Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  3. THE HYDRA

  Driving to our village from Argos one passes through a little town called Myli at the head of the Gulf. Is this the place that features in the first section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?

  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying:

  ‘Stetson!

  You who were with me in the ships at Mylae …’

  superimposing, if so, the First World War and its American reinforcements (Stetson) on the War of Troy and invoking all such wars to date – the poem was published in 1922. But was Myli the port from which Agamemnon’s argosy sailed to Troy? More likely it was Nauplia, since Myli in ancient times was a town called Lerna and most of the shore at the head of the Gulf was a marsh. The marsh has been eliminated now, but this is still a most unprepossessing place, a long curving road with a shallow sea and dreary-looking beach on one side and holiday homes on the other. Nearer to Nauplia there’s a factory with tall chimneys emitting a great cloud of white smoke and a sulphurous smell, plus a series of grotesque nightclubs in various Hollywood/Mexican styles. Stetson, now a Greek cowboy home from finding his fortune in the USA, has put his mark on the dried-up marsh.

  In Herakles’ time it was a serious bog, inhabited by the Lernaian Hydra, and his second Labour was to kill this monster, which was said to have a body like a dog’s and nine heads. The bog itself was dangerous enough – even some fifteen centuries later, in the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, it was unfathomable and sometimes swallowed unwary travellers – but the Hydra was poisonous, breathing out lethal fumes from all its heads. Although the marsh was only a few miles from Tiryns, Herakles travelled there by chariot, driven by his young nephew Iolaos, son of his twin half-brother Iphikles. Herakles had probably been warned in advance by the goddess Athene that he might need his charioteer’s assistance, as indeed proved to be the case. It was Athene too who showed him the monster’s lair under a plane tree at the source of one of the rivers which fed the marsh and suggested that he light a bonfire and fetch it out with a shower of burning arrows. After that Athene withdrew and left him to it.

  The creature, when it emerged from the ooze onto dry land and rushed angrily towards Herakles, had a body the size of a large pig, its skin was mottled and waxy like a toad’s, and its nine snaky necks, writhing hideously from every part of its body, overtopped Herakles, though the heads, puffing poison, were relatively small. It was more like a giant octopus on legs than a dog. Herakles shot two arrows into it as it approached. These increased its fury but seemed to have no other effect. As the Hydra reached him, Herakles held his breath and swung his club horizontally across all the heads at once. The Hydra was momentarily dazed and sat back on its haunches, while its necks, which had become tangled, sorted themselves out. Herakles took the opportunity to pull out his arrows – he always disliked losing them – but was dismayed to see that two new necks and heads grew out of the wounds. With his head turned away, he drew a deep breath and, as the now eleven heads reached towards him again, swiped them again. This went on for some time until it became clear to Herakles that however hard and often he hit the heads, he was doing them no real damage. He and the Hydra could go on like this for ever, except that even Herakles could not continue swinging his club for more than a day or two, so the Hydra would eventually get the better of him. The next time the necks reared up again, he threw his club aside, drew his long knife and slashed off the nearest head. The neck started to gush green slime and then – horrible to see – grew two more heads. Herakles slashed again and cut off both heads. Slime poured out and four heads grew. Herakles cut off a different head, but again two heads grew in its place. This was a monster now with fifteen poisonous heads instead of the original nine. What to do? His nephew was watching from behind the chariot.

  ‘Iolaos!’ shouted Herakles, retrieving his club and retreating a few yards, ‘bring brands from the fire!’

  Then as the Hydra followed he stopped it with another side-swipe to its fifteen undulating necks and kept swiping until Iolaos joined him with a red-hot branch in either hand.

  ‘Now when I take off a head,’ said Herakles, ‘you must cauterise the neck.’

