Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #2)

by Stephen Fry

The bull was, of course, a bull, and so had no sense of how to respond to a woman’s advances. In the froth and frenzy of her erotic passion, the lovestruck Pasiphae went to her friend, and perhaps ex-lover, Daedalus, and asked if he could help her have her way with the bull. Without so much as a second thought, Daedalus, excited perhaps by the intellectual challenge, set about manufacturing an artificial heifer. He made it from wood and brass, but he stretched a real cow’s hide over the frame. Pasiphae fitted herself inside, the correct part of her presented to the correct opening. The whole contraption was wheeled to the meadow where the bull was grazing. I know, my boy, it is gross, but I am telling you the story as the world knows it. Astonishingly, the depraved plan worked. P...

Poseidon now sent the bull mad. Its untamable terrorizing of the island caused Eurystheus to choose it as the seventh task he set for Heracles, who came to Crete, subdued it, and took it to Mycenae. This was of course the bull that escaped from Mycenae, crossed into mainland Greece, and tore up the plain of Marathon until you, my splendid boy, tamed it and brought it to Athens finally to be sacrificed. Quite a bull, wasn’t it?

In due course Pasiphae, the bull’s seed inside her, gave birth. What emerged was—as might be expected and thoroughly deserved—a monstrous aberration, half human and half bull. Minos was disgusted but neither he nor Pasiphae had the heart or stomach to kill the abomination. Instead, Minos commissioned Daedalus to construct a building in which this creature—which they named Asterion after Minos’s father, but which the world called the MINOTAUR—could be safely housed and from which it could never escape.

The building Daedalus designed, which he named the Labyrinth, was an annex to his great Palace of Knossos, but so elaborate and complex was its maze-like design of passageways, blank walls, false doors, dead ends, and apparently identical corridors, galleries, and alcoves that a person could be lost in its interior for a lifetime. Any can enter, but none can ever find their way out. Indeed, the cunning of the labyrinth is that its design leads inevitably to the central chamber that lies in its very heart. It is a stone room where Asterion the Minotaur lives out his wretched monstrous life. High above is a grating, which lets in some sunlight, and allows food to be thrown down to him. As he grew from infant-calf to man-bull (I should say that his lower half is human and upper half is bull, complete with a full set of horns), it became clear that his favorite food was flesh. Human flesh for preference. A certain number of thieves, bandits, and murderers are likely to be sentenced to death on Crete in the normal course of events and their carcasses go some way to satisfying the Minotaur, but every year he has a special treat.

“Over the next two weeks you will be given all the food and drink you require. Starting tomorrow a youth will be selected and taken into the labyrinth. The next day it will be a girl. A youth the day after, and so on, until the two weeks are over and the last of you has been taken. The ship’s crew will then be released to sail back to Athens under safe passage with the news that the tribute is paid and your kingdom safe for another year. Understood?”

“The corridors that lead from here through the labyrinth are dark,” she said. “They take you inevitably to the center. But to escape you will need this ball of thread. From the point where the guard leaves you, attach the end to the doorway and unroll it as you go further in. That way you will always be able to follow it out.” “Suppose I am the last chosen for the Minotaur,” said Theseus. “I cannot let thirteen good young Athenians die. I must be chosen first.” “Don’t you worry about that. I shall bribe the captain of the guard and you will be chosen tomorrow morning, I promise. I can give you no weapon though. You must tackle Asterion on your own.” “I fought his father without weapons and won,” said Theseus, thinking back to the Marathonian Bull.

“When you kill him, kill him quickly and mercifully. He is a monstrous mistake, but he is my brother. My half-brother at least.” Theseus smiled into her eyes. “I love you, Ariadne.” “I love you, Theseus.” “When I have killed him, I shall return and release my companions. You will sail with me back to Athens and we shall rule together as king and queen. Now leave, both of you, before we are discovered.” “One last kiss,” said Ariadne.

“Farewell, bull man,” breathed Theseus. “Farewell, Asterion, son of Pasiphae, son of the Bull from the Sea, the Cretan Bull, the Marathonian Bull. Farewell, brother of the beautiful Ariadne. Farewell, farewell.”

