Heroes

by Stephen Fry

  ‘Quick, turn the ship about! And row!’ yelled Jason. ‘Row like you rowed through the Clashing Rocks!’

  Once they were safely out of range, they looked back. The huge automaton was striding round the corner of the island and out of sight.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ demanded the Argonauts.

  ‘TALOS,’ said Nestor. ‘That was Talos.’

  ‘My tutor Chiron told me about him when I was a child,’ said Jason, ‘but I always thought it was just a stupid story made up to amuse me.’

  ‘He’s real enough as you have seen,’ said Nestor. ‘He walks around Crete three times every day to protect the island from pirates and invading fleets.’

  ‘Is it true that Hephaestus constructed him in his Olympian forge at the command of Zeus?’ asked Jason.

  ‘I thought Daedalus built him for King Minos,’ said Meleager.

  ‘No, no. I believe I am right in saying that he is the last of the great race of Bronze Men,’ Nestor said. ‘They were born from the Meliae – you know, the nymphs of the ash tree who sprang from the earth when Kronos castrated his father Ouranos.’fn71

  ‘If that is true,’ said Medea, ‘then he is not a machine, but a mortal; and as a mortal he can be killed.’

  ‘But darling,’ said Jason. ‘He is made of solid bronze.’

  ‘Not quite true,’ said Nestor. ‘Whether he is man or machine, it is certain that he has a single tube or pipe running down from his neck to his ankle like a great vein. This is where his ichor runs, the divine fluid necessary for his life and motion.fn72 It is all held in by a brass nail in his heel. If that nail is dislodged, the liquid will run out and he will fall.’

  ‘Why risk engaging with him?’ Meleager asked. ‘Let’s just leave.’

  ‘We need provisions,’ said Euphemus. ‘We’re out of fresh water, bread, fruit … everything.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Ancaeus, ‘he’s here again!’

  It was true, Talos had reemerged and was sloshing through the waves towards them.

  ‘Let me,’ said Medea, standing up high on the foredeck, calling out her incantations. ‘Come Talos, come! Come to me, come to me!’

  Talos stopped mid-stride and cocked his head. Medea stared deep into the blank eyes chanting all the while. As the dragon in the Grove of Ares had done, Talos froze.

  ‘There,’ said Medea. ‘Now, someone go down and pull out that nail of his.’

  Pirithous was only too happy to dive into the water and do the deed. He came up from the waves, a bronze pin between his teeth. Behind him the automaton creaked, tottered and crashed into the sea.

  Jason hugged Medea. ‘You’re a miracle worker!’fn73

  They crept east along the northern shore of the island and put in at Heraklion,fn74 where the collapse of Talos had yet to be noticed.

  Now provisioned for the final leg of their homeward voyage they sailed on to Iolcos.fn75

  THE MAGICAL DEATH OF PELIAS

  Jason knelt before Pelias, the Fleece spread out before him.

  The successful return of Jason and his crew complete with Golden Fleece was the last thing that Pelias had expected or hoped for. Wicked men who send heroes on their quests always believe that they are sending them to certain death. Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.

  ‘Sorry it took so long,’ said Jason, ‘but Colchis is a fair distance and there were one or two obstacles on the way.’

  Pelias, under the curious gaze of his court, did his best to look pleased.

  ‘I accept this Fleece. It certainly looks genuine. You may leave.’

  They withdrew. It was clear at once that Pelias had no intention of giving up his throne. What is more, Jason now discovered that his father and mother, Aeson and Alcimede, were dead. Some said that, along with his young brother Promachus, they had been executed by Pelias; others that a distraught Aeson had poisoned his wife and son and fallen on his own sword after Pelias told him that it was certain the Argo had sunk with all lives lost.

  ‘In either case,’ said Jason bitterly, ‘Pelias is responsible for their deaths.’

  ‘Let me deal with that, darling,’ said Medea. ‘He’s your kinsman and it wouldn’t be right for you to be seen to end his life. You know how fussy gods and mortals are about such things.’

  Medea befriended Pelias’s nine daughters, the PELIADES:fn76 ALCESTISfn77, ALCIMEDE, fn78, ANTINOË, ASTEROPEIA, EVADNE,fn79 HIPPOTHOË, MEDUSA (not the Gorgon), PELOPIA and PISIDICE.

