Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘They were my friends,’ said Herakles, ‘but they have some explaining to do.’

  ‘What is your mission here? I hope you’ve not been sent to steal anything from us.’

  Herakles looked round at the assembled Amazons and concluded that his mission would be hopeless if he revealed it in public, so he asked if he could speak to the queen in private. Hippolyte looked him now in the eyes, very seriously.

  ‘I mean you no harm,’ he said.

  ‘Come, then!’ she said and, taking his hand, led him through the door at the back of the hall into her own private room, closing the door behind her.

  ‘If your mission is not to kill or rape or kidnap me, as I first assumed,’ she said, ‘what can it be?’

  Herakles pointed to the wall, on which were hanging Hippolyte’s double-headed axe and her bow and quiver.

  ‘You came to take my weapons?’

  ‘No, but what is that hanging beside them?’

  ‘That’s the girdle you mentioned, the one given me by Ares. As you can see, it’s a warrior’s belt, heavy with bronze discs and the great bronze sword in its scabbard, fit for the god of war, but hardly for a woman. I never wear it, even in battle. I prefer to ride light and trust to my axe and arrows.’

  ‘It’s that I came for,’ said Herakles. ‘My foolish cousin’s foolish daughter wanted it, but I think she would really prefer the one you are wearing.’

  ‘That she can’t have,’ said Hippolyte, ‘but the other, perhaps. What would you give for it? Your lion skin?’

  ‘If you insist.’

  Herakles took off the lion skin and held it out. But Hippolyte smiled.

  ‘It would fit me no better than Ares’ girdle,’ she said. ‘I thought myself tall until I confronted you.’

  Herakles dropped the lion-skin on the floor and smiled in return, standing there naked except for his snakeskin loincloth.

  ‘You made me leave my weapons in the ship,’ he said. ‘What else have I got to give you?’

  Hippolyte, smiling still, eyed his loincloth.

  ‘Take it!’ he said. ‘It was made from the snakes I strangled in my cradle. I value it greatly as a memento of childhood, but I would like to think of it hanging on your wall in place of the god’s girdle.’

  Hippolyte stepped forward, undid the knot on Herakles’ hip and dropped the snakeskin on top of the lion skin.

  ‘You shall have it back,’ she said and, undoing her own girdle, slipping deftly out of her chiton, untying the pad that flattened her left breast, stood naked before him.

  They stared at each other’s bodies for some time in silence. The queen spoke first:

  ‘That’s a very large cock,’ she said, ‘Do you think it will fit?’

  ‘It generally does,’ he said. ‘When the will is there.’

  ‘The will is there, yes.’

  ‘Then we can but try.’

  Which they did, and soon enough it did fit, very pleasurably for both.

  ‘My foolish cousin and his foolish daughter little imagined,’ said Herakles, when they were lying sated side by side, ‘that they were sending me on my best Labour yet.’

  ‘I would make you king of the Amazons and save you any further labours except this one,’ said Hippolyte, ‘but I’m afraid that our laws allow no man to remain in our city after he has performed his only useful function.’

  ‘You mean to kill me, do you?’

  ‘No, I mean to keep our bargain. You have given me what you had to give, I shall give you the girdle of Ares.’

  ‘I care less for that than I do for its owner. If I cannot stay with you here, will you come with me? I will make you queen of any city you care to name, in Greece or Asia.’

  ‘Now you’re boasting, Herakles. You’re not king of any city, but merely the servant of the contemptible king of Tiryns.’

  ‘Apollo served Admetos and both he and Poseidon served Laomedon, King of Troy. These were punishments decreed by Father Zeus, but they did not lose their power or status as gods once their service was completed.’

  ‘Do you compare yourself to gods?’

  ‘Far from it. I am as mortal as you. But you must have heard that what I undertake I do, and that what I undertake is more than any other man could even think of doing. When I want a city I shall have a city.’

  ‘I’m already queen of a city and a people. Why should I want any other?’

  ‘Because you would also be queen of Herakles and because we fit so well.’

