by Stephen Fry
fn54 I’ve spelled his name this way to avoid confusion with Argus the shipwright.
fn55 In today’s Republic of Georgia the river is now the Rioni and the port is Poti, headquarters of the Georgian navy.
fn56 Now Kutaisi, Georgia’s legislative capital.
fn57 Should you so wish, you can be introduced to the twelve original Titans in the first volume of Mythos (page 7).
fn58 See under Theseus for the story of Pasiphae (here). Circe will feature in the story of Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War.
fn59 Pronounced ‘ee-dee-ya’ I would think. She was Aeëtes’ aunt, being an Oceanid, and therefore a sister of his mother Perseis.
fn60 If you’re anything like me, you’ll find all these relationships wildly confusing, although they are probably no more complicated than those in your own family. Save that you are less likely to be so incestuously connected to Titans, sea nymphs and enchantresses.
fn61 Aeëtes is thought to be a form of the Greek word for ‘eagle’.
fn62 Hecate, goddess of witchcraft and potions, was a daughter of the second generation Titans Perses and Asteria. She features in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
fn63 Unless you are fortunate enough to possess the wisdom of Nestor, you might find his plan easier to understand after a look at the map here. I don’t mind waiting.
fn64 On their way through, Jason established Ljubljana, the capital of today’s Slovenia. The people there celebrate him as a founder hero. They say he killed a dragon in a lake and saved the inhabitants. That dragon remains the city’s emblem (although the story was later Christianized and Jason was replaced by St George).
fn65 As Odysseus was to discover many years later, during his decade-long struggle to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
fn66 Lilybaeum is today’s Marsala, famous for its honey-sweet wine. Butes and Aphrodite became lovers. Some say it was around the time of her affair with ADONIS (see Mythos, Vol. I, page 325), and that she only did this to make Adonis jealous. She bore Butes a son, ERYX, who grew up to be one of the finest boxers of his generation. Not fine enough to survive a bout with Heracles, however. Even in his later years the great hero was too much for Eryx. He knocked him dead with one punch. Doubtless, being Heracles, he was filled with remorse and tried to put him back together again.
fn67 Planets are ‘wandering rocks’ too – they get their name from the same Greek source word planetai meaning ‘wanderers’. Early astronomers were alerted to their difference from other heavenly bodies when they observed them roaming apparently randomly across the sky and called them planetes asteres, wandering stars.
fn68 Or like the Millennium Falcon trying to steer through an asteroid field.
fn69 Today’s Corfu.
fn70 The Southern Adriatic. Confusing because the name ‘Ionia’ refers to parts of Asia Minor, today’s Turkey far to the other side of Greece.
fn71 See Mythos, Vol. I.
fn72 Ichor, the silvery-gold blood that ran in the veins of the gods was deadly poison to mortals.
fn73 The word he used must have been ‘thaumaturge’. A lifetime ago, when I was learning ancient Greek as an eight-year-old, the textbook the school used liked to remind one of the English words that derived from Greek: ‘graph’ and ‘graphic’ from grapho, ‘telephone’ from phonos, that sort of thing. I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: ‘thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word “thaumaturge”.’ And I suppose that was true, since I’ve never forgotten it.
fn74 Also known as Chandax.
fn75 This is where the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius comes to an end (as does the Argonautica Orphica, a Byzantine Greek retelling of the fifth or sixth century AD ostensibly narrated by Orpheus). Whether Apollonius failed to finish, or whether he felt he had best remain true to his title and deal only with the voyage and not with the repercussions and aftermath, is not known.
fn76 Not to be confused with the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. See the first volume of Mythos (page 100). Euripides wrote a tragedy called the Peliades, but it is lost.
fn77 She was later won by Admetus, and offered to die in his place. Heracles wrestled Death for her soul if you recall.
fn78 Same name as Jason’s mother, which is confusing.
fn79 I know, that name rather stands out amongst the others, doesn’t it? It’s the only one the spell-checker didn’t challenge. Evadne means ‘very holy’ which makes me think, wrongly, of Evander Holyfield.
