Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

by Stephen Fry

  fn4 You might notice strong resemblances to Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, for instance.

  fn5 Apuleius, who flourished in the second century AD, was from North Africa but wrote in Latin and so used the names Cupid (interchangeably with Amor) for Eros, Venus for Aphrodite and Anima for Psyche, a translation that conveys the word’s sense not just of ‘soul’ but of ‘breath of life’ – ‘that which animates’. If you were to translate Apuleius literally you would get a very allegorical tale indeed. ‘Love said to Soul, you must not look at me’, ‘Soul fled from Love’, etc.

  fn6 In due time Psyche gave birth to their child: a daughter, HEDONE, who was to be the spirit of pleasure and sensual delight. The Romans called her VOLUPTAS. Hedonism and voluptuousness, unsurprisingly, are hers.

  MORTALS

  fn1 She gave her name to the city of Mycenae.

  fn2 A heifer is to a cow as a filly is to a mare.

  fn3 ‘Argive’ meant ‘citizen of Argos’, but in later times was often used to mean any Greek – especially as distinct from a Trojan.

  fn4 There are those who like to suggest that the idea of Argus having a hundred eyes arose from a fanciful way of expressing his extreme watchfulness. It might just as well have been playfully said and then seriously believed, they maintain, that he had eyes in the back of his head. We repudiate such dull, unromantic propositions with the contempt they deserve. Argus had a hundred eyes. Fact.

  fn5 Painters and sculptors often depicted Hera on a chariot drawn by peacocks, and there is, of course, the Sean O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock.

  fn6 Strange that ‘Oxford’ and ‘Bosporus’ mean exactly the same thing.

  fn7 The very hero who would one day unchain Prometheus and set him free.

  fn8 The name ‘Erechthonius’ is sometimes used of both Erechtheus and various of his descendants. His chthonic birth out of Gaia can be seen in both names.

  fn9 As for Pandrosos, the obedient sister who resisted looking into the basket, a temple was raised to her near that of Minerva, and a festival instituted in her honour called Pandrosia.

  PHAETON

  fn1 Phaeton (like Apollo’s alternative name ‘Phoebus’) means ‘shining one’. Sometimes rendered as Phaethon, Phaëton or Phathon, it is usually pronounced to rhyme with ‘Satan’ or ‘Nathan’, though you can, if you prefer, rhyme it with ‘Titan’ or ‘Python’.

  fn2 A daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, the Oceanid Clymene might be regarded as one of the most influential mothers in all Greek myth. From her couplings with the Titan Iapetus she was, on the one side, the mother of Atlas and Menoetius (two of the Titans who furiously opposed the gods during the Titanomachy and were duly punished) and, on the other, of Epimetheus and Prometheus. These offspring alone establish Clymene’s importance as a great matriarch of the early world. Some, though, say that the Oceanid Clymene and the Clymene who was Phaeton’s mother were not the same woman at all, and that actually the mother of Atlas and the other Titans should be called ASIA, so as not to muddle her with the mortal Clymene, mother of Phaeton. It all gets very confusing and is best left to academics and those with time on their hands.

  fn3 Even the nature of Phaeton’s father is debated. In some versions of the story his father is the sun Titan, Helios. I shall go along with Ovid and attribute the fatherhood of Phaeton to the god Apollo.

  fn4 Or Cycnus.

  fn5 Sole indeed – SOL was Helios’s Roman name. When you breathe in the gas named after him – helium – it makes you giggle with exactly the same mocking, high-pitched, hysterical squeak that Helios himself made when he jeered at Phaeton.

  fn6 The rather pleasing word for being placed amongst the stars, the classical equivalent of canonization perhaps, is ‘catasterism’. A mostly lost ancient prose work called the Catasterismi, telling of the mythological origins of the constellations, is credited to one Pseudo-Eratosthenes of Alexandria.

