by Stephen Fry
Telemachus, 123–4
Telephus, 268–9, 389
Tenedos (island), 149
Tenes of Tenedos, 149–50, 381
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 348
Tethys, 37, 50, 85, 362
Teucer (son of Idaea), 2n
Teucer of Salamis: son of Telamon and Hesione, 29; suitor for Helen, 73; joins the Achaean fleet, 119; descended from Zeus, 159; skilled bowman, 90–1, 171, 217, 257; rescued by Ajax, 217; demands funeral rites for Ajax, 266; rescues the Atreides, 276; in List of Characters, 381
Teucrians, 3n
Thalassa, 37n
Theano, 253, 389
Thebes, 4
Thermodosa, 252n
Thersilochus, 240
Thersites, 254–5, 254n, 255n, 381
Theseus, 71, 98, 132, 190, 252, 252n, 297, 316, 330–1, 331n; in List of Characters, 371–2
Thessalus, 35
Thessaly, 35, 119
Thetis: beloved of Peleus, 36–42; marriage to Peleus, 44–5; attempts to make her sons immortal, 82–4; dips Achilles in the Styx by his heel, 85–7, 258; hides Achilles on Skyros, 129–32; warning to Achilles, 150; on the side of the Greeks, 158; avoided by the gods, 160; appeals to Zeus, 193–5, 216; consoles Achilles, 234; commissions Achilles’ armour from Hephaestus, 235–6; and Achilles’ death, 261–2; in List of Characters, 363
Thrace, 161, 176
Thracians, 222–3
Thrasius, 240
Thrasymedes, 256
Thyestes, 64, 65–7, 81, 190n, 372
Thymbraeus, 302–3, 308
Tiberius, Emperor, 48n, 133n
Tiryns (city state), 24n
Titans, 37n
Tithonius, 12n
Tithonus, 256, 389
Troad, the, 5, 5n, 64, 96, 111, 147, 156, 161
Troezen (city state), 7, 24n, 63, 64n
Troilus, 90, 179–81, 389
Trojans, 3n, 6, 6n, 157, 161–2
Tros, 3, 4, 15, 389
Tros (son of Alastor), 240
Troy (Ilium; Ilion): foundation, 4–6; fortification by Apollo and Poseidon, 10–11; sacked by Heracles, 19–22; Priam rebuilds, 47–8; wealth, 47–8, 94; funeral games, 54, 91–2, 94–9; reinforcements and defences, 173–4; pillage and destruction by the Greeks, 324–32; excavations of, 348–51
Troy: Dream and Reality (exhibition, 2001), 350
Troy: Myth and Reality (exhibition, 2019), 350
Tyche (chance), 77
Tyndareus, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75–80, 372
Typhon, 152n, 364
Ventris, Michael, 275n, 344n
Virgil, Aeneid, 327n
women of Troy, 246, 253
Wooden Horse: plan and construction, 295–300; examined by the Trojans, 301–3; the Greeks inside, 309–14; enters Troy, 312–13, 315
writing/ scripts, 275n, 341, 343–4
Xanthus see Scamander (river)
xoanon, 5n, 6
Zephyrus (West Wind), 146
Zeus: overthrows Kronos, 38; father of Dardanus, 1–2; and Ganymede, 4; gift of horses to Tros, 15; father of Aeacus, 25; and the Myrmidons, 30; at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, 42, 46–7; father of Helen, 68–70; tricks Aphrodite, 108–13; intervention in the Trojan War, 159–60, 210, 216; sends Agamemnon a dream, 194–5; wish to protect Hector, 243; regret over mankind, 332–3; in List of Characters, 358
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by Michael Joseph in 2020
Copyright © Stephen Fry, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustration by Sarah Young
ISBN: 978-1-405-94448-9
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
It Fell from Heaven
1 The stories of Helle, the golden ram and Jason can be found in Heroes (page 185), and the tragedy of Hero and Leander in Mythos (page 359). Even later in history those same straits, now called the Dardanelles after Dardanus, were the source of terrible fighting in and around the peninsula city that the Greeks called Kalli Polis (Beautiful City), which over time had turned into the name Gallipoli.
