The attraction of Apollo, especially to writers, artists and musicians, is that he is a god of outstanding physical beauty and presence, responsible for harmony and order after the earth’s early period of violent upheaval – look at him calming the chaotic wedding feast of Lapiths and Centaurs in the sculptures from the west pediment of Zeus’ temple at Olympia. Dionysos may be needed, as Nietszche suggests, to break things up again, to get the juices flowing, to reintroduce the wild and barbaric and reinvigorate what has become sclerotic and academic, but after more than a century of that, the appeal of Apollo’s watchwords, ‘Know yourself’ and ‘Nothing in excess’, is all the greater. Not that in his intimate human encounters he always seems quite master of his own emotions, whether of love or anger, but this too is part of his attraction, that he gets caught up in the knotty problems and contrivances which all human affairs inevitably entail, that he behaves sometimes more like a man than a god.
HERAKLES
1. THE MARES
Several new houses are being built and some old ones reconstructed on a site overlooking our village square. The big bags of concrete waiting to be mixed are labelled ‘HERAKLES’. Son of Zeus and the mortal Alkmene, the Superman of ancient Greece, Herakles remains the most famous of all the Greek heroes and has the most stories attached to him. He was born in Thebes, but his family came from Argos and many of his celebrated Labours were performed in the Peloponnese. He should have been the king of Argos, except that from the very beginning he was up against the goddess Hera, Father Zeus’ wife and sister, whose main role in Greek mythology seems to be to persecute her husband’s mortal mistresses and their children. Hera made sure that Herakles’ cousin Eurystheus, who was conceived after him, should be born before him and would therefore inherit the kingdom which Zeus had intended for his son Herakles.
Even this did not mollify the angry goddess. When Herakles was still in his cradle she sent a pair of snakes to finish him off. Alerted by the frightened screams of his mortal twin, Iphikles, their father and mother came running into the babies’ room to find that Herakles was holding a lashing snake in each hand. He smiled sweetly at his horrified parents, squeezed both snakes to death and dropped them on the floor.
Little Iphikles’ father, Amphitryon, was not, of course, little Herakles’ real father. While Amphitryon was away exacting revenge for the murder of his wife’s two brothers – this was Alkmene’s bride-price – Zeus had taken his place in Alkmene’s bed and, in order to ensure that she would bear a truly remarkable hero, stayed there for a night the length of three nights, ordering the sun to stand still – or rather, as Zeus would have known but most Greek storytellers did not, stopping the earth rolling on its axis. When Amphitryon returned to his wife’s arms he found her exhausted and astonished that her husband still had the energy for another night of lovemaking. Nevertheless she did her best to satisfy him and the result was twins, one by Zeus and one by Amphitryon.
We last met Herakles on his way to Thrace, having wrested Admetos’ wife Alcestis from the arms of Death. His task in Thrace, the eighth of his Twelve Labours, was to capture four man-eating mares belonging to the local king, Diomedes, and bring them to his cousin Eurystheus, whose palace was at Tiryns. These Twelve Labours were the consequence of another attempt by Hera to ruin Herakles’ life. She sent him mad, and in his madness he mistook his wife Megara, daughter of King Creon of Thebes, and their six children for enemies and killed them. When he recovered his wits immediately after the slaughter and saw what he had done, he broke away from the soldiers sent to arrest him and went into the palace armoury intending to kill himself, bolting the door from inside so as not to be prevented. But the goddess Athene, who had instructions from Zeus to look after him as assiduously as Hera tried to destroy him, appeared to him while he was still hesitating over which of the innumerable weapons available he should take down from the wall and turn on himself. She told him that Zeus had not brought him into the world to leave it so soon and that his great strength and fierce spirit were intended to benefit mankind.
‘Where was the benefit of killing my beloved wife and children?’ he asked.
‘That was not the will of Zeus,’ said Athene.
‘Then Zeus is not all-powerful?’
Gods never criticise each other in front of mortals, so Athene avoided mentioning Hera’s jealousy.
‘In the short term his will is sometimes frustrated,’ she said, ‘by the free will of others, whether mortals or immortals. But in the long term, often by winding, zig-zag paths, he reaches his goal and achieves his purpose.’
‘And along those crooked paths, our sufferings, my great loss and sorrow and despair, are nothing to him?’
‘Zeus did not create mortals, any more than men created animals. He may sympathise with your losses and sorrows, he cannot by his nature share them. No more than you can share his knowledge of the future and of where the paths will eventually lead. You can only trust him and be sure that from a man such as you he expects more, even in such dreadful circumstances, than self-pity and self-harm.’
The Labours, to be imposed by the cousin he particularly despised, were his penalty and expiation, an ancient and more exacting version of our own Community Service Orders. Most of them entailed ridding the world of dangerous monsters, though one or two, such as fetching the golden apples of the Hesperides and stealing the girdle of the Queen of the Amazons, were merely frivolous. It may be that Eurystheus ran out of ideas for really useful tasks, or more likely that he didn’t want any more live monsters brought back to Tiryns. The storytellers say that he asked for them to be brought back alive, but since he was so terrified by them that whenever Herakles reappeared with another over his shoulder Eurystheus took refuge in a large bronze urn, this was surely Herakles’ own humorous wheeze, a way of getting back at his taskmaster and perhaps hinting that he’d do better to set tasks that didn’t involve monsters.
