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

by Stephen Fry

But then Nyx, without Erebus’s help, gave birth to MOROS, or Doom, who was to become the most feared entity in creation. Doom comes to every creature, mortal or immortal, but is always hidden. Even the immortals feared Doom’s all-powerful, all-knowing control over the cosmos.

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?

Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me.

Seriously though

Lerna, a lake that could be used as one of the entrances to the underworld, Hades posted HYDRA, another child of Tartarus and Gaia. I mentioned before the frightening mutations possible when monsters mate, and the difference between Cerberus and his sister Hydra offers a striking example. On the one hand, a dog with a more or less manageable three heads and an elegantly snaky tail to wag; and on the other, his sister, a many-headed water-beast who was almost impossible to kill. Chop off one of her heads and she could grow back ten more in its place.

But, ambitious, snobbish, conservatively protective of hierarchy, and impatient of originality and flair as she certainly was—the archetype of many a literary aunt and cinematic dowager dragon—Hera was never a bore.48 The force and resolution with which she faced up to a god who could disintegrate her with one thunderbolt shows self-belief as well as courage.

Ares—MARS to the Romans—was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid. Nevertheless even Zeus acknowledged with grudging consent that he was a necessary addition to Olympus. War may be stupid, but it is also inevitable and sometimes—dare one say it?—necessary.

War is bother stupid and often necessary. People will people after all.

Meliss is still the Greek word for the honeybee, and it is true that its sting is a suicide weapon of last resort. If it should try to fly away after the barb has lodged in the pierced skin of its victim, a bee will tug out its own insides in the effort of freeing itself. The much less useful and diligent wasp has no such barb and can administer its sting as many times as it likes without danger to itself. But wasps, annoying as they are, never made selfish, hubristic demands of the gods.

Great Aunt Lillian raised bees. I’m highly allergic; she told me about the sting killing the bees. A form of self protective suicide (and trust me y’all: I’ve been there). She taught me how to just be still and let the bee “sniff” me out. According to her I was/am pretty but the bee would be able to tell I wasn’t a flower.

Athena’s kind of beauty was expressed in aesthetics, in the apprehension of its ideal in art, representation, thought, and character, rather than in the more physical, obvious, and perhaps superficial kinds that would always be the business of Aphrodite. The love that Athena stood for had a less heated and physical emphasis too; it was the kind that would later become known as “Platonic.”

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.

Gaia, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo), and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was

Zeus decided it was time for the whole human experiment to be brought to a close. To that end he gathered the clouds into a storm so intense that the land was flooded and all the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world were drowned. All, save Deucalion and Pyrrha who—thanks to the perspicacity of Prometheus—survived the nine days of high water aboard their wooden chest, which floated safely on the flood. Like good survivalists they had kept their chest well provisioned with food, drink, and a few useful tools and artifacts, so that when the deluge finally receded and their vessel was able to settle on Mount Parnassus, they could survive in the postdiluvian mud and slime.83

So many traditions have floods wiping out humanity.

There was no graver sin in Zeus’s eyes than the betrayal of xenia, the sacred duty of hosts toward guests, and guests toward hosts.

So, Zeus was a southerner at heart. Good for him, the philandering so and so!

Just to run the thread of the narrative right through to one of its conclusions (and as a further example of how one story could lead on to other, even more significant and far-reaching, myths), you should know that Nephele, the cloud image of Hera, went on to marry a Boeotian king called ATHAMAS,148 by whom she bore two sons, PHRIXUS and HELLE. Nephele had cause to save the life of Phrixus—an Isaac to his father’s Abraham—when Athamas tied his son to the ground and made to sacrifice him. Just as the Hebrew god revealed a ram in a thicket to Abraham and saved Isaac’s life, so Nephele sent a golden ram to rescue her son Phrixus. The golden fleece of that ram gave rise to the great quest of Jason and his Argonauts. All on account of a drunken degenerate king who had the temerity to make eyes at Hera.

Again, early traditions/religions fitting the same story into their history. Makes you wonder; how many traditions do Greek and Jewish history share?

To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods’, who are too jealous, petty, and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them.

“Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.”

I may not get on with Mother. She isn’t the word’s nicest person and was even worse growing up; age seems to be chilling her out. Thing is, you wanna mess with Mother or you make her cry, you’re gonna deal with me. No one, NO ONE messes with my parents or children.

At this time, as in the subsequent Age of Heroes, there was always the possibility of humans attaining immortal rank. It was to happen to HERACLES. In later civilizations Roman emperors could be deified, Roman Catholics sanctified, and film actors catasterized in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“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.

I love this story!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Tithonus” is one of his most loved and anthologized poems. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed to Eos, in which he begs her to deliver him from his senility. . . . After many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream . . . It contains a famous line that might be considered one of the great themes of Greek myth: The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

Just once or twice in Greek myth mortal lovers are granted a felicitous ending. It is that hope, perhaps, that spurs us on to believe that our quest for happiness will not be futile.

Seems about right to me. Only once or twice have I seen a “happily ever after”.

This theoxenia, this divine testing of human hospitality, is notably similar to that told in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. Angels visit Sodom and Gomorrah and only Lot and his wife show them decency and kindness. The debauched citizens of Sodom of course, rather than setting the dogs on the angels wanted to “know them”—in as literally biblical a sense as could be, giving us the word “sodomy.” Lot and his wife, like Philemon and Baucis, were told to make their getaway and not look back while divine retribution was visited on the Cities of the Plain. Lot’s wife did look back and she was turned, not into a linden, but into a pillar of salt.

Again, matching stories.

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.

Definitely

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.

Sad thing is, most of today’s society aren’t thinking ahead at all.

Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favorite Greek motto was, after all, mēdén ágan “nothing too much”), Russell reminds us that the Greeks seemed to be aware of a need to counter his influence with darker, deeper, less stable passions: It is evident that this process [acting on prudence and forethought] can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

What Elpis being left behind in Pandora’s jar meant to the Greeks, and what it might mean for us today, have been matters of intriguing debate amongst scholars and thinkers since the invention of writing and perhaps even before that. 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.

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 imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there i...