Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold
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Zeus’s determined mother visited Crete whenever she felt able to slip away from the ever watchful Kronos.
‘Never forget what your father did. He ate your brothers and sisters. He tried to eat you. He is your enemy.’
Zeus would listen as Rhea described the unhappy condition of the world under Kronos.
‘He rules by fear. He has no sense of loyalty or trust. This is not the way, my Zeus.’
‘Doesn’t that make him strong?’
‘No! It makes him weak. The Titans are his family, his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. Already some are beginning to resent his monstrous tyranny. When your time comes you will exploit that resentment.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘A true leader forges alliances. A true leader is admired and trusted.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘A true leader is loved.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘Ah, you laugh at me, but it is true.’
‘Yes, m—’
Rhea slapped her son.
‘Be serious. You are no fool, I can see that for myself. Adamanthea tells me that you are intelligent, but impetuous. That you spend too much time hunting wolves, teasing the sheep, climbing trees, seducing the ash-tree nymphs. It is time you were properly schooled. You are sixteen now and soon we must make our move.’
‘Yes, mother.’
The Oceanid and the Potion
Rhea asked her friend Metis, wise and beautiful daughter of Tethys and Oceanus, to prepare her son for what was to come.
‘He is clever, but wayward and rash. Teach him patience, craft and guile.’
Zeus was captivated by Metis from the start. He had never seen such beauty. The Titaness was a little smaller than most of her race, but endowed with a grace and gravity that made her shine. The step of a deer and the guile of a fox, the power of a lion, the softness of a dove, all allied to a presence and force of mind that sent the boy dizzy.
‘Lie down with me.’
‘No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.’
‘Here. On the grass.’
Metis smiled and took his hand. ‘We have work to do, Zeus.’
‘But I love you.’
‘Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?’
‘Don’t you love me?’
Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust.
For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.
Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.
One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Today,’ said Metis, ‘is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfil your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.’
‘What’s in that jar?’
‘In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I’ll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look, here is your mother. She will explain.’
As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other’s eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready.
Rebirth of the Five
Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea and sky to mark the end of Hemera’s and Aether’s diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. Power over everything gave him no satisfaction. Since Rhea had – without explanation – banned him from the conjugal bed, sleep had been a stranger to him too. Denied its healing balm his mood and digestion, neither good at the best of times, had worsened. The last of the babies he had swallowed seemed to have provoked a sharp acid reflux that the previous five had not. Where was the joy in omnipotence when his stomach griped and his thoughts stumbled blindly in the thick fog of insomnia?
His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny. He called out to her.
‘Rhea?’
‘Kronos! Awake at this hour?’
‘I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.’ Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.
‘Oh tush, my love. Cannot the wit and craft of a Titaness surpass those silly sleep demons? There is nothing Hypnos and Morpheus can do to soothe your aching body, to calm your racing mind, to ease your wounded spirit, that I cannot match with something sweet and warm of my own.’
‘Your sweet warm lips! Your sweet warm thighs! Your sweet warm –’
‘Those in time, impatient lord! But first, I have brought you a present. A lovely boy to be your cupbearer.’
From the recess stepped Zeus, a radiant smile lighting up his handsome face. He bowed and proffered Kronos a jewelled goblet which the Titan snatched greedily.
‘Pretty, very pretty. I might try him later,’ he said casting an admiring eye over Zeus and drinking down the contents of the goblet in one greedy draft. ‘But Rhea, it is you that I love.’
It was too dark for him to see that Rhea had hoisted one eyebrow into an arch of contemptuous incredulity.
‘You love me?’ she hissed. ‘You? Love? Me? You, who ate all but one of my darling children? You dare talk to me of love?’
Kronos gave an unhappy hiccup. He was undergoing the strangest sensations. He frowned and tried to focus. What was Rhea saying? It could not be that she no longer loved him. His mind was even more foggy and his stomach even more turbulent than usual. What was wrong with him? Oh, and there was something else she had said. Something that made no sense at all.
‘What do you mean,’ he asked in a voice thick with confusion and nausea, ‘by saying that I ate “all but one” of your children? I ate all of them. I distinctly remember.’
A strong young voice cracked through the night air like a whip. ‘Not quite all, father!’
Kronos, the nausea rising in an alarming surge, turned in shock to see the young cupbearer step from the shadows.
‘Who … who … whooooooooo!’ Kronos’s question turned into a sudden uprush of uncontrollable vomiting. From his gut, in one heaving spasm, erupted a large stone. The linen in which it was once wrapped had long since been dissolved by stomach acid. Kronos gazed at it stupidly, his eyes swimming and his face white. But before he could understand what he was seeing he was assailed by that horrible and unmistakable feeling that tells a vomiter there is more to come. Far more.
Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work.fn19 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.fn20 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.
If you recall, Metis’s potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grâce. He would sever Kronos’s head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground.
‘Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,’ said Rhea. ‘Let it be.’
‘But I must kill him,’ said Zeus. ‘We must be revenged.’
