Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

by Stephen Fry

  fn9 Neil Gaiman’s Sandman character, Dream, is also known as Morpheus, and formed the inspiration for the character Morpheus played by Laurence Fishburne in the Wachowskis’ Matrix films.

  fn10 Four exceptions perhaps. Hypnos is not so bad after all. The longer you live, the fonder you become of him. And talking of living long – perhaps Geras isn’t too awful either. So five.

  fn11 Their names signify not their size but their chthonic origins – generated from the earth, ‘Gaia-gen’ if you will. Gaia’s name, incidentally, became worn down to Ge in later Greek. She is still there in earth sciences like ‘geology’ and ‘geography’, not to mention the later environmental studies that have restored her full name – James Lovelock and his popular ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ being a prime example.

  fn12 The sugars of the ‘manna ash’, which still grows in southern Europe, give their name to today’s sweetener Mannitol.

  fn13 At least the deposed Sky Father has the consolation of the planet Uranus named in his honour – it being the convention that the planets take the Roman names of the gods they represent.

  fn14 The females of the race can be called ‘Titanesses’.

  fn15 In fact the area of central Greece where Mount Othrys stands is called Magnesia to this day: it gave its name to magnesium, magnets and, of course, magnetite. Manganese too, through a spelling mistake.

  fn16 As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort.

  fn17 The question of how long it took for immortals to be weaned, to walk, talk and grow into adulthood is a vexed one. Some sources maintain that Zeus grew from a baby into young manhood in a single year. Divine time and mortal time seem to have run differently, just like those of dogs and humans do, or elephants and flies, for example. It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

  fn18 Zeus was often playful. The Romans called him JUPITER or JOVE, so he had quite literally a jovial disposition. ‘The Bringer of Jollity’, Gustav Holst calls him in his orchestral suite The Planets.

  fn19 The potion was prepared by Metis and it would be nice to think that is where our word ‘emetic’ comes from, but I don’t think it does.

  fn20 Although in birth order Hera had been the last to be born before Zeus, she now counted as the second child. A kind of reverse seniority operated as they emerged from Kronos’s gullet. Zeus became officially the eldest of the children while Hestia, having been the firstborn, was now considered the youngest. It makes sense if you are a god.

  CLASH OF THE TITANS

  fn1 Hesiod, in the eighth century BC, offers us the fullest extant account, but other poets also sang of it; an epic called the Titanomachia, by the eighth-century Eumelus of Corinth (or possibly the legendary blind bard Thamyris of Thrace), is tantalizingly mentioned in other texts, but remains lost to us. Hesiod describes the pitched battle that shook the earth like this: ‘The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and … reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods, and a heavy quaking reached dim Tartarus and the deep sound of their feet in the fearful onset and of their hard missiles. So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one another, and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to starry heaven; and they met together with a great battle-cry.’

  fn2 See Appendix here.

  fn3 The PIERIDES came from Pieria too. They were nine sisters who made the mistake of challenging the Muses, only to be turned into birds for their troubles. Alexander Pope refers to Pieria as the fount of all wisdom and knowledge in this well-known couplet from his Essay on Criticism:

  A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;

  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring …

  fn4 To give the actors added height, and with it metaphorical stature too.

  fn5 Which also gave us (via the word for a flourishing green shoot) the element thallium, a favourite of crime writers and criminal poisoners.

  fn6 Sharing her name with the Muse of comedy.

  fn7 Sometimes just Auxo.

  fn8 Atropine, the poison derived from mandrakes and Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), gets its name from this last and most terrible of the sisters.

  fn9 Later Greeks considered the Fates to be not daughters of Night, but of Necessity – ANANKE. They bear a very strong resemblance to the Norns of Norse mythology.

  fn10 The TAGIDES were nymphs associated within just one river, the Tagus, but now that I’ve mentioned them we can forget all about them as we shan’t meet them ever again.

  fn11 Atlas’s brother MENOETIUS, whose name means ‘doomed might’, had been a furiously powerful and terrible opponent too, but Zeus had destroyed him with one of the very first thunderbolts.

