Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  SEEKING SANCTUARY

  Wisdom, in the form of Metis, may have whispered to Zeus in one ear, but in the other he always heard the hot urgings of passion. When beautiful girls and women—and sometimes youths—crossed his path, nothing could stop him from chasing them from one end of the earth to the other, even if he had to transform himself into any number of animals to do it. Once the lustful fit was on him, Metis could no more control him than a whisper can quieten a tempest, while Hera’s wild shrieks of jealous rage had no more power to call him back than the wingbeats of a butterfly can blow a ship off course.

  I have mentioned that Zeus’s passionate glance had already fallen once on Leto, demure daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus. I should imagine that “demure” is an annoying word for a woman to hear applied to herself (one rarely hears of demure men after all), but Leto was to become a kind of minor deity representing precisely the quality of modest dignity that the word “demure” evokes.62 Nevertheless Zeus soon chased her down and had his way with her.

  An unshowy Titaness, Leto (LATONA to the Romans) was later worshipped as a goddess of motherhood as well as a paragon of modesty. Probably this was in honor of a pregnancy which, once Zeus had finished with her, turned out to be a most courageous triumph over adversity. For when Hera found out that her husband had got Leto with child, she commanded her grandmother Gaia to deny Leto any land on which to give birth. It was maddening enough to Hera that the baseborn Athena should have taken precedence in Zeus’s affections over her noble and darling sons Hephaestus and Ares (she seemed to have forgotten, in her sudden burst of maternal feeling for her firstborn, that she had once hurled him down from heaven), and she was not about to let another bastard godling come muscling in to disturb Olympus’s proper order. There is much about Hera that brings to mind the Roman emperor Augustus’s wife Livia or the wives of certain English kings and mafia dons. Always looking to the dynasty and the bloodlines, always prepared to do anything for honor and family, lineage, and legacy.

  Denied landfall, poor pregnant young Leto sailed the seas looking for somewhere to give birth. She tried to find shelter with the wild HYPERBOREANS, who dwelt beyond the North Wind,63 but fearing the wrath of Hera they would not let her stay. At sea in every sense, Leto cast up prayers to Zeus, who had got her into this dreadful pickle in the first place; but, as King of the Gods, his authority rested on accepting and endorsing the other gods’ right to rule their own spheres and exercise their own will. He could not interfere and countermand Hera’s edict or undo her awful spell. Leaders, kings, and emperors always complain that they are the least free of their subjects, and there is some truth to this. Certainly Zeus, for all his might and majesty, was always constrained by the cabinet government principles of consensus and collective responsibility that allowed him to rule.

  The best that he could manage for Leto now was to persuade his brother Poseidon to cause an upswell of waves to guide her boat to Delos, a small uninhabited island floating in the eddies and swirl of the Cyclades, unanchored to the seabed and therefore immune from Hera’s curse.

  TWINS!

  Leto made an exhausted landfall on the hospitable floating island of Delos with barely enough strength to crawl up beyond the dunes to shelter beneath a straggling line of pine trees that fringed the shore. The few pine nuts and grasses she could eat there would not feed the active life she felt kicking inside her and so she made her way to a green valley that she could see in the distance. There, beneath Mount Cynthos, she subsisted for a month on fruits and seeds, living like a wild creature but safe from the curse of Hera. Her stomach swelled so much during this time that she feared she was carrying a monster or giant. But still she foraged, ate, and rested, foraged, ate, and rested.

  One day the pangs of hunger gave way to new and sharper stabs of pain. Alone and unaided Leto gave birth to a girl, the most lovely baby yet.64 Leto gasped out the name ARTEMIS for her. Strong, endowed with a most astonishing silvery quickness and supple strength, the infant girl found herself put to immediate and miraculous work even on this, her first day alive. For Leto now understood why her pregnancy had been so hard and so heavy—there was another child inside her, and this younger twin had become lodged sideways in the birth canal, causing her terrible agonies. Artemis proved to have an instinctive sense of how a baby should most easily be delivered and assisted with the birth of a glorious twin brother.

