Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined

Stephen Fry

Audio by Paper2Audio.

♦ Part One ♦

Out of Chaos

These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.

The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with Chaos.

Was Chaos a god—a divine being—or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager's bedroom only worse?

Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn.

As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.

Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way, I don't know. I wasn't there. Nor were you.

And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your trousers began as chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over eons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that sheathes your lovely legs. In time you will abandon your trousers—not now, I hope—and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned. In either case their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to cold Chaos. And what is true for your trousers is of course true for you.

So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.

Now, you might be the kind of person who asks, “But who or what was there before Chaos?” or “Who or what was there before the Big Bang? There must have been something.”

Well, there wasn't. We have to accept that there was no "before," because there was no Time yet. No one had pressed the start button on Time. No one had shouted Now! And since Time had yet to be created, time words like "before," "during," "when," "then," "after lunch," and "last Wednesday" had no possible meaning. It screws with the head, but there it is.

The Greek word for “everything that is the case,” what we could call “the universe,” is Kosmos. And at the moment—although “moment” is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase “just now”)—at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case. A stretching, a tuning up of the orchestra …

But things are about to change very quickly.

The First Order

From formless Chaos sprang two creations: Erebus and NYX. Erebus, he was darkness, and Nyx, she was night. They coupled at once and the flashing fruits of their union were Hemera, day, and Ee thur, light.

At the same time—because everything must happen simultaneously until Time is there to separate events—Chaos brought forth two more entities: GAIA, the earth, and Tartarus, the depths and caves beneath the earth.

I can guess what you might be thinking. These creations sound charming enough—Day, Night, Light, Depths, and Caves. But these were not gods and goddesses, they were not even personalities. And it may have struck you also that since there was no time there could be no dramatic narrative, no stories; for stories depend on Once Upon a Time and What Happened Next.

You would be right to think this. What first emerged from Chaos were primal, elemental principles that were devoid of any real color, character, or interest. These were the Primordial Deities, the First Order of divine beings from whom all the gods, heroes, and monsters of Greek myth spring. They brooded over and lay beneath everything ... waiting.

The silent emptiness of this world was filled when Gaia bore two sons all on her own. The first was Pontus, the sea, and the second was Ouranos, the sky—better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety. Hemera and Aether bred too, and from their union came Thalassa, the female counterpart of Pontus the sea.

Ouranos, who preferred to pronounce himself Ooranoss, was the sky and the heavens in the way that—at the very beginning—the primordial deities always were the things they represented and ruled over. You could say that Gaia was the earth of hills, valleys, caves, and mountains yet capable of gathering herself into a form that could walk and talk. The clouds of Ouranos the sky rolled and seethed above her but they too could coalesce into a shape we might recognize. It was so early on in the life of everything. Very little was settled.

Image summary: A weathered stone relief carving depicting a figure in a draped garment. The figure is heavily eroded, with the head missing and the right arm broken off at the elbow. The figure's left arm extends forward, holding a cylindrical object, possibly a scroll or a handle, while the overall composition is framed within a recessed rectangular architectural niche.

1. This trick of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, can be found in nature still. In aphids, some lizards, and even sharks, it is a reasonably common way to have young. There won't be the variation that two sets of genes allow; this is the same in the genesis of the Greek gods. The interesting ones are all the fruit of two parents, not one.

2. Indeed ouranos is the Greek word for "sky" to this very day.

The Second Order

Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.

Something else began too—what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape.

Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.

Right from the start, the union of Ouranos and Gaia was gratifyingly productive. Twelve robust, healthy children came first—six male, six female. The males were Okeanus, COEUS, CRIUS, Hyperiod, Iapetus, and Kronos. The females, Theia, Themis, Nemorisinee, Feebee, Tethys, and Rhea. These twelve were destined to become the Second Order of divine beings, earning themselves a legendary name.

And somewhere, as Time crept into being, the clock began, the clock of cosmic history that still ticks today. Perhaps one of these newborns was responsible, we can look into that later.

Not content with these twelve strong beautiful brothers and sisters, Ouranos and Gaia gave the world yet more progeny—two distinctive, but distinctly not beautiful, sets of triplets. The three Siklopeez came first, one-eyed giants who gave their father sky a whole new range of expressions and modulations. The eldest cyclops was called Brontes, thunder, next came Steropes, the lightning, and then Arges, brightness. Ouranos could fill the heavens with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. He gloried in the noise and spectacle. But the second set of triplets Gaia bore sent even greater shudders through him and all who saw them.

Perhaps it is kindest to say that they were a mutational experiment never to be repeated, a genetic dead end. For these newborns—the Hekatonkyreez —each had fifty heads and a hundred hands and were as hideous, fierce, violent, and powerful as anything that had yet been released into being. Their names were Kottus the furious, GYGES the long-limbed, and Ee gee on the sea goat, sometimes also called Bree are eos the vigorous one.

Gaia loved them. Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

Filled with disgust, he cursed them: “For offending my eyes, you shall never see light again!” As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia's womb.

The Cyclopes had a single, orb-shaped eye in the middle of their forehead.

Gaia's Revenge

We have good cause to wonder here what “he pushed them into Gaia's womb” really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.

What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires and the three Cyclopes, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished.

Gaia's agony was unbearable and inside her, alongside the Cyclopes and the trio of writhing, flailing three-hundred-handed clawing and a hundred-and-fifty-headed butting Hecatonchires, there sprang up a hatred, a most terrible and implacable hatred against Ouranos, the son she had borne and the husband with whom she had given birth to a new generation. And, like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge.

The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world's most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artifact from its rock. For nine days and nights she labored until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain.

Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children.

“Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?” she asked each in turn. “You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.”

Perhaps we imagine that Gaia—Mother Earth—is soft, warm, bountiful, and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueler, harsher, and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys. But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling, and testing each other's strength and dominance like puppies in a basket. Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world. Tethys was about to have his baby—no sin in those early days of course: Propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings.

She was pregnant with Nilus, the Nile, and would go on to give birth to other rivers and to at least three thousand Oceanids or sea nymphs, attractive deities who moved as easily on dry land as in the waters of the sea. They already had two fully grown daughters: Klymeene, who was the lover of Iapetus, and the clever and wise Metis, who is due to play a very important part in what is to come. The pair were happy and looking forward to life on the ocean wave, so neither saw any reason to help kill their father Ouranos.

Next Gaia visited her daughter nemowzeen, who was busy being unpronounceable. She seemed a very shallow, silly, and ignorant being, who knew nothing and appeared to understand less. This was deceptive, for each day that passed she got smarter and smarter, more and more well informed and more and more capable.

Her name means “memory” (giving us the word “mnemonic”). At the time of her mother's visit, the world and the cosmos were very young, so nemowzeen had had no opportunity to prime herself with knowledge or experience. As the years passed, her endless capacity for the storage of information and sensory experience would make her wiser than almost anyone. One day she would mother nine daughters, the Muses, whom we shall meet later.

“You want me to help you kill Ouranos? Surely the Sky Father cannot die?”

“Dethrone or disable him, then . . . it is no more than he deserves.”

“I will not help you.”

"Why not?"

“There is a reason and when I know it I will remember it and tell you.”

Exasperated, Gaia went next to Theia, who was also paired off in another sibling union, to her brother Hyperion.

In due course Theia would give birth to Heelyos the sun, Selene the moon, and EOS the dawn, quite enough parenting to be getting on with, so they too showed no interest in Gaia's plans to depose Ouranos.

Despairing at her pallid and unadventurous brood's refusal to live up to what she imagined to be their divine destinies—not to mention repulsed by how loved up and domesticated they all appeared to be—Gaia next tried Phoebe, perhaps the most intelligent and insightful of the twelve. From the earliest age, shining Phoebe had shown that she possessed the gift of prophecy.

“Oh no, Mother Earth,” she said, when she had heard Gaia's plan. “I could take no part in such a plot. I see no good coming from it. Besides, I'm pregnant. . . .”

“Damn you,” snapped Gaia. “Who by? Coeus, I bet.”

She was right, Phoebe's brother Coeus was indeed her consort. Gaia stormed off with renewed fury to visit her remaining offspring. Surely one of them had the stomach for a fight?

She called on Themis, who would one day be regarded everywhere as the embodiment of justice and wise counsel, and Themis wisely counselled her mother to forget the unjust idea of usurping Ouranos. Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and—as we all do, whether mortal or immortal—ignored it, choosing instead to try the mettle of her son Crius, who consorted with her daughter by Pontus, Yuribya.

“Kill my father?” Crius stared at his mother in disbelief. “B-but how . . . I mean . . . why? . . . I mean . . . oh.”

“What's in it for us, Mother?” asked Eurybia, who was known as “the flint-hearted.”

"Oh, just the world and all that's in it," said Gaia.

"To share with you?"

“To share with me.”

“No!” said Crius. “Leave, Mother.”

"It's worth considering," said Eurybia.

“It's too dangerous,” said Crius. “I forbid it.”

Gaia turned with a snarl and sought out her son Iapetus. "Iapetus, beloved boy.

Destroy the monster Ouranos and rule with me!"

The Oceanid Clymene, who had borne Iapetus two sons and was pregnant with another, stepped forward. “What mother could ask such a thing? For a son to kill his own father would be the most terrible crime. All Cosmos would crv out.”

“I must agree, Mother,” said Iapetus.

“A curse on you and a curse on your children!” spat Gaia.

Image summary: An ancient Greek red-figure pottery painting inside a black bowl, depicting a seated woman and a standing man separated by a central pillar. The woman sits on a stool, holding a small tray, while the man stands opposite her wearing a crown and robes. The scene is enclosed within a circular border featuring a decorative meander pattern.

Themis, the Titan goddess who became the embodiment of law, justice, and order. She is shown here seated on the Delphic tripod, holding a cup in one hand and a sprig of laurel in the other.

A mother's curse is a terrible thing. We shall see how the children of Iapetus and Clymene, Atlas, Epimetheus, and Prometheus, met their ends.

Rhea, the eleventh of Gaia's children to be asked, said that she would have no part in the plan, but—throwing up her hands to stop a savage torrent of abuse from her mother—suggested that her brother Kronos, the last of these strong beautiful children, might very well like the idea of deposing his father. She, Rhea, had heard him many times cursing Ouranos and his power.

“Really?” cried Gaia. “You say so? Well, where is he?”

“He's probably mooching around down by the caves of Tartarus. He and Tartarus get on so well. They're both dark. Moody. Mean. Magnificent. Cruel.”

“Oh god, don't tell me you're in love with Kronos...”

“Put in a good word for me, Mummy, please! He's just so dreamy. Those black flashing eyes. The thunderous brows. The long silences.”

Gaia had always thought that her youngest's long silences indicated nothing more than dullness of intellect, but she sensibly refrained from saying so. After assuring Rhea that she would of course recommend her warmly to Kronos, Gaia sped down, down, down to the caves of Tartarus to find him.

If you were to drop a bronze anvil from the heavens it would take nine days to reach the earth. If you were to drop that anvil from the earth it would take another nine days to reach Tartarus. In other words the earth is halfway between the sky and Tartarus. Or you might say Tartarus is as far from the ground as the ground is from the sky. A very deep, abysmal place then, but more than just a place.

Remember Tartarus was a primordial being too, who was born out of Chaos at the same time as Gaia. So when she approached him, they greeted each other as family members will.

“Gaia, you've put on weight.”

"You look a mess, Tartarus."

“What the hell do you want down here?”

“Shut up for once and I'll tell you...”

