Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  MORE METAMORPHOSES

  fn1 Sometimes these myths can be regarded as aetiological – in other words, offering explanations for how things got to be the way they are. Arachne could be seen as a story that explains why the spider weaves, Melissa tells us why the bee makes honey, and so on. Sort of ‘How the Elephant Got Its Trunk’ fables. Certainly the names of flowers and animals that relate to many of these types of myth have come down to us in Latinate scientific nomenclature such as ‘Daphne Laureola’ for the spurge laurel, or the common or garden names, Narcissus, Hyacinth, etc.

  fn2 Attica is the area of Greece that includes Athens. ‘Attic Greek’ is the classical form of the language that comes down to us in the poetry, drama, oratory and philosophy of the great Athenian writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries BC. To many Greeks from outside Attica it was perhaps what England is to the other countries of the United Kingdom, the snooty dominant region that outsiders tactlessly and lazily think of when they say ‘Greece’.

  fn3 Not to be confused with SCYLLA the cruel sea monster that, with the whirlpool CHARYBDIS, formed such an impassable barrier to sailors in the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland.

  fn4 Who was turned by Zeus into a wolf you may recall, during the early days of Pelasgian mankind.

  fn5 In fact Callisto does double duty in the heavens as she lives on as one of Jupiter’s moons.

  fn6 The Greeks thought the sound the hoopoe made was pou? pou? which means ‘where? where?’ – perhaps indicating the distraught Tereus calling for his son. Shakespeare called the nightingale ‘Philomel’ in Sonnet CII – ‘As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing’ – but confusingly Philomela’s name is most commonly seen in the scientific name for the song-thrush: Turdus philomelos.

  fn7 The Greek for ‘one who shows figs’ is sycophant – it seems that either sellers of the fruit in the streets and marketplaces were known for their fawning, flattering attentions, or showing a fig was the equivalent of a phallic gesture (figs have always been considered an erotic fruit after all) or it may have been something to do with the way figs are harvested. Whatever the reason, fig-showing/sycophancy became a word associated in Athenian legal contexts with those who brought frivolous, malicious or unjustified private prosecutions. Their toadying manner caused the word ‘sycophancy’ to take on its common meaning today.

  fn8 Creon was that soul of pragmatism and good governance whose tragic family history was the subject of Sophocles Theban Cycle of plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. I played him when I was sixteen and received reviews. I’ll say no more.

  fn9 In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom and his confused friends memorably mangle the names of these doomed lovers in their performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:

  Pyramus (Bottom): Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.

  Thisbe (Flute): As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.

  fn10 It forms the subject of John Keats’s extended poem Endymion.

  EOS AND TITHONUS

  fn1 Laomedon was the son of Ganymede’s elder brother Ilos, the King of Troy.

  fn2 A cicada in some versions. I was always taught a grasshopper perhaps because they are commonly found in Britain. Books for British children probably thought a cicada would be a harder insect for us to visualize. Oddly Tithonus’s name lives on biologically not as a cicada or grasshopper, but in a type of birdwing or swallowtail butterfly, Ornithoptera tithonus.

  fn3 A happy thought inspired the geologist Albert Oppel to name one of the late Jurassic ages the Tithonian as a bow to Eos, for it is the age that marks the dawn of the Cretaceous. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ is one of his most loved and anthologized poems. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed to Eos, in which he begs her to deliver him from his senility.

  … After many a summer dies the swan.

  Me only cruel immortality

  Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

  Here at the quiet limit of the world,

  A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream …

  It contains a famous line that might be considered one of the great themes of Greek myth:

  The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

  THE BLOOM OF YOUTH

  fn1 ‘Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid.’ is her complaint, according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

  fn2 Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis retells the myth, basing itself on the version Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. In Shakespeare’s rendition the death of Adonis causes Venus to curse love and decree that henceforward it should always be tinged with tragedy. As she prophesies in her grief:

  Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend …

  It shall be cause of war and dire events

  And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire …

  They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

  A prophecy that seems to have come all too true.

  ECHO AND NARCISSUS

  fn1 Note the similarity of the offence to Actaeon’s crime of spying on Artemis. The modesty of the gods while bathing was prodigious.

  T. S. Eliot makes memorable reference to Tiresias in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of his poem The Waste Land:

  I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

  Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see …

  I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

  Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest …

  And I Tiresias have foresuffered all …

  fn2 The honour of being asked to adjudicate amongst the gods might seem great for a mortal, but as this story shows, and as the Trojan prince Paris was to discover, the results could be catastrophic.

  fn3 The Moirai, you will remember, were the Fates. The Greeks felt that for every individual there was a personal, singular moira that could be expressed as a mixture of necessity, doom, justice and fortune. Something between luck and kismet.

  fn4 Ameinias, according to some sources, became a sweet-smelling herb. Possibly dill. Perhaps cumin. Maybe anise.

  fn5 No one we know, of course …

  LOVERS

  fn1 The remains of Babylon lie under, or poke through, the sands of Iraq, about fifty miles south of Baghdad.

  fn2 In the farcical production in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pyramus (played by Bottom) cries out as he stabs himself:

  Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

  Now am I dead,

  Now am I fled;

  My soul is in the sky.

  Tongue, lose thy light;

  Moon, take thy flight;

  Now die, die, die, die, die.

