Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined

♦ Part Two ♦

Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined

Stephen Fry

Audio by Paper2Audio.

The humans of the Mediterranean world at this time were mostly ruled over by kings. How these autocrats established dominion over their peoples varied. Some were descended from immortals, gods even. Others, as is the human way, seized power through force of arms or political intrigue.

Inakuhus was one of the very earliest rulers in Greece. He was the first King of Argos in the Peloponnese peninsula, then a bustling new town and now one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Inachus was later semi-deified and turned into a river, but during his life as a human his consort MELIA bore him two daughters, IO and Meeseen.

Mycene was satisfactorily married off to a nobleman called Arestor, but Io's fate was to be the first mortal girl to attract the predatory attentions of Zeus. Inachus had chosen Hera, the Queen of Heaven, as the patron deity of Argos, and his daughter Io had been brought up as a priestess in the most important shrine to Hera in the Grecian world. For Zeus to dally with any female would be enough to cause his wife indignation, but any attempt to defile one of her own priestesses would stretch her anger to its limits. Yet he desired the lovely Io very much. How to have her without Hera finding out.

Zeus stroked his beard, thought hard, and came up with what he believed was a masterstroke. He transformed Io into a cow, a beautiful plump young heifer with shivering flanks and large, gentle eyes. If he hid her in a field Hera would never spot her and he could visit her whenever he liked. Or so he imagined. When lust descends, discretion, common sense, and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.

It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress. Hera, to whom cows were sacred, and who possessed therefore a keen, expert eye for the species, noticed the animal and suspected its true identity straightaway.

“What a delightful heifer,” Hera remarked casually to Zeus at breakfast on Olympus one morning. “Such a perfect shape. Such long lashes and appealing eyes.”

“What, that old thing?” said Zeus, looking down with a feigned air of boredom to where Hera was pointing.

“That's one of your fields, darling, so she must be one of yours.”

“Possibly,” said Zeus, “very possibly. One has thousands of cows browsing around. Can't be expected to keep tabs on all of them.”

“I should very much like that particular heifer,” said Hera, “as a birthday present.”

“Er . . . really? That one? I'm sure I could find you a much fatter and fitter animal.”

“No,” said Hera—and those who knew her would have recognized the glint in her eye and the steel in her voice. “That is the one I should like.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Zeus affecting a yawn. “She's yours. There's a jar of ambrosia at your elbow … chuck it down my end, would you?”

Hera knew her husband all too well. Once his libidinous propensities were aroused there would be no taming them. She had to moved to a small gated paddock and sent her servant Argus, Inachus's grandson, to watch over her.

Argus, son of Mycene and Arestor, was a loyal follower of Hera's like all the

Argives at that time, but he also possessed a very special gift which made him a perfect guardian of his aunt Io. He had a hundred eyes. His nickname was

Panoptes, the “all-seeing.” Obedient as ever to Hera's will, he stationed himself in the field, fixed fifty eyes on Io and let the other fifty range independently around and up and down, on the lookout for marauders.

Zeus saw this and paced about in a fury. His blood was up. He crashed his fist into his palm. He would have Io. It had become a matter of principle to defeat Hera in this silent and unacknowledged war. He knew the limits of his own cunning, however, so he called upon the williest and most amoral rogue on Olympus to aid him.

Hermes understood right away what needed to be done. Ever happy to oblige Zeus and sow mischief he hurried to Io's paddock.

“Hello, Argus. Let me keep you company for a while,” he said, unlatching the gate and slipping in. “Nice heifer you've got there.”

Argus swiveled a dozen eyes toward Hermes, who sat down on the grass, took out a set of pipes, and started to play. For two hours he played and he sang. The music, the afternoon heat, the scent of poppies, lavender, and wild thyme, the soft lapping and purling of a nearby stream—slowly Argus's eyes started to close, one by one.

As the very hundredth eye at last winked shut Hermes lowered his pipes, stole forward, and stabbed Argus in the heart. All the gods were capable of great cruelty —Hermes could be as vicious as any of them.

With Argus dead, Zeus opened the gate into the field and set Io free. But before he had a chance to change her back into human form, Hera, who had seen what had happened, sent down a gadfly which stung Io so painfully and persistently that she bucked and screamed and galloped away, far from Zeus's reach.

Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant, Hera took Argus's hundred bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl, transforming it into what we know today as the peacock—which is how the now proud, colorful, and haughty bird came forever to be associated with the goddess.

Io, meanwhile, charged on along the northern shore of the Aegean Sea, swimming over at the place where Europe becomes Asia, the spot we still call in her honor the cow-crossing, or in Greek, the Bosporus. On and on she careered, thrashing, tossing, and squealing in her agony until she reached the Caucasus. There the gadfly seemed to relent for a while, enough for her to see the figure of Prometheus, racked in pain upon the mountainside.

“Sit down and catch your breath awhile, Io,” said the Titan. “Be of good cheer. Things will get better.”

“They could hardly be worse,” wailed Io. “I'm a cow. I'm being attacked by the largest and most spiteful gadfly the world has ever seen. And Hera will destroy me. It's only a question of whether I am stung to death or go mad and drown myself in the sea.”

“I know it seems dark for you now,” said Prometheus, “but I see into the future sometimes and I do know this. You will return to human shape. You will found a great dynasty in the land where Nilus crawls. And from your line will spring the greatest of all the heroes. So chin up and be cheerful, eh?”

It was hard for Io, in all her tribulation, to ignore these words from one who—even as she looked on in horror—was being ripped open and gorged upon by a pair of evil-looking vultures. What were her minor inconveniences when set against his perpetual agony?

As things turned out, Io did return to human shape. She met up with Zeus in Egypt and bore him a son, Epafus, who will play an important part of the story of Phaeton, which is just coming up. Supposedly Zeus impregnated Io just by gently laying a hand on her—Epaphus means “touch.” Io also had a daughter by Zeus, called Kerosessa, whose son Byzas went on to found the great city of Byzantium. Whether Keroessa was conceived by touch or the more traditional method of generation we do not know.

Io may have been a cow, but she was a very influential and important one.

Chinese text.

A rather touching story tells of how Athena, without sacrificing her chastity, had a role in the conception and birth of one of the founders of the city-state of Athens.

Lame Hephaestus, ever since splitting Zeus's head and thereby helping bring Athena into the world, had developed a strong passion for the goddess. One day, unable to control his lust, he tracked her down to some corner of high Olympus and tried to force himself on her. Alas, in his excitement he succeeded only in spilling his seed on her thigh. Athena, in silent disgust, removed her headband and used it to wipe up the mess before throwing it down the mountain.

The sodden fillet landed on the ground far below. Hephaestus's divine semen seeped into the earth and Gaia was made pregnant. From her was born a boy, Erektheus. Looking down from heaven Athena saw this and determined that this child should be immortal. She descended from Olympus, put the baby in a wicker basket, closed it up, and placed it in the care of three mortal sisters, Herse, Aglowros, and Pandrosos. On no account, Athena told them, must the basket ever be opened. But Aglauros and Herse could not resist peeping inside.

They saw a wriggling baby boy bound up in the coils of a writhing snake. All snakes were sacred to Athena and this one was a part of the enchantment which the goddess was using to endow the infant Erechtheus with immortality. The shocking sight sent the two women instantly insane and they threw themselves off the topmost point of the hill now called the Acropolis, or “high citadel.” Erechtheus grew up to be (or to father, the stories disagree) Erektheneeus, the legendary founder of Athens.

If you visit the Acropolis in Athens today you can still see, just to the north of the Parthenon, the beautiful temple called the Erechtheum. Its famous porch of caryatid columns in the form of draped maidens is one of the great architectural treasures of the world. Shrines were erected not far away to poor Aglauros and Herse too, which is only fitting.

102. She gave her name to the city of Mycenae.

103. A heifer is to a cow as a filly is to a mare.

104. “Argive” meant “citizen of Argos,” but in later times was often used to mean any Greek—especially as distinct from a Trojan.

105. There are those who like to suggest that the idea of Argus having a hundred eyes arose from a fanciful way of expressing his extreme watchfulness. It might just as well have been playfully said and then seriously believed, they maintain, that he had eyes in the back of his head. We repudiate such dull, unromantic propositions with the contempt they deserve.

Argus had a hundred eyes. Fact.

106. Painters and sculptors often depicted Hera on a chariot drawn by peacocks, and there is, of course, the Sean O'Casey play Juno and the Paycock.

107. Strange that “Oxford” and “Bosporus” mean exactly the same thing.

108. The very hero who would one day unchain Prometheus and set him free.

109. The name “Erechthonius” is sometimes used of both Erechtheus and various of his descendants. His chthonic birth out of Gaia can be seen in both names.

110. As for Pandrosos, the obedient sister who resisted looking into the basket, a temple was raised to her near that of Minerva, and a festival instituted in her honor called Pandrosia.

Phaeton

The Son of the Sun

Erechtheus had Athena as a proxy parent, Gaia as a mother, and Hephaestus as a father. Three immortal parents could be regarded as overdoing it (and as boastfulness about their founder on the part of Athenians), but it was not uncommon for mortals to claim one such progenitor. The story of the brave but foolhardy Fayton, three like the myth of Persephone, explains how certain changes to the geography of the world came about, as well as offering a very literal example of a favorite finger-wagging lesson of Greek myth—how pride comes before a fall.

Phaeton had divine parentage, but was brought up by his stepfather Merops, a disappointingly mortal man. Whenever Merops was away Phaeton's mother Klymeenee, who may or may not have been immortal, would delight the boy with stories of his divine father, the glorious sun god Phoebus Apollo.

When Phaeton was old enough he went to school alongside other mortal boys, some of whom were fully human and others of whom, like him, could claim divine ancestry on one side or another. One such was Epaphus, the son of Zeus and Io. With such illustrious parents Epaphus felt entitled to lord it over his schoolmates. Phaeton, who was a proud and passionate youth, hated being bossed around by Epaphus and was constantly irritated by the other's arrogance and air of superiority.

Epaphus was always so maddeningly blasé about his pedigree. He would say things like: “Yes, next weekend Dad—Zeus, don't you know—is inviting me up to Olympus for supper. He said he might let me sit on his throne, maybe take a sip or two of nectar. Had it before, of course. There'll just be a few of us. Uncle Ares, my half sister Athena, a few nymphs perhaps to round up the numbers. Should be a laugh.”

Phaeton would always return home in a fury after enduring this oh-so-casual name-dropping. “How come,” he would complain to his mother, “Epaphus gets to see his father every weekend when I have never even met mine?”

Clymene would hug her son tightly and try to explain. “Apollo is so busy, darling. Every day he has to drive his chariot of the sun across the sky. And when that duty is done he has shrines at Delos and Delphi and goodness knows where else to attend. Prophecies, music, archery . . . he is quite the busiest of all the gods. But I'm sure he'll come and visit us soon. When you were born he left this for you —I was going to wait to give it to you when you were a little older, but you might as well have it now . . .”

Clymene went to a cupboard and took out an exquisite golden flute which she handed to him. The boy at once brought it to his mouth and blew, producing a breathy and far from musical hiss.

“What is it supposed to do?”

"Do? What do you mean, darling?"

“Zeus gave Epaphus a magic leather whip which makes dogs obey his every command. What does this do?”

"It's a flute, my love. It makes music. Beautiful, charming music."

"How?"

“Well, you learn how to shape the notes and then you … well, you play it.”

“Where's the magic in that?”

“Have you never heard flute music? It's the most magical sound there is. It does take rather a lot of practice though.”

Phaeton threw the instrument down in disgust and stormed off to his bedroom, where he sulked for the rest of the day and night.

A week or so later, on the last day of term before the long summer holidays, he found himself being approached by the exasperatingly condescending Epaphus.

“Hi there, Phaeton,” he drawled. “Wondered if you wanted to join me at the family villa on the North African coast next week? Small enough house party. Just Dad, maybe Hermes, Demeter, and a few fauns.

We sail tomorrow. Could be a laugh. What do you say?”

“Oh, what a shame,” cried Phaeton. “My father, Phoebus Apollo you know, has invited me to . . . to drive the sun-chariot across the sky next week. Can't let him down.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, didn't I mention it? He's always going on at me to help take the load off his shoulders, do a bit of the old sun-driving for him.”

“You're seriously telling me . . . Bullshit. Guys, you've got to come and listen to this!” Epaphus called the other boys over to where he and Phaeton stood facing each other. “Tell them,” he demanded.

Phaeton was caught in the lie now. Pride, fury, and frustration drove him on. He was damned if he was going to back down and let this insufferable snob win the day.

“It's really nothing,” he said. “Just that my dad Apollo is insisting I learn to drive the horses of the sun. No big deal.”

The other boys, led by a sneering Epaphus, hooted their disbelief and derision. "We all know your father is that boring old fool Merops!" one of them shouted.

“He's just my stepfather!” cried Phaeton. “Apollo is my real father. He is! You'll see. Just you wait and see. It'll take me a while to get to his palace, but one day soon—look up at the sky.

I'll wave down at you. That'll be me driving the day along. You'll see!”

And off he ran home, jeans, catcalls, and the mocking laughter of his schoolfellows ringing in his ears. One of the boys, his friend and lover Cygnus, chased after him.

“Oh Phaeton,” cried Cygnus, “what have you said? It can't be true. You've complained to me so many times that you've never even met your real father. Go back and tell them you were joking.”

“Leave me alone, Cygnus,” said Phaeton, pushing him away. “I'm going to the Palace of the Sun. It's the only way to silence that pig Epaphus. By the time you see me again everyone will respect me at last and know me for who I really am.”

“But I know who you are,” said the unhappy Cygnus. “You are Phaeton and I love you.”

Father and Sun

Nor was there anything Clymene could say to make Phaeton change his mind either. She watched in an agony of distress as he gathered up his few belongings.

“Look up and you'll see me,” he said, kissing her farewell. “I'll wave as I ride by.”

The Palace of the Sun lay, of course, due east; in fact as far east as India. How Phaeton got there isn't agreed upon. I've read that magical sun hawks told Apollo of the boy's slow struggle from mainland Greece across Mesopotamia and the land we would now call ee-rahn, and that the god instructed these splendid birds to bear him up and fly him the rest of the way.

However Phaeton got there, he arrived at night and immediately was summoned to the throne room of the palace, where Apollo sat robed in purple in the glimmer that gleamed from the gold, silver, and jewels which decorated the chamber. The throne he sat on, that alone was studded with more than ten thousand rubies and emeralds. The youth fell to his knees, quite overpowered by the magnificence of the palace, the dazzle of the gemstones, and above all by the radiant glory of his father the god.

“So, you are Clymene's boy, are you? Stand up, let's have a look at you. Yes, I can see that you might be the fruit of my loins. You have the cast of countenance, the coloring. I'm told you traveled a long way to be here. Why?”

The question was blunt and Phaeton found himself a little flustered. He managed to stammer out some words about Epaphus and “the other boys” and was painfully aware that he sounded more like a spoiled child than the proud son of an Olympian.

“Yes, yes. Very mean, very disrespectful. And where do I come in?”

“All my life,” said Phaeton, burning with the pride and resentment that had smoldered inside him for so very long, “all my life my mother has told me about great and glorious Apollo, the golden god, my shining perfect father. B-b-but you've never visited us! You've never invited us anywhere. You've never even acknowledged me.”

“Well, yes, I'm sorry about that. Remiss of me. I've been a terrible father, I wish I could make it up to you.” Apollo mouthed the words that absent fathers mouth everywhere and every day, but his mind was really on horses, music, drink . . . anything but this tedious, sulky, and complaining child.

“If you could just grant me one wish. One wish, that's all.”

"Of course, of course. Name it."

“Really? You mean it?”

"Of course."

"You swear you'll grant it?"

“I swear,” said Apollo, amused by the boy's extreme earnestness. “I swear by my lyre. I swear by the cold flowing waters of Styx herself. Name it, I say.”

“I want to drive your horses.”

“My horses?” said Apollo, not quite understanding. “Drive them? What do you mean?”

“I want to steer the sun-chariot across the sky. Tomorrow.”

“Oh no,” said Apollo, a smile spreading across his face. “No, no, no! Don't be silly. No one can do that.”

“You promised!”

“Phaeton, Phaeton. It's brave and splendid even to dream of doing such a thing. But no one, no one drives those animals but me.”

“You swore by Styx!”

“Zeus himself couldn't control them! They are the strongest, wildest, most headstrong and unmanageable stallions ever born. They answer to my touch and mine alone. No, no. You can't ask such a thing.”

“I have asked it. And you have sworn!”

“Phaeton!” The other eleven gods would have been astonished to hear such a pleading, desperate note in Apollo's voice. “I beg of you! Anything else. Gold, food, power, knowledge, love . . . You name it, it's yours in perpetuity. But not this. Never this.”

“I have asked and you have sworn,” the stubborn youth replied.

Apollo bowed his golden head and cursed inwardly.

Oh, those gods and their quick tongues. Oh, those mortals and their foolish dreams. Will either ever learn?

“Right. Let's go and meet them then. But know this,” Apollo said as they neared the stables and the horsey smell grew stronger and sharper in Phaeton's nostrils. “You can change your mind at any time. I won't think any the less of you. Frankly, I'll think a great deal the more of you.”

At the god's approach the four stallions, white with golden manes, stamped and shifted in their stalls.

“Hey, Pyrois! Whoa there, Phlegon! Hush now, Aeos! Quietly, Aethon!” Apollo called to each in turn. “All right, come forward, boy, let them get to know you.”

Phaeton had never seen such beautiful horses. Their eyes flashed gold and their hoofs struck sparks on the flagstones. He was filled with awe, but felt too a sudden stab of fear which he tried to play off as thrilled anticipation.

Lined up before the massive gates of dawn was a golden quadriga, the great chariot to which the four stallions would soon be harnessed. A quiet female figure in saffron robes hurried past. Phaeton caught from her a fragrance which he could not name but which made him dizzy with delight.

“That was Eos,” said Apollo. “It will soon be time for her to open the gates.”

Phaeton knew all about Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She was called rhododaktylos—the “rosy-fingered one”—and admired everywhere for her sweetness and soft beauty.

As he helped his father walk the stallions forward and into position at the head of the chariot, Phaeton suddenly felt himself pushed roughly aside.

“What is this mortal doing?”

A huge figure dressed in shining buff leather armor had taken the bridle of all four horses at once and was leading them forward.

"Ah, Helios, there you are," said Apollo. "This is Phaeton. My son Phaeton."

“So?”

Phaeton knew that Helios was the brother of Eos and the moon goddess Selene and assisted Apollo in his daily duties with the chariot. Apollo seemed slightly awkward in the Titan's presence.

“Well, the thing is. Phaeton will be driving the chariot today.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, he might as well learn now, don't you think?”

"You are joking?"

“I sort of promised.”

"Well, sort of unpromise then."

“Helios, I can't. You know I can't.”

Helios stamped his feet and gave a roar that caused the horses to rear and whinny. “You've never once let me drive, Apollo! Never. How many times have I asked and how many times have you told me I'm not ready? And now you let this . . . this shrimp take the reins?”

“Helios, you will do as you're told,” said Apollo. “I have spoken and so I have … er, spoken.”

Apollo took the four leather traces from Helios and lifted Phaeton up and into the seat of the chariot. Helios gave a shout of laughter as he saw the youth slide back and forth.

“He rolls in it like a little pea!” he said with a surprisingly high-pitched giggle.

“He'll be fine. Now, Phaeton. These reins—they are your lines of communication with the horses. They know the way, they run this course every day, but you must show them that you are their master, you understand?”

Phaeton nodded eagerly.

Something of his nervous excitement and Helios's fury seemed to have been picked up by the horses, who bucked and snorted restlessly.

“The most important thing,” continued Apollo, “is to fly neither too high nor too low. A middle course between the sky and the earth, yes?”

Again Phaeton nodded.

“Oh, I nearly forgot. Hold out your hands . . .” Apollo took a jar and poured oil from it into Phaeton's outstretched palms. “Anoint yourself with that all over. It will protect you from the heat and light generated by the stallions as they gallop through the air.

The earth below will be warmed and lit as you go, so keep a straight line westward toward the Garden of the Hesperides. It's a twelve-hour drive. Be steady. Remember—the horses know. Call them by name, Aeos and Aethon, Pyrois and Phlegon.”

As Apollo said their names Phaeton saw their ears prick up. “But it's not too late, boy. You've seen them, you've handled them, I'll give you gold sculptures of them cast by Hephaestus to take home. That should satisfy your school friends.”

Another high-pitched titter from Helios sent a flush to Phaeton's cheek.

“No,” he said stiffly. “You gave a promise and so did I.”

Daybreak

As Phaeton spoke Eos came forward in a bright cloud of pearl and rose. She bowed smilingly to Apollo and Helios, looked a puzzled question at the blushing Phaeton in the chariot, and took up her position at the gates of dawn.

To a traveler looking eastward and upward at the clouds in which the Palace of the Sun was hidden, the first sign that Eos was at work always came in the form of a flush of coral pink that suffused the sky. As she threw the gates wider, that soft pink hardened into a gleam of gold which grew ever brighter and fiercer.

To Phaeton, inside the palace, the effect was reversed: The doors opened to reveal the dark world beyond, illuminated only by the silver gleam from Eos and Helios's sister, the moon goddess Selene, reaching the end of her nightly course. As Eos pushed the gates farther open Phaeton saw pink and gold light radiate outward, drowning the darkness of the night. As if that were a signal the four horses pricked their ears, shuddered, and reared. Phaeton was jerked back and the chariot beneath him began to roll forward.

“Remember, boy,” shouted Apollo, “don't panic. A firm hand. Don't snatch at the reins. Just let the horses know you're in control. Everything will be fine.”

“After all,” cried Helios as the chariot began to lift from the ground, “what can possibly go wrong?” His squeals of falsetto laughter stung Phaeton like a lash.

Switching points of view again to the traveler looking eastward from the road below, the gold gleam is now a great ball of fire that is becoming harder and harder to observe without squinting. The short flush of dawn is over and the day has begun.

The Drive

Apollo's horses charged upward, pawing the air. All was well. They knew what they were doing. They reached a certain height, leveled out, and charged forward. This was easy.

Phaeton pulled himself upright, careful not to strain the traces, and looked around. He could see the curve that marked the separation of blue sky and star-filled darkness. He could see the effect of the light blazing out from the chariot.

He was insulated, somehow magically safe from its heat and glare, but great clouds melted and fizzed into vapor as they approached. He looked down and saw the long shadows of mountains and trees contract as they flew forward. He saw the wrinkled sea send back a million scintillations of light, and he saw the sparkle of dew rising into a shimmering mist as they neared the coast of Africa. Somewhere, just west of Nilus, Epaphus would be holidaying on the beach. Oh, this was going to be the greatest triumph ever!

As the coastline swung more clearly into view Phaeton pulled at the reins, trying to nose down Aeos, the lead horse on his left-hand side. Aeos had perhaps been thinking of other things, of golden straw or pretty mares, he had certainly not been imagining a tug to pull him off course. In a panic he shied and dived, pulling the other horses with him. The chariot bucked in the air and plummeted straight for the earth.

In vain Phaeton tugged the reins, which had somehow become tangled in his hands. The green earth screamed toward him and he saw his certain death. He took one final desperate yank at the reins, and at the very last minute—either in response to that pull or as an instinctive move to save themselves—the four steeds swooped upward and galloped blindly north.

But not before Phaeton saw with terror and dismay that the terrible heat of the sun-chariot had set the earth on fire.

As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched.

He was now terribly out of control. The horses knew for certain that the familiar firm hand of Apollo was not there to guide them. Was it wild joy at their freedom or panic at the lack of control that maddened the four? Having plunged down close enough to make the earth catch fire now they leapt up so far toward the purple curve that separated the sky from the stars that the world below grew cold and dark. The sea itself froze and the land turned to ice.

: Image summary: A dynamic Baroque-style painting depicting a chaotic mythological scene with numerous figures, horses, and deities amidst swirling clouds and golden light. A central figure in blue and white robes is flanked by an angelic figure with wings, while several muscular human figures and rearing white horses are entwined in a dramatic, spiraling composition of ascent and descent.

Thrashing, swaying, swooping, and careering onward, without any control or sense of direction, the chariot bounced and bucketed in the air like a leaf in a storm. Far below, the people of the earth looked up in wonder and alarm. Phaeton was screaming at the horses, begging them, threatening them, jerking at the reins ... but all in vain.

Phaeton had begged his father Apollo to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky.

The Fallout

On Olympus news of the devastation being wrought upon the surface of the earth reached the gods and, at last, the ears of Zeus himself.

“Look what's happening,” cried a distraught Demeter. “The crops are being sunburned or frostbitten. It's a disaster.”

“The people are afraid,” said Athena. “Please, Father. Something must be done.”

With a sigh Zeus reached for a thunderbolt. He looked where the chariot of the sun was now plunging in a mad tumble toward Italy.

The thunderbolt, as all Zeus's thunderbolts did, hit its mark. Phaeton was blasted clear of the chariot and fell flaming to earth, where he dropped like a spent rocket into the waters of the River Eridanos with a hiss and a fizz.

The great sun-steeds were pacified by the absence of the panicky boy's yells and violent tugs at their traces and at last settled into their proper altitude and course, making their way instinctively to the land of the Hesperides in the far west.

Phoebus Apollo was not a good or affectionate father, but the death of his son hit him very hard. He vowed never again to drive the chariot of the sun, passing the duty on to the grateful and enthusiastic Helios, who forever after became the sun's sole charioteer.

Phaeton's affectionate friend Cygnus went to the River Eridanos, into whose waters poor dead Phaeton had plunged. He sat there on the bank mourning the loss of his lover with such a plaintive wail that a distraught Apollo struck him dumb and finally, out of pity and remorse for the youth's ceaseless but now silent and inconsolable suffering, transformed him into a beautiful swan. This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honor of Cygnus the young of all swans are called "cygnets."

And what of Epaphus? Did he look up and see Phaeton high above him steering the great chariot, or was he too busy eating dates and flirting with nymphs on board the ship sailing him and his friends to their holiday beach in North Africa? One would like to think that he did look up and that the glare of the chariot blinded him, a suitable punishment for his cruel taunts. In fact Epaphus went on to become a great patriarch. He married Nilus's daughter Memphis, after whom he named the city that he had founded. They had a daughter, Libya, and his line, which included his great-grandson Eejiptus, went on to rule Egypt for generations.

Phaeton himself was eventually placed amongst the stars in the consolation constellation called Auriga, the Charioteer. The French named a very sporty, lightweight, dangerous racing carriage the phaéton in his honor. It was the preferred conveyance of hot-headed young men of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who, unwittingly re-enacting the myth of Phaeton in their youthful impetuosity, very often overturned their carriages, to the fury of their long-suffering fathers.

The American classicist and teacher Edith Hamilton offered this as Phaeton's epitaph:

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared.

And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

111. Phaeton (like Apollo's alternative name Phoebus) means “shining one.” Sometimes rendered as Phaethon, Phaeton, or Phathon, it is usually pronounced to rhyme with “Satan” or “Nathan,” though you can, if you prefer, rhyme it with “Titan” or “Python.”

112. A daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, the Oceanid Clymene might be regarded as one of the most influential mothers in all Greek myth. From her couplings with the Titan lapetus she was, on the one side, the mother of Atlas and Menoetius (two of the Titans who furiously opposed the gods during the Titanomachy and were duly punished) and, on the other, of Epimetheus and Prometheus. These offspring alone establish Clymene's importance as a great matriarch of the early world. Some, though, say that the Oceanid Clymene and the Clymene who was Phaeton's mother were not the same woman at all, and that actually the mother of Atlas and the other Titans should be called Asia, so as not to muddle her with the mortal Clymene, mother of Phaeton. It all gets very confusing and is best left to academics and those with time on their hands.

113. Even the nature of Phaeton's father is debated. In some versions of the story his father is the sun Titan, Helios. I shall go along with Ovid and attribute the fatherhood of Phaeton to the god Apollo.

114. Or Cycnus.

115. Sole indeed-sol was Helios's Roman name. When you breathe in the gas named after him—helium—it makes you giggle with exactly the same mocking, high-pitched, hysterical squeak that Helios himself made when he jeered at Phaeton.

116. The rather pleasing word for being placed amongst the stars, the classical equivalent of canonization perhaps, is “catasterism.” A mostly lost ancient prose work called the Catasterismi, telling of the mythological origins of the constellations, is credited to one Pseudo-Eratosthenes of Alexandria.

Kadmus

The White Bull

Thanks to Phaeton desert wastes and icy polar regions now gave mankind extremes of temperature to cope with, on top of the cycle of seasons caused by Persephone's stay in the underworld. The lesson of Phaeton did not stop humankind from reaching ever higher, however. No lesson, no matter how grim, ever seems to deter us. All over Greece kingdoms continued to rise and fall. The Grecian world encompassed Asia Minor too in those days, that bulge of land east of Greece that encompasses what we now call Turkey, as well as Syria and the lands of the Levant (modern-day Lebanon). The influence of this part of the world on Greek culture and myth was immense, bringing great trade, alphabetic writing, and eventually the founding of the first example of the polis, the city-state that was to reach its greatest pitch with the establishment of Troy, Sparta, and Athens. It is a story of Zeus, transformations, a dragon, snakes, a city, and a marriage.

The King of the Levantine city of Tyre, Agenor (a son of Poseidon and Libya), and his Queen Telefassa (a daughter of Nilus and the cloud nymph Arne) had five children: a daughter, Europa, and four sons, Kadmus (or sometimes, in the more Greek spelling, Kadmos), CILIX, Feneeks, and Thasos.

The children of Agenor were playing in a flower-filled meadow one afternoon when Europa wandered off and became separated from her brothers. Her eye had been caught by a beautiful white bull grazing in the long grass. As she approached, the animal lifted its head to look at her. Something in its gaze fascinated her.

She moved closer. The bull's breath was sweet and its nose soft and strokeable. She threaded garlands of flowers around its horns and ran her fingers through its thick, warmly inviting coat.

Then, without quite knowing why, she lifted herself onto its back. She leaned forward and took a horn in each hand.

“Oh, you beautiful thing,” she breethd into its ear. “So strong and wise and kind.”

With a toss of its huge head the animal started to trot forward. The trot soon became something close to a gallop. Europa laughed and urged him on.

Cadmus and his younger brothers had been competing against each other to see who could throw a rock the greatest distance (Cadmus always won—he was an especially gifted thrower of stones, discuses, and javelins). They turned just in time to watch their sister being carried out of sight on the back of a bull. They ran after it as fast as they could, but the bull possessed unbelievable speed. It seemed to the brothers, impossible as it must be, that the animal's hoofs were no longer touching the ground.

Panicking, they called out Europa's name and shouted to her to throw herself off, but she either didn't hear or didn't heed them. The bull rose higher and higher in the air until it had vanished from sight.

Cadmus returned home and broke the news to his parents King Agenor and Queen Telephassa. Loud was the lamentation and great the recrimination.

In the meantime, the white bull flew Europa farther and farther west from her home kingdom of Tyre, across the Mediterranean in the direction of the isles of Greece. Delighted and entirely unafraid, Europa laughed as first the ground flashed beneath her and then the sea. Europa was entranced. The journey was so remarkable that the whole landmass to the west of her homeland has been called Europe in her honor ever since.

They didn't stop until they reached the island of Crete where the bull revealed himself to be ...

...who else but Zeus?

Whether it was his transformation of Io into a heifer that inspired him to take the shape of a bull we cannot know, but the trick seems to have worked, for Europa stayed happily on Crete for the rest of her life. She was to bear Zeus three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon-the first two of whom went on after their deaths, you may recall, to become the Judges of the Underworld, weighing the lives of dead souls and allotting them their punishments and rewards accordingly.

Tur

Back home in Tyre, Europa's unhappy parents sent Cadmus and his three brothers to find their sister, with firm instructions not even to think of returning home without her.

The Tyrians were already famous navigators and traders. Cadmus's brother Phoenix (not to be confused with the mythical bird) would in time succeed Agenor as ruler of the kingdom, which he renamed Phoenicia after himself. The Phoenicians' skill as merchants would bring them great wealth and prestige.

They dealt in silks and spices from the far east, but it was the invention and propagation of the alphabet that gave them such an advantage over their neighbors and rivals. For the first time in human history any language could be written down according to its sound, which meant the Mediterranean coastline, including North Africa and the Middle East, was able to communicate for the first time using symbols on papyrus, parchment, wax, or pottery shards that could be spoken out loud. The marks on the page or screen that you are interpreting as you read now derive from that Phoenician alphabet. And it was Cadmus who would take his people's marvelous invention to Greece in the course of his long search for Europa.

For years they traveled in vain. For some reason, perhaps an unseen divine influence, Crete seems to have been the one place they failed to search. The island that they alighted on for the longest time was Samothrace, far in the northern Aegean.

On Samothrace there lived a Pleiad called Elektra. The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, were (if you recall) daughters of Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione. By Zeus, this Electra had given birth to two sons, Dardanus and Iayson, as well as a daughter, Harmonia. Cadmus was immediately captivated by Harmonia's beauty and sweet, placid manner and took her with him on his quest. How willing she was at first is not certain, but the pair left Samothrace and headed for mainland Greece—ostensibly in search of Europa, but really, as far as Cadmus was concerned, in search of a greater purpose.

The Oracle Speaks

Cadmus is often called “the First Hero.” If you care to do the arithmetic you will see that he was a fifth-generation being, of equally human and divine parentage. He could trace his line back to the very beginnings of life through his paternal grandfather Poseidon, whose father was Kronos, son of Ouranos. Through his grandmother Libya he was descended from Inachus, adding a quantity of royal human blood to course through his veins. He had the restlessness and wanderlust that marks the hero, as well as the required measures of courage, confidence, and self-belief. Poseidon was fond of his grandson, as was natural, but it was Athena who looked upon him with the greatest favor, especially now that he had allied himself to Harmonia, who was one of Athena's most devoted followers.

Just as Cadmus's brother Thasos had settled a smaller nearby island, called Thasos, and Phoenix had given his name to the Phoenician kingdom, so the third of Cadmus's brothers, Cilix, now abandoned the quest for Europa, returning east to Asia Minor to establish his own kingdom, which he called Cilicia.

With Harmonia by his side and a large retinue of loyal followers from Tyre in attendance upon them both, Cadmus headed for Delphi to consult the oracle. He knew in his bones, as all heroes do, that he was destined for greatness, but he did not know quite where his future lay; and he still needed guidance in the matter of his search for the lost Europa.

You already know enough about oracles to be unsurprised by the eccentricity of the Pythia's response.

“Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon,” she chanted. “Cast aside the quest for your sister and follow instead the heifer marked with the half moon. Follow the cow until it drops down exhausted. Where it falls, there must you build.”

“Build what?”

"Farewell, Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon."

"What cow? I see no cow."

“Where the cow falls, there must Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon, build.”

“Yes, but this cow...”

“The heifer with the half moon will help Harmonia and her hero, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon.”

“Look here...”

“Farewell”

Cadmus and Harmonia looked at each other, shrugged, and quit Delphi with their retinue of loyal Tyrians. It was possible that a cow really would materialize magically before them, or perhaps some celestial messenger might appear to guide them to such an animal. In the meantime, they might as well look around.

Now, Delphi and its oracle, stadium, and temples are situated in the area of Greece called Phocis. The King of Phocis, Pelagon, hearing that Harmonia and Cadmus—by now famous throughout the land because of his gift of the alphabet—were in the area, sent out messengers to invite them to stay as his guests of honor at the royal palace. It was an invitation the travel-strained pair and their hungry retinue were only too pleased to accept.

The Phocian Games

Three days of feasting and revelry in their honor had passed agreeably and uneventfully when Cadmus and Harmonia, taking an evening walk about the palace gardens between banquets, found their way stopped by Pelagon's father, Amfidamas.

“I had a dream,” said Amphidamas, coming close to the couple and breathing the fumes of honey-wine all over them, “in which you, Cadmus, ran races, hurled javelins, threw discuses, and won the greatest prize the world has ever seen. Now, my son Pelagon inaugurates the Phocian Games tomorrow. A little local meeting, but dreams are dreams and have a purpose. When does Morpheus ever lie? My advice is that you enter.” With a benevolent hiccup, he tottered away.

“Well now,” said Cadmus, putting an arm about Harmonia's waist and gazing wistfully up at the moon. “Why not? The man has not yet been born who can throw a discus or a javelin as far as I can. And I believe I'm pretty swift around the track too.”

“My hero!” sighed Harmonia, burying her head on his chest. She did this not in worshipful admiration but to muffle her laughter—she found the men's vanity when it came to physical prowess endlessly amusing.

The competition against which Cadmus pitted himself next day consisted chiefly of puny local youths and pot bellied palace guards. When he sent the discus right out of the palace grounds with his first throw, a servant had to be sent to fetch it and the crowd cheered. By the end of the afternoon Cadmus had won every event. Harmonia glared at the women and girls who blew him kisses and threw flowers at his feet.

Pelagon, who was not a rich monarch, sent his chamberlain in search of a suitable prize for his noble victor ludorum.

“People of Phocis,” cried the king, placing a hastily plaited crown of olive leaves on Cadmus's brow, “behold your champion, our honored guest Prince Cadmus of Tyre. And here comes a prize worthy of his great speed and strength and grace.”

A loud cheer went up, which fell into a puzzled silence as the palace chamberlain came through the crowd driving ahead of him a large cow. The silence bubbled into a titter and the titter burst into outright laughter. The cow chewed its cud, lifted its tail, and sent out a liquid spatter of dung from its rear. The crowd hooted with derision.

Pelagon turned scarlet. His father Amphidamas said to Cadmus with a wink, “Oh well. Morpheus can't be right all the time, hey?”

But Harmonia nudged Cadmus in great excitement. "Look," she breethd, "look, Cadmus, look!"

Cadmus saw at once what had attracted her attention. On the cow's back was a mark in the shape of a half moon. There was no other way to describe it. A clear half moon!

Pelagon was murmuring something unconvincing in his ear about the animal's pedigree and high milk yield, but Cadmus interrupted him.

“Your majesty could not have found a more marvelous and welcome prize! I am overcome with delight and gratitude.”

"You are?" said a faintly stunned Pelagon.

The chamberlain was so astonished to hear this that he dropped the switch of willow with which he had been slapping the beast toward the winner's rostrum. It took perhaps thirty seconds for the heifer to become aware that the stinging smack was no longer there to force her on, so she turned and started to amble away.

“Indeed,” said Cadmus jumping from the rostrum and helping Harmonia down after him. “It really is the perfect present. Just exactly what we wanted . . .”

The cow made its way through the crowd. Cadmus and Harmonia, their backs to the royal party, began to follow. Over his shoulder Cadmus called back to the king, stammering out thanks and incoherent courtesies.

“Your majesty will excuse us . . . such a wonderful stay . . . so grateful for your hospitality . . . excellent food, marvelous entertainment . . . most kind . . . er . . . farewell . . .”

“So grateful,” repeated Harmonia. “We'll never forget it. Never. The loveliest heifer! Goodbye.”

“B-but! What? I mean . . .?” said Pelagon, puzzled by this swift and sudden leave-taking. “I thought you were staying another night?”

“No time. Come, men. With us!” cried Cadmus, summoning his retinue of Tyrian servants, men-at-arms, camp-followers, and attendants. Buckling up their armor on the run, dropping food, and kissing farewell to new acquaintances they caught up with Cadmus, Harmonia, and the cow.

“Mad,” said Amphidamas, watching the plume of dust spiral upward in the distance as Cadmus's ragtag army disappeared from view. “Quite mad. Said so from the first.”

The Water Dragon

For three days and three nights Cadmus, Harmonia, and their train of loyal Tyrians followed the heifer with the half-moon markings as it lumbered up and down hills, through meadows, over fields, and across streams. They seemed to be traveling in a southeasterly direction toward the province of Boeotia.

Harmonia believed that the heifer might turn out to be Europa herself. After all, in ravishing her Zeus had transformed himself into a bull, so why mightn't she have taken bovine form too? Cadmus, hypnotized by the rhythmic swaying of the cow's broad posterior, was more inclined to think that the whole thing was a cruel hoax sent to perplex him.

