burning coals. Hearing that the Olympians were furious at his mockery and the theft of their nectar and ambrosia, he made a great show of repentance and begged that they accept his own hospitality in recompense for his misconduct.

  Now, all of this took place around the time Demeter was searching for her abducted daughter Persephone. In her grief she had allowed all growing things to wither and die. The world was barren and infertile and no one knew how long this would last. The prospect of a feast came as a welcome excitement. Knowing of the opulent and ostentatious lifestyle of King Tantalus, the gods were greatly looking forward to the legendary pleasures of his table.fn5 They were in for a shock.

  As the Pelasgian king Lycaon had done before him, Tantalus served up his own son to the gods. The young Pelops was killed, jointed, roasted, slathered in a rich sauce and set before them. They sensed instantly that something was wrong and declined to eat. But Demeter, whose mind was wholly on her lost daughter, distractedly picked at and ate the boy’s left shoulder.

  When Zeus understood what had happened, he summoned one of the three Fates, Clotho, the spinner. She collected the body parts, stirred them in a great cauldron and put them back together. Demeter, awakened to her dreadful lapse, commissioned Hephaestus to carve a shoulder from ivory to replace the one she had consumed. Clotho attached the prosthetic, which fitted perfectly. Zeus breathed into the boy’s body and Pelops stirred back into life.

  Pelops’s great beauty attracted Poseidon, and for a while they became lovers. Yet darker forces were at work with the youth, and his later life and deeds called down a curse upon him and all his house.fn6 Compounded with the curse earned by the abominable crime of Tantalus, this curse was to pursue his
descendants down to the last of their line, ORESTES.

  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.fn8

  Sisyphus

  Brotherly Love

  The eternal punishment Sisyphus endures in Hades has also entered language and lore, but there is much more to his story than the famous stone he is doomed endlessly and fruitlessly to push uphill. Sisyphus was a wicked, greedy, duplicitous and often cruel man, but who cannot find something appealing – heroic even – in the unquenchable zest and fist-shaking defiance with which he lived (in fact outlived) his life? Few mortals dared to try the patience of the gods in so reckless a fashion. His foolhardy contempt and refusal to apologize or conform put one in mind of a Grecian Don Giovanni.

  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. Hellen’s son AEOLUS had four sons – Sisyphus, SALMONEUS, Athamas and CRETHEUS. Sisyphus and Salmoneus hated each other with as visceral and implacable a hatred as the human world had yet witnessed. Rivals in their parents’ affections, rivals in everything, from the cradle neither could bear to see the other succeed. The two princes outgrew their father’s realm of Aeolia, as Thessaly was called in those days, and moved south and west to found their own kingdoms. Salmoneus ruled over Elis and Sisyphus established Ephyra, later called Corinth. From these fastnesses, they glared at each other across the Peloponnese, their bitter enmity growing with each passing year.

  Sisyphus hated Salmoneus so much it robbed him of his sleep. He wanted him dead, dead, dead. The desire was so agonizing he stabbed himself repeatedly in the thigh with a dagger to relieve himself of it. But there was nothing he could do. The Furies would avenge themselves terribly if he dared murder a brother. Fratricide was amongst the worst of the blood crimes. Eventually he decided to consult the oracle at Delphi.

  ‘Sons of Sisyphus and Tyro rise to slay Salmoneus,’ intoned the Pythia.

  This was sweet music to Sisyphus’s ears. TYRO was his niece, daughter of his hated brother Salmoneus. All Sisyphus had to do was marry and get sons from her. Sons who would ‘rise to slay Salmoneus’. Uncles could marry nieces without raising any eyebrows in those days and so he set about beguiling and seducing Tyro with horses, jewels, poems and oceans of personal charm, for Sisyphus was nothing if not captivating when he chose to be. In due course his wooing won her, they wed and she bore him two bouncing boys.

  One day some years later, Sisyphus was out fishing with his friend MELOPS. Sunning themselves on the banks of the River Sythas, they fell into conversation. At exactly the same time, Tyro set out from the palace with a maid, the two boys – now aged five and three – and a hamper of food and wine, with the idea of surprising Sisyphus with a family picnic.

  Back on the riverbank, Melops and Sisyphus talked lazily about horses, women, sport and war. Tyro’s group made their way across the fields.

  ‘Tell me, sire,’ said Melops, ‘it has always surprised me that despite your bitter feud with King Salmoneus, you chose to marry his daughter. For all that I can tell, you still dislike him as much as ever.’