  CADMUS

  fn1 Before this great Phoenician idea, writing took the form of visual symbols such as hieroglyphs and pictograms. Like our numbers, these bore no relation to their sound. The written ‘24’, for example, gives no clue to pronunciation at all and you’d say the sign differently according to the practices of your language. The alphabetical (i.e. phonetical) characters in twenty-four or vingt-quatre or vierundzwanzig tell you just how to say them. That was the crucial breakthrough. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks into the writing system more or less in use there today. Its close Cyrillic relation spread from Bulgaria in the ninth century AD to the Balkans, Russia and many other areas of eastern Europe and Asia, while the Romans adapted the Greek alpha and beta into the alphabetic system you are interpreting so fluently at this minute. Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who lived in the fifth century BC, still called such writing ‘Cadmean’.

  fn2 Not the tragic ELECTRA, daughter of AGAMEMNON and CLYTEMNESTRA, but another much earlier one. The name is interesting; it is the female form of electron, the Greek word for ‘amber’. The Greeks noticed that if you rub amber vigorously with a cloth it magically attracts dust and fluff. They called this strange property ‘amberiness’, from which all our words ‘electric’, ‘electricity’, ‘electron’, ‘electronic’, and so on, ultimately derive.

  fn3 He gave his name to the Dardanelles, site of the ill-fated Gallipoli landings in the First World War.

  fn4 Some sources claim that Ares and Aphrodite were Harmonia’s parents. Her later ascent to the status of goddess of harmony (CONCORDIA to the Romans) certainly hints at a more divine pedigree. Given what Ares was about to do to her, you might think him a most unnatural father – so loyal to his water dragon, so cruel to his human daughter. Other mythographers, notably Roberto Calasso, an Italian writer whose creative interpretations of myth are well worth reading, have elegantly compromised and suggested that Harmonia was indeed the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, but was given to be suckled and adopted by Electra of Samothrace.

  fn5 It forms the wedge of land that separates Turkey from Syria and is now called Çukurova.

  fn6 A central region of Greece, north of the Gulf of Corinth. Without giving too much away it is worth relating that it once bore the name ‘Cadmeis’ …

  fn7 Ovid calls the Ismenian Dragon Anguis Martius, the ‘Snake of Mars’. It seems (ap)ophis (snake) and drakon (dragon) were pretty much undifferentiated in Greek myth, much as Wurm (worm) and Drachen (dragon) are interchangeable in Germanic legend.

  fn8 Chthonius had the name that defined them all as chthonic beings.

  fn9 The polis or ‘city state’ was to become the defining unit of government in ancient Greece. Athens was the best known, but Sparta, Thebes, Rhodes, Samos and many others flourished around the Greek world, forming alliances, trading and fighting with each other. Despite Greek giving us the word ‘democracy’, the polis could also be ruled either by a king (tyrannos in Greek, so when we say ‘tyrant’ we don’t always mean ‘despot’) or by the ‘rule of the few’, which in Greek is oligarchy. From polis come all those words like ‘polite’, ‘politics’ and ‘police’.

  fn10 I’m damned if I can find a convincing definition of ‘girdle’. Some think it’s a belt, others a device more like a Playtex panelled support or corset – others yet have described it as a ‘mythical Wonderbra’. Calasso calls it ‘a soft deceiving sash’.

  fn11 ‘A garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground’ is Roberto Calasso’s excellent description in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

  fn12 Scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. The Dalmatae (a name ultimately deriving from an early Albanian word for ‘sheep’) were an Illyrian tribe to the northwest of the region who gave their name to this Dalmatian coast (and the dog).

  fn13 Being from Tyre, Cadmus probably used the word for ‘let it be so’ most commonly used throughout the Middle East: Amen.

  TWICE BORN

  fn1 Cadmus and Harmonia’s sons Polydorus and Illyrius were too young to rule. I
n time Polydorus would go on to reign in Thebes, and Illyrius would rule over the kingdom that bore his name, Illyria, as we have already seen.

  fn2 The real Beroë, an Oceanid who had indeed nursed the young gods, gave her name to the city of Beirut.

  fn3 Another word for the appearance and revelation of a god to a mortal is ‘theophany’.

  fn4 It was common, as you may remember from Apollo’s promise to Phaeton, for gods to swear by this dark and hateful river.

  fn5 An astonishing story. As Ovid himself says of it: ‘If man can believe this …’

  fn6 The name probably couples ‘god’ (Dio, meaning Zeus) with the Nysus, the birthplace.

  fn7 A grateful Zeus rewarded them by adding them to the heavens as the Hyades, a spiral constellation whose rising and setting the Greeks believed presaged rain.

