Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  The warriors paid no attention. Their marching on the spot turned into a slow march forward. In exasperation Cadmus picked up a rock which, with his customary skill and strength, he hurled into their ranks. It struck one of the soldiers on the shoulder. The man looked at the soldier next to him and, taking him to be the aggressor, lunged at him with a mighty roar, sword drawn. Within moments bloodcurdling battle cries were heard all around the field as the soldiers fell upon each other.

  “Stop! Stop! I command you to stop!” yelled Cadmus like a frantic parent on the touchline watching their son being squashed in a scrum. Stamping the ground in frustration he turned to Harmonia. “What is the point of Athena taking all this trouble to force me to create a race of men, only for them to destroy each other? Look at this violence, this bloodlust. What does it mean?”

  But even as he spoke, Harmonia was pointing to the center of the fray. Five of Cadmus’s Spartoi stood in a circle, the sole survivors. The rest lay dead, their blood soaking back into the soil from which they had come. Forward came the five, their swords pointing to the ground. They reached Cadmus and knelt down, heads bowed.

  Great was the relief, great the rejoicing from the Tyrians. The day had been strange, as strange a day as mortals had known in all history. But some kind of order seemed to have emerged.

  “What is the name of this place?” Cadmus asked. “Does anyone here know?”

  A voice spoke up, the voice of the man who had warned that the Ismenian Dragon was sacred to Ares. “I’m from hereabouts,” he said. “We call this ‘the plain of Thebes.’”

  “Then on this plain shall I build a great city. From now on we are not Tyrians, but Thebans”—a great cheer went up—“and these five Spartoi shall be my Theban lords.”

  THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONIA

  The Five Founding Lords of Thebes were given the names ECHION, UDAEUS, CHTHONIUS, HYPERENOR, and PELOR.124

  Under the supervision of Cadmus and his loyal army of Tyrian followers they slowly built up a citadel (the Cadmeia) from which grew a flourishing town. In time this town became the powerful city-state of Thebes.125 The strong wall that encircled it was pierced by seven great bronze gates, each dedicated to the glory of an Olympian god.

  The wall was constructed by AMPHION and ZETHUS, twin sons of Zeus by ANTIOPE, the daughter of the local river god ASOPOS. Hermes had been a lover of Amphion and taught him to play the lyre. When it came to the construction of the great wall around the Cadmeia, Amphion sang to the accompaniment of the lyre and the heavy stones carried by Zethus were so enchanted by the music that they floated into place and the city walls were finished in no time. As a result Amphion and Zethus, as well as Cadmus, are credited as co-founders of Thebes.

  The work completed, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to the matter of their marriage. Descended from Titans and gods, allied to and punished by Olympians, but very mortal and very human, the pair might nowadays be called an “iconic power couple.” Today’s press and social media, one suspects, would hardly be able to resist dubbing them “Cadmonia.”

  Their status as the foremost lovers of the known world meant their wedding feast was an honor never before accorded a mortal union, attended by the highest in the land and the highest from heaven. The gifts were stupendous. Aphrodite lent Harmonia her girdle, a magical item of lingerie that had the power to provoke the most dizzying and rapturous desire.126 It is said that Harmonia was bed-shy and that her love for Cadmus had yet to be consummated. This girdle, loaned for the duration of her honeymoon by the goddess of love and beauty (who may well have been Harmonia’s natural mother), was therefore a gift of great value.

  But no wedding gift outshone the necklace that Cadmus conferred upon his bride. It was the most beautiful piece of jewelery yet seen. Fashioned from the choicest chalcedony, jasper, emeralds, sapphires, jade, lapis, amethyst, silver, and gold, it caused gasps of wonder amongst the guests when he clasped it about his beautiful wife’s neck.127 The whisper went round that it too had been given by Aphrodite.

  The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who—if you remember—nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed. Miserable misfortune and tragic calamity would rain down upon the heads of whosoever wore or owned it.

  This is all confusing and fascinating in equal measure. If Ares and Aphrodite were indeed Harmonia’s true parents, why would they want to doom their own daughter? All to avenge a dead water snake? Besides, could sweet Harmony really be the child of Love and War? And, if so, why would the gentle issue of those two powerful and frightening forces be cursed by them with such unnatural cruelty?

  The pairing of Cadmus and Harmonia seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing, and trade represented by Cadmus—his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means “of the east”—can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both.

  But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don’t quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.

  So back to the story. The marriage was a great success. The girdle did its (literally) aphrodisiac work and the happy pair were blessed with their own issue: two sons, POLYDORUS and ILLYRIUS, and four daughters: AGAVE, AUTONOË, INO, and SEMELE.

  Cadmus still had to pay for his killing of the dragon, however. Ares bound him to labor on his behalf for an Olympian year, which seems to have been eight human years.

  After this, Cadmus returned to rule over the city he had built. But the curse of the necklace was to pollute any happiness or satisfaction he might have enjoyed as king.

