Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  “Here’s the deal,” Midas told the barber. “I give you a bigger salary and a more generous pension than any other member of the palace staff and you keep quiet about what you have seen. If, however, you breathe a word to anyone I will slaughter your family before your eyes, cut out your tongue, and leave you to wander the world in mute poverty and exile. Understood?”

  The frightened barber nodded.

  For three years each side kept to the bargain. The barber’s wife and family waxed fat and happy on the extra money that came in and no one found out about the king’s asinine auditory appendages. Turbans in the Midas style caught on throughout Phrygia, Lydia, Thrace, and beyond. All was well.

  But secrets are terrible things to have to keep. Especially such juicy ones as that to which the royal barber was privy. Every day he would wake up and feel that the knowledge was writhing and swelling inside him. The barber loved his wife and family and was in any case loyal enough to his monarch not to have any wish to humiliate or embarrass him. But that bulging, ballooning secret had to be released somehow before he burst. No unmilked cow with swollen udders, no mother of overdue twins, no gut-stuffed gastronome straining on the privy, could ever feel such a desperate need for relief from their agonies than this poor barber.

  Finally he hit upon a scheme which he felt sure would rid him of his burden without endangering his family. Awaking from a tortured night in which he had dreamed that he revealed the secret to the gaping populace of Gordium from a balcony in the main square, he went out at first light deep into the remote countryside. In a lonely place by a stream he dug a deep trench in the ground. Looking about him in all directions to make sure that he was alone and that there was no possibility of being overheard, he knelt down, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted these words into the hole:

  “Midas has ass’s ears!”

  Scrabbling frantically to close up the hole before the words could escape, he failed to notice one tiny seed floating down and settling at the bottom . . .

  When the backfilling was done, the barber stamped fiercely up and down on the earth to seal in the dreadful secret. He skipped all the way back to Gordium, headed straight for his favorite tavern, and ordered a flagon of the house’s best wine. He could drink now without fear that the wine might loosen his tongue. It was as if he were Atlas and the sky had finally been lifted from his shoulders.

  Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, back in the remote field by the stream that tiny seed, warmed by the soft breath of Gaia below, began to germinate. Soon, a delicate little reed was shouldering its way through the topsoil and pushing its delicate head into the air. As the breeze caught the reed it softly whispered, “Midas has ass’s ears.”

  The faint words reached the rushes and sedges that fringed the riverbank. “Midas has ass’s ears . . .”

  The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

  “Midas has ass’s ears,” sighed the branches.

  “Midas has ass’s ears,” sang the birds.

  And at last the news reached the city.

  “Midas has ass’s ears!”

  King Midas woke with a start. There was laughter and shouting in the street outside the palace. He crept to the window, crouched down, and listened.

  The humiliation was too much for him to bear. Without stopping to wreak his vengeance on the barber and the barber’s family, he mixed a poisonous draught of ox-blood, raised his eyes heavenward, gave a bitter laugh and a shrug, drained the drink, and died.

  Poor Midas. His name will always mean someone fortunate and rich, but truly he was unlucky and poor. If only he had kept to his roses. Green fingers are better than gold.

  APPENDICES

  THE BROTHERS, A SIDEBAR

  A final word about Epimetheus and Prometheus, the sons of Clymene (or Asia) the Oceanid and Iapetus the Titan, and younger brothers of sky-shouldering Atlas and thunderbolt-exploded Menoetius. It is generally held that Prometheus means “forethought” and Epimetheus “afterthought,” from which it is usually inferred that Epimetheus blundered into things without considering consequences while his elder brother Prometheus deliberated with more perspicacity. It might be convincingly argued that there was nothing especially cautious, forwardthinking, or prescient about Prometheus’s actions in bringing fire to man. It was impulsive, generous . . . loving even, but not especially wise. Epimetheus was a kindly, well disposed individual also, and his failings were only . . . I was going to say only human, but that can hardly be right, for he was a Titan. His failings were certainly titanic in their consequences. The perceived difference between the brothers is used to this day by philosophers to express something fundamental about us all.

  In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras the title character suggests a creation myth somewhat different from the traditionally accepted one.

  The gods (so Protagoras tells Socrates) decided to populate nature with new strains of mortal life, there being only immortals in the world at that time. Out of earth and water and with divine fire and divine breath they created animals and man. They charged Prometheus and Epimetheus with the task of allocating to these creatures all the attributes and characteristics that would enable them to live fulfilled and successful lives. Epimetheus said he would do the distributing and Prometheus could come and check up on his work. This the brothers agreed upon.

  Epimetheus set to with a will. He gave armor to some animals—the rhinoceros, the pangolin, and the armadillo, for instance. To others, almost at random it seemed, he handed out heavy weatherproof fur, camouflage, venom, feathers, tusks, talons, scales, claws, gills, wings, whiskers, and goodness knows what else. He assigned speed and ferocity, he apportioned buoyancy and airworthiness—every animal was fitted out with its own cleverly designed and efficient speciality, from navigational skills to expertise in burrowing, nest-building, swimming, leaping, and singing. He was just congratulating himself for providing the bats and dolphins with echolocation when he realized that this had been the very last of the available gifts. He had, with his characteristic lack of foresight, completely omitted to consider what he would bestow on man—poor, naked, vulnerable, smooth-skinned, two-legged man.

  Epimetheus went guiltily to his brother and asked what they should do now that there was nothing left at the bottom of the gift basket. Man had no defences with which to arm himself against the cruelty, cunning, and rapacity of these now superbly provisioned animals. The very powers that had been lavished on the beasts would surely finish off weaponless mankind.