Quite suddenly, after descending a steep hill and arriving at the edge of a wide plain, the heifer sank heavily down and gave vent to an exhausted groan.

“Good lord,” said Cadmus.

“Just as the oracle prophesied!” cried Harmonia. “What did the Pythia say? 'Where the cow falls, there must you build.' So.”

“So?” said Cadmus, irked. “What do you mean, 'So'? Build? Build what? Build how?”

“I'll tell you what,” said Harmonia. “Let's sacrifice the cow to Pallas Athena. The poor thing's almost dead anyway. Athena will guide us.”

Cadmus agreed and elected to pitch a primitive kind of camp right there. So that he could properly purify the sacrifice he sent some of his men to fetch water from a nearby spring.

Cadmus slit the cow's throat and was just sprinkling its blood on a makeshift altar bedecked with wildflowers and burnt sage when one of the Tyrians returned in the most pitiable state of distress, bearing awful news. A dragon, in the grotesque form of a giant water serpent, guarded the spring. It had already killed four men, constricting them in its coils and biting off their heads with its enormous jaws. What could be done?

Heroes do not wring their hands and wonder, heroes act. Cadmus hurried to the spring, picking up a heavy boulder on the way. Hiding behind a tree he whistled to attract the dragon's attention, and then threw the boulder at the dragon's head, smashing its skull and killing it outright.

“So much for water snakes,” said Cadmus, looking down at the monster's blood and brains as they mixed with the waters of the spring.

A voice sounded out loud and clear. “Son of Agenor, why do you stare at the snake you have slain? You too shall be a snake and endure the stares of strangers.”

Cadmus looked around but could see no one. The voice must have sounded inside him. He shook his head and returned to the camp, delighted alike by the cheers of his supporters and the admiring kisses of Harmonia, to whom he said nothing about the voice he had heard.

Far enough away to be able to do so without Cadmus hearing, one of his men was drawing in his breath through his teeth with the irritating relish of those who have bad news to impart. This man came from Boeotia and whispered to his companions with a wise shake of the head that Drakon Ismenios, the Ismenian Dragon, which Cadmus had just slain, was known to be sacred to Ares, the god of war. Indeed, he went on, some believed that the creature was actually a son of Ares!

“No good will come of this deed,” he said, tutting and clicking. “You do not cross the god of battles with impunity. No, sir. Makes no difference who your grandfather is.”

It is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favored you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you.

And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favorites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn't mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others.

Cadmus, by slaying an Arean favorite, had certainly made an enemy of the most aggressive and remorseless of the gods. But he knew none of this, for the muttering in the ranks of his retinue had not reached his ears. He blithely lit the incense and completed his sacrifice to Athena, feeling that things were still going very much his way. This feeling was reinforced by Athena's immediate and benign appearance. Pleased by the offering of the heifer, she glided down from the cloud of fragrant smoke that Cadmus had sent up and favored her humble worshippers with a grave smile.

The Dragon's Teeth

“Rise, son of Agenor,” said the goddess, stepping forward and raising the supplicant Cadmus to his feet. “Your sacrifice was agreeable to us. If you follow my instructions carefully all will be well. Plow the fertile plain. Plow it well. Then sow the furrows with teeth from the dragon you have slain.”

With these words she stepped back into the smoke and disappeared. If Cadmus had not the assurance from Harmonia and the others that they had heard just the same words from Athena too, he might have believed that he had dreamed it. But divine instructions are divine instructions, however odd. In fact the older, Cadmus was becoming aware, the more likely to be divine.

First he carved a plowshare from holm oak wood. Then, since no draught animals were available, he harnessed a willing team of his most loyal attendants. They would have laid down their lives for this charismatic Prince of Tyre, so pulling a plow was nothing to them.

It was late spring and the soil of the plain was free-moving enough to be pulled into shallow but straight and well-marked furrows without too terrible an effort from the straining Tyrians.

The field plowed, Cadmus now set to dibbling the furrows an inch or two deep with the blunt end of a spear. Into each dibbled hole he dropped a dragon's tooth. As we all know, humans have thirty-two teeth. Water dragons have rows and rows of them, like sharks, each ready to advance when the row in front has been worn down with too much grinding of men's bones. Five hundred and twelve teeth Cadmus planted in all. When he had finished he stood back to survey the field.

A light wind blew across the plain, catching the crests of the furrows and sending up powdery flurries of soil. Dust devils whipped and whirled around. A great hush descended.

Harmonia was the first to see the earth in one of the furrows shift. She pointed and all eyes followed. A gasp and a muffled cry went up from the watching crowd.

The tip of a spear was pushing through, then a helmet appeared, followed by shoulders, a breastplate, leathern-greaved legs . . . until a fully armed soldier rose up, wild and fierce, stamping his feet. Then another, and another, until the field was filled with fighting men, marching on the spot in furrowed lines. The clanging and banging of their armor, the clashing and bashing of their buckles, belts, and boots, the clamor and smacking of the metal and leather of their cuirasses, greaves, and shields, their rhythmic grunting and martial shouts all built into a great and horrid din that filled the onlookers with fear.

All but Cadmus, who stepped boldly forward and raised a hand.

“Spartoi!” he called out across the plain, giving them a name that means “sown men.” “My Spartoi! I am Prince Cadmus, your general. At ease.”

Perhaps because they were born of dragon's teeth pulled from the jaws of a creature sacred to the god of war, these soldiers were filled from the first with extraordinary aggression. In reply to Cadmus's command they simply clattered and rattled their shields and spears.

“Silence!” yelled Cadmus.

The warriors paid no attention. Their marching on the spot turned into a slow march forward. In exasperation Cadmus picked up a rock which, with his customary skill and strength, he hurled into their ranks. It struck one of the soldiers on the shoulder.

The man looked at the soldier next to him and, taking him to be the aggressor, lunged at him with a mighty roar, sword drawn. Within moments bloodcurdling battle cries were heard all around the field as the soldiers fell upon each other.

“Stop! Stop! I command you to stop!” yelled Cadmus like a frantic parent on the touchline watching their son being squashed in a scrum. Stamping the ground in frustration he turned to Harmonia. “What is the point of Athena taking all this trouble to force me to create a race of men, only for them to destroy each other? Look at this violence, this bloodlust. What does it mean?”

But even as he spoke, Harmonia was pointing to the center of the fray. Five of Cadmus's Spartoi stood in a circle, the sole survivors. The rest lay dead, their blood soaking back into the soil from which they had come.

Forward came the five, their swords pointing to the ground. They reached Cadmus and knelt down, heads bowed.

Great was the relief, great the rejoicing from the Tyrians. The day had been strange, as strange a day as mortals had known in all history. But some kind of order seemed to have emerged.

“What is the name of this place?” Cadmus asked. “Does anyone here know?”

A voice spoke up, the voice of the man who had warned that the Ismenian Dragon was sacred to Ares. "I'm from hereabouts," he said. "We call this 'the plain of Thebes.'"

“Then on this plain shall I build a great city. From now on we are not Tyrians, but Thebans”—a great cheer went up—“and these five Spartoi shall be my Theban lords.”

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia

The Five Founding Lords of Thebes were given the names Ekion, Udaeus, Kthoneeuses, Hyperenor, and Pelor.

Under the supervision of Cadmus and his loyal army of Tyrian followers they slowly built up a citadel (the Cadmeia) from which grew a flourishing town. In time this town became the powerful city-state of Thebes. The strong wall that encircled it was pierced by seven great bronze gates, each dedicated to the glory of an Olympian god.

The wall was constructed by Amfion and Zethus, twin sons of Zeus by Antyope, the daughter of the local river god Asopos. Hermes had been a lover of Amphion and taught him to play the lyre. When it came to the construction of the great wall around the Cadmeia, Amphion sang to the accompaniment of the lyre and the heavy stones carried by Zethus were so enchanted by the music that they floated into place and the city walls were finished in no time. As a result Amphion and Zethus, as well as Cadmus, are credited as co-founders of Thebes.

The work completed, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to the matter of their marriage. Descended from Titans and gods, allied to and punished by Olympians, but very mortal and very human, the pair might nowadays be called an “iconic power couple.” Today's press and social media, one suspects, would hardly be able to resist dubbing them “Cadmonia.”

Their status as the foremost lovers of the known world meant their wedding feast was an honor never before accorded a mortal union, attended by the highest in the land and the highest from heaven. The gifts were stupendous. Aphrodite lent Harmonia her girdle, a magical item of lingerie that had the power to provoke the most dizzying and rapturous desire. It is said that Harmonia was bed-shy and that her love for Cadmus had yet to be consummated. This girdle, loaned for the duration of her honeymoon by the goddess of love and beauty (who may well have been Harmonia's natural mother), was therefore a gift of great value.

But no wedding gift outshone the necklace that Cadmus conferred upon his bride. It was the most beautiful piece of jewelry yet seen. Fashioned from the choicest chalcedony, jasper, emeralds, sapphires, jade, lapis, amethyst, silver, and gold, it caused gasps of wonder amongst the guests when he clasped it about his beautiful wife's neck. The whisper went round that it too had been given by Aphrodite.

The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who—if you remember—nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed. Miserable misfortune and tragic calamity would rain down upon the heads of whosoever wore or owned it.

This is all confusing and fascinating in equal measure. If Ares and Aphrodite were indeed Harmonia's true parents, why would they want to doom their own daughter? All to avenge a dead water snake? Besides, could sweet Harmony really be the child of Love and War? And, if so, why would the gentle issue of those two powerful and frightening forces be cursed by them with such unnatural cruelty?

The pairing of Cadmus and Harmonia seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing, and trade represented by Cadmus—his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means “of the east”—can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both.

But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don't quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.

So back to the story. The marriage was a great success. The girdle did its (literally) aphrodisiac work and the happy pair were blessed with their own issue: two sons, Polydorus and Illyrius, and four daughters: Agave, Autonoe, Ino, and Semele.

Cadmus still had to pay for his killing of the dragon, however. Ares bound him to labor on his behalf for an Olympian year, which seems to have been eight human years.

After this, Cadmus returned to rule over the city he had built. But the curse of the necklace was to pollute any happiness or satisfaction he might have enjoyed as king.

Consigned to the Dust

After many years of peace and prosperity in Thebes, Cadmus and Harmonia's daughter Agave had married Pentheus, the son of Echion, one of the Five Founding Lords (the last five Spartoi standing, you will remember). Tiring of kingship, but like so many heroes after him unable to restrain the itchy feet of wanderlust, Cadmus said to Harmonia one day: "Let us travel. Let us see more of the world. Pentheus is ready to take the throne in our absence."

They saw much. Many towns and many cities. They went as an ordinary middle-aged couple, asking for no great welcome or banquets in their honor.

Only a small party of attendants accompanied them. It was unfortunate, though, that Harmonia included the cursed necklace in her luggage.

After a great deal of traveling around Greece they determined on a visit to the kingdom up toward the western Adriatic, south of the Balkans, and facing the east coast of Italy, that had been established by their youngest boy, Illyrius, and which was unsurprisingly called “Illyria.”

Once there, Cadmus suddenly fell weary and was filled with an insupportable dread. He called up to the skies.

“For the last thirty years I have known in my heart that in killing that cursed water snake I killed any chance of happiness for me or my wife. Ares is remorseless. He will not rest until I am as flat on the earth as a snake. If it will calm him and bring more peace to my troubled life then let me end my life sliding through the dust. Let it be so.”

No sooner were those words out of his mouth than his unhappy prayer became an unhappy reality. His body began to shrink sideways and stretch lengthways, his skin to blister and form smooth scales, and his head to flatten into a diamond shape. The tongue that had shouted that dreadful wish to the heavens now flicked and darted out from between two fangs. The man who was once Cadmus, Prince of Tyre and King of Thebes, fell writhing to the ground, a common snake.

Harmonia let out a great howl of despair.

"Gods have pity!" she cried. "Aphrodite, if you are my mother show love now and let me join upon the earth the one I love. The fruits of the world are dust to me. Ares, if you are my father show mercy. Zeus if, as some say, you are my father then, in the name of all creation, take pity, I beg you."

It was, however, none of those three who heard her prayers, but merciful Athena who transformed her into a snake. Harmonia glided through the dust after her serpent-husband and they coiled about each other with love.

The pair lived out their days in the shadows of a temple sacred to Athena, only showing themselves when they needed to heat their blood in the noonday sun. When the end came, Zeus returned them to their human shapes in time to die. Their bodies were taken to be buried with great ceremony in Thebes, and Zeus sent two great serpents to guard their tombs for eternity.

We will leave Cadmus and Harmonia to their everlasting rest. They died quite unaware that their youngest daughter, Semele, had, in their absence, unleashed a force into the world that would change it forever.

117. Before this great Phoenician idea, writing took the form of visual symbols such as hieroglyphs and pictograms. Like our numbers, these bore no relation to their sound. The written “24,” for example, gives no clue to pronunciation at all and you'd say the sign differently according to the practices of your language.

The alphabetical (that is phonetical) characters in twenty-four or vingt-quatre or vierundzwanzig tell you just how to say them. That was the crucial breakthrough. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks into the writing system more or less in use there today.

Its close Cyrillic relation spread from Bulgaria in the ninth century A.D. to the Balkans, Russia, and many other areas of eastern Europe and Asia, while the Romans adapted the Greek alpha and beta into the alphabetic system you are interpreting so fluently at this minute. Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who lived in the fifth century B.C., still called such writing “Cadmean.”

118. Not the tragic Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra, but another much earlier one. The name is interesting; it is the female form of electron, the Greek word for “amber.” The Greeks noticed that if you rub amber vigorously with a cloth it magically attracts dust and fluff. They called this strange property “amberiness,” from which all our words “electric,” “electricity,” “electron,” “electronic,” and so on, ultimately derive.

119. He gave his name to the Dardanelles, site of the ill-fated Gallipoli landings in the First World War.

120. Some sources claim that Ares and Aphrodite were Harmonia's parents. Her later ascent to the status of goddess of harmony (Concordia to the Romans) certainly hints at a more divine pedigree. Given what Ares was about to do to her, you might think him a most unnatural father—so loyal to his water dragon, so cruel to his human daughter. Other mythographers, notably Roberto Calasso, an Italian writer whose creative interpretations of myth are well worth reading, have elegantly compromised and suggested that Harmonia was indeed the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, but was given to be suckled and adopted by Electra of Samothrace.

121. It forms the wedge of land that separates Turkey from Syria and is now called Cukurova.

122. A central region of Greece, north of the Gulf of Corinth. Without giving too much away it is worth relating that it once bore the name “Cadmeis”...

123. Ovid calls the Ismenian Dragon Anguis Martius, the “Snake of Mars.” It seems (ap)ophis (snake) and drakon (dragon) were pretty much undifferentiated in Greek myth, much as Wurm (worm) and Drachen (dragon) are interchangeable in Germanic legend.

124. Chthonius had the name that defined them all as chthonic beings.

125. The polis or “city-state” was to become the defining unit of government in ancient Greece. Athens was the best known, but Sparta, Thebes, Rhodes, Samos, and many others flourished around the Greek world, forming alliances, trading, and fighting with each other. Despite Greek giving us the word “democracy,” the polis could also be ruled either by a king (tyrannos in Greek, so when we say “tyrant” we don't always mean “despot”) or by the “rule of the few,” which in Greek is oligarchy. From polis come all those words like “polite,” “politics,” and “police.”

126. I'm damned if I can find a convincing definition of “girdle.” Some think it's a belt, others a device more like a Playtex paneled support or corset—others yet have described it as a “mythical Wonderbra.” Calasso calls it “a soft deceiving sash.”

127. “A garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground” is Roberto Calasso's excellent description in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

128. Scene of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains Sales. The Dalmatae (a name ultimately deriving from an early Albanian word for “sheep”) were an Illyrian tribe to the northwest of the region who gave their name to this Dalmatian coast (and the dog).

129. Being from Tyre, Cadmus probably used the word for “let it be so” most commonly used throughout the Middle East: Amen.

Twice Born

The Eagle Lands

After Cadmus and Harmonia departed on their travels, their son-in-law Pentheus reigned in Thebes. He was not a strong king, but he was honest and did the best he could with the limited store of character and cunning on which he was able to call. While the city-state flourished well enough under him, he needed always to look over his shoulder to the children of Cadmus, his brothers-and sisters-in-law, whose greed and ambition posed a constant threat. Even his wife Agave seemed contemptuous of him and anxious for him to fail. His youngest sister-in-law, Semele, was the only one with whom he felt at all at ease, in truth because she was less worldly than her brothers Polydorus and Illyrius, and nothing like as ambitious for wealth and position as her sisters Agave, Autonoë, and Ino. Semele was a beautiful, kindly, and generous girl, content with her life as a priestess at the great temple of Zeus.

One day she sacrificed to Zeus a bull of especially impressive size and vigor. The offering complete, she took herself off to the River Asopos to wash the blood from her. It so happened that Zeus, pleased with the sacrifice and intending anyway to look in on Thebes to see how the city prospered, was flying over the river at the time in his favorite guise of an eagle. The sight of Semele's naked body glistening in the water excited him hugely and he landed, turning himself quickly back into his proper form.

I say "proper form," for when the gods chose to reveal themselves to humans they presented themselves in a reduced, manageable guise that did not dazzle or overawe. Thus the figure that stood on the riverbank smiling at Semele appeared human. Large, stunningly handsome, powerfully built, and possessed of an unusual radiance, but human all the same.

Crossing her arms over her breasts Semele called out, “Who are you? How dare you sneak up upon a priestess of Zeus?”

“A priestess of Zeus, are you?”

“I am. If you mean any harm to me I will cry out to the King of the Gods and he will rush to my aid.”

"You don't say so?"

"You may be sure of it. Now leave."

But the stranger came closer. "I am well pleased with you, Semele," he said. Semele backed away. "You know my name?"

“I know many things, loyal priestess. For I am the god you serve. I am the Sky Father, the King of Olympus. Zeus, the all-powerful.”

Semele, still half in the river, gasped and fell to her knees.

“Come now,” said Zeus, striding through the water toward her, “let me look into your eyes.”

It was splashy, frenzied, and wet, but it was real lovemaking. When it was over Semele smiled, blushed, laughed, and then wept, leaning her head on Zeus's chest and sobbing without cease.

“Don't cry, dearest Semele,” said Zeus, running his fingers through her hair. “You have pleased me.”

“I'm sorry, my lord. But I love you and I know all too well that you can never love a mortal.”

Zeus gazed down at her. The eruption of lust he had felt was all over, but he was surprised to feel the stirrings of something deeper, glowing like embers in his heart. A god who operated in vertical moments with no real thought for consequences along the line, he really did experience just then a great wellspring of love for the beautiful Semele, and he told her so.

“Semele, I do love you! I love you sincerely. Believe me now when I swear by the waters of this river that I will always look after you, care for you, protect you, honor you.” He cupped her face in his hands and bent forward to bestow a tender kiss on her soft, receptive lips. “Now, farewell, my sweet. Once every new moon I will come.”

Dressed in her gown, her hair still damp and her whole being warm and bright with love and happiness, Semele walked back across the fields toward the temple. Looking up, a hand shading her eyes, she saw an eagle sweep and soar through the sky, seemingly into the sun itself, until the dazzle of it made her eyes water and she was forced to look away.

The Eagle's Wife

Zeus meant well.

Those three words so often presaged disaster for some poor demigod, nymph, or mortal. The King of the Gods did love Semele and he really meant to do his best by her. In the fervor of his new infatuation he managed conveniently to forget the torments I had endured, maddened by the gadfly sent by his vengeful wife.

Alas, Hera may no longer have had Argus of the hundred eyes to gather intelligence for her, but she had thousands of eyes in other places. Whether it was one of the jealous sisters, Agave, Autonoë, or Ino, who spied on Semele and whispered to Hera the story of the lovemaking in the river, or whether it was one of the Queen of Heaven's own priestesses, is not known. But find out Hera did.

So it was that, one afternoon, Semele, returning with romantic sentiment to the place of her regular amorous encounters with Zeus, encountered a stooping old woman leaning on a stick.

“My, what a pretty girl,” croaked the old woman, slightly overdoing the cracked and cackling voice of a miserable crone.

"Why thank you," said the unsuspicious Semele with a friendly smile.

“Walk with me,” said the hag, pulling Semele toward her with her cane. “Let me lean upon you.”

Semele was polite and considerate by nature in a culture where the elderly were in any case accorded the greatest attention and respect, so she accompanied the old woman and endured her roughness without complaint.

"My name is Beroë," said the old woman.

“And I am Semele.”

“What a pretty name! And here is Asopos,” Beroë indicated the clear waters of the river.

“Yes,” assented Semele, “that is the river's name.”

“I heard tell—" here the old woman's voice lowered into a harsh whisper “—that a priestess of Zeus was seduced here. Right here in the reeds.”

Semele went silent, but the flush that spread instantly up her neck to her cheeks betrayed her as completely as any spoken words.

“Oh, my dear!” screeched the crone. “It was you! And now that I look, I can see your belly. You are with child!”

“1 … 1 am …” said Semele with a becoming mixture of diffidence and pride. “But … if you can keep a secret …?”

“Oh, these old lips never tell tales. You may tell me anything you wish, my dear.”

“Well, the fact is that the father of this child is—none other than Zeus himself.”

“No!” said Beroë. “You don't say so? Really?”

Semele gave a very affirmative nod of the head. She did not like the old woman's sceptical tone. "Truly. The King of the Gods himself."

“Zeus? The great god Zeus? Well, well. I wonder . . . No, I mustn't say.”

"Say what, lady?"

“You seem such a sweet innocent. So trusting. But, my dear, how can you know that it was Zeus? Isn't that exactly what some wicked seducer might say just to win you?”

"Oh no, it was Zeus. I know it was Zeus."

"Bear with an old woman and describe him to me, my child."

“Well, he was tall. He had a beard. Strong. Kindly . . ."

"Oh no, I'm sorry to say so, but that is hardly the description of a god."

“But it was Zeus, it was! He turned himself into an eagle. I saw it with my very own eyes.”

“That's a trick that can be taught. Fauns and demigods can do it. Even some mortal men.”

“It was Zeus. I felt it.”

“Hm …” Beroë sounded doubtful. “I have lived amongst the gods. My mother is Tethys and my father Oceanus. I raised and nursed the young gods after they were reborn from Kronos's stomach. It's true. I know their ways and their natures and I tell you this, my daughter. When a god manifests himself or herself as they truly are it is like a great explosion. A wondrous thing of force and fire.

Unforgettable. Unmistakable."

"And that's just what I felt!"

“What you felt was no more than the ecstasy of mortal lovemaking. Depend upon it. Tell me now, will this lover of yours come to you again?”

"Oh, yes indeed. He visits me faithfully every change of the moon."

“If I were you,” said the old woman, “I would make him promise to reveal himself to you as he really is. If he is Zeus you will know it. Otherwise I fear you have been made a fool of, and you are far too lovely and trusting and sweet-natured for that to be allowed. Now, leave me to contemplate the view. Shush, shush, go away."

And so Semele left the crone, growing more and more hotly indignant all the while. She could not help it, but this warty and wrinkled old creature had got under her skin. So typical of old age to try to take away any pleasure that youth might feel.

Her own sisters, Autonoë, Ino, and Agave, had disbelieved her when she told them proudly of how she loved Zeus and Zeus loved her. They had shrieked with incredulous mocking laughter and called her a gullible fool. And now this Beroë doubted her story too.

Yet maybe, just maybe there was something in what her sisters and the old witch said. Gods surely had more to them than warm flesh and solid muscle, appealing as those were? “Well,” Semele said to herself, “two more nights and there'll be a new moon in the sky, and then I can prove that nasty interfering old hag wrong.”

Had Semele chanced to turn and look back toward the river, she might have witnessed the extraordinary sight of that nasty interfering old hag, now youthful, beautiful, magisterial, and imperious, rising up to the clouds in a purple and gold chariot drawn by a dozen peacocks. And had she the gift of second sight, Semele might have been granted a vision of the actual Beroe, innocent old nurse of the gods, living out her life miles away in respectable retirement on the coast of Phoenicia.

The Manifestation ^{132}

It was with some impatience that, on the night of the new moon, Semele paced up and down by the banks of River Asopos, awaiting her lover. He arrived at last, this time as a stallion—black, glossy, and fine, galloping through the fields toward her as the sun set in the west behind him, seeming to set his mane on fire. Oh, how she loved him!

He let her stroke his flanks and palm his hot nostrils before he transformed himself into the shape she knew and loved so well. Hugging and holding him hard, she began to cry.

“My darling girl,” said Zeus, his finger running down to her belly, where it traced the outline of their child, “not weeping again? What am I doing wrong?”

"You really are the god Zeus?"

“I am.”

"Will you promise to grant any wish?"

"Oh, must you really?" said Zeus with a sigh.

“It's nothing—not power or wisdom or jewels, or anything like that. And I don't want you to destroy anyone. It's a small thing, really it is.”

“Then,” said Zeus, chucking her affectionately under the chin, “I will grant your wish.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. I promise by this river—no, I've already sworn one thing by it. I shall promise you by the great Stygian stream herself.” Raising his hand with mock solemnity, he intoned, “Beloved Semele, I swear by sacred Styx that I will grant your next wish.”

“Then,” said Semele with a deep breath, “show yourself to me.”

"How's that?"

“I want to see you as you really are. Not as a man, but as a god, in your true divinity.”

The smile froze on Zeus's face. "No!" he cried. "Anything but that! Do not wish such a thing. No, no, no!"

It was the tone of voice that gods often used when they realized they had been trapped into a rash promise. Apollo cried out in the same way, you will remember, when Phaeton called upon him to honor his oath. Suspicion flared up in Semele.

"You promised, you swore by Styx! You swore, you swore an oath!"

"But my darling girl, you don't know what you're asking."

"You swore!" Semele actually stamped her foot.

The god looked up at the sky and groaned. "I did. I pledged my word and my word is sacred."

As he spoke Zeus began to gather himself into the form of a great thundercloud. From the center of this dark mass flashed the brightest light imaginable. Semele looked on, her face breaking into a broad and ecstatic smile of joy. Only a god could change like this. Only Zeus himself could grow and grow with such dazzling fire and golden greatness.

But the brightness was becoming so fierce, so terrible in the ferocity of its glare, that she threw up an arm to shade her eyes. Yet still the brilliance intensified. With a crack so loud that her ears burst and filled with blood, the radiance exploded in bolts of lightning that instantly struck the girl blind. Deaf and sightless she staggered backward, but too late to avoid the blazing force of a thunderbolt so powerful that it split her body open, killing her at once.

Above him, around him, inside him, Zeus heard the triumphant laughter of his wife. Of course. He might have known. Somehow Hera had tricked this poor girl into forcing the awful promise from him.

Well, she would not get their child. With a peal of thunder Zeus returned to flesh and blood and plucked the fetus from Semele's belly. It was too young to breathe the air, so Zeus took a knife and sliced open his thigh and tucked the embryo inside. Holding it tight within this makeshift womb Zeus knelt down to sew the child safely into his warm flesh.

The Newest God

Three months later Zeus and Hermes traveled to Nysus on the north coast of Africa, an area that lies, it is generally believed, somewhere between Libya and Egypt. There Hermes cut open the stitching on Zeus's thigh and delivered him of a son, Dionysus. The infant was suckled by the rain nymphs of Nysus; and, once weaned, was tutored by potbellied Silenus, who was to become his closest companion and follower—a kind of Falstaff to the young god's Prince Hal. Silenus had his own train of followers too, the sileni—satyr-like creatures forever associated with antic riot, rout, and revelry.

It was as a youth that Dionysus made the discovery with which he will always be associated. He found out how to make wine from grapes. It is possible that Kiron the centaur taught him the trick; but another, more charming story relates it to the young god's passionate love for a youth called Ampelos. Dionysus was so besotted that he arranged all kinds of sporting contests between himself and Ampelos, always letting the youth win. This seems to have caused the boy to become rather spoiled, or at least reckless and foolhardy.

Riding a wild bull one day he made the error of boasting that he rode his horned steer more skilfully than the goddess Selene rode her horned moon. Choosing a punishment straight from Hera's vicious playbook, Selene sent a gadfly to sting the bull, which caused the maddened animal to throw and gore Ampelos.

Silenus, the potbellied tutor of Dionysus, accompanied by the sileni—satyr-like creatures forever associated with antic riot, rout, and revelry.

Dionysus rushed to the dying youth's mangled side, but he could not save him. Instead he caused the dead and twisted body to transform magically into a winding, writhing climbing plant, while the drops of blood solidified and swelled into luscious berries whose skin shone with the bloom and luster the god had so admired. His lover had become a vine (which is still called ampelos in Greece to this day). From it Dionysus produced the first vintage and drank the first draught of wine. This witchcraft, as it were, of turning the blood of Ampelos into wine became the god's gift to the world.

A combination of the intoxicating effects of his invention and the enmity of Hera—whose hatred of any bastard of Zeus's, divine or otherwise, was always implacable—sent Dionysus mad for a while. To escape her curses, he spent the next few years traveling far and wide, spreading viticulture and the techniques of winemaking around the world. In Assyria he encountered the king and queen, Stafilos and Methe, and their son Botrys. After a banquet in Dionysus's honor Staphylus died of the first fatal hangover. As compensation, and in their honor, Dionysus named bunches of grapes staphylos, alcoholic liquid and drunkenness methe, and the grape itself botrys.

Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. “Methylated spirits” and “methane” take their names from Methe. Botrytis, the “noble rot” that benignly affects grapes on the vine, lending premium dessert wines their incomparable (and shatteringly expensive) bouquet, owes its name to Botrys.

Throughout his adventures, the new god was accompanied not just by Silenus and his retinue of satyrs, but by an intense band of women followers too—the Meenads.

Dionysus was soon established as the god of wine, revelry, delirious intoxication, uninhibited dissipation, and “the orgastic future.” The Romans called him by the name Bakus and worshipped him quite as devotedly as did the Greeks. He was to stand in a kind of polar opposition to Apollo—one representing the golden light of reason, harmonious music, lyric poetry, and mathematics, the other embodying the darker energies of disorder, liberation, wild music, bloodlust, frenzy, and unreason.

Of course the gods had living personalities and stories, and so they often strayed from such frozen symbolic identities. Apollo, as we shall see very soon, was himself capable of being bloody, crazed, and cruel, while Dionysus could be more than just the embodiment of inebriation and debauchery. He was sometimes called “the Liberator,” a vegetal life force whose license could benevolently relieve and renew the world.

Thirteen at Table

The vine leaf, the thyrsus—a staff topped with a pine cone—a chariot drawn by leopards or other exotic beasts, depraved attendants sporting roaring erections, jars flowing with wine—the Dionysiac Idea added much to the world. The importance of this new god was such that he simply had to be welcomed into Olympus. But there was already a full complement of twelve gods in residence and thirteen was, even then, looked on as an unlucky number. The gods scratched their chins and wondered what could be done. They wanted Dionysus—the truth was they liked him and the festive energy he brought to every gathering. And more than anything they liked the idea of wine being added to nectar, instead of fermented honey and plain fruit juice.

“This comes at a perfect time,” said Hestia, rising to her feet. “I feel more and more than I am needed down in the world to help people and their families and to be present in the temples that celebrate the virtues of hearth, home, and hallway. Let young Bacchus take my place.”

There was an unconvincing murmur of protestation as Hestia stepped down, but she was insistent and the exchange was made to the delight of all the gods—save one. Hera regarded Dionysus as Zeus's grossest insult to her. Apollo, Artemis, and Athena were shameful enough as illegitimate additions to the dodecatheon, but that a bastard half-human god should be admitted to heaven offended her to the core. She vowed always to abstain from Dionysus's poison drink and personally to shun the carousals with which he wrecked the peace and decorum of heaven.

When Aphrodite gave birth to a son by Dionysus, Hera cursed the baby, whose name was Priapus, with ugliness and impotence and had it cast down from Olympus. Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner. But deflation and disappointment were his fate. He went about in a constant state of excitement which, on account of Hera's curse, always failed him when he tried to do anything about it. This chronic and embarrassing problem made it natural that he should be forever associated with alcohol, his father's gift to the world that ever “provokes the desire but takes away the performance.”

Nonetheless, whether Hera liked it or not, Dionysus the Twice Born, the only god to have a mortal human parent, rose to take his place now as a full member of the finally fixed Olympian Twelve.

130. Cadmus and Harmonia's sons Polydorus and Illyrius were too young to rule. In time Polydorus would go on to reign in Thebes, and Illyrius would rule over the kingdom that bore his name, Illyria, as we have already seen.

131. The real Beroë, an Oceanid who had indeed nursed the young gods, gave her name to the city of Beirut.

132. Another word for the appearance and revelation of a god to a mortal is “theophany.”

133. It was common, as you may remember from Apollo's promise to Phaeton, for gods to swear by this dark and hateful river.

134. An astonishing story. As Ovid himself says of it: “If man can believe this…”

135. The name probably couples “god” (Dio, meaning Zeus) with the Nysus, the birthplace.

136. A grateful Zeus rewarded them by adding them to the heavens as the Hyades, a spiral constellation whose rising and setting the Greeks believed presaged rain.

137. Books 10, 11, and 12 of the sprawling forty-eight-book epic poem the Dionysiaca, written by the Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis in the fifth century A.D., details this relationship and its aftermath at great length.

138. Nonnus interrupts the action here (a thing he does a lot: his poem is astonishingly dull, given its superb subject matter) by having Eros come to comfort Dionysus with tales of other great male lovers. He tells of Kalamos and Karpos (the latter being son of Zephyrus the West Wind and Kloris, nymph of greenery and new growth—as in “chlorophyll” and “chlorine”), two beautiful youths passionately in love with each other. During a swimming contest (athletics and hunting seem to be a theme with beautiful youths coming to a sticky end, as we shall see in the tales of Hyasinthus, Aktaion, Krokus, and Adonis, amongst others), Karpos dies, and a desolated, grief-stricken Kalamos commits suicide. Kalamos is then changed into reeds and Karpos into fruit: they are the Greek words for “reed” and “fruit” to this day.

139. It is said that he gave the secrets of the vine to every known land except Britain and Ethiopia. It is sadly true that neither country has a great reputation for winemaking, although that is changing and these days English wines are making a name for themselves. Perhaps the same is true of Ethiopian vintages.

140. The violent mysteries of these extreme worshippers were depicted in all their shocking savagery by the Athenian playwright Euripides in the fifth century B.C. in the Bacchae. In this bloody tragedy Dionysus returns to Thebes to wreak his revenge on those of his mother's sisters who refused to believe Semele's claim to be carrying Zeus's child. The god sends King Pentheus mad and causes his own bewitched aunts, Agave, Ino, and Autonoë, to tear the poor man apart, limb from limb.

141. Ovid, in his retellings of Dionysus's myths, commonly uses the name Liber for him. It carries the sense of “freedom” and of “libertine”—as well as, unconnectedly, “book.”

The Beautiful and the Damned Angry Goddesses

Actaeon

The Cadman house was one of the most important dynasties of the Greek world. First Cadmus, as founder of Thebes and bringer of the alphabet, and then his family were all central in the making of Greece. But, like many of the great houses, there was a curse attached to it. The killing of the water dragon allowed the city to be built, but it cast the curse of Ares over it too. The Fates seldom allowed glory and triumph without the accompaniment of suffering and sorrow.

Cadmus's daughter Autonoë had a son, Actaeon, by a minor god called Aristaeus, much venerated in Boeotia (he was sometimes referred to as “the Apollo of the fields”). Like many of the later heroes, Actaeon was tutored and trained by the great and wise centaur Chiron. He grew up to become a much-admired huntsman and leader, renowned for his fearlessness in the chase and the skill and tender strength with which he handled his beloved hounds.

One day, having lost the scent of an especially noble stag, Actaeon and his fellow huntsmen separated to pick up the trail. Stumbling through some bushes Actaeon happened on a pool where Artemis was bathing. As she was the goddess of his favorite pursuit, hunting, Actaeon should have known better than to stare dumbstruck at her nakedness. She was also the fierce queen of celibacy, chastity, and virginity. But so beautiful was she, so much more lovely than any being Actaeon had ever beheld, that he stood rooted to the spot, his mouth open and his eyes—and not only his eyes—bulging.

It may have been a twig snapping beneath his foot, it may have been the sound of Actaeon's drool hitting the ground, but something made Artemis turn. She saw a young man standing there ogling, and her blood was fired. The thought of anyone spreading the word that they had seen her naked was so abhorrent to her that she called out.

“You, mortal man! Your staring is a profanity. I forbid you ever to speak. If you utter just one syllable your punishment will be terrible. Indicate to me that you understand.”

The unhappy youth nodded. Artemis disappeared from view and he was left alone to consider his fate.

Behind him a hallo started up as his fellow huntsmen announced that they were once more upon the scent. Instinctively Actaeon called out. The moment he did so Artemis's curse descended and he was changed into a stag.

Actaeon raised his head, now heavy with antlers, and galloped through the woods until he came to a pool of water. He looked down into the pool, and at the sight of himself he gave what should have been a groan but which came out as a mighty bellow. The bellow was answered by a great baying and yipping. Within seconds his own pack of hounds had streamed into the clearing.

They had been trained by Actaeon himself to rip out a stag's throat and feast on its steaming blood for their reward. As the yowling and snarling creatures leapt up at him snapping their jaws Actaeon raised his forelegs in the direction of Olympus, as if beseeching the gods for pity. They either did not hear or did not heed. In seconds he was torn to pieces. The hunter hunted!

Erysichthon

The goddess Demeter is associated with fruitful abundance and the generous bounty of nature, but if pushed beyond her usual forbearance she could be as vengeful as Artemis, as this tale of her ruthless punishment of Erisikhthon, King of Thessaly, clearly shows.

In need of timber for the construction of new apartments in his palace, the bold, fearless, and impatient Erysichthon one day led a party of woodmen out to the forest, where they came upon a flourishing grove of oaks.

“Excellent,” he cried. “Swing your axes, boys.”

But his men drew back muttering and shaking their heads.

Erysichthon turned to his foreman. “What's the matter with them?”

“These trees are sacred to Demeter, sire.”

“Nonsense. She has more than she knows what to do with. Bring them down.”

More muttering.

Erysichthon snatched the foreman's whip, which its owner only ever really waved for show, and cracked it menacingly over the heads of the foresters.

"Chop those trees down, or feel its sting!" he cried.

With their king cracking the whip and urging them on, the men reluctantly chopped down the trees. But when they came to a giant oak that stood alone at the end of the grove they stopped again.

"Why, this is the tallest and broadest of them all!" said Erysichthon. "I that alone will provide the timber for the rafters and columns of my throne room and still leave enough over for a great bed for me."

The foreman pointed a trembling finger at the oak's branches, which were hung with garlands.

The king was unimpressed. "And?"

“My lord,” whispered the foreman, “each wreath stands for a prayer that the goddess has answered.”

“If the prayers have already been answered she will have no need of flower arrangements. Cut it down.”

But seeing that the foreman and his team were too afraid to proceed, the impetuous Erysichthon snatched up an axe and set about it himself.

He was a strong man and, like most rulers, he loved to show off his will, skill, and sinew. It was not long before the trunk creaked and the mighty oak began to sway. Did Erysichthon hear the plaintive cries of a hamadryad in the boughs? If he did he paid no heed but swung his axe again and again, until down crashed the tree —branches, votive wreaths, garlands, hamadryad, and all.

As the oak died, so died its hamadryad. With her last breath she cursed Erysichthon for his crime.

Demeter heard of Erysichthon's sacrilege and sent word to Limos. Limos was one of the vile creatures that had flown from Pandora's jar. She was a demon of famine who might be regarded as Demeter's inverse, the goddess's necessary opposite in the mortal world. One the fecund and bountiful herald of the harvest, the other the mercilessly cruel harbinger of hunger and blight. Since the two existed in an irreconcilable matter—antimatter relationship, they could never meet in person, so Demeter sent a nymph of the mountains as her envoy, to urge Limos to deliver the hamadryad's curse on Erysichthon, a task the malevolent demon was only too happy to undertake.