  It worked. Herakles cut, Iolaos applied his smouldering branch to the green slime, the neck shrank and shrivelled like the stalk of a dead flower, and no more heads grew. Soon they were down to the original nine, but now the Hydra gained an ally. An enormous crab, the size of a round shield, came out of the marsh and sank its pincers into Herakles’ left foot. Herakles shouted with pain, stumbled and would have fallen and been easy prey for the Hydra’s poisonous breath, but Iolaos caught his arm and kept him upright. With a mighty kick Herakles dislodged the crab, turning it upside down – its pincers waving uselessly in the air – and went on beheading the Hydra.

  It was still not a won battle. Two or three times a puffing head came perilously close to Iolaos’ face and he fell back without cauterising the neck that Herakles had just exposed, allowing more heads to grow. But by midday the monster was down to three heads and had had enough. It turned and began to run back to its lair. Herakles, seizing the burning branch from Iolaos, ran after it, sliced a head with one hand and cauterised it with the other. Now there were only two heads and the creature, despairing of reaching its lair, turned sideways into the marsh. Herakles followed, sliced, cauterised and now there was only one head left. The Hydra’s body was already sinking into the mud and Herakles was up to his thighs in it. Iolaos began to be alarmed.

  ‘Leave it, uncle, leave it! Don’t go any further!’ he shouted, but Herakles was determined to finish the job and with one more stroke of his knife severed the last head, cauterised the neck with the last few inches of his burning branch and plunged his knife downwards into the creature’s body, now invisible beneath the surface of the marsh. The dead Hydra took the knife with it into the depths and neither was ever seen again. But Herakles himself, up to his middle in mud, was now in immediate danger of being sucked down. His struggles to escape only made him sink lower, his great strength was useless. It was lucky he had brought the chariot, not to speak of the charioteer, who immediately untied the two horses, still wearing their harness, from the tree round which they had been grazing, tossed the reins to Herakles, who had sunk now to his armpits, and urged the horses up the slope from the beach. Slowly the hero’s mighty torso emerged, his belly and buttocks, his massive thighs, and suddenly he was free, dragged like a great marble statue coated in stinking sludge onto firm ground.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Time for lunch.’

  But Iolaos pointed to the fire, which had begun to spread. Together they beat and stamped it out, leaving the hot centre still smouldering.

  ‘We shall need that,’ said Herakles and, taking his club to the crab, which was still lying on its back, feebly gesticulating with its claws, he beat it to death and threw it on the fire.

  While it was cooking Herakles washed himself thoroughly in a clear spring near the Hydra’s lair and picking up his two arrows from the ground where he had thrown them, returned them to his quiver. It didn’t occur to him that these arrows were now steeped in the Hydra’s deadly poison and he would only discover this later to his great sorrow. When the crab was nicely done they scooped out its flesh with Iolaos’ knife, ate it with some bread and olives they had brought with them, and afterwards lay down for a siesta in the shade of the trees.

  Although its intervention was a mere footnote to the story, this giant crab nevertheless rose in due course to the stars as the constellation Cancer, my own sign of the zodiac, and in memory of its loyalty to a fellow monster twinkles modestly beside the head of Hydra, largest of all the constellations.

  Herakles and Iolaos returned to Tiryns in the evening and Herakles entertained Eurystheus and his courtiers over dinner with a full account of his battle with the Hydra, plonking his left leg on the table to show them the gashes left by the crab’s pincers. Everyone was amazed and grateful, except Eurystheus.

  ‘All very well,’ he said, ‘but I
can’t count it as one of your ten Labours. You had too much help from Iolaos. And besides, what proof is there that the Hydra is really dead? You say it sank into the marsh, but there are no independent witnesses, only your own nephew. However, the next one I’ve got for you should be a lot easier and I hope this time you’ll stick to the rules.’

