‘Yes, let’s see it!’ said Polydektes, ‘Whatever you’ve faked up to look like the Gorgon’s head. But don’t think that’s going to save your lying tongue or prevent me marrying your mother!’
Perseus pulled the head out of the satchel and held it up.
‘This is the head of Medusa!’
They hardly had time to gasp before they were turned to stone, every person in the room, Polydektes, his guests and his servants, all except Perseus himself. Only the servants outside the room, those working in the kitchen or fetching more food and wine or guarding the doors, were spared, as Perseus put the head back in the satchel and left the house. What the servants saw when they did enter the silent room was soon spread round the town and all over the island, and eventually far beyond the island, so that long afterwards people came from all over Greece to gape at this interrupted feast, this silent assembly of guests with their mouths open in astonishment and terror, these wide-eyed servants bearing trays or wine jugs, and the angry, derisive host waving his knife, set for ever in stone.
7. THE GRANDFATHER
Perseus had no wish to stay any longer on the island. Most people were glad to be rid of Polydektes and elected his brother Diktys to be king in his place, but some who had lost relatives at the feast could not forgive Perseus. Every small community, of course, is full of private quarrels and resentments, but on an island as small as Seriphos they are harder to live with, and Perseus and his mother were still regarded as strangers. They decided to return to Argos so that Danaë could see her parents again and Perseus could introduce his lovely wife Andromeda to his grandfather and claim his place as heir to the kingdom. Akrisios had never told Danaë why he had set her adrift in the chest, and she believed it was because he was ashamed of a daughter who had borne an illegitimate child. She was sure that as soon as he met Perseus and Andromeda and heard the story of Perseus’ heroic deeds, her father would easily forget the past and rejoice in the survival of his daughter and grandson.
Diktys provided a ship, which sailed up the Gulf and landed them at Nauplia, from where they immediately sent a messenger ahead to Argos to bring the good tidings to Akrisios. Poor king! Never did a messenger carrying what seemed the best of news meet with such a rebuff, such an expression of shock and dismay. By the time Danaë, Perseus and Andromeda arrived at Argos, not far behind the messenger, Akrisios was gone. He had remembered that Teutamidas, the new King of Larissa, far to the north in Thessaly, was holding funeral games in honour of his dead father, to which he had invited Akrisios among others. It was left to Queen Eurydice to explain to her daughter and grandson and her grandson’s wife that her husband was urgently called away and much regretted not being able to receive them. She did not, however, explain the real reason for his absence – he had forbidden her to do that – with the result that Perseus decided that he too, as heir apparent to the kingdom of Argos, must follow his grandfather and also attend the games, so as to compete for prizes with all the other young princes of Greece. His grandmother failed to dissuade him, since she could give no good reason except that he must have had enough travelling already, and in any case felt that her husband’s fate, after so many abortive attempts to evade it, was inexorable. Was he never to return to Argos as long as his grandson was there? Or would he try once again, deviously or directly, to get rid of Perseus? She hoped, of course, that the whole notion of him being killed by his grandson was false, that the oracle had been wrong or he had misunderstood it, and that if only the two could meet, all would be well and the dark cloud that had hung over their lives so long would be dispelled at last. She loved her husband, but she doted on Perseus from the moment she saw him, and was sure Akrisios would too.
Before leaving for Larissa, Perseus went up to a small, bare, conical hill, set among higher hills to the north-east of Argos. He had dreamed of it several nights running but never been there before. On top of the hill he made sacrifices to Athene and Hermes, asking them whether he should now return the adamantine sickle, the bat skin satchel and the dragon skin helmet to the Stygian Nymphs, and what he should do with the head of Medusa and the winged sandals. When he had made the sacrifices and sent his attendants back to Argos, he spent the night alone on the hill with the magical objects beside him and dreamt that he heard heavenly music. He woke to find that it was growing light and that the music continued. Hermes in his shepherd’s hat and cloak was sitting near him, playing the lyre which he had himself invented by stringing lengths of sheep gut across the shell of a tortoise, over which he had stretched ox-hide. Perseus closed his eyes again and pretended still to be asleep, not wanting the music ever to stop, but Hermes laughed and slung the lyre over his back.
‘It was meant to wake you up, not send you back to sleep,’ he said.
‘I wish you would play more,’ said Perseus.
