Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures

by Stephen Fry

‘But focus,’ said Hermes. ‘Relaxation without focus leads to failure.’ ‘Focus without relaxation leads to failure just as surely,’ said Athena. ‘So concentrate …’ said Perseus. ‘Exactly.’ ‘… but calmly?’ ‘Concentrate calmly. You have it.’

Through their son Perses, their bloodline founded the Persian nation and people.

‘Mouth is open, darling, and there’s a string of drool dribbling from your beard right into your lap. It’s most unappealing. Would you like Ganymede to find you a napkin?’

Milk sprayed from her nipple in a great arc across the night sky, imprinting it with stars. Stars which, from that moment, would be known as the Milky Way.fn9

As Yoda had expressed it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: ‘Do. Or do not. There is no try.’

‘You see?’ said Prometheus. ‘It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labours, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will.’

It was here, in Elis, that Heracles now established athletic competitions to be held every four years, in honour of his father Zeus. He called them, after the name of his father’s mountaintop abode, the Olympic Games.

‘It is the fate of the young never to learn,’ the centaur sighed. ‘I suppose it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that propels them to their triumphs, just as surely as it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that unseats them and sends them plummeting to their ends.’

In a fight, do not do what you want to do, but what you judge your enemy least wants you to.

Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of enquiry of which the Athenians were so proud – logic, numbers, rhetoric, order and discovery – only to reveal a truth that is disordered, shameful, transgressive and bestial.

With a cry of despair Aegeus threw himself to his death in the sea below, the sea that ever since has been called, in his honour, the Aegean.