Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  MORE METAMORPHOSES

  We have seen the gods transform men and women into animals out of pity, punishment, or jealousy. But, just as they could be as proud and petty as humans, so the gods could be equally motivated by desire. Mortal flesh, as we have seen, was as appealing to them as immortal. Sometimes their urges were little more than primitive lust, but they could fall genuinely in love too. There are many stories of the gods chasing after and transforming the loveliest youths and young women into animals, new plants, and flowers, and even rocks and streams.167

  NISUS AND SCYLLA

  NISUS was a King of Megara, a city on the coast of Attica.168 He had been granted invincibility in the form of a single lock of purple hair which kept him immune from any human harm. For some reason his kingdom was attacked by the forces of King Minos of Crete.

  One day Nisus’s daughter, the Princess SCYLLA,169 caught sight of Minos on board one of his warships as it passed close to the walls of Megara and fell in love with him. So maddened by desire did she become that she decided to steal her father’s lock of purple hair and give it to Minos on board his ship; in return he would repay her generosity with love. But once she had stolen the lock Nisus became as vulnerable as any mortal. And while she was still secretly making her way to Minos, her father was killed in a palace uprising. Minos, far from being pleased by Scylla’s act of disloyalty to her own father, was disgusted, and would have nothing to do with her. He kicked her off his ship, hoisted sail and left Megara, vowing never to return.

  So overmastering was her passion that even now Scylla could not give up on the man she loved. She swam after Minos, calling pathetically. She mewed and cried so plaintively after him that she was turned into a gull. Such was the humor of the gods that at the same time her father Nisus was transformed into a sea-eagle.

  In revenge he has relentlessly harried his daughter across the oceans ever since.

  CALLISTO

  Before he was turned into a wolf—as you may recall—during the early days of Pelasgian mankind, King Lycaon of Arcadia had a beautiful daughter called CALLISTO, who was raised as a nymph dedicated to the virgin huntress Artemis.

  Zeus had long frothed with desire for this beautiful, unattainable girl and tricked her one day by transforming himself into the very image of Artemis herself. She readily fell into the arms of the great goddess she followed, only to find herself ravaged by Zeus.

  Some time later, bathing naked in the river, she was seen by Artemis who, enraged by her follower’s state of pregnancy, expelled poor Callisto from her circle. Alone and unhappy she wandered the world, before giving birth to a son, ARCAS. Hera, never one to show mercy to even the most innocent and guileless of her husband’s lovers, punished Callisto further by transforming her into a bear.

  Some years later Arcas, now a youth, was hunting in the forest when he came upon a great she-bear. He was just about to launch his javelin at her when Zeus intervened to prevent an inadvertent matricide and raised them up into the heavens as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the constellations of the Great Bear and the Little Bear. Hera, still angry, cursed these constellations so that they would never share the same waters which (I am told) explains their permanently opposing circumpolar positions.170

  PROCNE AND PHILOMELA

  King PANDION of Athens had two beautiful daughters, PROCNE and PHILOMELA. Procne, the elder, left Athens to marry King TEREUS of Thrace, by whom she had a son, ICTYS.

  One year, her younger sister Philomela came to Thrace to stay with the family for the whole summer. The dark heart of Tereus, one of the darkest that ever beat, was fiercely disturbed by the beauty of his young sister-in-law and he dragged her to his chambers one night and raped her. Fearful that his wife and the world might discover the hateful crime, Tereus tore out Philomela’s tongue. Knowing that she was unable to read and write, he felt safe that she could never communicate to anyone the abominable truth of what had taken place.

  But over the next week or so Philomela wove a tapestry in which she depicted for her sister Procne all the details of her violation. The wronged and raging sisters planned a revenge that would match the monstrous evil of the crime. They knew how to hurt Tereus most. He was a violent and repulsive man given to wild rages and unspeakable depravities, but he had one weakness—his deep love for his boy Ictys. This unbounded affection Procne and Philomela knew well. Ictys was Procne’s son too, but what maternal love she once felt had been quite overwhelmed by hatred and an unquenchable lust for revenge. Abandoning all pity, the sisters went to the child’s bedchamber and murdered him in his sleep.

  “Philomela will be leaving for Athens soon,” Procne told her husband the next morning. “Why don’t we hold a banquet tonight to bid her farewell and to honor the kindly hospitality you have offered her?”

  Philomela whimpered and nodded her head vigorously. “She seems to think it would be a good idea too.” Tereus grunted his assent.

