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

by Stephen Fry

Early human beings the world over wondered at the sources of power that fueled volcanoes, thunderstorms, tidal waves, and earthquakes. They celebrated and venerated the rhythm of the seasons, the procession of heavenly bodies in the night sky, and the daily miracle of the sunrise. They questioned how it might all have started. The collective unconscious of many civilizations has told stories of angry gods; dying and renewing gods; fertility goddesses; deities; demons; and spirits of fire, earth, and water.

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.

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.

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

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

Zeus muttered something about the trouble with being the King of the Gods was that there was no one higher to pray to,

Temptation loses much of its power when removed from sight.

Prometheus, mankind’s chief creator, advocate, and friend, taught us, stole for us, and sacrificed himself for us. We all possess our share of Promethean fire, without it we would not be human. It is right to pity and admire him but, unlike the jealous and selfish gods, he would never ask to be worshipped, praised, and adored.

When lust descends, discretion, common sense, and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.

It all gets very confusing and is best left to academics and those with time on their hands.

But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don’t quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.

When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhymed “thighs” with “eyes,” “hips” with “lips,” “youth” with “truth,” “boy” with “joy,” and “desire” with “