These testy exchanges won't stop them, at a future date, from mating and producing Typhon—the worst and deadliest of all the monsters. But just now Gaia is in no mood for love or for trading insults.

“Listen. My son Kronos—is he nearby?” A resigned groan from her brother.

“Almost certainly. I wish you'd tell him to leave me alone. He does nothing all day but hang around looking at me with his eyes drooping and his mouth open. I think he's got some kind of man-crush on me. He copies my hairstyle and leans limply against trees and boulders looking miserable, melancholy, and misunderstood. As if he's waiting for someone to paint him or something. When he's not gazing at me he's staring down into that lava vent over there.

In fact there he is now, look. Try and talk some sense into him.”

Gaia approached her son.

Image summary: An ancient Greek black-figure pottery vessel depicts the god Zeus, labeled with the Greek letters IEYS, wielding a thunderbolt against the serpentine monster Typhon. Zeus, positioned on the left, lunges forward with his weapon raised, while the winged, snake-tailed Typhon faces him on the right, integrated into the curved surface of the ceramic vase.

Zeus aims a thunderbolt at the winged and snake-legged monster, Typhon.

The Sickle

Now, Kronos (or Cronus as he sometimes styled himself) was not quite the pained and vulnerable emo-like youth that Rhea's and Tartarus's descriptions may have led us to picture, for he was the strongest of an unimaginably strong race. He was darkly handsome, certainly; and yes, he was moody. Had Kronos the examples to go by, he would perhaps have identified with Hamlet at his most introspective, or Jaques at his most self-indulgently morbid. Konstantin from The Seagull with a suggestion of Morrissey. Yet there was something of a Macbeth in him too and more than a little Hannibal Lecter—as we shall see.

Kronos had been the first to discover that brooding silence is often taken to indicate strength, wisdom, and command. The youngest of the twelve, he had always hated his father. The deep and piercing venom of envy and resentment was beginning to unravel his sanity, but he had managed to hide the intensity of his hatred from all but his adoring sister Rhea, who was the only member of his family with whom he felt comfortable enough to reveal his true self.

As they made their way up from Tartarus, Gaia poured more poison into his receptive ear.

“Ouranos is cruel. He is insane. I fear for myself and for all of you, my beloved children. Come, boy, come.”

She was leading him to Mount Othrys. You recall the strange and terrible artifact that I told you she had wrought and hidden in the cleft of the mountain before she went visiting each of her children? Gaia now took Kronos to that place and showed him what she had made.

"Pick it up. Go on."

Kronos's black eyes glittered as they took in the shape and meaning of this most strange object.

It was a sickle. An enormous scythe whose great curved blade had been forged from adamantine, which means “untameable.” A massive aggregate of grey flint, granite, diamond, and ophiolite, its half-moon blade had been refined to the sharpest edge. An edge that could cut through anything.

Kronos plucked it from its hiding place just as easily as you or I would pick up a pencil. After feeling the balance and heft of it in his hand, he swung it once, twice. The powerful swish as it whipped through the air made Gaia smile.

“Kronos, my son,” she said, “we must bide our time until Hemera and Aether dive into the waters of the west and Erebus and Nyx prepare to cast the dark—”

“You mean we must wait until evening.” Kronos was impatient and quite lacking in poetry or finer feeling.

“Yes. Eventide. That is when your father will come to me, as he always does. He likes to—"

Kronos nodded curtly. He did not wish to know the details of his parents' lovemaking.

“Hide there, in that very cleft where I hid the sickle. When you hear him covering me, and he grows loud in his roars of passion and groans of lust—strike.”

Night and Day, Light and Dark

As Gaia predicted, Hemera and Aether were tired after twelve hours of playing and slowly Day and Light slipped down westward into the sea. At the same time, Nyx slipped off her dark veil and she and Erebus threw it over the world like a shimmering black tablecloth.

As Kronos waited in the cleft, sickle in hand, all creation held its breath. I say “all creation,” for Ouranos and Gaia and their offspring were not the only beings to have reproduced. Others had multiplied and propagated too, with Erebus and Nyx the most productive by far. They had many children, some terrible, some admirable, and some lovely.

We have already seen how they gave birth to Hemera and Aether. But then Nyx, without Erebus's help, gave birth to Moros, or Doom, who was to become the most feared entity in creation. Doom comes to every creature, mortal or immortal, but is always hidden. Even the immortals feared Doom's all-powerful, all-knowing control over the cosmos.

After Moros came a great rush of offspring, one after the other, like a monstrous airborne invasion. First came Apate, Deceit, whom the Romans called Fraus (from whom we derive the words “fraud,” “fraudulent,” and “fraudster”). She scuttled off to Crete where she bided her time.

Geras, Old Age, was born next; not necessarily so fearful a demon as we might think today. While Geras might take away suppleness, youth, and agility, for the Greeks he more than made up for it by conferring dignity, wisdom, and authority. Senektus is his Roman name, a word that shares the same root as “senior,” “senate,” and “senile.”

A pair of perfectly ghastly twins were next: OIZYS (Miseria in Latin), the spirit of Misery, Depression, and Anxiety, and her cruel brother Momos, the spiteful personification of Mockery, Scorn, and Blame.

Nyx and Erebus were just getting into their stride. Their next child, Eris (Discordia), Strife, lay behind all disagreements, divorces, scraps, skirmishes, fights, battles, and wars. It was her malicious wedding present, the legendary Apple of Discord, that brought about the Trojan War, though that epic clash of arms was a long, long way in the future.

Strife's sister Nemesis was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition—the vice that the Greeks called hubris. Nemesis has elements in common with the eastern idea of karma, and we use her today to suggest the fateful retributive opposition the lofty and wicked will one day meet and which will bring them down. I suppose you could say Holmes was Moriarty's Nemesis, Bond was Blofeld's, and Jerry was Tom's. Erebus and Nyx also gave birth to Karon, whose infamy would grow once he took up his duties as ferryman for the dead. Hypnos, the personification of Sleep, was born to them too. They were also the progenitor of the Oneroy—thousands of beings charged with the making and bringing of dreams to the sleeping.

Amongst the Oneroi whose names are known to us were Fobetor, god of nightmares, and Fantasos, responsible for the fantastic manner in which one thing turns into another in dreams. They worked under the supervision of Hypnos's son Morpheus, whose name itself suggests the morphing, shifting shapes of the dream world. “Morphine,” “fantasy,” “hypnotic,” “oneiromancy” (the interpretation of dreams), and many other verbal descendants of Greek sleep have survived into our language. Sleep's brother Thanatos, Death himself, gives us the word “euthanasia,” “good death.” The Romans called him Mors, of mortals, mortuaries, and mortification.

Image summary: A photograph of an ancient bronze sculpture depicting a face with a large wing extending from the right side of the head. The figure has a serene expression with hollowed-out eyes and textured, wavy hair.

These new beings were frightening and loathsome in the extreme. They left on creation a terrible but necessary mark, for the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.

There were, however, three lovely exceptions: three beautiful sisters, the Hesperideez—nymphs of the west and daughters of the evening. They heralded the daily arrival of their mother and father, but with the soft gold of the gloaming rather than the dread black of night. Their time is what movie cameramen today call “magic hour,” when the light is at its most beguiling and beautiful.

These then were the offspring of Nyx and Erebus, who even now were shrouding the earth in the darkness of night as Gaia lay waiting for her husband for what she hoped would be the last time and Kronos lurked in the shadows of that recess in Mount Othrys, keeping a firm grip on his great scythe.

♦ Hypnos, the personification of sleep. He would father Morpheus, who shaped and formed dreams.

Ouranos Gelded

At last, Gaia and Kronos heard from the west the sound of a great stamping and shaking. The leaves on the trees shivered. Kronos, standing silently in his hiding place, did not tremble. He was ready.

“Gaia!” roared Ouranos as he approached. “Prepare yourself. Tonight we shall breed something better than hundred-handed mutants and one-eyed freaks. . . .”

“Come to me, glorious son, divine husband!” called Gaia, with what Kronos thought a distastefully convincing show of eagerness.

The horrible sounds of a lustful deity slobbering, slapping, and grunting suggested to him that his father was attempting some kind of foreplay.

In his alcove, Kronos breethd in and out five times. Never for a second did he weigh the moral good of what he was about to do, his thoughts were only for tactics and timing. With a deep inhalation he raised the great sickle and stepped swiftly sideways from his hiding place.

Ouranos, who had been preparing to lie on top of Gaia, sprang to his feet with an angry snarl of surprise. Walking calmly forward, Kronos swung the scythe back and swept it down in a great arc. The blade, hissing through the air, sliced Ouranos's genitals clean from his body.

All Cosmos could hear Ouranos's maddened scream of pain, anguish, and rage. Never in creation's short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid.

Kronos leapt forward with an obscene cry of triumph, catching the dripping trophy in his hands before it could reach the ground.

Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words:

“Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.”

Kronos looked down at Ouranos. His black eyes showed nothing, but his mouth curved into a dark smile.

"You have no power to curse, Daddy. Your power is in my hands."

He juggled before his father's eyes his grisly spoils of victory, burst and slimy with blood, oozing and slippery with seed. Laughing, he pulled back his arm and hurled the package of genitals far, far from sight. Across the plains of Greece they flew and out over the darkening sea.

All three watched as Ouranos's organs of generation vanished from sight across the waters. Kronos was surprised, when he turned to look at her, that his mother had covered her mouth in what appeared to be horror. Tears were leaking from Gaia's eyes.

He shrugged. As if she cared.

Erinyes, Gigantes, and Meliae

Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed toward reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower. Where divine blood fell, life could not help but spring from the earth.

So no matter how murderous, cruel, rapacious, and destructive the character of Ouranos, he had been the ruler of creation after all. For his son to have mutilated and emasculated him constituted a most terrible crime against Cosmos.

: Image summary: A classical painting depicting several muscular figures surrounding an armillary sphere, an astronomical instrument consisting of nested metal rings. One nude male figure stands to the right, holding a long staff and touching a small globe. In the lower center, an elderly bearded man reclines on his back, while other figures gesture upward toward a floating figure in the upper left corner.

the Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn

Jorjo Vasari and Kristofano Gherardi (1555)

Kronos (Cronus) uses a scythe to mutilate his father, Ouranos (Uranus).

Perhaps what happened next is not so surprising.

Great pools of blood formed around the scene of Ouranos's castration. From that blood, the blood which fell from the ruined groin of Ouranos, living beings emerged.

The first to push themselves out of the sodden ground were the Erinyeez, whom we call the Furies, Alekto (remorseless), Megera (jealous rage), and Tisifone (vengeance). Perhaps it was an unconscious instinct of Ouranos that caused such vengeful beings to rise up. Their eternal duty, from the moment of their chthonic—or out-of-the-ground—birth, would be to punish the worst and most violent of crimes: relentlessly to chase the perpetrators and to rest only when the guilty had paid the full and dreadful price. Armed with cruel metallic scourges, the Furies flayed the very flesh from the bones of the guilty. The Greeks, with characteristic irony, nicknamed these female avengers the Yumenideez or"kindly ones." Next to rise from the soil were the Gigantes. We have inherited"giant,""giga," and"gigantic" from them, but while they were certainly possessed of prodigious strength, they were no greater in stature than their half brothers and sisters.

Finally, in that instant of pain and destruction were created also the Meliaee, graceful nymphs who were to become guardians of an ash tree whose bark exuded a sweet and healthful manna.

As all these unexpected new beings emerged alive from the blood-soaked ground, Kronos stared at them in disgust and scattered them with a sweep of his scythe. Next he turned to Gaia.