  ‘Yes, we do fit well.’

  ‘Can you really pretend that this life of yours among women, murdering your casual lovers – terrified out of their manhood, no doubt, more often than not – bearing children to conquered slaves, destroying your sons like unwanted puppies, is the best you could have? Queen you may be, but queen of a misshapen state, queen of an anomaly, queen of women who make war before they can make love and whose daughters cannot escape the same unnatural fate.’

  ‘You are holding up a mirror to the world in general, the world of men, in which most women are forced to live as child-bearing slaves, beaten and raped out of any residue of love, in which sons are valued, but not daughters. If our state is misshapen it is because it cannot be otherwise in this world misshapen by men. If we did not make war on men and exclude them, we would be their slaves like all the other women in the world. It’s simple enough, isn’t it, Herakles? You, who can do anything you undertake, might think of undertaking this: change your world of men so that women can be their equals and we Amazons will change our state so that men can be our equals.’

  ‘I will found such a city and you shall be queen of it.’

  ‘Found it first and then send for me!’

  They laughed and made love again, then Hippolyte got up and washed and put on her clothes. Herakles also washed, tied on his snakeskin loincloth and, taking the girdle of Ares from the wall, fastened it round his waist. He retrieved his lion skin from the floor and hung it over his arm.

  ‘You had better wear it,’ said Hippolyte, ‘and pull it round you to conceal the girdle. I would not give much for your chances if my people were to see you strutting away with your prize.’

  ‘And what of your chances when they find out it’s gone?’

  ‘Leave me to manage my own people! But I will walk down to the harbour with you, so that when they find out they will know it was not stolen.’

  ‘If you bear a child, the son of Herakles and Hippolyte, what will you do with him?’

  ‘With him? You know what our laws require. With her, she will no doubt be strangling snakes in her cradle and grow up to be such a queen of the Amazons as will extend our power far beyond the borders of Pontos.’

  ‘And this is what you bought with the girdle of Ares?’

  ‘A good bargain, don’t you think? And so I shall tell my people.’

  ‘I must warn you that my children are most often sons.’

  ‘But mine most often daughters.’

  Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – there was to be no such child, male or female, from this legendary union. As Herakles and Hippolyte walked together from the palace to the harbour they were surrounded with the queen’s chief warriors and followed by a great crowd of gaping Amazons, whispering among themselves, speculating about what this might mean, their queen showing such unprecedented favour to a man. Was he her prisoner or she his? Would she allow him to sail away alive? Or was she hostage to him and in danger of being abducted? And there were no doubt some women in the crowd, though they could not have admitted it to their friends, who, admiring the god-like couple, secretly wished that their laws were not so strict and that they too might walk and talk openly with a man.

  When Herakles and Hippolyte reached the harbour enclave, they clasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes for the last time. Then Herakles turned and went inside the barrier alone. But whether it was again the goddess Hera’s continual malevolence towards Herakles, as some storytellers say, or whether it was Hippolyte’s unders
tandable pang at the thought of losing this man she couldn’t help loving, something made the queen step forward after him beyond the barrier, calling out:

  ‘Herakles! Don’t forget to found that city!’

  He turned with a delighted smile.

  ‘No, and be sure I’ll send for you, Hippolyte!’

  But, as he turned, his lion skin swung open, revealing the belt of Ares round his waist. With a great cry of rage and horror, the queen’s guard of warriors rushed forward brandishing their weapons. Herakles drew the bronze sword from the belt and laid about him. The men from his ship, whom he had warned to be armed and ready at all times in case he had to steal and run away with the girdle, came immediately to his assistance with bows and spears. The battle was fierce and brief. Leaving a swathe of dead and wounded Amazons and a few dead comrades of their own, Herakles and his crew regained the ship, cast off and rowed away. But lying among the dead by the harbour barrier was Hippolyte herself, caught unarmed in the middle of the furious melée and pierced through the throat by the bronze sword of Ares. Herakles only heard much later, after he had delivered the fatal girdle to Eurystheus’ silly daughter, that he had unwittingly killed the lovely woman who gave it to him in exchange for a child she would now never bear.