Limos had, according to Ovid, rather let herself go. With sagging, withered breasts, an empty space for a stomach, exposed rotten bowels, sunken eyes, crusted lips, scaly skin, lank, scurfy hair, and swollen pustular ankles, the figure and face of Famine presented a haunting and dreadful spectacle. She stole that night into Erysichthon's bedroom, took the sleeping king in her arms, and breethd her foul breath into him. Her poison fumes seeped into his mouth, throat, and lungs. Through his veins and into every cell of his body slid the terrible, insatiable worm of hunger.

Erysichthon awoke from strange dreams feeling very, very peckish. He surprised his kitchen staff with an enormous breakfast order. He consumed every morsel, yet still his appetite was unsated.

All day he found that the more he ate the more ravenous he became. As days and then weeks passed, the pangs of hunger gnawed deeper and deeper. No matter how much he consumed he could never be satisfied, nor gain so much as an ounce of weight. Food inside him acted like fuel on a fire, causing the hunger to burn ever more fiercely. For this reason his people began referring to him behind his back as Aethon, which means “burning.”

He was perhaps the first man ever to eat himself out of house and home. One by one all his treasure and possessions, and even his palace, were sold off to buy food. But still this wasn't enough, for nothing could appease his colossal appetite. At last, he was reduced to selling his daughter Mestra to raise money to quiet the remorseless demands of his unassuageable appetite.

This was a more cunning and less barbarous act than perhaps it sounds: the beautiful Mestra had once been a lover of Poseidon's, who had rewarded her with the ability to alter her shape at will—a power in the especial gift of the god of the ever-changing sea. Every week Erysichthon would offer his daughter to a rich suitor and accept the bride-money. Mestra would accompany her fiancé to his home, escape in the shape of one animal, or another, and return to Erysichthon, ready to be sold again to a fresh gullible suitor.

Even this arrangement proved insufficient to tamp down the dreadful flames of hunger, and in desperation one day he chewed off his left hand. The arm followed, then his shoulder, feet, and hams. Before long, King Erysichthon of Thessaly had eaten himself all up. Demeter and the hamadryad were avenged.

142. If you want to impress your friends, you can learn the following list of the male and female hounds as given by Ovid in his version of the myth. If nothing else they might serve as useful names for online passwords.

Dogs: Melampus, Ichnobates, Pamphagos, Dorceus, Oribasos, Nebrophonos, Lailaps, Theron, Pterelas, Hylaeus, Ladon, Dromas, Tigris, Leucon, Asbolos, Lacon, Aello, Thoos, Harpalos, Melaneus, Labros, Arcas, Argiodus, Hylactor.

Bitches: Agre, Nape, Poemenis, Harpyia, Canache, Sticte, Alce, Lycisce, Lachne, Melanchaetes, Therodamas, Oresitrophos.

The Doctor and the Crow

T.P.R ^ine

There was once an intensely attractive young princess called Koronis, who came from the Thessalian kingdom of Phlegyantis. So great was her beauty that she caught the attention of the god Apollo, who took her as a lover. You might think that the companionship and love of the most beautiful of the gods would be enough for anyone, but Coronis—while pregnant with Apollo's child—fell for the charms of a mortal called Iskhys and slept with him.

One of Apollo's white crows witnessed this act of betrayal and flew back to tell his master all about the insult to his honor. Enraged, Apollo asked his sister Artemis to take revenge. Only too willing, she attacked the palace at Phlegyantis with plague arrows—poisoned darts that spread a terrible disease throughout the compound. Many besides Coronis were infected.

The crow saw all and returned to give Apollo a full report.

"She's dying, my lord, dying!"

"Did she say anything? Did she admit her guilt?"

“Oh yes, oh yes. 'I deserve my fate,' she said. 'Tell the great god Apollo that I ask no forgiveness and beg no pity, beg no pity, only save the life of our child. Save the life of our child.' Ha! Ha! Ha!”

With such malicious glee did the crow crow, that Apollo lost his temper and turned it black. All crows, ravens and rooks ever since have been that color.

When Apollo, now filled with remorse, reached plague-stricken Phlegyantis he found Coronis lying dead on her funeral pyre, the flames licking all round her. With a cry of grief he leapt through the flames and from her womb cut out their child who was still living. Apollo raised Coronis to the stars as the constellation Corvus, the Crow.

The rescued infant boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, was put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Perhaps because he had been delivered by a surgical procedure (albeit a rather violent one), perhaps because while he had been in the womb infection had raged all around him, perhaps because his father was Apollo, god of medicine and mathematics—probably for all these reasons—Asclepius demonstrated early on some very remarkable talents in the field of medicine.

As the boy grew, it quickly became clear to Chiron that he allied an incisive, logical, and curious mind with a natural gift for healing. Chiron, no mean naturalist, herbalist, and reasoner himself, took enormous pleasure in training the boy in the medical arts. Besides giving him a thorough grounding in the anatomy of animals and humans, he taught him that knowledge is gained from observation and careful record keeping rather than from spinning theories.

He showed him how to gather medicinal plants, grind them, mix them, heat them, and work them into powders, potions, and preparations that could be eaten, drunk, or stirred into food. He instructed him how to staunch blood flow, concoct fomented poultices, dress wounds, and reset fractured bones. By the time he was fourteen he had saved a soldier's leg from being amputated, brought a fevered young girl back from the very brink of death, rescued a bear from a trap, saved the population of a village from an epidemic of dysentery, and relieved the suffering of a bruised snake by the application of an ointment of his own devising.

This last case proved to be invaluable, for the grateful serpent had licked Asclepius's ear in thanks, whispering as he did so many secrets of the arts of healing that were closed even to Chiron.

Athena, to whom snakes were sacred, bestowed her thanks too, in the form of a jar of Gorgon's blood. You might think this a poor gift. Far from it. Sometimes the law of opposites applies. A single drop of the silvery-gold ichor that keeps the gods immortal is fatal for humans to touch or taste. The blood of a creature as deadly and dangerous as a serpent-haired Gorgon, on the other hand, has the power to bring the dead back to life.

By the time he was twenty Asclepius had mastered all the arts of surgery and medicine. He embraced his teacher Chiron in a fond farewell and left to set up on his own as the world's first physician, apothecary, and healer. His fame spread around the Mediterranean with great speed. The sick, lame, and unhappy flocked to his surgery, outside which he hung a sign—a wooden staff with a snake twined round it, seen to this day on many ambulances, clinics, and (often disreputable) medical websites.

He married Epione, whose name means “soothing” or “relief from pain.” Together they had three sons and four daughters. Asclepius trained his girls as rigorously as Chiron had trained him.

The eldest, Hygeeia, he taught the practices of cleanliness, diet, and physical exercise that are today named “hygiene” after her.

To Panakea he revealed the arts of universal health, of medicinal preparation, and the production of remedies and treatments that could heal anything—which is what her name means: “cure all.”

ACESO he instructed in the healing process itself, including what we would now call immunology.

The youngest girl Iaso specialized in recovery and recuperation.

The elder boys, Makaon and Podalirius, became prototypes of the army doctor. Their later service in the Trojan War was recorded by Homer.

The youngest son, Telesphorus, is usually depicted as being hooded and of very restricted growth. His field of study was rehabilitation and convalescence, the return of a patient to full health.

All might have gone well had Asclepius kept tightly sealed the jar that Athena presented to him. Tightly sealed. Whether it was the glory of being celebrated as a kind of saint and savior or whether it was a genuine desire to beat death with his arts we cannot know, but Asclepius used the Gorgon's blood once to revive the corpse of a dead patient, then a second time, and soon he was using it as liberally and regularly as castor oil.

Hades began to grumble and fume. Unable to bear it any longer he went so far as to leave the underworld and stand angrily before the throne of his brother Zeus.

“This man is denying me souls. He pulls them back from Thanatos just as they are ready to cross over to us. Something must be done.”

“I agree,” said Hera. “He is subverting the proper order of things. If a person is marked down for death it is quite unacceptable for a mortal to interfere. Your daughter did a very foolish thing in giving him Gorgon's blood.”

Zeus frowned. There was no denying the truth of what they said. He was disappointed in Athena. She had not betrayed him in so flagrant and unforgivable a manner as Prometheus, but there were points of similarity that troubled him. Mortals were mortal and that was that. Allowing them access to potions that gave them ascendancy over death was quite wrong.

The thunderbolt which struck Asclepius was wholly unexpected, as bolts from the blue always are. It killed him stone dead. All of Greece lamented the loss of their beloved and valued physician and healer, but Apollo did more than mourn the passing of his son. He raged. As soon as he heard the news he took himself off to the workshop of Hephaestus and with three swift arrows shot dead Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, the Cyclopes whose eternal task and pleasure it was to manufacture the Sky Father's thunderbolts.

Such astounding rebelliousness was not to be brooked. Zeus was intolerant of any threat to his authority and always moved swiftly to put down the slightest hint of insurrection. Apollo was thrown from Olympus and commanded to serve the Thessalian king Admetus in a lowly position for a year and a day. Admetus had earned the approval of Zeus by his exceptionally warm hospitality and kindness to strangers—always a direct route to Zeus's heart.

Apollo had been punished when young, you will recall, for slaying the serpent Python. His beauty, splendor, and golden charm hid a stubborn will and a hot temper. He submitted to this punishment readily enough, however. Admetus was impossible to dislike and, serving as his cowherd, Apollo ensured that every cow under his care gave birth to twins. Cattle and twins were special to him.

Asclepius, meanwhile, was raised to the heavens as the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Bearer.

Later traditions asserted that Zeus restored Asclepius to life and raised him up as a god. It is true that throughout the Mediterranean world he and his wife and daughters were worshipped as divine. Temples to him, known as asclepia, sprang up everywhere, bearing great similarities to modern spas and health clubs. Their officiating priests wore white and bathed, massaged, and pampered the paying supplicants with preposterous oils, creams, and patent mixtures, just as they do today. Ever sacred to Asclepius, snakes (the nonvenomous kind) were encouraged to slither about the treatment rooms and clinics, a sight perhaps less common in our contemporary temples to health. The spirit and mind were as attended to then as they are now. “Holistic” is, after all, a Greek-derived word. Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an “incubation”) and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

The Asclepion of Epidaurus was as big a draw as the town's celebrated theater is today. Those who visit it can still see records of the illnesses, treatments, diets, and cures of the patients who flocked there.

143. Although, on a B.B.C T.V adaptation of the Gormenghast books, I worked with an albino crow called Jimmy White.

144. Koronis is a Greek word for “crow” or “rook.” Its original meaning is “curved,” whether in reference to the curves of the princess or of the bird's beak I cannot say.

145. Some use the staff of Asclepius (or Hippocratic staff)—a rough wooden stick, entwined with a single serpent. Others use the caduceus of Hermes—a more slender and elegant staff entwined by two serpents whose heads meet at the top and are surmounted by a pair of wings. There does not seem to be any professional or clinical significance in the choice; it is purely a matter of preference.

146. The poet and scholar Callimachus, who lived in the third century B.C., suggested that Apollo and Admetus became enthusiastic lovers during this period of servitude.

Crime and Punishment

The regular appearance, interference, and intercourse of the gods with human society, which would be so remarkable, thrilling, and troubling to us if it happened today, was sometimes taken for granted by the more foolish and self-important mortals of the Silver Age. Some kings were so puffed up that they ignored the most elementary precepts of the gods and exhibited the most flagrant disrespect toward them. Such blasphemous acts of lese majesty seldom went unpunished. Like parents admonishing children with gruesome moral fables, or like Dante or Hieronymus Bosch with their cautionary hellscapes, the ancient Greeks seemed to relish the details and delightful aptness of the often elaborate and excruciating tortures that Olympus and Hades reserved for those men and women whose transgressions most aggravated them.

Ixion

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. Few mortals showed more contempt for its principles than Ixion, King of the Lapiths, an ancient tribe from Thessaly.

His first crime was one of simple greed. We are familiar with the idea of dowries, the practice of families of prospective brides paying to have their daughters taken off their hands. In the very earliest days things were done the other way around: Prospective husbands paid the bride's family for the right to marry their daughter.

Ixion wed the beautiful DIA but refused to pay her father, King Marsyas of Phocis, the agreed bride-price. In retaliation the affronted Deioneus sent a raiding party to take a herd of Ixion's best horses. Hiding his vexation beneath a wide smile, Ixion invited Deioneus to dinner at his palace in Larissa. When he arrived Ixion pushed him into a fiery pit.

This flagrant breach of the rules of hospitality was trumped by the even grosser sin of blood killing. The slaying of a family member was considered a taboo of the most heinous kind. With this action Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad.

The princes, lords, and neighboring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him. The King of the Gods, though, was in a surprisingly forgiving mood. The people of Thessaly had acted quickly to show their revulsion at Ixion's double crime of xenia abuse and kin-slaying. Zeus was minded to be merciful. He not only released Ixion from his torment but went so far as to invite him to a banquet on Olympus.

Such an honor was rare for mortals. The glamour and grandeur of an Olympian feast were beyond anything Ixion would have seen before. He was especially bowled over by the queenly beauty of Hera. Whether it was the intoxicating effects of the great occasion or the wine, nobody could afterward decide—perhaps it was nothing more than congenital boorish idiocy—but far from behaving with the modest gratitude you might expect of any mortal invited to the immortal dinner table, Ixion committed the catastrophic error of trying to seduce the Queen of Heaven. He blew Hera kisses, winked at her, tried to nibble her ear, whispered lewd remarks, and made concerted grabs at her breasts. He not only insulted the most dignified and proper of the Olympians but he once more transgressed the laws of xenia. Failing in the duties as a guest was considered as heinous as failing in the duties of a host.

After Ixion had staggered down from Olympus, slapping backs and belching out thanks, an offended Hera told Zeus of the outrage upon her honor. Zeus was equally incensed. He decided to lay a trap for Ixion. The Cloud Gatherer gathered a cloud and sculpted it into an anatomically exact and fully working likeness of Hera. He blew on it, animating it into life and sent it down to a meadow outside Larissa, where he had seen Ixion sprawled asleep on the grass, snoring off the effects of the banquet.

When Ixion awoke to find Hera beside him, he rolled over and coupled with her there and then. At the sight of this unspeakable blasphemy Zeus sent down a thunderbolt and a fiery wheel. The thunderbolt blasted Ixion into the air and pinned him to the wheel, which Zeus sent spinning across the heavens. In time the firmament was deemed too good for him and Ixion, bound to his wheel of fire, was sent down to Tartarus, where he revolves, spread-eagled and roasting in agony to this very day.

The Hera-Cloud was given the name Arne. Her union with Ixion produced a son, Kalisto, an ugly and misshapen boy who grew into a lonely and unhappy man who took his pleasure, not with humans, but with the wild mares of Mount Pelion, where he liked to roam. The untameable and savage progeny of this unnatural union between man and horse were named, after him,"centaurs."

Consequences

Many of the Greek myths lead to cascades of consequences. As we have already seen, leading figures in one story will go on to marry and found dynasties from whom are born yet more legendary heroes. And there are plenty of subsidiary myths that spin off from the Wheel of Ixion.

While on the subject of Mount Pelion, for example, it is worth mentioning the story of Ifimedia, who was so in love with Poseidon that she would regularly sit by the shore, scooping up seawater and pouring it over her breasts and into her lap. Poseidon was touched by this show of adoration and swept out of the ocean in an embracing wave to conjoin with her. Twin sons were born, OTUS and Efialtes. They were true giants in our modern sense: As boys they grew by the breadth of a human hand every month. It was clear that when they reached manhood they would be the largest beings alive.

As you will recall, the jealous and ambitious Poseidon had always kept in mind the possibility that one day his younger brother Zeus might slip up and be toppled from his throne. The sea god put in the heads of his fast-growing boys the idea of challenging heaven by creating their own mountain from which to rule the world. Their plan was to pull up Mount Ossa and heap it on Olympus. On top of Ossa they would pile Mount Pelion. But before the twins had grown to the full height and strength necessary to achieve this, word reached Zeus of the possibility of their rebellion and Apollo was sent to fell them with arrows. Their punishment in the underworld was to be bound to pillars with writhing snakes.

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, by whom she bore two sons, Fricksus 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.

The Wheel of Ixion became a popular subject for artists and sculptors and the phrase “a wheel of fire” is sometimes used to describe an agonizing burden, punishment, or duty. The expression “to pile Pelion on Ossa” is seen too, meaning to add difficulty to difficulty.

Tantalus

Perhaps the best-known torment the gods ever devised is that which was dreamed up for the wicked King Tantalus. The consequences of his crimes had ramifications that rang down through the years. The curse upon his house was not lifted until the very end of the mythic age.

Tantalus ruled the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor, the region later known as the Turkish province of Anatolia. Mineral deposits from nearby Mount Sipylus had yielded him enormous riches, from which he established a prosperous city that he immediately called Tantalis. He married DIONE (one of the Hyades, or rain nymphs, who had suckled the infant Dionysus) and by her had a son, Pelops, and a daughter, Niobe.

Either there was a kink in Tantalus's personality or his power and wealth had fooled him into believing himself equal to the gods. Like Ixion before him he made the mistake of abusing Zeus's hospitality, in his case by returning from a banquet on Olympus with stolen ambrosia and nectar in his pockets. He also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip.

But then he committed a blood murder, one even worse than Ixion's crime of casting his father-in-law into a pit of burning coals. Hearing that the Olympians were furious at his mockery and the theft of their nectar and ambrosia, he made a great show of repentance and begged that they accept his own hospitality in recompense for his misconduct.

Now, all of this took place around the time Demeter was searching for her abducted daughter Persephone. In her grief she had allowed all growing things to wither and die. The world was barren and infertile and no one knew how long this would last. The prospect of a feast came as a welcome excitement. Knowing of the opulent and ostentatious lifestyle of King Tantalus, the gods were greatly looking forward to the legendary pleasures of his table. They were in for a shock.

As the Pelasgian king Lycaon had done before him, Tantalus served up his own son to the gods. The young Pelops was killed, jointed, roasted, slathered in a rich sauce, and set before them. They sensed instantly that something was wrong and declined to eat. But Demeter, whose mind was wholly on her lost daughter, distractedly picked at and ate the boy's left shoulder.

When Zeus understood what had happened, he summoned one of the three Fates, Clotho, the spinner. She collected the body parts, stirred them in a great cauldron, and put them back together. Demeter, awakened to her dreadful lapse, commissioned Hephaestus to carve a shoulder from ivory to replace the one she had consumed.

Clotho attached the prosthetic, which fitted perfectly. Zeus breethd into the boy's body and Pelops stirred back into life.

Pelops's great beauty attracted Poseidon, and for a while they became lovers. Yet darker forces were at work with the youth, and his later life and deeds called down a curse upon him and all his house. Compounded with the curse earned by the abominable crime of Tantalus, this curse was to pursue his descendants down to the last of their line, Orestes.

Tantalus himself was dispatched straight to Tartarus and punished in a manner befitting one who dared tempt the gods into feasting on the flesh of the victim of a blood crime. He was placed in a pool of water up to his waist. Above his head waved the bough of a tree from which hung luscious and appetizing fruits.

Hunger and thirst raged within him, but every time he stretched up to take a bite, the branch would swing out of his reach. Every time he stooped to drink, the waters of the pool would shrink back to deny him. He could not move away, for above him, threatening to crush him if he dared try to escape, hovered a great stone of the hard glaucous element that would one day be called"tantalum."

There Tantalus stands to this day, agonizingly close to satisfaction, but always denyed it, enacting the tortured frustration that bears his name—tantalized, but never satisfied, until the end of time.

147. Only one such equine-human hybrid had been seen on earth before: the great Chiron, tutor to Asclepius, Achilles, and many others. Chiron's birth could be traced back to the time of Kronos, son of Ouranos and Gaia, father of Zeus and Hera. During a lull in the Titanomachy, Kronos fell for Fileera, an Oceanid of great beauty. She repelled his advances until, tiring of her bashfulness, he transformed himself into a great black stallion and took her against her will. Chiron was the offspring of this union and—despite pre-dating Centauros by many hundreds of years—he is referred to as a centaur by convention.

148. Athamas was a brother of Sisyphus, the reason for whose infamy we shall soon see.

149. Shakespeare's King Lear cries out:

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

150. There was another son, Broteas, who liked to hunt and whose life seems to have been uneventful compared to that of his siblings. He is said to have carved a figure of Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess, into the rock of Mount Sipylus. Parts of it are still visible to the tourist today.

151. The Olympians may have subsisted on ambrosia and nectar, but they took great delight in the variety offered by mortal diets too.

152. Named by historical convention the house of Atreus, after one his sons. The fall of the house of Pelops and Atreus involves the destinies of many heroes and warriors right down to the Trojan war and its aftermath. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes were all descended from Pelops and said to have inherited his and Tantalus's curse. Pelops's name lives on, of course, in the Peloponnese, the great peninsula to the south west of the Grecian mainland.

153. Tantalum is one of those refractory metals that is essential these days in the manufacture of many of our electronic devices.

154. A tantalus is a small cabinet containing two or three drinks decanters, usually of brandy, whisky, or rum. The drinks are on display but the cabinet is locked, and thus tantalizingly out of the reach of the children of the household.

Sis￥Phus

Brotherly Love

The eternal punishment Sisyphus endures in Hades has also entered language and lore, but there is much more to his story than the famous stone he is doomed endlessly and fruitlessly to push uphill. Sisyphus was a wicked, greedy, duplicitous, and often cruel man, but who cannot find something appealing—heroic even—in the unquenchable zest and fist-shaking defiance with which he lived (in fact outlived) his life? Few mortals dared to try the patience of the gods in so reckless a fashion. His foolhardy contempt and refusal to apologize or conform put one in mind of a Grecian Don Giovanni.

Deucalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of the Great Flood, had had a son named Hellen, after whom the Greeks to this day call themselves Hellenes. Hellen's son Ayolus had four sons—Sisyphus, Salmonyus, Athamas, and Cretheus. Sisyphus and Salmoneus hated each other with as visceral and implacable a hatred as the human world had yet witnessed. Rivals in their parents' affections, rivals in everything, from the cradle neither could bear to see the other succeed. The two princes outgrew their father's realm of Aeolia, as Thessaly was called in those days, and moved south and west to found their own kingdoms. Salmoneus ruled over Elis and Sisyphus established Ephyra, later called Corinth. From these fastnesses, they glared at each other across the Peloponnese, their bitter enmity growing with each passing year.

Sisyphus hated Salmoneus so much it robbed him of his sleep. He wanted him dead, dead, dead. The desire was so agonizing he stabbed himself repeatedly in the thigh with a dagger to relieve himself of it. But there was nothing he could do. The Furies would avenge themselves terribly if he dared murder a brother. Fratricide was amongst the worst of the blood crimes. Eventually he decided to consult the oracle at Delphi.

"Sons of Sisyphus and Tyro rise to slay Salmoneus," intoned the Pythia.

This was sweet music to Sisyphus's ears. TYRO was his niece, daughter of his hated brother Salmoneus. All Sisyphus had to do was marry and get sons from her. Sons who would “rise to slay Salmoneus.” Uncles could marry nieces without raising any eyebrows in those days and so he set about beguiling and seducing Tyro with horses, jewels, poems, and oceans of personal charm, for Sisyphus was nothing if not captivating when he chose to be. In due course his wooing won her, they wed, and she bore him two bouncing boys.

One day some years later, Sisyphus was out fishing with his friend Melops. Sunning themselves on the banks of the River Sythas, they fell into conversation. At exactly the same time, Tyro set out from the palace with a maid, the two boys—now aged five and three—and a hamper of food and wine, with the idea of surprising Sisyphus with a family picnic.

Back on the riverbank, Melops and Sisyphus talked lazily about horses, women, sport, and war. Tyro's group made their way across the fields.

“Tell me, sire,” said Melops, “it has always surprised me that despite your bitter feud with King Salmoneus, you chose to marry his daughter. For all that I can tell, you still dislike him as much as ever.”

“Dislike him? I abominate, loathe, despise, and abhor him,” said Sisyphus with a loud laugh. A laugh that allowed the approaching Tyro to draw a bead on his exact position. As her party drew nearer she could now hear every word her husband spoke.

“I only married that bitch Tyro because I hate Salmoneus so much,” he was saying. “You see, the oracle at Delphi told me that if I had sons by her they would grow up to kill him. So when he dies by the hand of his own grandchildren I will be rid of my vile pig of a brother without fear of the pursuit of the Erinyes.”

“That is . . .” Melops tried to find the word.

“Brilliant? Cunning? Ingenious?”

Tyro checked her sons, who were about to run to the spot from which they could hear their father's voice. Turning them round she pushed them at speed toward a bend in the river, the maid following behind.

Tyro had swallowed Sisyphus's charm whole, but she loved her father Salmoneus with a loyalty that overrode any other consideration. The idea of allowing her sons to grow up to kill their grandfather was out of the question. She knew how to defy the oracle's prophecy.

“Come child,” she said to the eldest, “look down at the stream. Can you see any little fishes?”

The small boy knelt on the riverbank and looked down. Tyro put a hand to his neck and pushed him under. When he had stopped struggling she did the same to the youngest.

“Now,” she said quite calmly to the traumatized maid, “this is what you will do…”

Sisyphus and Melops caught plenty of fish that afternoon. Just as the light was fading and they had started to pack up for the day, Tyro's maidservant appeared before them, bobbing a nervous curtsey.

“Beg pardon, majesty, but the Queen asks that you might greet the princes. They are by the riverbank, awaiting your majesty. Just behind the willow tree, sire.”

Sisyphus went to the place indicated to find his two sons lying stretched out on the grass, pale and lifeless.

The maid ran for her life and was never heard of again. Tyro, by the time the enraged Sisyphus had reached the palace with drawn sword, was safely on her way to her father's kingdom of Elis. On her arrival home Salmoneus married her to his brother Cretheus, with whom she was deeply unhappy.

Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus's power to summon storms, he'd ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons, and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skyward at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils, and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus.

Sisyphean Tasks

Sisyphus held a great feast to celebrate the death of his preposterous thunder-making brother. The morning after, he was awoken by a deputation of aggrieved lords, landowners, and tenant farmers. After he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and cleared his headache with a goblet of unwatered wine he consented to hear what might be the matter.

“Majesty, someone is stealing our cattle! Each one of us can report a loss. Your own royal herds are depleted too. You are a wise and clever king. Surely you can find out who is responsible?”

Sisyphus dismissed them with a promise to investigate. He had a very good idea that the thief was his neighbor Autolikus, but how to prove it? Sisyphus was guileful and smart, but Autolycus was a son of Hermes himself, the prince of robbers and rascals, the god who as an infant had rustled Apollo's cattle. From Hermes, Autolycus had inherited not only this propensity to take cows that didn't belong to him, but also powers of enchantment that made it very difficult to catch him in the act. Besides, the cattle that Sisyphus and his neighbors had lost were brown and white and generously horned, while those of Autolycus were black and white and entirely hornless. It was baffling, but Sisyphus was sure that spells taught by Hermes were behind it and that Autolycus was secretly color-changing stolen cows.

“Very well,” he said to himself, “we shall see which proves the more powerful, the cheap magic of a trickster god's bastard or the native wit and intelligence of Sisyphus, founder of Corinth, the cleverest king in the world.”

He commanded that all his and his neighbors' cattle should have the words "Autolikus Stole me" carved into their hoofs in tiny lettering. Over the next seven nights, as expected, the local herds continued regularly to be depleted. On the eighth day Sisyphus and the leading landowners paid Autolycus a visit.

“Greetings, my friends!” their neighbor cried with a cheery wave. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“We have come to inspect your cattle,” said Sisyphus.

“By all means. Are you thinking of breeding black and whites yourself? My pedigree herd is unique in the region, they tell me.”

“Oh, it's unique all right,” returned Sisyphus. “Whoever saw hoofs like this?” He lifted the foreleg of one of the cows.

Autolycus leaned forward, read the words carved into the hoof, and gave a cheerful shrug. "Ah," he said. "Fun while it lasted."

“Take them all,” commanded Sisyphus. As the landowners led the animals away, Sisyphus looked toward Autolycus's house. “I think I'll help myself to all your cows,” he said. “Every last heifer.” By which he meant Amfithea, Autolycus's wife.

Sisyphus was not a good man.

The Eagle

The achievement of outsmarting the progeny of the trickster god went to Sisyphus's head. He began to believe that he really was the cleverest and most resourceful man in the world. He set himself up as a kind of royal problem-solver, pronouncing on all manner of issues brought to him and charging enormous sums for his rulings. But there is a difference between guile and good sense, cunning and judgment, quick-wittedness and wisdom.

Do you recall the Asopos? It was in the waters of this Boeotian river that the Theban priestess Semele had washed, attracting the attentions of Zeus and bringing about the birth of Dionysus. Unhappily the god of that river had a daughter, Aygina, who was beautiful enough to catch Zeus's eye. In the form of an eagle the god swooped down and seized the girl, taking her to an island off the coast of Attica. The distraught river god searched everywhere for her, asking everyone he met if they had seen any sign of his beloved daughter.

“A young girl, dressed in goatskin, you say?” responded Sisyphus when his turn came to be pressed for information. “Why, yes, I saw just such a maiden snatched up by an eagle not long ago. She had been bathing in the river when he dived out of the sun . . . It was the most—”

"Where did he take her? Did you see?"

"Are those bracelets real gold? I must say they are very fine."

“Take them, they are yours. Only for pity's sake tell me what happened to Aegina.”

“I was high on a hill so I saw the whole thing. The eagle took her to—that ring of yours, an emerald, is it? Why thank you, now let me see . . . Yes, they flew across the sea and landed there, on that island. Come to the window.

You can just make it out on the horizon, see? Oenone, they call the island, I believe. That's where you'll find them. Oh, are you leaving?”

Asopos chartered a boat and made his way to the island. He hadn't made it halfway over before Zeus saw him coming and sent a thunderbolt across his bows. Its blast swept Asopos and his boat in a great tidal bore up his own estuary and into his river.

But Sisyphus! Zeus had had his eye on that villain for some time. It had not gone unnoticed to the god of xenia that Sisyphus had a history of abusing the guests that traveled in his lands. Taxing them, plundering their treasures, making free with their women, shamelessly transgressing every canon of the sacred laws of hospitality. And now he presumed to interfere in matters that were none of his business, to meddle in the affairs of his betters, to tell tales on the King of the Gods himself. It was time to take measures. An example must be set that would serve as a warning to others. Death and damnation to him.

Despite Sisyphus's royal blood, his life had been too wicked, too shameless, Zeus ruled, to merit the dignity of his being conducted to the underworld by Hermes. Instead Thanatos, Death himself, was sent to shackle and escort him.

Cheating Death

Inasmuch as so gloomy a spirit was capable of so cheerful an emotion, Thanatos always enjoyed that moment when he manifested himself in front of those marked down for death.

Appearing before them, and visible to no one else, his gaunt form cloaked in black, wisps of hellish gasses streaming from him, he would stretch out his arm to his victims with a cruelly deliberate slowness. The moment he touched their flesh with the tip of his bony finger there would come a piteous whimper from the soul within them. Thanatos took great delight in watching his victim's skin go pale and the eyes flutter and film over as life was extinguished. Above all he loved the sound of the soul's last shuddering sigh as it emerged from its mortal carcass and submitted itself to his manacles, ready to be led away.

Sisyphus, like most wily, ambitious schemers, was a light sleeper. His mind was always turning, and the slightest noise could jerk him awake. Thus it was that even the silent whisper of Death gliding into his bedchamber caused him to sit up.

"Who the hell are you?"

“Who the hell indeed? The Hell is just who I am. Mwahahaha!” Thanatos unloosed the sinister, ghoulish laugh that so often sent dying mortals screaming mad.

“Stop groaning. What's the matter with you? Have you got toothache? Indigestion? And don't talk in riddles. What is your name?”

“I haven't got all night.”

"My name is ..."

“Have you even got a name?”

“Thanatos.”

“Oh, so you're Death, are you? Hm.” Sisyphus seemed unimpressed. “I thought you'd be taller.”

“Sisyphus, son of Aeolus,” Thanatos intoned in quelling accents, “King of Corinth, Lord of . . .”

“Yes, yes, I know who I am. You're the one who seems to have trouble remembering his name. Sit down, why don't you? Take the weight off your feet.”

"My weight is not on my feet. I am hovering."

Sisyphus looked down at the floor. "Oh yes, so you are. And you've come for me have you?"

Not confident that any words of his would be received with the respect and awe they deserved, Thanatos showed Sisyphus his manacles and shook them threateningly in his face.

“So you've brought shackles along. Iron?”

“Steel. Unbreakable steel. Fetters forged in the fires of Hephaestus by Ste-ropes the Cyclops. Enchanted by my lord Hades. Whomsoever they bind cannot be unbound save by the god himself.”

“Impressive,” Sisyphus conceded. “But in my experience nothing is unbreakable. Besides, there isn't even a lock or catch.”

“The hasp and spring are too cunningly contrived to be seen by mortal eyes.”

“So you say. I don't believe for a second that they work. I bet you can't close them round even your skinny arm. Go on, try.”

Such open ridicule of his prized manacles could not be borne. “Foolish man!” cried Thanatos. “Such intricate devices are beyond the understanding of a mortal. See here! Round my back once and pass in front. Easy. Bring my wrists together, then close up the bracelets. And if you would be good enough to press just here, to engage the clasp, there's an invisible panel and . . . behold!”

“Yes, I see,” said Sisyphus thoughtfully. “I do see. I was wrong, quite wrong. What superb workmanship.”

“Oh.”

Thanatos tried to wave the manacles, but his whole upper body was now constrained and immobile. “Er … help?”

Sisyphus sprang from his bed and opened the door of a large wardrobe at the end of the room. It was the simplest thing in the world to send the hovering, tightly bound Thanatos across the room. With one push he had glided in and bumped his nose on the back of the closet.

Turning the key on him Sisyphus called out cheerily. “The lock to this wardrobe may be cheap and manmade, but I can assure you that it works as well as any fetters forged in the fires of Hephaestus.”

Muffled despairing cries came, begging to be let out, but with a hearty "Mwahahaha" Sisyphus skipped away, deaf to Death's entreaties.

“My name . . .” Thanatos paused for effect. “My name . . .”

Life Without Death

The first few days of Thanatos's imprisonment passed without incident. Neither Zeus nor Hermes nor even Hades himself thought to verify that Sisyphus had been checked in to the infernal regions as arranged. But when a whole week passed without the arrival of any new dead souls, the spirits and demons of the underworld began to murmur. Another week went by and not a single departed shade had been admitted for processing, save one venerable priestess of Artemis, whose blameless life merited the honor of a personal escort to Elysium by Hermes, the Psychopomp. This sudden stemming of the flow of souls quite perplexed the denizens of Hades, until someone remarked that they hadn't seen Thanatos in days. Search parties were sent out, but Death could not be found. Such a thing had never happened before. Without Thanatos the whole system collapsed.

In Olympus opinion was divided. Dionysus found the whole situation hilarious and drank a toast to the end of lethal cirrhosis of the liver. Apollo, Artemis, and Poseidon were more or less neutral on the subject.

Demeter feared that Persephone's authority as Queen of the Underworld was being flouted. The seasons over which mother and daughter had dominion required that life be constantly ended and begun again, and only the presence of death could achieve this. The impropriety of such a scandal made Hera quite indignant, which made Zeus restive in turn. The usually merry and irrepressible Hermes was anxious too, for the smooth running of the underworld was partly his responsibility.

But it was Ares who found the situation most intolerable. He was outraged. He looked down and saw battles being fought in the human realm with their customary ferocity, yet no one was dying.

Warriors were being run through with javelins, trampled by horses, gutted by chariot wheels, and beheaded by swords but they would not die. It made a mockery of combat. If soldiers and civilians did not die, why then—war had no point. It settled nothing. It achieved nothing. Neither side in a battle could ever win.

Lesser deities were as divided over the issue as the Olympians. The Keres continued to drink the blood of those felled in battle and could not care less what happened to their souls. Two of the Horai, Diké and Eunomia, agreed with Demeter that the absence of death upset the natural order of things. Their sister Eirene, the goddess of peace, could barely contain her delight. If the absence of Death meant the absence of war then surely her time had come?

Ares nagged his parents Hera and Zeus with such incessant clamor that at last they could bear it no longer. They declared that Thanatos must be found. Hera demanded to know when he had last been seen.

“Surely, Hermes,” said Zeus, “it wasn't so long ago that you sent him to fetch the soul of that black-hearted villain Sisyphus?”

“Damn!” Hermes slapped his thigh in annoyance. “Of course! Sisyphus. We sent Thanatos to chain him up and escort him to Hades. Wait here.”

The wings at Hermes' heels fluttered, flickered, and hummed and he was gone.

He returned in the blink of an eye. “Sisyphus never reached the underworld. Thanatos was sent to Corinth to fetch him half a moon ago and neither has been seen since.”

“Corinth!” roared Ares. “What are we waiting for?”

The locked wardrobe in the bedchamber was soon found and wrenched open, revealing a humiliated Thanatos sitting tearfully in the corner under some cloaks. Hermes took him to the infernal regions where Hades waved his hand to release the enchanted manacles.

“We will speak about this later, Thanatos,” he said. “For the moment a logjam of souls awaits you.”

“First let me fetch that villain Sisyphus, sire,” pleaded Thanatos. “He won't be able to trick me twice.”

Hermes arched an eyebrow, but Hades looked across to Persephone, sitting in her throne next to his. She nodded. Thanatos was her favorite amongst all the servants of the underworld.

“Just make sure you don't foul it up,” grunted Hades, dismissing him with a wave of the hand.

Burial Rites

We have established that Sisyphus was no fool. He did not imagine for a second that Thanatos would stay locked in his closet for eternity. Sooner or later Death would be released and set upon his trail once more.

In the town villa in which he had made temporary lodging, Sisyphus addressed his wife. After his niece Tyro drowned his sons and left him he had married again. His new young queen was as kindly and obedient as Tyro had been willful and contrary.

“My dear,” he said, drawing her to him, “I feel that soon I shall die. When I have breethd my last and my soul has fled what will you do?”

“I will do what must be done, my lord. I will wash and anoint you. I will place an obolus on your tongue so that you might pay the ferryman. We will stand guard seven days and seven nights over your catafalque. Burnt offerings will be made to please the King and Queen of the Underworld. And in this way your journey to the Meadows of Asphodel shall be a blessed one.”

“You mean well, but that is exactly what you must not do,” said Sisyphus. “The moment I am dead I want you to strip me naked and have me thrown into the street.”

“My lord!”

“I am quite serious. Deadly serious. This is my desire, my entreaty, my command. No matter what anyone else says, you will send up no prayers, make no sacrifices, perform no obsequies. Treat my remains as you would those of a dog. Promise me that.”

“But_ _”

Sisyphus took her by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes to reinforce the earnestness of his commands. “As you love me and are bound to me, as you hope never to be haunted by my angry shade, promise to do exactly as I have said. Swear it on your soul.”

“I—I swear it.”

“It is good. Now, let us drink. A toast—“To life!”

His timing, as ever, was impeccable, for that very evening Sisyphus was awoken by the whisper of Death at his bedside.

"Your time is come, Sisyphus of Corinth."

"Ah, Thanatos. I've been expecting you."

"Do not hope to trick me."

“Me? Trick you?” Sisyphus stood and bowed in meek submission, putting up his wrists for shackling. “Nothing could be further from my mind.”

The manacles were attached and the pair glided down to the mouth of the underworld. Thanatos left Sisyphus at the near bank of the Styx and departed, anxious to make headway with the great backlog of souls that were awaiting collection.

Charon the ferryman sculled his boat across and Sisyphus stepped aboard. As he poled the boat off the bank, Charon stretched out his palm.

"Nothing doing," said Sisyphus, patting his pockets.

Without a word Charon pushed him overboard into the blackness of the Styx. It was cold, abominably cold, but Sisyphus managed to get across. The waters burned and blistered his skin almost beyond endurance, but once he was on the other side he knew that he presented just such a piteous sight as he had intended.

Shades flitted past him, averting their eyes.

“Which way to the throne room?” he asked of one. Following their directions he found himself in the presence of Persephone.

"Dread queen," Sisyphus inclined his head. "I beg an audience with Hades."

