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

by Stephen Fry

To survive in such a world, mortals have felt the need to supplicate and submit themselves to the gods, to sacrifice to them and flatter them with praise and prayer. But some men and women are beginning to rely on their own resources of fortitude and wit. These are the men and women who—either with or without the help of the gods—will dare to make the world safe for humans to flourish. These are the heroes.

“But focus,” said Hermes. “Relaxation without focus leads to failure.” “Focus without relaxation leads to failure just as surely,” said Athena.

From hero to zero is a tired phrase today, but nobody before had so swiftly gone from universal love and admiration to loathing and contempt.

When an adversary was alive he knew no mercy, but the moment they were gone he did his best, where possible, to send them to the next world with honor and ceremony.

You were born to live your own life, whether it’s a happy one or a wretched one. I have given you all I need give you. I don’t expect you to die for me, and you shouldn’t expect me to die for you. So, you love the light of day. What makes you think your father hates it? Know this: we are a long time dead. Life may be short, but it is sweet.”

I think it is not that Heracles was arrogant in assuming he could best a god; more that he regarded all living things, divine or mortal, as his equals.

“Yet I know that is not what I was put on this earth to do or be. Not because you or the oracles have told me, but because I feel it. I know what I am capable of. To deny it would be a betrayal. I would end my days hating myself.”

“It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labors, 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.”

He preferred to be direct and uncomplicated in his dealings but had learned over the years the hard lesson that simulation and deceit can be greater weapons than honest strength and raw courage.

With a shudder and a sigh the soul fled from Heracles. The great hero was finally at peace, freed from his life of almost unendurable torment and toil.

His childishness, therefore, was offset by a childlike lack of guile or pretense, as well as a quality that is often overlooked when we catalog the virtues: fortitude—the capacity to endure without complaint.

No labor was more Heraclean than the labor of being Heracles.

Heracles, like most classical Greeks, was as happy to dine at the man-trough as at the lady-buffet.

Ananke is the Greek personification of Necessity. Like Moros (Doom) and Dike (Justice), the laws of these gods are more powerful than the will of the gods.

Hermes invented the lyre, Apollo improved upon it, but Orpheus perfected it.

“Not an excuse, sir, but a reason. The best and only reason.” “A pert reply. And what is this reason?” “Love.”

Surely, even here, in the dark caverns of death, love still sat in their souls? Could they remember the first time they felt the sweeping rush of love? Love came to peasants, kings, and even gods. Love made all equal. Love deified, yet love leveled.

He saw too lots of words beginning with “self,” which gave him pause. Self-belief, self-possession, self-righteousness, self-confidence, self-love. Perhaps these characteristics are as necessary to a hero as courage.

But I hope you understand enough of the ways of the Fates and of the gods to know that only darkness and despair awaits those who believe that their achievements are theirs and theirs alone.

“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.

“You’ll make me proud,” Chiron called after him, tears running down his cheeks, “if you don’t make yourself proud.”

In many ways the voyage of the Argo might be regarded as a kind of dress rehearsal for the epic siege of Troy and, even more so, its aftermath, the Odyssey and the fall of the house of Atreus.

Picture this in your minds. What you most desire lies on the other side. Love, fame, riches, peace, glory. Whatever you have dreamt of is there.

“What is it that drives mortals more than anything? More than power or gold?”

Wicked men who send heroes on their quests always believe that they are sending them to certain death. Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends, and stories.

Acastus arranged not only a grand funeral for his father, but funeral games too. They were to become the most famous yet celebrated, surpassed only by those held a generation later by Achilles to honor the death of his beloved friend PATROCLUS, cut down by HECTOR before the walls of Troy.

Her love for Jason was animal, obsessive, and terrifyingly passionate. Her fury when she discovered his betrayal no less volcanic.

Men! It’s not that they’re brutish, boorish, shallow, and insensitive—though I dare say many are. It’s just that they’re so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever, and entirely without fault, of course.

The infanticide is something she agonizes over. At first she decides she cannot and must not do it. Then she pictures what the children’s fate will be if she does not. Less kindly hands than hers will take their lives.

For this one short day forget your children, and mourn tomorrow. For even if you kill them still you loved them very much. I am an unhappy woman.

Their heroism, perhaps, derived from their ability to bring their mix of the human and the divine to bear against the grinding pressures of fate.

“But it is you who cannot see. Or perhaps you refuse to see. Those who curse are most accursed. Those who look out are those who most need to look in.”

But Theseus was not interested in the past, only the future. It is one of the distinguishing features of heroes that makes them appealing and unappealing at one and the same time.

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.

What is certainly clear is that Theseus was very much a human being, with all the weaknesses, strengths, and inconsistencies that the condition confers upon us.

yet another taming of the wild in which the Greeks characterized themselves as ridding the world of the more barbarous, monstrous, and uncivilized elements that threatened, like encroaching swarms, their sense of harmony and the potential graces of ordered civilization.

Collectively their themes are best understood in symbolic terms, as representations of the way the Greeks characterized themselves as the champions of order and civilization against the chaotic hordes of barbarism and the monstrous.

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.

The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors—earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilization.

The world was being reshaped as a home fit for mortal beings only.

Myth is not history. Variant tellings and narrative lines are inevitable.

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.

Let’s face it, even today we cannot understand or explain much of what drives us.

the gods in Greek myth represent human motives and drives that are still mysterious to us. Might as well call them a god as an impulse or a complex. To personify them is a rather smart way—not of managing them perhaps, but of giving shape, dimensions, and character to the uncontrollable and unfathomable forces that control us.

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.