  9. THE APPLES

  The accounts of Herakles’ last few Labours have him roaming the Mediterranean world from Arabia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco to Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, the Balkans and the Black Sea; and even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which he himself set up on either side of the Strait of Gibralter, to the fringes of the Atlantic Ocean. His complicated and sometimes contradictory adventures in the course of his missions to collect Hippolyte’s girdle, the red cattle of the three-headed giant Geryon and the golden apples of the Hesperides included defeating predatory tribes, founding cities and fathering children, as well as destroying monsters, giants, bandits and evil rulers. Most of these subsidiary activities were presumably inserted by local storytellers so as to attach his prestigious name to a district, a city or a dynasty, much as we now put his name on a bag of concrete or boast that other assorted celebrities ‘slept here’. I once came across two modest terrace-houses facing each other on a narrow street in Bonifacio, on the southern tip of Corsica, which cap most such boasts: one side claimed the Emperor Charles V, the other Napoleon Bonaparte, though not, of course, at the same time.

  Shall I claim that Herakles, who spent so much time in Arcadia, visited our village and, in the ravine beside it, blocked the river with immense boulders? The storytellers say that he did that to the river Strymon, on the border between Macedonia and Thrace, either so as make a bridge for Geryon’s cattle as he drove them back to Tiryns or to punish the river god, who had aggravated him and whose stream had previously been navigable. The river god in our case has been more or less permanently disabled, since our local authority (the demos) pipes the water from higher up so that the bed is quite dry. Very occasionally the river god recovers his powers and unleashes a spate, which has been known to carry away unlucky donkeys tethered in its path or cars parked in the wrong place in the seaside town below. Contracts for Greek houses contain with good reason a clause forbidding building within so many metres of the course of a possible spate. Meanwhile the demos, with the help of funds from the EU, has transformed part of the ravine into a public square, with drinking fountains, a viewing platform and a terrace – a kind of mini-spa. Even if Herakles didn’t personally place the boulders, he was surely here in spirit with his bags of concrete, and the demos might just as well put his name to this place as so many of their ancient predecessors did to theirs, all round the Mediterranean.

  When Herakles set out on his eleventh and penultimate Labour, to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, he had no idea where to find them. Somebody, probably his guardian goddess Athene, told him that he should ask the sea god Nereus, son of Poseidon and Gaia, the earth goddess. Athene could have given him the information herself, of course, but the gods treat mortals much as sensible parents treat children, helping them only enough to help themselves. Nereus was not an easy person to get directions from, since he lived at the bottom of the sea, but by his wife Doris he had 50 sea nymph daughters called the Nereids whose favourite bathing place was the mouth of the River Po in northern Italy. Herakles therefore took a ship from Patras in the Peloponnese up the Adriatic Sea towards what is now Venice, as one can still do, and soon discovered the Nereids swimming and sunbathing and playing ball games on the beach. Their father, they said, frequently came up from the bottom of the sea to watch them – they were certainly a lovely sight, whether, as the earliest Greek vase painters and sculptors depicted them, they wore wet and clinging dresses or, as in later depictions, nothing at all. They advised Herakles to wait around until their father turned up and, although several days passed before he did, this must have been a very welcome break in very pleasant company for the indefatigable hero.

  Nereus, when he did appear, walking ponderously out of the sea and up the beach, was not such a pretty sight as his daughters. Barnacles, mussels and other sea creatures clung to his body and limbs, his hair and beard were tangled with seaweed and he smelt violently of fish. The Nereids had warned Herakles that their father could be gruff and grumpy and that if he refused to answer questions the only solution was to wrestle with him.

  ‘Wrestle with him?’ said Herakles. ‘Are you sure about that? If anybody asked me a question and got no answer and then immediately started to wrestle with me, I’d not only not answer his question, I’d wrap him round a tree.’

  ‘Dad enjoys a good wrestle,’ said one of the Nereids.

  ‘It amuses him,’ said another.