‘His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.’
Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate.
In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order …
They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves ‘Titans’. They would be gods. And not just gods, but the gods.
Part Two
* * *
THE BEGINNING
Clash of the Titans
At the summit of Mount Othrys, Kronos lay stretched out on the ground. The other Titans had not yet learned of Zeus’s rescue of his brothers and sisters, but it seemed likely that when they did they would react with furious violence. Under cover of the night Rhea and her six children slipped away, putting as great a distance between themselves and Titan country as they could.
War, Zeus understood clearly, was inevitable. Kronos would not rest as long as his children lived and Zeus was just as determined to dethrone his father. He heard louder than ever the sound he had heard within him since infancy: a softly insistent whisper from Moros telling him that it was his destiny to rule.
The bloody, violent and destructive conflict that followed is known to historians as the TITANOMACHY.fn1 While most of the details of this ten-year war may be lost to us, we do know that the heat and fury, the explosive power and colossal energy released by the battling Titans, gods and monsters caused mountains to bellow fire and the ground itself to quake and crack. Many islands and landmasses were formed by these battles. Whole continents shifted and reshaped themselves and much of the world as we know it now owes its geography to these seismic disturbances, to this literally earth-shaking conflict.
In a straight fight it is almost certain that the combined strength of the Titans would have been too much for their young adversaries. They were stronger and more remorselessly savage. All but Clymene’s sons Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with Kronos, far outnumbering the small group of self-styled gods ranged against them under Zeus’s generalship. But just as Ouranos had paid dearly for his crime of imprisoning the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires inside Gaia, so Kronos was about to pay for the blunder of imprisoning them in the caverns of Tartarus.
It was the wise and clever Metis who advised Zeus to go down and release his three one-eyed and three hundred-handed brothers. He offered them freedom in perpetuity if they would help him defeat Kronos and the Titans. They needed no further encouragement. The Gigantes too chose to side with Zeus and proved themselves brave and tireless fighters.fn2
In the final decisive battle the pitiless ferocity of the Hecatonchires – not to mention their surplus of heads and hands – combined quite marvellously with the wild electric power of the Cyclopes whose names were, if you recall, Brightness, Lightning and Thunder: Arges, Steropes and Brontes. These gifted craftsmen hammered their mastery of storms into thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, which he learned to fling with pinpoint accuracy at his enemies, blasting them to atoms. Under his direction the Hecatonchires picked up and hurled rocks at furious speed, while the Cyclopes harried and dazzled the enemy with lightning shows and terrifying peals of thunder. The hundred hands of the Hecatonchires scooped and launched, scooped and launched innumerable rocks at the enemy like so many demented windmilling catapults until, bludgeoned and battered, the Titans called for a ceasefire.
We will leave them, their great bloodied heads bowed in full and final surrender, and take a moment to look at what else had been going on in the world while battle raged for those ten terrible years.
The Proliferation
The fire and fury of war had scorched, enriched and fertilized the earth. New growth burst through to create a fresh, green world for the triumphant gods to inherit.
If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into life-forms of ever greater diversity, variety and richness. The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form and what you might call resolution. High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being.
I like to picture the first stage of creation as an old-fashioned TV screen on which a monochrome game of Pong played. You remember Pong? It had two white rectangles for rackets and a square dot for a ball. Existence was a primitive, pixellated form of bouncing tennis. Some thirty-five to forty years later there had evolved ultra hi-res 3-D graphics with virtual and augmented reality. So it was for the Greek cosmos, a creation that began with clunky and elemental lo-res outlines now exploded into rich, varied life.
Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters – to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.
The Muses
One of the original Titans, Mnemosyne (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed.fn3
We think of the Muses today as patron saints of the arts in general, and private sources of inspiration in particular. ‘O for a Muse of fire!’ cries the Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He or she is ‘my muse’ we might say of those who fire our creativ
ity and spur us on to greatness. The Muses can be found in ‘music’, ‘amusements’, ‘museums’ and general ‘musings’. W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet’s ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. Sometimes she gives you gold, sometimes you read back what she has dictated and see that it is dross. The Muses’ mother might be Memory, but their father is Zeus, whose faithless inconstancy is the subject of many stories yet to come.
But let us meet these nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to their own particular art form.
Calliope
Rather an undignified linguistic end meets CALLIOPE, the Muse of epic poetry. Somehow she became a steam-powered organ commonly played in fairgrounds, which are just about the only places where you will hear her name spoken today. To the Roman poet Ovid she was the chief of all the Muses. Her name means ‘beautiful voice’ and she gave birth to ORPHEUS, the most important musician in all Greek history. The finest poets, Homer, Virgil and Dante included, invoked her aid when embarking on their great epics.
Clio
Now relegated to a model of Renault motorcar and a series of awards in the advertising industry, CLIO or Kleio (famous) was the Muse of history. She was responsible for proclaiming, for noising abroad and making famous the deeds of the great. America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honour.