Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)

by Stephen Fry

Aphrodite, the supreme goddess of love and of beauty, was attended by a retinue of winged and naked godlings called Erotes. Like many deities (Hades and his underworld cohorts, for example) the Erotes suddenly found themselves with much to do once humanity established itself and began to flourish.

ANTEROS—the youthful patron of selfless unconditional love.96 EROS—the leader of the Erotes, god of physical love and sexual desire. HEDYLOGOS—the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentine cards, love letters, and romantic fiction. HERMAPHRODITUS—the protector of effeminate males, mannish females, and those of what we would now call a more fluid gender. HIMEROS—the embodiment of desperate, impetuous love, love that is impatient to be fulfilled and ready to burst. HYMENAIOS—the guardian of the bridal chamber and wedding music. POTHOS—the personification of languorous longing, of love for the absent and the departed.

In a view perhaps more commonly held across the classical world, he was the son of Ares and Aphrodite. Under his Roman name of CUPID he is usually represented as a laughing winged child about to shoot an arrow from his silver bow, a very recognizable image to this day, making Eros perhaps the most instantly identifiable of all the gods of classical antiquity.

Cupidity and erotic desire are associated with him, as is the instant and uncontrollable falling in love that results from being pierced by his dart, the arrow that compels its victims to fall for the first person (or even animal) they see after being struck.97 Eros can be as capricious, mischievous, random, and cruel as love itself.

EROS—the strain of love named after the god, or after whom the god is named. The kind that gets us into most trouble. So much more than affectionate, so much less than spiritual, eros and the erotic can lead us to glory and to disgrace, to the highest pitch of happiness and the deepest pit of despair.

Perhaps the best-known myth involving Eros and Psyche—Physical Love and Soul—is almost absurdly ripe for interpretation and explanation.

PSYCHE, was so entirely beautiful that many in the kingdom abandoned the cult of Aphrodite and worshipped this young girl in her place. Aphrodite was a jealous and vengeful goddess and could bear no rivalry, least of all from a mortal. She summoned her son Eros. “I want you to find a pig,” she said to him, “the ugliest and hairiest in all the land. Go to the palace where Psyche lives, shoot your arrow into her, and make sure that the pig is the first thing she sees.”

A flustered Eros scratched his own arm with the point of his arrow as he drew the bow. Psyche woke up with a start and lit a candle. Eros saw Psyche and fell deeply in love with her. What a business. The god of love himself lovestruck. You might imagine that the next thing he would do is fire an arrow at Psyche and that all would end happily. But here Eros comes out of the story rather well. So real, pure, and absolute was his love that he could not think of cheating Psyche out of her own choice. He took one last longing look at her, turned, and leapt out of the window and back into the night.

That night, in pitch darkness, the beautiful young man came to her bed again. She tried to speak to him, but he placed a finger to her lips and a voice sounded inside her head. “Hush, Psyche. Ask no questions. Love me as I love you.” And slowly, as the days passed, she realized that she did love this unseen man very much. Every night they made love. Every morning she awoke to find him gone.

With Eros indisposed the world began to suffer. Youths and maidens stopped falling in love. There were no marriages. The people began to murmur and grumble. Unhappy prayers were raised to Aphrodite. When she heard them, and learned that Eros was hiding away and neglecting his duties, she became vexed. The news that a mortal girl had stolen her son’s heart and caused him such harm turned her vexation to anger. But when she discovered that it was the very same mortal girl that she had once commanded Eros to humiliate, she grew livid. How could her plan to make Psyche fall in love with a pig have backfired so terribly? Well, this time she would personally and conclusively ensure the girl’s downfall.

“This has been an extraordinary and undignified entanglement. Aphrodite, beloved one. Your position is not threatened; it never can be. Look down at the earth and see how your name is everywhere sanctified and praised. Eros, you have too long been a foolish, impudent, and irresponsible boy. That you love and are loved will be the making of you and may save the world from the worst excesses of your mischievous and misdirected arrows. Psyche, come and drink from my cup. This is ambrosia, and now that you have tasted it you are immortal. Here, witnessed by us all, you will forever be yoked with Eros. Embrace your daughter-in-law, Aphrodite, and let us all be merry.”

Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant, Hera took Argus’s hundred bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl, transforming it into what we know today as the peacock—which is how the now proud, colorful, and haughty bird came forever to be associated with the goddess.

As things turned out, Io did return to human shape. She met up with Zeus in Egypt and bore him a son, EPAPHUS, who will play an important part of the story of Phaeton, which is just coming up. Supposedly Zeus impregnated Io just by gently laying a hand on her—Epaphus means “touch.” Io also had a daughter by Zeus, called KEROESSA, whose son BYZAS went on to found the great city of Byzantium. Whether Keroessa was conceived by touch or the more traditional method of generation we do not know. Io may have been a cow, but she was a very influential and important one.