“My husband is in Tartarus today. I speak for him. Who are you and how can you dare stand before me in this condition?”

Sisyphus was naked, an ear was torn off, and one of his eyes hung down from its socket. His spectral body was covered in bite marks, welts, bruises, gashes, and open sores, testimony to its physical counterpart's rough treatment on the streets of Corinth above. His wife had obeyed his instructions.

“Madam,” he bowed low before Persephone, “no one feels the impropriety of this as keenly as I. My wife, my spiteful, wicked, monstrous, blasphemous wife—it is she who has brought me to this pitiable state. Even as I lay dying I heard her say to her women, 'We will not waste gold on burial rites. The gods of the underworld are nothing to us. Throw his body outside for the dogs to eat. Spend the money he set aside for his funeral on a great feast. The heifers he kept for sacrificing to Hades and Persephone shall be roasted for our pleasure.' She laughed and clapped her hands, and those, dread queen, were the last sounds I heard in the world."

Persephone was outraged. "She dared? She dared? She shall be punished."

“Aye, majesty. But how?”

“Flayed alive...”

“Yes. Not bad. But I say, permit me, wouldn't it be funny—” Sisyphus smiled as an idea struck him, “—wouldn't it be funny if you returned me to the upper world alive? Imagine her shock!”

“Hm...”

“And I would make sure that every day she paid for her insolence and disrespect. No gold or feasting, nothing but harsh treatment, insults, and servitude. I can't wait to see her face when I appear in front of her, alive and well and whole … and perhaps … perhaps even more youthful and vital and handsome than ever?

She is only twenty-six, but imagine her torment if I outlived her! I would use her as my slave. Every day would be torture to her.”

Persephone smiled at the thought and clapped her hands. “Let it be so.” The years spent in the underworld had given Persephone a regal pride and rigid belief in the proper running of the infernal kingdom.

And thus it was that Sisyphus was led out to the upper world where he and his delighted queen lived happily ever after.

His death, when it finally did come, was another matter.

Rolling the Rock

Zeus, Ares, Hermes, and Hades had not been pleased when they found out how Sisyphus had evaded death for a second time. Persephone had made her decision, however, and the ruling of one immortal could not be undone by another.

When, after nearly fifty more years of serene and prosperous living, Sisyphus's wife's mortal span came at last to its end, the contract between Persephone and Sisyphus expired with her. Thanatos paid him a third and final visit.

This time Sisyphus gave Charon the fee and crossed the Styx in good order. Hermes awaited him on the farther bank.

“Well, well, well. King Sisyphus of Corinth. Liar, fraud, rogue, and trickster. A man after my own heart. No mortal has managed to cheat death once—you contrived to do it twice. Clever you.”

Sisyphus bowed.

“Such an achievement deserves a chance at immortality. Follow me.”

Hermes led Sisyphus down innumerable passageways and galleries to a vast underground chamber. A great ramp sloped up from the floor to the ceiling. A boulder stood at the bottom, lit by a shaft of light.

"The upper world," said Hermes indicating the source of the light.

Sisyphus saw that the slope led up to a square inlet high in the roof through which a beam of daylight shone. As Hermes pointed the inlet closed up and the shaft of light disappeared.

“Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live forever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.”

“That's it?”

“That's it,” said Hermes. “Of course, if you don't like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. Make your choice. An idyllic afterlife down here or a shot at immortality above.”

Sisyphus examined the boulder. It was bulky, but not colossally so. The slope was steep, but not precipitously. Forty-five degrees of gradient, but no more.

So. An eternity skipping though the fields of Elysium with the dull and well behaved or eternity up above in the real world of fun, filth, frolic, and frenzy?

“No tricks?”

“No tricks, no pressure,” said Hermes, putting his hand on Sisyphus's shoulder and flashing his most dazzling smile. “Your choice.”

You know the rest. Sisyphus put his shoulder to the boulder and began to push it up the slope. Halfway there and he was confident that life eternal was assured.

Three-quarters done and he was tired, but not blown. Four-fifths and . . . damn, this was hard work. Five-sixths, pain. Six-sevenths, agony. Seven-eighths . . . He was within an inch of the top now, within a fingernail's length, just one more supreme effort and . . . Noooooooo! The stone slipped, bounced over Sisyphus and rolled down to the bottom. "Well, not bad for a first effort," Sisyphus thought to himself. "If I take my time, if I conserve my strength, I can get there. I know I can. I'll discover a technique. Maybe I'll go up backward, taking the weight on my back. I can do this..."

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free.

Painters, poets, and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind's courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance, and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.

155. The rascally entertainer, pickpocket, tinker, and “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is called Autolycus.

156. This violation of Amphithea gave rise to the rumor that Sisyphus was the true father of Autolycus's daughter Antiklea. Anticlea begat Laertes and Laertes begat the great hero Odyssues also known as Ulysses, who was known above all for his wiliness and resource.

157. Asopos had charge of at least two rivers. There was the one in Boeotia that watered Thebes, and this one, which ran through Corinth.

Hubris

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.

All Tears

You may remember that Pelops was not the only child of Tantalus and Dione. They also had a daughter, Niobe. Despite the terrible fate that befell her father and the bleak adventures of her brother, she was a proud, confident woman. She had met and married Amphion, the son of Zeus and Antiope. He was a former lover of Hermes, you may recall, one of the twins who had constructed the walls of Thebes, enchanting the stones with his singing and strumming of the lyre. Between them Niobe and Amphion had seven daughters and seven sons, the Niobids.

Swollen with dangerous levels of conceit and self-regard, Niobe liked to tell all who would listen how important she was and just how royal and divine her bloodlines were.

“On my mother's side I claim descent from Tethys and Oceanus—they're first-generation Titans, you know. On my father's side, well there's Tmolus, of course, the most highborn of all the Lydian mountain deities. My dear husband Amphion is a son of Zeus, and of Antiope, the daughter of King Niktyus, himself a son of one of the original Theban Spartoi who sprang from the dragon's teeth.

So my darling sons and daughters really can boast the most distinguished lineage, one feels justified in saying, of any family in the world. Not that I ever allow them to boast, of course. The well bred are never puffed up.”

Such foolishness might have been no more than faintly sad were it not that Niobe even presumed to compare herself to the Titaness Leto, mother of gods. On the very day that the people of Thebes gathered annually to sing Leto's praises and tell the story of Artemis and Apollo's miraculous birth on Delos—on that very day, sacred to the Titaness and her dignity—Niobe unburdened herself of her haughtiest broadside.

“I mean, I'd be the first to admit that Leto's dear twins Artemis and Apollo are charming and fully divine, of course they are. But only two children? One girl and one boy?

Good heavens, how she can even call herself a mother I fail to understand. And who's to say that of my seven sons and seven daughters there won't be some, if not all, who will ascend to divine and immortal rank?” Given their birth I think it rather more likely than not, don't you? In my view, celebrations of such a lazy, vulgar, and unproductive mother as Leto are in extremely poor taste. Next year I shall make sure the festival is canceled altogether.”

When word reached Leto that this jumped-up Theban was insulting her in such a fashion, and daring to set herself up over her, she burst into tears in front of her sympathetic twins.

“That terrible, boastful, conceited woman,” she choked. “She called me lazy for having only two children . . . She said I was unproductive . . . and she called me vulgar. She said she would prevent the people of Thebes from celebrating my f-f-festal day . . .”

Artemis put an arm round her while Apollo paced up and down, slamming the ball of his fist into his palm.

“She has fourteen children,” wailed Leto, “so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate . . .”

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

Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion's and Niobe's fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword.

Niobe's grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud, and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. But not even solid rock had the power to hold back such tears as these. Niobe's weeping pushed her tears through the stone and sent them cascading in waterfalls down the mountainside.

Even today, visitors to Sipylus, now called Mount Spil, can see the rock formation in which the outlines of a female face can still be discerned. In Turkish this is known as {A} glayan Kaya or “Weeping Rock.” It looks down on the city of Manisa, the modern name for Tantalis. The waters that gush from this rock will flow forever in their grief.

Apollo and Marsyas: Puffed Cheeks

Mortal humans were not the only beings capable of exhibiting excessive pride. The goddess Athena's injured self-regard led, indirectly, to the downfall of a conceited creature called MARSYAS.

It all began when Athena proudly invented a new musical instrument which she named the aulos. It was a double-reeded pipe of what we would call the woodwind family, not unlike the modern oboe or cor anglais. There was one problem with this splendid instrument: whenever Athena played it—gorgeous as the music that emerged undoubtedly was—it elicited from her fellow Olympians nothing but roars of laughter. There was no way for Athena to get a good sound from it without blowing so hard that her cheeks bulged. To see this goddess, the very personification of dignity, going all pink and swelling up like a bullfrog was more than her disrespectful family could take without howling out loud. Wise as Athena was, and free (for the most part) of affectation and conceit, she was not entirely without vanity and could not bear to be mocked. After three attempts to win the gods over with the mellifluous sounds of her new instrument, she cursed it and cast it down from Olympus.

The aulos fell to earth in Asia Minor, in the kingdom of Phrygia, near the source of the Maeander river (whose winding course lends its name to all mazy, wandering streams), where it was picked up by a satyr called Marsyas. As a follower of Dionysus, Marsyas was gifted with curiosity as well as many more disreputable traits. He dusted the aulos off and blew into it. A small peep was the only result. He laughed and scratched at the tickling buzz in his lips. He puffed and blew hard again until a long, loud musical note was produced. This was fun. He went on his way, blowing and blowing until he could, after a surprisingly short time, play a real tune.

Within a month or two his fame had spread around all of Asia Minor and Greece. He became celebrated as “Marsyas the Musical,” whose skill on the aulos could make trees dance and stones sing.

He revealed in the fame and adulation that his musicianship brought. Like all satyrs he required little more than wine, women, and song to make him happy, and his mastery of the third ensured a ready supply of the other two.

One evening, the fire crackling, Maenads at his feet gazing up adoringly at him, he called drunkenly to the heavens. “Hey there, Apollo! You, god of the lyre! You think you're so musical, but I bet if there was a compishon … a compention … a condition … What's the word?”

“Competition?” suggested a drowsy Maenad.

“One of them, yes. If there was … what she said … I'd win. Easy. Hands down. Anyone can strum a lyre. Boring. But my pipes. My pipes beat your strings any day. So there.”

The Maenads laughed, Marsyas laughed too, belched, and fell into a contented sleep.

The Competition

The next day Marsyas set off with his many followers to Lake Aulocrene. They had arranged to meet other satyrs there for a great feast at which Marsyas would play wild, corybantic dances of his own composition. He would pluck some reeds from the shores of the lake (whose very name testified to their abundance—aulos means “reed” and krene is “fountain” or “spring”) and cut himself a new mouthpiece for his aulos. Piping and dancing he led his followers in a merry trail of music until he turned a corner to find his way blocked by a dazzling and disturbing spectacle.

In the meadow a stage had been erected on which sat the nine Muses in a broad semicircle. At the center of the stage, lyre in hand, stood Apollo, a grim smile playing on his beautiful lips.

Marsyas skidded to a halt, the assorted satyrs, fauns, and Maenads behind bumping into him and each other in a concertina of confusion.

“Well, Marsyas,” said Apollo. “Are you ready to put your brave words to the test?”

“Words? What words?” Marsyas had forgotten his drunken boast of the night before.

“'If there was a competition between me and Apollo,' you said, 'I would beat him hands down.' Now is your chance to find out if that is true. The Muses themselves have traveled from Parnassus to hear us and judge. Their word is final.'”

“B-b-but ... I ...” Marsyas's mouth was suddenly very dry and his legs suddenly very wobbly.

“Are you or are you not a finer musician than I?”

Marsyas heard behind him a murmur of doubt from his followers and the flames of his pride flared up again.

“In a fair contest,” he declared with a burst of bravado, “I can certainly outplay you.”

Apollo's smile widened. "Excellent. Join me up on the stage here. I shall start. Here is a little air. See if you can reply to it."

Marsyas took up a position next to Apollo, who bent to tune his lyre. When this was done he gently strummed and delicately plucked. The most beautiful melody emerged—subtle, sweet, and seductive. It came in four phrases, and as the last one sounded, Marsyas's followers broke into appreciative applause.

Immediately Marsyas put the aulos to his mouth and repeated the phrases. But he gave each a little tweak and modulation—a shower of grace notes here, a riffle of accidentals there. A gasp of admiration from his followers and even a nod from Calliope herself encouraged him to end with a flourish.

Apollo replied at once with a variation on the phrases in double time. The complexity of his picking and strumming was marvelous to the ear, but Marsyas responded with even greater speed, the melody bubbling and singing from his pipes with a magical splendor that provoked yet more applause from the audience.

Now Apollo did something extraordinary. He turned his lyre upside down and played the phrases backward—they still held up as a tune, but now they were imbued with a mystery and a strangeness that enthralled all who heard. When he finished Apollo nodded to Marsyas.

Marsyas had an excellent ear and he started to play the inverted tunes just as Apollo had, but the god interrupted him with a sneer. “No, no, satyr! You must turn your instrument upside down as I did mine.”

“But that's ... that's not fair!” Marsyas protested.

“How about this then?” Apollo played on his lyre and sang, “Marsyas can blow down the infernal thing. But while he does it, can he sing?”

Infuriated, Marsyas played for all he was worth. His face purple with the effort and his cheeks swollen so that it looked as if they must rupture, hundreds of notes exploded in a volley of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes—filling the air with a music that the world had never heard before. But Apollo's divine voice, the chords and arpeggios that flew from the golden strings of his lyre—how could Marsyas's pipes compete with such a sound?

Panting with exhaustion, sobbing with frustration, Marsyas cried aloud, “Not fair! My voice and breath sing into my aulos just as much as your voice sings out into the air. Of course I cannot turn the instrument upside down, but any unbiased judge can tell that my skill is the greater.”

Judgment

With a final glissando of triumph Apollo turned to the jury of Muses. “Sweet sisters, it is not for me to say, it is of course for you to decide. To whom do you award the palm of victory?”

Marsyas was out of control now. Humiliation and a burning sense of injustice drove him to turn on the judges. “They can't be impartial, they are your aunts or your stepsisters or some such incestuous thing. They are family. They will never dare to . . .”

“Hush, Marsyas!” pleaded a Maenad.

“Don't listen to him, great god Apollo!” urged another.

“He's hysterical.”

“He's good and honorable.”

“He means well.”

It did not take the Muses long to confer and to announce the results.

“We unanimously declare,” said Euterpe, “that Apollo is the winner.”

Image summary: A Renaissance-style painting depicting a group of figures in a lush, hilly landscape. In the center, a woman dressed in a short yellow garment holds a viol and looks toward a man seated to her right, who wears a blue tunic over a red cloak. To the left, another woman in a yellow garment interacts with a nude man. In the far right background, a woman in a pink dress sits beside a large vessel. The scene is set outdoors with scattered trees, rocky outcrops, and distant mountains.

To punish Marsyas for his hubris in daring to test an Olympian, Apollo peeled the skin from the Satyr's living body.

Apollo bowed and smiled sweetly. But what he did next might make you forever think less of this golden and beautiful god, the melodious Apollo of reason, charm, and harmony.

He took Marsyas and flayed the skin off him. There is no nice way of saying it. To punish Marsyas for his hubris in daring to challenge an Olympian, he peeled the skin from the living body of the screaming satyr and hung it on a pine tree as a lesson and warning to all.

The “Flaying of Marsyas” became a favorite subject for painters, poets, and sculptors. For some his tale echoes the fate of Prometheus: a symbol of the artist-creator's struggle to match the gods, or of the gods' refusal to accept that mortal artists can outdo the divine.

158. Once he had married Niobe and taken her to Thebes, the city he helped found, Amphion added three strings to that lyre's original four, so that, in honor of her birthplace in Asia Minor, he could play music in what is still called the Lydian mode.

159. 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 Herakles. In later civilizations Roman emperors could be deified, Roman Catholics sanctified, and film actors catasterized in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

160. The rock is limestone, but the element niobium, very similar in composition and characteristics to tantalum, is named after the queen of tears.

161. It is a pleasing coincidence that one of the chief uses of palladium, the element named in Pallas Athena's honor, is in the manufacture of woodwind instruments. Or is it a coincidence? Hm...?

162. Now, if you really cannot stomach the idea of such cruelty from an otherwise so admirable god, you might prefer another reading of the story. The Hungarian philologist and mythographer Károly Kerényi, one of the great pioneers of the study of Greek myth, pointed out that satyrs customarily dressed themselves in pelts of animal skin. He maintains that what Apollo actually did was confiscate the hide from Marsyas so that he had to go naked. That was all.

The punishment was no greater than that. This is an amiable and convincing interpretation but not one that generations of artists ever believed.

163. One version of the myth maintains it was a capricious and sulky Apollo who challenged the gifted Marsyas, not the other way around, making the fable more about divine jealousy than mortal hubris.

Arachne

The Weaver

In a small cottage outside a little town called Hypaepae in the kingdom of Lydia there dwelt a merchant and craftsman called Idmon. He worked in the nearby Ionian city of Colophon as a trader in dyes, specializing in the highly prized color Phocaean purple. His wife had died giving birth to a girl, Araknay. Idmon was as proud of Arachne as ever father was of daughter. For since her early childhood she had shown the most extraordinary skill as a weaver.

Spinning and weaving were naturally of great importance in those days. Next to the growing of food few things were as crucial to human welfare as the reliable manufacture of textiles for clothing and furnishing. And “manufacture” is quite the right word. It literally means “making by hand”—and all such work was done by hand then. Fleece or flax was spun into threads and loaded onto looms to be woven into woolen or linen cloth. It was so much the province of skilled women that the very gender itself was given names in some cultures and languages that reflected the practice. In English we still talk of the “distaff side” of a family, meaning the female line. The distaff was the spindle around which the wool or flax was wound preparatory to spinning. And those who spun were called “spinsters,” a name which once applied without negative connotation to any unmarried woman.

But as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art.

From the very first Arachne's skill at the loom was the talk and pride of all Ionia. The speed and accuracy of her work were astonishing; the assurance and dexterity with which she selected one colored thread after another, almost without looking, stunned the admirers who often crowded into Idmon's cottage to watch her at work. But it was the pictures, patterns, and intricate designs that emerged from under the blur of her shuttle that caused onlookers to burst into spontaneous applause and declare her without equal. The forests, palaces, seascapes, and mountain views she created were so real that you felt you could jump into them. It wasn't only the mortal citizens of Colophon and Hypaepae that came to see her at her loom: Local naials from the River Pactolus and oreads from nearby Mount Tmolus crowded into the cottage and shook their heads in wonder too.

All were agreed that Arachne was the kind of phenomenon that might come only once in five centuries of history. To be so technically skilled was cause for admiration enough, but to be endowed with such taste—she never overdid the use of purples or other costly and showy dyes, for example—that was the miracle.

Such praise as she daily received would have gone to anyone's head. Arachne was not a spoiled or conceited child—in fact when not at the loom she came across as practical and prosaic rather than flighty or temperamental. She understood that she had been given a gift and was not one to claim personal credit for it. But she did value her talent and believed that in rating it at its proper worth she was simply being honest.

“Yes,” she murmured, gazing down at her work one fateful afternoon, “I truly think if Pallas Athena herself were to sit down and spin with me she would find herself unable to match my skill. After all, I do this every day and she only weaves once in a while, for amusement. It's no wonder I am so far her superior.”

With so many nymphs present in the front room of Idmon's cottage you can be sure that news soon got back to Athena of Arachne's ill-chosen words.

: Image summary: A painting depicting a room of women engaged in various activities. In the foreground, a woman sits at a spinning wheel on the left, while another woman in a red skirt sits on the floor and a third woman in a blue skirt sits on a bench on the right. In the background, through an arched opening, other women are visible in a brightly lit gallery or studio, with some interacting near a large canvas or tapestry depicting a landscape with figures.

Arachne, so proud of her weaving, challenged an Olympian to a contest.

The Weave-Off

A week or so later, the usual crowd gathered round her, Arachne sat at the loom completing a tapestry that represented the founding of Thebes. Gasps and moans of appreciation greeted her depiction of the dragon-tooth warriors rising from the earth, but the oohs and aahs of her admirers were interrupted by a loud knocking on the cottage door.

It was opened to reveal a bent and wrinkled old woman. “I do hope I've come to the right place,” she wheezed, dragging in a great sack. “I'm told a wonderful weaver lives here. Ariadne, is it?”

She was invited inside. "Her name is Arachne," they told her, pointing to the girl herself seated at her loom.

"Arachne. I see. May I look? My dear, these are your own? How superb."

Arachne nodded complacently.

The old woman plucked at the weave. “Hard to believe that a mortal could do such work. Surely Athena herself had a hand in this?”

“I hardly think,” Arachne said with a touch of impatience, “that Athena could do anything half so fine. Now, please don't unpick it.”

"Oh, you think Athena inferior to you?"

“In the matter of weaving it's hardly a matter of opinion.”

“What would you say to her if she was here now, I wonder?”

“I would urge her to confess that I am the better weaver.”

“Then urge away, foolish mortal!”

With these words the wrinkles on the ancient face smoothed away, the dull, clouded eyes cleared to a shining grey, and the bent old woman straightened herself into the magnificent form of Athena herself. The crowd of onlookers fell back in stunned surprise. The nymphs in particular shrank into the corners, ashamed and frightened to be seen wasting their time admiring the work of a mortal.

Arachne went very pale and her heart thudded within her, yet outwardly she managed to keep her composure. It was disconcerting to have those grey eyes fixed upon her but all their wisdom and steadiness of gaze could not alter the plain truth.

“Well,” said she with as much calmness in her voice as she could manage, “I've no wish to offend, but it is, I think, undoubtedly true that as an artist of the loom I have no rival, on earth or on Olympus.”

“Really?” Athena arched an eyebrow. “Let's discover then. Would you like to go first?”

“No, please . . .” Arachne vacated her seat and pointed to the loom. “After you.”

Athena examined the frame. “Yes, this will do,” she said. “Phocaean purple, I see. Not bad, but I prefer Tyrian.” So saying she pulled from her sack a quantity of colored wools. “Now then . . .”

Within seconds she was at work. The boxwood shuttle flew back and forth and, magically, wonderful images began to appear. The crowd of people pressed forward. They saw that Athena was bringing to life nothing less than the story of the gods themselves. There was the gelding of Ouranos in all its gory detail; how sticky the blood looked. There the birth of Aphrodite; how fresh and damp the ocean spray. Here was a panel that showed Kronos swallowing Rhea's children, and here another of the infant Zeus being suckled by the she-goat Amalthea. Athena even wove into the tapestry the story of her own birth from Zeus's head. Next came a dazzling depiction of all twelve gods enthroned on Olympus. But she wasn't finished yet.

As if deliberately and publicly to humiliate Arachne for her presumption, Athena now created panels that showed the price paid by mortals for daring to set themselves up as equals or superiors to the gods. In the first she showed Queen Rodope and King Hemus of Thrace, who were changed into mountains for daring to compare their grandeur as a couple to that of Hera and Zeus. And in another panel Athena wove the image of Gerana, Queen of the Pygmies, who proclaimed her beauty and importance to be greater by far than that of the Queen of Heaven and had been transformed by an enraged Hera into a crane-bird. In that same corner she wove a picture of Antigone, who had her hair turned into snakes for a similar act of impudence. Finally Athena adorned the border of her work with designs of olive—the tree holy to her—before standing to receive the acclamation that was her due.

Arachne was gracious enough to join in the applause. Her mind had worked as fast as Athena's shuttle and she knew just what she was going to create. A kind of madness had overcome her. Having found herself in the unlooked-for position of competing against an Olympian goddess, she now wanted to show the world not just that she was the better weaver, but that humans were better than gods in every way.

It maddened her that Athena should present so grandiose a subject as the birth and establishment of the Olympian deities and then depict such clumsy fables of punished hubris. Well, two could play the game of parables. She would show her!

Arachne sat down, cracked her knuckles and began. The first form that came to life beneath her flying fingers was that of a bull. There was a young girl riding it. Another panel showed the bull rising in the air and crossing the sea. The girl looked back over the waves toward young men running in panic to the cliffside. Could it be? Was this scene the ravishing of Europa and were those boys Cadmus and his brothers?

A murmur rose from the onlookers who pressed round on all sides to get a closer look. The following series of images made it all too clear what Arachne was up to. Here was Asteria, daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus, despairingly turning herself into a quail to try and escape the rapacious attentions of Zeus in the shape of an eagle. Next to this Arachne wove a picture of Zeus as a swan insinuating himself around the body of Tindareus's wife Leda. Now he was a dancing satyr chasing the beautiful Antiope; next the lustful god appeared in one of his strangest metamorphoses—a shower of golden rain, in which unlikely manifestation he could be clearly seen impregnating the imprisoned Danae, daughter of King Akrisius of Argos. Many of these ravishings and seductions were the subjects of mortal gossip. For Arachne to be bringing them to life in colored silk was unpardonable. Further scenes of Zeus's depraved career followed—the hapless nymph Aegina and the lovely Persephone molested by him in the form of a speckled snake. The rumor that in this manner Zeus had once taken Persephone, his own daughter by Demeter, had been whispered before, but for Arachne to show it now was sacrilege.

Yet Zeus was not the only god whose tales of degeneracy she wrote in thread. Scenes of Poseidon now appeared, the sea god shown first as a bull, galloping after the frightened ARNE of Thessaly, then disguised as the mortal Enipeus so as to win the lovely Tyro, finally as a dolphin in his pursuit of the enchanting Melantho, daughter of Deucalion.

Apollo's depredations were the next to appear: Apollo the hawk, Apollo the lion, Apollo the shepherd, all despoiling maidens without pity or shame. And Dionysus too was portrayed, disguising himself as a large cluster of grapes to deceive the beautiful Srigone, and in a fit of temper, transforming AlkathoË and the Minyades into bats for daring to prefer a contemplative life to one of frenzied revelry.

All these episodes and more were summoned by Arachne's art. They shared the common theme of the gods taking deceitful and often savage advantage of mortal women. Arachne completed her work by weaving around it a patterned edge of interlacing flowers and ivy leaves. When she was done she calmly pushed the shuttle to one side and stood up to stretch.

The Reward

The onlookers drew back horrified, fascinated, and disturbed. The girl's audacity was breathtaking, but there could be no denying the supreme skill and artistry with which this bold but blasphemous work had been executed.

Athena came forward to examine every inch of the surface and could see no blemish or flaw. It was perfect. Perfect but sacrilegious and impermissible. In silence she ripped the web and tore up every scene. Finally, unable to master her rage, she snatched up the shuttle and hurled it at Arachne's head.

The pain of the shuttle striking her brow seemed to waken Arachne from her trance. What had she done? What madness had possessed her?

She would never be allowed to weave again. She would be made to pay a terrible price for her insolence. The punishments that had been visited on the girls whose fates she had registered in her tapestry would be as nothing to those visited upon her.

She took a length of thick hemp from the floor. “If I cannot weave I cannot live!” she cried and ran from the cottage before anyone could even think of stopping her.

The spectators pressed around the window and the open door and watched in frozen horror as Arachne ran across the grass, swung the rope over the branch of an apple tree, and hanged herself. They turned as one to look at Athena.

A tear rolled down the goddess's cheek. "Foolish, foolish girl," she said.

The crowd of onlookers followed her in appalled silence as she made her way out of the cottage and toward the tree. Arachne was swinging at the end of the rope, her dead eyes bulging from her head.

“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.

I his 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.

164. Lydia is a common setting for many of the myths. The Greeks colonized the area they called Ionia, which included Lydia, and which today we would recognize as the Anatolian region of Turkey.

165. The gods later took pity on her and changed her into a stork. Storks ever after ate snakes, apparently. This was not the Theban Antigone, daughter of Edipus, but a Trojan girl of the same name.

166. Daughters of Minyas, a King of Boeotia. They were Lukesippe, Arsippe, and Alkatho {dot}{E} . A recently discovered species of European bat is named the Myotis alcathoe in her honor. The sisters' fate was often used as a warning to those who were tempted away from a life of Dionysian revelry—we are more likely to expect warnings in the other direction these days.

More Metamorphoses

We have seen the gods transform men and women into animals out of pity, punishment, or jealousy. But, just as they could be as proud and petty as humans, so the gods could be equally motivated by desire. Mortal flesh, as we have seen, was as appealing to them as immortal. Sometimes their urges were little more than primitive lust, but they could fall genuinely in love too. There are many stories of the gods chasing after and transforming the loveliest youths and young women into animals, new plants, and flowers, and even rocks and streams.

Nisus and Scylla

Nisus was a King of Megara, a city on the coast of Attica. He had been granted invincibility in the form of a single lock of purple hair which kept him immune from any human harm. For some reason his kingdom was attacked by the forces of King Minos of Crete.

One day Nisus's daughter, the Princess Silla, caught sight of Minos on board one of his warships as it passed close to the walls of Megara and fell in love with him. So maddened by desire did she become that she decided to steal her father's lock of purple hair and give it to Minos on board his ship; in return he would repay her generosity with love. But once she had stolen the lock Nisus became as vulnerable as any mortal.

And while she was still secretly making her way to Minos, her father was killed in a palace uprising. Minos, far from being pleased by Scylla's act of disloyalty to her own father, was disgusted, and would have nothing to do with her. He kicked her off his ship, hoisted sail and left Megara, vowing never to return.

So overmastering was her passion that even now Scylla could not give up on the man she loved. She swam after Minos, calling pathetically. She mewed and cried so plaintively after him that she was turned into a gull. Such was the humor of the gods that at the same time her father Nisus was transformed into a sea-eagle.

In revenge he has relentlessly harried his daughter across the oceans ever since.

Callisto

Before he was turned into a wolf—as you may recall—during the early days of Pelasgian mankind, King Lycaon of Arcadia had a beautiful daughter called CALLISTO, who was raised as a nymph dedicated to the virgin huntress Artemis.

Zeus had long frothed with desire for this beautiful, unattainable girl and tricked her one day by transforming himself into the very image of Artemis herself. She readily fell into the arms of the great goddess she followed, only to find herself ravaged by Zeus.

Some time later, bathing naked in the river, she was seen by Artemis who, enraged by her follower's state of pregnancy, expelled poor Callisto from her circle. Alone and unhappy she wandered the world, before giving birth to a son, ARCAS. Hera, never one to show mercy to even the most innocent and guileless of her husband's lovers, punished Callisto further by transforming her into a bear.

Some years later Arcas, now a youth, was hunting in the forest when he came upon a great she-bear. He was just about to launch his javelin at her when Zeus intervened to prevent an inadvertent matricide and raised them up into the heavens as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the constellations of the Great Bear and the Little Bear. Hera, still angry, cursed these constellations so that they would never share the same waters which (I am told) explains their permanently opposing circumpolar positions.

Procne and Philomela

King Pandion of Athens had two beautiful daughters, Prokne and Filomela. Procne, the elder, left Athens to marry King Tereus of Thrace, by whom she had a son, ICTYS.

One year, her younger sister Philomela came to Thrace to stay with the family for the whole summer. The dark heart of Tereus, one of the darkest that ever beat, was fiercely disturbed by the beauty of his young sister-in-law and he dragged her to his chambers one night and raped her. Fearful that his wife and the world might discover the hateful crime, Tereus tore out Philomela's tongue. Knowing that she was unable to read and write, he felt safe that she could never communicate to anyone the abominable truth of what had taken place.

But over the next week or so Philomela wove a tapestry in which she depicted for her sister Procne all the details of her violation. The wronged and raging sisters planned a revenge that would match the monstrous evil of the crime. They knew how to hurt Tereus most. He was a violent and repulsive man given to wild rages and unspeakable deprivities, but he had one weakness—his deep love for his boy Ictys. This unbounded affection Procne and Philomela knew well.

Ictys was Procne's son too, but what maternal love she once felt had been quite overwhelmed by hatred and an unquenchable lust for revenge. Abandoning all pity, the sisters went to the child's bedchamber and murdered him in his sleep.

“Philomela will be leaving for Athens soon,” Procne told her husband the next morning. “Why don't we hold a banquet tonight to bid her farewell and to honor the kindly hospitality you have offered her?”

Philomela whimpered and nodded her head vigorously. “She seems to think it would be a good idea too.” Tereus grunted his assent.

At the feast that night a succulent stew was served which the king greedily consumed. He soaked up all its juices with hunks of bread, but found he still had room for more. Just out of arm's reach lay a dish covered by a silver dome.

“What's under that?”

Philomela pushed the dish toward him with a smile.

Tereus lifted the dome and gave a shout of horror when he saw his dead son's head grimacing up at him. The sisters screeched with laughter and exultation. When he realized what had been done to him, and understood why the stew was so deliciously tender, Tereus gave a great roar and snatched down a spear from the wall. The two women ran from the room and cried out to the gods for aid.

As King Tereus chased them out of the palace and down the street he found himself suddenly rising into the air. He was being transformed into a hoopoe bird, and his yells of pain and fury began to sound like forlorn whoops. At the same time, Procne was changed into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.

Although nightingales are famous for the melodious beauty of their song, it is only the male of the species that sings. The females, like tongueless Philomela, remain mute. Many species of swallow are named after Procne to this day and the hoopoe bird still wears a kingly crown.

Ganymede and the Eagle

In the northwest corner of Asia Minor there lay a kingdom called Troad, or Troy, in honor of its ruler King Tros. Troy looked across the Aegean Sea westward to mainland Greece; behind it lay the whole of what is now Turkey and the ancient lands to the east. To the north were the Dardanelles and Gallipoli and to the south the great island of Lesbos. The principal city Ilium (which was to become known simply as the city of Troy) derived its name from Ilos, the eldest son of Tros and his queen Kalirroe, a daughter of the local river god Skamander. Of the royal couple's second boy, Asarakus, little is recorded, but it was their third son, Ganimede, who took the eye and indeed the breath of all who encountered him.

No more beautiful youth had ever lived and moved upon the earth than this Prince Ganymede. His hair was golden, his skin like warm honey, his lips a soft, sweet invitation to lose yourself in mad and magical kisses.

Girls and women of all ages had been known to scream and even to faint when he looked at them. Men who had never in all their lives considered the appeal of their own sex found their hearts hammering, the blood surging and pounding in their ears when they caught sight of him. Their mouths would go dry and they found themselves stammering foolish nonsense and saying anything to try to please him or attract his attention. When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhymed “thighs” with “eyes,” “hips” with “lips,” “youth” with “truth,” “boy” with “joy,” and “desire” with “fire.”

Unlike many born with the awful privilege of beauty, Ganymede was not sulky, petulant, or spoiled. His manners were charming and unaffected. When he smiled, the smile was kind and his amber eyes were lit with a friendly warmth. Those who knew him best said that his inner beauty matched or even exceeded his outer.

Had he not been a prince it is likely that more fuss would have been made of his startling looks and his life would have been made impossible. But because he was the favored son of a great ruler no one dared try to seduce him, and he lived a blameless life of horses, music, sport, and friends. It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all.

They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumors of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn't known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus.

It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always.

Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god.

All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: His presence lit up Olympus.

Zeus dispatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss.

“Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,” Hermes told him. “He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.”

Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him...

But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai “gladdening” and medon “prince” and/or medeon “genitals.” “Ganymede,” the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word “catamite.”

Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover, and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.

Moon Lovers

A word about two immortal sisters. We have met in passing Eos, or Aurora as the Romans called her, and know that her task was to begin each day by flinging wide the gates that let first the god Apollo and then her brother Helios drive the sun-chariot through. Their sister Selene (Luna to the Romans) drove the nocturnal equivalent, the moon-chariot, across the night sky. By Selene, Zeus had fathered two daughters, Pandia (whom Athenians celebrated every full moon) and Ersa (sometimes Herse), the divine personification of the dew.

After Zeus tired of Selene, she fell in love a number of times. A fine, heroic youth called Sefalus caught her eye and she abducted him. She gave no thought to the fact that he was already spoken for—married, in fact, to Prokris, a daughter of Erechtheus, first King of Athens (the issue of Hephaestus's spilled semen), and his queen, Praksithea. Despite Selene's radiant beauty and the luxurious moon palace she installed him in, the kidnapped Cephalus found himself missing his wife Procris dreadfully. No matter what silvery arts of love the goddess of the moon employed, she failed to arouse him. Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife.

All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold...

With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind.

“Aiee,” she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, “it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.”

“What can you mean?”

“Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn't bear thinking about.”

“How little you know her!” Cephalus returned with some heat, “she is as faithful as she is lovely.”

“Ha!” said Selene. “All it takes is honey and money.”

“What's that?”

“Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.”

"How cynical you are."

“I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That's not cynicism, it's realism.”

“But you don't know Procris,” Cephalus insisted. “She's not like other people. She is faithful and true.”

“Pah! She'd leap into bed with anyone when your back's turned. I tell you what . . .” Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. “If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets—I bet she'd be all over you.”

“Never!”

“Up to you, but . . .” Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. “Oh look—there's a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too . . .”

Selene vanished and at that very moment Cephalus found that he was indeed bearded. The change of wardrobe that had inexplicably appeared by the roadside seemed to beckon to him.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Selene's words had planted a seed of doubt. In putting on this absurd costume, Cephalus told himself that he was not yielding to this doubt, but rather setting out to show Selene that her cynicism was misplaced. He and Procris would call up to her that very night as she glided by in her chariot. "How wrong you were, goddess of the moon!" they would cry, "how little you understand a loving mortal heart."

Words to that effect. That would show her.

A short while later, Procris opened the door to a handsome, bearded, helmeted, gowned stranger. She was looking a little haggard and drawn. The sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband had hit her hard. Before she had time to enquire of her visitor, however, Cephalus shouldered his way into the house and dismissed the servants.

"You are a very beautiful woman," he said in a thick Thracian accent.

Procris blushed. "Sir, I must..."

“Come, let us seat ourselves on this couch.”

“Really, I cannot . . ."

"Come now, no one's looking."

She knew that it was pushing the boundaries of hospitable xenia a little further than was called for, but Procris complied. The man was so forceful.

“What's a beauty like you doing all alone in such a big house?” Cephalus picked a fig from a copper bowl, took a lascivious bite from it and dangled the soft juicy half that remained in front of Procris.

As her mouth opened to remonstrate, Cephalus pushed in the squashy figure

“A sight to enflame the gods themselves,” he said. “Be mine!”

"I'm married!" she tried to say through the seeds and pulp.

“Marriage? What's that? I'm a rich man and will give you whatever jewels or ornaments you ask for, if only you will yield. You are so beautiful. And I love you.”

Procris paused. It may have been that she was trying to swallow the remains of the figure It may have been that she was tempted by the offer of precious things. Perhaps she was touched by this sudden and intense declaration of love. The pause was long enough to cause Cephalus to rise in fury, cast off his disguise, and reveal himself.

“So!” he thundered. “This is what happens when you are alone! Dishonorable, deceitful woman!”

Procris stared in disbelief. “Cephalus? Is that you?”

“Yes! Yes, it is your poor husband! This is how you behave when I am away. Go! Leave my sight, faithless Procris. Away with you!”

He lunged forward, shaking his fist, and the terrified Procris fled. Out of the house she ran, out into the woods, never stopping until she collapsed with exhaustion on the fringes of a grove sacred to Artemis.

The goddess discovered Procris lying there the next morning and coaxed from her the story of what had happened.

For a year and a day she stayed with the divine huntress and her retinue of fierce maidens, but at last she could bear it no longer.

“Artemis, you have looked after me, tutored me in the arts of the chase, and shown me how men are always to be shunned. But I cannot lie to you: In my heart I love my husband Cephalus as much as ever I did. He wronged me, but the wrong he did came from his great love for me, and I yearn to forgive him and lie in his arms, his wife once more.”

Artemis was sorry to see her go, but she was in a charitable mood. Not only did she let Procris return to her husband without first plucking her eyes out or feeding her to the pigs (actions that were by no means alien to her) but she bestowed upon her two remarkable gifts to present to Cephalus as a peace offering.

Lailaps and Alopex Teumesios

One of the gifts that Procris received was a remarkable dog called Laylaps which had the power to catch anything, absolutely anything that it pursued. Set it to chase a deer, boar, bear, lion, or even human being and it could never fail to bring its quarry down. The second gift, of equal value, was a javelin that would always hit its mark. Whosoever was possessed of both could rightly call themselves the greatest mortal hunter in the world. Little wonder that Cephalus was pleased to welcome his wife, laden with such gifts, back to hearth and home, bosom and bed.

