Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  The Greek gods may not have had the same internal organs as humans – a fluid called ichor served them for blood and they consumed only ambrosia and nectar – but they certainly had seed and frequently increased the human population on an ad hoc basis. Not that they did this as a favour to us. They were attracted to beautiful mortals, mostly women, occasionally men. The goddesses Hera, Athene, Artemis and Demeter are not reported to have had sexual relations with mortals, but Aphrodite, the goddess of love, herself fell in love with Anchises and bore him the Trojan hero Aeneas. Her other notorious mortal love affair was with Adonis, a keen hunter who was gored by a wild boar and became the vivid blood red anemone which flowers in early spring in the sheltered parts of the hills round our house. The male gods too sometimes fancied men. Zeus loved Ganymedes, a prince of Troy, and brought him to Olympos as his cupbearer, Poseidon loved Pelops, and Apollo loved Cyparissos and Hyacinthos.

  Cyparissos was a grandson of Herakles and another passionate hunter, but became such a miserable companion after killing his favourite stag by mistake that Apollo gave up on him and turned him into a cypress tree. His memorials are everywhere along our coast, but especially round cemeteries. Apollo’s love for the beautiful and athletic Hyacinthos, a prince of Sparta, ended more abruptly. The lovers were throwing the discus together when the wind caught the discus – no plastic frisbee, but made of stone – and blew it against the boy’s head, cracking his skull and killing him. One version has it that Boreas, the north wind, and Zephyr, the west wind, were also in love with Hyacinthos and killed him out of jealousy. But if they were both blowing their kisses towards him at the same time it was probably misadventure, not murder. Apollo turned Hyacinthos into the flower named after him.

  But on the whole Apollo preferred women. In his play Ion, Euripides tells the story of a girl called Creousa, the unmarried daughter of an early king of Athens, who was picking wild flowers on the lower slopes of the Acropolis when she was spotted by Apollo, dragged into a nearby cave and raped. Their child, Ion, whom Creousa bore in secret and left in the same cave to die, became eventually the ancestor of the Ionians, most of whom lived in classical times along the coast of Asia Minor, now the western coast of Turkey. Their distant descendants are back in Greece now after the forcible ethnic exchange that took place in 1923, when the 800,000 Turks living in Greece were swapped for the 1.5 million Greeks living in Turkey, a Stalinist solution carried out under the auspices of the League of Nations. The dire consequences for people uprooted and resettled among resentful and unfriendly compatriots in a small, already overpopulated country with meagre resources were still evident after the Second World War.

  When Creousa visited the cave surreptitiously a few days later she found no corpse. All traces of her baby, including its basket and wrappings and an ancestral necklace of entwined serpents which she had clasped round its neck, had vanished. She assumed, what she had hoped all along, that some kindly peasant had found and adopted it. She went sadly home to her father’s palace and in due course married a man called Xouthos, who after her father’s death became king of Athens. Many years later she and her husband were still childless and went to Delphi to get advice from Apollo’s oracle. It was Xouthos, in fact, who consulted the priestess, while Creousa, very nervous and unsettled by this visit to her long-ago secret rapist’s headquarters, stayed in their hotel room – Delphi was always a tourist mecca, with souvenir stalls, eating places and all levels of accommodation. She gave her attendant women permission to tour the sights – temples, statues, monuments to victory in war or sport – before gathering outside the priestess’s sanctuary to wait for Xouthos and hear what advice he had received.

  He emerged exultant, smiling happily, swivelling his head from side to side, evidently looking for something. Just below him, sweeping the temple steps, was a boy in his teens. Xouthos no sooner caught sight of him than he ran down the steps and put his arms round the boy.

  ‘My son, my son!’ he said.

  The boy tried to push him away.

  ‘No, no!’ he said, ‘you’re mistaken. I’m just an attendant here, just a servant working for the priestess.’

  ‘The priestess herself told me that you were my son,’ said Xouthos.