‘Of course you do. It is not music you could ever hear enough of. The more I played, the more you would ask for more until you became so addicted to it that you’d be good for nothing else. Before you die I will play for you once again, but not today.’
‘You’ve come to take back these borrowed things?’
‘Yes, I will give Medusa’s head to Athene to wear on her aigis, and return the sickle, the satchel and the helmet to the Stygian Nymphs.’
‘I promised to return them myself.’
‘I wouldn’t advise it.’
‘Shouldn’t one keep promises?’
‘In general, yes. But those nymphs would never let you go.’
‘I’m sorry I lost the polished shield.’
‘It served its purpose.’
‘I still feel badly about those nymphs.’
‘You have other purposes to serve. In the first place, your wife Andromeda and your descendants, one of whom will be an even greater hero than you. In the second place, when your grandfather dies, which will happen quite soon, you are to end the long quarrel between him and his brother Proetos by giving the kingdom of Argos to your cousin, Proetos’ son, Megapenthes.’
‘Am I to have no kingdom of my own to hand on to my descendants?’
‘In return he will give you Tiryns, which he governs now, and you will build it into a great fortress. You will also ask him to give you this little hill and he will willingly do so.’
‘I should think so. What use is this hill to anyone?’
‘You will build another fortress here, commanding with Tiryns not only the plain of Argos, but the road between the Gulf of Argos to the south and the Gulf of Corinth to the north. This hill, called Mycenae, will make your descendants and successors, kings of the triple fortress cities of Argos, Tiryns and Mycenae, the richest and most powerful rulers in the whole of Greece.’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And the great goddess Athene?’
‘Perhaps.’
Hermes gathered up the precious objects, smiled and was gone. Perseus stood for a while on the hill looking sadly at the place where the god had sat and trying to hear the music again in his mind. Then he shook himself, went down the hill and walked across the plain to Argos.
When he reached Larissa he found that he was famous. His killing of Medusa and his rescue of Andromeda from the sea-monster had already begun to be told by storytellers with embellishments of their own. But try as he might, he couldn’t meet his grandfather Akrisios, who had always just left the palace or was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed or was somewhere in the crowd watching one of the events at the funeral games. Perseus took part in several events – running, riding, boxing, wrestling, javelin throwing – without success. He had never been trained as an athlete and was up against the best performers in Greece. But he did better with the discus, although he had never thrown it before – perhaps his practice at aeronautics had given his body the necessary flexibility – and reached the final. Alas, trying too hard to put extra strength into his throw, he lost his balance and the heavy stone discus flew prematurely out of his hand and into the crowd
of spectators, where it fatally injured an old man. Perseus, in great distress, ran to where the old man was lying on the grass and knelt beside him.
‘Does anyone know who he is?’ he asked the people around.
‘Everyone knows him,’ they said. ‘He is a great king.’
‘Then why is he here in the crowd and not in the royal enclosure with the King of Larissa?’
‘He always seemed to be hiding,’ they said.
‘Why should he do that?’
‘Nobody knows why.’
‘What is his name?’ asked Perseus.
‘Akrisios, King of Argos,’ they said.
‘My grandfather!’
Perseus, in tears, bent down to kiss his grandfather’s face, bloodied from the terrible wound in his head. As he did so, the old man opened his eyes and his lips moved.
‘Perseus!’ he seemed to say with his last breath.
Looking up from our Arcadian terrace in the autumn I can see the constellations of Perseus and Andromeda directly overhead, with Cassiopeia and Cepheus next to them. Why should Perseus’ baleful parents-in-law have deserved this honour, when famous heroes like Jason and Theseus did not? However, it was not the gods or even such early astronomers as the unlucky brothers Atreus and Thyestes who named the classical constellations, but the much later astronomer, mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus. Ptolemy, as he’s generally known, lived in Alexandria in the middle of the second century AD and made a catalogue of more than a thousand stars. It must have been a wearisome business trying to fit those myriad pin-pricks of light into recognisable configurations, and perhaps when it came to the Perseus group he was at the end of a long night’s star-gazing and glad to knock off four constellations at a blow regardless of merit.
