Heroes

by Stephen Fry

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  MICHAEL JOSEPH

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  Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published 2018

  Copyright © Stephen Fry, 2018

  For picture credits

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Jacket figure illustrations: © Sarah Young

  Author photo © Claire Newman Williams

  ISBN: 978-1-405-94038-2

  PERSEUS

  fn1 One of the most important of all Greek city states. The name given to its people, the Argives, was often used by Homer simply to mean ‘Greek’. Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, although Macedonian, were said to originate from Argos.

  fn2 Often rendered as Danaë, so it should, I suppose, be pronounced ‘Danaye’.

  fn3 The Roman poet Horace, in his Odes, changed the bronze room to a bronze tower, and thenceforward it has often been portrayed as just such a fairytale Rapunzel-like minaret. The earlier sources insist, however, that it was a room, with slits in the roof to let in light and air.

  fn4 We do not know whether or not Danaë enjoyed the experience. There are those, it is said, for whom the prospect of a golden shower is actually rather … well … quite.

  fn5 Which simply means ‘net’.

  fn6 Not the Italian Pisa of the Leaning Tower, but a city state in the northwestern Peloponnese. The quest for the hand of Hippodamia had repercussions that sounded down to the end of the mythic era and the aftermath of the Trojan War. But their details are for another time and place.

  fn7 The description of the Gorgons in Mythos omits the idea of Medusa’s separate creation as a mortal Gorgon. There are, of course, many different accounts. The story Danaë tells Perseus is perhaps the most popular.

  fn8 In later times a ‘consultation tax’ would have to be paid to the priestess, as well as the cost of the requisite sacrifices.

  fn9 The priestess, known as the PYTHIA, would hold on to a sacred tripod that connected her to the ground. She would receive her messages from clouds of sulphurous steam that rose (and still do) from under the earth at Delphi.

  fn10 By our standards at least. For a Greek he was more than usually clothed …

  fn11 The Graeae’s names, as so often in Greek myth, have meanings. Pemphredo is ‘she who guides the way’, Enyo ‘warlike’ and Dino ‘terrible’ (as in dinosaur, which means ‘terrible lizard’). Dino was sometimes called Persis ‘the destroyer’. I’ve avoided that name on account of its similarity to Perseus. But it shows that Perseus and all the Pers- names carry ‘destructive’ meanings.

  fn12 The two main (and multitudinous) families of sea nymphs, the Oceanids and Nereids were daughters and grand-daughters respectively of the sea Titans OCEANUS and TETHYS. As such they were cousins of Poseidon. See the first volume of Mythos (page 10).

  fn13 Not to be confused with Ceto, mother of the two immortal Gorgons. Although the sea goddess does lend her name to all such sea monsters and, through them, our cetaceans.

  fn14 Nilus was one of the more important of the river gods, the potamoi – his descendants bred with Aegyptus, Libya and Ethiopia. As with Asia and Europa, the names of these deities, demigods and mortals can still be found on our maps today.

  fn15 Andromeda, like many mortals now, seems to show a distaste for incest. The gods are never so fussy.

  fn16 Herms or hermai were square columns used as good-luck boundary markers and signposts. They had a carved head, typically of the god Hermes (though usually uncharacteristically bearded) on top and male genitals lower down, which were thought to bring good luck when stroked in … a certain way.

  fn17 Strictly speaking the Peloponnese hadn’t yet earned its name, which was taken from that of King PELOPS, whom we shall encounter later on.

  HERACLES

  fn1 A daughter of Pelops and Hippodamia. It was Pelops who won the chariot race and the hand of Hippodamia that Polydectes had pretended he was going to try for. That story has to be told, but not just yet.

  fn2 Similar to a well-known episode in Arthurian legend. Merlin disguises Uther Pendragon as Gorlois, husband of Igraine, and in that form he sleeps with her and fathers Arthur …

  fn3 ‘Even though the sound of it produces consternation,’ as Mary Poppins and Bert the chimney-sweep might sing.

  fn4 Also ‘Ilithyia’. I pronounce her name, probably wrongly, like ‘Alicia’ said with a lisp. Eileithyia was depicted as a woman wielding a torch, representing the burning pains of childbirth, or with her arms raised in the air to bring the child to the light. The Romans called her Lucina or Natio.

