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

by Stephen Fry

“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.”

Peleus of Aegina (not to be confused with Pelias of Iolcos, Jason’s wicked uncle) volunteered for the quest along with his brother TELAMON. They would each go on to father heroes. Telamon’s sons were Teucer, the legendary bowman, and Ajax (the Great), both of whom would play key roles in the siege of Troy. The only surviving offspring of Peleus by his marriage to the sea nymph Thetis was to be Achilles, perhaps the most glorious and perfect of all the heroes.

A broken Jason lived on in Corinth until his old friend and fellow Argonaut Peleus, brother of Telamon, persuaded him to return to Iolcos and overthrow Acastus. This they managed and Jason was finally installed as king. His reign did not last long, however. He fell asleep one afternoon under the stern of his beloved Argo and a rotten and poorly attached beam fell on him and killed him instantly. Forward on the prow, the figurehead muttered to itself. “I warned him when the sternpost was sheared off by the Clashing Rocks all those years ago. ‘Mend it well,’ I said. ‘Mend it well, or one day you’ll regret it.’ Mortals, there’s no helping them.”

Many scholars and thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Birth of Tragedy, have seen in Oedipus a character who works out on stage the tension in Athenians (and all of us) between the reasoning, mathematically literate citizen and the transgressive blood criminal; between the thinking and the instinctual being; between the superego and the id; between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses that contend within us. Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of inquiry 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.