To a traveler looking eastward and upward at the clouds in which the Palace of the Sun was hidden, the first sign that Eos was at work always came in the form of a flush of coral pink that suffused the sky. As she threw the gates wider, that soft pink hardened into a gleam of gold which grew ever brighter and fiercer.

As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched.

Phaeton’s affectionate friend Cygnus went to the River Eridanos, into whose waters poor dead Phaeton had plunged. He sat there on the bank mourning the loss of his lover with such a plaintive wail that a distraught Apollo struck him dumb and finally, out of pity and remorse for the youth’s ceaseless but now silent and inconsolable suffering, transformed him into a beautiful swan. This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honor of Cygnus the young of all swans are called “cygnets.”

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

In the meantime, the white bull flew Europa farther and farther west from her home kingdom of Tyre, across the Mediterranean in the direction of the isles of Greece. Delighted and entirely unafraid, Europa laughed as first the ground flashed beneath her and then the sea. Europa was entranced. The journey was so remarkable that the whole landmass to the west of her homeland has been called Europe in her honor ever since.

Whether it was his transformation of Io into a heifer that inspired him to take the shape of a bull we cannot know, but the trick seems to have worked, for Europa stayed happily on Crete for the rest of her life. She was to bear Zeus three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and SARPEDON—the first two of whom went on after their deaths, you may recall, to become the Judges of the Underworld, weighing the lives of dead souls and allotting them their punishments and rewards accordingly.

On Samothrace there lived a Pleiad called ELECTRA.118 The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, were (if you recall) daughters of Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione. By Zeus, this Electra had given birth to two sons, DARDANUS119 and IASION, as well as a daughter, HARMONIA.120 Cadmus was immediately captivated by Harmonia’s beauty and sweet, placid manner and took her with him on his quest. How willing she was at first is not certain, but the pair left Samothrace and headed for mainland Greece—ostensibly in search of Europa, but really, as far as Cadmus was concerned, in search of a greater purpose.

the Ismenian Dragon, which Cadmus had just slain, was known to be sacred to Ares, the god of war. Indeed, he went on, some believed that the creature was actually a son of Ares!

It is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favored you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you. And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favorites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn’t mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others.

The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who—if you remember—nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed. Miserable misfortune and tragic calamity would rain down upon the heads of whosoever wore or owned it.

As he spoke Zeus began to gather himself into the form of a great thundercloud. From the center of this dark mass flashed the brightest light imaginable. Semele looked on, her face breaking into a broad and ecstatic smile of joy. Only a god could change like this. Only Zeus himself could grow and grow with such dazzling fire and golden greatness. But the brightness was becoming so fierce, so terrible in the ferocity of its glare, that she threw up an arm to shade her eyes. Yet still the brilliance intensified. With a crack so loud that her ears burst and filled with blood, the radiance exploded in bolts of lightning that instantly struck the girl blind. Deaf and sightless she staggered backward, but too late to avoid the blazing force of a thunderbolt so powerful that it split her body open, killing her at once.

With a peal of thunder Zeus returned to flesh and blood and plucked the fetus from Semele’s belly. It was too young to breathe the air, so Zeus took a knife and sliced open his thigh and tucked the embryo inside. Holding it tight within this makeshift womb Zeus knelt down to sew the child safely into his warm flesh.134 THE NEWEST GOD Three months later Zeus and Hermes traveled to Nysus on the north coast of Africa, an area that lies, it is generally believed, somewhere between Libya and Egypt. There Hermes cut open the stitching on Zeus’s thigh and delivered him of a son, DIONYSUS.135 The infant was suckled by the rain nymphs of Nysus;136 and, once weaned, was tutored by potbellied Silenus, who was to become his closest companion and follower—a kind of Falstaff to the young god’s Prince Hal. Silenus had his own train of followers too, the sileni—satyr-like creatures forever associated with antic riot, rout, and revelry.

Dionysus was soon established as the god of wine, revelry, delirious intoxication, uninhibited dissipation, and “the orgastic future.” The Romans called him by the name BACCHUS and worshipped him quite as devotedly as did the Greeks. He was to stand in a kind of polar opposition to Apollo—one representing the golden light of reason, harmonious music, lyric poetry, and mathematics, the other embodying the darker energies of disorder, liberation, wild music, bloodlust, frenzy, and unreason.