  4. THE STAG

  The Arcadian Stag was not a monster. On the contrary, it was a most beautiful dappled creature with golden antlers and brazen hooves. Some said it was a hind, but if so what was it doing with antlers, unless it was a reindeer? Perhaps the confusion arose because it had been roaming the Arcadian mountains with its four attendant hinds when the goddess Artemis, whose favourite hunting ground was in those mountains, spotted them. She captured the four hinds and used them to draw her chariot, but the stag escaped. It frequently came down into Argolis and ate the farmers’ crops, but was too swift and cunning ever to be caught, and no one dared to shoot or harm it in any way for fear of angering Artemis. So Eurystheus told Herakles to catch it and bring it to Tiryns.

  Herakles travelled in his chariot as far as the mountains, but then dismissed Iolaos and continued on foot. Otherwise, as he said:

  ‘These Labours will keep sprouting like the Hydra’s heads and I shall grow old in my cousin’s service. Which is no doubt what he intends, since he must know that as soon as I’m through with them, my final Labour – a free bonus service to all his subjects – will be to turn that bronze urn of his upside down with him inside it.’

  It was several days before the stag appeared, stepping delicately down from the upper slopes to feed on somebody’s vineyard. Herakles, who had been hiding near this spot because it was relatively high up and isolated and he guessed might prove a temptation to his quarry, crept out and came within a few feet of it. But a dry stick cracked under his foot, the stag’s head went up and in a second it was off up the hill. Herakles ran after it. He was a faster runner than any man in Greece, then or since, but still no match for the stag, which after an hour’s pursuit vanished into a forest of chestnut trees. Herakles went back down to his hiding-place to collect his possessions – lion-skin, club, bow and arrows, a bag of provisions and a coil of rope for lassooing and trussing the stag – then climbed the hill again and spent the night under the chestnut trees.

  In the morning he saw the stag – its golden antlers and polished bronze hooves glinting in the sun – silhouetted on the next hill, and carefully worked his way round the hill so as to approach it with the breeze blowing towards him. But again the animal heard him, again it galloped away, and again Herakles pursued it, this time for three hours, since the ground was more open and the running easier. He hoped to tire it out, but it was he who tired first and returned disconsolately to his possessions among the chestnut trees.

  Thereafter he sighted and pursued the stag almost every day, always in vain. But it surprised him that although every day he had to return over the whole course they had run to fetch his possessions, the stag never seemed to spend the night far away, but appeared on some nearby eminence as soon as the sun rose. Once, exhausted, Herakles overslept and was awakened by a gentle snorting and a stamping of bronze hooves quite near his sleeping-place. He rose cautiously to his feet, but it was not until he began to move towards it that the creature turned gracefully on its slender legs like a dancer and made off into the distance. Herakles realised then that the stag was enjoying this daily chase, that it never mingled with the herds of ordinary deer on the mountains and must have been lonely and bored until he came on the scene. On the days when he did not see it at once, he discovered it later returning from another foray off the mountain into somebody’s crops, but most days they ran their race up and down the high ground from Mounts Ktenias and Parthenion in the north to Parnon in the south.

  But how was he ever to catch it? It would have to be by some trick. One morning he pretended to be asleep again and when the stag came closer and snorted and stamped as before, took no notice. The stag came closer still, lowered its head and with the tip of one brazen hoof flipped a small shower of leaves and dirt on to the sleeper’s head. When Herakles still took no notice, the stag snorted again and this time touched his foot, protruding from the lion skin. Herakles was up in a flash, but the animal leapt in the air, turning as it leapt and galloped away up the hill. Herakles shook his fist in the air and shouted:

  ‘You are a joker, I see, and you are taking the piss out of Herakles. This cannot go on. Even if this were not one of my Labours, I would catch you for my own sake, if it takes the rest of my life.’

  The seasons came and went and Herakles became a familiar sight to the shepherds and goatherds and their boys, who pastured their flocks on the mountains in the summer and led them down to the valleys in the winter. When the simple rations Herakles had brought with him were used up, he obtained more from these people or, if they had none to spare, went down into the villages. The stag seemed to shadow him, for it was never far away when he returned up the mountain. But on one occasion, rounding a crag, he came face to face with a lion. The lion glared at him for a moment or two, put its shaggy head on one side, opened its jaws and snarled.