  fn5 Eurystheus means ‘broad-shouldered’, which might suggest that his delivery gave Nicippe a twinge of pain as he emerged.

  fn6 Historis somehow escaped her wrath. Perhaps she was smart enough to hide.

  fn7 ‘Iphi-’ means ‘strong’ or ‘mighty’ (cf. Iphigenia, the ‘strong-born’) and ‘cles’ means ‘pride’ or ‘glory’. Apparently an ‘iphi’ is also a smallish Egyptian unit of dry measurement, familiar to the Greeks, and corresponding roughly to 1–1½ gallons. Perhaps he was dubbed ‘the Glorious Half-Pint’.

  fn8 It would be pleasing to think that they were rattlesnakes and that this remarkable incident initiated the custom of giving newborn babies rattles to wave, but sadly there is no evidence that the species ever existed outside the Americas.

  fn9 Sounds silly, but it is true. The Milky Way is a galaxy and the word galaxy is derived from the ancient Greek word gala, meaning ‘milk’. Hence galactic and, perhaps, Galaxy milk chocolate.

  fn10 Hera, who was herself a mother, would have had breast milk; Athena, a virgin goddess, would not have been able to feed the baby.

  fn11 While he was Hercules to the Romans and to many of us in everyday speech today, it has become the convention these days to render him Heracles.

  fn12 See Mythos, Vol. I, for further information about Autolycus, rascally son of Hermes.

  fn13 We will find out more of these twins, known as the Dioscuri, a little later on.

  fn14 For nature and fate, the Greeks might have said physis and moira.

  fn15 Variously an individual mountain and a mountain range. Sacred to Dionysus, it was here that Pentheus was torn to pieces by his mother and aunts, and Actaeon by his own hounds (see Mythos, Vol. I). Cithaeron will go on to play a vital role, as we shall see, in the life and tragic destiny of Oedipus.

  fn16 Not to be confused with the historical Thespis, Greece’s first actor.

  fn17 We will meet Creon again when we tell the story of Oedipus.

  fn18 A practice of self-mortification that still goes on. I have seen with my own eyes penitents arriving on their knees at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. Some of them have kneel-walked hundreds of miles to get there. Far from being Herculean, they are usually ancient and diminutive old ladies.

  fn19 Enthusiasm meant, originally, possession by a god. The verb ‘enthuse’ was a later American English back-formation.

  THE LABOURS OF HERACLES

  fn1 In Greek they were variously called the erga or more commonly the athloi of Heracles. The word ergon simply means ‘work’ while athlos means more than labour, it carries a sense of ‘test’. Our words athlete and athletic derive from it.

  fn2 At the risk of sending you mad by going over the family tree again, his father was Sthelenus, making Eurystheus a great-grandson of Perseus. As was Heracles, whose parents Alcmene and Amphityron were cousins and each a grandchild of Perseus. But of course Zeus was really Heracles’ father, as he was Perseus’s. Therefore Perseus was both Heracles’ great-grandfather and half-brother. Those
Greeks, eh?

  fn3 For more about this beast, see the chapter devoted to the adventures of Bellerophon.

  fn4 Greek ceramic representations of the Hydra tend to show a kind of upside-down octopus: a round, sometimes doughnut shaped body out of which extend nine snakes. Popular comic book art makes the creature more like a nine-headed dragon.

  fn5 Pronounced ‘Serry-nay-uh’ I think. Ceryneia, or Keryneia, today lies in the north west of the Peloponnese in the region known as Achaea. ‘Achaean’ is the name Homer most commonly gave the Greek forces in the Trojan War.

  fn6 What’s the difference between a hind and a doe? Your guess is as good as mine.

  fn7 For the fraught circumstances of their birth see Mythos, Vol. I.

  fn8 See Mythos, Vol. I, for the story of Ixion. There is more to come on Nephele and Chiron in Jason’s story, and we will meet the centaurs again with Theseus.

  fn9 See Mythos, Vol. I.

  fn10 In some versions of this episode, Chiron himself was accidentally scratched by one of Heracles’ arrows and suffered the most appalling agony. He alone amongst his race, being a son of Kronos, was immortal. The prospect of living eternally in such pain was insupportable to him. He begged the gods to be released into death and Zeus granted his wish, casting him into the heavens as the constellation Sagittarius, the man-horse archer. This is an egregious example of timeline inconsistency since Chiron was later tutor to ACHILLES who was yet to be born.