When Aphrodite gave birth to a son by Dionysus, Hera cursed the baby, whose name was PRIAPUS, with ugliness and impotence and had it cast down from Olympus. Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner. But deflation and disappointment were his fate. He went about in a constant state of excitement which, on account of Hera’s curse, always failed him when he tried to do anything about it. This chronic and embarrassing problem made it natural that he should be forever associated with alcohol, his father’s gift to the world that ever “provokes the desire but takes away the performance.”

Demeter heard of Erysichthon’s sacrilege and sent word to Limos. Limos was one of the vile creatures that had flown from Pandora’s jar. She was a demon of famine who might be regarded as Demeter’s inverse, the goddess’s necessary opposite in the mortal world. One the fecund and bountiful herald of the harvest, the other the mercilessly cruel harbinger of hunger and blight. Since the two existed in an irreconcilable matter–antimatter relationship, they could never meet in person, so Demeter sent a nymph of the mountains as her envoy, to urge Limos to deliver the hamadryad’s curse on Erysichthon, a task the malevolent demon was only too happy to undertake.

Limos had, according to Ovid, rather let herself go. With sagging, withered breasts, an empty space for a stomach, exposed rotten bowels, sunken eyes, crusted lips, scaly skin, lank, scurfy hair, and swollen pustular ankles, the figure and face of Famine presented a haunting and dreadful spectacle. She stole that night into Erysichthon’s bedroom, took the sleeping king in her arms, and breathed her foul breath into him. Her poison fumes seeped into his mouth, throat, and lungs. Through his veins and into every cell of his body slid the terrible, insatiable worm of hunger.

Erysichthon awoke from strange dreams feeling very, very peckish. He surprised his kitchen staff with an enormous breakfast order. He consumed every morsel, yet still his appetite was unsated. All day he found that the more he ate the more ravenous he became. As days and then weeks passed, the pangs of hunger gnawed deeper and deeper. No matter how much he consumed he could never be satisfied, nor gain so much as an ounce of weight. Food inside him acted like fuel on a fire, causing the hunger to burn ever more fiercely. For this reason his people began referring to him behind his back as AETHON, which means “burning.” He was perhaps the first man ever to eat himself out of house and home. One by one all his treasure and possessions, and even his palace, were sold off to buy food.

Even this arrangement proved insufficient to tamp down the dreadful flames of hunger, and in desperation one day he chewed off his left hand. The arm followed, then his shoulder, feet, and hams. Before long, King Erysichthon of Thessaly had eaten himself all up. Demeter and the hamadryad were avenged.

He married EPIONE, whose name means “soothing” or “relief from pain.” Together they had three sons and four daughters. Asclepius trained his girls as rigorously as Chiron had trained him. The eldest, HYGIEIA, he taught the practices of cleanliness, diet, and physical exercise that are today named “hygiene” after her. To PANACEA he revealed the arts of universal health, of medicinal preparation, and the production of remedies and treatments that could heal anything—which is what her name means: “cure all.” ACESO he instructed in the healing process itself, including what we would now call immunology. The youngest girl IASO specialized in recovery and recuperation. The elder boys, MACHAON and PODALIRIUS, became prototypes of the army doctor. Their later service in the Trojan War was recorded by Homer. The youngest son, TELESPHORUS, is usually depicted as being hooded and of very restricted growth. His field of study was rehabilitation and convalescence, the return of a patient to full health.

The thunderbolt which struck Asclepius was wholly unexpected, as bolts from the blue always are. It killed him stone dead. All of Greece lamented the loss of their beloved and valued physician and healer, but Apollo did more than mourn the passing of his son. He raged. As soon as he heard the news he took himself off to the workshop of Hephaestus and with three swift arrows shot dead Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, the Cyclopes whose eternal task and pleasure it was to manufacture the Sky Father’s thunderbolts.

When Ixion awoke to find Hera beside him, he rolled over and coupled with her there and then. At the sight of this unspeakable blasphemy Zeus sent down a thunderbolt and a fiery wheel. The thunderbolt blasted Ixion into the air and pinned him to the wheel, which Zeus sent spinning across the heavens. In time the firmament was deemed too good for him and Ixion, bound to his wheel of fire, was sent down to Tartarus, where he revolves, spread-eagled and roasting in agony to this very day.

The Hera-Cloud was given the name NEPHELE. Her union with Ixion produced a son, CENTAUROS, an ugly and misshapen boy who grew into a lonely and unhappy man who took his pleasure, not with humans, but with the wild mares of Mount Pelion, where he liked to roam. The untameable and savage progeny of this unnatural union between man and horse were named, after him, “centaurs.”

As the Pelasgian king Lycaon had done before him, Tantalus served up his own son to the gods. The young Pelops was killed, jointed, roasted, slathered in a rich sauce, and set before them. They sensed instantly that something was wrong and declined to eat. But Demeter, whose mind was wholly on her lost daughter, distractedly picked at and ate the boy’s left shoulder.