  At the feast that night a succulent stew was served which the king greedily consumed. He soaked up all its juices with hunks of bread, but found he still had room for more. Just out of arm’s reach lay a dish covered by a silver dome.

  “What’s under that?”

  Philomela pushed the dish toward him with a smile.

  Tereus lifted the dome and gave a shout of horror when he saw his dead son’s head grimacing up at him. The sisters screeched with laughter and exultation. When he realized what had been done to him, and understood why the stew was so deliciously tender, Tereus gave a great roar and snatched down a spear from the wall. The two women ran from the room and cried out to the gods for aid. As King Tereus chased them out of the palace and down the street he found himself suddenly rising into the air. He was being transformed into a hoopoe bird, and his yells of pain and fury began to sound like forlorn whoops. At the same time, Procne was changed into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.

  Although nightingales are famous for the melodious beauty of their song, it is only the male of the species that sings. The females, like tongueless Philomela, remain mute.171 Many species of swallow are named after Procne to this day and the hoopoe bird still wears a kingly crown.

  GANYMEDE AND THE EAGLE

  In the northwest corner of Asia Minor there lay a kingdom called Troad, or Troy, in honor of its ruler King TROS. Troy looked across the Aegean Sea westward to mainland Greece; behind it lay the whole of what is now Turkey and the ancient lands to the east. To the north were the Dardanelles and Gallipoli and to the south the great island of Lesbos. The principal city Ilium (which was to become known simply as the city of Troy) derived its name from ILOS, the eldest son of Tros and his queen CALLIRRHOË, a daughter of the local river god SCAMANDER. Of the royal couple’s second boy, ASSARACUS, little is recorded, but it was their third son, GANYMEDE, who took the eye and indeed the breath of all who encountered him.

  No more beautiful youth had ever lived and moved upon the earth than this Prince Ganymede. His hair was golden, his skin like warm honey, his lips a soft, sweet invitation to lose yourself in mad and magical kisses.

  Girls and women of all ages had been known to scream and even to faint when he looked at them. Men who had never in all their lives considered the appeal of their own sex found their hearts hammering, the blood surging and pounding in their ears when they caught sight of him. Their mouths would go dry and they found themselves stammering foolish nonsense and saying anything to try to please him or attract his attention. When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhymed “thighs” with “eyes,” “hips” with “lips,” “youth” with “truth,” “boy” with “joy,” and “desire” with “fire.”

  Unlike many born with the awful privilege of beauty, Ganymede was not sulky, petulant, or spoiled. His manners were charming and unaffected. When he smiled, the smile was kind and his amber eyes were lit with a friendly warmth. Those who knew him best said that his inner beauty matched or even exceeded his outer.

  Had he not been a prince it is likely tha
t more fuss would have been made of his startling looks and his life would have been made impossible. But because he was the favored son of a great ruler no one dared try to seduce him, and he lived a blameless life of horses, music, sport, and friends. It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all.

  They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumors of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn’t known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus.

  It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: His presence lit up Olympus.

  Zeus dispatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss.

  “Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,” Hermes told him. “He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.”

  Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him . . .

  But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai “gladdening” and medon “prince” and/or medeon “genitals.” “Ganymede,” the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word “catamite.”

  Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

  When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover, and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.

  MOON LOVERS

  A word about two immortal sisters. We have met in passing Eos, or AURORA as the Romans called her, and know that her task was to begin each day by flinging wide the gates that let first the god Apollo and then her brother Helios drive the sun-chariot through. Their sister Selene (LUNA to the Romans) drove the nocturnal equivalent, the moon-chariot, across the night sky. By Selene, Zeus had fathered two daughters, PANDIA (whom Athenians celebrated every full moon) and ERSA (sometimes HERSE), the divine personification of the dew.

  After Zeus tired of Selene, she fell in love a number of times. A fine, heroic youth called CEPHALUS caught her eye and she abducted him. She gave no thought to the fact that he was already spoken for—married, in fact, to PROCRIS, a daughter of Erechtheus, first King of Athens (the issue of Hephaestus’s spilled semen), and his queen, PRAXITHEA. Despite Selene’s radiant beauty and the luxurious moon palace she installed him in, the kidnapped Cephalus found himself missing his wife Procris dreadfully. No matter what silvery arts of love the goddess of the moon employed, she failed to arouse him. Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife. All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold . . .

  With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind.

  “Aiee,” she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, “it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.”