Herakles had arranged for a few friends to meet him on the coast of Thrace, since he guessed that extracting the mares from King Diomedes’ stables would provoke a battle with the king’s equally savage warriors, the Bistones. It was easy enough to get at the mares, given that Diomedes’ servants had orders to feed them with unaccredited strangers – those without visas, as it were. Accordingly, as soon as Herakles turned up at the palace entrance and begged for something to eat, the guards seized him and two of them marched him round to the stables. They were particularly contemptuous of such a huge man with such a powerful physique who submitted so meekly to having his hands tied behind his back. He had left his weapons – his club and his bow and arrows – as well as his lion skin, with his friends on the beach and was wearing only an old tattered cloak and a pair of patched leather trousers, so that they took him for a vagrant from some distant part of Asia.
The groom on duty at the stables was delighted to see him.
‘Now what shall we do with you?’ he said.
‘A little something to eat!’ whined Herakles, rolling his eyes.
‘Oh, more than a little something,’ said the groom, pulling back the tattered cloak and eyeing the mighty torso of the strongest man in the world. ‘As we say here, I should think you could eat like a horse.’
He and the guards had a good laugh.
‘In fact, in your case I’d say more like four horses,’ and he pointed jovially to the four man-eating mares snorting and stamping in their stall and straining at the heavy iron collars and chains that prevented them from breaking out.
‘They do look hungry,’ said Herakles and, bursting the rope round his wrists, raised both arms and felled the guards on either side of him with simultaneous blows to the back of their necks. Then, as the groom turned to run, Herakles caught him by his lank Thracian-style hair and told him to unlock the mares’ collars and hitch them to the king’s four-horse chariot, which stood in a shed nearby. The groom, stuttering with terror, told him they must not be released before they’d eaten human flesh, but after that they became perfectly calm
and amenable.
‘That’s fine,’ said Herakles. ‘Then give them their breakfast!’
And he made the groom drag the two guards into the stall, where the mares immediately started to devour them. While they were doing so Herakles and the groom brought out the chariot.
‘What would you say now?’ asked Herakles contemplating the mares with blood dripping from their jaws and the torn corpses at their feet, ‘Have they had enough or will they need a second course before they’ll pull the chariot?’
‘They won’t need any more,’ said the groom.
‘Just as well,’ said Herakles, ‘you’re too puny to go far between four horses. Release them, then, and hitch them up!’
Half an hour later the two remaining guards at the palace entrance were appalled to see the four mares gallop past drawing the king’s best chariot, whose only occupant was the recently arrested stranger in his tattered cloak and patched trousers.
It wasn’t far to the beach, where Herakles gave the mares to his friend Abderos to look after while he and his other friends prepared to do battle with the Bistones who would surely be in hot pursuit as soon as King Diomedes heard of the theft. The friends had not been idle while Herakles was absent, but according to his instructions had dug a long trench in the level ground above the beach between the two swift rivers that entered the sea at that point. Herakles was still damming the rivers with rocks and debris when a cloud of dust on the road announced that the Bistones were coming, several score of them, all on foot except for King Diomedes in his second-best chariot drawn by two vegetarian stallions.
Even with Herakles at their head, the dozen or so friends did not feel hopeful about the outcome, but they did as they had been told and dug through the last barriers between the river and the trench, leaping away as the river poured into its new course. Herakles quickly filled the last gaps in his two dams, and as the Bistones broke into a charge they suddenly found themselves confronted with a double torrent and surrounded by a rapidly expanding lake. What could they do but turn and run back up the road? But the king’s chariot in the lead took the full force of the two diverted rivers and overturned, spilling Diomedes and his charioteer into the water. Both jumped clear and the charioteer managed to flounder to safety, but the king was not so lucky. He probably never knew what hit him – it was Herakles’ massive club and the blow on Diomedes’ bronze helmet shattered his skull. Herakles pulled him out of the water and laid him on the beach, then, picking up his bow and arrows, went to help his friends finish off those Bistones who had escaped the water and still wanted a fight.
But when they returned triumphant to the beach they were met by a dreadful sight. Abderos had led the mares to a small grove of fir trees and tied them in pairs to two stout trunks, then sat down nearby on a rock to watch the battle with the Bistones. Two of the mares, however, had chewed through the ropes that held them and, hungry again, had caught Abderos from behind and were even now consuming his corpse. The other two mares were desperately straining at their ropes to join the feast and would no doubt soon be free. Herakles sent his friends to collect as many fallen Bistones as they could carry and himself fetched King Diomedes and threw him in front of the two tethered mares before driving the other two off the corpse of Abderos with his club. All four then set about tearing the flesh off their former owner. And strange to say, when Herakles’ friends returned with assorted Bistones, the mares showed no interest in them and indeed never afterwards ate anything but grass and hay and the occasional apple. But before hitching them to Diomedes’ best chariot and riding back to Tiryns, while his friends dispersed to their various cities and islands, Herakles buried the bones of Abderos and promised his spirit to return one day and found a city named after him.
