Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  But once the winter had set in, it became very cold. A sprinkling of snow fell on the tops of the mountains, then more, and the whole terrain over which they raced turned white. The snow was not thick enough at first to slow them down too much, but in the new year more fell. All tracks were invisible now and their own footprints were wiped out overnight. Herakles noticed that the stag had become thinner and a little slower and guessed that it was not finding enough to eat, whereas he himself, paying weekly visits to the nearest village, was carrying up heavier bags of food and felt even stronger and more energetic in the cold weather than he had during the heat of summer. His strategy now was to try to drive the stag down off the open mountain so as to corner it in a fold of the lower hills where it could not run so easily and its superior turn of speed would be neutralised. The animal understood, of course, what he was up to and would always break for higher ground. In this way they gradually moved northwards to the western slopes of Mount Kyllene, the second highest peak in the Peloponnese, where the borders of Arcadia, Achaia and Corinthia meet.

  Here, as the snow began to melt and the first spring flowers appeared, the stag, desperately hungry now, at last turned downwards in search of fresh green leaves. Before long they were following the River Ladon, at this point, close to its source, a small brook. But the banks soon became higher and the stream, swollen by melted snow, broader and deeper. The stag was finding plenty to eat here during the nights when they rested, but it was evidently in territory it did not know and in leading the way showed signs of uncertainty. The ground on either side was growing steeper, and one morning Herakles saw that they were coming to a point at which the river narrowed and became deeper to pass through a rocky gorge. The bank they were on was barred by a sheer cliff. The stag, of course, had already seen what lay ahead, and it suddenly darted sideways towards the river.

  ‘No, no!’ shouted Herakles, forgetting that he was trying to catch the animal and thinking only of its safety. ‘It’s too deep and fast. You’ll be carried away.’

  Either the stag heard him and understood his alarm or it was simply daunted by its own view of the river. It stopped on the bank. But then as Herakles came nearer, it began to descend and entered the water, which rose round its body as it walked cautiously forward into the current. Herakles reached the bank and stood there for a moment above the stag, the closest he had ever been to it, except for that occasion when he was pretending to be asleep. How small it looked now, how vulnerable, as the water lapped round its sides and it stumbled on the boulders in the riverbed! Surely it couldn’t make the crossing without being swept away? And now the water was up to its neck and it lost its footing altogether and was struggling to swim against the current. Herakles ran a few metres further along the bank, plunged into the river just below the stag and, setting his feet firmly on the riverbed with the water up to his waist, caught the animal in his arms as the current carried it down towards him. It struggled for a moment or two and then became quite still as Herakles waded to the bank muttering soft silly words as if to some beloved boy or girl who had finally submitted to him:

  ‘Got you, sweetheart! That river nearly had you, didn’t it? What a chase you’ve given me! What a joy to have you safe! No harm, no harm, I promise you. Herakles kills monsters, but he loves beautiful creatures and you are the most beautiful of all the creatures he ever saw. You’ll come with me now to Tiryns, I’ll carry you there myself.’

  Whenever Herakles pursued the stag he wore his rope wound many times round his waist – it was all he did wear – but he had no need of the rope. As he hoisted the stag on to his shoulders it made no attempt to escape. It lay across the back of Herakles’ neck with its head resting on his thick, bushy hair and its legs dangling either side of his chest, and Herakles held the pairs of slender legs in his huge hands without too much pressure, since the stag was entirely relaxed, and so, when Herakles had collected his lion skin and weapons, they set out for Tiryns.

  Soon after they left the river and began to climb a narrow path, they met an old woman in black, her face barely visible inside the hood of her winter cloak. She didn’t seem unduly surprised by the sight of this huge man, from the back of whose head apparently sprouted two sets of golden antlers.

  ‘Ya saas, kyría (your health, lady)!’ – or words to that effect in his more ancient Greek – said Herakles politely and waited for her to move aside.

  ‘That stag is not yours,’ said the woman, still barring his way.