fn80 ‘Looking for a ewe’s teat to suckle from’ as Ovid rather endearingly puts it.
fn81 It is far more likely to have been a magic trick than real witchcraft. I don’t doubt my friends the magnificent Penn and Teller could reproduce the effect perfectly. It’s very much in their wheelhouse – their frequently sordid and spectacularly sick wheelhouse. They are, in some respects, the Medeas of our time.
fn82 Acastus is often listed as one of the Argonauts, which would mean that Pelias was either willing to sacrifice him – for he never believed the Argo would return – or perhaps that Acastus was there to ensure the Fleece, if found, would be returned to him.
fn83 Half-uncle if my calculations are correct. Can there be such a thing as a half-uncle? At any rate, Pelias was a half-brother of Jason’s father Aeson, sharing Tiro as a mother.
fn84 Samos was famous for the quality of its wine. It is celebrated by Byron in the glorious ‘Isles of Greece’ section of his epic poem Don Juan. ‘Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!’
fn85 His words were Πολλὰ μεταξὺ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου (Polla metaxu pelei kulikos kai cheileos akrou) according to Jenny March in her excellent Dictionary of Classical Mythology. If you put that into Google Translate however, it comes out as ‘A lot of people are screaming and screaming’ – go figure.
fn86 What follows is based on Euripides’ version of the story in his tragedy Medea.
fn87 No relation to the Theban royal of the same name in the stories of Heracles and Oedipus. This Creon was a descendant of Sisyphus which suggests some kind of family tie to Jason, which may explain his offer of sanctuary.
fn88 Euripides doesn’t give them names, but according to Apollodorus they were Thessalus, Mermerus and Pheres.
fn89 The eldest of the three, Thessalus, was away being tutored by Chiron and survived. He would return from Chiron’s cave to rule over Iolcos and Greater Aeolia, which we now call Thessaly in his honour.
fn90 It seems that almost all the actresses who play the part win Tony or Olivier Awards these days.
fn91 Translation by C. A. E. Luschnig.
fn92 See the story of Theseus (here). It is Medea’s presence in Athens, as we shall see, that makes it impossible for Theseus to have been an Argonaut.
ATALANTA
fn1 As in the lovers HERO and LEANDER, whose tragic tale is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 359) – and the daughter of Leonato in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
fn2 Minyas was the founder king of Orchomenos in Boeotia, the great rival city state of Thebes. Heracles defeated Minyas’ descendant Erginos and was given the hand of Megara in marriage as a reward.
fn3 Pronounced ‘Skeenius’ to rhyme with ‘genius’.
fn4 The name means, so far as I can tell, ‘equal in weight’ – which is a strange thing to call someone. But perhaps she got the name because the men who found her believed her to be a man’s equal.
fn5 The same that had done for King Ancaeus of Samos before he had a chance to taste his wine.
fn6 His name means ‘Man of Wine’.
fn7 It’s not entirely clear when in Jason’s busy life this adventure took place. It is usually assumed to be between the return of the Argo and the flight from Iolcos after the death of Pelias.
fn8 It means, according to Robert Graves, ‘excessive wooing’.
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br /> fn9 The Deianira who was to go on and play such a fateful role in the life and death of Heracles.
fn10 But Meleager is married already, to a very beautiful girl called CLEOPATRA (no relation to the one we know) the daughter of Prince IDAS and Princess MARPESSA).
fn11 Toxeus actually means ‘bowman’, as in toxophily.
fn12 To this day there are species of guinea fowl and turkey that bear the scientific name meleagrididae.
fn13 See under Heracles for the fate of Deianira. Her sister Gorge had a child by her own father, Oeneus, who grew up to feature in the Trojan War.
fn14 And never was, until Achilles …
fn15 See the story of Oedipus (here). Parthenopaeus was described by most sources as long-haired, fast-running and outstandingly beautiful, like his mother. He figures prominently as a heroic figure in Statius’s Thebiad.
fn16 Cybele was a Phrygian deity associated with both Artemis and Gaia.