“I promised you, Earth Mother,” he said, “that I would release you from your gnawing agony—hold still.”

With another sweep of the scythe he sliced open Gaia's side. Out tumbled the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires. Kronos looked down at his parents, both of them now bloody, panting, and snarling like angry wounded animals.

“No more shall you cover Gaia,” he said to his father. “I banish you to live out eternity beneath the ground, buried deeper even than Tartarus. May you sulk there in your fury, gelded and powerless.”

“You have overreached yourself,” hissed Ouranos. “There will be revenge. I curse your life, that it be ground out in slow remorseless perpetuity, its immortal eternity an insufferable burden without end. Your own children will destroy you as _ _”

“As I destroyed you. Yes, I know. You said. We'll see about that.”

“You and your brothers and sisters, I curse you all, your straining ambition will destroy you.”

The “striving, straining one,” or Titan, is the title we reserve for Kronos, his eleven siblings, and (much of) their progeny. Ouranos meant it as an insult, but somehow the name has resounded through the ages with a ring of grandeur. No one, to this very day, would be insulted to be called a Titan.

Kronos met these curses with a sneer and, corralling his mutilated father and newly freed mutant brothers at the point of his sickle, he led them down to Tartarus. The Hecatonchires and Cyclopes he imprisoned in the caves, but his father he buried even deeper, as far from his natural domain of the heavens as he could contrive.

Brooding, simmering, and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

From the Foam

We return now to the great arc in the heavens traced by Ouranos's severed gonads. Kronos had flung the Sky Father's junk, if you recall, far across the sea.

We can watch it now. Near the Ionian island of Cythera it drops, splashes, bounces, rises up again, and finally falls and half sinks beneath the waves. Great ropes of semen trail in its wake like ribbons from a kite. Where they strike the surface of the sea a furious frothing is set up. Soon all the waters bubble and boil. Something arises. From the horrors of patricidal castration and unnatural ambition it must be—surely—something unimaginably ugly, something terrible, something violent, something appalling, that promises only war, blood, and anguish?

The whirlpool of blood and seminal fluid foments, fizzes, and foams. Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow, and then a face. But what kind of face?

A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam. In Greek “from the foam” can be rendered as something like Afrodite, and this is the name of the one who now lifts herself from the spume and spray.

She stands on a large scallop shell, a demure and gentle smile playing on her lips. Slowly she alights onto a beach on Cyprus. Where she steps flowers bloom and clouds of butterflies arise. Around her head, birds fly in circles, singing in ecstasies of joy. Perfect Love and Beauty has made her landfall and the world will never be the same.

The Romans called her Venus, and her birth and arrival on the sands of Cyprus on the scallop shell were never better portrayed than in Botticelli's exquisite painting, which once seen is never forgotten.

We leave Aphrodite making her home on Cyprus and return to Kronos, who is on his way back from the dark caves of Tartarus.

: A Renaissance painting depicting the Birth of Venus. In the center, a nude woman with long red hair stands in a large scallop shell floating on the sea. To the left, two winged figures, Zephyrus and Aura, blow a breeze toward her. To the right, a woman in a floral dress holds out a red cloak to cover Venus as she steps onto the shore.

Botticelli's Birth of Venus shows Aphrodite as she makes landfall in Cyprus.

Rhea

When he arrived on Mount Othrys, Kronos found his sister Rhea waiting for him. The sight of her darkly handsome brother, a huge sickle dripping blood in his hand, thrilled her to the point of internal explosion.

His authority was established: None of his brother or sister Titans dared question him. His father was powerless, and Gaia, who found she could take no joy in the violent overthrow she had set in motion, withdrew into her realm and into a more passive existence. She never lost her strength, authority, or high status as Mother Earth and ancestress of all, but she no longer ventured forth to interact or conjoin. Kronos was the master now. After a great feast in which his achievement in unmanning and unseating Ouranos was roaringly and most unmusically sung, Kronos turned to the blushing, trembling Rhea and pulled her aside to make love to her.

Rhea's joy was complete. She had played her part in helping the brother she adored achieve mastery of all creation. And now they were united.

More than that, in the fullness of time she began to feel a child moving inside her. A baby girl, she felt sure. Her happiness was unclouded.

Kronos, on the other hand ... his already dour disposition was darkened by something else. The words of his father Ouranos began to echo in his head:

Your own children will overthrow you as you overthrew me.

Over the coming weeks and months Kronos watched with sullen foreboding as Rhea's belly filled and swelled.

Your own children... your own children...

When the day came for her confinement, Rhea laid herself down in an alcove in the mountain—the same recess in the rocks, in fact, where Gaia had concealed the scythe and Kronos had hidden. Here she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whom she named Hestia.

The name was hardly out of Rhea's mouth before Kronos stepped forward, snatched the child from her arms, and swallowed it whole. He turned and departed without so much as a hiccup, leaving Rhea white with shock.

The Children of Rhea

Kronos was now lord of earth, sea, and sky, with the scythe the symbol of his authority. His sceptre. The earth he took from Gaia, the sky from Ouranos. With threats of violence he wrested dominion over the sea from Pontus and Thalassa and from his siblings Oceanus and Tethys. He trusted no one and ruled alone.

Still Kronos continued to take his pleasure with Rhea and still she consented, loving him hopelessly and trusting that the monstrous eating of their firstborn had been some sort of aberration.

It was not. Their next child, a boy she called HADES, was devoured in just the same manner. And then another baby girl, Demeter. Next was Posei don, a second boy, and finally a third girl, Hera. All of them swallowed whole with as much ease as you and I might gulp down an oyster or a spoonful of jelly.

By the time Kronos consumed Hera, Rhea's fifth pregnancy, her love for Kronos had turned to hate. That same night he seized her and made love to her again. She swore to herself that if she became pregnant he would never take her sixth child. But how could she prevent him? He was all powerful.

One morning she arose and felt the familiar nausea. She was pregnant. Her divine instincts told her that her sixth was to be a boy.

She left Othrys and took herself off in search of her mother and father. For all that she had contributed to their downfall she retained a daughter's trust in their wisdom and good will. She knew too that their fury at her part in their ruin was as nothing to their undying hatred of Kronos.

For three days her calls to Gaia and Ouranos rang round the hills and caves of the world.

“Earth Mother, Sky Father, hear your daughter and come to her aid! The son who cut you and cast you out has become the foulest of ogres, the most depraved and unnatural creature in all the world. Five of your grandchildren has he eaten. I have one more baby inside me, ready to come into the world.

Teach me how to save him. Teach me, I beg, and I will raise him to revere you always.”

A deep and terrible rumbling was heard far below. The ground shook beneath Rhea's feet. The voice of Ouranos came roaring into her ears, but within it she heard too the calmer tones of her mother.

Together the three of them hatched a marvelous plan.

Image summary: An oil painting depicting a grotesque, wild-haired creature with wide eyes and a gaping mouth, grasping a small, pale, nude human figure that it is consuming headfirst.

The Switch

In order to set this marvelous plan in motion Rhea went to Crete to confer with a she-goat named Amalthea. Also living on the island were the Meliae, nymphs of the manna-bearing ash tree. If you remember, they had sprung from the soil soaked by Ouranos's blood, along with the Furies and the Giants. After an encouraging conversation with Amalthea, Rhea conferred with these mild and sweet-natured nymphs. Satisfied that the things she needed to achieve on Crete could be achieved, she returned to Mount Othrys to prepare for her time.

Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting, and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances. The prophecy of Ouranos still rang in his ears, and the superstitious pangs of paranoia that ravage all despotic usurpers grew fiercer in this ur-Stalin each day.

Gaia had told Rhea about a certain stone—an object of perfect magnetite just the right size for their purposes, smooth and shaped like a bean—which could be found in the hills not far from Mount Othrys itself.

In the mornings Kronos liked to stride from one end of Greece to the other visiting each of his Titan brothers and sisters, outwardly to consult with them, in truth to make sure that they were not plotting against him. At the time she knew he would be on the seashore, visiting Oceanus and Tethys, Rhea went to the place that Gaia had described, found the stone, and took it home to Mount Othrys, where she swaddled it in linen. The plan was coming together.

One afternoon not long afterward, with Kronos near enough to hear her but far enough away to take some time to arrive, Rhea began to scream the screams of childbirth. Louder and louder came her agonized howls, tearing the fabric of the air until, after a sudden silence, they were replaced by the best impression she could give of a baby's first gasping cries.

Sure enough, Kronos approached. His shadow fell over Rhea.

“Give me the child,” he said.

“Dread lord and husband—" Rhea cast him an imploring look. “Will you not let me keep this one? Look at him, so sweet, so innocent. So harmless.”

With a rough laugh Kronos snatched the tightly wrapped baby from Rhea's cradling arms and bolted it down in one great gulp, swaddling linen and all. Down it went like the others, never touching the sides. Punching his breastbone once, then twice, Kronos gave a loud belch and left his tormented wife to her grief-stricken sobs.

The moment he had gone, the sobs turned to hysterical, barely suppressed chokes and screams. Chokes and screams of laughter.

Catching her breath and rising from her bed, Rhea slipped down the mountainside and made her way to Crete, traveling as fast as anyone could in so heavily pregnant a state.

Image summary: A red-figure painting on a ceramic vase depicting two figures in a domestic or ritual scene. On the left, a draped woman leans forward, holding up a piece of fabric. To the right, a bearded man stands facing her, one hand raised in a gesture and the other holding a long staff.

The Cretan Child

Rhea's accouchement on Crete was easy enough. Tenderly assisted by the she-goat and the Meliae she prepared to give birth in the safety and comfort of a cave on Mount Ida. Soon she was delivered of a quite transcendently beautiful baby boy. She named him Zeus.

Just as Gaia had recruited her youngest child Kronos in order to take revenge on her son and husband Ouranos, so Rhea vowed she would rear this, her youngest child, to destroy her husband and brother Kronos. The dreadful cycle of bloodlust, greed, and killing that marked the birth pangs of the primordial world would continue into the next generation.

Rhea knew she must return to Mount Othrys before Kronos noticed her absence and suspected that something was wrong. As had been arranged, the goat Amalthea would suckle the baby with her rich and nutritious milk while the Meliae would feed him on the sweet and wholesome manna that wept its gum from their ash trees. In this way young Zeus could grow up on Crete strong and well nourished. Rhea would visit him as often as was possible, to tutor him in the arts of revenge.

Although this is the best-known version, there are many different accounts as to how Zeus escaped the attention of the great Kronos, god of earth, sky, and seas. One records that a nymph named Adamantheah suspended the infant Zeus by rope from a tree. Strung up between earth, sea, and sky he remained in this way invisible to his father. It is a pleasingly Daliesque image—the baby who would become the mightiest of all beings gurgling, babbling, and chuckling in midair, hanging between the elements over which he was destined to rule.

The Oath of Allegiance

While, unknown to his father, Zeus grew strong on goat's milk and manna in Crete and learned to walk, talk, and understand the world around him, Kronos summoned his Titan siblings to Mount Othrys to renew their pledges of loyalty and obedience.

“This is our world now,” he told them. “Fate has decreed that I must be childless, the better to rule. But you must do your duty. Breed! Fill the world with our Titan race. Bring them up to obey me in all things and I will grant you lands and provinces of your own. Now, bow before me.”

The Titans bowed low and Kronos gave a grunt of satisfaction that was the closest he ever came to an expression of happiness. The vengeful prophecy of his father had been averted; the eternal Age of the Titans could begin.

The infant Zeus being fed by nymphs and the she-goat Amalthea on Crete.