  CONSIGNED TO THE DUST

  After many years of peace and prosperity in Thebes, Cadmus and Harmonia’s daughter Agave had married PENTHEUS, the son of Echion, one of the Five Founding Lords (the last five Spartoi standing, you will remember). Tiring of kingship, but like so many heroes after him unable to restrain the itchy feet of wanderlust, Cadmus said to Harmonia one day: “Let us travel. Let us see more of the world. Pentheus is ready to take the throne in our absence.”

  They saw much. Many towns and many cities. They went as an ordinary middle-aged couple, asking for no great welcome or banquets in their honor. Only a small party of attendants accompanied them. It was unfortunate, though, that Harmonia included the cursed necklace in her luggage.

  After a great deal of traveling around Greece they determined on a visit to the kingdom up toward the western Adriatic, south of the Balkans, and facing the east coast of Italy, that had been established by their youngest boy, Illyrius, and which was unsurprisingly called “Illyria.”128

  Once there, Cadmus suddenly fell weary and was filled with an insupportable dread. He called up to the skies.

  “For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth as a snake. If it will calm him and bring more peace to my troubled life then let me end my life sliding through the dust. Let it be so.”129

  No sooner were those words out of his mouth than his unhappy prayer became an unhappy reality. His body began to shrink sideways and stretch lengthways, his skin to blister and form smooth scales, and his head to flatten into a diamond shape. The tongue t
hat had shouted that dreadful wish to the heavens now flicked and darted out from between two fangs. The man who was once Cadmus, Prince of Tyre and King of Thebes, fell writhing to the ground, a common snake.

  Harmonia let out a great howl of despair.

  “Gods have pity!” she cried. “Aphrodite, if you are my mother show love now and let me join upon the earth the one I love. The fruits of the world are dust to me. Ares, if you are my father show mercy. Zeus if, as some say, you are my father then, in the name of all creation, take pity, I beg you.”

  It was, however, none of those three who heard her prayers, but merciful Athena who transformed her into a snake. Harmonia glided through the dust after her serpent-husband and they coiled about each other with love.

  The pair lived out their days in the shadows of a temple sacred to Athena, only showing themselves when they needed to heat their blood in the noonday sun. When the end came, Zeus returned them to their human shapes in time to die. Their bodies were taken to be buried with great ceremony in Thebes, and Zeus sent two great serpents to guard their tombs for eternity.

  We will leave Cadmus and Harmonia to their everlasting rest. They died quite unaware that their youngest daughter, Semele, had, in their absence, unleashed a force into the world that would change it forever.

  117. Before this great Phoenician idea, writing took the form of visual symbols such as hieroglyphs and pictograms. Like our numbers, these bore no relation to their sound. The written “24,” for example, gives no clue to pronunciation at all and you’d say the sign differently according to the practices of your language. The alphabetical (i.e. phonetical) characters in twenty-four or vingt-quatre or vierundzwanzig tell you just how to say them. That was the crucial breakthrough. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks into the writing system more or less in use there today. Its close Cyrillic relation spread from Bulgaria in the ninth century a.d. to the Balkans, Russia, and many other areas of eastern Europe and Asia, while the Romans adapted the Greek alpha and beta into the alphabetic system you are interpreting so fluently at this minute. Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who lived in the fifth century b.c., still called such writing “Cadmean.”

  118. Not the tragic ELECTRA, daughter of AGAMEMNON and CLYTEMNESTRA, but another much earlier one. The name is interesting; it is the female form of electron, the Greek word for “amber.” The Greeks noticed that if you rub amber vigorously with a cloth it magically attracts dust and fluff. They called this strange property “amberiness,” from which all our words “electric,” “electricity,” “electron,” “electronic,” and so on, ultimately derive.

  119. He gave his name to the Dardanelles, site of the ill-fated Gallipoli landings in the First World War.

  120. Some sources claim that Ares and Aphrodite were Harmonia’s parents. Her later ascent to the status of goddess of harmony (CONCORDIA to the Romans) certainly hints at a more divine pedigree. Given what Ares was about to do to her, you might think him a most unnatural father—so loyal to his water dragon, so cruel to his human daughter. Other mythographers, notably Roberto Calasso, an Italian writer whose creative interpretations of myth are well worth reading, have elegantly compromised and suggested that Harmonia was indeed the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, but was given to be suckled and adopted by Electra of Samothrace.

  121. It forms the wedge of land that separates Turkey from Syria and is now called Çukurova.

  122. A central region of Greece, north of the Gulf of Corinth. Without giving too much away it is worth relating that it once bore the name “Cadmeis” . . .

  123. Ovid calls the Ismenian Dragon Anguis Martius, the “Snake of Mars.” It seems (ap)ophis (snake) and drakon (dragon) were pretty much undifferentiated in Greek myth, much as Wurm (worm) and Drachen (dragon) are interchangeable in Germanic legend.

  124. Chthonius had the name that defined them all as chthonic beings.

  125. The polis or “city-state” was to become the defining unit of government in ancient Greece. Athens was the best known, but Sparta, Thebes, Rhodes, Samos, and many others flourished around the Greek world, forming alliances, trading, and fighting with each other. Despite Greek giving us the word “democracy,” the polis could also be ruled either by a king (tyrannos in Greek, so when we say “tyrant” we don’t always mean “despot”) or by the “rule of the few,” which in Greek is oligarchy. From polis come all those words like “polite,” “politics,” and “police.”