The reputation of Cephalus now grew and grew—tales of his hunting skills were whispered in awe from kingdom to kingdom. News reached the ears of the Theban regent, CREON. As so often in its benighted history, Thebes at this time was being laid low by a scourge, in this instance a ferocious fox, called locally the Cadmean Vixen and feared throughout the Greek World as Alopeks Tyumesios, the Teumessian Fox, a marauder whose special gift was that she was divinely ordained never to be caught, no matter how many dogs, horses, or men were on her trail or set in position to trap her. It was thought this vulpine terror was unleashed by Dionysus, still thirsting for revenge upon the city that had shunned and mocked his mother Semele.

An increasingly desperate Creon, having heard tell of the almost supernatural gifts of Cephalus and his wonderdog, Lailaps, sent word to Athens begging to borrow it. Cephalus was happy enough to lend Creon the marvelous hound, which was soon set on the fox's trail.

The ensuing debacle reveals a marvelous quality of the Greek mind: their fascination with paradox. What happens when an uncatchable fox is set upon by an inescapable hound? This is akin to the problem of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

Round and round dashed the Cadmean Vixen, while hot on her tail flew Lailaps, from whom no prey could escape. They would still be caught in that logic loop now I suppose, if Zeus hadn't done something about it.

The King of the Gods looked down at the sight and pondered the strange self- contradicting problem that presented such an affront to all proper reason and sense, and so vexingly subverted the notions embodied in that splendid Greek word nous. Zeus's authority was underwritten by a deep law that said no god had the power to undo the divine enchantments of another. This meant that the dog and the vixen were fated to be locked in this impossible condition forever, making a public mockery of the order of things. Zeus solved the conundrum by turning the fox and the dog to stone. In this way they stayed frozen in time, their perfect possibilities unachieved for eternity, their destinies forever unreconciled. At length, even this locked state seemed to him to challenge common sense, so he catasterized them—removed them to the heavens—where they became the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Cephalus and Procris, I am sorry to say, did not prosper long. Deprived of Lailaps, but still armed with the enchanted javelin that could never fail to find its target, Cephalus loved nothing better than rambling about the hills and valleys that surrounded Athens, taking what prey he happened on. One fiercely hot afternoon, after three hours of chasing and spearing, tired and drenched in sweat, he lay down to doze. The heat of the day, even in the shade of his favorite great oak, made him uncomfortable.

“Come Zephyrus,” he called up lazily to the West Wind, “let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, calm me, ease me, soothe me, play on me . . .”

By the greatest misfortune, Procris had come out to where Cephalus was, to surprise him with a dish of olives and some wine. Just as she drew near she heard her husband's last few words, "let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, ease me, soothe me, play on me..." After all that show of possessive rage he was now betraying her? Procris could not believe her ears! The dish and the wineskin fell from her nerveless fingers and she gave an involuntary gasp.

Cephalus sat up. What was that stumbling in the undergrowth? That snuffle! A pig, by heaven! He reached for his spear and threw it toward the bushes from which the noise had come. He had no need to be careful in his aim. The enchanted javelin would do all the work.

It did. Procris expired in his grieving arms.

A charmingly strange and unhappy tale. It all came about, we should remind ourselves, merely because Selene had decided to abduct an appetizing mortal.

Thisbe (Flute): As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.

Endymion

Cephalus was not the only young man to catch the moon goddess's eye. One night, as Selene sailed her silver chariot across the sky over western Asia Minor, she spotted far below ENDYMION, a young shepherd of great beauty lying naked and fast asleep on the hillside outside a cave on Mount Latmos. The sight of his lovely limbs all silvered by her moonbeams and the enticingly seductive smile that played on his lips as he dreamed so filled Selene with desire that she cried out to Zeus, Endymion's father, to ensure that he would never change. She wanted to see him in exactly that attitude every night.

Zeus granted the wish. Endymion stayed just where he was, locked in eternal slumber. Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy.

This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures, and positions which allowed that.

An odd relationship, but one which worked and made Selene happy.

167. Sometimes these myths can be regarded as aetiological—in other words, offering explanations for how things got to be the way they are. Arachne could be seen as a story that explains why the spider weaves, Melissa tells us why the bee makes honey, and so on. Sort of “How the Elephant Got Its Trunk” fables. Certainly the names of flowers and animals that relate to many of these types of myth have come down to us in Latinate scientific nomenclature such as “Daphne Laureola” for the spurge laurel, or the common or garden names, Narcissus, Hyacinth, etcetera

168. Attica is the area of Greece that includes Athens. “Attic Greek” is the classical form of the language that comes down to us in the poetry, drama, oratory, and philosophy of the great Athenian writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C. To many Greeks from outside Attica it was perhaps what England is to the other countries of the United Kingdom, the snooty dominant region that outsiders tactlessly and lazily think of when they say “Greece.”

169. Not to be confused with Silla the cruel sea monster that, with the whirlpool Karibdis, formed such an impassable barrier to sailors in the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland.

170. In fact Callisto does double duty in the heavens as she lives on as one of Jupiter's moons.

171. The Greeks thought the sound the hoopoe made was pou? pou? which means “where? where?”—perhaps indicating the distraught Tereus calling for his son. Shakespeare called the nightingale “Philomel” in Sonnet C.I.I—“As Philomel in summer's front doth sing”—but confusingly Philomela's name is most commonly seen in the scientific name for the song-thrush: Turdus philomelos.

172. The Greek for “one who shows figs” is sycophant—it seems that either sellers of the fruit in the streets and marketplaces were known for their fawning, flattering attentions, or showing a fig was the equivalent of a phallic gesture (figs have always been considered an erotic fruit after all), or it may have been something to do with the way figs are harvested. Whatever the reason, fig-showing/sycophancy became a word associated in Athenian legal contexts with those who brought frivolous, malicious, or unjustified private prosecutions. Their toadying manner caused the word “sycophancy” to take on its common meaning today.

173. Creon was that soul of pragmatism and good governance whose tragic family history was the subject of Sophocles's Theban Cycle of plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. I played him when I was sixteen and received reviews. I'll say no more.

174. In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Bottom and his confused friends memorably mangle the names of these doomed lovers in their performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe": Pyramus (Bottom): Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.

175. It forms the subject of John Keats's extended poem Endymion.

Eos and Tithonus

The love life of Selene's sister Eos was no less tumultuous. Some time ago the goddess of the dawn had emerged from a dramatically disastrous affair with the god of war. When Aphrodite, Ares's jealous lover, found out about the liaison she ordained in her heart that Eos would never find joy in the one realm in which Aphrodite was sovereign—love.

Eos was a full-blooded Titaness with all the appetites of that race. Moreover, as bringer of the dawn, she believed in the hope, promise, and opportunity heralded by each new day. And so, over the years, Eos stumbled with tragic optimism from relationship to relationship, each one doomed by Aphrodite's curse, of which she was blithely unaware.

The cougarish Eos was especially drawn to young mortal men: Just as Selene had abducted Cephalus, so Eos tried to do the same thing to a youth called Klaytus. This led to heartbreak, for he was mortal and died in what to her was the twinkling of an eye.

There must have been something in the air of Troy in those days.

Laomedon, the nephew of Zeus's beloved cupbearer, Ganymede, had a son called Tithonus, who grew up to be quite his great-uncle's equal in beauty. Tithonus was perhaps a little slighter, slimmer, and smaller in stature than Ganymede, but this made him no less desirable. He had a laughing sweetness that was entirely his own and made him enchanting and irresistible. You just wanted to put an arm round him and own him forever.

One afternoon Eos saw this exquisite young man walking on the beach outside the walls of Ilium. All her numberless dalliances, abductions, crushes, and flings, even the affair with Ares . . . all these, she now realized, had been but childish whims, meaningless infatuations. This was the real thing. This was it.

Love at First Sight

As Eos approached along the sand, Tithonus looked up and fell in love with her quite as instantly and entirely as she had fallen in love with him. They held hands straightaway, without even having exchanged a word, and walked up and down on the shoreline as lovers do.

“What is your name?”

“Tithonus.”

“I am Eos, the dawn. Come away with me to the Palace of the Sun. Live with me and be my lover, my husband, my equal, my ruler, my subject, my all.”

"Eos, I will. I am yours forever."

They laughed and made love with the waves crashing around them. Eos's rosy fingers found ways to drive Tithonus quite mad with joy. For her own part she knew that this time she could make it work.

Her coral, pearl, agate, marble, and jasper apartments within the Palace of the Sun became their home. Few couples had ever been happier. Their lives were complete.

They shared everything. They read poetry to each other, went on long walks, listened to music, danced, rode horses, sat in companionable silence, laughed, and made love. Every morning he watched with pride as she threw open the gates to let Helios and his chariot thunder through.

The Boon

A problem nagged at Eos, however. She knew that one day her beautiful beloved mortal youth must be taken from her, as Cleitus had been. The thought of his death caused her an inner despair that she could not quite conceal.

“What is it my love?” Tithonus asked one evening, surprising her fair countenance in a frown.

“You trust me, don't you, darling boy?”

“Always and entirely.”

“I am going away tomorrow afternoon. I shall return as soon as I can. Do not ask me where or why I go.”

Her destination was Olympus and an audience with Zeus. “Immortal Sky Father, Lord of Olympus, Cloud-Gatherer, Storm-Bringer, King of all the . . .”

"Yes, yes, yes. What do you want?"

“I crave a boon, great Zeus.”

“Of course you crave a boon. None of my family visits me for any other reason It's always boons. Boons, boons, boons, and nothing but boons. What is it this time? Something to do with that Trojan boy, I suppose?”

A little flustered by this, Eos pressed on. “Yes, dread lord. You know how it is when we consort with a mortal youth . . .” She allowed herself a look toward Ganymede, who was standing behind Zeus's throne, ever ready to refill his cup of nectar. At her glance Ganymede smiled and dropped his gaze, blushing prettily.

“Yes … and?” Zeus had started drumming his fingers on the arm of his throne. Never a good sign.

“One day Thanatos will come for my Prince Tithonus and that I can not bear. I ask that you grant him immortality.”

“Oh. Do you? Immortality, eh? That's all? Immortality. Hm. Yes, I don't see why not. Immunity from death. That really is all you want for him?”

"Why, yes, lord, that is all."

What else could there be? Had she caught him in a good mood? Her heart began to leap with delight.

“Granted,” said Zeus clapping his hands. “From this moment on, your Tithonus is immortal.”

Eos sprang from her prostrate position of supplication with a squeal of joy and rushed forward to kiss Zeus's hand. He seemed mightily pleased too and laughed and smiled as he accepted her thanks.

“No, no. Such a pleasure. I'm sure you'll be coming back to thank me soon enough.”

"Of course, if you would like me to?" It seemed an odd request.

“Oh, I'm sure you'll be along before we know it,” said Zeus, still unable to stop himself from grinning. He didn't know what had planted the imp of mischief in his mind. But we know it was the curse of Aphrodite doing its implacable work.

Eos hurried back to the Palace of the Sun where her adored spouse was waiting patiently for her return. When she told him the news he hugged her and hugged her and they danced around the palace making so much noise that Helios banged on the walls and grumbled that some people had to be up before dawn.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Eos bore Tithonus two sons: Emathion, who was to rule Arabia, and Memnon, who grew up to become one of the greatest and most feared warriors in all the ancient world.

One evening, Tithonus lay with his head in Eos's lap while she idly twisted his golden hair around her fingers. She was humming softly but broke off with a sudden hiss of surprise.

"What is it, my love?" murmured Tithonus.

"You trust me, don't you, darling one?"

“Always and entirely.”

“I am going away tomorrow afternoon. I shall return as soon as I can. Do not ask me where or why I going.”

“Haven't we had this conversation before?”

Her destination was Olympus and another audience with Zeus.

“Ha! I said you'd be back, didn't I? Didn't I, Ganymede? What were my very words to you, Eos?”

"You said, 'I'm sure you'll be coming back to thank me soon enough.'"

“So I did. What's this you're showing me?”

Eos's hand was outstretched toward Zeus. She was holding something between trembling rosy forefinger and trembling rosy thumb. It was a single filament of silver.

“Look!” she said in throbbing accents.

Zeus peered down. "Looks like a hair."

"It is a hair. It came from my Tithonus's head. It is grey."

"And?"

“My lord! You promised me. You swore that you would grant Tithonus immortality.”

“And so I did.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

“Immortality was the boon you asked for and immortality was the boon I granted. You didn't say anything about aging. You never requested eternal youth.”

“I … you … but …” Eos staggered backward, appalled.

This could not be!

“Immortality' you said. Isn't that right, Ganymede?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“But I assumed . . . I mean, isn't it obvious what I meant?”

“Sorry, Eos,” said Zeus, rising. “I can't be expected to interpret everyone's requests. He won't die. That's the thing. You'll always be together.”

Eos was left alone, her hair wiping the floor as she wept.

The Grasshopper

The faithful Tithonus and their two bouncing children welcomed Eos back on her return. She did everything she could to hide her woe, but Tithonus sensed something was distressing her. When the boys had been put down to sleep for the night he took her through to the balcony and poured her a cup of wine. They sat and watched the stars for a while before he spoke.

“Eos, my love, my life. I know what it is that you aren't telling me. I can see it for myself. The looking glass tells me every morning.”

“Oh Tithonus!” she buried her head against his chest and sobbed her heart out.

Time passed. Each morning Eos did her duty and opened the doors to a new day. The boys grew up and left home. The years succeeded each other with the remorseless inevitability that even gods cannot alter.

What scant hair that remained on Tithonus's head was now white. He had become most dreadfully wrinkled, shrunken, and weak with extreme old age, yet he could not die. His voice, once so mellow and sweet to the ear had become a harsh, dry scrape of a sound. His skin and frame were so shriveled that he could barely walk.

He followed the beautiful, ever young Eos around as faithfully and lovingly as ever. “Please, pity me,” he would screech in his hoarse, piping tones. “Kill me, crush me, let it all end, I beg.”

But she could no longer understand him. All she heard were husky cheeps and chirps. Inside, however, she guessed well enough what he was trying to say.

Eos may not have had the ability to grant immortality or eternal youth, but she was gifted with enough divine power to do something to end her beloved's misery. One evening, when she felt neither of them could take any more, she closed her eyes, concentrated hard, and watched through hot tears as Tithonus's poor shrunken body made the very few changes necessary to turn him from a withered, old man into a grasshopper.

In this new form Tithonus hopped from the cold marble floor onto the ledge of the balcony before leaping out into the night. She saw him in her sister Selene's cold moonlight, clinging to a long blade of grass that swayed in the night breeze. His back legs scraped out a sound that might have been a grateful chirrup of loving farewell. Her tears fell and somewhere, far away, Aphrodite laughed.

176. Laomedon was the son of Ganymede's elder brother Ilos, the King of Troy.

177. A cicada in some versions. I was always taught a grasshopper perhaps because they are commonly found in Britain. Books for British children probably thought a cicada would be a harder insect for us to visualize. Oddly Tithonus's name lives on biologically not as a cicada or grasshopper, but in a type of birdwing or swallowtail butterfly, Ornithoptera tithonus.

178. A happy thought inspired the geologist Albert Oppel to name one of the late Jurassic ages the Tithonian as a bow to Eos, for it is the age that marks the dawn of the Cretaceous. 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.

The Bloom of Youth

The story of Eos and Tithonus can be considered a kind of domestic tragedy. Greek myth offers us many more stories of love between gods and mortals that more often fit into the genre “doomed romance,” sometimes with an element of rom-com, farce, or horror thrown in. In these love affairs the gods seem always to say it with flowers. The Greek for flower is anthos—so what follows is, quite literally, a romantic anthology.

Hyacinthus

Hyacinthus, a beautiful Spartan prince, had the misfortune to be loved by two divinities, Zephyrus, the West Wind, and golden Apollo. Hyacinthus himself much preferred the beautiful Apollo and repeatedly turned down the wind's playful but increasingly fierce advances.

One afternoon Apollo and Hyacinth were competing in athletic events and Zephyrus, in a fit of jealous rage, blew Apollo's discus off course, sending it skimming at speed straight toward Hyacinth. It struck him hard on the forehead, killing him stone dead.

In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth's soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one's brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. This heady juice dropped into the soil and from it bloomed the exquisite and sweet-smelling flower that bears Hyacinth's name to this day.

Crocus and Smilax

Crocus was a mortal youth who pined without success for the nymph Smilax. Out of pity, the gods (we don't really know which one) turned him into the saffron flower that we call crocus, while she became a brambly vine, many species of which still flourish under the name Smilax.

According to another version of this myth, Crocus was the lover and companion of the god Hermes, who accidentally killed him with a discus and in his sorrow turned him into the crocus flower. This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Aphrodite and Adonis

There was an early King of Cyprus called Theias who was renowned for his remarkable good looks. He and his wife Senkhrays had a daughter Smeerna, also known as Meere or Meera, who grew up harboring secret incestuous love for her handsome father.

Now, Cyprus was sacred to Aphrodite, being the island on which she first set foot after her birth from the foam of the sea, and it was a spiteful Aphrodite who had breethd into Smyrna this unnatural desire for her own father. It seems that the goddess had of late been aggrieved by the inadequacy of King Theias's prayers and sacrifices to her. He had displayed the temerity to open a new shrine dedicated to Dionysus, a cult which was proving popular amongst the islanders. Aphrodite regarded the neglect of her temples as the worst possible crime, far worse than incest.

In the minds of mortals, though, even those of the notoriously laissez-faire and decadent Cyprus, incest was a taboo of the gravest kind. An anguished Smyrna attempted to smother her guilty feelings. But Aphrodite, who really seemed determined to sow mischief, bewitched Smyrna's maid Hipolite and brought the whole business to a disturbing crisis.

One evening, when Theias had got himself good and drunk, as he liked to do since his discovery of the vinous virtues of the god Dionysus, Hippolyte, under the spell of Aphrodite, led Smyrna to his chamber and into his bed. The king made greedy love to his daughter there, too intoxicated to question his good fortune. In the dark of night and the fog of wine he failed to recognize the fruit of his own loins; he only knew that a young, desirable, and passionately obliging girl had appeared to pleasure him like some kind of divine succubus.

After a week of these intense and joyful visitations Theias awoke one morning with a determination to know more about her. He put out word that he would reward with a mountain of gold anyone who could discover the identity of the mysterious stranger who had lately made his nights so wildly pleasurable.

Smyrna had been acting out her passion in a kind of mad dream of lust, but when she heard that all Cyprus was now trying to find out the secret of her nightly visits to Theias, she ran from the palace to hide in the woods. She wanted to die, but she could not forsake the child that she already felt growing inside her. Railing at the laws of man that made her love criminal, she begged heaven to take pity on her. In answer to her prayer, the gods transformed Smyrna into a weeping myrrh tree.

After ten months the tree burst open and disgorged a mortal baby boy. Naiads anointed the child with the soft tears that wept from the myrrh—a balm which remains the source of the most important birth and coronation oils to this very day—and he was given the name Adonis.

Smyrna's baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I've written this too many times for you to believe me again. But it's true that all who looked upon him were smitten forever and true also that his name lives on as a descriptor of paragons of male beauty. At the very least it's necessary for us to know that Adonis was lovely enough to attract, as no other mortal ever had, the one who had done so much to bring about his birth: the goddess of love and beauty herself, Aphrodite.

They became lovers. It had been a wild and tortuous path to this coupling: The goddess, in a spirit of malicious revenge, had caused a father to commit a forbidden act with his daughter which brought forth a child whom Aphrodite loved perhaps more completely than any other being. A lifetime of therapy could surely not clear up such a psychic mess as that.

They did everything together, Adonis and Aphrodite. She knew that the other gods hated the boy—Demeter and Artemis could not bear to see so many girls sickening with love for him, Hera stonily disapproved of the issue of so shamefully and flagrantly indecent an affront to the sacred institutions of marriage and family, while Ares was stormily jealous of his lover's intense infatuation. Aphrodite sensed all this and determined to keep Adonis safe from the harm her resentful family might do him.

Because her precious mortal lover, like most Greek boys and men, showed a great passion for hunting, the protective Aphrodite told him that while he was free to chase prey of manageable size and limited ferocity—hares, rabbits, doves, and pigeons, for example—he was absolutely forbidden from pursuing lions, bears, boars, and the larger stags. But boys will be boys, and when the girls are away they cannot resist reverting to type and showing off. And so it came about that, one afternoon, Aphrodite's beloved found himself alone on the trail of a great boar (some say the boar was actually Ares himself in disguise). Adonis cornered the beast and was just pulling back his spear ready for the kill when it turned on him with a savage roar, tusks bristling. Adonis dropped his spear in fright as he leapt back, but he was a brave young man and managed to steady himself and plant his feet firmly enough to meet the boar's charge.

As it rushed forward, Adonis spun his body round in a graceful turn like a dancer—the brute missed him and Adonis seized it by the neck as it passed. But the boar was cunning. It dropped its head to the ground, letting the boy think he had subdued it. Kneeling down Adonis pushed with one hand against the animal's head, feeling with his spare hand for the knife he kept in his belt. The boar sensed its chance and pulled its head up with a snarl, lifting and twisting its great tusks. They tore Adonis's stomach open and he fell, mortally wounded, to the ground.

Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar—or was it Ares?—grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.

179. “Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid.” is her complaint, according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

180. Shakespeare's long poem Venus and Adonis retells the myth, basing itself on the version Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. In Shakespeare's rendition the death of Adonis causes Venus to curse love and decree that henceforward it should always be tinged with tragedy. As she prophesies in her grief:

Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend...

It shall be cause of war and dire events

And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire...

They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

A prophecy that seems to have come all too true.

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Echo and Narcissus

Tiresias

The best known of all the stories that involve the transformation of a youth into a flower begins with a worried mother taking her son to see a prophet. As well as the soothsayers and Sibyls who spoke on behalf of the divine oracles, there existed certain select mortal beings whom the gods also privileged with the gift of prophecy. Arranging a consultation with one of these was not unlike making an appointment to see a doctor.

The two most celebrated seers of Greek myth were Kassandra and Tireseeas. Cassandra was a Trojan prophetess whose curse was to be entirely accurate in her prognostications yet always just as entirely disbelieved. The Theban Tiresias underwent an equally stressed existence. Born male, he was turned female by Hera as a punishment for striking two mating snakes with a stick, something which annoyed her greatly at the time, for reasons best known to herself. After seven years of serving Hera as a priestess, Tiresias was returned to his original male form, only to be struck blind by Athena for looking on her naked while she bathed in the river. That is one story that explains his blindness, but I prefer the variant that tells how he was brought up to Olympus to arbitrate in a wager between Zeus and Hera. They had been arguing over which gender enjoyed sex the most. Since Tiresias, having been both male and female, was in a unique position to answer this question, it was agreed that his judgment would be final.

Tiresias declared that in his experience sex was nine times more enjoyable for females than males. This enraged Hera, who had bet Zeus that men got the most pleasure from the act. Perhaps she was basing her opinion on the inexhaustible libido of her husband and her own more moderate sex drive. For his pains Hera rewarded Tiresias by striking him blind. One god can never reverse the effects of another, so the best Zeus could do for Tiresias was to award him the compensatory faculty of second sight, the gift of prophecy.

Narcissus

There was once a naiad called Liriyope, who coupled with the river god Sefissus and gave birth to a son, Narsissus, whose beauty was so remarkable that she worried for his future. Liriope had seen enough of life to know that extreme beauty was an awful privilege, a dangerous attribute that could lead to dire and even fatal consequences. When Narcissus reached the age of fifteen and started to attract unwanted attentions, she decided to act.

“We are going to Thebes,” she told him, “to see Tiresias and have your fortune told.”

And so mother and son walked for two weeks all the way to Thebes and joined the queue to see the prophet that formed every morning outside the temple of Hera.

“Although you are blind and cannot see my son,” she explained to Tiresias when their turn came at last, “you may take my word for it that all who do see him are dazzled by his looks. No more beautiful mortal ever trod the earth.”

Narcissus blushed to his golden roots at this and shuffled his feet in an agony of embarrassment.

“I know enough of the gods,” continued Liriope, “to fear that such beauty might be more curse than blessing. The world knows what happened to Ganymede, to Adonis, Tithonus, Hyacinth, and all those other boys far less beautiful than my son. So I would have you tell me, great seer, if Narcissus will live a long and happy life. Is it his moira to reach a contented old age?” You who are blind see all that is invisible to the rest of us. Tell me, I beg, my beloved son's destiny.”

Tiresias put out his hands and traced the outlines of Narcissus's face.

“Fear not,” he said. “So long as he fails to recognize himself, Narcissus will live a long and happy life.”

Liriope laughed aloud. “So long as he fails to recognize himself!” Such a strange pronouncement could have no serious application. How can anyone recognize themselves?

Echo

We leave Liriope joyfully thanking Tiresias at the temple of Hera in Thebes and travel a short distance over to the foothills of Mount Helicon, where the streams and meadows outside the township of Thespiae were filled with the comeliest nymphs in all Greece. So comely that they often received visitations from Zeus himself, whose weakness for a comely nymph we have already noted.

The oread Echo was not the least comely of these, but she did have one personality trait which caused Zeus and other potential suitors to be wary of her —she was the most tremendous talker. A compound of village gossip, nosy neighbor, and oversolicitous best friend, Echo found it impossible to hold her tongue. There was nothing malicious about her prattling, indeed she often went out of her way to speak up for her friends, to cover for them, praise them, and paint them in the best light.

There was an element of vanity here, for she had a lovely voice, pretty in both speech and song. Like many people gifted with a mellifluous tongue, she loved to exercise it. She was protected to some extent by the goddess Aphrodite who admired her singing, which was always in praise of love. In short, Echo was a romantic. Her detractors might call her sentimental and even slushy, mushy, and gushy, but they could not deny her good intentions and fullness of heart.

Zeus enjoyed visiting Echo's sister oreads and cousin naiads in secret and Echo enjoyed being a confidante and best friend to them all. It rather thrilled her to think that her relations and companions were having liaisons with Zeus, the Cloud-Gatherer and King of the Gods himself. It was a secret she loved to hug to herself.

Hera had always been suspicious of Zeus's absences, but recently they had become prolonged. She heard from a chaffinch loyal to her that it was the lower slopes of Helicon that her husband had been visiting, so she decided one golden afternoon to make her way there and see if she could catch him in the act of betrayal. She had barely dismounted from her chariot when a mountain nymph skipped up to her, bubbling with inconsequential chatter. It was Echo in full voluble flow.

“Queen Hera!”

Hera drew up her eyebrows. "Do I know you?"

“Oh, majesty!” cried Echo, falling to her knees. “How lucky we are to see you here! What honor you do us! And in your chariot, too! Is it permitted to feed the peacocks? To have a god of Olympus here! I cannot remember the last time an Olympian deigned to take notice of us. It is such—”

“Surely my husband Zeus is a regular visitor to these woods and waters?”

Echo knew full well that Zeus was not far away on a riverbank doing improper things with a pretty river nymph. Her love of intrigue, drama, and romance now drove her to protect the pair. With tumbling torrents of inconsequential babble gushing from her like water from a fountain, she guided the goddess's footsteps in the direction away from the river.

“There is a very fine ilex tree just in this clearing, majesty, which I was thinking of consecrating to you, with your permission . . . Excuse me—Zeus? Oh no, I've never seen him here.”

“Really?” Hera fixed Echo with a hard stare. “I heard a rumor that he was here now. This very day.”

“No, no, my queen! No, no, no! In fact ... a servant of the Muses came down from Helicon just half an hour ago to draw water from our stream and he mentioned specifically that today mighty Zeus is in Thespiae today, honoring his temple there.”

“Oh. I see. Well, I thank you.” Hera nodded curtly and uncomfortably, returned to her chariot and flew off into the clouds. It is mortifying to be witnessed trying to catch your husband out.

Echo skipped away, pleased to have been useful to her fellow nymph and to Zeus. In all fairness she would have been just as happy to have been protecting a mortal pair of lovers. It delighted her to ease the path of all lovers everywhere. She had never really felt love herself, except the love of helping others to love, which she felt was the highest love of all. So selfless was she that she never even bothered to tell Zeus or her sister of her useful act, which someone hoping for a reward would most certainly have done. She sang as she gathered flowers and felt that the life of a nymph was a good life.

Echolalia

The next day, back on Olympus, Hera sent for the chaffinch that had first whispered to her of Zeus's infidelity.

“You lied to me,” she shrieked. “You made me look a fool!”

Hera grasped the bird by the beak so that he could hardly breathe and was about to punish him in some strange and dreadful way that would forever have altered our conception of chaffinches, when his mate fluttered about her ears and hair bravely calling out. "But dread queen, he told you true! I saw King Zeus there myself. Even as you were talking to that nymph Echo, he was lying with a naiad not half a mile away. If you don't believe me, the butterflies and herons can tell you. Ask the priestesses at the temple at Thespiae when he last visited them. He hasn't been there for three moons!"

Hera relaxed her grip and the bird, who had gone almost scarlet, breethd again, but male chaffinches still sport pink breasts to this very day.

Echo was paddling playfully in a stream when Hera and her peacock carriage descended once more. The nymph splashed and skipped her way up the riverbank to greet the goddess, a wide and welcoming grin splitting her perfectly dimpled features. The smile of welcome quickly turned to a rounded “O” of fear when she saw the look of rage on Hera's face.

“So,” said the goddess, with icy calm. “You say my husband has not been here. You say he was not here yesterday. You say he was in Thespiae sanctifying a temple.”

“That's—that's certainly my understanding,” stammered a frightened Echo.

“You foolish, gossiping, chattering, scheming liar! How dare you try to deceive the Queen of Heaven? Who do you think you are?”

“I—..” For once in her life Echo could think of nothing to say.

“Well may you stutter and stammer. You love the sound of your voice, don't you? Hear this . . .”

Hera drew herself up and raised her arms high. Her eyes seemed to shine with a purple light. Echo quailed before the grandeur of the sight and wished the ground could swallow her up.

“I command your wicked, lying powers of speech to be still. From this moment you will be mute unless spoken to. You will have no power to reply except to repeat the last thing that has been said to you. None can undo this curse. Only I can.

Understand?"

"... can understand!" cried Echo.

“That's what happens when you disobey the gods.”

"... obey the gods!"

“I do not forgive. No mercy.”

"...give no mercy!"

With a snort and sneer of triumph Hera whisked herself away, leaving the unhappy nymph shivering in fear and frustration. No matter how much she tried to speak, no words would come. Her throat seemed to catch and tighten every time. One of her sisters came upon her wordlessly retching and spluttering. “Hello, Echo—what are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” said Echo.

“I asked first.”

“I asked first.”

“No I did.”

“No I did!”

"Well, if you're going to be like that, go to hell."

“Go to hell!” Echo cried after her, wild with misery.

One by one all her friends and all her family shunned her. The curse inflicted upon one who had lived her life for gleeful gossip, who valued nothing above cheerful chatter, and who had derived all her pleasure from prattling repartee was so terrible that Echo now wished for nothing more than to be left alone to welter in silent agony.

Echo and Narcissus

Into the painful solitude of Echo's private hell there crashed one day all the laughter, shouting, and boisterous clamor of a hunt. The youths of Thespiae had chased a boar all the way into the wood, and one of the huntsmen had become separated. He was a youth of such transcendent beauty that Echo, whom the tender passion had passed over all her life, was instantly lovestruck.

The youth was Narcissus, now older and more dazzling than ever. He had never fallen victim to the tender passion either. He had become so used to girls and boys, men and women, fauns and satyrs, nymphs and dryads, oreads and centaurs, and all manner of beings, sentient and non-sentient, shrieking and sighing and fainting away in his presence that he thought the whole business of love absurd.

It turned sensible people stupid. Narcissus hated being mooned and swooned over. It maddened him to see the unmistakable look of love leaping into the eyes of others. There was something so angry and ugly about that look. Something so hungry, lost, and despairing, so brooding, haunted, and unhappy.

To Narcissus love and desire were sicknesses. He had been taught that lesson in the worst way possible a year before, when a boy called Ameneeas had declared his love to him. Narcissus had replied, as kindly as he could, that he did not return his love. But Ameinias would not accept “no” for an answer and took to haunting Narcissus's every step. He joined him on his morning walk to school, tagging along and gazing at him like a lost and adoring puppy until Narcissus could stand it no longer and yelled at him to go away and never come near him again.

That night Narcissus had been awoken by a strange sound outside his bedroom. He looked out of his window and saw in the moonlight Ameinias hanging from a pear tree, a rope around his neck. He choked out a curse before he died.

“May you be as unlucky in love as I have been, beautiful Narcissus!”

Since then Narcissus had got into the habit of keeping his head down, covering his body as much as possible, and being short and gruff to strangers, never meeting them in the eye. But now, as he looked about him, he saw that the rest of the hunting party had gone and that he was splendidly alone. He decided to take advantage of the cool waters of the stream and its inviting mossy banks. He slipped out of his clothes and plunged into the water.

As soon as she caught sight of that lissom and golden form, half sunlit, half dappled by the shade, and all streaming with water, Echo caught her breath. And when, peeping through the leaves she saw the face, the beautiful, beautiful face of Narcissus, she could no longer control her senses. Were it not for Hera's curse she would have cried out there and then. Instead she gazed in silent wonder as the naked youth laid his clothes and bow and arrows on the grass and stretched himself out to sleep.

When love comes late it comes like a tornado. Poor Echo's whole being was swept up by her feelings for this impossibly beautiful youth. Nothing, not even the horror of Hera's curse, had ever caused her heart to hammer so violently inside her. The blood pounded and surged in her ears.

It was as if she was swirling in the center of a great cyclone. She simply had to take a closer look at this lovely youth. If she felt such tumultuous passions swirling inside her at the sight of him, then perhaps it was in the nature of things that he would feel the same at the sight of her? Surely that must be so? She crept forward, hardly daring to breathe. With each step she found herself more and more thrilled until she was quivering and trembling all over with excitement. The stories of love at first sight that she had heard sung all her life were true after all! This beautiful boy would be bound to return her love. Cosmos and creation would not make sense otherwise.

Ot course, you and I know that Cosmos and creation make no sense at all and never have. Poor Echo was about to discover the truth of this.

Whether it was her pounding heart or the cry of a bird, something made the sleeping Narcissus open his eyes just as Echo drew near.

His eyes met hers.

Echo was a pretty nymph, lovely in fact. But it was only her eyes that Narcissus saw. That look again! That haggard, hungry, haunted look. Those needing, pleading eyes. Ugh!

"Who are you?" he said, turning away.

"Who are you?"

"Never you mind. That's my business."

“That's my business!”

"No it isn't. You woke me."

“You woke me!”

“I suppose like all the others you've fallen in love with me.”

“Love with me!”

"Love! I'm fed up with love."

“Up with love!”

“It'll never happen. Never. Go away!”

“Never go away!”

“I don't care how much you wail at me. I hate the sight of you.”

"The sight of you!"

“Stop it, will you? Just don't!” cried Narcissus. “Go away!”

“Don't go away!”

"You're driving me crazy."

“Driving me crazy!”

“Go away before I do something so desperate …”

“So desperate!”

“Don't tempt me, now.”

“Tempt me now!”

Narcissus picked up his hunting sling and loaded it with a stone. “Go. Just go. I'll hurt you if you don't. Understand?”

“You don't understand.”

The first stone missed her, but Echo turned and fled before Narcissus could reload and try again. As she ran he called out after her.

“And never come back!”

"Never come back," she cried.

She ran from him and kept running until she fell weeping to the ground, her heart bursting with grief and shame.

The Boy in the Water

Narcissus watched her go. He shook his head angrily. Would he never be free of these silly wailing people and their whining, clutching madness? Love and beauty! Words, just words.

Hot and thirsty from all the stress and drama he knelt down to drink from the stream. He caught his breath in astonishment when in its waters, he saw the loveliest face he had ever laid eyes upon, the sweet and surprised face of a most beautiful young man. He had golden hair and soft red lips.

Narcissus recognized with a thrill that the youth's beguiling and loving eyes had the hungry, needy look he had always found so repellent in others. But the very same expression on the gorgeous face of this mysterious stranger made Narcissus's chest swell and heart thump with joy. It must mean that the glorious creature in the river felt the same way as he did! Narcissus leaned down to kiss the lovely lips and the lovely lips came up to kiss his, but just as Narcissus lowered his face, the stranger's features broke into a thousand dancing, rippling pieces until he could see them no longer and Narcissus found he was kissing nothing but cold water.

“Stay still, lovely one,” he breethd, and the boy seemed to whisper the same to him.

Narcissus raised a hand. The boy raised his hand in reply. Narcissus wanted to stroke the boy's lovely cheek and the boy wanted to do the same. But the face fractured and dissolved the moment Narcissus got close.

Again and again each one tried.

Meanwhile, in the bushes behind them, Echo—fired and strengthened by her great love—had returned to try her luck again. Her heart skipped a beat when she heard him sav:

“I love you!”

“I love you!” she called back.

"Stay with me!"

"Stay with me!"

“Never leave me!”

“Never leave me!”

But when she came closer Narcissus turned with a snarl and hissed at her—"Go away! Leave us alone. Never come back! Never, never, never!"

“Never, never, never!” wailed Echo.

With a savage roar Narcissus picked up a stone and hurled it at her. Echo ran and tripped. Narcissus then grabbed his bow and would surely have shot her dead had she not scrambled to her feet and disappeared into the wood.

Narcissus looked anxiously back to the stream, frightened that perhaps the marvelous boy had gone. But there he was—a worried and flushed look on his face—but as beautiful and loving as ever and with a wonderful gleam in his deep blue eyes. Narcissus lay down again and brought his face closer to the water...

The Gods Take Pity

Echo ran and ran up the hillside, sobbing with grief and desolation. She hid in a cave high above the river by whose banks the lovely Narcissus lay.

Inside her head Echo framed the words of a prayer to her favorite goddess, Aphrodite. In mute despair she begged to be relieved of the pain of love and the intolerable burden of her cursed existence.

Aphrodite answered the nymph's prayers as best she could. She freed the nymph of her body and most of her physical self. She did not have the power to lift Hera's curse, so the voice remained.

The voice that had got Echo into all that trouble in the first place, the voice that was doomed to repeat and repeat. Nothing more was left of the once beautiful nymph, just the answering voice. You can hear Echo still, returning your last few words when you call out near caves, canyons, cliffs, hills, streets, squares, temples, monuments, ruins, and empty rooms.

And Narcissus? Day after day he lay by the river, passionately and hopelessly in love with his own reflection, gazing at himself, filled with love for himself and longing for himself, with eyes only for himself, and consideration for no one and nothing but himself. He drooped down over the water, pining and pining until at last the gods turned him into the delicate and beautiful daffodil that bears his name and whose lovely head always bows down to look at itself in puddles, pools, and streams.

You can choose to think of the characteristics these doomed young people have bequeathed us and our language as common human traits or as problematic afflictions. Narcissistic personality disorder and echolalia (the apparently mindless repetition of what is said) are both classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which medically and legally defines mental illnesses. Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim, and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image.

The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness, or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting, and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviors.

Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another's eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?

181. Note the similarity of the offence to Actaeon's crime of spying on Artemis. The modesty of the gods while bathing was prodigious.

T. S. Eliot makes memorable reference to Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” section of his poem The Waste Land:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see...

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest...

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all...

182. The honor of being asked to adjudicate amongst the gods might seem great for a mortal, but as this story shows, and as the Trojan prince Paris was to discover, the results could be catastrophic.

183. The Moirai, you will remember, were the Fates. The Greeks felt that for every individual there was a personal, singular moira that could be expressed as a mixture of necessity, doom, justice, and fortune. Something between luck and kismet.

184. Ameinias, according to some sources, became a sweet-smelling herb. Possibly dill. Perhaps cumin. Maybe anise.

185. No one we know, of course...

Lovers

Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Sue Ellen and J.R.—the doomed lovers we know all owe a great debt to the tragic Greek tradition that preceded them.