The Cretan Boy

Kronos may have grunted with satisfaction, but Moros, the figuration of Destiny and Doom, smiled—as he always does when the powerful exhibit confidence. On this occasion Moros smiled because he could see that Zeus was flourishing on Crete. He was growing into the strongest and most striking male in all creation—indeed his radiance had become almost painful to look upon. The goodness of goat's milk and the nurturing potency of manna had given him strong bones, a clear complexion, sparkling eyes, and glossy hair. He made the journey, to use the Greek terms, from pais (boy) and ephebos (teenager) to kouros (youth) and thence into a fine example of what we might call today a young adult. Even now the first downy outlines of what was to become a legendary and mighty example of the art of the beard were showing themselves on his chin and cheeks. He possessed the confidence, the unforced air of command, which marks those destined to lead. He was quicker to laughter than anger, but when his ire was roused he could frighten every living creature within his orbit.

From the first he exhibited a blend of zest for life and strength of will that filled even his mother with awe, and some attested that Amalthea's milk conferred extraordinary capabilities on the youth as he grew. To this day Cretan guides entertain visitors with tales of the young Zeus's remarkable powers. They tell the story (as if it happened within their lifetimes) of how, as an infant playing with his beloved nanny-goat and unaware of his own strength, Zeus accidentally snapped off one of her horns. By virtue of his already prodigious divine powers, this broken horn instantly filled itself with the most delicious food—fresh bread, vegetables, fruit, cured meats, and smoked fish—a supply that never gave out no matter how much was taken from it. Thus originated the celebrated Horn of Plenty, the Kornukopeah.

Zeus's determined mother visited Crete whenever she felt able to slip away from the ever-watchful Kronos.

“Never forget what your father did. He ate your brothers and sisters. He tried to eat you. He is your enemy.”

Zeus would listen as Rhea described the unhappy condition of the world under Kronos.

“He rules by fear. He has no sense of loyalty or trust. This is not the way, my Zeus.”

"Doesn't that make him strong?"

“No! It makes him weak. The Titans are his family, his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. Already some are beginning to resent his monstrous tyranny. When your time comes you will exploit that resentment.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“A true leader forges alliances. A true leader is admired and trusted.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“A true leader is loved.”

“Yes, Mother.”

"Ah, you laugh at me, but it is true."

“Yes, M_ _”

Rhea slapped her son.

“Be serious. You are no fool, I can see that for myself. Adamanthea tells me that you are intelligent, but impetuous. That you spend too much time hunting wolves, teasing the sheep, climbing trees, seducing the ash-tree nymphs.

It is time you were properly schooled. You are sixteen now and soon we must make our move.”

“Yes, Mother.”

The Oceanid and the Potion

Rhea asked her friend Metis, wise and beautiful daughter of Tethys and Oceanus, to prepare her son for what was to come.

“He is clever, but wayward and rash. Teach him patience, craft, and guile.”

Zeus was captivated by Metis from the start. He had never seen such beauty. The Titaness was a little smaller than most of her race, but endowed with a grace and gravity that made her shine. The step of a deer and the guile of a fox, the power of a lion, the softness of a dove, all allied to a presence and force of mind that sent the boy dizzy.

“Lie down with me.”

“No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.”

“Here. On the grass.”

Metis smiled and took his hand. “We have work to do, Zeus.”

"But I love you."

“Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?”

"Don't you love me?"

Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust.

For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.

Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.

One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone.

"What on earth are you doing?"

“Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.”

"Of course you are."

“Today,” said Metis, “is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfill your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.”

“What's in that jar?”

“In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I'll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.”

“I don't understand.”

"Look, here is your mother. She will explain."

As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other's eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready.

Rebirth of the Five

Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea, and sky to mark the end of Hemera's and Aether's diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. Power over everything gave him no satisfaction. Since Rhea had—without explanation—banned him from the conjugal bed, sleep had been a stranger to him too.

denyed its healing balm, his mood and digestion, neither good at the best of times, had worsened. The last of the babies he had swallowed seemed to have provoked a sharp acid reflux that the previous five had not. Where was the joy in omnipotence when his stomach griped and his thoughts stumbled blindly in the thick fog of insomnia?

His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea's low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope toward the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny. He called out to her.

“Rhea?”

“Kronos! Awake at this hour?”

“I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.

“Oh tush, my love. Cannot the wit and craft of a Titaness surpass those silly sleep demons? There is nothing Hypnos and Morpheus can do to soothe your aching body, to calm your racing mind, to ease your wounded spirit, that I cannot match with something sweet and warm of my own.”

"Your sweet warm lips! Your sweet warm thighs! Your sweet warm—"

“Those in time, impatient lord! But first, I have brought you a present. A lovely boy to be your cupbearer.”

From the recess stepped Zeus, a radiant smile lighting up his handsome face. He bowed and proffered Kronos a jewelled goblet which the Titan snatched greedily.

“Pretty, very pretty. I might try him later,” he said casting an admiring eye over Zeus and drinking down the contents of the goblet in one greedy draft. “But Rhea, it is you that I love.”

It was too dark for him to see that Rhea had hoisted one eyebrow into an arch of contemptuous incredulity.

“You love me?” she hissed. “You? Love? Me? You, who ate all but one of my darling children? You dare talk to me of love?” Kronos gave an unhappy hiccup. He was undergoing the strangest sensations.

He frowned and tried to focus. What was Rhea saying? It could not be that she no longer loved him. His mind was even more foggy and his stomach even more turbulent than usual. What was wrong with him?

Oh, and there was something else she had said. Something that made no sense at all.

“What do you mean,” he asked in a voice thick with confusion and nausea, “by saying that I ate 'all but one' of your children? I ate all of them. I distinctly remember.”

A strong young voice cracked through the night air like a whip. "Not quite all, Father!"

Kronos, the nausea rising in an alarming surge, turned in shock to see the young cupbearer step from the shadows.

“Who … who … whoooooooooo!” Kronos's question turned into a sudden uprush of uncontrollable vomiting. From his gut, in one heaving spasm, erupted a large stone. The linen in which it was once wrapped had long since been dissolved by stomach acid.

Kronos gazed at it stupidly, his eyes swimming and his face white. But before he could understand what he was seeing he was assailed by that horrible and unmistakable feeling that tells a vomiter there is more to come. Far more.

Zeus leapt fleetly forward, picked up the regurgitated boulder and hurled it far, far away, much as Kronos had once flung Ouranos's genitals far, far away from the exact same spot. We will find out later where it landed and what happened.

Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard, and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work. One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera. Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.

If you recall, Metis's potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grâce. He would sever Kronos's head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground.

“Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,” said Rhea. “Let it be.”

“But I must kill him,” said Zeus. “We must be revenged.”

“His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.”

Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate.

In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their savior and their leader.

They swore allegiance to him forever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order . . .

They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves “Titans.” They would be gods. And not just gods, but the gods.

3. The brontosaurus or “thunder lizard” got his name from Brontes. The novelist sisters from Yorkshire may have too. Their father was born 'Brunty' but changed it to Brontë, perhaps to lend a grand peal of classical thunder to his Irish name, perhaps in honor of Admiral Nelson who had been made Duke of Brontë—the dukedom was located on the slopes of Etna and is believed to have derived its name from the Cyclops slumbering beneath.

4. Pronounced heck-a-ton-key-rays—the hecaton means “hundred” and the chires “hands” (as in “chiropractor”).

5. “Tethys” is also the name palaeontologists given to the great ancient sea that was an ancestor of the Mediterranean.

6. Since there were perhaps three thousand Oceanids it would be fruitless to list them, even if all their names were known. But it is worth introducing Kalipso, Amphitrite, and the dark and fearful STYX who—like her brother Nilus—was to become the deity of a very significant river. One more Oceanid merits a mention, but only because of her name—Doris. Doris the Oceanid. She went on to marry the sea god Nereyus and by him mother many Nereids, friendly nymphs of the sea.

7. Themis later became the personification of law, justice, custom—mores, the rules that govern how manners and things are or should be.

8. Typhon gave us typhus, typhoid, and the deadly tropical storm, the typhoon. Later we will meet two of Typhon's repulsive offspring by a half woman, half water snake called Ekidnah.

9. Momos (Momus to the Romans) would go on to be worshipped in a seriocomic literary way as the guiding spirit of Satire. Aesop incorporated him into some of his fables and he is the hero of a lost play by Sophocles.

10. The Romans, perhaps confusingly, called Nemesis Invidyah, which is also the Latin for “envy.”

11. Neil Gaiman's Sandman character, Dream, is also known as Morpheus, and formed the inspiration for the character Morpheus played by Laurence Fishburne in the Wachowskis' Matrix films.

12. Four exceptions perhaps. Hypnos is not so bad after all. The longer you live, the fonder you become of him. And talking of living long—perhaps Geras isn't too awful either. So five.

13. Their names signify not their size but their chthonic origins—generated from the earth, “Gaia-gen” if you will. Gaia's name, incidentally, became worn down to Ge in later Greek. She is still there in earth sciences like “geology” and “geography,” not to mention the later environmental studies that have restored her full name—James Lovelock and his popular “Gaia Hypothesis” being a prime example.

14. The sugars of the “manna ash,” which still grows in southern Europe, give their name to today's sweetener Mannitol.

15. At least the deposed Sky Father has the consolation of the planet Uranus named in his honor—it being the convention that the planets take the Roman names of the gods they represent.

16. The females of the race can be called “Titanesses.”

17. In fact the area of central Greece where Mount Othrys stands is called Magnesia to this day: it gave its name to magnesium, magnets, and, of course, magnetite. Manganese too, through a spelling mistake.

18. As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort.

19. The question of how long it took for immortals to be weaned, to walk, talk, and grow into adulthood is a vexed one. Some sources maintain that Zeus grew from a baby into young manhood in a single year. Divine time and mortal time seem to have run differently, just like those of dogs and humans do, or elephants and flies, for example. It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

20. Zeus was often playful. The Romans called him Jupiter or Jove, so he had quite literally a jovial disposition. “The Bringer of Jollity,” Gustav Holst calls him in his orchestral suite The Planets.

21. The potion was prepared by Metis and it would be nice to think that is where our word “emetic” comes from, but I don't think it does.

22. Although in birth order Hera had been the last to be born before Zeus, she now counted as the second child. A kind of reverse seniority operated as they emerged from Kronos's gullet. Zeus became officially the eldest of the children while Hestia, having been the firstborn, was now considered the youngest. It makes sense if you are a god.

the Beginning ♦ Part Two ♦

Clash of the Titans

At the summit of Mount Othrys, Kronos lay stretched out on the ground. The other Titans had not yet learned of Zeus's rescue of his brothers and sisters, but it seemed likely that when they did they would react with furious violence. Under cover of the night Rhea and her six children slipped away, putting as great a distance between themselves and Titan country as they could.

War, Zeus understood clearly, was inevitable. Kronos would not rest as long as his children lived, and Zeus was just as determined to dethrone his father. He heard louder than ever the sound he had heard within him since infancy: a softly insistent whisper from Moros telling him that it was his destiny to rule.

The bloody, violent and destructive conflict that followed is known to historians as the Tytanomakee. While most of the details of this ten-year war may be lost to us, we do know that the heat and fury, the explosive power and colossal energy released by the battling Titans, gods, and monsters caused mountains to bellow fire and the ground itself to quake and crack. Many islands and landmasses were formed by these battles. Whole continents shifted and reshaped themselves and much of the world as we know it now owes its geography to these seismic disturbances, to this literally earth-shaking conflict.