  Mother and daughter cried out with joyful surprise when the boy gave his first choking cries. For the hair on his head was not jet black like his sister’s or mother’s, it was blond—an inheritance from his maternal grandmother, the shining Phoebe. Leto named the child APOLLO. “Delian Apollo,” he was sometimes called in honor of his birthplace, and “Phoebus Apollo” in deference to his Titaness grandmother and his own radiant, golden beauty, for Phoebus means “shining one.”

  ARTEMIS

  Zeus loved Artemis almost as much as he loved Athena and took great pains to protect her from the wrath of Hera, who could not bear to look upon yet another child of adultery, especially one whom she loftily characterized as a hoydenish tomboy and a disgrace to the dignity of feminine divinity.

  One afternoon, when Artemis was still a very young girl, Zeus found her playfully catching and releasing mice and frogs in the undergrowth down at the base of Mount Olympus. He sat on a rock beside her and hoisted her onto his knee.

  She tugged at his beard for a while before she asked, “Father, do you love me?”

  “Artemis, what a question! You know I do. You know I love you with all my heart.”

  If you are the child of a faithless reprobate of a father there is almost nothing you cannot get him to agree to. Artemis now twisted Zeus around her fingers just as she twisted the hairs of his beard.

  “Do you love me enough to grant me a wish?”

  “Of course, my dear.”

  “Hm. Come to think, that’s nothing. You grant wishes to the smallest and least significant nymphs and water sprites. Would you grant me several wishes?”

  Inwardly Zeus groaned. The whole world seemed to believe that being the all-powerful one, sitting upon the throne of Olympus and commanding the heavens and the earth, was the easiest job there was. What did they know of paternal guilt, sibling rivalry, power struggles, and jealous wives? Please one member of the family and you maddened another.

  “Several wishes? Goodness! Surely you have everything a girl could want? You are immortal and once you reach your moment of greatest beauty you will never age. You are strong, clever, swift, and—ow!” This last exclamation was in reaction to a hair that had been plucked with some violence from his chin.

  “They aren’t difficult wishes, Daddy. Just the smallest things.”

  “Very well, let’s hear them.”

  “I never ever want to have a boyfriend or husband or have a man touch me, you know, in that way—”

  “Yes, yes . . . er . . . I fully understand.”

  This may have been the first time Zeus ever blushed.

  “Also, I want lots of different names, like my brother has. ‘Appellations,’ they’re called. Also a bow, which I notice he has a whole collection of but I don’t because I’m a girl which is totally unfair. I’m the older twin after all. Hephaestus can make me a really special one as a birth present just like he did for Apollo, a silver bow with silver arrows please. And I want a knee-length tunic for hunting in, because long dresses are stupid and impractical. I don’t want dominion over towns or cities, but I do want to rule mountainsides and forests. And stags. I like stags. And dogs, hunting dogs anyway, not lap dogs which are useless. And, if you’d be very very kind, I’d like a choir of young girls to sing my praises in temples and a group of nymphs to walk the dogs and look after me and help protect me from men.”

  “Is that it?” Zeus was almost giddy at this recitation.

  “I think so. Oh, and I’d like the power to make childbirth easier for women. I’ve seen how painful it is. In fact, it is actually quite sincerely gross
and I want to help make it better.”

  “Goodness me. You don’t ask for the moon, do you?”

  “Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I’d love the moon, please. That will be all. I’ll never ask for anything ever again ever.”

  Zeus granted every wish. How could he not?

  Goddess of the chase and the chaste, of the untutored and the untamed, of hounds and hinds, of midwives and the moon, Artemis duly became. The queen of archers and huntresses grew to value her independence and her celibacy above all things. The kindness with which she expressed her sympathy for women in childbirth was countered by the ferocity with which she pursued game and punished any man who presumed to come too near. Feared, admired, and adored across the ancient world, she was sometimes known, in honor of the mountainside of her birth, as CYNTHIA. The Romans called her DIANA. Her special tree was the cypress. Inasmuch as Athena was goddess of things cultivated, made, crafted, and thought through, Artemis—in her dominion over the natural, instinctive, and wild—stood as her opposite. They shared, however—along with Hestia—a passion for their own chastity.