OEDIPUS
fn1 The foundation of Thebes, as befits its precedence, is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 224).
fn2 The story of Tantalus is treated in Mythos (page 261): the fate of House of Atreus belongs to the story of the Trojan War.
fn3 See the first volume of Mythos (page 230).
fn4 Pronounced Lie-us.
fn5 The curse of Ares had lain on the royal house of Thebes ever since Cadmus slew the Ismenian water dragon. See the first volume of Mythos (pages 220 and 244).
fn6 They were responsible for finishing the construction of Thebes’ walls and its acropolis, the Cadmeia. See the first volume of Mythos (page 225).
fn7 As previously pointed out, not the Italian Pisa, but a city state in the Peloponnese (which hadn’t yet earned that name from Pelops), the large peninsula to the south west of Greece joined to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth. It was inherited by Pelops when he won the hand of Hippodamia in marriage. See the story of Perseus (here).
fn8 Another version of the story maintains that Chrysippus was killed by his half-brothers Atreus and THYESTES out of jealousy at their father’s love for him. Euripides wrote a play about the life and fate of Chrysippus that is sadly lost to us.
fn9 The Greek for that is ‘anagram’.
fn10 Zeus’s mother RHEA had fooled her husband Kronos into eating the stone, thinking it was the infant Zeus. When Kronos later vomited up the stone, Zeus threw it so that it landed at Pytho/Delphi. See the first volume of Mythos (page 97).
fn11 And of course, in Greek letters Python and Typhon are not anagrams, but we’ll pretend we don’t know that.
fn12 The Sphinx is usually given as a child of Echidna and Typhon, though some sources suggest she was their grandchild – a daughter of Orthrus and Chimera.
fn13 An asclepion was a cross between a health spa, a hospital and a temple to Asclepius.
fn14 See the first volume of Mythos for the full story (page 330).
fn15 Oedipus Tyrannos in its original Greek, but often confusingly given the Latin title Oedipus Rex. I was a perfectly dreadful Oedipus in a production (the W. B. Yeats translation) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1979. The unhappy citizens of Edinburgh still talk about it in hushed, disbelieving tones. One of Laurence Olivier’s most celebrated feats was his double bill as Oedipus and as Mr Puff in Sheridan’s The Critic. They say Olivier’s scream as Oedipus when he suddenly realises the truth about himself – the cascade of truths – was one of the great moments in theatrical history. They don’t say that of my performance.
fn16 As in the third state of man in the Sphinx’s riddle …
fn17 Literally rivals, since their plays were submitted in competition, only the prizewinning texts going into production.
fn18 There was also a fourth work by Aeschylus, a comic companion piece or ‘satyr’ play, called Sphinx. They are sometimes collectively referred to as Aeschylus’s Oedipodea.
fn19 I sometimes dream that a great find will restore thousands of the great lost works of antiquity to us. Many perished in the catastrophic fire (or fires) at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, but who knows? – maybe one day a huge repository of manuscripts will be uncovered. We have eighteen or nineteen plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost a hundred. Only seven of Aeschylus’s eighty remain, while just seven plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of a hundred and twenty known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.
THESEUS
fn1 The same Aethra to whom Bellerophon had once been engaged.
fn2 In Euripides Heracleidae or ‘Children of Heracles’, it is given that Alcmene was the daughter of Pelops’s son Pittheus, making him the common grandfather of Heracles and Theseus. Hence my occasional use of the word ‘cousin’ when talking of the two heroes.
fn3 See the story of Heracles (here).
fn4 How Medea acquired such a dreadful reputation, and how she came to be in Athens, you will recall, is told in the story of Jason (here and here).