  “What can you mean?”

  “Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “How little you know her!” Cephalus returned with some heat, “she is as faithful as she is lovely.”

  “Ha!” said Selene. “All it takes is honey and money.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.”

  “How cynical you are.”

  “I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That’s not cynicism, it’s realism.”

  “But you don’t know Procris,” Cephalus insisted. “She’s not like other people. She is faithful and true.”

  “Pah! She’d leap into bed with anyone when your back’s turned. I tell you what . . .” Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. “If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets—I bet she’d be all over you.”

  “Never!”

  “Up to you, but . . .” Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. “Oh look—there’s a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too . . .”

  Selene vanished and at that very moment Cephalus found that he was indeed bearded. The change of wardrobe that had inexplicably appeared by the roadside seemed to beckon to him.

  Despite his protestations to the contrary, Selene’s words had planted a seed of doubt. In putting on this absurd costume, Cephalus told himself that he was not yielding to this doubt, but rather setting out to show Selene that her cynicism was misplaced. He and Procris would call up to her that very night as she glided by in her chariot. “How wrong you were, goddess of the moon!” they would cry, “how little you understand a loving mortal heart.” Words to that effect. That would show her.

  A short while later, Procris opened the door to a handsome, bearded, helmeted, gowned stranger. She was looking a little haggard and drawn. The sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband had hit her hard. Before she had time to enquire of her visitor, however, Cephalus shouldered his way into the house and dismissed the servants.

  “You are a very beautiful woman,” he said in a thick Thracian accent.

  Procris blushed. “Sir, I must . . .”

  “Come, let us seat ourselves on this couch.”

  “Really, I cannot . . .”

  “Come now, no one’s looking.”

  She knew that it was pushing the boundaries of hospitable xenia a little further than was called for, but Procris complied. The man was so forceful.

  “What’s a beauty like you doing all alone in such a big house?” Cephalus picked a fig from a copper bowl, took a lascivious bite from it and dangled the soft juicy half that remained in front of Procris.172

  “Sir!”

  As her mouth opened to remonstrate, Cephalus pushed in the squashy fig.

  “A sight to enflame the gods themselves,” he said. “Be mine!”

  “I’m married!” she tried to say through the seeds and pulp.

  “Marriage? What’s that? I’m a rich man and will give you whatever jewels or ornaments you ask for, if only you will yield. You are so beautiful. And I love you.”

  Procris paused. It may have been that she was trying to swallow the remains of the fig. It may have been that she was tempted by the offer of precious
things. Perhaps she was touched by this sudden and intense declaration of love. The pause was long enough to cause Cephalus to rise in fury, cast off his disguise, and reveal himself.

  “So!” he thundered. “This is what happens when you are alone! Dishonorable, deceitful woman!”

  Procris stared in disbelief. “Cephalus? Is that you?”

  “Yes! Yes, it is your poor husband! This is how you behave when I am away. Go! Leave my sight, faithless Procris. Away with you!”

  He lunged forward, shaking his fist, and the terrified Procris fled. Out of the house she ran, out into the woods, never stopping until she collapsed with exhaustion on the fringes of a grove sacred to Artemis.

  The goddess discovered Procris lying there the next morning and coaxed from her the story of what had happened.

  For a year and a day she stayed with the divine huntress and her retinue of fierce maidens, but at last she could bear it no longer.

  “Artemis, you have looked after me, tutored me in the arts of the chase, and shown me how men are always to be shunned. But I cannot lie to you: In my heart I love my husband Cephalus as much as ever I did. He wronged me, but the wrong he did came from his great love for me, and I yearn to forgive him and lie in his arms, his wife once more.”

  Artemis was sorry to see her go, but she was in a charitable mood. Not only did she let Procris return to her husband without first plucking her eyes out or feeding her to the pigs (actions that were by no means alien to her) but she bestowed upon her two remarkable gifts to present to Cephalus as a peace offering.

  LAILAPS AND ALOPEX TEUMESIOS

  One of the gifts that Procris received was a remarkable dog called LAILAPS which had the power to catch anything, absolutely anything that it pursued. Set it to chase a deer, boar, bear, lion, or even human being and it could never fail to bring its quarry down. The second gift, of equal value, was a javelin that would always hit its mark. Whosoever was possessed of both could rightly call themselves the greatest mortal hunter in the world. Little wonder that Cephalus was pleased to welcome his wife, laden with such gifts, back to hearth and home, bosom and bed.