  ‘The thing is,’ said a third, ‘that he keeps changing shape.’

  ‘Just as you’ve got a grip on him,’ said a fourth, ‘he’ll turn into a seal …’

  ‘Or an octopus …’ said a fifth.

  ‘Or a shark …’ said a sixth.

  ‘Or a lion …’ said a seventh.

  ‘Or a buzzard …’ said an eighth.

  ‘Or a toad …’ said a ninth.

  ‘Or a worm …’ said a tenth.

  And by the time all 50 Nereids had suggested some creature Nereus might turn into, Herakles had begun to understand the scope of their father’s sense of humour.

  ‘What you have to do,’ said the first Nereid, ‘is keep hold of him, whatever he turns into, and when he finally gets tired of the game and turns back into himself, you can ask your question and he’ll probably answer it.’

  ‘But suppose he doesn’t, or doesn’t know the answer?’ said Herakles. ‘Is it really worth all this hassle?’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t worry about that,’ said the Nereid. ‘Dad loves showing off his knowledge, once he’s had his bout of wrestling, and he knows absolutely everything, past, present and future.’

  So as soon as Herakles had asked politely where he could find the golden apples of the Hesperides and Nereus had looked at him contemptuously and belched his terrible fishy breath straight into his face, Herakles grabbed him round the waist and kicked his legs from under him. Only to find himself belly-to-belly with a stinging jellyfish, and, still grasping it in spite of the pain, being squeezed in his turn by a python. But he had no sooner got the python’s neck between his hands than it became a vast basking shark with no neck at all and many times his own size. Still he held on and fell on top of the whale-like creature, when it shrank to a sea urchin and spiked him savagely in the chest before metamorphosing into a mullet and almost sliding out of his grasp into the sea before Herakles caught it by the tail, which turned into a butterfly. Herakles closed his great fists around the fluttering insect and said:

  ‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll crush you to death, old man?’

  But it was already an ant, crawling between his fingers and over the back of his hand, and as Herakles covered it with his other hand, the ant became a heron, then a bee, then a stork, then a rat, and still Herakles held on, as the rat became a f
ox and the fox a bear and the bear a porpoise … and suddenly at last Nereus himself, the old man of the sea.

  ‘You did well, young man,’ he said. ‘The butterfly usually has them, because they’re afraid if they crush it they’ll never get the answer, so they open up a bit and away I go.’

  ‘But if you were crushed?’ asked Herakles.

  ‘Nothing to worry about. My reactions are quick and I’d turn into something else. Besides, I’m immortal. What is your question?’

  Having enjoyed his peculiar form of exercise, Nereus became relaxed and friendly. He not only told Herakles that the Garden of the Hesperides was in the Atlas Mountains on the southern side of the Mediterranean, he gave him essential advice on what he had to do to get the golden apples. The tree which bore the apples, he said, was given by his mother Gaia to Hera as a wedding present when she married Zeus, and it was planted in the goddess’s own walled garden, where it was guarded by a dragon. The giant Atlas had been Hera’s gardener until he joined the other giants in attacking Mount Olympos and attempting to overthrow the Olympian gods. After their defeat, most of the giants, who were immortal and couldn’t be got rid of altogether, were buried deep under various mountains. Atlas, however, was given the task of standing on top of the mountain range that bears his name and holding up the sky on his head, while his four daughters, the Hesperides, took on the job of looking after Hera’s garden.

  ‘So I have to avoid Atlas, charm his daughters and kill the dragon.’ said Herakles. ‘But if the tree belongs to Hera, my enemy ever since I was born, she is going to be less than amused.’

  ‘For that reason I suggest that you don’t kill the dragon or charm his daughters or avoid Atlas. On the contrary, go straight up to Atlas and ask him to fetch the apples.’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘Because you’ll offer to hold up the sky while he’s doing it – I’m sure you’re capable of that – and he’ll think that the golden apples you want are his golden chance to leave you holding the sky.’

  ‘And he’ll be right. How can I get him to take it back?’