Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘I asked my father,’ he said. ‘He told me that opportunities like this come only once in a lifetime and I should take it.’

  ‘Well done!’ said Herakles. ‘You can start by carrying my club.’

  Arriving at Tiryns, Herakles, with Hylas proudly carrying the club beside him, walked up the street to the palace, while the people, seeing the boar snorting and struggling on Herakles’ shoulder, shrank into doorways and alleyways for fear it might escape. Inside the palace itself, Eurystheus viewed the animal from his bronze urn.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘so that’s the Erymanthean Boar! Did you have much trouble catching it?’

  Herakles explained how it had fallen into a snowdrift.

  ‘Oh, I see, you mean anyone could have scooped it up?’

  Herakles laid it on the floor beside the urn so that its tusks were scraping the bronze.

  ‘What do you want done with it now?’ he asked, fiddling with the ropes round its legs.

  ‘Are those ropes secure?’ asked Eurystheus.

  ‘Fairly secure,’ said Herakles, ‘but it’s a big beast and you can never tell with ropes. Chains would be better.’

  ‘Well, you can kill it now,’ said Eurystheus, shrinking down inside his urn, ‘and give it to my cooks.’

  But Herakles saw no reason – it was not in his contract – to supply Eurystheus’ kitchen, so he took it back down to the town to give to the townspeople. As he was doing so he met his nephew Iolaos, with the news that Jason and his Argonauts were gathering in Thessaly to sail to Colchis, in what is now Georgia, in order to win, as they put it, or steal, as the Colchians saw it, the Golden Fleece.

  ‘I must join them,’ said Herakles. ‘Opportunities like this come only once in a lifetime.’

  With that, he simply dumped the trussed boar in the market-place and set out on horseback, with Hylas on another horse beside him, to join the Argonauts.

  What happened to the boar, who killed it, who ate it, is not recorded, but aeons later the travel writer Pausanias was told that its mighty tusks were still to be seen in Apollo’s temple at Cumae in Italy. He thought this unlikely.

  6. THE ARGONAUTS

  Herakles’ love for Hylas was unusual. He generally preferred women, in fact he fathered 66 children by 60 different women. True, 50 of those were the daughters of King Thespios, with whom Herakles was staying while he was hunting the lion of Kithairon, an earlier and more ordinary beast than the lion of Nemea. This was when Herakles was just eighteen years old, before he started his Labours. Thespios recognised a future hero when he saw one and, being fond of all his daughters equally as well as anxious for grandchildren with the best possible heredity, sent them in turn, night after night for 50 nights, to sleep with Herakles. Some say he had them all in one night, but that is clearly improbable, even for Herakles, who does not seem to have noticed that it was a different daughter each night. All 50 daughters conceived and bore sons, and the eldest bore twins.

  The Argonauts, who included the singer Orpheus and many mortal sons of gods, were surprised and delighted by the arrival of Herakles. They had feared he would not be allowed to interrupt his Labours. Since they were rowing themselves whenever the wind was adverse, an oar wielded by Herakles was obviously going to give the ship jet power. But in the end he wasn’t much use to them, and the cause was Hylas.

  The Argonauts, rowing lustily to the rhythm of Orpheus’ lyre, began by crossing the Aegean Sea, stopping first at Lemnos, where they found that the island was almost entirely populated by women. These women had neglected the worship of Aphrodite and been afflicted with an unpleasant smell. Their men responded by making regular visits to sweeter smelling women on the mainland, and their wives and daughters accordingly conspired one night to murder them all. Only Queen Hypsipyle had qualms at the last moment and hid her father. Whether Aphrodite had relieved them of the bad smell by the time the Argonauts put in to the harbour or whether it made no difference, her rites of love were rapidly and energetically observed by a shipload of salt-stained, sex-starved heroes coming ashore to an excited mob of exceptionally willing women.