  ‘Excuse me!’ said Herakles. ‘I’ve been chasing this stag for nearly a year now and if it’s not mine I’d like to know whose it is.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said the woman. ‘It’s mine.’

  Herakles smiled indulgently. This person was evidently out of her mind and no doubt that was why she was wandering alone far from her village.

  ‘By what right is it yours?’ he said.

  ‘By ancient right.’

  ‘Ah, that’s easy to say. But you’ll have to prove it. I’m taking this stag – mine by right of possession – to King Eurystheus at Tiryns. If you want to make an issue of it, you’ll have to come to Tiryns yourself and put your claim before the king. Now I’m already quite tired and I have a long way to go, so be so kind as to step aside or I may have to give you a nudge.’

  ‘Herakles,’ said the woman, ‘you are a big fellow, but I warn you that if you give me a nudge you will regret it.’

  ‘I always regret discourtesy,’ said Herakles, ‘especially to a woman, especially to an old woman, especially to one that knows my name, but I have a shortish temper and people that bar my way tend to inflame it.’

  With that, he took a step forwards and was about to take another and brush the woman aside, when she put out one hand, placed it flat on his chest and with the gentle touch of a breeze but the force of a hurricane pushed him back.

  ‘Herakles,’ she said, ‘I have four hinds with golden horns and bronze hooves. This is the stag that foolishly ran away when I captured them. My hinds are missing him and he is missing them. Since I wished to reunite them, I put it into Eurystheus’ head to set you this task, and when you have shown him the stag you must bring it to my temple at Aulis.’

  As she spoke she grew many times taller than Herakles, her black cloak and thin black dress dissolved to reveal feet in golden sandals beneath a dazzling white peplos and above it, the face of a young woman of unearthly beauty, with golden hair piled under a golden circlet. She held a bow in one hand, and a strap passing over her shoulder and between her breasts secured the quiver of arrows on her back.

  Herakles bowed his head, recognising Artemis, avoiding meeting her eyes.

  ‘I will do what you say, great goddess,’ he said.

  ‘You shall have light feet and a swift journey to Tiryns,’ she said and suddenly the sun was shining in Herakles’ eyes and the goddess was no longer there.

  At Tiryns the stag was kept in the king’s stable, where it was fed royally and admired by crowds of visitors. Herakles himself visited the stag every day. It would eat from his hand and he would rub its nose while he reminisced aloud about their year together and apart in the mountains. Then, when both were thoroughly rested and refreshed and Herakles had shaved the beard he had grown in the mountains, they left together, Herakles riding a horse, the stag trotting beside him, travelling northwards across the Isthmus of Corinth and past Athens to Aulis. Some storytellers say that Herakles was still pursuing the stag and that the chase took them all over Greece, but this was because they were often seen to be running, the stag in front and Herakles behind, just as they had over the Arcadian mountains, for the sheer pleasure of reliving the experience. On these occasions the horse, loaded with Herakles’ lion skin and weapons, cantered along beside Herakles if the terrain allowed it, or, on narrower tracks, trotted steadily in the rear.

  Why did the stag never attempt to escape in earnest? Animals, no less than men, are subject to the gods, and although the stag had once run away from Artemis, it had learnt
from its loneliness in the mountains that that had been a mistake. Now it was submitting to the will of the goddess and it knew that as well as Herakles did, though not in so many words or with any knowledge of their destination. When they reached the temple, Herakles patted the stag and rubbed its nose.

  ‘You’re going to the ladies now,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure they’ll appreciate you as you’ll appreciate them, but don’t forget your old friend and pursuer, Herakles! He won’t forget you.’

  Then he delivered the stag to the priestesses of the temple and returned to Tiryns to be given his next assignment.