  ‘How could she do that?’ asked the boy. ‘She doesn’t know who my parents are. She found me as a baby, left by some unfortunate woman on these very steps, and she took me in and brought me up, and as soon as I was old enough gave me the job of keeping the place clean and stopping the birds from roosting on the pediment and shitting everywhere. Look, there’s a couple of doves up there now! I must get my bow and arrows. Let me go, please!’

  ‘All I can say,’ said Xouthos, ‘is that the priestess told me that the first male person I met when I came out of the temple would be my son. Why? I’ve no idea. What does it matter? I asked the advice of Apollo and this was his answer. Perhaps you don’t know who I am?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said the boy, ‘and it strikes me that you might have met anyone when you came out of the temple. That old man there, for example,’ pointing to a very bent old slave standing with the women at the foot of the steps.

  ‘It was you I met first,’ said Xouthos, ‘and it certainly would have been unfortunate and not at all what the priestess meant if I’d met that fellow first, since he’s been a slave in my wife’s family for about fifty years and is far too old to be my son or the son of any living man. I must tell you, dear boy, that I am the King of Athens and it would surprise me a great deal if you aren’t absolutely delighted to find yourself from this moment on not a sweeper or a bird-scarer, but a prince and the heir to a great kingdom.’

  ‘I see, that’s nice. But, you know, I’m very happy as I am. This is pleasant work in a beautiful place. And what more could anyone ask than to serve the great god Apollo?’

  ‘Apollo evidently means you to serve him from now on in a higher station. Or do you suppose that the advice I received from his priestess was incorrect?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t suppose that. The priestess has been a mother to me and Apollo himself a father.’

  ‘Then you are my son. You are my son and I want to celebrate this wonderful news with a great feast for all the people of Delphi. Put away your broom, dear boy, and come with me! We have arrangements to make – a marquee, food, drink, tables, servants – and since you’ve lived here all your life, you’ll know all the best people to supply these things.’

  ‘This is very sudden and confusing,’ said the boy. ‘Do you mean that Apollo wants you to adopt me or that he’s saying I’m really your son?’

  ‘Undoubtedly the latter. You really are my son.’

  ‘Then who is my mother?’

  ‘That I’m afraid I can’t say.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘It’s a puzzle to me too, I must admit. But I did come to Delphi long ago, when I was very young, and took part in one of the Dionysian mysteries here.’

  ‘You had sex with someone you didn’t know?’

  ‘Well, probably, yes. There were a lot of maenads – girls in a very excited state.’

  ‘So you might have got one of them pregnant with me?’

  ‘That’s the only rational explanation I can offer. But I remember nothing about it – no details. I can only assume that Apollo is better informed than I am. Now, come with me! We have work to do, celebrations to look forward to. Do you have a name, by the way? I shall call you Ion, because you were the first to meet me.’

  And putting his arm round the boy’s shoulders, Xouthos led him away, still protesting that he really had no wish to be a prince. Princes, said Ion, led a very unenviable life; always in the public eye, always in danger of being assassinated, always anxious about their status and their wealth and their popularity. And he wouldn’t even be a legitimate prince, but a foreigner with an unknown mother. People would no doubt be polite to his face, but behind his back they’d despise him. He really would prefer to go on being who he was, the person who kept Apollo’s tem
ple clean and had nothing else to worry about.

  Most of this conversation had been overheard by Creousa’s women and the old slave, so that when Creousa finally appeared to discover what advice her husband had received, they were able to tell her that he’d already found his son. This was not at all what she wanted to hear. Now he had a son and she didn’t. Xouthos himself was a foreigner to Athens, only reigning as its king because he was married to her. Now the heir to the throne would be another foreigner, a boy whose unknown mother had conceived him during a drunken orgy. Creousa, egged on by her women and the old slave, became angrier and angrier the more she thought about the way her husband was treating her, bringing in some by-blow of his own to usurp the throne of her ancestors. As for her husband’s public celebration, she would have nothing to do with it. She hoped this upstart sweeper would drink himself stupid and open her husband’s eyes to his utter unsuitability. She wished she could poison the wretched creature.

  ‘Why not?’ asked the old slave. ‘Give me the poison and I’ll make sure it goes into his wine.’