2 In some versions Dardanus annexed, absorbed or even invaded an existing kingdom that had been founded by King Teucer, a son of the river god SCAMANDER and the oread, or mountain nymph, Idaea. This Teucer is not to be confused with the bowman of the same name whom we shall meet later. In later poetry and chronicles Trojans were sometimes called Teucrians.
3 The youngest of Dardanus’s three sons, Idaeus, gave his name to Mount Ida, the greatest of the peaks lying to Dardania’s south.
4 Indeed, the cupbearer lives two immortal lives in the night sky: as the constellation Aquarius, the Water-Carrier, and as a moon of his lover, Jupiter (the planets all take on the gods’ Roman names).
5 Also in honour of Tros, the whole peninsula was beginning now to be referred to as the Troad (pronounced ‘Tro-ad’, not to rhyme with ‘toad’).
6 Three ancient Greek cubits, roughly approximating to four feet six inches. A wooden cult object like this, carved in the form of a deity (usually a goddess), was known as a xoanon.
7 The liquid vowel ‘i’ in ancient Greek and Latin often becomes a consonantal ‘j’ in English: ‘Jason’ for ‘Iason’, ‘Jesus’ for ‘Iesus’, ‘Julius’, ‘Juno’, ‘juvenile’, etc. The French have Troyen and Troyenne; in German it’s Trojaner but pronounced ‘Troy-ahner’. It’s the same ‘y’ sound in Italian and Spanish. The Portuguese spell and say it a bit like us, though: Trojan to rhyme with ‘explosion’. Modern Greeks say Tro-as, rhyming with ‘slow ass’.
8 Hence the name of Homer’s epic poem the Iliad.
9 Zeus punished Tantalus with an eternal torment in the underworld: water and fruit were kept always just out of his reach, giving our language the word ‘tantalize’. See Mythos, page 221.
10 Pronounced ‘Ee-no-may-us’.
11 One of whom, TITHONUS, married EOS, goddess of the dawn, and was granted immortality by Zeus. Immortality, but not eternal youth. As a result he withered away until Eos turned him into a grasshopper. See Mythos, page 317.
12 A fate identical to that which befell the Ethiopian princess Andromeda, who was rescued by HERACLES’ great-great-grandfather (and half-brother) PERSEUS: see Heroes, page 35.
Salvation and Destruction
1 See Heroes, page 88.
2 Pronounced almost as ‘Hess irony’ … but without the ‘r’. Rhymes with ‘Hermione’ and ‘Briony’.
3 Some historians claimed Heracles was inside for three whole days, which seems unlikely. It is the same number of days Jonah is said to have been inside his big fish, so perhaps that is just the canonical duration in such stories.
4 There are versions of this story that suggest the corrosive gastric juices of the dragon
either completely stripped Heracles of all his hair or else turned it permanently white.
5 The discounted labours were the Second – the Lernaean Hydra – and the Fifth – the Augean Stables. For further details, see Heroes, page 99.
6 See the map on pages vi–vii. The Argolid, or Argolis, is the name given to the (sometimes loosely confederated) city states of Corinth, Mycenae, Tiryns, Epidaurus, Troezen and Argos.
7 Salamis was a sister of Aegina, which makes Cychreus, what …? I’m so bad at kindred and affinity … Telamon’s grandmother’s sister’s son would be his …? A cousin of some sort, at least.
8 See the story of BELLEROPHON in Heroes (page 148) for a similar example of blood crime and its expiation through kingly intercession.
9 Other versions attest to Cychreus’s daughter Periboea being the mother of Ajax by Telamon. There is also a source that makes Glauce, not Endeis, the mother of Telamon and also, by him, the mother of Ajax. But we need not concern ourselves with all these variant and mind-fogging details. Suffice to say, Telamon fathered Ajax the Great. The name Ajax, incidentally, or Aias as the Greeks more commonly rendered it, derives from a word meaning ‘to mourn’ or ‘lament’ (a cross between those words of pain and despair ‘Aiee!’ and ‘Alas!’), although the poet Pindar claims it derives from aetos, ‘eagle’. To make matters more complicated, as we will discover, there were two warriors called Ajax/Aias who fought for the Greek side in the Trojan War: but more on that later.