  ‘It is so sad that your father is growing old,’ she said to them. ‘My own father, Aeëtes, is twenty years Pelias’s senior, but he looks – and acts – young enough to be his grandson.’

  ‘How is that?’ the daughters demanded.

  ‘I expect you’ve heard of my powers,’ said Medea.

  ‘They say you’re a witch!’ said Pelopia.

  ‘I always think that’s such a terrible word. I prefer ‘enchantress’. Yes, there are ways to make your father youthful, but I don’t suppose you’d be interested?’

  ‘Oh, we would, we would!’ cried the girls, who loved their father very much.

  Medea now prepared a gruesome conjuring trick. With the girls watching in open-mouthed stupefaction, she took an old ram and cut its throat before butchering it into small pieces which she threw into a great cauldron. Next she sprinkled magic herbs into the pot and made dramatic passes over it with her hands. Suddenly, a bleating sound was heard and a lamb leapt alive from the cauldron and gambolled awayfn80.

  The girls gasped and clapped their hands.

  ‘There you are,’ said Medea, handing them a packet of herbs. ‘Now you try it. Don’t forget to move your hands exactly like this …’ She repeated the mystical gestures she had made over the pot.

  The girls ran to Pelias’s chamber where he was taking his afternoon nap. With cries of joy and excitement they slit his throat and cut him up. They carried the bloody chunks of his flesh to the cauldron, dropped them in, sprinkled in the herbs and made the magical passes with their hands. They waited breathlessly for a rejuvenated Pelias to spring from the pot, but strangely he did not.

  When they went sobbing to their brother Acastus and told him what they had done, he immediately knew that the girls had been tricked.

  ‘She gave you the wrong herbs, you fools!’fn81

  Acastus arranged not only a grand funeral for his father, but funeral games too. They were to become the most famous yet celebrated, surpassed only by those held a generation later by Achilles to honour the death of his beloved friend PATROCLUS, cut down by HECTOR before the walls of Troy.

  Acastus was a far more likeable man than his fatherfn82 and the people of Iolcos believed him when he apportioned as much blame to Jason as to Medea for the death of Pelias. From being the popular hero Jason became overnight a loathed criminal. Until he atoned for the blood killing – Pelias was, after all, his unclefn83 – he could not even stay in Iolcos, let alone claim its throne.

  So Medea and Jason fled, leaving Acastus to rule the kingdom. The crew of the Argo dispersed, returning to their homes, lives and subsequent adventures. Many of them were to meet up again and join in the Calydonian boar hunt. Meanwhile, it is worth leaving Jason and Medea for a moment to relate the story of Ancaeus, the man who took over the duties of helmsman of the Argo following the death of Tiphys.

  Once the Argo had put in at Iolcos, Ancaeus made for his home island of Samos, just north of Patmos. Before he left to join the Argonauts, he had planted out a vineyard, which he hoped would be bearing grapes by the time he came backfn84 The island’s seer told Ancaeus that, while he would certainly return to Samos safe and sound, he would never taste the vineyard’s wine. On his return Ancaeus saw to his delight that the grapes had ripened beautifully and been turned into wine. He summoned the seer before him and raised a cup of the wine to his lips.

  ‘So much for your fals
e prophecies,’ he said, waving the cup in the seer’s face. ‘I should sack you for incompetence.’

  ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip,’ said the seer.fn85

  Just as Ancaeus was about to take a drink, a clamour rose up outside. A wild boar was ravaging the vineyard. Ancaeus put down the cup and ran out to inspect the damage. The boar charged out, tossed him on his tusks and gored him to death.

  The seer, fully aware that he had coined a new proverb that would be repeated for generations, picked up the cup of wine and drained it.

  The boar was later sent by Artemis to Calydon, as we shall find out when we follow the adventures of Atalanta.

  MEDEA RISES UP

  The story of Jason and Medea now moves to Corinth where they found refuge from the wrath of Acastus and the people of Iolcos.fn86

  King CREONfn87 offered them sanctuary, and they soon settled in comfortably enough to life in his palace. Medea bore Jason three sonsfn88 and all was well until Jason’s eye fell upon Creon’s daughter CREUSA.

