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

by Stephen Fry

“She has fourteen children,” wailed Leto, “so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate . . .” “Enough!” said Artemis. “Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.” Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion’s and Niobe’s fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword. Niobe’s grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud, and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. But not even solid rock had the power to hold back such tears as these. Niobe’s weeping pushed her tears through the stone and sent them cascading in waterfalls down the mountainside.

Apollo bowed and smiled sweetly. But what he did next might make you forever think less of this golden and beautiful god, the melodious Apollo of reason, charm, and harmony. He took Marsyas and flayed the skin off him. There is no nice way of saying it. To punish Marsyas for his hubris in daring to challenge an Olympian, he peeled the skin from the living body of the screaming satyr and hung it on a pine tree as a lesson and warning to all.162 The “Flaying of Marsyas” became a favorite subject for painters, poets, and sculptors. For some his tale echoes the fate of Prometheus: a symbol of the artist-creator’s struggle to match the gods, or of the gods’ refusal to accept that mortal artists can outdo the divine.

The crowd of onlookers followed her in appalled silence as she made her way out of the cottage and toward the tree. Arachne was swinging at the end of the rope, her dead eyes bulging from her head. “A talent like yours can never die,” Athena said. “You shall spin and weave all your days, spin and weave, spin and weave . . .” As she spoke Arachne started to shrivel and shrink. The rope she dangled from stretched itself into a thin filament of glistening silk up which she now pulled herself, a girl no longer but a creature destined always busily to spin and weave. This is how the first spider—the first arachnid—came into being. It was not a punishment as some would have it, but a prize for winning a great competition, a reward for a great artist. The right to work and weave masterpieces in perpetuity.

It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: His presence lit up Olympus.

Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

ENDYMION Cephalus was not the only young man to catch the moon goddess’s eye. One night, as Selene sailed her silver chariot across the sky over western Asia Minor, she spotted far below ENDYMION, a young shepherd of great beauty lying naked and fast asleep on the hillside outside a cave on Mount Latmos. The sight of his lovely limbs all silvered by her moonbeams and the enticingly seductive smile that played on his lips as he dreamed so filled Selene with desire that she cried out to Zeus, Endymion’s father, to ensure that he would never change. She wanted to see him in exactly that attitude every night. Zeus granted the wish. Endymion stayed just where he was, locked in eternal slumber. Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy. This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures, and positions which allowed that. An odd relationship, but one which worked and made Selene happy.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT As Eos approached along the sand, Tithonus looked up and fell in love with her quite as instantly and entirely as she had fallen in love with him. They held hands straightaway, without even having exchanged a word, and walked up and down on the shoreline as lovers do. “What is your name?” “Tithonus.” “I am Eos, the dawn. Come away with me to the Palace of the Sun. Live with me and be my lover, my husband, my equal, my ruler, my subject, my all.” “Eos, I will. I am yours forever.” They laughed and made love with the waves crashing around them. Eos’s rosy fingers found ways to drive Tithonus quite mad with joy. For her own part she knew that this time she could make it work. Her coral, pearl, agate, marble, and jasper apartments within the Palace of the Sun became their home. Few couples had ever been happier. Their lives were complete. They shared everything. They read poetry to each other, went on long walks, listened to music, danced, rode horses, sat in companionable silence, laughed, and made love. Every morning he watched with pride as she threw open the gates to let Helios and his chariot thunder through.

One afternoon Apollo and Hyacinth were competing in athletic events and Zephyrus, in a fit of jealous rage, blew Apollo’s discus off course, sending it skimming at speed straight toward Hyacinth. It struck him hard on the forehead, killing him stone dead. In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth’s soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one’s brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. This heady juice dropped into the soil and from it bloomed the exquisite and sweet-smelling flower that bears Hyacinth’s name to this day.

CROCUS AND SMILAX Crocus was a mortal youth who pined without success for the nymph SMILAX. Out of pity, the gods (we don’t really know which one) turned him into the saffron flower that we call crocus, while she became a brambly vine, many species of which still flourish under the name Smilax. According to another version of this myth, Crocus was the lover and companion of the god Hermes, who accidentally killed him with a discus and in his sorrow turned him into the crocus flower. This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

At the very least it’s necessary for us to know that Adonis was lovely enough to attract, as no other mortal ever had, the one who had done so much to bring about his birth: the goddess of love and beauty herself, Aphrodite. They became lovers. It had been a wild and tortuous path to this coupling: The goddess, in a spirit of malicious revenge, had caused a father to commit a forbidden act with his daughter which brought forth a child whom Aphrodite loved perhaps more completely than any other being. A lifetime of therapy could surely not clear up such a psychic mess as that.

“I command your wicked, lying powers of speech to be still. From this moment you will be mute unless spoken to. You will have no power to reply except to repeat the last thing that has been said to you. None can undo this curse. Only I can. Understand?” “. . . . can understand!” cried Echo. “That’s what happens when you disobey the gods.” “. . . obey the gods!” “I do not forgive. No mercy.” “. . . give no mercy!”

Echo ran and ran up the hillside, sobbing with grief and desolation. She hid in a cave high above the river by whose banks the lovely Narcissus lay. Inside her head Echo framed the words of a prayer to her favorite goddess, Aphrodite. In mute despair she begged to be relieved of the pain of love and the intolerable burden of her cursed existence. Aphrodite answered the nymph’s prayers as best she could. She freed the nymph of her body and most of her physical self. She did not have the power to lift Hera’s curse, so the voice remained. The voice that had got Echo into all that trouble in the first place, the voice that was doomed to repeat and repeat. Nothing more was left of the once beautiful nymph, just the answering voice. You can hear Echo still, returning your last few words when you call out near caves, canyons, cliffs, hills, streets, squares, temples, monuments, ruins, and empty rooms.

Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim, and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image. The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness, or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting, and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviors.

Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another’s eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?

As for their spirits—well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes. Moreover, in honor of the couple’s love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the color of their passion and their blood.

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus. Now am I dead, Now am I fled; My soul is in the sky. Tongue, lose thy light; Moon, take thy flight; Now die, die, die, die, die.

Lampros took his wife at her word without bothering with any anatomical inspections and thus, raised male, Leucippos grew up to be a fine, intelligent, universally liked, and accepted boy. Teenage years approached, however, and Galatea became more and more afraid that her beloved child’s lush natural curves and striking lack of any downy growth on the chin must eventually give the game away to Lampros, who was not the kind of man to overlook such a deception. For safety’s sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex. Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after.

LEUCIPPOS II, DAPHNE, AND APOLLO Interestingly, another myth tells of a different sex-changing LEUCIPPOS—this one a son of OENOMAUS—who fell in love with the naiad DAPHNE, whom Apollo also loved but had not so far wooed or seduced. In order to be near Daphne, this Leucippos disguised himself as a girl and joined her company of nymphs. The jealous Apollo saw this and caused the reeds to whisper to Daphne that she and her attendants should bathe in the river. Accordingly they slipped out of their clothes and splashed about naked. When Leucippos, for obvious reasons, refused to remove his maidenly garb the girls teasingly stripped him bare, discovered his embarrassing and unmistakable secret, and angrily speared him to death. By this time Apollo’s own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia, and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches, and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia’s receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree. For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became ...

In the southern port town of Amathus, a group of women known as the PROPOETIDES, or “daughters of Propoetus,” were so indignant at the amount of sexual license that pervaded there, they even had the temerity to suggest that Aphrodite should no longer stand as the island’s patroness. To punish such blasphemous impertinence, the wrathful Aphrodite visited upon these sanctimonious sisters feelings of insatiable carnal lust, at the same time ridding them of any sense of modesty or shame. So cursed, the women lost the ability to blush and began eagerly and indiscriminately to prostitute their bodies about the island. A sensitive and wildly attractive young sculptor called PYGMALION saw the flagrant and shameless behavior of the Propoetides and grew so disgusted that he decided to foreswear all love and sex in perpetuity.

“We can’t just stand here in the rain with our backs to the town,” said Baucis. “I’ll look if you will.” “I love you, Philemon, my husband.” “I love you, Baucis, my wife.” They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden. For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims.

Poor Midas. His name will always mean someone fortunate and rich, but truly he was unlucky and poor. If only he had kept to his roses. Green fingers are better than gold.

It is generally held that Prometheus means “forethought” and Epimetheus “afterthought,” from which it is usually inferred that Epimetheus blundered into things without considering consequences while his elder brother Prometheus deliberated with more perspicacity. It might be convincingly argued that there was nothing especially cautious, forwardthinking, or prescient about Prometheus’s actions in bringing fire to man. It was impulsive, generous . . . loving even, but not especially wise. Epimetheus was a kindly, well disposed individual also, and his failings were only . . . I was going to say only human, but that can hardly be right, for he was a Titan. His failings were certainly titanic in their consequences. The perceived difference between the brothers is used to this day by philosophers to express something fundamental about us all.

Epimetheus set to with a will. He gave armor to some animals—the rhinoceros, the pangolin, and the armadillo, for instance. To others, almost at random it seemed, he handed out heavy weatherproof fur, camouflage, venom, feathers, tusks, talons, scales, claws, gills, wings, whiskers, and goodness knows what else. He assigned speed and ferocity, he apportioned buoyancy and airworthiness—every animal was fitted out with its own cleverly designed and efficient speciality, from navigational skills to expertise in burrowing, nest-building, swimming, leaping, and singing. He was just congratulating himself for providing the bats and dolphins with echolocation when he realized that this had been the very last of the available gifts.

He had, with his characteristic lack of foresight, completely omitted to consider what he would bestow on man—poor, naked, vulnerable, smooth-skinned, two-legged man. Epimetheus went guiltily to his brother and asked what they should do now that there was nothing left at the bottom of the gift basket. Man had no defences with which to arm himself against the cruelty, cunning, and rapacity of these now superbly provisioned animals. The very powers that had been lavished on the beasts would surely finish off weaponless mankind. Prometheus’s solution was to steal the arts from Athena and flame from Hephaestus. With these, man could use wisdom, wit, and industry to pit himself against the animals. He might not swim as well as a fish, but he could work out how to build boats; he might not run as swiftly as a horse, but he could learn to tame, shoe, and ride one. One day he might even construct wings to rival those of the birds. Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus—not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals.

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant . . . True forethought only arises when a man does something toward which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date . . . the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought—which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros, or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least . . .

Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture, and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly, and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred, and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall, and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame, and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.

Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can’t be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. Most of those who told and retold the myths would have been aware, I think, at some level of their consciousness, that they were telling fictional tales. They might have thought the world was once peopled with nymphs and monsters, but they could be fairly certain that such beings no longer existed.

We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur’an. There were “mysteries” and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons.

It is always a mistake to think of the Greeks as superior human beings uniquely endowed with enlightened wisdom and rational benevolence. We would find much in ancient Greece alien and distasteful to us. Women could play no real part in affairs outside the home, slavery was endemic, punishments were harsh, and life could be brutal. Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus, and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully, and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. “Know thyself” was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people—if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings—they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim.