Heroes

by Stephen Fry

  fn59 Fine heroes in their own right, Peleus and Telamon also joined Heracles in the quest for the Golden Fleece, as we shall see. But they are now most remembered as the fathers of the two mightiest Greek heroes of the Trojan War: AJAX, son of Telamon, and Achilles, son of Peleus. The son of Telamon and Hesione was the legendary bowman TEUCER, who fought beside his half-brother Ajax at Troy.

  fn60 Some say it was in revenge for the abduction of his sister Hesione that, many years later, Priam sent his son PARIS to carry off Helen of Sparta, thus sparking the cataclysmic conflict which brought ruin upon both Greeks and Trojans. But that dreadful tale is for another day.

  fn61 Confusing, but not the same Eurytus whose son, Iphitus, Heracles threw from the walls of Tiryns.

  fn62 Not many words or names begin with ‘Ct-’, do they? The twins were sons of Poseidon and MOLIONE (hence their joint name of the MOLIONIDES). Molione was married to Augeas’s brother ACTOR, hence their loyalty to him.

  fn63 Presumably at the head of some sort of force or army: the mythographers aren’t very clear on this. Though such was his strength and temper that he certainly could do the work of one hundred armed men.

  fn64 Known to this day as Pylos-Nestoras (Navorino to the Italians across the Adriatic Sea).

  fn65 Consider, for instance, the stories told of Hermes and of his son Autolycus in Mythos, Vol. I, pages 101 and 268. Or, more recently, the quarrel of Eurytus and Heracles that we have just heard.

  fn66 As Odysseus and his men would discover to their cost one day.

  fn67 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 22.

  fn68 Thus ‘giant’ and ‘gigantic’ really mean ‘earthborn’ and have nothing to do with size, despite the way the words are now used and how the ‘giga-’ was taken from ‘gigantic’ to mean ‘huge’.

  fn69 The Greek word is pharmakon, as in ‘pharmacy’ and ‘pharmaceutical’.

  fn70 Pronounced ‘Die-an-era’.

  fn71 Like most water divinities he could change his shape at will – witness those Old Men of the Sea, Nereus, Proteus and later Thetis.

  fn72 At least so says Sophocles, the Athenian tragedian of the fifth century BC in his play Women of Trachis, which tells the story of Deianira and of the later life and death of Heracles.

  fn73 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 32.

  fn74 You meet one person whose name begins with ‘Ct’ and then another pops up ten minutes later.

  fn75 Pronunciation? Your guess is as good as mine. Kay-uhx perhaps, or maybe Cakes. I assume Alcyone is pronounced to rhyme with Hermione.

  fn76 In Philoctetes’ possession, the arrows of Heracles would play a crucial part in the climax of the Trojan War. The gods move in mysterious ways to achieve their ends.

  fn77 In The Odyssey, Homer places Heracles in Hades, a discrepancy that caused later mythographers to offer confusing and rather unconvincing explanations. His mortal shade went to the Underworld, they suggested, while the immortal one rose up to Olympus. There hadn’t been a suggestion before this, so far as I know, that anyone could be endowed with two souls, whether they had a divine parent or not. The Greeks, if the truth be told, were far too wise to have a consistent eschatology that presumed infallible knowledge of an afterlife. They had noted that no one ever returned from death and took the sane and sensible view that those who claimed to know what happened to a person after they died were either fools or liars. Thus there was no ‘system’ to Elysium, Tartarus, Erebus, the Fields of Asphodel and the Underworld. Nor is there any such consistent law of the afterlife in either testament of the Bible, come to that. All the threats of hell and punishment and promises of heaven and reward came much, much later in our history.

  fn78 Hebe would be Heracles’ half-sister of course, but that’s nothing. Perseus was simultaneously his great-grandfather and half-brother.

  fn79 Athenian exceptionalism at the height of the classical era was as unpopular with the rest of the world as British exceptionalism in the days of the Raj or American and Russian exceptionalism are today.

  BELLEROPHON

  fn1 Usually pronounced with the emphasis on the second ‘e’ – ‘Bell-er-ophon’. The early Greeks tended to call him Bellerophontes.

  fn2 As we shall discover in due course, Theseus had a similarly problematic paternity.

  fn3 The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: ‘A marvellous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes.’ No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

  fn4 Poseidon was a god not just of the wide oceans, but of springs and fountains too. His offspring Pegasus, after flying free from the severed neck of Medusa, made landfall first on Mount Helicon. He struck his hoof on the ground and water bubbled up to become the famous Hippocrene, which means horse fountain. Helicon, like Parnassus, was one of the places where the nine MUSES liked to live (see Mythos, Vol. I, page 46). To drink from the Hippocrene became a metaphor for poetic inspiration (as in Keats’s longing for ‘the true, the blushful Hippocrene’ in his Ode to a Nightingale). But Pegasus did not linger there, he flew on to Corinthian Pirene, another place sacred to the Muses.

  fn5 Pronounced Sthen-a-bee-a or perhaps Stheneebia. Up to you. The name means ‘strong cow’ – or, if one is feeling kinder, ‘one made strong through their possession of cows’. Earlier sources, like Homer, called her ANTEIA.

  fn6 A not uncommon mythic trope or ‘mytheme’. You may remember in the Bible (or the musical) that Potiphar’s wife made the same false accusation against Joseph after failing to seduce him. Achilles’ father Peleus was to suffer similarly at the hands of ASTYDAMEIA, wife of King ACASTUS, who – in just the same way that Proetus was purifying Bellerophon – was cleansing Peleus of the crime of accidental fratricide at the time. Make of these repetitions what you will.

  fn7 Often given the rather more handsome name Amphianax (pronounced ‘Amph-eye-an-ax’).

  fn8 When Homer has Bellerophon’s grandson GLAUCUS tell this story in the Iliad, the letter is actually not written but composed of ‘symbols’ or ‘murderous signs’ enclosed, not in a letter, but a ‘folding tablet’ … Homer pre-dated paper and alphabets (or at the most coincided with the very beginning of the Phoenician alphabet), but he would have been aware of the Linear B syllabary and other early scripts. The tablets would have been of clay.

  fn9 Usually pronounced ‘kai-meera’, though the Greeks say something closer to ‘heemera’, with a hissy opening ‘h’.

  fn10 Almost certainly a literal meandering. He was over Caria, through which the River Maeander, eponym of all wandering streams, still winds its lazy course.

  fn11 Home of the wise centaur Chiron, master of the healing arts. See the story of Jason (here, here).

  fn12 Cheimarrhus was said to sail in a ship with a lion’s figurehead for the prow and a serpent for the sternpost which, taken with the similarity of his name to that of the Chimera (both derive from a Greek word for ‘goat’), makes one wonder if he wasn’t just another version of the monster’s story. See the Afterword for a discussion of this kind of ‘Euhemerism’, or historical interpretation.

  fn13 Another version says that Bellerophon returned to Tiryns, made a show of forgiving Stheneboea and offered her a ride on Pegasus. Once they were far out at sea he pushed her off.

  ORPHEUS

  fn1 Who would certainly have been father of Heracles’ unfortunate music teacher, Orpheus’s brother or half-brother Linus.

  fn2 See Mythos, Vol. I.

  fn3 Now Cape Matapan.

  fn4 The Asphodel Meadow was sometimes given as the place where ordinary, non-heroic mortals resided in the underworld. As I mentioned in a footnote on the death of Heracles, there is little consistency across the sources and poets as to what happened to the dead. An asphodel, incidentally, is a white heathland flowering plant. Homer’s Odyssey seems to have the first mention of such a flower carpeting the Elysian Fields of Hades, but it later entered the poetic language across Europe. William Carlos Williams’ p
oem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ is a notable example.

  fn5 Charon liked to use old-fashioned words like ‘Avaunt’, ‘Nay’ and ‘Forsooth’. He believed they enhanced his dignity.

  fn6 The three judges were sons of Zeus, mortal kings famed for the righteousness of their rule, who determined on behalf of Hades the fates of the dead in the underworld. Heracles sensibly avoided them during his visit. See the first volume of Mythos (page 143).

  fn7 The Greeks even had a word for this Dionysian tearing apart, this frenzied dismemberment – they called it sparagmos.