In a straight fight it is almost certain that the combined strength of the Titans would have been too much for their young adversaries. They were stronger and more remorselessly savage. All but Clymene's sons Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with Kronos, far outnumbering the small group of self-styled gods ranged against them under Zeus's generalship. But just as Ouranos had paid dearly for his crime of imprisoned the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires inside Gaia, so Kronos was about to pay for the blunder of imprisoned them in the caverns of Tartarus.

It was the wise and clever Metis who advised Zeus to go down and release his three one-eyed and three hundred-handed brothers. He offered them freedom in perpetuity if they would help him defeat Kronos and the Titans. They needed no further encouragement. The Gigantes too chose to side with Zeus and proved themselves brave and tireless fighters.

In the final decisive battle, the pitiless ferocity of the Hecatonchires—not to mention their surplus of heads and hands—combined quite marvelously with the wild electric power of the Cyclopes whose names were, if you recall, Brightness, Lightning, and Thunder: Argos, Steropes, and Brontes. These gifted craftsmen hammered their mastery of storms into thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, which he learned to fling with pinpoint accuracy at his enemies, blasting them to atoms. Under his direction the Hecatonchires picked up and hurled rocks at furious speed, while the Cyclopes harried and dazzled the enemy with lightning shows and terrifying peals of thunder. The hundred hands of the Hecatonchires scooped and launched, scooped and launched innumerable rocks at the enemy like so many demented windmilling catapults until, bludgeoned and battered, the Titans called for a ceasefire.

We will leave them, their great bloodied heads bowed in full and final surrender, and take a moment to look at what else had been going on in the world while battle raged for those ten terrible years.

The gods battle the Titans during the ten-year conflict known as the Titanomachy.

The Proliferation

The fire and fury of war had scorched, enriched, and fertilized the earth. New growth burst through to create a fresh, green world for the triumphant gods to inherit.

If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into lifeforms of ever greater diversity, variety, and richness.

The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form, and what you might call resolution.

High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being.

I like to picture the first stage of creation as an old-fashioned T.V screen on which a monochrome game of Pong played. You remember Pong? It had two white rectangles for rackets and a square dot for a ball. Existence was a primitive, pixelated form of bouncing tennis. Some thirty-five to forty years later there had evolved ultra hi-res 3-D graphics with virtual and augmented reality. So it was for the Greek cosmos, a creation that began with clunky and elemental lo-res outlines now exploded into rich, varied life.

Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing, and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

The Muses

One of the original Titans, nemowzeen (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed.

We think of the Muses today as patron saints of the arts in general, and private sources of inspiration in particular. “O for a Muse of fire!” cries the Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare's Henry V. He or she is “my muse” we might say of those who fire our creativity and spur us on to greatness. The Muses can be found in “music,” “amusements,” “museums,” and general “musings.” W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet's ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. Sometimes she gives you gold, sometimes you read back what she has dictated and see that it is dross. The Muses' mother might be Memory, but their father is Zeus, whose faithless inconstancy is the subject of many stories yet to come.

But let us meet these nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to their own particular art form.

Calliope

Rather an undignified linguistic end meets Kalliope, the Muse of epic poetry. Somehow she became a steam-powered organ commonly played in fairgrounds, which are just about the only places where you will hear her name spoken today. To the Roman poet Ovid she was the chief of all the Muses. Her name means "beautiful voice," and she gave birth to Orfyus, the most important musician in all Greek history. The finest poets, Homer, Virgil, and Dante included, invoked her aid when embarking on their great epics.

Clio

Now relegated to a model of Renault motorcar and a series of awards in the advertising industry, CLIO or Kleio (famous) was the Muse of history. She was responsible for proclaiming, for noising abroad, and making famous the deeds of the great. America's oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

The Muses: nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to her own particular art form.

Erato

Erato was the Muse of lyric and love poetry. Her name is related to Eros and the erotic and she has sometimes been represented in art with a golden arrow to suggest the connection. Turtle doves and the myrtle are common symbols associated with her, as is the lute.

Euterpe

The Muse of music itself, the “delightful” and “joyous” Yooterpee bore, by the river god Strymon, the Thracian king Rhesus who went on to play a very minor part in the Trojan War. Whether he gave his name to the monkeys that in turn went on to describe types of human blood factor is not agreed upon.

Melpomene

The tragic Muse, Melpomene (whose name derives from a Greek verb meaning “to celebrate with dance and song”), represented originally the chorus and then the whole of tragedy—a very important fusing of music, poetry, drama, mask, dance, song, and religious celebration. Tragic actors wore a type of thick-soled boot, called a “buskin” in English and the cothurnus in Greek; and Melpomene is usually depicted either holding or wearing these, as well as, of course, the famous tragic mask with its unhappy down-curved lips. Along with her sister Terpsichore, she was a mother to the Sirens, whose time will come.

Polyhymnia

Hymnos is the Greek for “praise,” and Polyhimnyah was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as—slightly randomly one might think—agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her “the Muse of mindfulness.” She is usually portrayed as a rather serious figure, finger-held pensively to her mouth in an attitude of solemn rumination. She is another contender, along with Calliope, for mother of the hero Orpheus.

Terpsichore

Cheese Shop Owner: Oh, I thought you were complaining about the bouzouki player.

Customer: Oh, heaven forbid. I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse.

This dialogue from Monty Python's immortal “Cheese Shop Sketch” introduced many, myself included, to Terpsykore, the Muse of dance.

Thalia

The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, Thaleyah supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for “to flourish.” Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors' boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

Urania

Yuranyah derives her name from Ouranos, the primal god of the heavens (and a great-grandfather of the nine sisters); she is the Muse who presides over astronomy and the stars. She is also considered a figure of Universal Love, a kind of Greek version of the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit.

Threesomes

The three-times-three Muses remind me to introduce more triads. Gaia and Ouranos gave birth, as we know, to three Hecatonchires, three Cyclopes, and four times-three Titans. We have already encountered the three Erinyes, also called the Eumenides—those vengeful Furies who sprang from the bloodsoaked earth at the moment of the castration of Ouranos. Three seems to have been a very magic number to the Greeks.

The Charites

During the course of the ten-year Titanomachy, apocalyptic as it was, Zeus always found time to fulfill his desires. Perhaps he saw it as discharging his duty to populate the earth. It is certainly the case that Zeus liked to discharge.

One day Zeus's eye fell on the most beautiful of all the Oceanids—Yurinome, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. Hidden in a cave while the battle roared outside, Eurynome bore Zeus three ravishing daughters, Agleyah (which means “splendor”), Yufrosyne also known as Yuthymyah (glee, merriment, mirth) and Thaleyah (cheerfulness). Together they were known as the Karites or, to the Romans, the Grashyee. We call them the Three Graces, favored throughout history by sculptors and painters seeking an excuse to render perfect female nudes. Their sweetness of nature gave the world something to counteract the horrible malice and cruelty of the Erinyes.

Horai

The HORAI, or Hours, consisted of two sets of triplet sisters. These daughters of Themis (the embodiment of law, justice, and custom) originally personified the seasons. There seem to have been two to begin with, summer and winter, Awkesyah and CARPO. The classical first triad of Horai was made up by the later addition of Thallo (Flora to the Romans), bringer of flowers and blossoms, the embodiment of spring. The Horai's most valuable quality derived from their mother: their gift of the propitious moment, the benign relationship between natural law and the unfolding of time—what you might call “divine serendipity.”

The second set of Horai was responsible for a more worldly kind of law and order. They were Yunomyah, goddess of law and legislation, Dee-kay, goddess of justice and the moral order (the Roman equivalent was Justitia), and Ayreen, the goddess of peace (Pax to the Romans).

Moirai

The three Moyrayee, or Fates, were named Klotho, Lakesis, and Atropos. These daughters of Nyx are to be thought of as sitting round a spinning wheel: Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos (the relentless, remorseless one, literally the “unturning”) chooses when to shear the thread and cut the life short. I picture them as sunken-cheeked crones, clothed in black rags, sitting in a cave cackling and nodding as they spin, but many sculptors and poets represented them as pink-cheeked maidens, dressed in white robes and smiling demurely. Their name derives from a word that means “portion” or “lot,” in the sense of “that which is allotted to you.” “It was not her portion to be loved,” or, “It was his lot to be unhappy,” are the kinds of phrases Greeks employed to describe attributes or destinies apportioned by the Moirai. Even the gods had to submit themselves to the Fates' cruel decrees.

Image summary: A white marble relief sculpture depicting three women draped in classical robes. The woman on the left leans forward, gesturing toward the central figure. The central woman sits upright, looking forward with a contemplative expression. The woman on the right is seated and leans over, looking down at a book or tablet in her lap.

The three Moirai, or Fates. Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos chooses when to cut the life off.

Keres

These carrion daughters of Nyx were the vile and rapacious spirits of violent death. Like the Valkyries of Norse and Germanic myth they collected the souls of warriors killed in battle. Unlike those benevolent warrior goddesses however, the Keres did not escort their heroic souls to the reward of a Valhalla. They flew from bleeding body to body, greedily sucking up the blood that flowed from them; then, when each corpse was thoroughly drained, they threw it over their shoulders and moved on to the next.

Gorgons

The primordial sea god Pontus had by Gaia a son, Forkis, and a daughter, CETO. The progeny of this brother and sister were three island-dwelling sisters, the Gorgons Stheno, Yuryalee, and Medusah. With hair of writhing venomous snakes, intense staring eyes, hideous fixed smiles, boar's tusk teeth, clawed hands of brass and taloned feet, and scaly golden bodies, these monstrous sisters appeared frightful enough to freeze the blood. But anyone who caught a Gorgon's eye—exchanged looks with her for just one fleeting second—would quite literally be turned instantly to stone. The word for that is “petrified,” which has come to mean scared stiff.

Spirits of Air, Earth, and Water

These threesomes were not the only significant beings to spring into life at this time. All over the world, as the Titanomachy raged around them, nature sprites and spirits of all kinds began to multiply and claim their areas of sovereignty. One pictures them scampering for shelter and trembling behind bushes while the rocks and thunderbolts fly through the air and the earth shakes with the violence of war. Somehow these often-fragile beings survived and thrived, to enrich the world with their beauty, dedication, and charm.

Perhaps the best known of them are the Nymphs, a major class of minor female deities, divided into clans or subspecies according to their habitats. The Oreads held court in the mountains, hills, and grottoes of Greece and its islands, while the Nereids (like the Oceanids from whom they descended) were denizens of the deep. Nayads, their freshwater counterparts, were found in lakes and streams of running water, or in the reeds that fringed them and on riverbanks. Over time some water nymphs began to associate themselves with ever more specific realms.

Soon there were Pegayee, who looked after natural springs, and Potamaydees, who dwelt in and around rivers. On land the Awloniadees kept to pastures and groves, while the Laymakydees lived in meadows. Woodland spirits included light-winged Dryads and the Hamadryads, sylvan nymphs whose lives were tied to the trees they made their home. When their tree died or was cut down, they died too. More specialist wood nymphs populated just apple trees or laurels. The Meliae, nymphs of the sweet manna-bearing ash tree, we have already met.

The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.

And so, while the natural world ripened, rippled, and replicated in this prodigiously bravura manner, seeding itself with ever more marvelous demigods and immortals, the earth trembled and shook with the violence and terror of war. But this proliferation ensured that, when the smoke and dust of battle at last cleared, the victors would rule a world filled with life, color, and character. The triumphant Zeus was set to inherit an earth, sea, and sky infinitely richer than the ones into which he had been born.