  GALATEAS

  fn1 A word that covers moulting, shedding, casting off and re-evaluating. Slipping out of one thing and popping on another.

  fn2 For more on this fascinating subject, see David D. Leitao, ‘The Perils of Leukippos: Initiatory Transvestism and Male Gender Ideology in the Ekdusia at Phaistos’, in Classical Antiquity, vol. 14, no. 1 (1995).

  fn3 Daphne should not be confused with DAPHNIS, a Sicilian youth of great beauty who was found as a baby under the laurel bush that gave him his name. Both Hermes and Pan fell in love with him, the latter teaching him to play the pipes. He became so proficient that later generations credited him with the invention of pastoral poetry. In the second century AD Longus, an author from Lesbos, wrote a romance (like The Golden Ass a contender for the title First Ever Novel) called Daphnis and Chloë which tells of two bucolic lovers who undergo all kinds of ordeals and adventures to test their love. Offenbach composed an operetta based on this tale. Even better known is the revolutionary 1912 ballet with music by Maurice Ravel, choreographed by Fokine and danced by Nijinsky.

  fn4 Paphian became a word to describe Aphrodite and the arts of love. George Bernard Shaw chose Pygmalion as the title for his play about a man who tries to turn a cockney girl into a Mayfair lady.

  fn5 Little is known about L
eander. Christopher Marlowe’s poem tells us nothing much more than that he was a youth who met Hero and fell in love. Leigh Hunt wrote another, which is no more informative.

  fn6 In Marlowe’s poem she wears a veil of flowers so realistically embroidered that she has to swat bees away …

  fn7 Leander’s name lives on in England’s venerable and exclusive rowing club, whose candy pink socks, tie and oar-blades are such an alarming feature of the Henley Regatta.

  fn8 The achievement clearly meant a lot to the club-footed but superbly athletic poet. He wrote this to his friend Henry Drury: ‘This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous; – so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.’

  Six days after his feat Byron even wrote a mock heroic poem on the subject, ‘Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’ (overleaf):

  If, in the month of dark December,

  Leander, who was nightly wont

  (What maid will not the tale remember?)

  To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

  If, when the wintry tempest roared,

  He sped to Hero, nothing loth,

  And thus of old thy current poured,

  Fair Venus! how I pity both!

  For me, degenerate modern wretch,

  Though in the genial month of May,

  My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,

  And think I’ve done a feat to-day.

  But since he crossed the rapid tide,

  According to the doubtful story,

  To woo, – and – Lord knows what beside,

  And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

  ’Twere hard to say who fared the best:

  Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!

  He lost his labour, I my jest:

  For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague.

  A later work of Byron which refers to Leander’s home, although unrelated to the myth, is The Bride of Abydos (1813).

  ARION AND THE DOLPHIN

  fn1 Only Orpheus, whose story belongs to the later Age of Heroes, exceeded Arion in skill and fame.

  fn2 The word ‘guitar’ derives from the word kithara.

  fn3 ‘Tyrant’ is just the Greek word for ‘autocratic ruler’, sometimes a self-appointed king. Periander was a real historical figure, cited as one of the so-called ‘Seven Sages of Greece’, who were mentioned by Socrates as exhibiting all the qualities of gnomic wisdom to which mankind should aspire.

  fn4 The tarantella is still popular throughout Europe.

  PHILEMON AND BAUCIS, OR HOSPITALITY REWARDED

  fn1 This theoxenia, this divine testing of human hospitality, is notably similar to that told in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. Angels visit Sodom and Gomorrah and only Lot and his wife show them decency and kindness. The debauched citizens of Sodom of course, rather than setting the dogs on the angels wanted to ‘know them’ – in as literally biblical a sense as could be, giving us the word ‘sodomy’. Lot and his wife, like Philemon and Baucis, were told to make their getaway and not look back while divine retribution was visited on the Cities of the Plain. Lot’s wife did look back and she was turned, not into a linden, but into a pillar of salt.

  PHRYGIA AND THE GORDIAN KNOT

  fn1 Sabazios was a horse-riding incarnation of Zeus worshipped by the Thracians and Phrygians

  fn2 When I first heard this story I thought not more of Alexander but less. ‘He cheated!’ I said. Suppose I ‘solved’ a randomized Rubik’s cube by jemmying it open with a screwdriver until all the pieces fell out and then pressing them back again in the right order? Who would praise that? But Alexander is congratulated by history for ‘thinking outside the box’ and called ‘the Great’. One rule for the genius warrior kings of the world and another for the rest of us.

  APPENDICES

  fn1 Scientists now tell us that the moon of Saturn named after Enceladus, a mere 800 million miles from earth, appears to offer the necessary conditions for life. So perhaps all along Gaia had laid plans for the expansion of her bloodline on other worlds.

  fn2 My Greek–English lexicon isn’t of much help with Polybotes’ name. It seems to mean ‘much-nourishing’ or ‘many feeding’. Fertile, perhaps.

  fn3 The fig thereafter bore Syceus’ name.

  fn4 Not to be confused with a minor god of bee-keeping with the same name.

  AFTERWORD

  fn1 Robin of Loxley/Locksley and Lord Fitzooth, the Earl of Huntingdon, are popular candidates.

  fn2 Interestingly, the absolute origin of the verb legere and its supine form lectum bears the meaning of ‘gather’ – as in ‘college’ and ‘collect’. So maybe legends are as much to do with stories that are collected as with those that are written down and read.

  fn3 He was accused of an irreligious refusal to recognize the Athenian state’s gods.