  Eros’s arrow, when it struck Medea, had never pierced a heart more ready for utter devotion. Her love for Jason was animal, obsessive and terrifyingly passionate. Her fury when she discovered his betrayal no less volcanic.

  To herself she swore revenge, yet she had enough inner strength somehow to conceal her rage, her hurt and her drastic intentions.

  ‘Can it be true,’ she asked Jason, ‘that you have decided to leave me?’

  ‘It’s political,’ he replied. ‘If I marry into Creon’s family then one day our children might rule Corinth and Iolcos. You can see the value in that, surely?’

  ‘After all I’ve done for you?’ Medea kept her voice steady. ‘Who was it who helped you defeat the fire-breathing oxen and the great serpent of the Grove of Ares? Who was it who overcame Talos of Crete …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. But it was Aphrodite when you come to think of it. Idmon told me the whole thing before he died. Aphrodite sent Eros to make you fall in love with me. On the orders of my protectress Hera. It was all her doing really, she was the one who helped me. You were merely her vessel.’

  Merely – her – vessel. In the days to come Medea would repeat those words to herself many times. But what came out of her mouth now was:

  ‘Of course, my love. You are right. I know that. I am happy for you, and happy for Creusa and her family. And to prove it, I shall send her the finest wedding gifts I can procure.’

  ‘You’re an angel,’ Jason kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Knew you’d understand.’

  Slapping her cheerfully on the behind, he left the room.

  Men! It’s not that they’re brutish, boorish, shallow and insensitive – though I dare say many are. It’s just that they’re so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever and entirely without fault of course.

  Creusa’s wedding gifts arrived, a gold coronet of leaves and a gorgeously embroidered and scented robe – all smeared by Medea with deadly poison. Creusa could not wait to try them on in front of a mirror of polished bronze. Within minutes the venom burned through her skin and entered her bloodstream. Her howls of pain summoned her father Creon, who held the dying girl in his arms, wailing and sobbing. But when he tried to lay her body down, he found that the poison gown was stuck to him and he too died in agony.

  Now Medea prepared to kill her sons.fn89

  It might seem that what Medea was about to do is the most terrible of her catalogue of gruesome crimes; but in Medea, Euripides puts in her mouth a great speech in which she prevaricates over whether or not to do the deed. It stands as one of the great soliloquies in drama. From it Medea emerges sympathetically as a tragic and wholly human dramatic hero.fn90

  The infanticide is something she agonises over. At first she decides she cannot and must not do it. Then she pictures what the children’s fate will be if she does not. Less kindly hands than hers will take their lives.

  Medea

  I have determined to do the deed at once,

  to kill my children and leave this land,

  and not to falter or give my children

  over to let a hand more hostile murder them.

  They must die and since they must

  I, who brought them into the world, will kill them.

  But arm yourself, my heart. Why hesitate

  to do these tragic, yet necessary, evils?

  Come, unhappy hand of mine, take the sword

  take it, move to the dismal turning point of life.

  Do not be a coward. Do not think of your children –

  how much you love them, how you gave them birth.

  For this one short day forget your children,

  and mourn tomorrow. For even if you kill them

  still you loved them very much. I am an unhappy woman.

  In an astonishing coup de théâtre Medea appears above the stage in a chariot drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather Helios, god of the sun. She has the bodies of her children with her, fearing that if she leaves them in Corinth they will not be given proper burial. Jason, having been told what has happened to his sons, calls up to her. Their exchange of blame and curses is magnificent. Jason’s final plea to her falls on deaf ears:

  Jason

  In the name of the gods

  let me touch the soft skin of my children.

  Medea

  That will not happen. Your words are thrown into the empty air.

  (She flies off toward Athens)fn91

  In Athens we will meet Medea again.fn92

  A broken Jason lived on in Corinth until his old friend and fellow Argonaut Peleus, brother of Telamon, persuaded him to return to Iolcos and overthrow Acastus. This they managed and Jason was finally installed as king. His reign did not last long, however. He fell asleep one afternoon under the stern of his beloved Argo and a rotten and poorly attached beam fell on him and killed him instantly.