2. THE COWSHEDS
Herakles had used his trick of diverting rivers once before, for his fifth Labour. This was a filthy job. In the north-western corner of the Peloponnese there was a king of the Epeans called Augeias, who owned a huge herd of pedigree cattle, 30,000 of them. But their sheds had not been cleaned for 30 years – in those days the Greeks did not value manure as a fertiliser – and there was so much dung in them that the cattle were having to be kept outside. Winter was approaching and King Augeias was wondering what to do about it, when his son Phyleus remarked jokingly that only a superman like Herakles could hope to shovel shit on that scale. Augeias immediately despatched a messenger to Tiryns and Eurystheus enthusiastically agreed to send Herakles, adding that the whole job was to be completed in a single day.
When Herakles arrived he inspected the cowsheds and walked about the neighbourhood, admiring the great herds of fine cattle in all the fields around.
‘What do you think?’ asked Augeias. ‘Can you do anything about it?’
‘Oh, yes, no problem,’ said Herakles. ‘My fee is 10 per cent.’
‘Ten per cent of what?’
‘Of your cattle.’
‘Three thousand head of cattle!’ said Augeias, who was evidently a mean man or he would have paid labourers to clean his cowsheds regularly. ‘I thought you did these jobs for nothing.’
‘This one is exceptionally unpleasant,’ said Herakles, ‘not really suitable for a son of Zeus, and I feel I’m entitled to some small reward. What do you think?’ turning to Augeias’ young son Phyleus who was standing beside them.
‘It seems fair to me,’ said Phyleus, a brave boy who was afraid of his father but had been taught by his mother always to tell the truth and was besides thrilled to be consulted by such a famous hero. ‘I don’t know who else would or could do it for twice that fee or even the whole herd.’
‘All right, I agree,’ said Augeias sulkily, with a furious glance at his son.
So the moment dawn broke next day, Herakles, completely naked, set to work knocking down one wall of the cowsheds and diverting the courses of the two nearby rivers, the Alpheos and the Peneos. Just before dusk he dug away the banks and the two rivers raced towards the sheds. There was a brief period of flooding as the water encountered the dung and Augeias’ servants’ quarters were inundated, but very slowly the massed cowpats began to slide and shift and suddenly with a mighty whoosh the two currents regained their power and scoured Augeias’ cowsheds from end to end. Herakles threw down his last spade – he had bent or broken dozens – and smiled at the king.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll be on my way with the three thousand cattle in the morning.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Augeias. ‘It was the rivers that cleared the cowsheds, not you, and you’ve cost me every spade in my kingdom.’
‘You made an agreement,’ said Herakles.
‘Did I?’
‘There were no get-out clauses, no ifs or buts. Your son was a witness.’
‘Was he?’
Both men turned to look at Phyleus, who blushed all over at the embarrassing choice he had to make between supporting his father or telling the truth.
‘There were no ifs or buts,’ he mumbled.
‘This is your inheritance, son,’ said Augeias.
‘But you did agree and I thought that was fair.’
‘Then you’ll get no inheritance at all.’
‘Better that than inheriting a broken promise.’
‘You don’t know what’s good for you, son, and as far as I’m concerned you’re no longer any son of mine. You can leave my kingdom and go on the roads as a beggar! As for you, Herakles, you’ve done what you were told to do and can go home to your master before I call out my fighting-men.’
Some say that Herakles did so and came back later to exact his revenge, but it’s hard to imagine a man of his temper behaving so meekly under such provocation. No, Herakles picked up the king and dangled him upside down by one leg over the rushing waters of the Alpheos.
‘Did you make an agreement or didn’t you, king of shit?’
‘All right, I did.’
‘Nobody messes with Herakles. Remember that in future!’
‘I will, I will.�
��
But the wretched man had no future. Whether on purpose or because his hands were greasy with sweat, Herakles dropped him and he was swept away through his own well-scoured cowsheds and out to the dung-dark sea. Then, resuming his lion skin, picking up his club and bow and arrows, shooting or clubbing a few of the foolish king’s more foolhardy guards who tried to stop him, Herakles rounded up a good number of the cattle and, taking the young Phyleus with him, drove them home to Tiryns, where he gave them to a farmer to care for on his behalf.
He did not forget the courage and honesty shown by the boy Phyleus, but a few years later returned to Augeias’ kingdom with a small force of friends, defeated and expelled Augeias’ younger son, a surly and unpopular ruler like his father, and installed Phyleus as king. And while he was in that part of the Peloponnese, Herakles revived the Olympic Games, which had ceased to be held sometime after the death of Pelops. The marble metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, carved by an unknown master in the fifth century BC, depicted Herakles’ Twelve Labours, and their fragments are among the treasures in the Archaeological Museum there. Why twelve rather than the ten Herakles had originally been assigned? Back at Tiryns, cousin Eurystheus declared that since Herakles had received a fee the cleansing of the cowsheds could not count as a Labour, so, with another that had already been ruled out, ten Labours became twelve.
Arcadian Nights Page 11