  Lemnos, as a result, was soon repopulated by a new generation of the sons and daughters of heroes, though none were the children of Herakles. Jason, as the leader of the expedition, lay with Queen Hypsipyle and gave her twin sons, and it may be that Herakles was too proud to sleep with any lesser woman. His relationship with Jason had been awkward from the beginning, for although Herakles made the ship go faster and was the strongest man and the best shot with a bow even in that distinguished company, he was not an easy person for the younger and less experienced man to give orders to. Or he may have been too besotted with Hylas to spare a thought for any woman.

  The Argonauts’ next port of call was the land of the Doliones, an island close to the mainland in the Sea of Marmara, where they were hospitably received by King Kyzikos and sent on their way with gifts and good wishes. Unfortunately, during the night the wind changed and blew them back on to its shores. The Argonauts did not realise it was the same island, the inhabitants took them for enemies, and there was a fierce fight in which the visitors slaughtered many of their hosts including King Kyzikos. When the sun came up and they saw their mistake, they were deeply upset, cut their hair in sorrow and apology and buried the king and the other dead with great ceremony.

  Further along the coast towards the Bosporus, after an exhausting day of competitive rowing against the wind, which Herakles easily won, they landed on the mainland for rest and supplies. Herakles, who had broken his oar, pulled up a large fir tree and whittled himself a replacement, while Hylas went to fetch water. When, after an hour or two, he had not come back, Herakles set off to look for him, and when after several hours more Herakles had not come back either, the rest of the Argonauts debated what to do. Jason was not altogether sorry to lose him, but others declared that he was the mainstay of the expedition. At any rate, after searching and shouting for some time and after fierce disagreements which nearly came to blows, the Argonauts finally accepted Jason’s argument that Hylas, Herakles and his brother-in-law, a Lapith called Polyphemos who was also missing, had found something better to do, and they sailed on without them.

  Herakles, meanwhile, had not found Hylas, but had eventually met Polyphemos beside a small lake. Polyphemos told him that he heard Hylas cry out, ran towards the sound assuming that he was being attacked and, coming in sight of the lake, saw the boy being kissed and fondled by three water nymphs who, when they saw Polyphemos with his sword drawn, dived below the surface taking Hylas with them. Herakles immediately dived in himself, but the lake was deep and dark and he could find no trace of the boy or his abductors. He came out at last and lay on the bank beside Hylas’ discarded water pot in utter misery. Polyphemos tried to comfort him:

  ‘The boy was too beautiful,’ he said. ‘If he had not been taken by those nymphs, you can be sure one of the gods would have wanted him. Ganymedes was seized by an eagle sent by Zeus himself and surely Hylas was at least as beautiful as Ganymedes.’

  ‘Losing a boy to Zeus is one thing,’ said Herakles, ‘but losing him to a bunch of bloody water-nymphs is quite another. You’re sure that’s what you saw? It wasn’t just that he slipped in and drowned? Or could he, like Narcissus, have seen his own reflection and fallen in love with it?’

  ‘He was pulled in by water nymphs, as I said,’ said Polyphemos.

  ‘Then he must have drowned anyway.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. The nymphs can’t have realised that he wouldn’t survive under water.’

  ‘Gods above! How stupid is that?’

  ‘Women …’ said Polyphemos. ‘I love them dearly, especially your sister, my dear wife Laonome. But their quick tempers and lack of patience sometimes get the better of their commonsense. They don’t always consider consequences. And women are more collective creatures than we are, they seldom work things out freshly for themselves, but tend to pick up their ideas from each other. Think of those murderous women of Lem
nos! Do you imagine men would ever have behaved like that, cutting off their noses to spite their faces? When we sack a city we don’t kill the women, do we? And besides, these were water-women – probably nobody ever told them that humans are made differently and don’t breathe like fish.’

  ‘I never loved any woman as I loved Hylas,’ said Herakles. ‘Men are made to get children and women to bear them, but love is not the same as that animal instinct. Love is aroused by pure beauty and a meeting of minds.’

  ‘Did Hylas have a mind?’ asked Polyphemos. ‘I never heard him put two words together.’

  ‘He did to me. He was quite innocent of the world and was always asking me questions.’

  Polyphemos refrained from saying what he thought, that Herakles’ love for Hylas sprang as much from the boy’s massaging of his hero’s vanity as from the hero’s possession of the boy’s beautiful body.