  fn12 These later images, however, show him holding up not the sky but the world.

  fn13 To some mythographers Kronos (the Titan) and Chronos (Time) are quite separate entities. I prefer the versions that unite them.

  fn14 Astronomers consult classical scholars when they name the heavenly bodies in our solar system. The numerous moons of Saturn include Titan, Iapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion, Tethys, Rhea and Calypso. Then there are the Rings of Saturn. Perhaps they signify time, like the rings of a tree.

  fn15 Some of the Titanides were very attractive and – as lustful, highly sexed and prone to falling in love as any being that has ever lived – Zeus already had designs on one or two of the more appealing ones.

  fn16 And ‘prescience’ or ‘forethought’ is just what the name Prometheus means …

  THE THIRD ORDER

  fn1 Hospitality, or xenia, was so extraordinarily esteemed in the Greek world that Hestia shared the care of it with Zeus himself, who was on occasion given the name Zeus Xenios. Sometimes the gods tested human ‘guest friendship’, as we shall see in the story of Philemon and Baucis. This was known as theoxenia. Xenophobes, of course, do not extend the hand of friendship to strangers …

  fn2 You will sometimes see the name DIS (a Latin word for ‘rich’) used for him or his Judaeo-Christian descendant, LUCIFER. Dante in his Inferno called the city of hell Dis. Today only cryptic crossword setters use the name with any frequency.

  fn3 Or ‘dwarf planet’ as it is now disrespectfully designated. The moons of Pluto are Styx, Nyx (or Nix), Charon, Kerberos and Hydra.

  fn4 Which is strange, as naiads, of course, were freshwater nymphs, unlike the salty Nereids and Oceanids. Perhaps the astronomers in this case failed to consult a classicist before allocating names.

  fn5 PROTEUS, the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, herded sea-beasts and knew much. To get information from him you had to wrestle him, which was tricky as he could quickly and frustratingly change himself into any number of new shapes – from lizard to leopard, from dolphin to dormouse. From this slippery ability we get the word ‘protean’.

  fn6 Not to be confused with ARION the singer songwriter, whom we will meet later.

  fn7 De-meter is often translated as ‘barley mother’ or ‘corn mother’, although it is now thought more likely that it originally signified ‘earth mother’, showing just how thoroughly Zeus’s generation of gods had wrested the reins from Gaia.

  fn8 Anagrammatically ‘Rhea’ does indeed come out of ‘Hera’; at least so I hear, but we won’t chase that hare.

  fn9 We shouldn’t forget that Gaia is a planet too: she is our home world. Latinized as Tellus or Terra Mater she is Saxonized for us as ‘Earth’ (cognate with the Germanic goddess Erde, Erda, Joeth or Urd).

  fn10 I would suggest that Marie Dressler, Lady Bracknell and Aunt Agatha, to name three great examples, can all trace their lineage back to Hera.

  fn11 Since Zeus took that decision the number twelve seems to have taken on important properties. It is divisible by two, three, four and six of course, making it twice as composite as the stupid number ten. The dozen can still be seen around us
in the Zodiac, the day’s hours, in months and inches and pennies (well, when I was a boy, it was twelve pennies to the shilling, anyway) not to mention the Tribes of Israel, Disciples of Jesus, Days of Christmas and the Asian twelve-year cycle. It’s a duodecimal world.

  fn12 The gods were – if you think it through – Aphrodite’s nephews and nieces. They were born of Kronos and she was the direct issue of the ejaculate of Ouranos.

  fn13 An important principal is demonstrated here, one that we will encounter many times. No god can undo the spells, transformations, curses or enchantments of another.

  fn14 Vulcan the planet and its people – notably Commander Spock – are not connected, so far as I can establish. The Romans sometimes referred to Vulcan as MULCIBER, smelter, in recognition either of his power to soften metal for working or his ability to soothe the anger of volcanoes.

  fn15 The Greeks still add pine resin to wine, call it retsina and offer it to visitors. No one knows why a normally kind and hospitable people should do such a thing. It tastes like what it essentially is, the kind of turpentine artists use to thin their oil paints. I love it.