  Artemis, goddess of the chase and the chaste, of hounds and hinds, queen of archers and huntresses

  APOLLO

  If Artemis was silver, her twin Apollo was all gold. If Artemis was the moon, he was the sun. His radiant features captivated all who beheld them. His proportions and lineaments remain to this day the very ideal of a certain kind of male beauty. I say “a certain kind,” for Apollo was striking not only in his fair complexion but in his beardless face and hairless chest, a rarity amongst Greeks or their gods. Like Jacob in the Bible he was a smooth man, but no less manly for that.

  Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason, and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric, and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony. The idea that the base material world and its ordinary objects had divine properties and could resonate with the heavens, this was Apollonian, whether expressed in the magical properties of squares, circles, and spheres or in the perfect modulation and rhythms of a voice or a chain of reasoning. Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift. Apollo had it in abundance, allied to an inability ever to lie. This made him a natural choice for taking charge of oracles and prophecy too. The python was sacred to him, of course, and the laurel. His particular animals were the dolphin and the white raven.65

  It would be a fool who mistook Apollo’s golden beauty for a sign of weakness. He was a supreme archer and when necessary as fierce and fiery a warrior as any on Olympus: Like all his close relations he was capable of cruelty, meanness, jealousy, and spite. Unusually for a god, he was worshipped by the Romans under his Greek name without any alterations. Apollo was Apollo wherever you went in the ancient world.

  THE WRATH OF HERA

  On the floating island of their birth, the newborn twins Apollo and Artemis had found themselves the focus of the Queen of Heaven’s continuing fury. Hera had done everything possible to prevent the birth of these living reminders of Zeus’s infidelity, and her frustrated rage at her failure knew no bounds. So she tried again.

  When the twins were just days old she sent the snake Python to consume them. You remember the magnetite stone the pregnant Rhea had duped Kronos into swallowing instead of the infant Zeus? The one that he had later vomited up and which Zeus cast far from Othrys? Well, it had landed at a place called Pytho on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Lodged fast in the earth it would in time become the Omphalos or navel-stone of Greece—the Hellenic bellybutton, its spiritual center and point of origin. From exactly the spot where it fell, at the command of Gaia, for whom this place was already sacred, there had emerged out of the ground a huge dragon-like serpent to serve as the stone’s guardian. Taking the name of his birthplace he was called Python, as have been many snakes in his honor since.

  Hera in her anger now sent Python to the isle of Delos to kill Leto and her children. Zeus took the risk of incensing Hera even further by secretly whispering this news to the wind, which passed it on to the infant Apollo, who in turn sent a desperate message to Hephaestus, begging for the best bow and arrow his half brother could fashion. Hephaestus toiled at the forge for seven days and seven nights, at the end of which time a matchlessly beautiful and powerful weapon and a set of golden arrows were dispatched to Delos, just in time for Apollo to take delivery of them, conceal himself behind the dunes, and await the great serpent’s arrival. The moment Python emerged from the sea and slithered onto the sand Apollo stepped from his hiding place and shot him through the eye with an arrow. He sliced the dead body into pieces there on the beach and sent up a great cry of triumph to the sky.

  You might think Apollo had every justification to protect his sister, his mother, and himself from such a deadly creature, but Python was chthonic—he sprang from the earth—making him a child of Gaia and as such under divine protection. Zeus knew that he must punish Apollo for the slaying of the serpent or lose all authority.