  Now, as it happened, Creousa did have some poison with her. It was given to her grandfather Erichthonios, the first king of Athens, by the city’s patron goddess, Athene: two drops of the Gorgon’s blood, one that killed and one that cured, contained in a double phial on a golden chain. The heirloom had passed to Creousa on her father’s death and she wore it on her wrist. She gave it to the slave and he tottered away towards the open space where they were already erecting the marquee, a hundred foot square, and bringing out costly tapestries from the oracle’s treasury to hang inside.

  Ion was proving a first-rate organiser and, as Xouthos said, he knew everyone in Delphi. They all liked him and were only too pleased to celebrate his sudden good fortune. The circular tapestry on the ceiling showed the sun setting, the moon rising and night leading on the constellations. Along the walls were tapestries from the East: sea battles between Greeks and Persians, hunters pursuing deer or lions, monsters that were half-human, half-animal. And near the door was a gift from Tiryns, a tapestry showing Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, the Gorgon.

  When the tent was ready and the tables laid with food and wine bowls, a herald stood up on a rock in the town square and shouted a general invitation to the banquet. These invitations to festivities in the seaside town below our village are issued now by the municipal authority (the demos) over loudspeakers in the town and in our village square.

  The old slave had already found Xouthos and been put in charge of mixing the wine with water (in those days the Greeks never drank it neat) and handing it round to the people of Delphi as they entered the tent. When they had all eaten and drunk and Xouthos was about to make a speech announcing that he had found the son he had come to Delphi for, the old slave sent all the attendants round to recharge the wine cups and himself selected and filled a large gold cup.

  ‘Apollo will have to look for another sweeper for his temple,’ he said, as he handed the cup to Ion, ‘but it will be hard to find your equal. Gods are seldom so lucky as to have their temples swept by princes.’

  Ion, who had little experience of human nature but had learnt the ways of gods since childhood, was horrified.

  ‘I never heard such unlucky words,’ he said. ‘Do you mean to insult the gods or to injure me?’ and he poured the contents of the cup on the ground.

  As he did so, one of the doves which had been pecking at the fragments of food dropped on the floor of the tent, darted forward and sipped from the pool of wine. Moments later, shaking and choking, it fell over and lay on its back with its claws in the air, dead. The old slave was already trying to make his way unobtrusively out of the tent as Xouthos shouted, ‘Seize that man and bring him to me! This was poison he meant for my son.’

  Caught and tortured until, with broken limbs and blind in one eye, he was nearly as dead as the dove, the old slave confessed that he had put poison in the cup and that he’d been given the poison by his mistress, Creousa. The people of Delphi, transformed in an instant from party-goers to a howling lynch mob, rushed out of the tent to find Creousa. She, warned by one of her attendant women, who had followed the old slave to the tent and seen what happened, ran up the steps into the temple, took hold of the altar and claimed the god’s protection, just as Orestes was to do one day when he was pursued by the Erinyes.

  Xouthos, meanwhile, who, as a ruler himself, feared illegality and riotous behaviour, persuaded the Delphian magistrates to convene a special court and, citing the slave’s confession, demanded the death sentence for his wife. The case was still being heard as Ion, at the head of the mob, burst into the temple and confronted Creousa.

  ‘What right have you,’ he shouted, ‘to claim sanctuary from Apollo when you meant to murder Apollo’s servant?’

  ‘Everyone has the right to claim sanctuary,’ she said.

  ‘Only the innocent, not the guilty.’

  ‘Guilt has to be proved.’

  ‘It has been proved. Your slave has admitted that you gave him the poison and that it was meant for me.’

  ‘What else could I do? My husband picks up some stray from the temple steps, claims it’s his son – what son? a whore’s mistake? – and means to bring him into my home, to set him on my throne – mine, inherited from my father, not his – he is a foreigner, king only by his marriage to me. So a foreigner’s bastard is to usurp the kingdom of my ancestors? No, let me die by all means sooner than that!’

  ‘Then come away from the altar and die! I’ve no wish to take your precious throne. It wasn’t I who wanted to break into your home, even before I knew what kind of stepmother you’d be. Your quarrel is with your husband, not with me, yet it was me you tried to poison. Come on! You’ve no right to Apollo’s protection. Leave the altar or I’ll pull you off it myself!’