  fn16 Of course, this is not the last time we shall witness Zeus playing with oaths and wriggling out of commitments.

  fn17 Or Cos, home of the type of romaine lettuce that bears its name and is one of the essential ingredients of a Caesar salad.

  fn18 Actually the gods did not have blood in their veins but a beautiful silvery-gold liquid called ICHOR. It was a paradoxical fluid because, while it retained all the eternal life-giving qualities of ambrosia and nectar, it was lethally and instantaneously poisonous to mortals.

  fn19 Also Athene – there doesn’t seem to be any shade of meaning attached to the variant spelling.

  fn20 Sea power, and the trade that it allowed, was to be the saving of Athens (it won them a startling victory over the Persians at Salamis). But the cultivation of the olive and the other crafts, arts and techniques that were the domain of Athena were arguably of even greater importance.

  fn21 Besides her armour, Athena was always depicted with an AEGIS. No one is quite agreed as to precisely what an aegis looked like. It is sometimes described as an animal skin (originally goat: aiga is a word for ‘goat’ in Greek), though pelts of lion or leopard can later be seen in sculpture and ceramic representations. Zeus’s aegis is generally held to have been a shield, perhaps covered with goatskin and often showing the face of a Gorgon. Human kings and emperors keen to suggest semi-divine status would throw an aegis over their shoulders as a mark of their right to rule. The word these days suggests a badge of leadership or authority. Acts are performed and proclamations made ‘under the aegis’ of such and such a person, principle or institution.

  fn22 Parthenos, the Greek word for virgin, was often attached to her name – hence ‘the Parthenon’, her temple on the Acropolis.

  fn23 We are permitted the use of that tired word here – it is Greek after all and allows us to picture Athena as embued with the grace of the Charities.

  fn24 I looked it up in a thesaurus and was offered: ‘unassuming, meek, mild, reserved, retiring, quiet, shy, bashful, diffident, reticent, timid, shrinking, coy; decorous, decent, seemly, ladylike, respectable, proper, virtuous, pure, innocent, chaste; sober, sedate, staid, prim, goody-goody, strait-laced’. I don’t suppose many women would jump up and down in delight if those words were used of them.

  fn25 In today’s Thrace, bounded by Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.

  fn26 Aphrodite and Athena, who equalled her in beauty, were neither of them in the strict sense born, so the claim is good.

  fn27 Why Apollo turned the raven black, and why the laurel also became sacred to him, we shall discover later on.

  fn28 Along with the regular Nemean and Isthmian Games, the Pythian and Olympic meetings made up the four so-called ‘Panhellenic Games’. The prizes do not really compare with today’s lucrative purses and endorsements. An olive wreath for the winners of the Olympics, laurel for the Pythian, pine for the Isthmian and – most thrilling of all – wild celery for the lucky victor of the Nemean Games.

  fn29 The name ‘Delphi’ is thought to derive from delphys, meaning ‘womb’. Of course it might be from adelphi, which means ‘siblings’ (because they come from the same womb). So perhaps the sacred place is named after Apollo the twin, perhaps after the womb of Gaia. There is another theory that suggests Apollo arrived at Pytho on a dolphin, delphis in Greek. A dolphin is, after all, a fish with a womb. But how he could have travelled so far over land on a dolphin I can’t quite say.

  fn30 When the Pythia prophesied she was possessed by the god Apollo, the Titaness Themis or the goddess Gaia. Or perhaps all three. The Greek for ‘divine possession’ is enthusiasmos – enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be ‘engodded’, to be divinely inspired.

  fn31 Some say that steam hissed out from the subterranean Castalian spring, which delighted the local goats, apparently. Perhaps this reminded people of a dolphin’s blowhole, offering yet another explanation for the change of the name from Pytho to Delphi. Castalia, incidentally, is the name of the future world in Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game.

  fn32 Today’s Mount Kyllini.

  fn33 Hermes’ natty headgear is known as the petasus. His staff, the kerykeion – or caduceus to the Romans – often appears as a worldwide symbol of medicine and ambulances, either as an alternative to or a confusion with the staff of ASCLEPIUS (of whom, more later).