  Forward on the prow, the figurehead muttered to itself. ‘I warned him when the sternpost was sheared off by the Clashing Rocks all those years ago. “Mend it well,” I said. “Mend it well, or one day you’ll regret it.” Mortals, there’s no helping them.’

  ATALANTA

  * * *

  BORN TO BE WILD

  Many Greek heroes were the mongrel offspring of humans, minor deities, demigods and even full Olympians. Some were born to prophetic curses that caused them to be outcast and raised by foster parents or even foster animals. A great many others would find their divine lineage a curse. Their heroism, perhaps, derived from their ability to bring their mix of the human and the divine to bear against the grinding pressures of fate. Well of course it did. That’s where all heroism comes from. I use the word ‘hero’ shorn of gender. Hero was a reasonably common female first name in the ancient worldfn1 and I hope we can agree that a division into heroes and heroines would be clumsy and unnecessary.

  The great hero Atalanta had a most royal pedigree: her mother was CLYMENE of the royal Minyad clanfn2 and her father, depending on whether you believe Ovid or Apollodorus as a source, was called either Iasus or Schoeneusfn3. Whatever his name, he was an Arcadian king and the kind of ruler who had no use for female offspring. When his firstborn by Clymene proved to be a girl, he had the child taken from the palace and exposed on a mountainside to die. He was neither the first nor the last royal father to consign an infant to such a fate, as we shall see.

  The baby was abondoned in a high cranny on Mount Parthenion where she would soon surely die. Indeed, only half an hour after the palace guard laid her down a bear, attracted by the cries or perhaps the unfamiliar human scent, lumbered up to investigate. As luck would have it – or MOROS, the deep fate that determines all – this was a she-bear, a she-bear, moreover, who had lost her newborn cub to wolves not twenty-four hours earlier. A maternal instinct still drove the bear, and instead of eating the infant she suckled her.

  And so the human baby girl grew to be a shy, wild and swift forest creature. Whether
she thought herself a bear or knew her difference at first we cannot know. She might have remained one of those legendary wild children of the woods adopted by animals and unsocialised by her own species – an ancient Greek Kaspar Hauser or Victor of Aveyron, a female Tarzan or Mowgli – were it not that, one day, she was seen and taken by a group of hunters. Luckily for her, they were well-disposed and kindly. They named her Atalantafn4 and taught her the secrets of trapping and killing, of shooting with arrows, spears and slings, coursing, hunting, tracking and all the arts of venery and the chase. She quickly equalled and surpassed their skill, combining as she did human subtlety with the ferocity and speed of the bear that brought her up. Her supreme swiftness and unmatched ability as a huntress made Atalanta a natural devotee of the goddess of Chastity and the Chase, Artemis, to whom she committed herself, heart and soul.

  One day she found herself cornered by two centaurs, the half-human, half-horse hybrids famed for the accuracy and the speed of draw of their archery. Atalanta loosed two arrows that found their mark before either centaur had managed even to raise his bow. Her reputation spread and soon everyone in the Mediterranean world had heard stories of the beautiful girl, dedicated to Artemis, who ran faster and shot straighter than any man.

  And when Artemis cursed a neighbouring kingdom with a monstrous boar that ravaged the people and their crops and livestock, it was to be Atalanta, the goddess’s most faithful servant and adherent, who would lift that curse.

  THE CALYDONIAN BOAR

  Somehow the citizenry and rulers of the city state of Calydon, part of the kingdom of Aetolia, now called Thessaly, had become lax in their devotions to the goddess Artemis. This was still a time when it was foolish to neglect any jealous deity, least of all the chaste huntress of the moon. As punishment for so insulting a slight to her honour and dignity, Artemis sent to Calydon a monstrous boarfn5 with razor-sharp tusks the size of tree branches and an insatiable appetite for goats, sheep, cows, horses and infant humans. It trampled down the crops, ravaged the vineyards and barns and, like Robert Browning’s rats in Hamelin, bit the babies in their cradles and drank the soup from the cooks’ own ladles. And much worse. The people in the countryside fled in terror to within the city walls and soon famine threatened.