  fn11 Was this Greek satire against the gods? A way of suggesting that the immortals were more full of shit than mortals?

  fn12 The southern Adriatic. Confusing because the name ‘Ionia’ refers to parts of Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, far to the other side of Greece.

  fn13 Perhaps inspiring the phrase ‘to take the bull by the horns’.

  fn14 See Mythos, Vol. I, Twice Born.

  fn15 We will see more of Pelias in the story of Jason, where he is an important figure. Alcestis was one of the daughters who would make that unfortunate mistake with their father and the cooking pot.

  fn16 See Mythos, Vol. I, pages 309 and 315.

  fn17 Loosely taken from the fifth-century Athenian dramatist Euripides’ version of this story, Alcestis.

  fn18 Also the name of the philosopher SOCRATES’ legendarily shrewish wife. Really Xanthos is yellow with a tinge of red, so perhaps it means ‘bay’ in the equine sense. Strange that although they are mares, all the sources give names with male endings. It should really be Podarge, not Podargos.

  fn19 Cf. dinosaur, the ‘terrible lizard’, as mentioned in realtion to the Graeae.

  fn20 Some sources claim they breathed fire, too.

  fn21 Heracles, like most classical Greeks, was as happy to dine at the man-trough as at the lady-buffet. Iolaus his nephew and Hylas, his page during the quest for the Golden Fleece, were another two male lovers or eromenoi.

  fn22 Abdera still stands and was notable in the great age of Greek philosophy for producing Democritus, whom some regard as the founder of the scientific method (I recommend the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s thoughts on him in his excellent book Reality Is Not What It Seems). The sophist Protagoras, famous for his dialogue with Socrates as recorded by Plato, was also born there. Earlier, in the sixth century BC, the lyric poet Anacreon found sanctuary there from the Persians. His life and work inspired the creation in eighteenth-century England of the Anacreontic Society of gentleman amateur musicians. The tune of the club’s song, ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’, was poached by the Americans in 1814 to fit the words of the poem ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, now their national anthem. Would that tune be heard at the start of every major sporting occasion in the United States if Abderus hadn’t been eaten by horses? Such speculations might well drive a person mad.

  fn23 The name Amazon means or may mean ‘breastless’, and while later artists and sculptors often depicted the women as being either without breasts or single-breasted, it is now thought that the name derived from their matchless skill at archery. In that to draw back a bow to its full extent, the breast has to be tucked out of the way …

  fn24 See under Atalanta, here.

  fn25 Now the River Terme in northern Turkey.

  fn26 An identical indignity to that suffered by Andromeda. The image of the helpless damsel tied to a rock awaiting her fate at the hands of a dragon is a pervasive one, not just in Greek myth and art. We can all, I dare say, offer interpretations according to our adherence to varying schools of psychology, gender politics and so on.

  fn27 Two generations earlier Zeus had Ganymede, the beautiful Trojan prince, to be his lover and cupbearer. He sent magical horses to Tros by way of compensation.

  fn28 The girdle of Hippolyta was successfully excavated from the ruins of the Temple of Hera at Mycenae by Dr Henry Walton ‘Indiana’ Jones Jnr., but currently languishes in a crate hidden in a vast US government warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant and a copy of the board game Jumanji.

  fn29 The frequent appearances of bulls, cows, boars, sows, rams, ewes, stags, hinds and horses that feature in the heroic adventures are of course a reflection of the importance of these animals in ancient Greek economic, social and agricultural life. Their place in farming, commerce and civilisation contrasts with the threat to these elements of life posed by dragons, centaurs and other monsters. The class of mutant or savage boars and bulls might be said to represent a medial state between the tame and the monstrous. Snakes, sacred to Athena and Hera especially, might be said to exist in a class of their own. They can be lethal, they can be prophetic but they cannot be tame.

  fn30 Erytheia’s name means ‘red’, or ‘reddish’, because by the time the sun had travelled that far west it was close to its red, sunset colouring. Some Greek and later Roman writers placed Erytheia in the Balearics. Maybe it was Ibiza. Others located it further west; the volcanic island of Madeira is a possibility. Given the presence of the fabled dog Orthrus, perhaps it was one of the Canary Islands – the word ‘canary’ deriving, of course, not from a bird but from the Latin canus, meaning ‘dog’. Lanzarote would be the best candidate, since the ‘rote’ in its name means ‘red’; though dull, factually obsessed historians will tell you that this is a coincidence.