When they were far out to sea Theseus looked back and thought he could see the desolate figure of Ariadne standing on the shore in the moonlight. Approaching the island from the other side they could already see the fleet of Dionysus. Theseus mourned the loss of the girl he had fallen in love with, but he knew that the safety of the young people in his charge overrode everything. He had to sacrifice his own happiness. He had to sacrifice her.

That, at least, is the Athenian explanation of the abandonment of Ariadne on Naxos. Other versions maintain that Theseus left her on the island because he had no more use for her. She had served her purpose and could be dispensed with. In some Cretan tellings, Dionysus duly arrived in force on Naxos, married Ariadne (raising her wedding diadem to the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis), had at least twelve children by her, and rewarded her after her death by rescuing her from Hades, along with his own mother Semele, and they all lived happily ever after on Olympus.

It is hard for us to like a Theseus who could coldheartedly abandon the girl who had been so instrumental in saving him and his companions, and doubtless that is why the Athenian version of the story lays emphasis on the hard choice that faced him and even goes so far to suggest that Ariadne was already in some way engaged to Dionysus when she first met Theseus, thus throwing all the bl...

“What is it?” he said, squinting up in the direction of their gaze. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” And then he saw it. Two of them flying in the sky above. An older and a younger man. They had wide white wings. The younger man swooped up and then down. Even from their distance it was clear that he was enjoying himself.

Minos knew who to blame. If the Minotaur was dead and his killer had escaped, it could only mean that Daedalus had somehow betrayed the secret of the labyrinth. Minos ordered that the inventor and his son Icarus should be imprisoned in his tower room at the top of the palace, a twenty-four-hour guard posted outside. There they could await a sentence of death.

“Now listen to me, Icarus. We are flying over the sea to Athens, where I am sure Theseus will welcome us. But take care as you go. Fly too low and the waves will soak your wings and drag you under. Fly too close to the sun and the heat of its rays will melt the candle wax that is holding the feathers together, you understand?”

Up and up he flew, gaining height for his planned dive-bombing. He was so high now he could hardly see Theseus’s ship below, so high that . . . so high that it was hot. He cried out in alarm as feathers began to fall from his wings. The wax was melting! He rolled over to point his head down and dive down as far from the sun as possible, but it was too late. The feathers were falling like snow all about him and he started to plummet. The air, now cold and hard, banged against him. He heard his father cry out. There was nothing he could do. The sea was rushing up toward him. Perhaps if he narrowed his shoulders he might be able to plunge below the surface and come up safe. The Fall of Icarus. Daedalus looked down in impotent despair. He knew that from such a height the sea would be like a bed of granite. He watched the body break on the waves and knew that his son’s bones would be smashed to pieces and the life gone from him. “Oh Icarus, Icarus, my beloved boy. Why couldn’t you listen? Why did you have to fly so close to the sun?”

It is the destiny of children of spirit to soar too close to the sun and fall no matter how many times they are warned of the danger. Some will make it, but many do not.

“Tell Minos,” said the eldest daughter, “that you will offer Daedalus up in chains tomorrow. But tonight, let him bathe, eat, drink, listen to music, and be royally feasted as befits so great a king.” Cocalus, as he always did, obeyed his daughters and relayed the message. Minos bowed at the honor done to him. It so happened that the restless and ever inventive Daedalus had designed and installed a heating system for the palace, consisting of a network of pipes which carried hot water from a central boiler, the first of its kind in the world. Minos got into his bath that evening, but he never got out. Down in the hypocaust, the sisters heated the water until it boiled. It burst from the pipes in the bathroom and scalded Minos to an agonizing death.

It is hard to know for sure what kind of a king Theseus was. Later, the Athenians, who wrote most of the history that has come down to us, so revered their Founder King that, if we are to believe them, he was the inventor, not only as we have discovered of wrestling and bull-leaping, but of democracy, justice, and all good government too, as well as being a paragon of intelligence, wit, insight, and wisdom—qualities that the Athenians (much to the contempt of their neighbors) believed uniquely exemplified their character and culture.

