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

by Stephen Fry

Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.

Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

Ares—MARS to the Romans—was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid.

There is doubt, disagreement, and speculation about what happened to Hephaestus after he had been cast down from heaven. Some say the infant god was cared for by the Oceanid Eurynome and either the Titaness Tethys, Eurynome’s mother, or perhaps by THETIS, a Nereid (daughter of Nereus and Doris) who was to give birth to ACHILLES many years later. It seems certain, though, that Hephaestus grew up on the island of Lemnos, where he learned how to forge metal and make exquisite, intricate objects.

In later years Athena and Poseidon would vie for the special patronage of the city of Cecropia. He struck his trident into the high rock on which they stood and produced a spring of seawater; an impressive trick, but its saltiness rendered it more or less useless as anything more than a picturesque public fountain. Athena’s simple gift was the first olive tree. The citizens of Cecropia in their wisdom saw the manifold benefits of its fruit, oil, and wood and chose her as their presiding deity and protectress, changing the name of their city to Athens in her honor.58

Leto made an exhausted landfall on the hospitable floating island of Delos with barely enough strength to crawl up beyond the dunes to shelter beneath a straggling line of pine trees that fringed the shore. The few pine nuts and grasses she could eat there would not feed the active life she felt kicking inside her and so she made her way to a green valley that she could see in the distance. There, beneath Mount Cynthos,

Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason, and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric, and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony.

You remember the magnetite stone the pregnant Rhea had duped Kronos into swallowing instead of the infant Zeus? The one that he had later vomited up and which Zeus cast far from Othrys? Well, it had landed at a place called Pytho on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Lodged fast in the earth it would in time become the Omphalos or navel-stone of Greece—the Hellenic bellybutton, its spiritual center and point of origin. From exactly the spot where it fell, at the command of Gaia, for whom this place was already sacred, there had emerged out of the ground a huge dragon-like serpent to serve as the stone’s guardian. Taking the name of his birthplace he was called Python, as have been many snakes in his honor since.

To atone for his grievous assault on the proper way of things and to allow the slain Python to sleep the eternal sleep of death in the arms of his mother Gaia, Zeus finally fixed the serpent’s resting place, the island of Delos, to the earth. While it no longer floats free, those who visit the island can testify to this day that it is tough to sail to, being beset by violent Etesian winds and treacherous meltemi currents. Anyone who travels there is likely to suffer the most awful seasickness. It is as if Hera has still not forgiven Delos for the part it played in the birth of the LETOIDES, the glorious twins Artemis and Apollo.