  JASON

  fn1 And are capitalised.

  fn2 Helios was also Gaia’s son, so she stood as both mother and grandmother to Bisaltes. This is nothing compared to the far more bizarre double and triple relationships of some.

  fn3 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 257.

  fn4 Usually pronounced ‘Bee-oh-shuh’.

  fn5 Although often called ‘the First Hero’, Cadmus more properly belongs in the first volume of Mythos, where you will find his story (page 210).

  fn6 The tragic effect that Euripides dramatised in his play The Bacchae, and the best known example of Dionysian sparagmos.

  fn7 In the Book of Genesis, you may remember, the patriarch Abraham was tested by God and told to sacrifice his son Isaac. Just as Abraham’s knife was descending God showed him a ram caught in a nearby thicket and told him to kill the animal in place of his son. One version of the story of Iphigenia and Agamemnon, which helped set in motion both the Trojan War and its tragic aftermath, is another example of this mytheme – but it is not yet time to hear that particular tale.

  fn8 Today the straits are known as the Dardanelles, which is another name derived from a figure of Greek myth – in this case DARDANUS, son of Zeus and ELECTRA (one of the seven heavenly sisters known as the PLEIADES). Dardanus was the father of Tros, the founder of Troy; it is because of him that Homer sometimes refers to the Trojans as ‘Dardanians’.

  fn9 Axeinos in Greek. Latterly, the Greeks gave it the wistfully optimistic name Euxinos – the ‘Euxine Sea’ – which means ‘hospitable’. In the same way the ‘Cape of Torments’ had its name changed to the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ by Portuguese navigators in the late fifteenth century.

  fn10 This backstory takes place before Heracles frees Prometheus of course.

  fn11 Yet another child of Typhon and Echidna, or (according to Apollonius Rhodus) of Gaia and Typhon.

  fn12 Some say that the madness that overtook him was sent by Hera, who never tired of punishing anyone who had anything to do with the raising, succouring and support of Dionysus, born of one of Zeus’s most brazen and outrageous affairs. It was enough for Hera that Athamas was married to Ino, and Ino had nursed the young Dionysus.

  fn13 Ino/Leucothea plays a key role generations later in the adventures of Odysseus.

  fn14 Athamas did have time to marry again: Themisto, his third wife, bore him four children, one of whom was Schoeneus, who went on to father (and abandon) Atalanta, whose story is told soon.

  fn15 See Mythos, Vol. I.

  fn16 We have already encountered both brothers, at a later stage in their careers, in the story of Heracles (here and here).

  fn17 Sometimes she is called Polymede.

  fn18 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 251.

  fn19 Not the same ARGUS PANOPTES whom Hera once turned into a peacock (see the first volume of Mythos, page 191), but Argus the Argive from Argos. His father Darnaus was king of Argos and (according to Apollodorus) the possessor of the first ship ever to set sail on the seas.

  fn20 Idmon did die, as we shall see. But he also achieved his prophesied fame – for here I am, thousands of years later, writing about him.

  fn21 It is generally held that, in historical ancient Greece, many grand families from Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes and all over the Greek world laid claim to Argonaut ancestors. Over the generations, poets and historians were paid to include such ancestors in ‘definitive’ accounts of the voyage in order to lend prestige to the pedigrees of the rich and powerful. For this reason there is no single, authoritative, universally recognised crew list or manifest for the Argo.

  fn22 Although all heroes are, of course, imperfect.

  fn23 Not to be confused with the Cyclops of the same name whom Odysseus encountered on his way home from the Trojan War. This Polyphemus was married to Heracles’ half-sister Laomene. He was a Lapith, and helped Theseus and Pirithous defeat the centaurs: see the story of Theseus (here).

  fn24 See the story of Atalanta (here).

  fn25 Pronounced ‘Calayiss’ and ‘Zee-tees’.

  fn26 Other versions of or references to the quest for the Golden Fleece have Atalanta playing an enthusiastic role in the voyage and its subsidiary adventures, but the main source on which I and most mythographers rely (the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius) tells that she was turned away.

  fn27 In some tellings he was accompanied by Theseus, but this messes too much with chronology, as the end of Jason’s story will show.

  fn28 At the inception and conclusion of which the sisters of the Dioscuri – Helen of Sparta and CLYTEMNESTRA, wife of Agamemnon – were to play such crucial roles.

  fn29 Pronounced ‘Hip-sipperly’.