  And, backed up by the crowd filling the temple, he might have done so if the priestess had not come out of her inner sanctum and stopped him.

  ‘Have you learnt nothing in all your years here?’ she said. ‘Violence in a god’s temple is violence against the god. Whatever this woman has done to you or tried to do is for Apollo to punish, not for you. You ceased to be a servant of the temple when Apollo named the King of Athens as your father, and even as a servant of the temple you have no business to attack someone who has claimed sanctuary here. Now, before you leave and take these people with you, I have something to give you. Wait here and stand well back from the altar!’

  The priestess went out and returned with a baby’s cradle.

  ‘This was yours,’ she said, putting it down in front of Ion. ‘This was what you were lying in when I found you on the temple steps eighteen years ago.’

  Everyone craned to see it, but Creousa could see it close to and, forgetting her fear, left the altar to touch it. Ion stepped forward to seize her, but the priestess intervened.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘No violence. If she goes with you willingly, so be it, but you must not touch her yet.’

  ‘This is mine,’ said Creousa. ‘Was mine, long ago.’

  And when she had identified the contents, the cloth woven by herself with a head of Medusa to represent Athene’s aigis, the necklace of gold serpents worn by every royal Athenian child, the wreath of olive leaves from the tree planted by Athene on the Acropolis, the whole story came out. Creousa was Ion’s mother and his father was Apollo.

  But how had the cradle and the baby it contained travelled from a cave in Athens to the steps of the temple at Delphi? In Euripides’ play the mystery is cleared up by the goddess Athene. She appears in person to confirm that Ion is indeed the child of Apollo and that, on his instructions, when Creousa abandoned her baby in the cave, Hermes had brought it to Delphi. Xouthos, who has meanwhile got a verdict from the Delphian magistrates that his wife is to be thrown from a crag to her death, is not best pleased to discover that the longed-for son is after all hers not his, but is mollified by promises that he and Creousa together will produce two more sons, Achaeos and
Doros, who, together with Ion, will be the eponymous ancestors of all future Greeks: Ionians, Achaeans and Dorians.

  Apollo emerges from all this with a mixture of credit and discredit. He saved the child and arranged for it to grow up in health and safety; on the other hand he conceived the child without the mother’s consent and gave her no help or comfort in her secret pregnancy (except, says Athene, to make it an easy birth and easy to conceal from her parents) or in her distress at abandoning it, or in all the years since. He contrived to prevent the mother killing her son and the son killing the mother, but at the cost of much misery for both and the torture of the unfortunate old slave. He passed the business of saving the child to his brother Hermes and the business of final explanation to his half-sister Athene, who admits that Apollo sent her because he wished to avoid hearing any reproaches.

  Euripides is often accused, and was accused in his lifetime, of bringing the gods into disrepute, of showing them in a bad light. Isn’t it rather that in re-interpreting the old stories he can’t help highlighting the difficulty of the relationships between mortals and immortals, between powerless creatures with short lives and powerful forces that last for ever? Whether any gods exist is still a vexed question, but there can be no question that the only view we have of them is our own, coloured by our own superstitions, traditions, sacred texts and theological dogmas. The Greek gods may sometimes seem as morally uncertain as we are, but the prophet Elijah’s Old Testament Jehovah certainly suffered from fierce jealousy of rival gods and he is just as vindictive towards mortals who offend him as the Olympians. The Christians’ three-person god is a complex abstraction, a theological compound of a remarkable rural preacher/teacher in Roman Palestine with the Jewish Jehovah and traditions from all over the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece and its great philosopher Plato. But for story-lines and the human touch, Christianity relies as much on its saints and martyrs as the Greeks did on their heroes or demigods. Saint Nicholas, for instance, patron of sailors as well as children, who has a chapel overlooking our favourite beach beside the Myrtoan Sea, seems to have inherited Poseidon’s function as marine overseer, together with a storyline borrowed from the myth of Dionysos.