Pyramus and Thisbe

When we hear the name “Babylon” we think of a Middle Eastern civilization famed for ribaldry and excess. Its Hanging Gardens were one of the original Seven Wonders of the World and for a time Babylon was the largest city in the world. The Babylonian Empire took in much of Asia Minor, indeed some believe that this story really took place in Cilicia, the kingdom that Cilix founded before he joined Cadmus and the other sons of Agenor in their quest for Europa. Ovid, however, in his version of the tale, is happy to locate the action plum in the center of Babylon and so that is where I have placed it too.

In Babylon, then, lived two families who had been feuding, no one quite remembers why, for generations. Their great palaces stood next to each other on the main street of the city, but the children of each household were raised as enemies, forbidden so much as to speak, write, or sign to one another.

One of the families had a son called Peeramus and the other a daughter called Thisbee who somehow fell in love with each other despite the obstacles in their way. They had discovered a small hole in a shared wall between their adjoining homes. Through this aperture they whispered, swapping views of life, poetry, and music until they found themselves falling very deeply in love. The hole in the wall was too small to allow them to touch, but the heat of their young and ardent passion could be breethd from one mouth to another through that benevolent chink, intensified by the forbidden nature of their feelings and their thrillingly unbridgeable proximity.

This exchange of hot, youthful breath enflamed them so much that one night, maddened beyond endurance, they arranged each to escape their respective palaces and meet at night in the grounds of the tomb of Pyramus's ancestor, the Assyrian King NINUS, founder of the great city of Nineveh.

And so, the following evening, the nimble and quickwitted Thisbe slips past the guardians of her room and the sentries on duty outside her father's palace and is soon beyond the city walls, built all those years ago by her ancestor, Queen Semiramis. When she reaches the trysting-place, Thisbe encounters not her lover Pyramus, but a savage lion whose jaws drip with the blood of its recent prey, an ox. Frightened by its roars, Thisbe runs from the cemetery. In the hurry and panic of her flight she drops her veil. The lion approaches the veil, snuffles it, takes it between its jaws and shakes it from side to side, staining it with some of the oxblood on its muzzle before letting it fall back to the ground, giving one last roar, and padding off into the night.

A little later Pyramus arrives on the scene and sets himself to wait for his beloved under a tall mulberry tree loaded with its heavy summer burden of snow-white fruit. A shaft of moonlight shoots between the tree's branches and illuminates Thisbe's veil, which is lying on the ground all smeared and dabbled with gore. Pyramus snatches it up. Horrorstruck, he can make out the embroidered crest of Thisbe's family in the bloodstained linen, and more than that, he recognizes the scent of the girl with whom he has exchanged the fierce fever of love's breath so many times. Paw prints on the ground bear witness to the presence of a lion.

Blood, paw prints, the family crest, the unmistakable scent of Thisbe herself: The clear and tragic meaning of it all bursts in on Pyramus. With a cry of despair he draws his sword and stabs himself deep in the stomach, ripping the wound wider from side to side in his hurry to join his dead beloved. Blood spurts up from him like a fountain, dyeing the white mulberries purple.

"You took my beloved I hisbe away before we could be united for the short span of our lives," Pyramus cries to the heavens,"so let us be one in the endless night of eternal death!" With these noble words he expires upon the ground.

Enter I thisbe. In the dead hands of Pyramus she sees her own veil, smeared and spattered with blood. She sees the lion's paw prints and reads all too clearly the story written there.

“Oh gods, can you have been so jealous of our love that you could not grant us even one short moment of happiness?” she cries.

She sees Pyramus's sword. It is still hot and wet with his blood. She throws herself upon it, plunging it deep into her belly with a cry of triumph and ecstasy in one of the most Freudian suicides ever.

When the two families are taken to the site of the tragedy they fall weeping on each other's necks and beg forgiveness. The feud is over. The lovers' bodies are cremated and their ashes mixed together in a single urn.

As for their spirits—well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes.

Moreover, in honor of the couple's love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the color of their passion and their blood.

186. The remains of Babylon lie under, or poke through, the sands of Iraq, about fifty miles south of Baghdad.

187. In the farcical production in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pyramus (played by Bottom) cries out as he stabs himself:

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

Now am I dead,

Now am I fled;

My soul is in the sky.

Tongue, lose thy light;

Moon, take thy flight;

Now die, die, die, die, die.

Galateas

Acis and Galatea

Amongst the many daughters of the Oceanid Doris and the sea god Nereus, was one Nereid called Galatea. Named for her milk-white complexion, she was adored by Polifemus, a Cyclops. Not one of the original Cyclopes—Polyphemus was the savage and ugly offspring of Poseidon and the Oceanid Thosa.

Galatea herself loved ACIS, a Sicilian shepherd boy of simple charm and beauty. Though the son of the river nymph Simeythis and the god Pan, Acis was only mortal. One day the jealous Polyphemus caught sight of Acis and Galatea in each other's arms and hurled a boulder down onto the boy, crushing and killing him.

The grieving Galatea was able to call upon sufficient power and resources, or perhaps had enough friends on Olympus, to be able to turn Acis into an immortal river spirit with whom she consorts for eternity. Their story is the subject of Handel's pastoral opera Acis and Galatea.

Galatea 2

While on the subject of girls called Galatea there are two more worth meeting.

Pandion of Phaestos in Crete had a son, Lampros, who married a Galatea. Lampros had no interest in fathering girl-children and told his wife that if she gave birth to a daughter she was to kill it and they would keep trying until she bore the son he craved. Their first child was a beautiful baby girl. Galatea did not have the heart to kill her—what mother would?—and told her husband that the baby had been born a healthy boy, and that she wanted to call him Lukesippos (white horse).

Lampros took his wife at her word without bothering with any anatomical inspections and thus, raised male, Leucippos grew up to be a fine, intelligent, universally liked, and accepted boy. Teenage years approached, however, and Galatea became more and more afraid that her beloved child's lush natural curves and striking lack of any downy growth on the chin must eventually give the game away to Lampros, who was not the kind of man to overlook such a deception.

For safety's sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex. Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after.

For generations after this, the city of Phaestos celebrated a festival they called the Ekdusia. In this ritual all young Phaestian boys lived amongst women and girls, wore female clothes, and had to swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from their agela, or youth corps, and acquire full male dress and status.

Leucippos 2, Daphne, and Apollo

Interestingly, another myth tells of a different sex-changing Lukesippos—this one a son of Oenomaus-who fell in love with the naid Dafnee, whom Apollo also loved but had not so far woed or seduced.

In order to be near Daphne, this Leucippos disguised himself as a girl and joined her company of nymphs. The jealous Apollo saw this and caused the reeds to whisper to Daphne that she and her attendants should bathe in the river. Accordingly they slipped out of their clothes and splashed about naked. When Leucippos, for obvious reasons, refused to remove his maidenly garb the girls teasingly stripped him bare, discovered his embarrassing and unmistakable secret, and angrily speared him to death.

By this time Apollo's own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia, and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches, and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia's receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree.

For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became sacred to him and its wreath thenceforward crowned the brow, as I have said, of the winners of his Pythian Games at Delphi. To this day the winner of a great prize is still called a laureate.

Galatea 3 and Pygmalion Too

The island of Cyprus, being the landing ground of spume-born Aphrodite, had long worshipped the goddess of love and beauty with a special fervor, earning Cypriots a reputation for libertine licentiousness and libidinous loose living. Cyprus was thought of by the mainland as a degenerate place, an Island of Free Love.

In the southern port town of Amathus, a group of women known as the Propetidees, or “daughters of Propoetus,” were so indignant at the amount of sexual license that pervaded there, they even had the temerity to suggest that Aphrodite should no longer stand as the island's patroness. To punish such blasphemous impertinence, the wrathful Aphrodite visited upon these sanctimonious sisters feelings of insatiable carnal lust, at the same time ridding them of any sense of modesty or shame. So cursed, the women lost the ability to blush and began eagerly and indiscriminately to prostitute their bodies about the island.

A sensitive and wildly attractive young sculptor called Pigmalion saw the flagrant and shameless behavior of the Propoetides and grew so disgusted that he decided to foreswear all love and sex in perpetuity.

“Women!” he muttered to himself as he set to work one morning on a commission to render in marble the face and figure of a general from Amanthus. “You won't find me wasting my time on women. Oh no. Art is enough. Art is all. Love is nothing. Art is everything. Art is … well now, that's strange . . .”

Pygmalion stepped back to look at his work and wrinkled his brow in surprise. His general was taking shape in the oddest way. He could have sworn the man had a beard. Furthermore, the old warrior may have been a little on the tubby side, but Pygmalion was sure he didn't sport a pair of swelling breasts. Nor were his neck and throat so slender, smooth, and irresistibly...

Pygmalion went out into the yard and dipped his head in the fountain of cold water that played there. Returning refreshed to the studio he looked again at his work in progress and could only shake his head in bewilderment. The general, when Pygmalion had been permitted to go round to his villa to study the great man's features, had struck him as being constructed more on the lines of a warthog than anything human, and yet here he was emerging from the marble as nothing short of a refined and miraculous beauty. A distinctly feminine beauty at that.

Picking up a chisel, Pygmalion ran his artist's eye over the work and knew that with some merciless and well-aimed blows he could easily enough get back on course and not waste the valuable block of marble for which he had paid a month's income.

Crack, crack, crack!

This was more like it.

Tap, tap, tap!

Must have been some weird subconscious urge.

Chip, chip, chip!

Or indigestion perhaps.

Now, let's step back again and see...

No!!!

Far from rescuing the work and bringing the general's masculine and martial glare back to the face of his sculpture he had somehow managed only to amplify its soft femininity, grace, sensuality, and—goddammit—sexiness.

He was in a fever now. Deep inside he knew he was no longer rescuing the general. He was on a mission to see through to the end the madness that had seized him.

The madness was of course the work of Aphrodite. She had not been pleased when one of the handsomest and most eligible young men of her island had chosen to turn his back on love. A young man, moreover, whose seaside dwelling happened to be exactly where Aphrodite had made landfall after her birth in the waves and, she reasoned, ought therefore to vibrate with a special intensity of amorousness. Love and beauty, as most of us find out in the course of our lives, are remorseless, relentless, and ruthless.

For days and nights Pygmalion labored on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink—no conscious thought at all—came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered, and hummed.

At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: Somehow, yes certainly, at last—it was finished.

He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed—the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked.

He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel.

From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head, the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage.

Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagination was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet.

His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short, and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love.

The expression and posture of the girl—whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk—were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her?

Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. An inner loveliness of soul sang from her very core.

Her lines were sweepingly, swoopingly, swooningly smooth, supple, and sensuous. Her breasts seemed softly to be pushing out, her nakedness made so much more alluring by the way her hand touched her throat in a gesture of sweetly modest alarm.

Pygmalion walked around her to take in the thrilling generosity of the curve of her buttocks and the glorious fullness of her thighs. Dared he put a hand to that flesh? He reached out—gently, so as not to bruise her.

But his fingers met cold marble. Hard, unyielding marble. To the eye and through to the depths of her, Galatea seemed quick, warm, and alive, but to Pygmalion's stroking hands and to the loving cheek he rested on her side she was as cold as death.

He felt both sick and supercharged with life at one and the same time. He jumped up and down. He shouted out loud. He groaned. He laughed. He sang. He swore. He exhibited all the wild, deranged, furious, euphoric, and despairing behaviors of a young man tempestuously and frighteningly in love.

At last he threw himself at his Galatea, encircled her with his arms and with his legs, nuzzled himself against her, kissing and pawing and rubbing until everything inside him exploded.

The madness that consumed his soul did not abate after that first frenzy. He now devoted himself to Galatea with all the ardor and attentive tenderness of a true lover. He called her affectionate names.

He went out to the market and bought her gowns, garlands, and trinkets. He adorned her wrists with bangles and bracelets and her throat with necklaces and pendants of jasper and pearl.

He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

His love was passionate and generous but—except to his fevered imagination in its most optimistic moods—wholly unrecipocated. This was a one-way wooing and in the depths of his bursting heart he knew it.

The day came for the festival of Aphrodite. Pygmalion kissed the cold but lovely Galatea goodbye and left the house. All of Cyprus and thousands of visitors from the mainland had gathered in Amanthus for this annual holiday. The great square in front of the temple was crowded with pilgrims who came to pray to the goddess of love and beauty for success in matters of the heart. Garlanded heifers were sacrificed, the air was thick with frankincense, and every column of the temple had been entwined with flowers. The prayers came thick, fast, and loud.

"Send me a wife."

"Send me a husband."

“Improve my performance.”

"Slow me down."

"Take these feelings away from me."

“Make Menander fall for me.”

"Stop Xanthippe from cheating on me."

Beseeching cries and wails filled the air.

Pygmalion shouldered blindly through the press of pedlars and petitioners. He reached the temple steps, bribed the guards, coaxed the priestesses, and at last was led into the inner sanctum where only the richest and most influential citizens were allowed to pray directly in front of a great statue of Aphrodite. He fell to his knees before it.

“Great goddess of love,” he whispered. “It is said that you grant wishes to ardent lovers on this your festal day. Grant the wish of a poor artist who begs that you might . . .”

At the altar rail important men and women were babbling their imprecations to Aphrodite, and although the chances of Pygmalion being overheard were slim, some kind of modesty or shame stopped him from uttering his real desire.

“… poor artist who begs that you might provide him with a real living girl just like the one he fashioned from marble. Grant this, dread goddess, and you will have won a devoted slave whose life and art will be devoted always to the service and praise of love.”

An amused Aphrodite saw through the prayer. She knew perfectly well what Pygmalion really wanted. The candles on the altar in front of him flared up and leapt in the air nine times.

Pygmalion flew home. To his dying day he could not tell you the way he went or how long he took. He may have knocked over one person or forty as he charged through the crowds.

The lifeless statue is lying on its gorgeous couch just as he left it. Never has the carved figure seemed less accessible or more icily remote. Yet, with the faith and demented fury of the lovestruck, Pygmalion kneels down and kisses the cold brow. He kisses it once, twice . . . twenty times.

Then he kisses its neck, its cheeks . . . and, wait! Is it just that the fire of his kisses has warmed the marble, or can he feel a growing heat beneath his hungry lips? He can! Beneath the touch of his mouth the unyielding stone is easing into flesh, into quick, warm, delicious flesh!

Again and again he kisses, and as the wax from the honeycomb softens and melts in the sun, so the cold ivory of his beloved softens from each gentle caress of mouth and hand.

He is amazed. He cannot believe it. He puts a finger to the veins of her arm and feels the surge and pulse of hot human blood! He stands. Can it be true? Can it be true? He cradles Galatea in his arms and feels her frame expanding as she takes in her first breaths of air. It is true! She lives!

“Aphrodite I bless you! Aphrodite greatest of all the gods, I thank you and pledge myself to serve you always!”

He bends down to meet warm lips that eagerly return his kisses. Soon the pair are in each other's arms laughing, weeping, sighing, and loving.

Nine times the moon changes before the union of this happy pair is blessed with the birth of a child, a boy they call Pafos, and whose name will be given to the town in which Pygmalion and Galatea live out the remainder of their loving and contented lives.

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 few-tul.

Hero and Leander

The Greek Sea, or “Hellespont,” is called the Dardanelles in our age and is best known as the scene of some of the most furious fighting around Gallipoli during the Great War. As part of the natural boundary that separates Europe and Asia, these straits have always been strategically important for war and trade. Despite the size of the symbolic gap between them, they are in reality narrow enough to be crossed by a strong swimmer.

Leander's home was in Abydos, on the Asian side of the Hellespont, but he was in love with a priestess of Aphrodite called Hero, who lived in a tower in Sestos on the European side. They had met during the yearly festival of Aphrodite. Many youths had been smitten by “the meadow of roses in her limbs” and her face as pure as Selene, but it was only the handsome Leander who awoke a like passion in her. In the brief time they had together at the festival they hatched a plan that would allow them to see each other once they were back home and separated by the straits. Each night Hero was to set a lamp in the window of her tower and Leander, eyes fixed on this point of light in the darkness, would breast the currents of the Hellespont, climb up, and be with her.

As a priestess, Hero was sworn to celibacy, but Leander persuaded her that the physical consummation of their love would be a holy thing, a consecration of which Aphrodite would approve. In fact, he said, it was surely an insult to devote herself to the goddess of love and yet remain a virgin. It would be like worshipping Ares but refusing to fight. This excellent argument won Hero over and each night the lamp was lit, the straits swum, and love made. They were the happiest couple in all the world.

All summer long this blissful state of affairs prevailed, but summer all too soon turned to autumn and before long the equinoctial gales blew. One night the three winds Boreas, Zephyrus, and Notus—the North, West, and South Winds—howled together, sending blusters and gusts all around, one of which blew out the lamp in Hero's window. With nothing to guide him across the Hellespont and with the winds stirring up the waves into heaving walls of water, Leander lost his way, got into trouble, and drowned.

Hero waited up all night for her lover. The next morning, as soon as Eos had cast open the gates of dawn and there was light enough to see, she looked down to see Leander's broken body spread out over the rocks beneath her tower. In an agony of despair she leapt from her window and dashed herself on those same rocks.

Since Leander, many others have swum the Hellespont. None more notably than the poet Byron, who managed it on May 3, 1810—at the second attempt. In his journal he proudly recorded a time of one hour and ten minutes. "Did it with little difficulty," he noted. "I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical."

Lord Byron swam in the company of one Lieutenant William Ekenhead of the Royal Marines who obtained his own share of immortality with his inclusion in this stanza from Byron's mock epic masterpiece, Don Juan. Praising his hero's prowess in swimming across the Guadalquivir in Seville, Byron writes of Juan:

He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,

As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided) Leander,

Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.

Shakespeare seems to have been especially fond of the ancient lovers' story, giving a character in Much Ado About Nothing the name Hero and putting these wonderfully cynical anti-romantic words into the mouth of Rosalind in As You Like It:

Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

188. A word that covers moulting, shedding, casting off, and reevaluating. Slipping out of one thing and popping on another.

189. For more on this fascinating subject, see David D. Leitao, “The Perils of Leukippos: Initiatory Transvestism and Male Gender Ideology in the Ekdusia at Phaistos,” in Classical Antiquity, volume 14, no. 1 (1995).

190. Daphne should not be confused with Dafnis, a Sicilian youth of great beauty who was found as a baby under the laurel bush that gave him his name. Both Hermes and Pan fell in love with him, the latter teaching him to play the pipes. He became so proficient that later generations credited him with the invention of pastoral poetry. In the second century A.D. Longus, an author from Lesbos, wrote a romance (like The Golden Ass, a contender for the title First Ever Novel) called Daphnis and kloh-ee which tells of two bucolic lovers who undergo all kinds of ordeals and adventures to test their love.

Offenbach composed an operetta based on this tale. Even better known is the revolutionary 1912 ballet with music by Maurice Ravel, choreographed by Fokine and danced by Nijinsky.

191. Paphian became a word to describe Aphrodite and the arts of love. George Bernard Shaw chose Pygmalion as the title for his play about a man who tries to turn a cockney girl into a Mayfair lady.

192. Little is known about Leander. Christopher Marlowe's poem tells us nothing much more than that he was a youth who met Hero and fell in love. Leigh Hunt wrote another, which is no more informative.

193. In Marlowe's poem she wears a veil of flowers so realistically embroidered that she has to swat bees away...

194. Leander's name lives on in England's venerable and exclusive rowing club, whose candy-pink socks, tie, and oar-blades are such an alarming feature of the Henley Regatta.

195. The achievement clearly meant a lot to the club-footed but superbly athletic poet. He wrote this to his friend Henry Drury: “This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous;—so much so, that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.”

Six days after his feat Byron even wrote a mock heroic poem on the subject, “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”:

If, in the month of dark December,

Leander, who was nightly wont

(What maid will not the tale remember?)

To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,

He sped to Hero, nothing loth,

And thus of old thy current poured,

Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,

Though in the genial month of May, My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,

And think I've done a feat to-day.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,

According to the doubtful story,

To woo,—and—Lord knows what beside,

And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

'Twere hard to say who fared the best:

Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!

He lost his labor, I my jest:

For he was drowned, and I've the ague.

A later work of Byron which refers to Leander's home, although unrelated to the myth, is The Bride of Abydos (1813).

Arion and the Dolphin

The Greeks, like all great civilizations, set a great price on music—placing it so high in the arts that it took its name from all nine of the daughters of Memory. Music festivals and music prizes, so ubiquitous a feature of our cultural life today, were quite as important in the Greek world.

Few earned a finer reputation in their lifetime as singer, minstrel, bard, poet, and musician than Arion, from Methymna on the island of Lesbos. He was the son of Poseidon and the nymph Onsaya, but despite this parentage he chose to devote his musical talent to the celebration and praise of the god Dionysus. His instrument of choice was the kithara, a variation of the lyre. He is accepted everywhere as the inventor of the poetic form known as the dithyramb, a wild choral hymn dedicated to wine, carnival, ecstasy, and delight.

With his dreamy brown eyes, sweet voice, and bewitching ability to cause the toes to tap and hips to rotate, Arion soon became something of an idol around the Mediterranean world. His patron and most enthusiastic supporter was the tyrant of Corinth, Periyander and it was he who found out about a big music festival being held in Tarentum, a prosperous port city set in the instep of Italy's heel. Periander gave Arion the money to get himself across the sea and take part in the competitive elements of the festival on the condition that he agreed to split the prize money on his return.

The outward journey was uneventful. Arion arrived in Tarentum, entered the competitions, and easily won first prize in every category. The judges and members of the public had never heard such thrilling and original music.

A treasure chest of silver, gold, ivory, precious stones, and exquisitely wrought musical instruments was his reward. In gratitude for so generous a prize Arion gave a free concert for the townspeople the following day.

The Tarentum region was famous for the great wolfspiders commonly found in the countryside all around. The locals called them, after their town, “tarantulas.” Arion had heard that tarantula venom could provoke hysterical frenzy and so he improvised for the crowd a variation on his wild dithyrambs that he called a tarantella. The delirious rhythms of this folk dance maddened the excitable

Tarentines, but toward the end he tamed them with a medley of his softest, most romantic airs. By the early hours he could have had his pick of any girl, boy, man, or woman in southern Italy and it is reported that, like the successful musician he was, he did.

A large crowd was there to see Arion off the next morning, many of the people blowing kisses and a good few sobbing their hearts out. He and his luggage, including the box of treasure, were rowed out to sea in a tender, where a small but serviceable brig crewed by a sea captain and nine civilian sailors was standing off. Arion was soon comfortably settled aboard. The crew hoisted sail and the captain set a course for Corinth.

Overboard

As soon as land was out of sight and they were in the open sea, Arion sensed that something was wrong. He was used to being stared at—he was after all as outrageously beautiful as he was talented—but the looks that were being directed at him by the crew were of a different order. Days passed in this sullen and threatening atmosphere and he grew more and more uncomfortable.

There was something in the sailors' eyes that resembled lust, but suggested a darker purpose. What could be wrong? Then one hot afternoon, the ugliest and meanest looking of the sailors approached him.

“What you got in that chest you're sitting on, boy?”

Of course. Arion's heart sank. That would account for it. The sailors had heard tell of his treasure. He supposed they wanted some of it, but he was damned if he was going to share his hard-won prize with anyone but Periander. He had earlier planned in his mind to tip the crew generously at the end of the voyage, but now his heart hardened.

"My musical instruments," he replied. "I am a kitharode."

"You're a what?"

Arion shook his head sorrowfully and repeated slowly, as if to a child. "I—play—the—kith—ara."

Such a mistake.

“Oh—do—you? Well—play—us—a—tune—then.”

“I'd rather not, if you don't mind.”

"What's going on here?" The captain of the brig approached.

“Snotty kid says he's a musician but won't play. Says he's got a kithara in that box of his.”

“Well now, I'm sure you won't mind showing it to us, will you, young man?”

The full ship's complement had circled round him now.

"I—I'm not feeling well enough to play. Perhaps tonight I'll be in better shape."

"Why don't you go below and rest in the shade?"

“N-no, I prefer the fresh air.”

“Seize him, lads!”

Rough hands lifted Arion up as easily as if he were a newborn puppy. “Let me go! Leave it alone. That's not your property!”

“Where's the key?”

“I've . . . I've lost it.”

"Find it, boys."

“No, no! Please I beg you . . .”

The key was easily found and wrenched from round Arion's neck. Low whistles and murmurs arose as the captain loosened the latch and raised the lid. Light from the glitter of gold and flash of gemstones danced on the sailors' greedy faces.

Arion knew he was lost.

“I am quite prepared to share my treasure with you...”

The sailors seemed to find the offer highly amusing and laughed heartily.

“Kill him,” said the captain, taking out a long rope of pearls and holding it up to the light.

The ugliest sailor took out a knife and approached Arion with an evil smile.

“Please, please … may I—may I at least sing one last song? My threnody, my own funeral dirge. You owe me that, surely? The gods would punish you if you dared send me to my death without a cathartic obsequy of some kind . . .”

“I'll stop you spouting those bloody words,” snarled the ugly sailor, drawing closer.

“No, no,” said the captain. “He does have a point. We'll let our Cygnus sing his swan song. I suppose you'll need this lyre.” He fished the kithara from the chest and gave it to Arion who tuned it, closed his eyes, and began to improvise. He dedicated the song to his father Poseidon.

“Lord of the Oceans,” he sang, “King of Tides, Earth Shaker, beloved father. Often have I neglected you in my prayers and sacrifices, but you, O great one, will not neglect your son. Lord of the Oceans, King of Tides, Earth Shaker, beloved _ _”

Without warning, clutching his kithara tightly to him, Arion leapt overboard and dropped into the waves. The last thing he heard was the laughter of the crew and the captain's dry voice: "That was easy! Now for the spoils."

If any of them had bothered to look down, a remarkable sight would have met their eyes. Arion had plunged below the surface and was fully intending to open his mouth and let the seawater in without a struggle. Someone had told him that drowning is a sweet and pleasant death, a slow passing into sleep, as long as you don't fight it. Choking is a terrible panicky nightmare, but true drowning is a serene and painless release. So he had been told. Despite this comforting knowledge, Arion kept his mouth firmly clamped, and with bulging cheeks he kicked at the water, hugging his kithara.

And then, just as his lungs were ready to burst, something amazing happened. He felt himself being pushed upward. Pushed hard and fast.

He was surging through the water. He had broken the surface! He could breathe!

What was going on? It must be a dream. The rush of the water, the bubbles and spray, the tilting, rocking horizon, the booming in his ears, the soaking, the roar, and the dazzle—it all prevented him from understanding what was happening until he dared look down and through stinging eyes saw that . . . that . . . he was on the back of a dolphin! A dolphin! He was riding it over the waves! But its skin was slippery and he began to slide off. The dolphin barreled and twisted, and Arion was somehow righted again.

The animal had deliberately maneuvered to keep him safe! Would it mind if he stretched out one hand and held onto the dorsal fin, much as a horseman might grip the horn of a saddle? The dolphin did not mind, indeed it bucked a little, as if in approval, and increased its speed through the water. Arion slowly reached for the strap of his kithara and swung the instrument behind him so that he could enjoy the ride with two hands on the fin.

The brig was out of sight now. The sun shone down, dolphin and man plowed furrows through the sea, sending up plumes of iridescent spray. Where were they going? Did the dolphin know?

“Hey, dolphin. Set your course for the Gulf of Corinth. I'll direct you when we get there.”

The dolphin gave a series of squeaks and clicks that seemed to indicate understanding and Arion laughed. On and on they went, chasing the nevernearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed.

At length they reached the gulf. The dolphin negotiated this busy shipping lane with graceful, zipping ease. Sailors on the busy barques, barges, and small boats turned to stare at the remarkable sight of a young man riding a dolphin. Arion steered on the fins with gentle tugs this way and that and they did not stop until they had reached the royal docks.

“Send word to King Periander,” he said, stepping from the dolphin onto the quay. “His minstrel is returned. And feed my dolphin.”

The Monument

Periander was overjoyed by the homecoming of the musician he loved. The story of his rescue filled the court with wonder and amazement. They feasted all night and into the morning. It was evening by the time they set out to see, praise, and pet the heroic dolphin.

But a sad sight met their eyes. Ignorant dock workers had brought the animal ashore to be fed. It had languished overnight without any water to keep its skin moist and then lay all morning and afternoon on the quayside, surrounded by inquisitive children, the hot sun burning down and drying it up. Arion knelt on the ground and whispered into its ear. The dolphin rippled an affectionate reply, heaved a shuddering sigh, and died.

Arion recriminated himself bitterly and even Periander's instructions that a high tower be constructed to commemorate the dolphin and glorify its memory failed to raise his spirits. For the next month all his songs were sad ones and the palace mourned along with him.

I've been the one that has been the brig crewed by the nine sailors and its villainous captain had been blown by a storm into Corinth. Periander sent messengers to command the crew to come before him, bidding Arion to stay away while he questioned them.

“You were supposed to be conveying my bard Arion back from Tarentum,” he said. “Where is he?”

“Alas, dread majesty,” said the captain. “So very sad. The poor boy was swept overboard in the storm. We recovered the body and gave him a most respectful burial at sea. Great pity. Charming lad, popular with all the crew.”

“Aye. Indeed. Pleasant fellow. Terrible loss . . .” muttered the sailors.

“Be that as it may,” said Periander, “news reaches me that he won his singing competition and came to you with a treasure chest, half of which is my property.”

“As to that . . .” the captain spread his hands. “The chest was lost during the violent pitching of the storm. It opened as it slid down the deck and into the sea and we managed to recover some small bits and pieces. A silver lyre of some kind, an aulos—one or two trinkets. I wish it had been more, sire, really I do.”

“I see . . .” Periander frowned. “Assemble tomorrow morning by the new monument at the royal docks. You can't miss it. There's a carved dolphin on top. Bring what treasure remains and perhaps I will allow you to keep Arion's share, now that the poor boy is dead. You are free to go.”

“Have no fear,” said Periander to Arion as he related to him all that had been said. “Justice will be done.”

Next morning, the sea captain and his nine men arrived early at the monument. They were laughing and relaxed, amused that they had to return only a small amount of Arion's treasure and might even expect to be given a share of that by the gullible tyrant.

Periander arrived with his palace guards at precisely the appointed hour. “Good morning, captain. Ah, the treasure. That's all you managed to save? Yes, I see what you mean, not much at all, is it? Now, remind me what befell Arion?”

The captain repeated his story fluently and easily, every word exactly the same as it had been the day before.

“So he really is dead? You really did recover the body, prepare it for burial, and then return it to the waves?”

“Absolutely.”

“And these trinkets are all that remain of the prize treasure?”

“It grieves me to say so, majesty, but yes.”

“How then,” Periander asked, “do you account for the discovery of all this hidden in the hollow of your ship's timbers?

At a sign, some guards came forward bearing a litter on which was disposed the bulk of the treasure.

“Ah. Yes. Well . . .” the captain gave a winning smile. “Foolish of us to attempt to deceive you, dread lord. The poor boy died, as I said, and there was his treasure. We are but poor working sailors, sire. Your cunning and wisdom has found us out.”

“That is handsome of you,” said Periander. “But I am still puzzled. I had a kithara made for Arion in silver, gold, and ivory. He never went anywhere without it. Why is it not here amongst the other things?”

“Well now,” said the captain. “I told you how fond we were of young Arion. Like a younger brother to us, isn't that right, lads?”

“Aye, aye . . .” muttered the sailors.

“We knew what his kithara meant to him. We included it with him in his shroud before committing his body to the waves. How could we have done otherwise?”

Periander smiled. The captain smiled. But suddenly his smile disappeared. From the mouth of the golden dolphin at the top of the column emerged the sound of a kithara. The captain and his men stared in amazement. Arion's voice joined the notes of the kithara and these were the words that came from out of the carved dolphin's mouth:

"Kill him, men," the captain said.

“Kill him now and seize his gold.”

“We'll kill him now,” the sailors cried.

"And throw him to the sharks."

"But stop," the minstrel said. "Only let me sing

One final farewell song."

One of the sailors let out a scream of fear. The others fell quaking to their knees. Only the captain, white-faced, stayed upright.

A door opened in the plinth and Arion himself stepped from the monument, strumming his kithara and singing:

But the dolphin came and saved him.

He rode it on the rolling waves.

They crossed the sea to Corinth.

The dolphin and the bard.

The sailors began to weep and blubber, begging forgiveness. They blamed each other and most especially they blamed the captain.

“Too late,” said Periander, turning on his heel. “Kill them all. Now, come with me, Arion and sing me a song of love and wine.”

At the end of the musician's long and successful life, Apollo, to whom dolphins and music were sacred, set Arion and his rescuer amongst the stars between Sagittarius and Aquarius as the constellation Delphinus, the Dolphin.

From their position in the heavens, Arion and his rescuer could aid navigators below and remind all of us of the strange and marvelous kinship that exists between mankind and dolphins.

196. Only Orpheus, whose story belongs to the later Age of Heroes, exceeded Arion in skill and fame.

197. The word "guitar" derives from the word kithara.

198. “Tyrant” is just the Greek word for “autocratic ruler,” sometimes a self-appointed king. Periander was a real historical figure, cited as one of the so-called “Seven Sages of Greece” who were mentioned by Socrates as exhibiting all the qualities of gnomic wisdom to which mankind should aspire.

199. The tarantella is still popular throughout Europe.

Philem On And Baucis, Or Hospitality Rewarded

In the hills of eastern Phrygia, in Asia Minor, an oak and a linden grow side by side, their branches touching. It is a simple, rural setting, far from any glittering palaces or soaring citadels. Peasant farmers scratch out their livings here, wholly dependent on the clemency of Demeter for the ripening of their crops and the fattening of their pigs. The soil is not rich and it is always a struggle for the people to fill their barns with enough provender to last them through the winter months, when Demeter languishes and mourns the absence from the upper world of her bright daughter Persephone. That oak tree and the lime tree, unimpressive as they seem when compared to the grand poplar groves and elegant cypress avenues that line the highways connecting Athens and Thebes, are nonetheless the holiest trees in the Mediterranean world. The wise and the virtuous make pilgrimage to them and hang votive gifts in their branches.

Many years ago a settlement had grown up in the valley below. It was somewhere between a town and village in size. It called itself, with that hopeful desperation that always marks the naming of failed settlements, Eumeneia, which means “the place of the good months”—in the forlorn expectation perhaps that Demeter would bless the barren soil of the place and provide bountiful harvests. She rarely did.

At the center of the agora, the main square, there stood a large temple of Demeter, opposite to one of almost equal size dedicated to Hephaestus (for the people needed their forges and workshops blessed). Around the town could be seen many votive shrines to Hestia and Dionysus. The sparse vineyards that straggled up the hillsides were as carefully tended as any of the olive trees or fields of corn. Life was hard, but the men and women here found much solace in the sour wine of their region.

At the top of a winding lane leading out of the town, in a small stone cottage, lived an old couple called Filemon and Bawkis. They had been married since they were very young and now in their old age they loved each other as deeply as ever, with a quiet unwavering intensity that amused their neighbors. They were poorer than most, their fields were the meanest and most barren in all of Eumeneia, but they had never been heard to complain. Every day Baucis milked their one goat, hoed, stitched, washed, and mended, while Philemon sowed, planted, dug, and scratched at the earth behind their cottage. In the late afternoons they gathered wild mushrooms, collected firewood, or simply walked the hills, hand in hand, talking of this and that or content to be silent companions.

If there was enough food to make a supper they would eat, otherwise they would go to bed hungry and fall asleep in each other's arms. Their three children had long since moved out and were bringing up their own families far away. They never visited and no one else was likely to knock on their door. Until one fateful afternoon.

Philemon had just returned from the fields and was sitting down in preparation for his monthly haircut. There was very little these days to crown his bald old head, but this was a monthly ritual that gave them both pleasure. The loud rat-atat-tat on their door almost caused Baucis to drop the razor she had been sharpening. They looked at one another in great surprise, each unable to remember the last time anyone had come calling.

Two strangers stood on the threshold, a bearded man and his younger, smooth-faced companion. His son perhaps.

"Hello," said Philemon. "How may we help you?"

The younger man smiled and removed his hat, a strange round cap with a shallow brim. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “We are a pair of hungry travelers, new to this part of the world. I wonder if we might trespass upon your good nature . . .”

“Come in, come in!” said Baucis, bustling up behind her husband. “It's chilly to be out at this time of year. We are higher up than the rest of the town, you know, and feel the cold a little more. Philemon, why don't you scare up the fire so that our guests might warm themselves?”

“Of course, my love, of course. Where are my manners?” Philemon stooped down and blew into the hearth, awakening the embers.

“Let me take your cloaks,” said Baucis. “Have a seat, sir, by the fire. And you, sir, I beg.”

“That is most kind,” said the older of the two. “My name is Astrapos, and this is my son Arguros.”

The younger man bowed at the mention of his name with something of a flourish and seated himself beside the fire. “We are very thirsty,” he said, with a loud yawn.

“You must have something to drink,” said Baucis. “Husband, you fetch the wine jug and I shall bring dried figs and pine nuts. I hope you gentlemen will consent to dine with us. We can't offer rich fare, but you would be most welcome.”

“Don't mind if we do,” said Arguros.

“Let me take your hat and staff...”

“No, no. They stay with me.” The young man pulled the staff close to him. It was of a most curious design. Was it a vine that was carved all around it, Baucis wondered? He was twisting it so deftly that the whole thing seemed alive.

“I'm afraid,” said Philemon coming forward with a jug of wine, “that you may find our local wine a little thin and perhaps a little … sharp. People from neighboring regions mock us for it, but I assure you that once you are used to the taste it can be really quite drinkable. We think so at least.”

“Not bad,” said Arguos after a sip. “How did you get the cat to sit on the jug?”

“Ignore him,” said Astrapos. “He thinks he's amusing.”

“Well, I have to admit that was rather funny,” said Baucis, approaching with fruit and nuts on a wooden plate. “I hate to think, young sir, what you're going to say about the appearance of my dried figs.”

“You're wearing a blouse so I can't see them. But the preserved fruit on this plate looks pleasant enough.”

“Sir!” Baucis slapped him playfully and went very pink. What a strange young man.

The slight awkwardness that usually attends the drink and nibbles phase of an evening was quickly mellowed by the cheek and cheerfulness of Arguros and the ready laughter of their hosts. Astrapos seemed to be of a gloomier disposition, and as they went to the table Philemon put a hand on his shoulder.

“I hope you will forgive the inquisitiveness of a foolish old man, sir,” he said, “but you seem a little distracted. Is there anything we can help you with?”

“Oh, ignore him. He's always down in the dumps,” said Arguos. “That's where he gets his clothes from, haha! But, in truth, there's nothing wrong with him that a good meal won't put right.”

Baucis met Philemon's eyes for a brief instant. There was so little in the larder. A side of salted bacon that they had been saving for the midwinter feast, some preserved fruit and black bread, half a cabbage. They knew they would go hungry for a week if they fed so much as half the appetites of two such hearty men. But hospitality was a sacred thing and the needs of guests must always come first.

"Another glass of that wine wouldn't hurt," said Arguos.

“Oh dear,” said Philemon, looking at the jug, “I fear that there isn't any more ….”

“Nonsense,” said Arguros snatching it away, “plenty left.” He filled his cup and then Astrapos's too.

“How strange,” said Philemon. “I could have sworn the pitcher was only a quarter full.”

"Where are your cups?" asked Arguros.

"Oh please, we don't need any..."

“Nonsense,” Arguros leaned back in his chair and reached for two wooden beakers on the side table behind him. “Now then . . . Let's have a toast.”

Philemon and Baucis were amazed, not only that there was enough wine in the pitcher to fill their beakers to the brim, but that its quality was so much better than either of them remembered. In fact, unless they were dreaming, it was the most delicious wine they had ever tasted.

In something of a daze, Baucis wiped the table down with mint leaves.

“Darling,” Philemon whispered in her ear, “that goose that we were going to sacrifice to Hestia next month. It's surely more important to feed our guests. Hestia will understand.”

Baucis agreed. “I'll go out and wring its neck. See if you can get the fire hot enough to give it a fine roasting.”