His new friend helped Theseus abduct the young Helen of Sparta,301 while for himself Pirithous decided it would be amusing to have Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, for a wife. When he proposed the insane idea of descending into the realm of the dead and snatching Persephone from under the very nose of her husband Hades, Theseus the hero, Theseus the wise, Theseus the clever, Theseus the great king and counselor nodded his head vigorously. “Why not? Sounds like fun.” The pair went to the spot that Orpheus had chosen for his descent, Tainaron on the southern tip of the Peloponnese, also called Cape Matapan, and boldly made their way down through the caves, passageways, and galleries into the kingdom of the dead. Whether Pirithous imagined that his rough soldierly charm would win Persephone over or whether they planned to take her by force of arms is not known. The expedition was predictably disastrous. An unamused Hades cast them into stone chairs, their naked buttocks stuck to the seats, their legs bound by living snakes. There they would have stayed until the crack of doom had not Heracles, as we have seen, happened past them on his way to parley with Hades for the loan of Cerberus.302 In order to release Theseus, Heracles had to jerk him quite violently from his seat. Theseus was pulled free but his buttocks were left behind. It was as if they had been superglued to the stone of the chair. Athenian representations of the older, post-Hades Theseus portray him as apygou...

Chastened, he chose a new bride for himself. His eye fell on PHAEDRA, the younger sister of Ariadne. Perhaps she reminded Theseus of his first love, perhaps he felt an alliance with her might repair the old wrong of leaving Ariadne on Naxos, perhaps it was nothing more than a political move. The motives of Theseus seem always the hardest to read of any of the heroes. Minos, the old enemy of Athens, was dead of course, boiled alive in Sicily. His son DEUCALION had inherited the throne and—presumably because he knew that Athens was now stronger than Crete and also saw the value of an alliance—approved and even helped arrange the marriage, all thoughts of Theseus’s abandonment of his sister Ariadne and slaughtering of his half-brother the Minotaur put aside. Phaedra and Theseus had two sons together, Acamas and Demophon, who would grow up to feature in a touching and honorable cameo in the Trojan War.

Hippolytus, Theseus’s son by Antiope? He had been sent to Theseus’s old home of Troezen. He grew into a handsome, athletic young man, whose greatest passion was hunting. His devotion to Artemis, the goddess of the chase and the chaste, was equaled by his contempt for Aphrodite and the distractions of love. No man or woman interested him. Aphrodite, of course, did not take kindly to being ignored and the revenge she prepared for this insolent young man’s neglect of her altars and practices was terrible indeed.

Greek myth is full of fathers who kill sons and sons who kill fathers, so the mutual bond of affection and admiration that blossomed between these two seems especially remarkable. During the visit they spent all day and every day in each other’s company. Hippolytus barely noticed Phaedra. She, however, noticed him. She slowly became obsessed and one night visited him and declared her love.305 With a touch more horror and visible disgust than was wise or tactful, Hippolytus rejected her advances. As with Stheneboea and Bellerophon and Potiphar’s Wife and Joseph, the scorned and humiliated Phaedra cried rape to Theseus, who cursed his son and called on his father Poseidon to punish him. As Hippolytus was driving his chariot along the shore one morning, the god sent one of his great bulls from the sea, which maddened the horses. The boy was trampled to death. Phaedra, on hearing this, took her own life.

The goddess Artemis appeared to Theseus and explained that his son had been innocent all along and that the tragedy had been the result of spurned love and Aphrodite’s resentment. Exiled from his kingdoms of Athens and Troezen for his role, however unwitting, in the deaths of his son and wife, wretched, bitter, desolated, and drained of all passion and purpose, Theseus came to a bathetic and pathetic end. A guest of King Lycomedes of Skyros, Theseus was pushed by his host over a cliff to his death. The cause of the argument between them is lost to us.

It is appropriate that Theseus should be linked in this way with the Athens of logic, philosophy, and open inquiry for he was the hero who more than any other embodied the qualities Athenians most prized. Like Heracles, Perseus, and Bellerophon before him, he helped cleanse the world of dangerous monsters, but the way he did so employed wit, intelligence, and fresh ways of thinking. He was fallible and flawed, as all the heroes were, but he stood for something great in us all. Long may he stand in Syntagma Square and long may he stand high in our regard.