  fn30 Hypsipyle’s father THOAS found his way to Tauris on the Crimean peninsula, where he was to play a part in the aftermath of the Trojan War and the fraught destiny of Agamemnon’s family.

  fn31 Unusual for Heracles, who was capable of spreading his seed far and wide, as the huge number of his descendants, the Heracleides, testifies. Perhaps it was because at this period in his life he had eyes only for Hylas.

  fn32 The kingdom which Heracles rid of its monstrous lion for his First Labour.

  fn33 A top score in Scrabble. He is pronounced ‘Sizzy-kuhss’ (while his wife Clite rhymes with ‘high tea’ rather than ‘bite’).

  fn34 The tribe who attacked them are often called the Gegeneis, but that is just another way of saying giants. The word has same root as ‘gigantic’. The -geneis means ‘birth’ or ‘born’ as in ‘genes’, ‘genesis’, ‘generation’, etc. The Ge- is like the geo- in ‘geography’ and ‘geology’ and derives from Gaia the earth. Thus ‘giant’, ‘gigantic’ and ‘Gegeneis’ really mean ‘earthborn’ or ‘chthonic’ and have nothing to do with size, despite the way the words are now used and how the ‘giga’ was taken from ‘gigantic’ to mean ‘huge’.

  fn35 Of course strictly speaking the Greeks didn’t have aitches, only the asper, or rough, ‘breathing’.

  fn36 This is how Apollonius Rhodius, a Greek poet of the third century BC, describes it in his Argonautica, the fullest surviving ancient narrative of the voyage of the Argo. In other sources Heracles joins Jason’s crew after the completion of his Labours.

  fn37 Telamon had his revenge though. On his return from the quest he told his friend Heracles of the twins’ insistence that they sail on and not turn back to pick him and Polyphemus up. Heracles never forgot the insult, and when he came upon the twins on the island of Tenos he didn’t think twice about killing them. He constructed two pillars to mark their graves, which were said to sway whenever their father the North Wind blew.

  fn38 The city of Cius became an important chain on the ancient Silk Road, but is now a ruin.

  fn39 See Mythos, Vol I, page 301.

  fn40 A scene beloved of artists ever since, most notably the post-Pre-Raphaelite (if that makes sense) J. W. Waterhouse.

  fn41 In Apollonius Rhodius’ version they first stopped off at the kingdom of the Bebryces, on the Asian shore, where Polydeuces defeated their king and champion AMYCUS in a boxing match.

  fn42 Not the Phineus of Egypt pertrified by Perseus, of course.

  fn43 Their names were Aello (‘storm’) and Ocypete (‘swift of flight’). Homer mentions a third, Podarge, (‘flashing foot’ – the same name as one of the Mares of Diomedes. Harpy itself means ‘snatcher’.

  fn44 Anyone who has observed the behaviour of seagulls in seaside towns w
ill wonder if they were the inspiration for the story of the Harpies. They snatch ice-cream cones from children and their droppings cake the promenades and seafronts.

  fn45 Stamphani and Arpia, two of the seven Heptani, or Ionian Islands, west of mainland Greece. The Strophades remain important sites for birds to this day.

  fn46 Like Hermes, Iris was a messenger of the gods. Her colourful qualities give us the name of the iris of the eye and all words that refer to the iridescence of the rainbow – petrol in water, that sort of thing. Like the Harpies, she was a daughter of the Titaness Electra.

  fn47 The Black Sea to us.

  fn48 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 189.

  fn49 For that reason they were sometimes called the Cyanean Rocks. Of course, few questions are more moot, vexed and thorny than whether or not the Greeks really saw blue, had a word for blue, or even knew what blue was. Famously, Homer often refers to the sea as oinops pontos ‘the wine-looking sea’, usually translated as ‘wine dark’. William Gladstone, finding time while serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote a book on Homer which included the first serious study of Greeks and colour. It has recently re-emerged as an interesting element in the renewed Sapir-Whorf debate in academic linguistics. If you are interested, I recommend Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

  fn50 The story of ‘Arion and the Dolphin’ is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 363).

  fn51 The name Jason actually means ‘healer’.

  fn52 They were not so far, after all, from Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics were held.

  fn53 According to some they were the birds who had flown from Lake Stymphalia when Heracles disturbed them with Athena’s rattle during his Sixth Labour.