THESEUS
1. THE STONE
Theseus does not rate a constellation, although, next to Herakles, he is the most famous hero of all. King of Athens, killer of the Minotaur, deserter of Ariadne, husband of Ariadne’s sister Phaedra, abductor of the underage Helen, living visitor to Hades, lover of an Amazon queen and indirect murderer of their son Hippolytos, his record is perhaps too mixed, his heroic deeds too compounded with human error. Or it may have been simply that he came too late, long after Perseus, in the wake of Herakles, belonging to a generation which no longer had close contact with the gods. None of the generation immediately following his, the heroes of the Trojan War, became constellations, not even Achilles. Their world was already sliding from myth into history and we name only streets or squares, not stars, after historical heroes.
Theseus was born on the ‘Claw’, the easternmost of the four principal Peloponnesian peninsulas, in a city called Troezen, cut off from neighbouring Argolis by the mountains we see from our terrace on the other side of the Gulf of Argos – Mavrovouni, Ortholithi and Didymo. Even as late as 1959, when I first visited Greece, there was no motor-road connecting Troezen to Argos, as there was none connecting our village under the Parnon mountains to anywhere beyond Kynouria. Such places were accessible only by sea or donkey or on foot. Troezen always had less association with Argos than with Athens, just across the Saronic Gulf, and to this day its district is administered from the Athenian port of Peiraias. It was in Troezen that Aigisthos took refuge from his cousin Agamemnon, and it was here that Agamemnon’s son Orestes came to be purified after killing his mother Clytemnestra and his cousin Aigisthos. Built on the lower slopes of a mountain, enclosed by mountains, Troezen overlooks a fertile plain and a large harbour sheltered by the island of Poros.
Theseus’ grandfather, Pittheus, a son of Pelops, was King of Troezen and famous for his wisdom. His only daughter Aithra was engaged to be married to the Corinthian prince Bellerophon, who, riding the winged horse Pegasos, had killed the monstrous Chimaera (a fire-breathing goat with a lion’s head and a serpent tail) and performed other heroic deeds. Unfortunately, whether out of curiosity or vainglory or both, he made Pegasos fly him up to the home of the gods on Mount Olympos. Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasos under his tail, Pegasos bucked and rolled like an aircraft in a severe patch of turbulence and flung his rider back to earth. Pegasos flew on to Olympos, where Zeus employed him as a thunderbolt carrier, an early version of the mules which used to carry mountain artillery up to the north-west frontier of India and other remote parts of the British Empire. Bellerophon landed in a thorn bush and survived, but lost his memory and became a miserable vagabond, lame, blind and outcast.
When he failed to turn up to claim his bride, King Pittheus was caught in a dilemma. He did not know what had happened to Bellerophon and assumed that, like many heroes, he might be delayed indefinitely by difficult and dangerous adventures. But Pittheus wanted grandchildren, since he had no son, and his daughter might grow too old if she had to wait too long. His solution was irregular but effective. During a long visit to Troezen by his old friend Aegeus, temporarily exiled from Athens, Pittheus made him drunk and then helped him to bed in Aithra’s room instead of his own. Theseus was the result, and Pittheus must have told his friend what he had done, since when Aegeus eventually returned to Athens, he gave instructions to Aithra that if the child was a boy and grew up to be sufficiently strong and intelligent, she was to send him to Athens to be heir to the kingdom of Athens as well as Troezen. How was she to know if he was sufficiently strong and intelligent? Aegeus said that he had concealed his own sword and sandals under a stone and if Theseus could recover them that would prove he was made of the right stuff.
The ancient city of Troezen stood a little to the north of the modern village of Trizina and there are still a few relics of it: one of the towers from the city wall, a temple to the Muses (where Pittheus reputedly taught the art of oratory), some sort of Asclepian complex – a clinic or a health and gymnastic centre – and the stone of Theseus. Except that it cannot be the stone, being far too insignificant and unremarkable and hardly capable of concealing a single sandal, let alone a sword. Some two feet high and four feet long, mainly rectangular, with a bite out of one side, it is more likely to have been a piece of the city wall, which to judge by the tower was made of the same hefty blocks as Tiryns.
Theseus grew up in awe of his cousin Herakles’ exploits and by the age of sixteen was determined to rival them. He was not, of course, as strong as Herakles – nobody was – nor was he the son of Zeus, though the Troezenians later claimed that his real father was not Aegeus but Poseidon and contrived an elaborate story in which Poseidon slept with Aithra on the same night as the drunken Aegeus. Since this was not unlike the story of Zeus sleeping with Herakles’ mother on the same night as her husband Amphitryon, Theseus himself may have been its original author. But what he lacked of Herakles’ superhuman strength and divine assistance (but also divine obstruction from Hera), Theseus made up for with his sharp intelligence, persuasive charm and the gifts for organisation and public relations which he had perhaps inherited from his wise grandfather. Herakles was too much of a maverick ever to be a king, but Theseus was a born leader.
When his mother told him about the sword and sandals under the stone, Theseus immediately set about finding them. It took him the best part of six months, as anyone who has ever walked in the Greek mountains will readily understand. A sword under a stone in that part of the world is roughly equivalent to a needle in a haystack in more arable places. Theseus characteristically conducted his search in an orderly sequence. He began with the road his father Aegeus had followed down to the harbour from which he had sailed back to Athens. Theseus did not really expect to find anything there, considering how many people must have travelled back and forth along the road in the more than sixteen years since Aegeus’ departure, but he needed to eliminate it before fanning out in an ever-widening circle round the city. His patience was inexhaustible. He perfectly understood that if his father’s test was in the last resort that of the strength to move the stone – and he was quite certain that his own strength was at least equal to Aegeus’ – its main purpose was to prove that he had the rare
r qualities of determination, persistence, percipience and self-control.
Having examined and occasionally lifted or shifted every large stone on the lower slopes of the mountain within a radius of about a mile round Troezen, Theseus began to climb higher. He couldn’t now follow a circular pattern, so he divided his search into vertical segments, probing the sides of each valley before following the stream that had created the valley up to its source near the top of the mountain. His mother and grandfather observed his efforts with admiration and pride.
‘That boy will go far,’ said Pittheus. ‘Day after day, week after week, he comes back tired and empty-handed, but never shows the slightest disappointment or frustration.’
‘I asked him about that,’ said Aithra, ‘how he could keep searching and never finding. He looked at me with surprise. ‘But I do keep finding, mother,’ he said. ‘Every day I find another area where it isn’t and can tick that off my list.’’
‘Remarkable!’ said the wise and cultivated Pittheus. ‘He already understands the value of the negative in the discovery of the positive, the contribution of the pause to the effectiveness of speech and of rests to the beauty of music.’
One day Theseus began exploring the valley immediately above Troezen, where an aqueduct brought water from the plentiful springs high above directly into the city. After eliminating the sides of the valley, he took the path that followed the aqueduct up to where it crossed the stream on a narrow, single-arched bridge, known now as the Devil’s Bridge, though the ancient Greeks knew nothing of the Devil. Their world was full of malevolent monsters and bad people, some of whom Theseus was soon to meet, but they happily lacked the concept of any guiding evil spirit in the universe.
The stream far below the bridge was a tumble of boulders and Theseus had decided to climb right to the top of it and then descend boulder by boulder. He crossed the bridge and took the path that led upwards, still high above the stream-bed, among plane trees and oleanders. After a while the banks of the stream became less steep and the path closer to the water. Hot and thirsty, Theseus left the path and clambered down to a lovely place, shaded by the trees, where the stream briefly paused in its descent and formed a pool. Theseus drank from the water spouting down into the pool, then took off his tunic and bathed in the pool, afterwards choosing a huge boulder in the sun on which to sit and dry himself. As he slid off it, he felt it tilt a little and realised that in the pleasure of bathing and sunning himself he had not thought to check underneath it. When he did so, he saw that although the upper part where he had been sitting was almost spherical, the underneath was cleft like a giant’s buttocks, with the two stone cheeks resting unevenly on the sloping rock below. Warily, in case this was the hiding place of some unpleasant creature, he put his hand into the dark cavity under the boulder and touched what might, he feared, be a snake. Nevertheless, he grasped it and pulled it into the light. He was holding the thong of a sandal. He pulled the whole sandal out and felt in the cavity again and brought out a second sandal. His heart beat fast with excitement. He stared at the two sandals for a long time in silence and joy. They were no ordinary sandals, but made of the finest leather, royal sandals, and they looked pristine. They had kept dry in their hiding-place above the water and the sun had never reached them to fade their ox-blood colour.
Arcadian Nights Page 25