Disposer Supreme and Judge of the Earth

Zeus now moved to make sure the defeated Titans could never rise again to threaten his order. His strongest and most violent opponent in the war had not been Kronos but Atlas, the brutally powerful eldest son of Iapetus and Clymene. Atlas had been at the center of every battle, rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity.

This killed two birds with one stone. Zeus's predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy.

At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him. Legs braced, muscles bunched, his mighty body contorted itself with this supreme and agonizing effort. For eons he groaned there like a Bulgarian weightlifter. In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day.

His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honor we still call “atlases.” To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named “the Atlantic” after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished.

As for Kronos—the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy—his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual, and lonely exile. Every day and hour and minute was his to be marked out, for Zeus doomed Kronos to count infinity itself. We can see him everywhere even today, the gaunt sinister figure with his sickle.

Now given the cheap and humiliating nickname “Old Father Time,” his sallow, drawn features tell us of the inevitable and merciless ticking of Cosmos's clock, driving all to their end days. The scythe swings and cuts like a remorseless pendulum. All mortal flesh is as grass beneath the cruel sweep of its mowing blade. We find Kronos in all things “chronic” or “synchronized,” in “chronometers,” “chronographs,” and “chronicles.” The Romans gave this saturnine, sallow husk of a defeated Titan the name Saturn. He hangs in the sky between his father Uranus and his son Jupiter.

Not all the Titans were banished or punished. To many Zeus showed magnanimity and mercy, while on those few who had sided with him in the war he showered favors. Atlass brother Prometheus was chief amongst those who had had the prescience to fight for the gods against their own kind. Zeus rewarded him with his companionship, taking ever more delight in the young Titan's presence until one day which was to have massive consequences for humankind, consequences we feel even now. The story of that friendship and its tragic end will be told soon.

During the war, the Cyclopes had, as mentioned, given Zeus in respectful homage the weapon with which he is always associated: the thunderbolt. Their brothers the Hecatonchires, whose tremendous strength had secured victory, were rewarded by being sent back to Tartarus—not as prisoners this time, but as guardians of the gates to those imponderable depths. The Cyclopes' reward was to be appointed by Zeus his personal artificers, armors, and smiths.

23. Hesiod, in the eighth century B.C., offers us the fullest extant account, but other poets also sang of it; an epic called the Titanomachia, by the eighth-century Eumelus of Corinth (or possibly the legendary blind bard Thamyris of Thrace), is tantalizingly mentioned in other texts, but remains lost to us. Hesiod describes the pitched battle that shook the earth like this: “The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and . . . reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods, and a heavy quaking reached dim Tartarus and the deep sound of their feet in the fearful onset and of their hard missiles. So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one another, and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to starry heaven; and they met together with a great battle cry.”

24. See Appendix on p. 315.

24. See Appendix on p. 315.

25. The Pyridees came from Pieria too. They were nine sisters who made the mistake of challenging the Muses, only to be turned into birds for their troubles. Alexander Pope refers to Pieria as the fount of all wisdom and knowledge in this well-known couplet from his Essay on Criticism:

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring...

26. To give the actors added height, and with it metaphorical stature too.

27. Which also gave us (via the word for a flourishing green shoot) the element thallium, a favorite of crime writers and criminal poisoners.

28. Sharing her name with the Muse of comedy.

29. Sometimes just Auxo.

30. Atropine, the poison derived from mandrakes and Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), gets its name from this last and most terrible of the sisters.

31. Later Greeks considered the Fates to be not daughters of Night, but of Necessity—Ananke. They bear a very strong resemblance to the Norns of Norse mythology.

32. The Tagydees were nymphs associated within just one river, the Tagus, but now that I've mentioned them we can forget all about them as we shan't meet them ever again.

33. Atlas's brother Menoetyus, whose name means “doomed might,” had been a furiously powerful and terrible opponent too, but Zeus had destroyed him with one of the very first thunderbolts.

34. These later images, however, show him holding up not the sky but the world.

35. To some mythographers Kronos (the Titan) and Chronos (Time) are quite separate entities. I prefer the versions that unite them.

36. Astronomers consult classical scholars when they name the heavenly bodies in our solar system. The numerous moons of Saturn include Titan, lapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion, Tethys, Rhea, and Calypso. Then there are the Rings of Saturn. Perhaps they signify time, like the rings of a tree.

37. Some of the Titanides were very attractive and—as lustful, highly sexed, and prone to falling in love as any being that has ever lived—Zeus already had designs on one or two of the more appealing ones.

38. And “prescience” or “forethought” is just what the name Prometheus means...

The Third Order

The shattered world was still smoking from the savagery of war. Zeus saw that it needed to heal, and he knew that his own generation, the Third Order of divine beings, must manage better than the first two had done. It was time for a new order, an order purged of the wasteful bloodlust and elemental brutality that had marked earlier times.

To the victors, the spoils. Like a chief executive who has just completed a hostile takeover, Zeus wanted the old management out and his people in. He allotted each of his siblings their own domain, their areas of divine responsibility. The President of the Immortals chose his cabinet.

For himself, he assumed overall command as supreme leader and emperor, lord of the firmament, master of weather and storms: King of the Gods, Sky Father, Cloud Gatherer. Thunder and lightning were his to command. The eagle and the oak were his emblems, symbols then as now of fierce grace and unopposable might. His word was law, his power formidably great. But he was not perfect. He was very, very far from being perfect.

Hestia

Of all the gods, Hestia—"First to be devoured and the last to be yielded up again"—is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus in his wisdom apportioned to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of "hearth and home." Our word "hearth" shares its ancestry with "heart," just as the modern Greek for "hearth" is kardia, which also means "heart."

In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like "economics" and "ecology." The Latin for hearth is focus—which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of words for a fireplace we have spun "cardiologist," "deep focus," and "eco-warrior." The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

Refusing offers of marriage from the other gods, Hestia devoted herself to perpetual maidenhood. Placid, contented, kind, hospitable, and domestic, she tended to stay away from the everyday power struggles and political machinations of the other gods. A modest divinity, Hestia is usually depicted in a plain gown offering up flame in a bowl or sitting on a coarse woollen cushion on a simple wooden throne. It was the custom in Greece to say a grace to her before every meal.

1 he Romans, whose name for her was V.E.S.1.A, considered her so important that they had a school of priestesses devoted to her, the celebrated Vestal Virgins. Their responsibility, aside from lifelong celibacy, was to make sure that the flame representing her was never extinguished. They were the original guardians of the sacred flame.

You can imagine then that there are not many great stories about this gentle and endearing goddess. I only know one, which we will hear before long. Naturally she comes out of it very well.

The Lottery

Zeus turned next to his dark and troublesome brothers, Hades and Poseidon. They had acquitted themselves with equal skill, bravery, and cunning in the war against the Titans, and he thought it only fair that they should draw lots for the two most important unassigned provinces—the sea and the underworld. You will recall that Kronos had wrested control of all things in, under, and over the sea from Thalassa, Pontus, Oceanus, and Tethys. Now, Kronos was gone and the saltwater realm was in Zeus's gift. As for the underworld—which included Tartarus, the mysterious Meadows of Asphodel (of which more later), and the subterranean darkness controlled by Erebus—it was time for those also to be subject to a sole presiding deity, one of Zeus's generation.

Hades and Poseidon had no love for each other, and when Zeus put his hands behind his back and brought them out before him in closed fists, they hesitated. In cases of fraternal dislike, each brother will usually want what the other wants.

“Does Hades hope for the sea or the underworld?” Poseidon wondered. “If he wants the underworld then I want that too, just to infuriate him.”

Hades thought along the same lines. “Whichever I choose,” he said to himself, “I will shout in triumph, just to annoy that prick Poseidon.”

In each of Zeus's outstretched fists lay concealed a precious stone: a sapphire as blue as the sea in one and a piece of jet as black as Erebus in the other. Poseidon did a jig of delight when he touched the back of Zeus's right hand and saw it open to reveal the winking blue sapphire. "The oceans are mine!" he roared.

“That means—yes!” cried Hades with a mighty fist-pump. “That means I have the underworld. Ha ha!”

Secretly, inside, he was sickened. Gods are such children.

Hades

This was the last time Hades was ever seen to laugh. From that moment on, any merriment or sense of fun deserted him. Perhaps the duties of King of the Underworld slowly ground away any youthful zest or lightness of touch that may once have been his.

Down to the depths he went to carve out his kingdom. While his name will always be associated with death and the afterlife, and the whole realm of the underworld (which shares his name) with pain, punishment, and perpetual suffering, Hades also came to symbolize riches and opulence. The jewels and precious metals that are mined deep underground and the priceless crops of grain, vegetables, and flowers that germinate beneath the earth are all reminders that from decay and death spring life, abundance, and wealth. The Romans called him Pluto and words like “plutocrat” and “plutonium” tell of this great opulence and power.

Under Hades' personal command came Erebus and Nyx and their son Thanatos (Death himself). A system of river deities, too dark and dreadful to flow in the open air, wound their way through this underworld. The principal was Styx (hate), a daughter of Tethys and Oceanus whose name and "stygian" attributes are invoked to this day whenever we want to describe something dark, menacing, and gloomy, something hellishly black and brooding. Into her seeped Flejethon, the flaming river of fire, Akeron, the river of woe, Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness, and Kokusythus, the stream of lamentation and wailing. Styx's brother Charon was appointed ferryman, and for the time being he waited, leaning on his pole, by the banks of the Styx. He had dreamed that one day souls by the thousand would come to the shores of the river and pay him the price of transport across. One day soon.

Space was given by Hades to the Furies, the earth-born Erinyes, to live within the darkest heart of his kingdom. From there the three of them could fly to all corners of the world to exact their revenge on those transgressors whose crimes were foul enough to merit their violent attentions.

In time Hades acquired a pet, a gigantic snake-tailed, three-headed dog, offspring of those monstrous children of Gaia and Tartarus, Echidna and Typhon. His name was Kerberos (although he answered to his Roman name, Serberus, too). He was the original hound of hell, the fearsome and tireless watchdog and guardian of the underworld.

At Lerna, a lake that could be used as one of the entrances to the underworld, Hades posted HYDRA, another child of Tartarus and Gaia. I mentioned before the frightening mutations possible when monsters mate, and the difference between Cerberus and his sister Hydra offers a striking example. On the one hand, a dog with a more or less manageable three heads and an elegantly snaky tail to wag; and on the other, his sister, a many-headed water-beast who was almost impossible to kill. Chop off one of her heads and she could grow back ten more in its place.

Despite these zoological atrocities, Hades was for the time being a quiet place, ruled over by a god with little to do. In order for hell to be busy, mortal beings are needed. Creatures that die. So we will leave Pluto for the time being, seated on his cold infernal throne, brooding darkly, as hostile, chilly, and remote as the planet that bears his name, and secretly cursing the good fortune that had given rule of the seas to his hated brother.

Poseidon

Poseidon was a very different kind of god to Hades. He could be as truculent, stormy, vain, capricious, inconsistent, restless, cruel, and unfathomable as the oceans he commanded. But he could be loyal and grateful too. In common with his brothers and some of his sisters, he was also to exhibit urgent bodily lust, deep spiritual love, and every feeling in between. Like all the gods, he was greedy for admiration, sacrifice, obedience, and adoration. Once your friend, always your friend. Once your enemy, always your enemy.

And he was ambitious for more than burnt offerings, libations, and prayers. He always kept an eager, avaricious eye on the youngest of his brothers, the one who now called himself “eldest” and “king.” Should the great Zeus make too many mistakes, Poseidon would be there to topple him from his throne.