  5. THE BOAR

  In the sculptures from the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia depicting the fight between Lapiths and Centaurs, the centaurs are horses with four legs and the full torsos and heads of men where the horses’ necks and heads should be. That was how Pheidias and his contemporaries imagined them in the classical era. But in mythical times, in the days of Herakles, they were not such clumsy combinations – three-quarters horse and half-man, making more than one whole. They were half of each, men down to the waist with the hindlegs and tails of horses, and they walked, therefore, on two legs, not four. Is it likely that the Lapiths – a tribe of ordinary men – would have invited four-legged creatures to their king’s wedding-feast? How would they have fitted round the table or reclined on the couches next to their hosts?

  They were not, however, even on two legs, the best guests for a wedding. Huge, hairy and wild, followers of Dionysos, the god of wine and orgies, prone to lust and violence, they got blazing drunk whenever they could. King Peirithoös must have thought that it was better to invite them than not, given that they lived in the neighbourhood and might have burst in anyway without an invitation. But the drinking had hardly got going, the women were still at the table, when the centaur Eurytos seized the royal bride and made off with her towards the bushes, whereupon the rest of the centaurs followed suit with the rest of the women. The Lapiths and their other guests leapt off their couches, battled fiercely with the centaurs, who were much bigger and stronger but fortunately outnumbered, rescued the women and drove the abductors away. This happened in Thessaly and afterwards the centaurs were forced to leave the area altogether and take refuge far away to the south, in the mountains of Arcadia.

  But just as some men are hooligans and some philosophers and some both at different times, so the centaurs were not all or always brutes. One of them, Chiron, was a famous teacher of hunting, medicine, music, gymnastics – not easy to teach if he had four legs – and the art of prophecy. He himself was taught these diverse skills by Apollo and Artemis and his own pupils included Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, Peleus, king of the Myrmidons, and his son Achilles.

  Herakles, who was two-and-a-half metres tall and nearly as big as the centaurs, got on well with them, especially the two most civilised ones, Pholos and Chiron. He was not one of Chiron’s pupils but had acquired his outstanding skill at archery from Eurytos, the instigator of the trouble at the Lapith wedding-feast. So when King Eurystheus gave him the task of capturing the Erymanthean Boar, Herakles decided to visit his old friend Pholos on the way. The boar had been ravaging crops and killing people in the area of Mount Erymanthos, the third highest peak in the Peloponnese, and the centaurs, after their flight from Thessaly and the angry Lapiths, had settled in some caves overlooking a deep ravine on the southern slopes of this mountain.

  Pholos was delighted to see Herakles, sat him down on one of the handsome stone seats he had carved from boulders, roasted a goat for him – though he ate his own portion raw – and brought out from the back of his cave a barrel of wine, a gift to the centaurs from their patron Dionysos. It was, of course, a peculiarly fine wine, fit for gods let alone centaurs, its grapes grown and picked by satyrs, pressed by the delicate feet of nymphs and maenads, selected and blended by the god himself, aged in oak barrels, and it had been maturing in this particular barrel for some time, since Dionysos had specified that it was not to be opened until the centaurs were visited by Herakles. Did Dionysos know what the outcome would be? He must have done, since he shared the Delphic oracle with Apollo and could look into the future. Whether he deliberately caused that future with his gift of fine wine is a more difficult question, since the gods are not always masters of fate, even if they know what it will bring.

  At any rate, as soon as Pholos opened the barrel and ladled the wine into a mixing bowl, it gave off a heavenly aroma, so powerful that all the centaurs in the nearby caves could smell it. They guessed immediately what it was and rushed furiously to Pholos’ cave to remonstrate, arriving just as he and his guest were toasting each other in the rare vintage. Pholos tried to remind them that this was the very occasion for which they had been given the wine by Dionysos, but with centaurian hotheadedness they shouted him down, complaining that he was keeping to himself what belonged to them all, and set about pulling Herakles and Pholos off their seats with the intention of throwing them both down the cliff and drinking the wine themselves. Herakles and Pholos retired further into the cave, where the meat was roasting, and beat them back with flaming brands from the fire, but when Herakles saw his old archery master Eurytos, who had gone back to his own cave for his bow, setting an arrow to the string, he ducked just in time and picked up his own bow and arrows. His aim, as always, was true. He shot Eurytos in the groin, so as to bring him down without killing him, but recoiling with shock and pain Eurytos fell backwards over the cliff and was shattered on the rocks far below.