  fn8 Books 10, 11 and 12 of the sprawling forty-eight-book epic poem the Dionysiaca, written by the Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis in the fifth century AD, details this relationship and its aftermath at great length.

  fn9 Nonnus interrupts the action here (a thing he does a lot: his poem is astonishingly dull, given its superb subject matter) by having Eros come to comfort Dionysus with tales of other great male lovers. He tells of KALAMOS and KARPOS (the latter being son of Zephyrus the West Wind and CHLORIS, nymph of greenery and new growth – as in ‘chlorophyl’ and ‘chlorine’), two beautiful youths passionately in love with each other. During a swimming contest (athletics and hunting seem to be a theme with beautiful youths coming to a sticky end, as we shall see in the tales of HYACINTHUS, ACTAEON, CROCUS and ADONIS, amongst others), Karpos dies, and a desolated, grief-stricken Kalamos commits suicide. Kalamos is then changed into reeds and Karpos into fruit: they are the Greek words for ‘reed’ and ‘fruit’ to this day.

  fn10 It is said that he gave the secrets of the vine to every known land except Britain and Ethiopia. It is sadly true that neither country has a great reputation for winemaking, although that is changing and these days English wines are making a name for themselves. Perhaps the same is true of Ethiopian vintages.

  fn11 The violent mysteries of these extreme worshippers were depicted in all their shocking savagery by the Athenian playwright Euripides in the fifth century BC in the Bacchae. In this bloody tragedy Dionysus returns to Thebes to wreak his revenge on those of his mother’s sisters who refused to believe Semele’s claim to be carrying Zeus’s child. The god sends King Pentheus mad and causes his own bewitched aunts, Agave, Ino and Autonoë, to tear the poor man apart, limb from limb.

  fn12 Ovid, in his retellings of Dionysus’ myths, commonly uses the name LIBER for him. It carries the sense of ‘freedom’ and of ‘libertine’ – as well as, unconnectedly, ‘book’.

  THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED

  fn1 If you want to impress your friends, you can learn the following list of the male and female hounds as given by Ovid in his version of the myth. If nothing else they might serve as useful names for online passwords.

  Dogs: Melampus, Ichnobates, Pamphagos, Dorceus, Oribasos, Nebrophonos, Lailaps, Theron, Pterelas, Hylaeus, Ladon, Dromas, Tigris, Leucon, Asbolos, Lacon, Aello, Thoos, Harpalos, Melaneus, Labros, Arcas, Argiodus, Hylactor.

  Bitches: Agre, Nape, Poemenis, Harpyia, Canache, Sticte, Alce, Lycisce, Lachne, Melanchaetes, Therodamas, Oresitrophos.

  THE DOCTOR AND THE CROW

  fn1 Although, on a BBC TV adaptation of the Gormenghast books, I worked with an albino crow called Jimmy White.

  fn2 koronis is a Greek word for ‘crow’ or ‘rook’. Its original meaning is ‘curved’, whether in reference to the curves of the princess or of the bird’s beak I cannot say.

  fn3 Some use the staff of Asclepius (or Hippocratic staff) – a rough wooden stick, entwined with a single serpent. Others use the caduceus of Hermes – a more slender and elegant staff entwined by two serpents whose heads meet at the top and are surmounted by a pair of wings. There does not seem to be any professional or clinical significance in the choice; it is purely a matter of preference.

  fn4 The poet and scholar Callimachus, who lived in the third century BC, suggested that Apollo and Admetus became enthusiastic lovers during this period of servitude.

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  fn1 Only one such equine–human hybrid had been seen on earth before: the great Chiron, tutor to Asclepius, Achilles and many others. Chiron’s birth could be traced back to the time of Kronos, son of Ouranos and Gaia, father of Zeus and Hera. During a lull in the Titanomachy, Kronos fell for PHYLIRA, an Oceanid of great beauty. She repelled his advances until, tiring of her bashfulness, he transformed himself into a great black stallion and took her against her will. Chiron was the offspring of this union and – despite pre-dating Centauros by many hundreds of years – he is referred to as a centaur by convention.

  fn2 Athamas was a brother of Sisyphus, the reason for whose infamy we shall soon see.

  fn3 Shakespeare’s King Lear cries out:

  Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

  Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

  Do scald like molten lead.