The goose, however, would not be caught. No matter how carefully Baucis waited and pounced, it leapt honking from her grasp every time. She returned to the cottage in a state of agitated disappointment.

“Gentlemen, I am so very sorry,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “I”m afraid your meal will be crude and disagreeable.”

“Tush, lady,” said Arguros, pouring more wine for everyone. “I've never partaken of a finer feast.”

"It's true. Tell them, Father."

Astrapos gave a grim smile. “We have been turned away from every house in Eumeneia. Some of the townspeople swore at us. Some spat at us. Some threw stones at us. Some set dogs on us. Yours was the last house we tried and you have shown us nothing but kindness and a spirit of xenia that I was beginning to fear was vanished from the world.”

“Sir,” said Baucis, feeling for Philemon's hand under the table and squeezing it. “We can only apologize for the behavior of our neighbors. Life is hard and they have not always been brought up to venerate the laws of hospitality as they should.”

“There is no need to make excuses for them. I am angry,” said Astrapos, and as he spoke a rumble of thunder could be heard.

Baucis looked across into the eyes of Astrapos and saw something that frightened her.

Arguos laughed. “Don't be alarmed,” he said. “My father is not angry with you. He is pleased with you.”

“Leave the cottage and climb the hill,” said Astrapos, rising. “Do not look back. Whatever happens do not look back. You have earned your reward and your neighbors have earned their punishment.”

Philemon and Baucis stood, holding hands. They knew now that their visitors were something more than ordinary travelers.

“There is no need to bow,” said Arguros.

His father pointed to the door. "To the top of the hill."

"Remember," Arguros called after them, "no looking back."

Hand in hand Philemon and Baucis walked up the hill.

"You know who that young man was?" said Philemon.

“Hermes,” said Baucis. “When he opened the door to let us go, I saw the snakes twined around his staff. They were alive!”

“Then the man he called his father was … must have been …”

“Oh my goodness!” Philemon paused on the hillside to catch his breath. “It's getting so dark, my love. The sound of the thunder is getting closer. I wonder if …”

“No darling, we mustn't look back. We mustn't.”

Disgusted by the hostility and shameless violations of the laws of hospitality shown to him by the townspeople of Eumeneia, Zeus had decided to do for this community what he had done back in the time of Deucalion and the Great Flood. The clouds gathered into a dense mass at his command, lightning flashed, thunder boomed, and the rain began to fall.

By the time the elderly couple struggled to the top of the hill, torrents of water were gushing past them.

“We can't just stand here in the rain with our backs to the town,” said Baucis.

“I'll look if you will.”

“I love you, Philemon, my husband.”

“I love you, Baucis, my wife.”

They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden.

For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims.

200. 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.

Phrygia and the Gordian Knot

The Greeks loved to mythologize the founders of towns and cities. Athena's gift of the olive to the people of Athens and her raising of Erechtheus (the issue of Hephaestus and the semen-soaked fillet, you will recall) to be the founder of the city seems to have helped foster the Athenian sense of self. The story of Cadmus and the dragon's teeth did the same for Thebans. Sometimes, as is the case with the founding of the city of Gordium, elements of the story can move from myth to legend to actual, identifiable history.

In Macedonia there lived a poor but ambitious peasant called Gordias. One day, as he labored in his barren stony fields, an eagle landed on the pole of his oxcart and fixed him with a fierce glare.

“I knew it!” Gordias said to himself, “I have always felt that I was marked for greatness. This eagle proves it. I have a destiny.”

He raised his plow and drove the ox and cart many hundreds of miles toward the oracle of Zeus Sabazios. As Gordias lumbered along, the eagle gripped the pole fast with its talons, never flinching no matter how violently the cart bumped and swayed over the potholes and boulders.

On the way, Gordias encountered a young Telmissian girl endowed in equal measure with great prophetic powers and an alluring beauty that stirred his heart. She seemed to have been expecting him and urged that they make haste at once to Telmissus, where he should sacrifice his ox to Zeus Sabazios. Gordias, fired by the coming together of all his hopes, undertook to follow her advice so long as she agreed to marry him. She bowed her head in assent and they set off for the city.

It so happened that, at this very moment, the King of Phrygia had just died in his bed. Since he left no heir or obvious successor, the people of his capital hurried to the shrine of Zeus Sabazios to find out what should be done. The oracle told them to anoint and crown the first man to enter the city in a cart. So it was that the townspeople were clustering excitedly round the gates at the very moment that Gordias and the prophetess arrived. The eagle flew from his perch with a great cry as they crossed the threshold. The populace threw their caps in the air and cheered until they were hoarse.

In a very short time Gordias had gone from scratching a lonely living in the Macedonian dirt to being wed to a beautiful Telmissian seer and crowned King of Phrygia. He drew up plans to rebuild the city (which he immediately named Gordium in his own honor) and settled down to reign over Phrygia and live happily ever after. Which he did. Sometimes, even in the world of Greek mythology, things go well.

The oxcart became a holy relic, a symbol of Gordias's divine right to rule. A carved post of polished dogwood was placed in the agora and the yoke of the cart secured to it with a rope tied up in the most intricate knot the world had seen. Gordias was determined that the cart should never be stolen from the town square. The legend arose, in that mysterious and unattributable way that legends do arise, that whoever untied this fiendish knot would one day rule Asia. Many tried—master mariners, mathematicians, toymakers, artists, artisans, tricksters, philosophers, and ambitious children, but none could even begin to unpick its elaborate interwoven hitches, loops, and twists.

The great Gordian knot lay unsolved for more than a thousand years until a reckless and brilliant young Macedonian conqueror and king called Alexander rode with his army into town. When told of the legend he took one look at the great tangle of rope, raised his sword, and swept it down, cutting the Gordian knot and earning the delighted praise of his own and future generations.

Meanwhile, back in time, Gordias's son Prince Midas grew up to be a friendly, merry young man, loved and admired by all who knew him.

201. Sabazios was a horse-riding incarnation of Zeus worshipped by the Thracians and Phrygians.

202. When I first heard this story I thought not more of Alexander but less. “He cheated!” I said. Suppose I “solved” a randomized Rubik's cube by jemmying it open with a screwdriver until all the pieces fell out and then pressing them back again in the right order? Who would praise that? But Alexander is congratulated by history for “thinking outside the box” and called “the Great.” One rule for the genius warrior kings of the world and another for the rest of us.

Midas

“Zeus!”

The Ugly Stranger

In due time Gordias died and his son Midas succeeded him as king. His life was simple but elegant. Phrygia was not an especially rich kingdom, but most of the time and money that Midas did possess were lavished on a magnificent rose garden in the palace grounds. It became known as one of the wonders of the age. Midas loved nothing more than to roam this paradise of color and fragrance and tend to his plants—each one of which bore sixty glorious blooms.

One morning, as he wandered the garden, noting with habitual delight how exquisitely the beads of dew twinkled on the delicate petals of his darling roses, Midas tripped over the slumbering form of an ugly, potbellied old man, curled up on the ground and snoring like a pig.

"Oh," said Midas, "I'm so sorry. I didn't see you there."

With a belch and a hiccup, the old man rose to his feet and bowed low. “Beg pardon,” he said. “Couldn't help but be drawn by the sweet scent of your roses last night. Fell asleep.”

“Not at all,” said Midas politely. He had been brought up always to show respect for his elders. “But why don't you come into the palace and partake of some breakfast?”

"Don't mind if I do. Handsome of you."

Midas had no way of knowing that this ugly, potbellied old man was Silenus, boon-companion of the wine god Dionysus.

“Perhaps you would like a bath?” he suggested as they made their way indoors.

“What for?”

"Oh, nothing. Just a thought."

Silenus stayed for ten days and ten nights, making deep inroads into Midas's meager cellar, but rewarding him with outrageous songs, dances, and stories.

On the tenth night Silenus announced that he would be leaving the next morning.

“My master will be pining for me,” he said. “Don't suppose your people could conduct me to him, could they?”

"With pleasure," said Midas.

The next day Midas and his retinue led Silenus on the long journey to the southern vineyards that Dionysus liked to frequent at that time of year. After many hours of struggling through the heat and tangle of choked lanes, steep hills, and narrow byways they came upon the wine god and his attendants picnicking in a field. Dionysus was overjoyed to see his old friend.

“Wine tastes sour without you,” he said. “Dances go wrong and music falls flat on the ears. Where have you been?”

“I got lost,” said Silenus. “This kind fellow—” he pushed the reluctant Midas forward to face the god, “—took me in to his palace and gave me the run of the place. I drank most of his wine, ate most of his food, pissed in his water jars, and sicked up over his silk cushions. Never complained. Thoroughly good soul.” Silenus slapped Midas on the back. Midas smiled as best he could. He hadn't known about the water jars and the silk cushions.

Dionysus, like many deep drinkers, could easily become very emotional and affectionate. He pawed gratefully at Midas. “You see?” he declared to the world in general. “You see? Just when you lose faith in humanity, they show their worth like this. This is what my father means by xenia. Makes my heart burst. Name it.”

“Excuse me?” Midas was keen to leave. Ten days and nights of Silenus had been quite enough. He yearned now to be alone with his flowers. A drunken Dionysus with a full entourage of Maenads and satyrs might just be too much even for his patience.

“Name your reward. Anything. Whatever you—hic!—desire I will providely divine. Which is to say,” Dionysus amended with dignity, “I will divinely provide. So there,” he added belligerently, turning suddenly round to face off no one in particular.

“You mean, my lord, that I can ask anything of you?”

Which of us has not entertained joyous fantasies of genies and fairies granting us wishes? I am sorry to say that, at this offer from Dionysus, Midas had rather a rush of blood to the head.

I have mentioned that Phrygia was one of the poorer kingdoms, and while Midas was not considered by his friends to be rapacious or avaricious, he did long, like any ruler, for more money to spend on his armies, his palace, his subjects, and his municipal amenities. The expenses of a royal household mount up and Midas had always been too benevolent a king to burden his people with heavy taxes. And so he found a most extraordinary wish making its way from his fevered brain to his mouth.

“Then I ask this,” he said, “that everything I touch be turned to gold.”

Dionysus smiled a rather diabolical smile. "Really? That's what you want?"

“That is what I want.”

“Go home,” said the god. “Bathe yourself in wine and go to bed. When you arise in the morning, your wish will be granted.”

Goldfinger

It is probable that Midas did not believe that anything would come of this exchange. The gods were notorious for dodging, twisting, and sliding out of their obligations.

Nevertheless, just in case—after all, what harm could it do? I mean, one never knows—that night, Midas poured a few hogsheads from his diminishing store of wine into the royal bath. The fumes from it ensured that when he went to bed he enjoyed a deep and untroubled sleep.

Midas awoke to a sparkling morning that cast all ideas of wild wishes and drunken gods from his mind. With thoughts only for his flowers, he sprang from bed and hurried to his beloved garden.

Never had the roses looked more beautiful. He leaned down and sniffed a pink young hybrid that was in that perfect state midway between bud and full bloom. The exquisite fragrance made him giddy with joy.

He lovingly made to unfurl the petals. In an instant the stem and flower had been transformed into gold. Solid gold.

Midas stared in disbelief.

He touched another rose and then another. The moment his fingers touched them they turned to gold. He ran up and down around the garden in a whooping frenzy, brushing his hands along the bushes until every one had been frozen into hard shining precious, priceless, glorious, golden gold.

Skipping and shouting with joy Midas beheld what had once been a garden of rare roses and was now the most valuable treasure in all the world. He was rich! He was insanely, monumentally rich! No man on earth had ever been richer.

The sound of his exultant shouts attracted his wife, who came out of the palace doors and stood looking down, their infant daughter in her arms.

“Darling, why are you shouting?”

Midas ran up to her and encircled mother and child in a tight hug of excited joy. “You won't believe it!” he said. “Everything I touch turns to gold! Look! All I have to do is—oh!”

He stepped back to see that his wife and infant girl were now one fused golden statue, glittering in the morning sun, a frozen mother and child group that any sculptor would have been proud of.

“I'll attend to that later,” Midas said to himself. “There must be a way to recover them . . . Dionysus wouldn't be so . . . meanwhile—Zim! Zam! Zoo!”

A guard on sentry, the great side-door to the palace, and his favorite throne were now entirely gold.

“Vim! Vam! Voo!”

The side table, his goblet, his cutlery—solid gold!

But what was this? Crack! His teeth almost broke on a hard golden peach. Tunk! His lips met metallic wine. Thwop! A heavy gold nugget that had once been a linen napkin crushed and bruised his lips.

The unbounded delight began to fade as Midas realized the full import of his gift.

You may imagine the rest. All at once the thrill and pleasure of his ownership of gold were changed to dread and fear. All Midas touched turned to gold, but his heart turned to lead. No words of his, no shrieks of imprecision to the heavens could return his cold solidified wife and daughter to quick warm life. The sight of his beloved roses dropping their heavy heads caused his own to bow in misery. Everything around him glinted and glittered, gleamed and glimmered with a gorgeous gaudy golden glow but his heart was as grim and grey as granite.

And the hunger and thirst! After three days of food and drink turning to inedible gold the moment it touched him, Midas felt ready for death.

Atop his golden bed, whose hard heavy sheets offered no warmth or comfort, he fell into a fevered sleep. He dreamed of his flowers blooming back into soft, delicate life—his roses, yes, but most of all the flowers that he now understood mattered most, his wife and child. In the wild, contorted dream he saw the soft colors returning to their cheeks and the light shining once more in their eyes. As these beguiling images danced and flickered in his mind the voice of Dionysus boomed inside him.

“Foolish man! It is fortunate for you that Silenus is so fond of you. Only for his sake do I show you mercy. When you awaken in the morning, betake yourself to the River Pactolus. Plunge your hands in its waters and your enchantment will be dissolved. Whatever you wash in the fast-flowing stream will be restored to you.”

The next morning Midas did what the voice in his dream had instructed. As promised, contact with the waters of the river relieved him of his golden touch. Mad with joy, he spent a good week shuttling back and forth immersing his wife, his daughter, his guards, servants, roses, and all of his possessions in the river and clapping his hands in delight as they returned to their valueless—but priceless—original state.

After this, the waters of the Pactolus, which wind around the foothills of Mount Tmolus, became the single greatest source of electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, in all the Aegean.

King Midas's Ears

You would think that Midas had learned his lesson by now. The lesson that repeats and repeats throughout the story of man. Don't mess with the gods. Don't trust the gods. Don't anger the gods.

Don't barter with the gods. Don't compete with the gods. Leave the gods well alone.

Treat all blessings as a curse and all promises as a trap. Above all, never insult a god. Ever.

In one respect Midas had certainly changed. He now spurned not just gold, but all riches and possessions. Shortly after Dionysus lifted the curse, Midas became a devoted follower of Pan, the goat-footed god of nature, fauns, meadows, and all the wild things of the world.

With flowers in his hair, sandals on his feet, and the merest suggestion of clothing covering his modesty, Midas left his wife and daughter in charge of Phrygia and devoted himself to a hippy-happy life of simple bucolic virtue.

All might have been well had not his master Pan taken it into his head to challenge Apollo to a competition to determine which was the superior, the lyre or the pipes.

One afternoon, in a meadow lying on the slopes of Mount Tmolus, Pan put the syrinx to his lips before an audience of fauns, satyrs, dryads, nymphs, assorted demigods, and other lesser immortals. A coarse but likeable air in the Lydian mode emerged. It seemed to summon barking deer, rushing waters, gambling rabbits, rutting stags, and galloping horses. The rough, rustic tune delighted the audience, especially Midas, who really did worship Pan and all the frolicking mirth and madness that the goat-footed one represented.

When Apollo stood and sounded the first notes of his lyre, a hush fell. From his strings arose visions of universal love, harmony and happiness, a deep abiding joy in life, and a sense of heaven itself.

When he had finished the audience rose as one to applaud. Tmolus, the deity of the mountain, called out, “The lyre of the great lord Apollo wins. All agreed?”

“Aye, aye!” roared the satyrs and fauns.

"Apollo, Apollo!" cried the nymphs and dryads. One lone voice demurred.

“No!”

“No?” Dozens of heads turned to see who could have dared dissent.

Midas rose to his feet. “I disagree. I say the pipes of Pan produce the better sound.”

Even Pan was astonished. Apollo quietly put down his lyre and walked toward Midas.

“Say that again.”

It could at least be said of Midas that he had the courage of his convictions. He swallowed twice before repeating, “I—I say the pipes make a better sound. Their music is more … exciting. More artistic.”

Apollo must have been in a soft mood that day, for he did not slaughter Midas on the spot. He did not peel the skin from him layer by layer as he had done to Marsyas when that unfortunate had had the temerity to challenge him. He did not cause Midas even the slightest amount of pain but just said softly, “You honestly think Pan played better than me?”

“I do.”

“Well, in that case,” said Apollo, with a laugh, “you must have the ears of an ass.”

No sooner were these words out of the god's mouth than Midas felt something strange and warm and rough going on in his scalp. As he put an enquiring hand to his head, howls and hoots and screams and screeches of mocking laughter started to come from the assembled throng. They could see what Midas could not. Two large grey donkey ears had pushed their way through his hair and were twitching and flicking back and forth for all the world to see.

“It seems I was right,” said Apollo. “You do indeed have the ears of an ass.”

Crimsoning with shame and mortification, Midas turned and fled the meadow, the taunts and jeers of the crowd sounding all the more clearly in his great furry ears.

His life as a camp-follower of Pan was over. Tying his head in a kind of turban, he returned to his wife and family in the palace of Gordium and—his carefree experiment in country living decidedly done with—settled back down into the life of a king.

The only person who saw his ass's ears was, necessarily, the servant who cut his hair every month. No one else in Phrygia knew the terrible secret and Midas was determined it should stay that way.

“Here's the deal,” Midas told the barber. “I give you a bigger salary and a more generous pension than any other member of the palace staff and you keep quiet about what you have seen. If, however, you breathe a word to anyone I will slaughter your family before your eyes, cut out your tongue, and leave you to wander the world in mute poverty and exile. Understood?”

The frightened barber nodded.

For three years each side kept to the bargain. The barber's wife and family waxed fat and happy on the extra money that came in and no one found out about the king's asinine auditory appendages. Turbans in the Midas style caught on throughout Phrygia, Lydia, Thrace, and beyond. All was well.

But secrets are terrible things to have to keep. Especially such juicy ones as that to which the royal barber was privy. Every day he would wake up and feel that the knowledge was writhing and swelling inside him. The barber loved his wife and family and was in any case loyal enough to his monarch not to have any wish to humiliate or embarrass him. But that bulging, ballooning secret had to be released somehow before he burst. No unmilked cow with swollen udders, no mother of overdue twins, no gut-stuffed gastronome straining on the privy, could ever feel such a desperate need for relief from their agonies than this poor barber.

Finally he hit upon a scheme which he felt sure would rid him of his burden without endangering his family. Awaking from a tortured night in which he had dreamed that he revealed the secret to the gaping populace of Gordium from a balcony in the main square, he went out at first light deep into the remote countryside. In a lonely place by a stream he dug a deep trench in the ground. Looking about him in all directions to make sure that he was alone and that there was no possibility of being overheard, he knelt down, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted these words into the hole:

“Midas has ass's ears!”

Scrabbling frantically to close up the hole before the words could escape, he failed to notice one tiny seed floating down and settling at the bottom...

When the backfilling was done, the barber stamped fiercely up and down on the earth to seal in the dreadful secret. He skipped all the way back to Gordium, headed straight for his favorite tavern, and ordered a flagon of the house's best wine. He could drink now without fear that the wine might loosen his tongue. It was as if he were Atlas and the sky had finally been lifted from his shoulders.

Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, back in the remote field by the stream that tiny seed, warmed by the soft breath of Gaia below, began to germinate. Soon, a delicate little reed was shouldering its way through the topsoil and pushing its delicate head into the air. As the breeze caught the reed it softly whispered, “Midas has ass's ears.”

The faint words reached the rushes and sedges that fringed the riverbank. "Midas has ass's ears..."

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

"Midas has ass's ears," sighed the branches.

"Midas has ass's ears," sang the birds.

And at last the news reached the city.

“Midas has ass's ears!”

King Midas woke with a start. There was laughter and shouting in the street outside the palace. He crept to the window, crouched down, and listened.

The humiliation was too much for him to bear. Without stopping to wreak his vengeance on the barber and the barber's family, he mixed a poisonous draught of ox-blood, raised his eyes heavenward, gave a bitter laugh and a shrug, drained the drink, and died.

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.

Appendices

The Brothers, a Sidebar

A final word about Epimetheus and Prometheus, the sons of Clymene (or Asia) the Oceanid and Iapetus the Titan, and younger brothers of sky-shouldering Atlas and thunderbolt-exploded Menoetius. It is generally held that Prometheus means “forethought” and Epimetheus “afterthought,” from which it is usually inferred that Epimetheus blundered into things without considering consequences while his elder brother Prometheus deliberated with more perspicacity. It might be convincingly argued that there was nothing especially cautious, forwardthinking, or prescient about Prometheus's actions in bringing fire to man. It was impulsive, generous . . . loving even, but not especially wise. Epimetheus was a kindly, well disposed individual also, and his failings were only . . . I was going to say only human, but that can hardly be right, for he was a Titan. His failings were certainly titanic in their consequences. The perceived difference between the brothers is used to this day by philosophers to express something fundamental about us all.

In Plato's dialogue Protagoras the title character suggests a creation myth somewhat different from the traditionally accepted one.

The gods (so Protagoras tells Socrates) decided to populate nature with new strains of mortal life, there being only immortals in the world at that time. Out of earth and water and with divine fire and divine breath they created animals and man. They charged Prometheus and Epimetheus with the task of allocating to these creatures all the attributes and characteristics that would enable them to live fulfilled and successful lives.

Epimetheus said he would do the distributing and Prometheus could come and check up on his work. This the brothers agreed upon.

Epimetheus set to with a will. He gave armor to some animals—the rhinoceros, the pangolin, and the armadillo, for instance. To others, almost at random it seemed, he handed out heavy weatherproof fur, camouflage, venom, feathers, tusks, talons, scales, claws, gills, wings, whiskers, and goodness knows what else. He assigned speed and ferocity, he apportioned buoyancy and airworthiness—every animal was fitted out with its own cleverly designed and efficient speciality, from navigational skills to expertise in burrowing, nest-building, swimming, leaping, and singing. He was just congratulating himself for providing the bats and dolphins with echolocation when he realized that this had been the very last of the available gifts. He had, with his characteristic lack of foresight, completely omitted to consider what he would bestow on man—poor, naked, vulnerable, smooth-skinned, two-legged man.

Epimetheus went guilty to his brother and asked what they should do now that there was nothing left at the bottom of the gift basket. Man had no defences with which to arm himself against the cruelty, cunning, and rapacity of these now superbly provisioned animals. The very powers that had been lavished on the beasts would surely finish off weaponless mankind.

Prometheus's solution was to steal the arts from Athena and flame from Hephaestus. With these, man could use wisdom, wit, and industry to pit himself against the animals. He might not swim as well as a fish, but he could work out how to build boats; he might not run as swiftly as a horse, but he could learn to tame, shoe, and ride one. One day he might even construct wings to rival those of the birds.

Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus—not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals.

Prometheus's name means, as I have said,"forethought." Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western 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. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, town dwellers, and traders? You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favorite Greek motto was, after all, meden 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.

The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought—which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros, or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least . . .

Hope

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 denyed 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.

Others have maintained that 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 denyed 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 is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration.

Hopefully, or hopelessly, we can decide for ourselves.

Giant Leaps

There are some stories in Greek myth of a Gigantomakee, or “war with the giants.” A hundred of this warrior race (who, as I have mentioned, were not especially tall or gigantic in the modern sense) were born of Gaia and the blood of the gelded Ouranos. It may be that the war was Gaia's last attempt at wrestling control of the cosmos. In some sources there seems to be an overlap or fusion with the Titanomachy. What seems certain is that a violent uprising of some sort did take place and that it was led by the King of the Giants, Yuremedon, against the gods.

Image summary: A marble relief sculpture depicting two muscular male figures with fish-like, scaled tails instead of legs, identifying them as tritons. The figure on the left is facing forward with one arm raised, while the figure on the right is seen from behind. Between them, a sculpted lion's head and a serpent are integrated into the composition.

Two giants battling the gods during the Gigantomachy.

We do not have the names of all the participants, but the fates of a few of the mightiest were certainly recorded. The most powerful of all, Enseladus (the noisy one) was buried by Athena under Mount Etna, from which prison he continues to grumble volcanically. Polibotes was crushed under Nisyrus, a section of the island of Cos that Poseidon broke off and thrust on top of him. Damisus (the conqueror) was killed early in the struggle, but came to fame later, when his body was exhumed by the centaur Chiron for spare parts. Hephaestus emptied a vat of molten iron all over the unfortunate Mimas (the imitator); Klitias (the renowned) was consumed in the flames of Hecate's torches; Sikeus, with Zeus in hot pursuit, was saved from extinction when Gaia turned him into a fig tree. Hippolytus (the stampeder of horses) was slain by Hermes, who cheated by wearing his invisibility cloak; and Dionysus killed Tifoueuss (the smolderer) with his sacred thyrsus.

I have read of one giant, called Aristaeus (the best), who was spared from the war by being hidden away in the shape of a dung beetle by his mother, Gaia. But how Thoon (the swift), Fotios (the reckless), Molios, Emfitos (the rooted one), and goodness knows how many others of the giant race all met their ends remains, as far as we know, unrecorded.

Oddly one account tells how the ferocious giant Porphirion (the purple one) in the act of trying to rape Hera was killed by Zeus and Heracles, which places his death much later in the timeline than the rest of the Gigantomachy. As if such a consistent and stable a device as a timeline could ever be used to delineate the complex, kaleidoscopic, and disorderly unfolding of Greek myth.

Feet and Toes

Like us the Greeks used feet as a measurement. One pous (plural podes) was made up of about fifteen or sixteen toes (daktyla) and was approximately as long as a British or American foot. There were one hundred podes to a plethron (the width of a running track), six of those to a stadion (the length of a running track, from which we get our word "stadium"), and eight stadia to the mile, or million. The foot business—podiatrists, octopuses (or octopodes), tripods, and so on—shows the interesting journey of the letter "P" as it strangely contorted to "F" the farther west it went: so pous became Fuss in German and foot in English. Pfennig, Pfeife, and Pfeffer are still stuck in the middle in modern German but have become penny, pipe, and pepper in English (though fife exists too). The early nineteenth-century philologist freed-rick von Schlegel first noticed this "Great Fricative Shift," which subsequently became part of Grimm's Law—so named in honor of the Brothers Grimm, who were the ones who really put in the work and showed how most of the languages of Europe and the Middle East could be traced all the way back to India and their notional Proto-Indo-European ancestor.

203. Scientists now tell us that the moon of Saturn named after Enceladus, a mere eight hundred million miles from earth, appears to offer the necessary conditions for life. So perhaps all along Gaia had laid plans for the expansion of her bloodline on other worlds.

204. My Greek-English lexicon isn't of much help with Polybotes's name. It seems to mean "much-nourishing" or "many feeding." Fertile, perhaps.

205. The fig thereafter bore Syceus's name.

206. Not to be confused with a minor god of beekeeping with the same name.

Afterword

I have assembled below a few thoughts on the nature of myth and a brief outline of some of the sources I have had recourse to in the writing of this book.

I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the “ages of man,” for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories “wrong” I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions.

In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive.

Myth v. Legend v. Religion

Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure. The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning “to be read.”

Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture, and craftsmanship.

That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly, and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred, and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall, and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame, and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.

Symbolical rather than historical in origin as myths and mythical figures might be, they underwent the same fictional remodeling and embellishments as more factually rooted legends. They too were written down, and the Greek myths especially, thanks to Homer, Hesiod, and those that followed, were chronicled and detailed in ways that have granted us the timelines, genealogies, and character histories that allow for storytelling of the kind I have attempted with this book.

Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can't be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. Most of those who told and retold the myths would have been aware, I think, at some level of their consciousness, that they were telling fictional tales. They might have thought the world was once peopled with nymphs and monsters, but they could be fairly certain that such beings no longer existed.

Prayer, ritual, and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things. At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion. It moves from stories told around the fire to a systematized set of beliefs to which obedience is owed. Priestly castes arose who ordained how people should behave.

How myths become codified into scriptures, liturgies, and theologies is a subject for another book and quite beyond my scope. We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur'an. There were “mysteries” and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons.

The Greeks

It is always a mistake to think of the Greeks as superior human beings uniquely endowed with enlightened wisdom and rational benevolence. We would find much in ancient Greece alien and distasteful to us. Women could play no real part in affairs outside the home, slavery was endemic, punishments were harsh, and life could be brutal. Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus, and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully, and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. “Know thyself” was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people—if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings—they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim.

So while they may have been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world, and themselves with greater candor and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own.

Location, Location

Greece. What and where is that? It was no kind of a nation at the time of the myths. There is a politically identifiable sovereign landmass and collection of islands we can now visit, but the Greek world of Mythos includes much of Asia Minor, incorporating Turkey, parts of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon as well as areas of North Africa, Egypt, the Balkans, Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. The story of “Arion and the Dolphin” takes us to southern Italy and other myths deal with people who might at times have described themselves as Hellenic, Ionian, Argive, Attic, Thracian, Aeolian, Spartan, Doric, Athenian, Cypriot, Corinthian, Theban, Phrygian, Sicilian, Cretan, Trojan, Boeotian, Lydian . . . and much more besides. It is all, I am well aware, confusing and probably irritating to anyone but a scholar or a Greek citizen. There is the map to consult, but otherwise I really hope you don't bust a boiler trying to work it all out. Goodness knows I bust mine often enough and I wouldn't wish the same confusion and worry on you.

Sources Ancient

To retell Greek mythical stories is to tread in the footsteps of giants. In the Foreword to this book I shared Edith Hamilton's observation that Greek myth is "the creation of great poets." While its deepest origins lie in prehistory and unrecorded folklore, in preparing material for this book I have been able, as any one of us can, to consult the very first poets of the Western tradition, who just happened to be Greek and whose subject matter just happened to be myth.

There is a unique treasury of extant sources that chart the chronology of Greek myth from the creation of the universe and birth of the gods all the way to the end of their interaction and interference in human affairs. It begins with Homer, who may or may not have been a single (blind) Ionian bard, but whose name is attached to the two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, that were put together some time, it is thought, in the eighth century B.C. Their setting is the siege of Troy and its aftermath, but Homer makes countless useful references back to earlier myths. His approximate contemporary, the poet Hesiod (undoubtedly an individual), did the most to create what might be called a timeline for Greek mythology. His Theogony (Birth of the Gods) narrates the creation, the rise of the Titans, the origin of the gods, and the establishment of Olympus. His Erga kai Hemerai (Works and Days) tells the great human creation stories of Prometheus and Pandora as well as laying out mankind's Five Ages—Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron.

Other Greek and subsequent Roman poets, writers, and travelers filled in gaps, elaborated, embroidered, fused, confused, and just plain fabricated Greek mythical stories that mostly descended from Hesiod's genealogical plan. Of these the Bibliotheca (Library), a great dictionary of myth, is perhaps the most valuable source. It was originally thought to have been the work of the scholar Apollodorus of Athens, who worked in the second century B.C., but this is now doubted; these days the work is attributed to an unknown who goes by the demeaning soubriquet of Pseudo-Apollodorus and dated to the first or second century A.D. Other compelling and/or reliable sources—all of them probably from the second century A.D.—include the Greek traveler and guidebook compiler Pawsanias, the “novelists” Longus (who wrote in Greek) and Apuleyus, (who wrote in Latin), and the Latin prose writer Hajinus.

Towering above them all is the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), whose Metamorphoses (Transformations) tells of those mortals, nymphs, and others who were changed by the gods into animals, plants, rivers, or even stones as a punishment or out of pity. His other works, principally the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Heroides (Heroines) also contain recastings of Greek myth, using always the Latin names for the gods—“Jove” or “Jupiter” for Zeus, “Diana” for Artemis, “Cupid” or “Amor” for Eros, and so on. Ovid is prolific, profuse, irreverent, saucy, and cinematic in his energy and restless switching of points of view. It is clear from the wealth of references in his plays and poems that Shakespeare, amongst many other writers and artists, was hugely influenced by him. Ovid was happy to add, subtract, and invent, and this has influenced and emboldened me to be—shall we say imaginative?—in some of my retellings too.

Sources Modern

Many children on both sides of the Atlantic grew up, as I did, on classic collections of the Greek myths by four enduringly popular Americans. Two were nineteenth-century writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave us A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel,; and Thomas Bulfinch, whose The Age of Fable (1855), later incorporated into the compendious, has run through dozens and dozens of editions in its 160 years of life. The twentieth century was dominated by the matchless Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942), which is still happily in print, and by Bernard Evslin's evergreen Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (1967). British equivalents include Charles Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and L. S. Hyde's Favorite Greek Myths (1905), this last being a great favorite of mine when I was a boy.

Estimable as all of these were, and still are, they tend shyly to skirt round or bowdlerize the erotic and violent episodes that form such an essential part of the Greek mythic world. The poet and novelist Robert Graves had no such compunctions, but his two eccentrically structured and narrated volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), while meticulous, scholarly, and inspiring, chart a more literary and mythographical course—often with a view to highlighting his obsession with cults of a “white goddess.” The approaches of James Frazer and those who came after, including Joseph Campbell, valuable as they are, also have other, less specifically Greek and more academic, psychological, comparative, and anthropological, fish to fry. Online these days there are plenty of sites devoted to helping the young “find” Greek myth—though you may feel like a lie-down after reading those that describe Cadmus as “a homie,” Hermes as “cool,” and Hades as “a dude with issues.”

The one website I would most heartily recommend is theoi dot com—a simply magnificent resource entirely dedicated to Greek myth. It is a Dutch and New Zealand project that contains over 1,500 pages of text and a gallery of 1,200 pictures comprising vase paintings, sculpture, mosaics, and frescoes on Greek mythological themes. It offers thorough indexing, genealogies, and subject headings. The bibliography is superb, and can lead one on a labyrinthine chase, hopping from source to source like an excited butterfly collector.

Spelling the Names

Because many Greek myths and the characters in them come down to us by way of Latin writers, and because our alphabet is more Roman than Greek, the spelling of personalities and places can be rather hit and miss. I could have chosen only to offer Greek spellings, so that Kerberos, Iason, and Kadmos are used instead of Cerberus, Jason, and Cadmus. Should I have given “Cronus” instead of Kronos? Maybe I ought to have favored “Aktaion” over Actaeon? “Narkissos” seems bloody-minded when we all know Narcissus so well. In the end I've been inconsistent, but consistently so.

Saying the Names

My advice is to pronounce them in your head the way that seems most comfortable to you. The Greek letter kappa covers hard “k” sounds, and the letter chi covers the more aspirated and guttural fricatives found in the “ch” of “loch” and “Bach,” though you are quite safe pronouncing all “ch” instances as if they are standard “k” sounds. The eta, or long Greek “e,” was sounded as “ee” when I was taught ancient Greek at school—so the letter itself was pronounced “eater.” Nowadays it's taught to rhyme with “waiter.” I get the sense that this modern pronunciation has entered American English more readily than British. Americans will tend to say “baiter” for beta where we say “beater,” for example.

So is Thetis “Theetis,” “Thettis,” or “Thaytis”? Is it “Maytis,” “Mettis,” or “Meetis” for Metis, and “Hearer” or “Hairer” for Hera? “Ahr-ease” or “Airease” for Ares? Modern Greeks pronounce it one way, English and American academics their ways, and common usage, inasmuch as there is common usage, goes its way. Anyone who tells you that there is a definitive right or wrong can be doubted, in my opinion.

207. Robin of Loxley/Locksley and Lord Fitzooth, the Earl of Huntingdon, are popular candidates.

208. Interestingly, the absolute origin of the verb legere and its supine form lectum bears the meaning of “gather”—as in “college” and “collect.” So maybe legends are as much to do with stories that are collected as with those that are written down and read.

209. He was accused of an irreligious refusal to recognize the Athenian state's gods.

Firstly to my beloved husband Elliott for being patient enough to endure my long periods spent away in the mythic landscape of ancient Greece. To my beloved persistent sister and assistant, Jo Crocker, for sculpting my life into a shape that allowed me the hours in which to write.

As ever thanks to my agent, Anthony Goff, and to Louise Moore and everyone at Michael Joseph, the friendly imprint of Penguin Random House that is obliging enough to publish me. Most especially to my diligent, maddening, charming, thoughtful, and stubbornly insightful editor, Jillian Taylor.

Picture Credits

Gaia, Mother Goddess Greek relief. Ancient Art Architecture Collection Ltd / Alamy. 21

Polyphenus, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1802. Landesmuseum Oldenburg. 22 to 23

Attic Red-Figure Cup, bpk / Antikensammlung Berlin. 26 to 27

Attic Black-Figured Hydria, c.540 to 530 B.C. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich. 29

Bronze head of Hypnos, c.275 B.c. British Museum / Alamy. 32

The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn by Giorgio Vasari, c.1560. Palazzo Vecchio, Room of the Elements. 34

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, c.1485. Uffizi Gallery. Florence / Bridgeman. 37

Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, Francisco de Goya, c.1823. Prado Museum, Madrid / Alamy. 40

Attic Red Figure attributed to the Nausicaa Painter, c.475 to 425 B.c. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 42

The Feeding of the Child Jupiter, Nicolas Poussin, c.I640 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C / Bridgeman. 44

The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants, Joachim Antonisz Wtewael, c.1608. Art Institute of Chicago /Bridgeman. 55

The Dance of the Muses, Joseph Paelinck, 1832. Private Collection / Alamy. 58

Relief of the Three Moirai. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 62

The Gods of Olympus, Sala dei Giganti, c.1528. Palazzo del Te / Bridgeman. 73

Head of Ares, after Greek original by Alkamenes, 420 B.C. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia / Alamy. 74

Venus and Mars, Sandro Boticelli, c.I485. National Gallery, London / Alamy. 75

Vulcan Forging the Thunderbolts of Jupiter, Peter Paul Rubens, I636–38. Prado Museum, Madrid / Bridgeman. 76

Hierogamy, unknown artist, 1st century A.D. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples / Bridgeman. 80

Black-figure Amphora, 6th century B.C. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman. 87

Minerva or Pallas Athena, Gustav Klimt, 1898. Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna / Bridgeman. 89

Diana, Paul Manship, 1925. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC / Alamy. 95

Apollo, Italian School, 17th century. Musee Massey, Tarbes, France / Bridgeman. 105

Red-Figure Cup, 5th century b.c. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman. 106

Prometheus Bringing Fire to Mankind, Friedrich Heinrich Fuger, I817. Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany / © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel / Ute Brunzel / Bridgeman. I22

Pandora, John William Waterhouse, 1896. Private Collection / Alamy. 127

Charon Crossing the River Styx, Joachim Patenier or Patinir, I5I5-24. Prado, Madrid, Spain / Bridgeman. 132

Prometheus Bound, Jacob Jordaens, c.I640. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Köln, Germany / Alamy. I37

The Return of Persephone, Frederic Leighton, c.1891. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) UK / Bridgeman. 141

Cupid and Psyche, François-Édouard Picot, I817. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman. I51

The Fall of Phaeton, Peter Paul Rubens, c.I604–8. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC / Bridgeman. 180

Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs, Peter Paul Rubens (studio of), c.I620, National Gallery, London / Bridgeman. 202

Apollo and Marsyas, Michelangelo Anselmi, c.I540. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC / Bridgeman. 237

The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, 1657.

Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman. 240

Marble Relief of the Battle of Giants, Gigantomachy. Getty Images / De Agostini Picture Library. 315

Index

Aceso, 212

Acheron (river), 68, 132, 133

Achilles, 77, 215

Acis, 278

Acrisius (king of Argos), 243

Actaeon, 203, 206 to 7, 265

Adamanthea, 43, 46, 135

Admetus (king of Thessaly), 213

Adonis, 203, 262 to 64

Aeacus, 133

Aegaeon (Briareos), 23

Aegina, 223, 243

Aegis, 89

Aegyptus, 181

Aeolus, 219, 224

Aesop, 31

Aether (light), 20, 30, 48, 81

Agamemnon, 184, 218

Agape, 145

Agave, 194, 196, 198, 199, 204

Agenor (king of Tyre), 182 to 83

Aglaea, 61

Aglauros, 171

Alcathoë, 243

Alexander the Great, 301

Algos (Pain), 129 Alma Mater, 119

Alopex Teumesios (Teumessian Fox), 253 to 54 alphabet, 183 to 84, 186, 323

Amalthea (goat), 41, 43, 44, 45, 242 ambrosia, 83, 84, 164, 217

Ameinias, 270

Ampelos, 202 to 3

Amphidamas, 186 to 88

Amphilogiai (Disputes), 129

Amphion, 192, 232 to 33

Amphithea, 222

Amphitrite, 25, 70, 78, 114

Androktasiai (Manslaughter), 129 anemones, 264

Anteros, 144 anthropos, 119

Anticlea, 222

Antigone (of Troy), 242

Antiope, 192, 232, 243

Apate (Fraus; Deceit), 31, 128

Aphrodite (Venus)

beauty, 37, 88, 93 birth, 36 to 37

Zeus collects from Cyprus, 72 union with Ares (Mars), 75 wedding feast with Hephaestus, 79 to 81 liaison with Hermes, 142 attended by Erotes, 144 as mother of Eros, 145 jealousy of Psyche, 146, 164 and Eros's withdrawal, 162 sets Psyche impossible tasks, I62–64 and Zeus's reuniting Eros and Psyche, I64–65 as supposed mother of Harmonia, I84 lends girdle to Harmonia, I92–93 gives birth to Priapus, 205 deprives Eos of finding joy in love, 256 creates incestuous desire in Smyrna, 262 love affair with Adonis, 263 to 64 protects Echo, 267 frees Echo of body, 273 and sexual license in Cyprus, 280 and Pygmalion's sculpture, 281, 283 to 84 festival in Cyprus, 283 to 84

Apollo

birth, 93 qualities, 96, 204 slays Python and sent to exile, 97 to 98 and Delphic oracle, 98 white cattle stolen by Hermes, 100 to 104 and creation of human race, 119 falls for Persephone, 138 drives sun chariot, 173, 177, 250 as father of Phaeton, 172 to 73 and Phaeton's driving chariot, 173 to 80 and death of Phaeton, 181 takes Coronis as lover, 210 at birth of Asclepius, 210 kills Cyclopes and punished by Zeus, 212 to 13 slays Otus and Ephialtes, 216

Niobe on, 233 musical competition with Marsyas, 235 to 38 depicted in Arachne's weaving, 243 love for Hyacinthus, 261 love for Daphne, 279

Pan challenges to musical competition, 306 to 7

Apollodorus of Athens, 321

Apple of Discord, 31

Apuleius, 146, 321

Aquarius (constellation), 250, 294

Arachne, 239 to 44, 245

Ararat, Mount, 130

Arcas, 246

Ares (Mars)

birth, 74 qualities, 74 to 75, 90 fails to free Hera, 78 at Aphrodite's wedding to Hephaestus, 81 as father of Eros, 145 as supposed father of Harmonia, 184 and killing of Ismenian Dragon, 189, 191, 194, 206 and disappearance of Thanatos (Death), 226 and Sisyphus's avoiding death, 229 jealousy of Adonis, 263

Arestor, 168, 169

Arges, 22, 55, 212

Argonauts, 216

Argos, 168

Arguos, 296 to 99

Argus (Panoptes), 169 to 70

Arion (horse), 70

Arion (musician), 288 to 94

Aristaeus, 206, 316 Aristides (king), I46, I47–48, I53

Arne of Thessaly, 243

Arsippe, 243

Artemis (Diana)

birth, 93 demands to be huntress and to remain chaste, 94 to 95 qualities, 107

Actaeon discovers bathing, 206 attacks Phlegyantis palace with plague arrows, 210

Niobe on, 233 kills Niobe's sons and daughters, 233 expels Callisto, 246 cares for Procris, 252 to 53 jealousy of Adonis, 263

Asclepius birth, 210 medical skills, 211 administers Gorgon's blood, 212 killed by Zeus, 212 healing temples (asclepia), 213 raised to heavens as constellation Ophiuchus, 213 staff of, 107, 211

Asia, I72. See also Clymene

Asopos, I92, I96, I98, 200, 222 to 23

Asphodel, Meadows of, 67, 134, 227

Assaracus, 248

Asteria, 243

Astrapos, 296 to 99

Athamas, 216, 219

Athena (Minerva)

birth, 86, 87, 88 qualities, 88 to 90, 107 and owl, 88 kills friend Pallas and bears name, 90 beauty, 93 and Zeus's creation of mankind, 116 to 17 breathes life into first human figures, 117, 119 teaches first female human, 124 and birth of Erechtheus, 171, 172, 300

Erechtheum, 171 and founding of Athens, 171 rewards Asclepius with gift of Gorgon's blood, 211, 212 invents aulos, 234 weaving duel with Arachne, 241 to 44 gives olive to Athens, 300

Athens, 88, 90, 171, 182, 245, 300

Atlantis, 65

Atlas born to Clymene, 172, 312 fate (to hold up sky), 27, 64, 79 seven daughters (the Pleiades), 99, 184

Atreus, house of, 218

Atropos, 61 to 62

Auden, W. H., 57

Aulocrene, Lake, 235

Auloniades, 63 aulos (wind instrument), 234 to 37

Auriga (constellation), 181

Aurora. See Eos Autolycus, 221 to 22

Autonoë, 194, 196, 198, 199, 204, 206

Auxesia (Auxo), 61

B

abylon, 275

Bacchus. See Dionysus

Baucis, 295 to 99 bees, 81 to 83

Boeotia, 188, 206

Boreas, 285

Bosch, Hieronymus, 214

Bosporus, 170

Botrys, 203 to 4

Briareos. See Aegaeon bride-price, 214

Brontë family, 22

Brontes, 22, 55, 121, 212

Broteas, 217

Byron, Lord, 133, 286, 287

Byzas, 171

C

admean Vixen. See Alopex Teumesios

Cadmus (Kadmos)

childhood, 182 seeks sister Europa, 183 to 85 travels with Harmonia, 184 to 90, 194 sows dragon's teeth, 190 to 91 founds Thebes, 191 to 92, 300 marriage and children with Harmonia, 192 to 94 changed into snake, 194 to 95 returned to human form for death, 195 dynasty, 206 and Cilix, 275 caduceus, 107, 211 Calanthe, I46, I47–48, I53–58, I61–62

Calasso, Roberto, I84, I92, I93

Callimachus, 213

Calliope (Muse of epic poetry), 57, 59, 83, 236

Calirrhoe, 248

Callisto, 246

Calypso, 25, 65

Campbell, Joseph, 322

Canis Major (constellation), 254

Canis Minor (constellation), 254

Carpo, 61

Cassandra, 265

Castalia, 98 catasterism, I81 catharsis, 214

Cecropia (city). See Athens

Cenchreis (queen of Cyprus), 262

Centauros, 215

Cephalus, 250 to 54

Cephissus, 266

Cerberus. See Kerberos

Ceres. See Demeter chaffinches, 267 to 69

Chaos, I8–20, 28, 56, I12–13 charisma, 91

Charites (Gratiae; the Three Graces), 61, 124

Charon birth, 31 appointed ferryman of underworld, 68, I32, I33 and Sisyphus, 228, 230

Charybdis, 245 Chiron, 202, 206, 210 to 11, 215, 316

Chloris, 203

Chthonius, 192

Cilicia, 185, 275

Cilix, 182, 185, 275

Cleitus, 256 to 57

Clio (Muse of history), 58

Clotho, 61, 62, 218

Clymene (Asia)

consorts with Iapetus, 25 offspring, 26 to 27, 54, 64, 112, 129, 131, 312 as mother of Phaeton, 172 to 75

Clytemnestra, 184, 218

Clytius, 316

Cocytus, 68

Coeus, 22, 26, 84, 91, 243

Colophon (Ionia), 239

Concordia. See Harmonia

Cornucopia, 45

Coronis (princess of Phlegyantis), 210

Corvus (the Crow), 210

Cosmos, 19, 35, 56

Cottus, 23

Creon, 253

Crete, 41 to 45, 183 to 84

Cretheus, 219, 221

Crius, 22, 26

Crocus, 203, 261

Cupid. See Eros

Cyclopes birth, 22, 23, 24, 35 rewarded by Zeus, 65 create trident for Poseidon, 69 to 70 assist Hephaestus, 79, I2I

Cygnus (Cycnus), I74, I81, 290

Cyllene, Mount (Mount Kyllini), 99 to 102

Cyprus (island), 37, 72, 262, 280, 283

Cythera (island), 36

D

almatae, 194

Damaris (queen), I46–48, 153

Damysus, 316

Dante Alighieri, 57, 68, 214, 314

Daphne, 279 to 80

Daphnis, 280

Dardanus, 184 death and the dead, I32–34. See also Thanatos

Deioneus (king of Phocis), 214

Delos, 92, 97 to 98, 173, 233

Delphi (Pytho), 27, 98, I30–31, I73, 185 to 86, 219 to 20, 280, 320

Delphinus (constellation), 294

Demeter (Ceres)

Kronos swallows, 39 spewed out by Kronos, 49

Poseidon invents horse for, 70 qualities, 70, 207 and bountiful Mother Earth, II9, I38, 295 and daughter Persephone, I38–42, 217 and Persephone's periodic return, I41–42, 295 and Phaeton's driving chariot, 180 wreaks vengeance on Erysichthon, 207 to 9 and absence of Death, 226 jealousy of Adonis, 263 temple in Eumeneia, 295 demure, meaning of, 91

Deucalion, I29–31, I35, 219, 243, 299

Dia (queen of the Lapiths), 214

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 274

Diana. See Artemis

Diké (Justitia; goddess of justice), 61, 226

Dione (queen of Lydia), 217, 232

Dionysus (Bacchus)

birth, 201, 222 makes wine, 203 to 4 passion for Ampelos, 202 to 3 qualities, 204 admitted to Olympian Twelve, 204 to 5 and disappearance of Thanatos, 226 depicted in Arachne's weaving, 243 and Teumessian Fox, 253

Theias opens shrine to, 262

Arion devotes musical talent to, 288 shrines, 295

Silenus visits, 302 to 3 grants Midas's wish, 303 worshippers react against prudence, 314 kills Typhoeus, 316

Dis, 68

Discordia. See Eris dithyramb, 288 dodecatheon, 72, 108 dolphins associated with Apollo, 96 associated with Eros, 146

Poseidon presents first to Amphitrite, 70 and name Delphi, 98 rescue Arion, 288 to 94

Doom. See Moros Doris, 25, 70, 77, 278

Drakon Ismenios. See Ismenian Dragon

Drury, Henry, 286

Dryads, 63

Dryope, 142

Dysnomia (Anarchy), 129

E

chidna, 28, 69

Echion, 192, 194

Echo, 265 to 74 echolalia, 274

Eirene (Pax; goddess of peace), 61, 226

Ekdusia (festival), 279

Ekenhead, Lieutenant William, 286

Electra, 184 electrum (alloy), 305

Eliot, T. S., 265

Elis, 219, 221

Elpis (Hope), 129, 314

Elysian Fields, 133

Emathion, 258

Emphytos, 316

Enceladus, 316

Endymion, 255

Enipeus, 243 Eos (Aurora), 25, 176, 177, 178, 250, 256 to 61

Epaphus, 170, 172 to 75, 179, 181

Ephialtes, 216

Ephyra (Corinth), 219

Epidaurus, 213

Epimetheus as son of Clymene, 27, 172 sides with Titans, 54 and early race of man, 120 meets and marries Pandora, 126 children, 129 qualities, 312, 314 and creation myth, 312 to 13

Erasmus, Desiderius, 125

Erato (Muse of lyric and love poetry), 59

Erebus, 20, 30 to 31, 33, 48, 67, 68, 113, 128

Erechtheus, 171 to 72, 250, 300

Erechthonius, 171

Eridanos (river), 180, 181

Erigone, 243

Erinyes (Eumenides; the Furies), 35, 60, 61, 68 to 69, 108

Eris (Discordia), 31, 129

Eros (Cupid)

as leader of Erotes, 144 qualities, 144 to 45 love for Psyche, 147, 151 to 52, 156 wounded and withdraws, 162 marriage to Psyche, 164 to 65 eros (form of love), 144

Erotes, 143, 144

Ersa (Herse), 250 Erysichthon (king of Thessaly; Aethon), 207 to 9

Eumelus of Corinth, 54

Eumeneia, 295, 298, 299

Eumenides. See Erinyes

Eunomia (goddess of law and legislation), 61, 226

Euphrosyne (Euthymia), 61

Euripides, 204

Europa, I33, I82–85, I88, 243, 276

Euryale, 63

Eurymedon (king of the Giants), 316

Eurynome, 61, 77

Eurynomos, I34

Euterpe (Muse of music), 59, 83, 237

Euthymia. See Euphrosyne

Evslin, Bernard, 322

F

ates. See Moirai feet, as measurement, 317 figs and fig tree, 252, 316 fire

Zeus forbids human possession, 118

Prometheus steals for mankind, 120 to 23 humans use, 125

Fishburne, Laurence, 32

Flora. See Thallo

Forster, E. M., 56

Fortunate Isles (Isles of the Blessed), 133

Fraus. See Apate

Frazer, James, 322

Furies, the. See Erinyes

G

aia (earth)

origins, 20, 21 and germination of thought and meaning, 22 union and progeny with Ouranos, 22 to 23 plans to kill Ouranos, 24 to 31 and castrating of Ouranos, 33 to 34 withdraws into inaction, 38 supports Rhea against Kronos, 39, 41 children by Pontus, 63 as planet Earth, 71 creates Python to protect Omphalos, 97 breath rises to Delphic oracle, 98 celebrates forming of dodecatheon, 109 and creation of humans, 119 creates new race after Great Deluge, 131, 135 gives birth to Erechtheus, 171, 172 as mother of giants, 315

Gaiman, Neil, 32

Galatea (and Acis), 278

Galatea (Pygmalion's sculpture), 280 to 84

Galatea (wife of Lampros), 278 to 79

Ganymede, 248 to 50, 256 to 59, 266 genealogy charts, 14 to 15

Gerana (queen of the Pygmies), 242

Geras (Senectus; old age), 31, 32, 128

Gigantes (Giants)

birth, 35 in war with Titans, 55, 315 to 16

Gilbert, Albert, 144 gods origins, 50 war with Titans, 54 to 55, 315 jealousies and animosities, 189 relations with humans, 214

Greeks view as imperfect, 314

Golden Age, 119 to 20, 127, 128, 129

Gordian knot, 301

Gordias (king of Phrygia), 300 to 302

Gordium, 300 to 301

Gorgons, 63, 89, 211 to 12

Graces, Three. See Charites grasshoppers, 259 to 60

Gratiae. See Charites

Graves, Robert, 322

Great Flood, 130, 219, 299

Greece, extent of, 182, 320

Greeks qualities, 320 view of imperfect gods, 314

Grimm's Law (phonetic), 317

Gyges, 23

H

ades (Pluto)

Kronos swallows, 39 spewed out by Kronos, 49 given control of underworld, 67 to 69 fails to free Hera, 78 welcomes dead to kingdom, 133 and Elysian Fields, 133 to 34 abducts Persephone, 138 to 42 Psyche enters realm of, I64 objects to Asclepius using Gorgon's blood to revive dead, 212 and return of Thanatos, 227 and Sisyphus's avoiding death, 229

Haemus (king of Thrace), 242

Hamadryads, 64

Hamilton, Edith, II, 181, 321, 322

Handel, George Frederick, 278

Harmonia (Concordia)

genealogy, 184 travels with Cadmus, 184 to 90, 194 and founding of Thebes, 191 to 92 marriage and children with Cadmus, 192 to 94 given cursed necklace, 193 transformed into snake, 195 returned to human shape for death, 195

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 322 hearth, 66

Hecate, 139, 316

Hecatonchires, 23, 24, 33, 35 to 36, 54 to 55, 64, 65, 108

Hedone (Voluptas), 165

Hedylogos, 144

Helicon, Mount, 57, 267 to 68

Helios (sun), 25, 139, 172, 177 to 78, 181, 250, 257

Helle, 216

Hellen, 219

Hellespont (Dardanelles), 285 to 87

Hemera (day), 20, 30, 48, 113

Hephaestus (Vulcan)

birth, 73 to 74

Hera rejects, 74, 77 manufacturing skills, 76, 77, 79 frees Hera from enchanted throne, 78

Cyclopes help, 79, I2I given workplace, 79 wedding feast with Aphrodite, 79 to 81 cures Zeus's headache, 86 makes bow for Artemis, 94 makes winged sandals and helmet for Hermes, I06, I07 fashions female human, I24 passion for Athena, I7I as father of Erechtheus, I7I–72, 300 carves shoulder for revived Pelops, 218 temple in Eumeneia, 295 attacks Mimas, 316 as mythical figure, 318

Hera

Kronos swallows, 39 spewed out by Kronos, 49, 71 consorts with Zeus and bears children, 73 to 75 qualities, 71 to 72 trapped by enchanted throne, 75 to 78 wedding feast, 79 to 81 jealousy of Zeus's affairs and offspring, 91, 93, 205, 267 to 68 denies Leto land on which to give birth, 92 sends Python to kill Leto and children, 97, 98 meets Hermes, 106 status among gods, 108 gives qualities to first human female, 124 as patron deity of Argos, 168 and Zeus's infatuation with Io, 168 to 70 takes revenge on Semele, 197 to 98, 201 dislikes Dionysus, 205 objects to Asclepius reviving dead, 212

Ixion attempts to seduce, 215 and disappearance of Death, 226 transforms Callisto into bear, 246 disapproves of Adonis, 263 and Tiresias's judgment on enjoyment of sex, 265 meets and punishes Echo, 267 to 70

Porphyrion attempts to rape, 316

Heracles, 233, 316

Hermaphroditus, 142 to 43, 144

Hermes (Mercury)

birth and qualities, 99 to 100, 106, 108 to 10 steals Apollo's white cattle, 100 to 104 makes lyre, 103 to 4 made messenger of the gods, 106, 107 tutors first human female (Pandora), 125 introduces Pandora to Epimetheus, 125 to 26 escorts dead to Hades and Elysium, 133, 225 falls for Persephone, 138 escorts Persephone from Underworld, 140 to 42 liaison with Aphrodite, 142 as father of Pan, Dryope, and Hermaphroditus, 142 fathers Silenus, 142 brings Psyche from Hades, 164 distracts and stabs Argus, 169 to 70 as lover of Amphion, 192, 232 helps at birth of Dionysus, 201 as father of Autolycus, 221 and organization of Underworld, 226 and Sisyphus's avoiding death, 229 takes gift from Zeus to King Tros, 249 loves Crocus, 261 visits Philemon and Baucis, 299 slays Hippolytus, 316

Hero, 285 to 87

Herse (personification of dew), 250. See also Ersa

Herse (mortal), 171

Hesiod, 54, 318, 319, 321

Hesione, 129, 131

Hesperides, 32

Hesse, Hermann, 98

Hestia (Vesta)

birth, 38

Kronos swallows, 38 spewed out by Kronos, 49 as goddess of the hearth, 66 to 67, 107 conducts wedding of Hera and Zeus, 80 chastity, 96 marks start of Reign of Twelve, 108 yields place to Dionysus, 205 shrines, 295

Himeros, 144

Hippocratic staff, 211

Hippolyte, 262

Hippolytus, 316

Holst, Gustav, 45

Homer, 57, 91, 134, 212, 319, 321 honey, 81 to 82, 83 hoopoe, 247 to 48

Hope. See Elpis

Horai (hours), 61, 226 hospitality. See xenia hubris, 31, 232 humankind. See man

Hunt, Leigh, 285

Hyacinthus, 203, 261

Hyde, L. S., 322

Hydra, 69

Hygieia, 212

Hyginus, 321

Hymenaios, 144

Hypaepaes, 239

Hyperboreans, 92

Hyperenor, 192

Hyperion, 22, 25, 65, 79

Hypnos, 31, 32

Hysminai (Battles), 129

I

apetus birth, 22 as lover of Clymene, 25, I72 declines to kill Ouranos, 26 freed, 79 offspring, 27, 64, I12, I72, 312

Iasion, 184

Iaso, 212

Ictys, 247

Ida, Mount (Phrygia), 43, I42

Idmon, 239 to 40

Illyria, 194, I96

Illyrius, 194, I96 llos (king of Troy), 248, 256

Inachus (king of Argos), 168, 184

Ino, 194, 196, 198, 199, 204

Invidia. See Nemesis

Io, 168 to 71, 172, 183, 197

Ionia, 239

Iphimedia, 216

Ischys, 210

Ismenian Dragon (Drakon Ismenios), 189, 191, 193

Isthmian Games, 98

Ixion (king of the Lapiths), 134, 214 to 17

J

ackson, Percy, 70

Jason and the Argonauts, 216

Jove. See Zeus

Jupiter. See Zeus

Justitia. See Diké

K

alamos, 203

Karpos, 203

Keats, John, 255

Kerberos (Cerberus), 69, 323

Kerényi, Károly, 238

Keres, 62 to 63, 128, 226

Keroessa, 171

Kithara (musical instrument), 288, 290 to 91, 293 to 94

Kronos (Saturn)

birth, 22 qualities, 27 to 28

L

Gaia persuades to kill Ouranos, 30 castrates Ouranos, 33 to 34 cursed by Ouranos, 35 to 36 liaison and children with Rhea, 38 to 39 consumes children, 38, 39, 40 dominance, 39, 43, 48, 67

Rhea plots against, 39, 41, 48 to 49, 97 bad temper, 48 spews out swallowed children, 49 war with gods, 54 to 55 sentenced to travel world endlessly (as “Old Father Time”), 65 as great-grandfather to Cadmus, 185 achesis, 61 to 62

Ladon, 279

Laertes, 222

Lailaps (dog), 253 to 54

Lamb, Charles, 322

Lampros, 278 to 79

Laomedon, 256

Latona. See Leto laurel tree, 279 to 80

Leander, 285 to 87

Leda, 243 legend versus myth versus religion, 318 to 19

Leimakides, 63

Leitao, David D., 279

Lemnos (island), 77

Lerna (lake), 69

Lethe (river), 68, 134 Leto (Latona), 84, 91 to 93, 97, 232, 233, 278

Letoides, 99

Leucippe, 243

Leucippos (child of Galatea), 278 to 79

Leucippos (son of Oenomaus), 279

Libya, 181, 182, 185

Limos (Starvation), 129, 208

Linden tree, 295, 299

Liriope, 266 to 67

Livia (wife of emperor Augustus), 92

Longus, 280, 321

Lot and wife (Biblical figures), 299

Love, 145 to 46

Lovelock, James, 35

Lucifer, 68

Luna. See Selene Lycaon (king of Arcadia), 130, 218, 246

Lydia, 217, 239

Lydian mode, 232

Lyre, 103 to 4, 107, 232

M

achaon, 2I2

Maeander (river), 234

Maenads, 204

Magnesia, 24, 4I

Maia, 99 to 104

Makhai (Wars), I29 man created by Zeus and Prometheus, II3–19 and possession of fire, II8, I20

Golden Age of innocence, II9–20 female fashioned by Hephaestus, 124 multiplies, 129, 130 new race created after Great Flood, 131 given attributes by Prometheus, 313 map, 12 to 13

Margaret (heron), 81

Marlowe, Christopher, 285

Mars. See Ares

Marsyas conceitedness, 234 plays aulos, 234 to 35 musical competition with Apollo, 235 to 37 flayed by Apollo, 237 to 38, 307 measurement (Greek), 317

Medusa, 63

Megaera (jealous rage), 35

Megala Kazania, 108, 121

Melantho, 243

Melia (queen consort of Inachus), 168

Meliae (nymphs), 35, 41, 43, 47, 64, 108

Melissa, 81 to 83, 245

Melops, 220

Melpomene (Muse of tragedy), 59, 60

Memnon, 258

Memphis, 181

Menoetius, 64, 172, 312

Merops, 172, 174

Mesopotamia, 10, 115

Mestra, 209

Methe (queen of Assyria), 203

Metis, 25, 46 to 47, 49, 54, 84 to 86, 88, 90 to 91, 117 Midas (king of Phrygia)

parentage and youth, 301, 302 wish to make gold turns to curse, 303 to 5 curse lifted, 305 follows Pan, 306 supports Pan in musical competition with Apollo, 306 to 7 grows ass's ears, 307 to 9

Mimas, 316

Minerva. See Athena

Minos (king of Crete), I33, I83, 245 to 46

Minyades, 243

Miseria. See Oizys nemowzeen, 22, 25, 57

Moirai (fates), 61 to 62, 266

Molios, 316

Momo (Momus), 31, I28 mores, 26

Moros (Doom), 30 to 31, 45, 54, 74, I38, 314

Morpheus, 31 to 32, 186, 187

Muses, 25, 57 to 60 music, 288

See also aulos, kithara, lyre

Mycene, 168, 169

Myrrhe. See Smyrna myrrh tree, 262 to 263 myths aetiological, 245 nature of, 318 to 19 sources of, 321 to 23

Mytilos (mountain peak), I20

N

aiads, 63, 70, 142 narcissism, 274

Narcissus, 266, 270 to 74, 323

Nature, spirits of, 63 to 64 nectar, 83

Neikea (Quarrels), 129

Nemean Games, 98

Nemesis (Invidia), 31

Nephele, 182, 215, 216

Neptune. See Poseidon

Nereids, 25, 63, 70

Nereus, 25, 70, 77, 278

Nietzsche, freed-rick, 314 to 15 nightingales, 248

Nilus, 25, 115, 181, 182

Ninus (king of Assyria), 275

Niobe, 217, 232 to 33

Niobids, 232

Nisus (king of Megara), 245 to 46

Noah (Biblical figure), 130

Nonnus of Panopolis, 202, 203

Notus, 285

Nycteus, 232

Nyctimus, 130 nymphs, 63 to 64

Nysus, 201

Nyx, 20, 30 to 31, 33, 61, 62, 68, 69, 113, 128 to 29, 144

O

oak tree, 295, 299

O'Casey, Sean, 170 Oceanids (sea nymphs), 25, 61, 70

Oceanus, 22, 24 to 25, 46, 61, 68, 70, 172, 199, 232

Odysseus (Ulysses), 222

Oenone (island), 223

Offenbach, Jacques, 280

Oizys (Miseria), 31 olive tree, 88 to 89, 300

Olympic Games, 98

Olympus, Mount, 73, 108

Omphalos, 42, 97

Oncaea, 288

Oneroi (bringers of dreams), 31

Oppel, Albert, 260

Oreads, 63

Orestes, 218

Orpheus, 57, 59, 288

Ossa, Mount, 216, 217

Othrys, Mount, 24, 30, 33, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 54, 73

Otus, 216

Ouranos (sky)

origins, 20 union and progeny with Gaia, 22 to 23

Gaia plans to kill, 24 to 30 castrated by Kronos, 33 to 34 blood generates vengeful beings, 35, 315 curses Kronos, 35 to 36 imprisoned in earth, 36 organs of generation scattered, 36 supports Rhea against Kronos, 39, 41 celebrates forming of dodecatheon, 109 and Cadmus's genealogy, 185

Ovid

on Actaeon's hounds, 207

Ars Amatoria, 321 calls Dionysus "Liber," 204 on decline of Limos, 208 on deluge, 130

Heroides, 322 on Ismenian dragon, 189

Metamorphoses, 262, 264, 321 on Phaeton's parentage, 172 on Pyramus and Thisbe, 275 on Venus and Adonis, 264 on Zeus's rescue of baby Dionysus, 201 wl, 88

P

actolus (river), 239, 305 palladium, 90, 234

Pallas (Triton's daughter), 90

Pan (Faunus)

birth, I42 and Psyche, I61, I65 offspring, I43, 278

Midas follows, 306, 307 challenges Apollo to musical competition, 306 to 7

Panacea, 212

Pandia, 250

Pandion (king of Athens), 247

Pandion of Phaestos, 278

Pandora, I25–29, I31, I32, I38, 208, 314 to 15, 321

Pandrosia (festival), I71 Pandrosos, I7I

Panhellenic Games, 98

Panopeus, I15

Paphos, 284

Paraclete (Holy Spirit), 60

Parnassus, Mount, 57, 97, 130 parthenogenesis, 20 parthenos, 90

Paul, St., I45

Pausanias, I15, 321

Pax. See Eirene peacock, 72, 170

Pegaeae, 63

Pelagon (king of Phocis), I86–87

Pelasgos (Pelasgians), I30, I31, 246

Pelion, Mount, 215 to 17

Pelops, 217 to 18, 232

Pelor, 192

Pentheus, 194, 196, 204

Periander (tyrant of Corinth), 288 to 89, 291 to 94

Persephone (Proserpina)

birth, 70 beauty, I38 abducted by Hades, I38–42, 217 six-monthly return to Earth, I41–42, 182, 295 and return of Thanatos, 227 answers Sisyphus's request, 228 to 29 supposedly taken by Zeus, 243

Phaestos, 279

Phaeton drives chariot of the sun, I72–80 death, 180 to 81 placed among stars, 181

Phantasos, 31

Philemon, 295 to 99 philia (form of love), 145

Philomela, 247 to 48

Phlegethon, 68

Phlegyantis, 210

Phobetor, 31

Phocian Games, 186 to 88

Phocis, 115, 135, 186

Phoebe, 22, 26, 84, 91, 93, 243

Phoenicians, 183 to 84

Phoenix, 182, 183, 185

Phoitios, 316

Phonoi (Murders), 129

Phorcys, 63

Phrixus, 216

Phrygia, 142, 234, 295, 300 to 303, 306, 307

Phylira, 215

Pieria, Thessaly, 57, 101

Plato, 312

Pleiades (Atlantides), 99, 184

Pleione, 99, 184

Pluto. See Hades

Podalirius, 212 polis (Greek city state), 182, 192

Polybotes, 316

Polydorus, 194, 196

Polyhymnia (Muse of hymns), 59

Polyphemus, 278 Pontus (Handship), 12

Pontus (sea), 20, 26, 39, 63, 67

Pope, Alexander, 57

Porphyrion, 316

Poseidon (Neptune)

Kronos swallows, 39 given control of sea, 67 to 68 character, 69 invents horse, 70 offspring, 70, 278, 288 fails to free Hera, 78 and patronage of city Cecropia, 88

Leto appeals to for help, 92 as Cadmus's grandfather, 185 as lover of Mestra, 209

Iphimedia's infatuation with, 216 as lover of Pelops, 218 depicted in Arachne's weaving, 243

Potameides, 63

Pothos, 144

Praxithea, 250

Priapus, 205

Primordial Deities, 20

Procne, 247 to 48

Procris, 250 to 54

Prometheus sides with Titans, 54 rewarded by Zeus, 65 and Zeus's headache, 86 qualities, 112, 312 fashions human beings for Zeus, 113 to 19, 135 steals fire for mankind, I20–23, 312 birth of son Deucalion, I29 builds wooden chest with Deucalion, I30 punished by Zeus, 27, I24, I35–37 encourages civilization among mankind, I35, 313 comforts Io, I70 as son of Clymene, I72 grants attributes to mankind, 313 in Hesiod, 321 pronunciation, 323 prophecy, 265 to 66

Propoetides, 280

Proserpina. See Persephone

Proteus, 70

Pseudea (Lies), I29

Pseudo-Apollodorus, 321

Psyche beauty, I46

Eros falls for, I47 offered for sacrifice, I47–48 carried to Eros's palace, I48–51

Eros makes love to invisibly, I51–52 returns home, I53–54 sisters accompany to Eros's palace and plot against, I55–60 spies on Eros, I59–60 takes revenge on sisters, I61–62

Aphrodite sets impossible tasks, I62–64 marriage and child with Eros, I64–65

Pygmalion, 280 to 85

Pyramus, 254, 275 to 77

Pyrrha, I29–31, I35, 219 Pythia (priestess), 98, 185, 219

Pythian Games, 98, 280

Pytho. See Delphi Python, 96 to 98, 213

R

religion versus myth versus legend, 318 to 19

Rhadamanthus, 133, 183

Rhea birth, 22 declines to kill Ouranos, 27 relations and children with Kronos, 29, 38 to 39 plots and acts against Kronos, 39, 41, 48 to 49, 97 gives birth to Zeus, 43 instructs son Zeus, 45 to 46

Rhesus (king of Thrace), 59

Rhodope (queen of Thrace), 242

Robin Hood, 318

Russell, Bertrand, 313

S

abazios, 300

Sahara desert, I79

Salmacis, I42–43

Salmoneus, 219 to 21

Samothrace, I84

Sarpedon, I83

Sartre, Jean-Paul, I94

Sato, I56, I61

Saturn. See Kronos

Schlegel, freed-rick von, 317

Scylla (princess of Megara), 245 to 46 Scylla (sea monster), 245 seasons, coming of, 142, 182

Selene (Luna; moon)

birth, 25 and Helios, 177, 178 punishes Ampelos, 203 drives moon chariot, 250 falls for Cephalus, 250, 255 desire for Endymion, 255

Semele, 194, 195 to 201, 204, 222, 253

Semiramis (queen of Assyria), 276

Senectus. See Geras Seven Sages of Greece, 288

Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 144

Shakespeare, William

As You Like It, 287

Henry 5, 57 influenced by Ovid, 322

King Lear, 217

Macbeth, 139

A Midsummer Night's Dream, 254, 276

Much Ado About Nothing, 287

Sonnet C.I.I, 248

Twelfth Night, 194

Venus and Adonis, 264

The Winter's Tale, 221

Shaw, George Bernard, 285

Sibyl, 98, 147, 265

Silenus, 143, 202, 204, 302 to 5

Silver Age, 129, 134, 142, 214

Sipylus, Mount (Mount Spil), 217, 233 to 34

Sirens, 59 Sisyphus, 134, 216, 219 to 31

Skolio (mountain peak), 120 to 21

Smilax, 261

Smyrna (Myrrhe; Myrrha), 262 to 63

Socrates, 288, 312, 319

Sodom and Gomorrah, 299

Sophocles, 31, 253 spelling, 323 spider, Arachne transformed into, 244

Staphylos (king of Assyria), 203

Stefani (mountain peak), 120

Steropes, 22, 55, 212, 225

Stheno, 63 storge (form of love), 145

Strymon (river god), 59

Styx (river), 25, 68, 69, 132 to 33, 228, 230 swans, 181

Syceus, 316 sycophant, 252

Symaethis, 278

T

agides, 63

Tantalus (king of Lydia), I34, 217 to 18, 232 tarantella, 289

Tarentum, 288

Tartarus, 20, 27 to 29, 36, 37, 54, 65, 67, 69, 215, 218, 221, 228, 231

Telephassa (queen of Tyre), I82–83

Telesphorus, 212

Telmissus, 300

Tennyson, Alfred, 260 Tereus (king of Thrace), 247 to 48

Terpsichore (Muse of dance), 59, 60, 83

Tethys, 22, 24 to 25, 39, 41, 46, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 77, 172, 199, 232

Thalassa (sea), 20, 25, 39, 67, 70

Thalia (daughter of Euronyme and Zeus), 61

Thalia (Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry), 60

Thallo (Flora), 61

Thamyris of Thrace, 54

Thanatos (Death)

name, 32 under Hades's rule, 68 accompanies dead, 133 impossible to avoid, 134 deceived by Sisyphus, 224 to 27 released, 227 takes Sisyphus to Hades, 227 to 28

Thasos, 182, 185

Thebes founded by Cadmus, 191 to 92, 206

Pentheus rules, 194, 196 scourged by fox, 253 to 54

Theia, 22, 25

Theias (king of Cyprus), 262

Themis, 22, 26 to 27, 61, 98, 130 theoxenia, 67, 299

Theseus, 70

Thespiae, 267 to 70

Thetis, 77, 323

Thisbe, 254, 275 to 77

Thoon, 316

Thoosa, 278 three, as significant number, 60 thyrsus, 204, 316

Tiresias, 265 to 67

Tisiphone (vengeance), 35

Titans

Kronos leads, 36, 43, 46 and rise of gods, 50 war with gods (Titanomachy), 54 to 55, 61, 63, 72, 315 defeated, 64 punished and rewarded, 65

Tithonus, 256 to 61, 266

Tmolus, 232, 306

Triton, 70, 85, 90

Tros (king of Troy), 248 to 49

Troy (Troad; Illium), 248, 321

Tyndareus, 243

Typhoeus, 316

Typhon, 28, 29, 69 tyrannos, 192 tyrant, meaning of, 192, 288

Tyro, 219 to 21, 227, 243

U

daeus, 192

Ulysses. See Odysseus Underworld, Hades given control of, 67 to 68 universe, origins of, I8

Urania (Muse of astronomy and stars), 60

Ursa Major (constellation), 246

Ursa Minor (constellation), 246

V

alkyries, 62

Venus. See Aphrodite

Vesta. See Hestia

Vestal Virgins, 67

Virgil, 57, 133

Voluptas. See Hedone

Vulcan. See Hephaestus

W

wine, 202 to 4 women, creation of, I24–25, I29 writing, I84

X xenia (hospitality), 67, 214 to 15, 223, 298, 303

Z

Zephyrus, I49, I53, I55–57, I62, 203, 254, 261, 285

Zethus, I92

Zeus (Jupiter; Jove)

birth and infancy, 43, 44 appearance and character, 45 growth to manhood, 45 taught by Metis, 46 to 47 and mother's plot against Kronos, 48 to 50 in war with Titans, 54 to 55 as father of Muses, 57 inherits rich natural world, 64 sentences Atlas, 64 promiscuity, 65, 71, 91 and hospitality, 67 rewards Hades and Poseidon, 67 to 68 pursues Demeter, 70 union with Hera, 73 to 75 forms assembly of twelve gods (dodecatheon), 72 to 73, 108 and Third Order of divine beings, 72 and Hephaestus's trapping of Hera, 78 wedding to Hera, 79 to 81 and Melissa's honey, 81 to 83 makes love to Metis, 84 to 85 passion for Leto, 91 to 92, 94 suffers headache from Metis, 85 to 86 gives birth to Athena, 86, 87, 88 infatuated with Athena, 90 guided by Metis from within, 90 to 91 loves and protects Artemis, 93 to 95 exiles Apollo, 97 to 98 accepts Hermes as messenger of gods, 106, 107 rule, 108 to 9, 138 relations with Prometheus, 112 to 13, 120 proposes creating mankind, 113 to 19 and Prometheus's theft of fire, 123 gives container to Pandora, 125, 126 turns Lycaon into wolf, 130 punishes Prometheus, 135 to 37

Eros tells of Psyche, 164 affair with Io, 168 to 71 as father of Epaphus, 172 to 73 carries off Europa as bull, 183 fathers Amphion and Zethus, 192 returns Cadmus and Harmonia to human shape for death, 195 love affair with Semele, 196 to 201 kills Asclepius for reviving dead, 212 punishes Apollo, 213 invites Ixion to Olympus, 215 abducts Aegina, 223 punishes Sisyphus, 223 and disappearance of Thanatos (Death), 226 and Sisyphus's avoiding death, 229

Arachne depicts promiscuity in weaving competition, 242 to 43 ravishes Callisto, 246 love for Ganymede, 248 to 50 turns Lailaps and Cadmean Vixen to stone, 254 grants Eos immortality for

Tithonus, 257 to 59 liaisons with nymphs at Mount Helicon, 267 to 68 visits Philemon and Baucis, 299 denies hope to mankind, 314 kills Porphyrion, 316

Zeus Sabazios, 300

Zona, I46, I47–48, I53–58, I62 Stephen Fry is an award-winning comedian, actor, presenter, and director. He rose to fame alongside Hugh Laurie in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (which he cowrote with Laurie) and Jeeves and Wooster, and he was unforgettable as General Melchett in Blackadder. He hosted over 180 episodes of Q.I and has narrated all seven of the Harry Potter audiobook recordings. He is the bestselling author of four novels—The Stars' Tennis Balls, Making History, The Hippopotamus, and The Liar—as well as three volumes of autobiography—Moab is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me.

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