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

by Stephen Fry

The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.

Brooding, simmering, and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, 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?

“I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me.

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. Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, “forethought.” Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say: 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. This is perhaps a way of suggesting that Prometheus is father of our civilization in a way more subtle than as the provider of fire, whether real or symbolic. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, town dwellers, and traders? You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us. Others have maintained that Elpis means more than “hope,” it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death, and ultimate failure that looms over us all. Such an interpretation of the myth is, in a dark manner, optimistic. Nietzsche looked at it in yet another, slightly different way. For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man’s existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora’s i...

So while they may have been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world, and themselves with greater candor and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own.