10 Once more demonstrating the onomastic minefield that must be negotiated when tiptoeing around the stories of Greek myth, for the Trojans had a Teucer too – one of the founding kings of the Troad, Dardanus’s predecessor.
11 Here we say goodbye to Aeacus. It is worth noting, however, that after Aeacus’s death his father Zeus rewarded him (if it can be said to be a reward) by setting him up as one of the three Judges of the Underworld, along with his Cretan half-brothers Minos and Rhadamanthus. See Mythos (page 143) and Heroes (page 174).
12 Not to be confused with the Theban Antigone, daughter of Oedipus: see Heroes, page 322.
13 See Heroes, pages 205 and 281.
14 You will already be aware of how confusing it can be to have so many similar words and names in these stories. Peleus is not to be confused with Pelias or the mountain which was soon to be his home, Pelion. In fact, even though the mountain is called Pelion in the much earlier story of the giants who tried to heap it up on top of Mount Ossa (see Mythos, page 260), it is possible that it took its name from Peleus, which means ‘muddy’. Perhaps Pelias, who came from this area, has a similar meaning. Maybe the Greeks thought Aeolia an especially muddy part of the world … Being a mountainous region it certainly gets more rainfall than most of Greece. Another potential and rather less charming meaning of the word is ‘the dark colour of extravasated blood’ …
15 See Heroes, pages 148 and 401.
16 … unless you are the issue of an incestuous coupling, of course.
17 Asclepius was the great healer who had been raised to divine status as the god of medicine. See Mythos, page 251.
18 ‘At the hoofs’ would be more precise.
19 Tethys was one of the original twelve Titan children of the primordial divine beings OURANOS and Gaia; along with Pontus, Thalassa and Oceanus, she was an original deity of the seas and oceans (see Mythos, page 10). Geologists named the ancient Mesozoic sea that once covered much of what is now Europe and western Asia after her.
20 See Mythos, pages 20 and 38.
21 In Greek the -id or -ides ending denotes ‘descended from’, indicating the paternal line. So the offspring of the sea god Nereus are Nereids, of Oceanus Oceanids, of Heracles the Heraclides, and so on. Thetis’s mother was an Oceanid whose name, although a perfectly good Greek name for a girl, will usually cause the modern reader to smile – Doris.
22 The Greek personification of destiny: see Mythos, page 17.
23 See Mythos, page 110.
24 The lyre had been the invention of the precocious infant Hermes on the day of his birth: see Mythos, page 106.
25 Poseidon is generally considered to have ‘invented’ the horse.
26 One of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. These magical fruits had played their part in the Eleventh Labour of Heracles and in the winning of Atalanta by Hippomenes: see Heroes, pages 100 and 291. Since they were originally a wedding present from Gaia, primordial goddess of the earth, to her grandchildren Zeus and Hera, the appearance of one of them at this last great wedding of the Olympian Age offers a grim circular symmetry.
27 Te kalliste: ‘to the most beautiful’. Kalos is the Greek word for ‘beautiful’ – as in ‘callisthenics’, ‘calligraphy’, and so on.
28 Hecuba’s origins are disputed. It was apparently a favourite game of the Roman emperor Tiberius to confound scholars by challenging them to name Hecuba’s mother. ‘Ha! You can’t!’ he would crow – according to the historian Suetonius in his book The Twelve Caesars. It is in many ways a recognition of the apparent ‘completeness’ of Greek myth that this story should proliferate. The expectation that every last genealogical connection in a real, historical dynasty could be known is asking too much – to expect such knowledge when it comes to a mythological family is on the face of it absurd, but such is the appeal of Greek mythology and its alluring sense of authentic detail …
29 To Arisbe, daughter of the seer Merops, King of Percote, a city to the northeast of Troy.
30 Pronounced to rhyme with ‘badger-lay-us’.
31 Which made Oenone a sister to Aesacus’s beloved, Hesperia.
32 Not the Italian Pisa, if you recall. The Greek Pisa lies in the northwest of the Peloponnese, capital of the kingdom of Elis.