THE LABOURS OF THESEUS
fn1 Some say that the Crommyonian Sow was the mother of the Calydonian Boar. See the story of Atalanta (here).
fn2 Kore, meaning the ‘maiden’, was the embodiment of Persephone when she rose up from the underworld in the spring and summer months as per her mother Demeter’s arrangement with Hades.
fn3 The Athenians believed that Theseus invented wrestling. His use of wit, technique and skill to turn Cercyon’s brute strength against him exemplified everything ancient Athens valued. The specific art he developed, what we might call ‘mixed martial arts’ was called by the Greeks pankration … ‘all strength’. If you recall, Heracles had picked up some of the technique and employed it on Antaeus during his Eleventh Labour.
fn4 Other interpretations of this confrontation would have it that the story was reverse-engineered to fit the myth of Theseus’ youthful Labours, and that it actually had its origins in a later and more routine political takeover. This reading has it that Cercyon was a real king and that Theseus wrested, rather than wrestled, his realm – Eleusis – from him in later days, when Theseus was by that time a king himself.
fn5 We even know the day of Theseus’s arrival in Athens. It was, according to Plutarch, the eighth day of the month of Hecatombaion, somewhere around July and August in our calendar. It was the month in the Attic calendar when each year a hundred cattle were ritually sacrificed to the gods.
fn6 According to Plutarch and Pausanias, they were the sons of PHYTALUS (‘butterfly’, perhaps?) who had once shown great kindness to Demeter. In recompense, the goddess granted his descendants the power to expiate those who broke the laws of hospitality.
fn7 Known as the Palliantidae.
fn8 See the story of Heracles (here). But don’t think too hard about timelines and the relative ages of Theseus and Heracles or we’ll all go mad.
fn9 Here again Theseus invented an art, that of bull-leaping. It may sound comical, but plenty of archaeological evidence has been uncovered showing this mixture of sport and entertainment. It can be considered a forerunner of modern bullfighting. Both techniques rely on finesse and timing and aim to tire the bull out rather than engage with it fairly. So different from dear, honest Heracles.
fn10 The same Plain of Marathon saw the soldiers of Athens win their startling victory against the Medes and Persians in 490 BC. Pheidippides was said to have run the 25 or so miles from Marathon to Athens to break the news of the victory, shouting the word ‘nenikekamen!’ – ‘we won!’ – before expiring the ground of exhaustion at having run the first ‘marathon’.
fn11 It sprang from where Cerberus’s drool hit the ground when Heracles took him to the Upper World.
fn12 Just as Perseus’s son Perses gave us Persia and the Persians, so Medus went on to give us the Medes. Medes and Persians in turn, went on to attempt to get
their revenge on Theseus’s city of Athens many, many generations later when they launched an invasion under Darius the Great and then Xerxes. One man’s Mede, as Dorothy Parker observed, is another man’s Persian. As for Medea, little more of her is heard, which is a pity. There was a tradition that had her in the Meadows of Asphodel marrying Achilles in the afterlife.
fn13 The zoological name for the genus is still perdix, the Latin for partridge.
fn14 See Mythos, Vol. I.
fn15 That bull ascended to the heavens as the constellation Taurus.
fn16 This was an especially cutting remark for Aegeus’s name means ‘goatlike’.
fn17 A spring month.
fn18 The Greek poet Bacchylides tells in one of his lyrics, his ‘dithyrambs’, that when the ship arrived Minos tried it on with one of the Athenian girls, Eriboia, and that Theseus defended her. Minos claimed that as a son of Zeus (in this version he is the first Minos, issue of Europa and Zeus) he had the right. Theseus countered that he was a son of Poseidon. Minos tested him by throwing a golden ring into the sea and telling Theseus to fetch it back. Theseus dived in and was taken by a dolphin to Poseidon’s palace where Nereids gave him the ring and all kinds of gifts besides. He then emerged from the sea and presented the ring and other treasures to an astonished Minos. All this is charming but it seems odd that Minos would then imprison Theseus with the others as if nothing had happened. He would surely be wary that Theseus might be the first Athenian to prove himself a match for the beast and the labyrinth itself.
fn19 The story of Daedalus and Icarus has long been a favourite with artists. The combined brilliance of Pieter Breugel the Elder and W. H. Auden has given us the latter’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, one of his finest. Sculptures and paintings on the subject abound. My favourite use of the myth is in the relief representation of the falling Icarus on the wall outside the bankruptcy court of Amsterdam. Rembrandt might well have looked up at it during the proceedings against him and been reminded of the perils of soaring ambition. So far as I know he never painted an Icarus picture himself but scores, hundreds, of artists and sculptors have.