  ‘It’s a dreadful loss,’ he said. ‘But somehow you must reconcile yourself to it. All life is gain and loss until at last we lose everything. But the memory of your deeds, Herakles, will never be lost and so in some sense you will gain what you lose. You will lose your life but gain immortality.’

  ‘My life is worth nothing to me now. Take your sword and put an end to it!’

  But Polyphemos was wiser than to go down in history as the man who killed Herakles with only half his deeds done. Besides, he thought that Herakles’ passion for Hylas was out of character and would probably pass in a day or two.

  ‘Do it yourself!’ he said, ‘I’m going back to the ship. They’ll be tired of waiting for us.’

  Indeed, when they returned to the shore to find that the Argonauts had abandoned them, Herakles’ fury almost drove the memory of Hylas out of his head. He wanted now to find a village or town, commandeer horses and gallop after the ship, not so as to take any further part in the expedition but to put an end to it by hammering the crew and breaking up the Argo. But the district was not at all populous and by the time they did find a village it was far too late to hope to catch up with the ship. In any case the village had no horses, only donkeys.

  The name Polyphemos is better known as that of the one-eyed Cyclops blinded and outmanoeuvred by crafty Odysseus. But this human Polyphemos, Herakles’ brother-in-law, though his opinion of women is disputable and was probably mostly based on his wife’s character, who may well have shared her brother Herakles’ ‘quick temper and lack of patience’, this Polyphemos too deserves to be remembered as the kind of sensible friend – like Orestes’ cousin Pylades – that every hero needs.

  7. THE BIRDS

  Herakles returned to Tiryns and took up his Labours again. First, he was to dislodge a flock of large and dangerous birds which had gathered in the trees around Lake Stymphalos and were attacking the farmers’ sheep and goats and sometimes their children. The lake was on the border between Arcadia and Corinthia, on the route he had taken when returning with the Erymanthian Boar. Passing sadly one evening through the forest where he had first met Hylas, it occurred to Herakles to seek out the boy’s family. They might easily blame him for the boy’s death and try to take revenge on the person who had indirectly brought it about, but Herakles could be kind-hearted as well as ruthless, and in any case he was still grieving and wanted to share his grief with the only other people in the world who would feel it as deeply as he did. The family’s first reaction to the bad news he brought them was bitterness and anger, but as Herakles stood there in front of them, his weapons laid on the ground, his head bowed, his face wet with tears, their anger melted away. They spent the night drinking, mourning and praising Hylas’ beauty and good nature.

  ‘He will not be forgotten,’ said Herakles.

  ‘Not as long as his name is linked with yours,’ said Hylas’ father. ‘In the short term it’s a terrible misfortune for him, for you and for us, but in the long term such an opportunity comes to only a few.’

  The next day Herakles pulled up a fir tree and shaped it into an oar to be set up as a memorial to Hylas’ brief glory as one of the Argonauts. Then several of the Dryopes accompanied him to Lake Stymphalos, where with a fearful noise of shouting, beating bronze pots and pieces of wood, they drove the angry, shrieking birds into the air. They were indeed enormous, vultures surviving from the Pleistocene era, with wing-spans of five metres. Herakles shot several down into the lake and one on to the shore before the rest dispersed, never to trouble that region again.

  Taking kind and sad leave of the Dryopes, Herakles carried the dead vulture back to Tiryns and, without telling Eurystheus it was dead, draped it over the top of his bronze urn, while he demonstrated how the birds had been driven into the air by striking the side of the urn with his club. When the bird’s stinking corpse had been removed by the king’s guards, Eurystheus was helped, more dead than alive with terror, nausea and earache, out of his urn. Immediately he ordered Herakles to go to the island of Crete and capture a feral, fire-breathing bull. The storytellers say that he was to bring it back to Tiryns alive, but it’s hard to imagine how a bull that breathed fire could be conveyed in a wooden ship, and besides, if Herakles really had succeeded in crossing the Myrtoan Sea from Crete with a bull that still breathed fire and presenting it to his cousin, Eurystheus would surely have been pot roasted.