33 A third son, Pittheus, went on to rule Troezen. Pittheus was the father of AETHRA, Theseus’s mother, who features in Heroes, but whom we shall meet again soon in relation to the story of Troy.
34 Literally ‘golden horse’.
35 The curse of Ares was on Cadmus for his slaying of the Ismenian Dragon and the curse of Dionysus on the next generation for their snubbing of the god’s mother, Semele. For these, and for the unfolding of the curse on the house of Laius, see Mythos (pages 220 and 230) and Heroes (page 295).
36 By throwing him down a well, according to some sources. Other versions have him killing himself …
37 With epic results: see Heroes (page 148).
38 As their grandfather Tantalus had done with their father, Pelops.
39 Lacedaemon, a son of Zeus, had been an ancient King of Laconia. He renamed the realm after Sparta, his wife (and niece). The Spartan people in classical times were known for their terseness and directness of speech. They (like stereotypical Yorkshire people, perhaps) didn’t hold with all the book-learning and southern metropolitan nonsense that was found in Athens and other such soft places. There is a story that King Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) besieged the city and threatened them thus: ‘If I defeat you, we will raze your city to the ground. We will kill every man and boy in the city and take every woman and girl into slavery.’ The Spartans sent a one-word reply. ‘If …’ This is often thought to be the original laconic reply.
40 Pronounced ‘Tinder-ay-us’, but ‘Tin-dahr-yus’ is possible.
41 See Heroes, page 50. In the same afternoon Alcmene had sex with both Zeus and her mortal husband Amphitryon causing her to give birth to the twins Heracles and Iphicles. Heracles was fathered by Zeus, Iphicles by Amphitryon.
42 https://www.dailysabah.com/asia/2019/03/29/chinese-woman-gives-birth-to-twin-babies-from-different-fathers-in-one-in-a-million-case.
43 This is the version preferred by Roberto Calasso, who writes about it with great drama and poetry in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There is indeed something poetic about the idea of Helen being a child of Nemesis, who, as a daughter of Night, is a sister of Eris. There is uncertainty about the origins of the name (‘torch’, ‘light’, ‘fire’, ‘sun’ are some possible meanings
), but it is generally agreed that its similarity to ‘Hellenic’, ‘Hellenes’ and other words for ‘Greek’ is coincidental.
44 See Heroes, page 114.
45 Meaning ‘sons of the god’, specifically ‘sons of Zeus’: the words Zeus, Deus and Dios are kindred, or ‘cognate’, as a linguist might say. The appellation Dioscuri is commonly applied to the twins despite only Polydeuces being Zeus’s true biological son.
46 And a prospective bride of the hero Bellerophon. See Heroes (pages 147, 329 and 394) for the full stories of Aethra, Pittheus, Bellerophon, Theseus and Pirithous.
47 Son of Telamon, and often called Telamonian Ajax, or Ajax the Mighty, or Ajax the Great.
48 No relation to Diomedes of Thrace, the owner of the flesh-eating mares that constituted Heracles’ Eighth Labour … (see Heroes, page 78).
49 He had been installed in the place of Theseus by Castor and Polydeuces when they swooped on Attica to rescue Helen.
50 The total number of suitors, if you combine those listed by such sources as Apollodorus, Hesiod and Hyginus, comes to forty-five.
51 The name ‘Ionian’ is potentially confusing, since these waters are off the west coast of Greece and nothing to do with the land of Ionia, which is what we would call Asia Minor, now Anatolian Turkey … all the way across the Aegean to the east, the land where Troy is situated. Odysseus’s Roman name is Ulysses … which is odd, since the Romans didn’t really have much use for the letter ‘y’. Ulixes is another Latin spelling. Most sources suggest that Odysseus was one of the applicants for the hand of Helen, but I stick to my guns in saying that he was not, and perhaps you will see why as the story unfolds.