  fn4 There was another son, BROTEAS, who liked to hunt and whose life seems to have been uneventful compared to that of his siblings. He is said to have carved a figure of Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess, into the rock of Mount Sipylus. Parts of it are still visible to the tourist today.

  fn5 The Olympians may have subsisted on ambrosia and nectar, but they took great delight in the variety offered by mortal diets too.

  fn6 Named by historical convention the house of Atreus, after one his sons. The fall of the house of Pelops and Atreus involves the destinies of many heroes and warriors right down to the Trojan war and its aftermath. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes were all descended from Pelops and said to have inherited his and Tantalus’s curse. Pelops’s name lives on, of course, in the Peloponnese, the great peninsula to the south west of the Grecian mainland.

  fn7 Tantalum is one of those refractory metals that is essential these days in the manufacture of many of our electronic devices.

  fn8 A tantalus is a small cabinet containing two or three drinks decanters, usually of brandy, whisky or rum. The drinks are on display but the cabinet is locked, and thus tantalizingly out of the reach of the children of the household.

  SISYPHUS

  fn1 The rascally entertainer, pickpocket, tinker and ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is called Autolycus.

  fn2 This violation of Amphithea gave rise to the rumour that Sisyphus was the true father of Autolycus’s daughter ANTICLEA. Anticlea begat LAERTES and Laertes begat the great hero ODYSSEUS aka Ulysses, who was known above all for his wiliness and resource.

  fn3 Asopos had charge of at least two rivers. There was the one in Boeotia that watered Thebes, and this one, which ran through Corinth.

  HUBRIS

  fn1 Once he had married Niobe and taken her to Thebes, the city he helped found, Amphion added three strings to that lyre’s original four, so that, in honour of her birthplace in Asia Minor, he could play music in what is still called the Lydian mode.

  fn2 At this time, as in the subsequent Age of Heroes, there was always the possibility of humans attaining immortal rank. It was to happen to HERAKLES. In later civilizations Roman emperors could be deified, Roman Catholics sanctified and film actors catasterized in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  fn3 The rock is limestone, but the element niobium, very similar in composition and characteristics to tantalum, is named after the queen of tears.

  fn4 It is a pleasing coincidence that one of the chief uses of palladium, the element named in Pallas Athena’s honour, is in the manufacture of woodwind instruments. Or is it a coincidence? Hm …?

  fn5 Now, if you really cannot stomach the idea of such cruelty from an otherwise so admirable god, you might prefer another reading of the story. The Hungarian philologist and mythographer Károly Kerényi, one of the great pioneers of the study of Greek m
yth, pointed out that satyrs customarily dressed themselves in pelts of animal skin. He maintains that what Apollo actually did was confiscate the hide from Marsyas so that he had to go naked. That was all. The punishment was no greater than that. This is an amiable and convincing interpretation but not one that generations of artists ever believed.

  fn6 One version of the myth maintains it was a capricious and sulky Apollo who challenged the gifted Marsyas, not the other way around, making the fable more about divine jealousy than mortal hubris.

  ARACHNE

  fn1 Lydia is a common setting for many of the myths. The Greeks colonized the area they called Ionia, which included Lydia, and which today we would recognize as the Anatolian region of Turkey.

  fn2 The gods later took pity on her and changed her into a stork. Storks ever after ate snakes, apparently. This was not the Theban ANTIGONE, daughter of OEDIPUS, but a Trojan girl of the same name.

  fn3 Daughters of Minyas, a King of Boeotia. They were LEUCIPPE, ARSIPPE and ALCATHOE. A recently discovered species of European bat is named the Myotis alcathoe in her honour. The sisters’ fate was often used as a warning to those who were tempted away from a life of Dionysian revelry – we are more likely to expect warnings in the other direction these days.

  MORE METAMORPHOSES

  fn1 Sometimes these myths can be regarded as aetiological – in other words, offering explanations for how things got to be the way they are. Arachne could be seen as a story that explains why the spider weaves, Melissa tells us why the bee makes honey, and so on. Sort of ‘How the Elephant Got Its Trunk’ fables. Certainly the names of flowers and animals that relate to many of these types of myth have come down to us in Latinate scientific nomenclature such as ‘Daphne Laureola’ for the spurge laurel, or the common or garden names, Narcissus, Hyacinth, etc.