  8. THE AMAZONS

  Herakles’ visit to the Amazons was suggested by Eurystheus’ daughter Admete. Someone had told her that Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons, wore a girdle given to her by Ares, and Admete thought she would like to wear it herself. She was evidently not a very clever or imaginative girl, or she would have guessed that a girdle given by the god of war to the queen of a tribe of female warriors was unlikely to be the sort of pretty fashion-accessory worn by feather-brained domestic princesses like herself. However, since Herakles had now more or less cleared the Peloponnese of monsters, his range had to be extended and Eurystheus no doubt hoped, on every occasion when his cousin set off to perform another Labour, that this time he would be worsted and would not return. Admete’s whim must have seemed to offer the best odds yet. Very well, so he had strangled the Nemean Lion, sliced up the Lernaian Hydra, caught the Arcadian Stag and the Erymanthean Boar, dispersed the Stymphalian Birds, killed the Cretan Bull, cleared the Augeian cowsheds, even brought back the man-eating mares of Diomedes. But how could he survive an encounter with a whole tribe of women who regularly defeated and slaughtered tribes of men in pitched battle and would be outraged by the mere appearance of a man inside their territory, let alone one who had come to rob their queen of her most famous possession?

  The Amazons did, of course, sleep with men from time to time, in order to keep their population steady, but they did so on their own terms, taking the best specimens of captured warriors and killing them – as well as any male babies – once they had done their job of fertilising an Amazon. Many of them were beautiful women, but they were also skilled with bows and double-headed axes, and the men of the neighbouring tribes knew better than to tangle with them. Depending on whether they were left- or right-handed, they bound one of their breasts flat under their chitons and it was this custom which gave rise to the false rumour that they actually cut off one breast so as to be able to draw back their bowstrings or cast their javelins more easily. And the fact that they wore the other breast fetchingly exposed gave them an immediate advantage over male opponents, whose concentration on the business of defending themselves was often fatally diverted.

  The Amazons lived beside the Black Sea, in the territory called Pontos on the northern coast of what is now Turkey, and their city, Themiskyra, was built beside the mouth of the river Thermodon. Herakles went there by sea. The Amazons allowed men in ships to dock and trade their goods within a strictly limited area of the harbour, and Herakles’ strategy was not to conceal his identity, as he had with King Diomedes and the Bistones, but to show himself openly and, trading his fame for hers, as it were, ask for an interview with Queen Hippolyte. The news that this celebrated hero had landed in their harbo
ur was swiftly carried to the palace and word came back that the queen would receive him, though he must be unaccompanied by any of his crew and must leave his weapons on the ship. It was only a short distance from the harbour to the palace and at least half the population of the city lined the street as Herakles, wearing his snakeskin loincloth and lion skin, strode up it, staring about him at these formidable women with as much curiosity and admiration as they showed in staring at him.

  Queen Hippolyte, tall, young and golden-haired, received him in her great hall in the presence of her chief warriors. She reminded Herakles of his encounter with Artemis, except that the goddess was infinitely taller and had not displayed her right breast – Hippolyte was evidently left-handed. There were several minutes of complete silence while she and her visitor appraised each other. The queen spoke first:

  ‘That was a very large lion,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen and killed lions myself, but never anything on that scale.’

  ‘It was large,’ said Herakles, ‘but the problem was not so much its size as its invulnerability. Its skin could not be pierced by a spear or arrows. I had to wrestle with it and strangle it. Even when it was dead I had to skin it with its own claws.’

  ‘And is it still the same now, still unpierceable?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘So, in effect it’s like wearing a suit of armour.’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘An enemy would have to strangle you, then?’

  Herakles laughed and patted his bare chest.

  ‘I don’t wear it belted up,’ he said. ‘But, tell me, is that the girdle that Ares gave you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘This is a pretty thing I inherited from my mother, quite light and flexible. The gold ornaments come from Colchis, which, as you know, is famous for its gold and goldsmiths, not to speak of its Golden Fleece, which I hear has been stolen by your friends the Argonauts.’