The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors—earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilization. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs, and mutant beasts infested the air, earth, and seas, we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity.

The giant serpent TYPHON, child of Gaia and Tartarus, was the primal and most deadly chthonic monster of them all. He mated with the sea creature ECHIDNA. Their brood includes many, if not most, of the monsters that our heroes were sent out to defeat. THE NEMEAN LION, slain by Heracles. THE LERNAEAN HYDRA (serpentine guardian of the gates of hell), slain by Heracles. ORTHRUS (canine guardian of the cattle of Geryon), slain by Heracles. LADON (dragon guardian of the Apples of the Hesperides), slain by Heracles. CERBERUS (canine guardian of the gates of hell), borrowed by Heracles. THE CHIMERA, slain by Bellerophon. THE SPHINX, defeated by Oedipus. THE CAUCASIAN EAGLE (sent by Zeus to tear out Prometheus’s liver), slain by Heracles. THE CROMMYONIAN SOW, slain by Theseus. THE COLCHIAN DRAGON (guardian of the Golden Fleece), hypnotized by Medea. SCYLLA, avoided by Jason.

I don’t believe all myths must be founded in some historical truth, but I do think it interesting that when the collective unconscious of the Greeks imagined and gave life, character, and narrative to a mythical strongman, they included in him a terrible and inexplicable tendency to explode in destructive psychotic rages310—I’m thinking not only of the savage murder of his family, but the massacre of the centaurs in the cave of Pholus, and the killing of Iphitus too. Of course plenty of musclemen are gentle, kind, and sweet-natured (André the Giant springs to mind), but I do not think it is outside the realms of possibility that the Greeks had heard of a real strongman who had a tendency to be overcome by savage fits of violence followed by periods of agonized remorse.

Myth is ripe for interpretation and I hope you often find yourself putting the book down and speculating on what the Greeks meant (or thought they meant) by Chrysaor and Pegasus bursting from the severed neck of Medusa, or how they distinguished between the Harpies, the birds from the Isle of Ares, and the Stymphalian birds. Myths are not crossword puzzles or allegories with single meanings and answers. Fate, necessity, cause, and blame are endlessly mixed in these stories as they are in our lives. They were no more soluble to the Greeks than they are to us.

Scholars and mythographers are interested in what is known as “double determination,” the tendency of poets, playwrights, and other authors to attribute agency and causality to both the inner person and an outer influence, a god or an oracle, for example. If Athena “whispers in your ear,” is it just a poetical way of saying that a clever thought has struck you, or did the goddess really speak? If someone falls in love, is it always the work of Aphrodite or Eros? When we are intoxicated or frenzied, are we driven by Dionysus? Did Heracles suffer from a hallucination and seizure, or did Hera send a delusional fit to him? Did Apollo send plague arrows into Troy, or was it simply that disease broke out in the city? When an oracle tells a king that a son or grandson will kill him, is that perhaps an external expression of the internal fear of patricidal overthrow that many rulers suffer from? Authors will say to this day that the Muse has abandoned them when what they really mean is that they are suffering from writer’s block. The further along the timeline of Greek myth we go from the founding of Olympus to the end of the Trojan War, and humanity begins to take center stage from the immortals, the more difficult it is to be sure. Greeks of the historical age would still write of Ares giving them courage or Apollo inspiring them, when it is clear that they did not mean it literally.

Myth can be a kind of human algebra which makes it easier to manipulate truths about ourselves. Symbols and rituals are not toys and games to be dispensed with on our arrival at adulthood, they are tools we will always need. They complement our scientific impulse; they do not stand in opposition to it. As with the interpretation of myths, double determination—the attribution of inner and outer influence—is as much a matter of preference as anything else. Some love to see the gods appear, interfere, and direct, others are happier following humans doing their thing with the minimum of divine intervention. The Muses whisper in my ear and tell me I am done.