  Prometheus’s solution was to steal the arts from Athena and flame from Hephaestus. With these, man could use wisdom, wit, and industry to pit himself against the animals. He might not swim as well as a fish, but he could work out how to build boats; he might not run as swiftly as a horse, but he could learn to tame, shoe, and ride one. One day he might even construct wings to rival those of the birds.

  Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus—not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals.

  Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, “forethought.” Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say:

  The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant . . . True forethought only arises when a man does something toward which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date . . . the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

  This is perhaps a way of suggesting that Prometheus is father of our civilization in a way more subtle than as
the provider of fire, whether real or symbolic. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, town dwellers, and traders? You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

  Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favorite Greek motto was, after all, mēdén ágan “nothing too much”), Russell reminds us that the Greeks seemed to be aware of a need to counter his influence with darker, deeper, less stable passions:

  It is evident that this process [acting on prudence and forethought] can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

  The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought—which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros, or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least . . .

  HOPE

  What Elpis being left behind in Pandora’s jar meant to the Greeks, and what it might mean for us today, have been matters of intriguing debate amongst scholars and thinkers since the invention of writing and perhaps even before that.

  For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us.

  Others have maintained that Elpis means more than “hope,” it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death, and ultimate failure that looms over us all. Such an interpretation of the myth is, in a dark manner, optimistic.

  Nietzsche looked at it in yet another, slightly different way. For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man’s existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration.

  Hopefully, or hopelessly, we can decide for ourselves.

  GIANT LEAPS

  There are some stories in Greek myth of a GIGANTOMACHY, or “war with the giants.” A hundred of this warrior race (who, as I have mentioned, were not especially tall or gigantic in the modern sense) were born of Gaia and the blood of the gelded Ouranos. It may be that the war was Gaia’s last attempt at wresting control of the cosmos. In some sources there seems to be an overlap or fusion with the Titanomachy. What seems certain is that a violent uprising of some sort did take place and that it was led by the King of the Giants, EURYMEDON, against the gods.

  Two giants battling the gods during the Gigantomachy.

  We do not have the names of all the participants, but the fates of a few of the mightiest were certainly recorded. The most powerful of all, ENCELADUS (the noisy one) was buried by Athena under Mount Etna, from which prison he continues to grumble volcanically.203 POLYBOTES was crushed under Nisyrus, a section of the island of Cos that Poseidon broke off and thrust on top of him.204 DAMYSUS (the conqueror) was killed early in the struggle, but came to fame later, when his body was exhumed by the centaur Chiron for spare parts. Hephaestus emptied a vat of molten iron all over the unfortunate MIMAS (the imitator); CLYTIUS (the renowned) was consumed in the flames of Hecate’s torches; SYCEUS, with Zeus in hot pursuit, was saved from extinction when Gaia turned him into a fig tree.205 Hippolytus (the stampeder of horses) was slain by Hermes, who cheated by wearing his invisibility cloak; and Dionysus killed TYPHOEUS (the smolderer) with his sacred thyrsus.

  I have read of one giant, called ARISTAEUS (the best),206 who was spared from the war by being hidden away in the shape of a dung beetle by his mother, Gaia. But how THOON (the swift), PHOITIOS (the reckless), MOLIOS, EMPHYTOS (the rooted one), and goodness knows how many others of the giant race all met their ends remains, as far as we know, unrecorded.

  Oddly one account tells how the ferocious giant PORPHYRION (the purple one) in the act of trying to rape Hera was killed by Zeus and Heracles, which places his death much later in the timeline than the rest of the Gigantomachy. As if such a consistent and stable a device as a timeline could ever be used to delineate the complex, kaleidoscopic, and disorderly unfolding of Greek myth.

  FEET AND TOES

  Like us the Greeks used feet as a measurement. One pous (plural podes) was made up of about fifteen or sixteen toes (daktyla) and was approximately as long as a British or American foot. There were one hundred podes to a plethron (the width of a running track), six of those to a stadion (the length of a running track, from which we get our word “stadium”), and eight stadia to the mile, or milion. The foot business—podiatrists, octopuses (or octopodes), tripods, and so on—shows the interesting journey of the letter “P” as it strangely contorted to “F” the farther west it went: so pous became Fuss in German and foot in English. Pfennig, Pfeife, and Pfeffer are still stuck in the middle in modern German but have become penny, pipe, and pepper in English (though fife exists too). The early nineteenth-century philologist Friedrich von Schlegel first noticed this “Great Fricative Shift,” which subsequently became part of Grimm’s Law—so named in honor of the Brothers Grimm, who were the ones who really put in the work and showed how most of the languages of Europe and the Middle East could be traced all the way back to India and their notional Proto-Indo-European ancestor.

  203. Scientists now tell us that the moon of Saturn named after Enceladus, a mere eight hundred 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.

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

  205. The fig thereafter bore Syceus’s name.

  206. Not to be confused with a minor god of beekeeping with the same name.

  AFTERWORD

  I have assembled below a few thoughts on the nature of myth and a brief outline of some of the sources I have had recourse to in the writing of this book.

  I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the “ages of man,” for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation
of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories “wrong” I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions. In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive.

  MYTH V. LEGEND V. RELIGION

  Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure.207 The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning “to be read.”208

  Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture, and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly, and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred, and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall, and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame, and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.