The Cyclopes, just as they had forged thunderbolts for Zeus, now created a great weapon for Poseidon too—a trident. This massive three-pronged fishing spear could be used to stir up tidal waves and whirlpools—even to make the earth tremble with earthquakes, which gave Poseidon the soubriquet “Earth Shaker.” His desire for his sister Demeter caused him to invent the horse to impress and please her. He lost his passion for Demeter, but the horse remained sacred to him always.

Under what we would now call the Aegean Sea, Poseidon built a vast palace of coral and pearl in which he installed himself and his chosen consort,

Amphitrite, a daughter of Nereus and Doris, or (some say) of Oceanus and Tethys. As a wedding gift, Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin. She bore him a son, Triton, a kind of merman, usually depicted sitting on his tail and blowing with bulging cheeks into a large conch shell.

Amphitrite, if truth be told, seems to have been rather colorless and appears in few stories of any great interest. Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods, and human heroes—Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

Poseidon's Roman equivalent was Neptune, whose giant planet is surrounded by moons that include Thalassa, Triton, Naiad, and Proteus.

Demeter

The next of Kronos's children to be apportioned her divine duties was Demeter. Hair the color of ripe wheat, skin like cream, and eyes bluer than cornflowers, she was as richly, dreamily beautiful as any of the goddesses, except perhaps ... well, the question of who was the most beautiful goddess would turn out to be the most vexed, thorny, and ultimately cataclysmic one ever asked.

So lovely was Demeter that she attracted the unwanted attention of her brothers Zeus and Poseidon. To avoid Poseidon she transformed herself into a mare, and to chase her he turned into a stallion. The issue of that union was a colt, Arion, who grew into an immortal horse magically endowed with the power of speech. By Zeus she had a daughter, Persefone, whose story comes along later.

Zeus gave Demeter responsibility for the harvest and with it sovereignty over growth, fertility, and the seasons. Her Roman name was CERES, from which we get our word “cereal.”

Like Hestia, Demeter is one of the divinities less clear in our minds today as a personality than others of her passionate and charismatic family. But, as with Hestia, her domain was of paramount importance to the Greeks; shrines and cults dedicated to her far outlasted those devoted to the more superficially glamorous gods. The one great story devoted to Demeter, her daughter, and the god Hades is as beautiful as it is dramatic, far-reaching and true.

Hera

Hera came out of Rhea second to last. Words that are still applied to her, and which would have maddened her greatly, include “proud,” “imperious,” “jealous,” “haughty,” and “vengeful.” In art and common reference she is often saddled with the extra indignity of three upsetting “-esques”: statuesque, Rubenesque, and—courtesy of her Roman appellation—Junoesque.

Fate and posterity have been unkind to the Queen of Heaven. Unlike Aphrodite or Gaia she has no planet named in her honor, and she must bear the burden of a reputation that portrays her as more reactive than active—reactive always to the errant infidelities of her husband-brother Zeus.

It is easy to dismiss Hera as a tyrant and a bore—jealous and suspicious, storming and ranting like the very picture of a scorned harridan wife (one imagins her hurling china ornaments at feckless minions), exacting spiteful revenge on nymphs and mortals who have displeased her, failed to burn enough animals on her altars, or, most fatally of all, committed the crime of consorting with Zeus (whether they had been willing or unwilling she never forgave them and could hold a grudge for lifetimes). But, ambitious, snobbish, conservatively protective of hierarchy, and impatient of originality and flair as she certainly was —the archetype of many a literary aunt and cinematic dowager dragon—Hera was never a bore. The force and resolution with which she faced up to a god who could disintegrate her with one thunderbolt shows self-belief as well as courage.

I am very fond of her and, while I am sure I would stammer, blush, and swallow awkwardly in her presence, she finds in me a devoted admirer. She gave the gods gravity, heft, and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritas. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground. Her special province was marriage; the animals associated with her were the peacock and the cow.

Over the course of the war against the Titans, she and Zeus developed into a natural couple, and it became apparent to him that she was the only one with enough presence, dignity, and command to stand as his consort and bear him new gods.

Crackling with tension, impatience, and distrust, theirs was nonetheless a great marriage.

A New Home

Zeus's ambition for a new era, a new dispensation for the cosmos, encompassed more than the simple distribution of powers and provinces amongst his brothers and sisters. Zeus imagined something more enlightened and rationally constituted than the bloody and brutal tyrannies that had gone before.

He envisioned an assembly of twelve major gods—a dodecatheon as he Greekly put it to himself. So far we have met six, the children of Kronos and Rhea. There was already another deity to call upon of course, one who was older than any of them—foam-born Aphrodite. The moment the Titanomachy erupted, Zeus collected Aphrodite from Cyprus, aware that she would constitute a great prize if kidnapped, ransomed, or recruited by the Titans. For the last ten years she had contentedly been living amongst them and thus the gods now numbered seven.

The triumphant gods of Olympus.

As the Titans had made Othrys their mountain home, so Zeus now chose for his headquarters Mount Olympus, Greece's highest peak. He and his gods would be known as the Olympians and they would rule as no divine beings ruled before or since.

The Runt

Hera was pregnant when the gods moved to Olympus. She could not have been more satisfied. Her ambition was to bear Zeus children of such majestic power, strength, and beauty that her place as Queen of Heaven would be assured for eternity. She knew that Zeus had a roving eye, and she was determined not to let any other parts of him rove either.

First she would give birth to the greatest of the gods, a boy whom she would call Hefestus, and then Zeus would marry her properly and submit himself forever to her will. This was her plan. The plans of the immortals, however, are as subject to the cruel tricks of Moros as are the plans of mortals.

When her time came, Hera lay down and Hephaestus was born. To her dismay the child turned out to be so swarthy, ugly, and diminutive that, after one disgusted glance, she snatched him up and hurled him down the mountainside. The other gods watched the wailing baby bounce once off a cliff and then disappear into the sea. There was a terrible silence.

We will find out what happened to Hephaestus soon enough, but for the moment let us stay on Olympus, where Hera soon became pregnant by Zeus again. This time she took every care to look after herself, eating healthy foods and exercising gently but regularly, in accordance with all the approved precepts and practices of pregnancy and parturition. She wanted a proper son, not a runt fit only to be thrown away.

It's War

In due time Hera was indeed delivered of the lusty, strong, and handsome child she had set her heart on.

Ares, for so she called him, was from the beginning a pugnacious, violent, and aggressive boy. He picked quarrels with everyone and thought of nothing but the clash of arms and horses, chariots, spears, and martial arts. It was natural that Zeus, who disliked him from the first, should appoint him god of war.

Image summary: A Renaissance-style painting depicting a reclining woman on the left in a white draped gown and a reclining, shirtless man on the right. Between them, two satyrs with horns and fur-covered lower bodies hold a long golden staff topped with a blue helmet, which is positioned near the man's head. A small cherub sits by the man's leg on the far right. The figures are set against a landscape background with greenery and a pale blue sky.

Ares sleeps peacefully, while Aphrodite watches, awake and alert

Ares—Mars to the Romans—was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid. Nevertheless even Zeus acknowledged with grudging consent that he was a necessary addition to Olympus. War may be stupid, but it is also inevitable and sometimes—dare one say it?—necessary.

As Ares grew swiftly to manhood he found himself irresistibly attracted to Aphrodite—as which gods weren't? More perplexingly perhaps, she was equally drawn to him. She loved him, in fact; his violence and strength appealed to some deep part of her. He in turn grew to love her, so far as such a violent brute was capable of the emotion. Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.

The Enchanted Throne

To cement her position as the universally recognized Queen of Heaven and undisputed consort of Zeus, Hera felt the need to institute a nuptial feast, a grand public ceremony that would forever bind her in wedlock to Zeus.

Hera's twin impulses of propriety and ambition motivated almost everything she did. She had been pleased to see her son falling for Aphrodite, yet she did not trust the goddess. If Aphrodite agreed to make a public commitment to Ares, as Zeus was to do to Hera, then that would make everything binding and official, setting a permanent seal on her triumph. The world's first wedding would therefore solemnize two marriages.

A date was set and invitations sent out. Presents began to arrive, the most spectacular of which, all agreed, was a marvelous golden chair addressed personally to Hera. Never had so glorious and gorgeous an object been seen. Whoever the anonymous sender might be, it was obvious, Hera declared, that he or she had the most exquisite taste.

Smiling with satisfaction, she lowered herself onto the throne. Instantly its arms came to life and sprang inward, enclosing her in a tight embrace. Struggle as she might she could not escape, the arms had locked themselves around her and she was trapped. The screams were appalling.

Hephaestus—god of fire, of blacksmiths, artisans, sculptors, and metalworkers—at work in his forge.

The Lame One

There is doubt, disagreement, and speculation about what happened to Hephaestus after he had been cast down from heaven. Some say the infant god was cared for by the Oceanid Eurynome and either the Titaness Tethys, Eurynome's mother, or perhaps by Thetis, a Nereid (daughter of Nereus and Doris) who was to give birth to Akillis many years later. It seems certain, though, that Hephaestus grew up on the island of Lemnos, where he learned how to forge metal and make exquisite, intricate objects. He quickly showed a remarkable talent for the fashioning of useful, ornamental, and even magical artifacts, which—allied to his strength with the bellows and apparent immunity from scorching in the intense heat of the forges—combined to make him the greatest of smiths.

In bouncing off the Olympian mountainside he had damaged his foot, which left him with a permanent limp. With his awkward gait, slightly contorted features, and disordered black curls, he was a fearful sight. His later reputation, however, was for faithfulness, kindness, good humor, and equable temper. Greek myth is replete with infants cast into the wilderness or abandoned on mountaintops to die, either because some prophecy foretold they would one day bring disaster on their parents, tribe, or city, or because they were considered accursed, ugly, or malformed. Such outcasts seemed always to survive and return to fulfill the prophecy or win back their birthright.

Hephaestus longed to come back to Olympus, which he knew to be his home by right, but he was aware that he could not do so without bitterness or on proper terms unless he allowed himself one measured act of revenge, which would prove his strength of personality, his right to divinity, and serve as his calling card to heaven.

So, as Hephaestus learned his trade and worked his bellows, his quick and clever mind devised the plan that his quick and clever fingers would turn into startling reality.

The Hand of Aphrodite

Bound fast on the golden throne, Hera howled with rage and frustration. Neither her power, nor even that of Zeus himself had been able to release her from its curse. How could she invite the immortal world to a feast in which she sat pinioned like a criminal in the stocks?

It would be grotesque and undignified. She would be laughed at. What magic was at work here? Who had done this to her? How could she be released from the spell?

The hapless Zeus, bombarded by a shrieked fusillade of questions and complaints, turned to the other gods for help. Whoever managed to release Hera, he proclaimed, could take Aphrodite's hand in marriage, the greatest matrimonial prize there was.

Ares was loudly annoyed by this peremptory decree. Was it not understood that he was to wed Aphrodite?

“Calm yourself,” said Zeus. “You are stronger than all the other gods put together. Your union is safe.”

Aphrodite was confident too and pushed her lover forward with encouraging words. But none of Ares's pulling and pushing and kicking and swearing had the slightest effect. If anything, it seemed that the more he strained, the tighter the throne's hold on Hera became. Poseidon (despite already having Amphitrite as his consort) made a spirited attempt that likewise came to nothing. Even Hades rose up from the underworld to try his hand at freeing Hera from her increasingly embarrassing predicament. All to no avail.