  ‘Dislike him? I abominate, loathe, despise and abhor him,’ said Sisyphus with a loud laugh. A laugh that allowed the approaching Tyro to draw a bead on his exact position. As her party drew nearer she could now hear every word her husband spoke.

  ‘I only married that bitch Tyro because I hate Salmoneus so much,’ he was saying. ‘You see, the oracle at Delphi told me that if I had sons by her they would grow up to kill him. So when he dies by the hand of his own grandchildren I will be rid of my vile pig of a brother without fear of the pursuit of the Erinyes.’

  ‘That is …’ Melops tried to find the word.

  ‘Brilliant? Cunning? Ingenious?’

  Tyro checked her sons, who were about to run to the spot from which they could hear their father’s voice. Turning them round she pushed them at speed towards a bend in the river, the maid following behind.

  Tyro had swallowed Sisyphus’s charm whole, but she loved her father Salmoneus with a loyalty that overrode any other consideration. The idea of allowing her sons to grow up to kill their grandfather was out of the question. She knew how to defy the oracle’s prophecy.

  ‘Come child,’ she said to the eldest, ‘look down at the stream. Can you see any little fishes?’

  The small boy knelt on the riverbank and looked down. Tyro put a hand to his neck and pushed him under. When he had stopped struggling she did the same to the youngest.

  ‘Now,’ she said quite calmly to the traumatized maid, ‘this is what you will do …’

  Sisyphus and Melops caught plenty of fish that afternoon. Just as the light was fading and they had started to pack up for the day, Tyro’s maidservant appeared before them, bobbing a nervous curtsey.

  ‘Beg pardon, majesty, but the Queen asks that you might greet the princes. They are by the riverbank, awaiting your majesty. Just behind the willow tree, sire.’

  Sisyphus went to the place indicated to find his two sons lying stretched out on the grass, pale and lifeless.

  The maid ran for her life and was never heard of again. Tyro, by the time the enraged Sisyphus had reached the palace with drawn sword, was safely on her way to her father’s kingdom of Elis. On her arrival home Salmoneus married her to his brother Cretheus, with whom she was deeply unhappy.

  Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus’s power to summon storms, he’d ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skywards at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus.

  Sisyphean Tasks

  Sisyphus held a great feast to celebrate the death of his preposterous thunder-making brother. The morning after, he was awoken by a deputation of aggrieved lords, landowners and tenant farmers. After he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and cleared his headache with a goblet of unwatered wine he consented to hear what might be the matter.

  ‘Majesty, someone is stealing our cattle! Each one of us can report a loss. Your own royal herds are depleted too. You are a wise and clever king. Surely you can find out who is responsible?’

  Sisyphus dismissed them with a promise to investigate. He had a very good idea that the thief was his neighbour AUTOLYCUS, but how to prove it? Sisyphus was guileful and smart, but Autolycus was a son of Hermes himself, the prince of robbers and rascals, the god who as an infant had rustled Apollo’s cattle. From Hermes, Autolycus had inherited not only this propensity to take cows that didn’t belong to him, but also powers of enchantment that made it very difficult to catch him in the act.fn1 Besides, the cattle that Sisyphus and his neighbours had lost were brown and white and generously horned, while those of Autolycus were black and white and entirely hornless. It was baffling, but Sisyphus was sure that
spells taught by Hermes were behind it and that Autolycus was secretly colour-changing stolen cows.

  ‘Very well,’ he said to himself, ‘we shall see which proves the more powerful, the cheap magic of a trickster god’s bastard or the native wit and intelligence of Sisyphus, founder of Corinth, the cleverest king in the world.’

  He commanded that all his and his neighbours’ cattle should have the words ‘AUTOLYCUS STOLE ME’ carved into their hoofs in tiny lettering. Over the next seven nights, as expected, the local herds continued regularly to be depleted. On the eighth day Sisyphus and the leading landowners paid Autolycus a visit.

  ‘Greetings, my friends!’ their neighbour cried with a cheery wave. ‘To what do I owe the honour of this visit?’

  ‘We have come to inspect your cattle,’ said Sisyphus.

  ‘By all means. Are you thinking of breeding black and whites yourself? My pedigree herd is unique in the region, they tell me.’

  ‘Oh, it’s unique alright,’ returned Sisyphus. ‘Whoever saw hoofs like this?’ He lifted the foreleg of one of the cows.

  Autolycus leaned forward, read the words carved into the hoof and gave a cheerful shrug. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Fun while it lasted.’