  126. I’m damned if I can find a convincing definition of “girdle.” Some think it’s a belt, others a device more like a Playtex paneled support or corset—others yet have described it as a “mythical Wonderbra.” Calasso calls it “a soft deceiving sash.”

  127. “A garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground” is Roberto Calasso’s excellent description in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

  128. Scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. The Dalmatae (a name ultimately deriving from an early Albanian word for “sheep”) were an Illyrian tribe to the northwest of the region who gave their name to this Dalmatian coast (and the dog).

  129. Being from Tyre, Cadmus probably used the word for “let it be so” most commonly used throughout the Middle East: Amen.

  TWICE BORN

  THE EAGLE LANDS

  After Cadmus and Harmonia departed on their travels, their son-in-law Pentheus reigned in Thebes.130 He was not a strong king, but he was honest and did the best he could with the limited store of character and cunning on which he was able to call. While the city-state flourished well enough under him, he needed always to look over his shoulder to the children of Cadmus, his brothers- and sisters-in-law, whose greed and ambition posed a constant threat. Even his wife Agave seemed contemptuous of him and anxious for him to fail. His youngest sister-in-law, Semele, was the only one with whom he felt at all at ease, in truth because she was less worldly than her brothers Polydorus and Illyrius, and nothing like as ambitious for wealth and position as her sisters Agave, Autonoë, and Ino. Semele was a beautiful, kindly, and generous girl, content with her life as a priestess at the great temple of Zeus.

  One day she sacrificed to Zeus a bull of especially impressive size and vigor. The offering complete, she took herself off to the River Asopos to wash the blood from her. It so happened that Zeus, pleased with the sacrifice and intending anyway to look in on Thebes to see how the city prospered, was flying over the river at the time in his favorite guise of an eagle. The sight of Semele’s naked body glistening in the water excited him hugely and he landed, turning himself quickly back into his proper form. I say “proper form,” for when the gods chose to reveal themselves to humans they presented themselves in a reduced, manageable guise that did not dazzle or overawe. Thus the figure that stood on the riverbank smiling at Semele appeared human. Large, stunningly handsome, powerfully built, and possessed of an unusual radiance, but human all the same.

  Crossing her arms over her breasts Semele called out, “Who are you? How dare you sneak up upon a priestess of Zeus?”

  “A priestess of Zeus, are you?”

  “I am. If you mean any harm to me I will cry out to the King of the Gods and he will rush to my aid.”

  “You don’t say so?”

  “You may be sure of it. Now leave.”

  But the stranger came closer. “I am well pleased with you, Semele,” he said.

  Semele backed away. “You know my name?”

  “I know many things, loyal priestess. For I am the god you serve. I am the Sky Father, the King of Olympus. Zeus, the all-powerful.”

  Semele, still half in the river, gasped and fell to her knees.

  “Come now,” said Zeus, striding through the water toward her, “let me look into your eyes.”

  It was splashy, frenzied, and wet, but it was real lovemaking. When it was over Semele smiled, blushed, laughed, and then wept, leaning her head on Zeus’s chest and sobbing without cease.

  “Don’t cry, deares
t Semele,” said Zeus, running his fingers through her hair. “You have pleased me.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord. But I love you and I know all too well that you can never love a mortal.”

  Zeus gazed down at her. The eruption of lust he had felt was all over, but he was surprised to feel the stirrings of something deeper, glowing like embers in his heart. A god who operated in vertical moments with no real thought for consequences along the line, he really did experience just then a great wellspring of love for the beautiful Semele, and he told her so.

  “Semele, I do love you! I love you sincerely. Believe me now when I swear by the waters of this river that I will always look after you, care for you, protect you, honor you.” He cupped her face in his hands and bent forward to bestow a tender kiss on her soft, receptive lips. “Now, farewell, my sweet. Once every new moon I will come.”

  Dressed in her gown, her hair still damp and her whole being warm and bright with love and happiness, Semele walked back across the fields toward the temple. Looking up, a hand shading her eyes, she saw an eagle sweep and soar through the sky, seemingly into the sun itself, until the dazzle of it made her eyes water and she was forced to look away.

  THE EAGLE’S WIFE

  Zeus meant well.

  Those three words so often presaged disaster for some poor demigod, nymph, or mortal. The King of the Gods did love Semele and he really meant to do his best by her. In the fervor of his new infatuation he managed conveniently to forget the torments Io had endured, maddened by the gadfly sent by his vengeful wife.

  Alas, Hera may no longer have had Argus of the hundred eyes to gather intelligence for her, but she had thousands of eyes in other places. Whether it was one of the jealous sisters, Agave, Autonoë, or Ino, who spied on Semele and whispered to Hera the story of the lovemaking in the river, or whether it was one of the Queen of Heaven’s own priestesses, is not known. But find out Hera did.