  In truth, the punishment he chose for Apollo was not so very harsh. Zeus exiled the young god for eight years to the snake’s birthplace beneath Mount Parnassus to atone for his crime. As well as replacing the snake-monster Python as guardian of the Omphalos, Apollo was tasked with organizing a regular athletics tournament there. The Pythian Games were duly held every four years, two on either side of the Olympic meeting.66

  Apollo also established at Pytho (whose name he changed to Delphi67) an oracle where anyone could come to ask the god or his appointed priestess (known sometimes as a SIBYL or the PYTHIA) questions about the future. In a trancelike state of prophetic ecstasy the priestess would sit out of sight of her interrogator, above a chasm in the ground which channelled down to the womb of the earth itself, and call her ambiguous prognostications up into the chamber above where the anxious petitioner awaited her proclamation. In this way Apollo and the Sibyl were seen to draw their oracular powers in part from Gaia herself, Apollo’s great-grandmother. Vapors were said to rise from beneath the ground that many took to be Gaia’s actual breath.68 The spring of Castalia bubbles up here, whose waters are said to inspire poetry in those who drink them or hear their whispers.69

  So Delian Apollo became Delphic Apollo too. People still travel to Delphi to ask him about their future. I have done so myself. Apollo never lies, but nor does he ever give a straight answer, finding it amusing to reply with another question or a riddle so obscure as only to make sense when it is too late to act upon it.

  To atone for his grievous assault on the proper way of things and to allow the slain Python to sleep the eternal sleep of death in the arms of his mother Gaia, Zeus finally fixed the serpent’s resting place, the island of Delos, to the earth. While it no longer floats free, those who visit the island can testify to this day that it is tough to sail to, being beset by violent Etesian winds and treacherous meltemi currents. Anyone who travels there is likely to suffer the most awful seasickness. It is as if Hera has still not forgiven Delos for the part it played in the birth of the LETOIDES, the glorious twins Artemis and Apollo.

  MAIA MAIA

  How many Olympians were there now? Let’s do a quick headcount.

  Zeus sat on the throne, with Hera at his side, that’s two. Around them were ranged Hestia, Poseidon (who liked to come inland and keep an eye on Zeus), Demeter, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Ares, Athena, Artemis, and Apollo—that’s eleven. Hades doesn’t count because he spent all his time in the underworld and had no interest in taking a seat in the dodecatheon. Eleven. One more then, before Olympus reaches its quorum of twelve.

  Hardly had the dust settled, and the shrieking recriminations from the Python debacle abated to sulks and glowers, than Zeus saw the path of his duty clear before him. He must father the twelfth and final god. Or, to put it another way, his sex-crazed glance fell on yet another appetizing immortal.

  During the Titanomachy, Atlas, the most ferocious champion of the Titans, had fathered seven daughters by the Oceanid PLEIONE
. In her honor the Seven Sisters were known as the PLEIADES, although sometimes, out of respect for their father, they might be addressed as the ATLANTIDES too.

  The eldest and loveliest of these dark-eyed sisters was called MAIA. She lived as a shy and happy oread on the pleasant Corinthian slopes of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia.70 Happy, that is, until the night the great god Zeus appeared to her and got her with child. With great stealth—for word of Hera’s attitude to Zeus’s bastard children had got out and struck fear into every beautiful girl in Greece and beyond—Maia in due time gave birth in a remote and hidden cave to a healthy boy, whom she named HERMES.

  THE INFANT PRODIGY

  Hermes proved himself to be the most extraordinarily pert and precocious baby that ever drew breath. Within a quarter hour of his birth he had crawled from one side of the cave to the other, throwing out comments to his startled mother as he did so. Five minutes later he had requested a light so that he might better examine the cave’s walls. Being offered none he struck two stones together over twists of straw and kindled a flame. This had never been done before. Now standing upright (and still not half an hour old), this remarkable infant announced that he was going for a walk.

  “The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,” he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of “-phobia” words as he spoke. “I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there’s a good mother.”

  As he ambled down the slopes of Mount Cyllene, this singular and sensational prodigy began to hum to himself. His humming turned into tuneful singing, which the nightingales in the woods around him immediately began to copy and have been trying to recapture ever since.