Heroes

by Stephen Fry

  fn20 He federated Megara (a region, not to be confused with Heracles’ first wife), for example, and installed Cercyon’s son Hippothoon on the throne of Eleusis, which extended the reach of Athens as far as Corinth.

  fn21 Usually pronounced ‘Pirry-tho-us’ with an unvoiced ‘th’, as in ‘thistle’ – think, ‘Pirry-throw-us’ without the R.

  fn22 The Lapiths were credited with inventing the bit for greater control of the horse’s mouth.

  fn23 Issue, some say, of the Marathonian Bull who fathered them before Theseus tamed him and took him to Athens to be sacrificed. The Marathonian Bull that had been the Cretan Bull that fathered the Minotaur, of course. The baleful influence of that animal seems to have no end.

  fn24 They were children of Ixion and Nephele, the cloud goddess in the shape of Hera that was created by Zeus to prove Ixion’s wickedness. The same Nephele who went on to send down the Golden Ram to rescue Phrixus.

  fn25 Her name means ‘tamer of horses’. Horses gallop all the way through the story of Pirithous.

  fn26 Similar to its effect on the centaurs including, fatefully, Nessus, who drank wine in Pholus’s cave during Heracles’ Fourth Labour.

  fn27 ‘War’ rather than ‘battle’ really, but battle sounds better in English somehow. The accidental rhyme in ‘War of the Centaurs’ or ‘Centaur War’ seems inelegant.

  fn28 See the story of Heracles (here).

  fn29 In some versions (including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Theseus is married to Hippolyta herself. In these tellings Theseus accompanies Heracles on the Ninth Labour, and instead of Heracles killing Hippolyta, he gives her to Theseus.

  fn30 For more on the Amazonian lifestyle see Heracles’ Ninth Labour (here).

  fn31 Sited just below the heights of the Acropolis, the Areopagus was the meeting place of the Athenian Council of Elders, and later the site of the court where serious crimes were tried. John Milton invoked it in his great polemic against censorship, the Areopagitica.

  fn32 The German classicist Bruno Snell puts it very well: ‘For the Greeks, the Titanomachy and the battle against the giants remained symbols of the victory which their own world had won over a strange universe; along with the battles against the Amazons and Centaurs they continue to signalize the Greek conquest of everything barbarous, of all monstrosity and grossness.’

  fn33 See the first volume of Mythos (page 43).

  fn34 See the story of Heracles (here).

  fn35 For example, the Parthenon in Athens prominently featured sculptures depicting the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy and the Centauromachy. Examples of the latter can still be seen to this day, as can the Centauromachy that once adorned another of the most important buildings of classical Greece, the temple of Zeus at Olympia.

  fn36 This story is better told another time …

  fn37 See Heracles’ Twelfth Labour (here).

  fn38 Think Mick Jagger.

  fn39 The twins not only returned Helen to Sparta, but they forcibly took Theseus’s mother Aethra along with her to act as her nurse and companion. This position she held into extreme old age. Her grandsons Acamas and Demophon would finally rescue her during the fall of Troy. But that too is a story for another time.

  fn40 The versions by Euripides in Hippolytus (the surviving play of two that he wrote on the story) and in Phaedra by the Roman playwright Seneca both alter this a little. She never speaks of her love, but commits suicide and leaves a note implicating Hippolytus.

  fn41 The Grandfather’s Axe, its blade and handle regularly replaced, presents a similar ontological conundrum in the field of study known as the Metaphysics of Identity.

  ENVOI

  fn1 See the story of Heracles (here, here and here).

  THE OFFSPRING OF ECHIDNA AND TYPHON

  fn1 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

  THE RAGES OF HERACLES

  fn1 The Benoit case has resulted in a much stricter regime of testing and a zero-tolerance of drug taking in the WWE, I am told.

  fn2 Perhaps comic book fans will also want to draw a comparison with Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk.

  AFTERWORD

  fn1 And dreams, ‘private myths’.

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  fn1 Hades spent all of his time in the underworld, so technically he is often not regarded as one of the twelve Olympians.

  fn2 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

  fn3 In some but not all versions of Heracles’ Eleventh Labour.

  fn4 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

  fn5 It was Zeus’s punishment for this appalling crime that immortalized Tantalus’s name. See the first volume of Mythos (page 263).

  fn6 See the first volume of Mythos (page 224).