  The scuffle now became a serious fight. The other centaurs fetched weapons and Herakles shot and killed or wounded several before a heavy shower of rain made the rocky apron in front of the cave so slippery that the remaining centaurs withdrew for fear of sliding into the ravine. Herakles and Pholos had a brief breathing space and took the opportunity to drink some more of the wine that had caused the fracas, but as soon as the shower passed their enemies were back and Herakles found that his bowstring had got wet and loosened, so that his shots fell short or missed their targets. He dropped the bow and used his club until at last those centaurs who were still on their feet seemed to have had enough and retreated. But just as he was restringing his bow, he saw a centaur coming cautiously on to the apron in front of the cave. Swiftly selecting an arrow from his quiver, he set it to the string and shot the intruder in the knee. Alas, it was his particular friend Chiron, who had come not to attack him but to try to make peace and tend the wounded. Now he himself lay there wounded, in terrible pain. Herakles and Pholos went to help him.

  ‘What is it?’ said Chiron. ‘What sort of arrow is that? Something frightful! I never had such torture.’

  Pholos pulled the arrow out of the wound and looked at the arrowhead.

  ‘Nothing special that I can see,’ he said, turning to look at Herakles.

  But as he turned, the arrow slipped out of his fingers and the point nicked his foot.

  ‘Careless!’ he said, and the next moment his eyes widened, his mouth fell open and he collapsed where he stood, dead.

  Now Herakles realised what had happened. This was one of the arrows he had retrieved from the Hydra. It was steeped in the Hydra’s poisonous blood. He had killed his friend Pholos and as good as killed his friend Chiron. Unlike the other centaurs, Chiron was immortal. He could not die of his wound, nor could he ever get rid of the excruciating pain in his knee. Skilled as he was in medicine, he could find no antidote. So he lived on, crippled and perpetually tormented, until at last, the storytellers say, he persuaded Zeus to give his immortality to Prometheus and was able to die.

  Distressed as Herakles was, blaming himself for what was not really his fault, he did not remember that his quiver contained one more of these poisoned arrows. His fate kept it for another day, far in the future, when it would kill another centaur and indirectly and ultimately himself. Meanwhile, he was only too glad to have to put his mind and strength to capturing the Erymanthian Boar. It didn’t take him nearly as long as catching the Arc
adian Stag. The boar was very big and made at least one attempt to charge Herakles and gore him to death with its huge tusks, as another boar had once served Aphrodite’s beloved Adonis. But Herakles clouted the boar’s snout with his club and vaulted over its back in the manner of a Minoan bull-jumper. After that the animal ran away whenever it saw him and the chase ended in the winter, when it blundered into a snowdrift and couldn’t free itself. Herakles lassoed it with his rope, dragged it out of the snow, clubbed it senseless without killing it, tied its legs securely – he had no such relationship here as he’d had with the stag – and carried it over his shoulder to Tiryns.

  On his way, passing through a forest, he met an extraordinarily handsome boy gathering firewood. The boy had heard of Herakles – who had not? – but had never seen him, and stared with astonishment and admiration at this famous hero carrying an enormous live boar on his shoulder. Herakles was equally astonished by the boy’s beauty and stopped to speak to him, discovering that his name was Hylas and that his father was king of the Dryopes, a people driven out of their homeland and now dispersed all over Greece, living as best they could – foraging, hunting, labouring in the fields and vineyards – in small groups in out-of-the-way places.

  ‘If you decide you want a better life,’ said Herakles, ‘come to Tiryns and ask for me. I can teach you a few more useful skills than picking up sticks.’

  Hylas opened his mouth but could find nothing to say. Suddenly he took to his heels and disappeared among the trees. Herakles continued on his way, but soon heard running feet behind him. Turning his head, stepping to the side of the track and grasping his club more firmly in case it was a vengeful centaur or some other enemy, he saw Hylas.