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

by Stephen Fry

But whenever we tell any story we have to snip the narrative string somewhere in order to make a starting point.

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

These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made. The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS. Was Chaos a god—a divine being—or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse? Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void. Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your trousers began as chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over eons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that sheathes your lovely legs. In time you will abandon your trousers—not now, I hope—and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned. In either case their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to cold Chaos. And what is true for your trousers is of course true for you. So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.

From formless Chaos sprang two creations: EREBUS and NYX. Erebus, he was darkness, and Nyx, she was night. They coupled at once and the flashing fruits of their union were HEMERA, day, and AETHER, light. At the same time—because everything must happen simultaneously until Time is there to separate events—Chaos brought forth two more entities: GAIA, the earth, and TARTARUS, the depths and caves beneath the earth.

The silent emptiness of this world was filled when Gaia bore two sons all on her own.1 The first was PONTUS, the sea, and the second was OURANOS, the sky—better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety.

the second was OURANOS, the sky—better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety.

Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge.

Perhaps we imagine that Gaia—Mother Earth—is soft, warm, bountiful, and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueler, harsher, and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable. She seemed a very shallow, silly, and ignorant being, who knew nothing and appeared to understand less. This was deceptive, for each day that passed she got smarter and smarter, more and more well informed and more and more capable. Her name means “memory” (giving us the word “mnemonic”). At the time of her mother’s visit, the world and the cosmos were very young, so Mnemosyne had had no opportunity to prime herself with knowledge or experience. As the years passed, her endless capacity for the storage of information and sensory experience would make her wiser than almost anyone.

Remember Tartarus was a primordial being too, who was born out of Chaos at the same time as Gaia. So when she approached him, they greeted each other as family members will. “Gaia, you’ve put on weight.” “You look a mess, Tartarus.” “What the hell do you want down here?” “Shut up for once and I’ll tell you. . . .”

There were, however, three lovely exceptions12: three beautiful sisters, the HESPERIDES—nymphs of the west and daughters of the evening. They heralded the daily arrival of their mother and father, but with the soft gold of the gloaming rather than the dread black of night. Their time is what movie cameramen today call “magic hour,” when the light is at its most beguiling and beautiful.

“Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.”

The first to push themselves out of the sodden ground were the ERINYES, whom we call the Furies, ALECTO (remorseless), MEGAERA (jealous rage), and TISIPHONE (vengeance). Perhaps it was an unconscious instinct of Ouranos that caused such vengeful beings to rise up. Their eternal duty, from the moment of their chthonic—or out-of-the-ground—birth, would be to punish the worst and most violent of crimes: relentlessly to chase the perpetrators and to rest only when the guilty had paid the full and dreadful price. Armed with cruel metallic scourges, the Furies flayed the very flesh from the bones of the guilty. The Greeks, with characteristic irony, nicknamed these female avengers the EUMENIDES or “kindly ones.”

The “striving, straining one,” or TITAN, is the title we reserve for Kronos, his eleven siblings, and (much of) their progeny. Ouranos meant it as an insult, but somehow the name has resounded through the ages with a ring of grandeur. No one, to this very day, would be insulted to be called a Titan.

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?

The whirlpool of blood and seminal fluid foments, fizzes, and foams. Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow, and then a face. But what kind of face? A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam. In Greek “from the foam” can be rendered as something like APHRODITE, and this is the name of the one who now lifts herself from the spume and spray. She stands on a large scallop shell, a demure and gentle smile playing on her lips. Slowly she alights onto a beach on Cyprus. Where she steps flowers bloom and clouds of butterflies arise. Around her head, birds fly in circles, singing in ecstasies of joy. Perfect Love and Beauty has made her landfall and the world will never be the same.

“Kronos! Awake at this hour?” “I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.

Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.

One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.22 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.

The brontosaurus or “thunder lizard” got his name from Brontes. The novelist sisters from Yorkshire may have too. Their father was born ‘Brunty’ but changed it to Brontë, perhaps to lend a grand peal of classical thunder to his Irish name, perhaps in honor of Admiral Nelson who had been made Duke of Brontë—the dukedom was located on the slopes of Etna and is believed to have derived its name from the Cyclops slumbering beneath.

One more Oceanid merits a mention, but only because of her name—DORIS. Doris the Oceanid. She went on to marry the sea god NEREUS and by him mother many NEREIDS, friendly nymphs of the sea.

15. At least the deposed Sky Father has the consolation of the planet Uranus named in his honor—it being the convention that the planets take the Roman names of the gods they represent.

18. As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort.

Although in birth order Hera had been the last to be born before Zeus, she now counted as the second child. A kind of reverse seniority operated as they emerged from Kronos’s gullet. Zeus became officially the eldest of the children while Hestia, having been the firstborn, was now considered the youngest. It makes sense if you are a god.

If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into lifeforms of ever greater diversity, variety, and richness. The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond.

Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing, and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

The Muses can be found in “music,” “amusements,” “museums,” and general “musings.” W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet’s ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. Sometimes she gives you gold, sometimes you read back what she has dictated and see that it is dross.

Rather an undignified linguistic end meets CALLIOPE, the Muse of epic poetry. Somehow she became a steam-powered organ commonly played in fairgrounds, which are just about the only places where you will hear her name spoken today.

Melpomene The tragic Muse, MELPOMENE (whose name derives from a Greek verb meaning “to celebrate with dance and song”), represented originally the chorus and then the whole of tragedy—a very important fusing of music, poetry, drama, mask, dance, song, and religious celebration. Tragic actors wore a type of thick-soled boot,26 called a “buskin” in English and the cothurnus in Greek; and Melpomene is usually depicted either holding or wearing these, as well as, of course, the famous tragic mask with its unhappy down-curved lips. Along with her sister Terpsichore, she was a mother to the Sirens, whose time will come.

Terpsichore Cheese Shop Owner: Oh, I thought you were complaining about the bouzouki player. Customer: Oh, heaven forbid. I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse. This dialogue from Monty Python’s immortal “Cheese Shop Sketch” introduced many, myself included, to TERPSICHORE, the Muse of dance.

Thalia The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for “to flourish.”27 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors’ boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

Moirai The three MOIRAI, or Fates, were named CLOTHO, LACHESIS, and ATROPOS. These daughters of Nyx are to be thought of as sitting round a spinning wheel: Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos (the relentless, remorseless one, literally the “un-turning”) chooses when to shear the thread and cut the life short.30 I picture them as sunken-cheeked crones, clothed in black rags, sitting in a cave cackling and nodding as they spin, but many sculptors and poets represented them as pink-cheeked maidens, dressed in white robes and smiling demurely. Their name derives from a word that means “portion” or “lot,” in the sense of “that which is allotted to you.” “It was not her portion to be loved,” or, “It was his lot to be unhappy,” are the kinds of phrases Greeks employed to describe attributes or destinies apportioned by the Moirai. Even the gods had to submit themselves to the Fates’ cruel decrees.

The three Moirai, or Fates. Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos chooses when to cut the life off.

Keres These carrion daughters of Nyx were the vile and rapacious spirits of violent death. Like the Valkyries of Norse and Germanic myth they collected the souls of warriors killed in battle. Unlike those benevolent warrior goddesses however, the Keres did not escort their heroic souls to the reward of a Valhalla. They flew from bleeding body to body, greedily sucking up the blood that flowed from them; then, when each corpse was thoroughly drained, they threw it over their shoulders and moved on to the next.

HESTIA Of all the gods, Hestia—“First to be devoured and the last to be yielded up again”—is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus in his wisdom apportioned to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of “hearth and home.” Our word “hearth” shares its ancestry with “heart,” just as the modern Greek for “hearth” is kardia, which also means “heart.” In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like “economics” and “ecology.” The Latin for hearth is focus—which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of words for a fireplace we have spun “cardiologist,” “deep focus,” and “eco-warrior.” The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of “hearth and home.” Our word “hearth” shares its ancestry with “heart,” just as the modern Greek for “hearth” is kardia, which also means “heart.” In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like “economics” and “ecology.” The Latin for hearth is focus—which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of words for a fireplace we have spun “cardiologist,” “deep focus,” and “eco-warrior.” The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

“Does Hades hope for the sea or the underworld?” Poseidon wondered. “If he wants the underworld then I want that too, just to infuriate him.” Hades thought along the same lines. “Whichever I choose,” he said to himself, “I will shout in triumph, just to annoy that prick Poseidon.” In each of Zeus’s outstretched fists lay concealed a precious stone: a sapphire as blue as the sea in one and a piece of jet as black as Erebus in the other. Poseidon did a jig of delight when he touched the back of Zeus’s right hand and saw it open to reveal the winking blue sapphire. “The oceans are mine!” he roared. “That means—yes!” cried Hades with a mighty fist-pump. “That means I have the underworld. Ha ha!” Secretly, inside, he was sickened. Gods are such children.

“That means—yes!” cried Hades with a mighty fist-pump. “That means I have the underworld. Ha ha!” Secretly, inside, he was sickened. Gods are such children.

His name was KERBEROS (although he answered to his Roman name, CERBERUS, too).

Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods, and human heroes—Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

I am very fond of her and, while I am sure I would stammer, blush, and swallow awkwardly in her presence, she finds in me a devoted admirer. She gave the gods gravity, heft, and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritas. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.

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

Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.

Zeus said, raising his hand, “from this moment forward the gathering of your honey will be made easier by my decree that you shall not labor alone. You will be queen of a whole colony, a whole swarm of productive subjects. Furthermore, I shall grant you a fatal and painful sting.” Melissa’s wings pricked up perkily. “But,” Zeus continued, “while it will bring a sharp pain to the one you sting, it is to you and your kind that it will bring death. So let it be.”

Goddess of the chase and the chaste, of the untutored and the untamed, of hounds and hinds, of midwives and the moon, Artemis duly became. The queen of archers and huntresses grew to value her independence and her celibacy above all things. The kindness with which she expressed her sympathy for women in childbirth was countered by the ferocity with which she pursued game and punished any man who presumed to come too near. Feared, admired, and adored across the ancient world, she was sometimes known, in honor of the mountainside of her birth, as CYNTHIA. The Romans called her DIANA. Her special tree was the cypress. Inasmuch as Athena was goddess of things cultivated, made, crafted, and thought through, Artemis—in her dominion over the natural, instinctive, and wild—stood as her opposite. They shared, however—along with Hestia—a passion for their own chastity.

Now standing upright (and still not half an hour old), this remarkable infant announced that he was going for a walk. “The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,” he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of “-phobia” words as he spoke. “I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there’s a good mother.”

Hospitality, or xenia, was so extraordinarily esteemed in the Greek world that Hestia shared the care of it with Zeus himself, who was on occasion given the name Zeus Xenios. Sometimes the gods tested human “guest friendship,” as we shall see in the story of Philemon and Baucis. This was known as theoxenia. Xenophobes, of course, do not

40. You will sometimes see the name DIS (a Latin word for “rich”) used for him or his Judeo-Christian descendant, LUCIFER. Dante in his Inferno called the city of hell Dis. Today only cryptic crossword setters use the name with any frequency.