by Stephen Fry
ΜΕ ΑΓ′ΑΠΗ
Text copyright © 2017 by Stephen Fry.
Art copyright © 2017 by the individual licensors.
Pages 325 and 326 are continuations of the copyright page.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
First published in the United States of America in 2019 by Chronicle Books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Michael Joseph.
ISBN 978-1-4521-7904-9 (epub, mobi)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-1-4521-7891-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Design by Maggie Edelman.
Cover illustrations by Karolina Schnoor.
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CONTENTS
10 FOREWORD
17 THE BEGINNING, PART ONE
18 Out of Chaos
20 The First Order
22 The Second Order
24 Gaia’s Revenge
29 The Sickle
30 Night and Day, Light and Dark
33 Ouranos Gelded
34 Erinyes, Gigantes, and Meliae
36 From the Foam
38 Rhea
39 The Children of Rhea
41 The Switch
43 The Cretan Child
43 The Oath of Allegiance
45 The Cretan Boy
46 The Oceanid and the Potion
48 Rebirth of the Five
53 THE BEGINNING, PART TWO
54 Clash of the Titans
56 The Proliferation
57 The Muses
60 Threesomes
63 Spirits of Air, Earth, and Water
64 Disposer Supreme and Judge of the Earth
66 The Third Order
66 Hestia
67 The Lottery
68 Hades
69 Poseidon
70 Demeter
71 Hera
72 A New Home
73 The Runt
74 It’s War
75 The Enchanted Throne
77 The Lame One
77 The Hand of Aphrodite
79 The Wedding Feast
83 Food of the Gods
84 Bad Zeus
85 The Mother of All Migraines
88 Athena
90 Metis Within
91 Seeking Sanctuary
92 Twins!
93 Artemis
96 Apollo
97 The Wrath of Hera
99 Maia Maia
99 The Infant Prodigy
101 Apollo Reads the Signs
102 Half Brothers
106 The Twelfth God
108 The Olympians
111 THE TOYS OF ZEUS, PART ONE
112 Prometheus
115 Kneading and Firing
116 A Reduced Set
117 A Name Is Found
119 The Golden Age
120 The Fennel Stalk
121 The Gift of Fire
124 The Punishments
124 The Gift
125 The Brothers
126 When It’s a Jar
129 The Chest, the Waters, and the Bones of Gaia
132 Death
135 Prometheus Bound
138 Persephone and the Chariot
140 The Pomegranate Seeds
142 Hermaphroditus and Silenus
144 Cupid and Psyche
144 Erotes
145 Love, Love, Love
146 Psyche
147 Prophecy and Abandonment
149 The Enchanted Castle
150 Voices, Visions, and a Visitor
153 Sisters
157 A Drop of Oil
160 Alone
162 The Tasks of Aphrodite
164 The Union of Love and Soul
167 THE TOYS OF ZEUS, PART TWO
168 Mortals
168 Io
171 The Semen-Soaked Scarf
172 Phaeton
174 The Son of the Sun
174 Father and Sun
178 Daybreak
179 The Drive
180 The Fallout
182 Cadmus
182 The White Bull
183 The Quest for Europa
185 The Oracle Speaks
186 The Phocian Games
188 The Water Dragon
190 The Dragon’s Teeth
192 The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia
194 Consigned to the Dust
196 Twice Born
196 The Eagle Lands
197 The Eagle’s Wife
200 The Manifestation
201 The Newest God
204 Thirteen at Table
206 The Beautiful and the Damned: Angry Goddesses
206 Actaeon
207 Erysichton
210 The Doctor and the Crow
210 The Birth of Medicine
214 Crime and Punishment
214 Ixion
216 Consequences
217 Tantalus
219 Sisyphus
219 Brotherly Love
221 Sisyphean Tasks
222 The Eagle
224 Cheating Death
225 Life without Death
227 Burial Rites
229 Rolling the Rock
232 Hubris
232 All Tears
234 Apollo and Marsyas: Puffed Cheeks
235 The Competition
237 Judgment
239 Arachne
239 The Weaver
241 The Weave-Off
244 The Reward
245 More Metamorphoses
245 Nisus and Scylla
246 Callisto
247 Procne and Philomela
248 Ganymede and the Eagle
250 Moon Lovers
253 Lailaps and Alopex Teumesios
255 Endymion
256 Eos and Tithonus
256 Love at First Sight
257 The Boon
258 Be Careful What You Wish For
259 The Grasshopper
261 The Bloom of Youth
261 Hyacinthus
261 Crocus and Smilax
262 Aphrodite and Adonis
265 Echo and Narcissus
265 Tiresias
266 Narcissus
267 Echo
268 Echolalia
270 Echo and Narcissus
272 The Boy in the Water
273 The Gods Take Pity
275 Lovers
275 Pyramus and Thisbe
278 Galateas
278 Acis and Galatea
278 Galatea II
279 Leucippos II, Daphne, and Apollo
280 Galatea III and Pygmalion Too
285 Hero and Leander
288 Arion and the Dolphin
289 Overboard
292 The Monument
295 Philemon and Baucis, or Hospitality Rewarded
300 Phrygia and the Gordian Knot
302 Midas
302 The Ugly Stranger
304 Goldfinger
306 King Midas’s Ears
311 APPENDICES
312 The Brothers, a Sidebar
314 Hope
315 Giant Leaps
316 Feet and Toes
318 AFTERWORD
318 Myth v. Legend v. Religion
320 The Greeks
&n
bsp; 320 Location, Location
321 Sources Ancient
322 Sources Modern
323 Spelling the Names
323 Saying the Names
324 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
325 PICTURE CREDITS
328 INDEX
352 About the Author
FOREWORD
I was lucky enough to pick up a book called Tales from Ancient Greece when I was quite small. It was love at first meeting. Much as I went on to enjoy myths and legends from other cultures and peoples, there was something about these Greek stories that lit me up inside. The energy, humor, passion, particularity, and believable detail of their world held me enthralled from the very first. I hope they will do the same for you. Perhaps you already know some of the myths told here, but I especially welcome those who may never have encountered the characters and stories of Greek myth before. You don’t need to know anything to read this book; it starts with an empty universe. Certainly no “classical education” is called for, no knowledge of the difference between nectar and nymphs, satyrs and centaurs, or the Fates and the Furies is required. There is absolutely nothing academic or intellectual about Greek mythology; it is addictive, entertaining, approachable, and astonishingly human.
But where did they come from, these myths of ancient Greece? In the tangle of human history we may be able to pull on a single Greek thread and follow it back, but by picking out only one civilization and its stories we might be thought of as taking liberties with the true source of universal myth. Early human beings the world over wondered at the sources of power that fueled volcanoes, thunderstorms, tidal waves, and earthquakes. They celebrated and venerated the rhythm of the seasons, the procession of heavenly bodies in the night sky, and the daily miracle of the sunrise. They questioned how it might all have started. The collective unconscious of many civilizations has told stories of angry gods; dying and renewing gods; fertility goddesses; deities; demons; and spirits of fire, earth, and water.
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 westward back to prehistory, Africa, and the birth of our species.
But whenever we tell any story we have to snip the narrative string somewhere in order to make a starting point. It is easy to do this with Greek mythology because it has survived with a detail, richness, life, and color that distinguish it from other mythologies. It was captured and preserved by the very first poets and has come down to us in an unbroken line from almost the beginning of writing to the present day. While Greek myths have much in common with Chinese, Iranian, Indian, Mayan, African, Russian, Native American, Hebrew, and Norse myths, they are uniquely—as the writer and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it—“the creation of great poets.” The Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.
The arc of the Greek myths follows the rise of mankind, our battle to free ourselves from the interference of the gods—their abuse, their meddling, their tyranny over human life and civilization. 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. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.
Mythos begins at the beginning, but it does not end at the end. Had I included heroes like Oedipus, Perseus, Theseus, Jason, and Heracles and the details of the Trojan War, this book would have been too heavy even for a Titan to pick up. Moreover, I am only concerned with telling the stories, not with explaining them or investigating the human truths and psychological insights that may lie behind them. The myths are fascinating enough in all their disturbing, surprising, romantic, comic, tragic, violent, and enchanting detail to stand on their own as stories. If, as you read, you cannot help wondering what inspired the Greeks to invent a world so rich and elaborate in character and incident, and you find yourself pondering the deep truths that the myths embody—well, that is certainly part of the pleasure.
And pleasure is what immersing yourself in the world of Greek myth is all about.
Stephen Fry
The Second Order
The Olympians
*Hades is not technically an Olympian, as he spent all of his time in the underworld.
THE BEGINNING
Part One
OUT OF CHAOS
These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.
The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.
Was Chaos a god—a divine being—or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse?
Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn.
As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.
Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. 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.
Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your trousers began as chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over eons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that sheathes your lovely legs. In time you will abandon your trousers—not now, I hope—and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned. In either case their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to cold Chaos. And what is true for your trousers is of course true for you.
So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.
Now, you might be the kind of person who asks, “But who or what was there before Chaos?” or “Who or what was there before the Big Bang? There must have been something.”
Well, there wasn’t. We have to accept that there was no “before,” because there was no Time yet. No one had pressed the start button on Time. No one had shouted Now! And since Time had yet to be created, time words like “before,” “during,” “when,” “then,” “after lunch,” and “last Wednesday” had no possible meaning. It screws with the head, but there it is.
The Greek word for “everything that is the case,” what we could call “the universe,” is COSMOS. And at the moment—although “moment” is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase “just now”)—at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case. A stretching, a tuning up of the orchestra .
. .
But things are about to change very quickly.
THE FIRST ORDER
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.
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.
I can guess what you might be thinking. These creations sound charming enough—Day, Night, Light, Depths, and Caves. But these were not gods and goddesses, they were not even personalities. And it may have struck you also that since there was no time there could be no dramatic narrative, no stories; for stories depend on Once Upon a Time and What Happened Next.
You would be right to think this. What first emerged from Chaos were primal, elemental principles that were devoid of any real color, 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.
The silent emptiness of this world was filled when Gaia bore two sons all on her own.1 The first was PONTUS, the sea, and the second was OURANOS, the sky—better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety. Hemera and Aether bred too, and from their union came THALASSA, the female counterpart of Pontus the sea.
Ouranos, who preferred to pronounce himself Ooranoss, was the sky and the heavens in the way that—at the very beginning—the primordial deities always were the things they represented and ruled over.2 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. The clouds of Ouranos the sky rolled and seethed above her but they too could coalesce into a shape we might recognize. It was so early on in the life of everything. Very little was settled.
Gaia, a primordial goddess and the personification of the Earth, brought into being at the dawn of creation.
1. This trick of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, can be found in nature still. In aphids, some lizards, and even sharks, it is a reasonably common way to have young. There won’t be the variation that two sets of genes allow; this is the same in the genesis of the Greek gods. The interesting ones are all the fruit of two parents, not one.