  ‘Are you looking for a fight?’ said Herakles. ‘Don’t try it! See what I’m wearing!’ and he pulled the head of the Nemean lion skin down over his eyes. ‘That beast was twice as big as you. So move over, little Leo, before I clout you with my club!’

  The lion snarled again, but with less conviction, then turned and slunk away into a cleft dense with undergowth.

  On another occasion, higher up the mountain, on a narrow track almost overgrown with broom bushes, he was suddenly confronted with a two-legged creature such as he had never seen before. It had the hairy thighs, legs, cloven hooves and horns of a goat, but the head, body and arms of a man. Its eyes and beard were those of a man, but its flat nose and prehensile lips were goatish. Herakles was taken by surprise and stopped in his tracks, then relaxed and bowed his head.

  ‘Great God Pan!’ he said. ‘You startled me.’

  Pan smiled. It was what he liked doing to passers-by and he was no doubt particularly pleased to have been able to startle Herakles, even if he did not, like most of Pan’s victims, take to his heels in panic.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me?’ asked Herakles. ‘How can I catch the Arcadian stag without doing it any injury?’

  ‘Have you got time?’ said Pan.

  ‘How much time?’

  ‘A year?’

  ‘That long?’

  ‘Or longer?’

  Everything Pan said ended with a question mark and a crooked smile.

  ‘But how?’ asked Herakles, ‘that’s the question.’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘Your help would be invaluable.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to do these things without help?’

  ‘True, but if you were to advise me …?’

  Pan only smiled and raised his bushy eyebrows.

  ‘A net, do you think?’ asked Herakles.

  ‘Have you got one?’

  ‘Or a hole in the ground?’

  ‘Who would walk into a hole in the ground?’

  ‘If it was disguised with sticks and leaves. No, I don’t think the creature would fall for that. He’d see me making it.’

  Pan was evidently losing interest. He scratched his oversized, goatish genitals.

  ‘I’m sure that some sort of surprise is the answer,’ said Herakles, ‘the sort of thing you’re so good at.’

  Pan smiled a wide, happy smile and vanished.

  Herakles had begun his pursuit of the stag in early spring. Now it was late autumn and the shepherds and goatherds were taking their flocks down to the valleys. Most of the wild animals in the mountains – the deer, the lions, the wild pig – were also making for their winter quarters lower down. Only Herakles and the stag still raced over the heights, though they too spent their nights lower down in more sheltered spots.

  Their relationship had become extr
aordinarily close within its special limits. Herakles did not feel any longer that the animal was mocking him. It would wait for him when he stopped to get his breath or urinate and sometimes watch from a short distance when he was eating his austere meals, and he was sure that the look in its large golden-brown eyes was friendly and sympathetic. Why should it not be? He himself felt the same towards the stag, indeed he had begun to think of himself less as a hunter than a competitor and he longed to embrace the creature, not as a captured quarry but as a respected rival, an athlete with a body and a will even more perfect and concentrated than his own. He had abandoned any idea of trapping or tricking the stag as beneath the dignity of either of them. Either he must one day overtake it or it must come of its own free will to him. Until then they must race their race and relish one another’s sole and exhilarating company in a landscape that grew emptier as it grew colder.

  The last weeks of autumn and the first of winter were wet. This hardly mattered to the two heated runners, except that they had to slow down over slippery rocks. The stag tended to gain in these circumstances since four feet are better than two over treacherous surfaces, but it would soon pause briefly for Herakles to make up the distance. The gap between them was usually about half a kilometre, but once when Herakles did slip and fall and was lying there for a moment disconcerted, the stag came back towards him and did not turn and make off until it saw Herakles get to his feet, rub his bruised thigh and start running again.