  fn31 India, most sources are agreed.

  fn32 Ireland? Britain? Portugal? There are many theories.

  fn33 Perhaps Helios’s western palace was in Wales and the bowl-shaped coracles that Welsh fisherman use are descendants of the Cup of Helios.

  fn34 A favourite torment. She had done the same to Zeus’s lover Io. The moon goddess Selene also sent one down to sting Ampelos, the beloved of Dionysus (see Mythos, Vol. I, for both stories).

  fn35 Perhaps the Rhine, possibly the Danube. Some even maintain that the river flowed in the legendary Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Islands’, which probably refer to the British Isles … If Heracles did visit Britain it is likely that in Cornwall he invented the sport of Tug of War.

  fn36 A title also given to the minor sea deity Proteus, who shared with Nereus the gifts of prophecy and shapeshifting. Hence ‘protean’. NEREUS is perhaps most familiar as the progenitor – along with his wife, the Oceanid DORIS – of the numerous friendly sea nymphs named Nereids in his honour.

  fn37 Tunisia and Algeria, we must suppose.

  fn38 Aegyptus, you will recall, was the grandson of Poseidon and Libya, and the uncle of Andromeda. Heracles’ descent from Perseus and Andromeda made Busiris a distant relative.

  fn39 The ruins of Thebes, Egypt, are contained within the cities of Luxor and Karnak.

  fn40 The Greeks usually called the Mediterranean just The Sea, or sometimes The Great Sea or Our Sea.

  fn41 Or a vulture. See Mythos, Vol. I, page 147.

  fn42 Ananke is the Greek personification of Necessity. Like Moros (Doom) and Dike (Justice) the laws of these gods are more powerful than the will of the gods. To call them personifications is perhaps stretching it a bit. They can be talked about as if they are deities, but in reality they are treated as inelu
ctable elements of fate.

  fn43 See Mythos, Vol. I.

  fn44 Another version says he went to Attica for the ceremony and that he needed to be made a citizen of Athens to undergo the ritual. This may be the people of Athens wishing to claim the greatest of all heroes, greater even than their beloved Theseus, as one of their own.

  fn45 Perhaps more familiar nowadays under its other name of Cape Matapan.

  fn46 The disgraceful adventures of Pirithous and Theseus are coming soon.

  fn47 The disturbing fate of Meleager will be revealed when we reach the story of Atalanta.

  fn48 Most accounts of the Twelfth Labour use this, later, name for Hades. Plouton became fused with the Roman PLUTO, the god of wealth. Precious metals and precious crops come from under the ground, so it was a natural elision.

  fn49 They say that where Cerberus’s drool fell aconite grew, the deadly poison sometimes called wolf’s bane.

  fn50 He seems to have forgotten his plan to bring his own wife back and, for the moment, his promise to seek out Meleager’s sister Deianira as a bride.

  fn51 Pronounced ‘Eekaylia’.

  fn52 See the ‘Rages of Heracles’ afterword for thoughts on this.

  fn53 We don’t know which gods. It seems a bit direct for Hera, so perhaps it was Zeus, for whom xenia was sacred.

  fn54 Neleus was the brother of King Pelias of Iolcos, and so the father of Alcestis.

  fn55 An especially apt name, given Heracles’ crime against xenia or guest friendship. Xenoclea is a name that glorifies the stranger or guest.

  fn56 Omphale’s name might be considered to be related to omphalos, meaning ‘navel’, it also can mean ‘button’ which plays into the cross-dressing narrative. It also means ‘boss’ which is apt enough – but the name had no such double meaning to the Greeks, of course.

  fn57 One of the judges in the musical competition between Pan and Apollo in which Midas made such an ass of himself. See Mythos, Vol. I, page 390.

  fn58 According to Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who lived in the fifth century BC, the descendants of this son (the name is variously given as AGELAUS or LAMAS), ruled Lydia for twenty-two generations. The most famous monarch of this dynasty was the sixth-century King CROESUS, who was as rich as … as rich as himself.