  fn34 Medieval and Renaissance alchemists called him Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Majestic). Since he is said to have been able magically to seal glass tubes, chests and boxes, a seventeenth-century invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres (which employed the power of atmospheric pressure and a vacuum to create an incredibly strong seal) was described as ‘hermetically sealed’, a phrase still much in use today.

  fn35 This is its modern name – meaning literally ‘large kettles’ and to this day a rewarding sight for mountaineers who dare scale the heights of Olympus.

  fn36 It was either the action of the Hecatonchires or of glacial moraines. No one can say for absolute certain.

  PROMETHEUS

  fn1 The Greek for ‘between rivers’ is Mesopotamia, which is how that area was always known to the Greeks.

  fn2 See Appendix here.

  fn3 That is one theory as to the origin of the word anthropos, which does strictly mean ‘man’. It is unfortunate that many words for our species seem to refer only to the male. ‘Human’, for example, is cognate with homo, the Latin for ‘man’. Thus ‘humanity’ rudely leaves out half the species. ‘Folk’ and ‘people’ aren’t so specific. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that ‘man’ is actually connected to mens (mind) and manus (hand), and was in fact gender neutral until perhaps a thousand years ago.

  THE PUNISHMENTS

  fn1 It is a subtler name than that, for pan-dora can mean ‘all-giving’ as well as ‘all-given’.

  fn2 It is said to have been Erasmus of all people, the great sixteenth-century scholar and Prince of Humanists, who misread Pandora’s pithos (jar) into pyxis (box).

  fn3 See Appendix, here.

  fn4 Foresight, but not prophecy …

  fn5 Another English word for a werewolf is lycanthrope, Greek for ‘wolf-man’.

  fn6 According to Ovid at least. Other sources suggest Mount Etna or Mount Athos. Round about the same time Noah was landing on Mount Ararat. Archaeology confirms, it seems, that there really was a Great Flood.

  fn7 See Appendix here.

  fn8 Charon was also happy to receive a danake or danace, the Persian equivalent, later incorporated into ancient Greek currency.

  fn9 Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s visit to the underworld tells of the colour of Charon’s boat.

  fn10 The story of how Zeus seduced Europa will be told a little later on.

  fn11 The Canaries were Byron’s candidate for the Isles of the Blessed in his Don Juan.

  fn12 But not in France, despite the n
ame of Paris’s grand thoroughfare, the Champs Elysées.

  PERSEPHONE AND THE CHARIOT

  fn1 She features prominently in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

  fn2 Helios could be as dull and slow in the wits as he was bright and swift in the sun-chariot. How he came to take over these duties from Apollo will be revealed later.

  fn3 Although some say this, I tend to believe that Pan (FAUNUS to the Romans) was older than the Olympians. Perhaps as old as nature itself. We will encounter him from time to time as we move forward.

  fn4 There were two Mount Idas – the Cretan one, Zeus’s birthplace, and another in Phrygia, Asia Minor – today’s Turkish Anatolia. This was the one from which Hermaphroditus hailed.

  fn5 The great museums of the world have hidden away treasures that represent intersex figures like Hermaphroditus. Many of these have only recently come to light, with exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and other leading institutions setting a trend for rediscovery of this neglected area. It coincides with a greater, society-wide understanding of the fluidity of gender.

  fn6 Or possibly Pan.

  CUPID AND PSYCHE

  fn1 The well-known aluminium statue by Alfred Gilbert that forms the focus of the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, is actually not of Eros but of Anteros, deliberately chosen to celebrate the selfless love that demands no return. This was considered an appropriate commemoration of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury’s great philanthropic achievements in hastening the abolition of child labour, reforming lunacy laws, and so on.

  fn2 Cupid draw back your bow

  And let your arrow go

  Straight to my lover’s heart for me, for me …

  © Sam Cooke

  fn3 The King James Bible renders the conclusion of the thirteenth chapter of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (written in Greek of course) as: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ In modern translations ‘charity’ is rendered simply as ‘love’.