When Zeus understood what had happened, he summoned one of the three Fates, Clotho, the spinner. She collected the body parts, stirred them in a great cauldron, and put them back together. Demeter, awakened to her dreadful lapse, commissioned Hephaestus to carve a shoulder from ivory to replace the one she had consumed. Clotho attached the prosthetic, which fitted perfectly. Zeus breathed into the boy’s body and Pelops stirred back into life.

Tantalus himself was dispatched straight to Tartarus and punished in a manner befitting one who dared tempt the gods into feasting on the flesh of the victim of a blood crime. He was placed in a pool of water up to his waist. Above his head waved the bough of a tree from which hung luscious and appetizing fruits. Hunger and thirst raged within him, but every time he stretched up to take a bite, the branch would swing out of his reach. Every time he stooped to drink, the waters of the pool would shrink back to deny him. He could not move away, for above him, threatening to crush him if he dared try to escape, hovered a great stone of the hard glaucous element that would one day be called “tantalum.”153 There Tantalus stands to this day, agonizingly close to satisfaction, but always denied it, enacting the tortured frustration that bears his name—tantalized, but never satisfied, until the end of time.

Sisyphus was a wicked, greedy, duplicitous, and often cruel man, but who cannot find something appealing—heroic even—in the unquenchable zest and fist-shaking defiance with which he lived (in fact outlived) his life? Few mortals dared to try the patience of the gods in so reckless a fashion. His foolhardy contempt and refusal to apologize or conform put one in mind of a Grecian Don Giovanni.

“I only married that bitch Tyro because I hate Salmoneus so much,” he was saying. “You see, the oracle at Delphi told me that if I had sons by her they would grow up to kill him. So when he dies by the hand of his own grandchildren I will be rid of my vile pig of a brother without fear of the pursuit of the Erinyes.” “That is . . .” Melops tried to find the word. “Brilliant? Cunning? Ingenious?” Tyro checked her sons, who were about to run to the spot from which they could hear their father’s voice. Turning them round she pushed them at speed toward a bend in the river, the maid following behind.

Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus’s power to summon storms, he’d ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons, and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skyward at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils, and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus.

Despite Sisyphus’s royal blood, his life had been too wicked, too shameless, Zeus ruled, to merit the dignity of his being conducted to the underworld by Hermes. Instead Thanatos, Death himself, was sent to shackle and escort him.

Thanatos always enjoyed that moment when he manifested himself in front of those marked down for death. Appearing before them, and visible to no one else, his gaunt form cloaked in black, wisps of hellish gasses streaming from him, he would stretch out his arm to his victims with a cruelly deliberate slowness. The moment he touched their flesh with the tip of his bony finger there would come a piteous whimper from the soul within them. Thanatos took great delight in watching his victim’s skin go pale and the eyes flutter and film over as life was extinguished. Above all he loved the sound of the soul’s last shuddering sigh as it emerged from its mortal carcass and submitted itself to his manacles, ready to be led away.

But it was Ares who found the situation most intolerable. He was outraged. He looked down and saw battles being fought in the human realm with their customary ferocity, yet no one was dying. Warriors were being run through with javelins, trampled by horses, gutted by chariot wheels, and beheaded by swords but they would not die. It made a mockery of combat. If soldiers and civilians did not die, why then—war had no point. It settled nothing. It achieved nothing. Neither side in a battle could ever win.

Lesser deities were as divided over the issue as the Olympians. The Keres continued to drink the blood of those felled in battle and could not care less what happened to their souls. Two of the Horai, Diké and Eunomia, agreed with Demeter that the absence of death upset the natural order of things. Their sister Eirene, the goddess of peace, could barely contain her delight. If the absence of Death meant the absence of war then surely her time had come?

“Yes. Not bad. But I say, permit me, wouldn’t it be funny—” Sisyphus smiled as an idea struck him, “—wouldn’t it be funny if you returned me to the upper world alive? Imagine her shock!” “Hm . . .” “And I would make sure that every day she paid for her insolence and disrespect. No gold or feasting, nothing but harsh treatment, insults, and servitude. I can’t wait to see her face when I appear in front of her, alive and well and whole . . . and perhaps . . . perhaps even more youthful and vital and handsome than ever? She is only twenty-six, but imagine her torment if I outlived her! I would use her as my slave. Every day would be torture to her.”

“Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live forever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.”

“Of course, if you don’t like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. Make your choice. An idyllic afterlife down here or a shot at immortality above.”

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free. Painters, poets, and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance, and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.

To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods’, who are too jealous, petty, and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them.