As Zeus himself tugged frantically and uselessly at the arms of the throne, enduring yet more insults from the humiliated and enraged Hera, a polite but insistent cough cut through the commotion. The assembled gods turned.

In the very hall of heaven, a gentle smile on his lopsided face, stood Hephaestus.

"Hello, Mother," he said. "Having problems?"

“Hephaestus!”

He limped forward. “I understand that there is some sort of reward . . .?”

Aphrodite looked at the ground, chewing her lip. Ares growled and started forward, but Zeus held him back. The other gods parted to let the ugly little creature hobble through to where Hera sat imprisoned in her throne of gold. At one touch of his fingers the arms of the golden throne swung open and Hera was free. She rose to her feet, adjusted her gown and straightened herself in a manner that told the world the whole situation had been under control the whole time. Color flew to Aphrodite's cheek. This could not be!

It was a moment of sweet revenge for Hephaestus, but his essential good nature kept him from gloating. Despite—or perhaps because of—the pangs of rejection he had endured all his life, he was motivated not by anger or resentment but only by a desire to please, to make himself useful and give delight. He knew that he was ugly and he knew Aphrodite did not love him. He knew that if he claimed her as his prize she would betray him and slip often into the bed of his brother Ares. But he was simply happy to be home.

As for Hera—rather than acknowledge that she had been paid back for her cruel and unnatural betrayal of the maternal instinct, she maintained a dignified and frosty silence. Secretly, the better part of her was rather proud of her elder boy, and in time she grew genuinely fond of him, as did all of Olympus.

Hephaestus would make gifts for Aphrodite and for all the gods and prove himself a worthy member of the twelve. He was given one whole valley of the mountain for his own forge. It was to become the greatest and most productive workshop in the world.

For assistants he chose the Cyclopes, themselves craftsmen of the highest order, as we have seen. Anything Hephaestus did not yet know they could teach him, and together, working to his designs, they would fashion remarkable objects that would change the world.

Hephaestus—god of fire, and of blacksmiths, artisans, sculptors, and metalworkers—was home. His Roman name is Vulkan, which lives on in volcanoes and vulcanized rubber.

The Wedding Feast

Fresh invitations to the marriage of Zeus and Hera, hastily amended to include the wedding of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, were now sent out. All who were summoned to the double wedding accepted with excited pleasure. Such a thing had never been known in all creation, but then creation had never known a goddess like Hera, with her great sense of propriety and intense feeling for order, ceremony, and familial honor.

Nymphs of the trees, rivers, breezes, mountains, and oceans talked of nothing but the wedding for weeks. The wood spirits too—the lustful fauns as well as the tough, barky dryads and hamadryads—made their way to Olympus from every forest, copse, and spinney. In celebration of the nuptials, Zeus went so far as to pardon some of the Titans. Not Atlas, of course, nor the long-exiled Kronos; but the least threatening and violent, Iapetus and Hyperion amongst them, were forgiven and allowed their freedom.

To add zest to an already frenziedly anticipated occasion, Zeus issued a challenge: whoever could devise the best and most original wedding dish could ask any favor of him. The lesser immortals and animals went wild with excitement at this chance to shine. Mice, frogs, lizards, bears, beavers, and birds all put together recipes to bring before Zeus and Hera. There were cakes, buns, biscuits, soups, eel-skin terrines, porridges made of moss and mold. All things sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and savory were placed on small trestle tables for the King and Queen of the Gods to judge.

But first the marriages took place. Aphrodite and Hephaestus were wed, then Hera and Zeus. The service was conducted with charming simplicity by Hestia, who anointed each of the four with aromatic oils, wafting perfumed smoke and singing in a low musical voice hymns to companionship, service, and mutual respect. Family and guests looked on, many of them sniffing and blinking back tears. A faun who made the tactless error of declaring between gulping sobs that Aphrodite and Hephaestus made a lovely couple was given a swift and violent kick in the backside by a glowering Ares.

The Wedding of Hera and Zeus

That official business over, it was time to find the winner of the great culinary competition. Zeus and Hera walked slowly up and down, sniffing, tapping, prodding, tasting, sipping, and licking their way round the entries like professional food critics. The competitors behind the trestle tables held their breath. When Zeus nodded approvingly at a wobbling hibiscus, beetle, and walnut jelly, its creator, a young heron called Margaret, gave a single shriek of excitement and fainted clean away.

But hers was not the prize. The winner was the seemingly modest submission of a shy little creature named Melissa. She offered up for the gods a very small amphora filled almost to the top with a sticky, amber-colored goo.

“Ah yes,” said Zeus, dipping his finger in with a knowledgeable and approving nod. “Pine resin.”

But it was not pine resin in the little jar, it was something quite other. Something new. Something gloopy without being unguent, slow-moving without being stodgy, sweet without being cloying, and perfumed with a flavour that drove the senses wild with pleasure. Melissa's name for it was "honey."

It seemed to Hera that when she took a spoonful the scent of the loveliest meadow flowers and mountain herbs danced and hummed inside her mouth. Zeus licked the back of the spoon and mmm-ed with delight. Husband and wife glanced at each other and nodded. No more consultation was needed.

“Um, the ... er ... standard has been ... has been agreeably high this year,” said Zeus. “Well done all. But Queen Hera and I are agreed. This ... ah ... honey takes first place.” The other creatures, trying to hide their disappointment, put on sporting expressions of pleasure as they formed a large semicircle and watched Melissa zip forward to claim her prize—a wish that was to be granted by the King of the Gods himself.

Melissa was very small and looked even smaller as she approached the winner's podium. She flew (for she could fly, despite looking as if she might be too bulky and bulgy in the wrong places to be able to) as close to Zeus's face as she dared and buzzed to him these words:

“Dread lord, I am pleased that you like my delicacy, but I must tell you it is quite extraordinarily hard to make. I have to zoom from flower to flower to collect the nectar deep inside. Only the smallest amount can be sucked up and carried. All day, for as long as Aether grants me light to see by, I must sip, search, and return to the nest, sip, search, and return to the nest, often traveling huge distances.

Even then, at day's end, I will only have the tiniest possible fraction of nectar to convert—using my secret process—into the confection that has so pleased you. Just that little amphora you are holding took me four and a half weeks to fill, so you can see that this is a most laborious business. The smell of honey is so intense, so ravishing, and so irresistible that many come to raid my nest. They do so with impunity, for I am small, and all I can do is buzz angrily at them and urge them to leave. Imagine, a whole week's work can be lost with just one swipe of a weasel's paw or one lick of a bear cub's tongue. Only let me have a weapon, your majesty. You have equipped the scorpion, who makes no foodstuffs, with a deadly sting, while the snake, who does nothing but bask in the sun all day, him you granted a venomous bite. Give me, great Zeus, such a weapon. A fatal one, that will kill any who dare to steal my precious stock of honey."

Zeus's eyebrows gathered in a dark and troubled frown. There was a rumbling in the sky and black clouds began to bank and billow above. The animals fidgeted, watching in alarm as the light dimmed and frets of wind flapped the festive tablecloths and ruffled the goddesses' shimmering gowns.

Zeus, like most busy and important beings, had no patience with fussiness or self-pity. This silly, flighty dot of a creature was demanding a mortal sting, was she? Well, he would show her.

“Wretched insect!” he thundered. “How dare you demand so monstrous a prize? A talent like yours should be shared out, not jealously hoarded. Not only shall I deny your request—”

Melissa broke in with a high-pitched drone of displeasure. "But you gave your word!"

There was a gasp from the whole assembly. Could she really have dared to interrupt Zeus and question his honor? “I beg your pardon, but I think you'll find that I proclaimed . . .” growled the god with an icy self-restraint that was far more terrifying than any outburst of temper “. . . that the winner could ask any favor. I made no promise that such a request would be granted.”

Melissa's wings drooped in disappointment.

“However,” Zeus said, raising his hand, “from this moment forward the gathering of your honey will be made easier by my decree that you shall not labor alone. You will be queen of a whole colony, a whole swarm of productive subjects. Furthermore, I shall grant you a fatal and painful sting.”

Melissa's wings pricked up perkily.

“But,” Zeus continued, “while it will bring a sharp pain to the one you sting, it is to you and your kind that it will bring death. So let it be.”

Another rumble of thunder and the sky began to clear. Immediately Melissa felt a strange movement inside her.

She looked down and saw that something long, thin, and sharp like a lance was pushing its way out of the end of her abdomen. It was a sting, as finely pointed as a needle but ending in a wicked and terrible barb. With a wild twitch, a buzz, and a final droning wail she flew away.

Meliss is still the Greek word for the honeybee, and it is true that its sting is a suicide weapon of last resort. If it should try to fly away after the barb has lodged in the pierced skin of its victim, a bee will tug out its own insides in the effort of freeing itself. The much less useful and diligent wasp has no such barb and can administer its sting as many times as it likes without danger to itself. But wasps, annoying as they are, never made selfish, hubristic demands of the gods.

It is also true that science calls the order of insects to which the honeybee belongs Hymenoptera, which is Greek for “wedding wings.”

Food of the Gods

Perhaps it was more than just temper and impatience that caused Zeus to punish Melissa—whose honey really was quite marvelously delicious—with such severity. Perhaps it had been policy. The whole assembled world of immortals was there to witness the moment. It had been a lesson for them in the implacability of the King of the Gods.

The silence that now fell on the wedding feast was as dark and forbidding as the storm clouds that had massed earlier. Zeus raised the amphora of honey high above his head.

“For my queen and my beloved wife, I bless this amphora. It shall never empty. Eternally shall it feed us. Whosoever tastes its honey shall never grow old or die. It shall be the food of the gods and, when mixed with the juice of fruits, it shall be the drink of the gods.”

A great cheer went up, doves flew overhead, the clouds and the silence were dispelled. The Muses Calliope, Euterpe, and Terpsichore stepped forward and clapped their hands. Music played, hymns of praise were sung, and the dancing began. Many plates were broken in ecstasy, a tradition that is carried on to this day wherever Greeks gather to eat, celebrate, and earn tourist money.

The Greek for “immortal” is ambrotos and “immortality” itself is Ambrozhah, which became the name of the specially blessed honey. Its fermented drinkable form, a kind of mead, they called Nektar in honor of the flowers whose sweet gift it was.

Bad Zeus

Hera's cup was running over—literally, at the moment, for an attentive naid was filling her goblet with nectar up to and over the brim—but figuratively too. Her oldest son had made a brilliant marriage and Zeus had sworn oaths of fidelity and fealty to her before all who mattered in the world.

She did not notice that, even now, her insatiable lord was watching with lustful eyes the dancing of Leto, a most beautiful nymph from the island of Kos.^{55} Leto was a daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus, themselves grateful recipients of Zeus's recent amnesty and present at the feast.

A voice murmured in Zeus's ear. "You are thinking that my cousin Leto owes you her life and should therefore be willing to share her bed with you."

Zeus looked up into the wise, humorous eyes of his tutor Metis, the Oceanid whose wit, guile, and insight were unmatched anywhere. Metis, whom he still loved and who he was sure loved him. His blood, already warmed by nectar and ambrosia, had been heated further by the dancing and the music. The spark that had always jumped between him and Metis threatened to burst into a great fire.

She saw this and raised a hand. “Never, Zeus, never. I have been like a mother to you. Besides, this is your wedding day—are you lost to all sense of decency?”

All sense of decency was exactly what Zeus was lost to. He touched Metis under the table. Alarmed, she moved away. Zeus got up and followed her. She quickened her pace, turned a corner, and darted down the mountainside.

Zeus ran in pursuit, transforming himself first into a bull, then a bear, next a lion, and then an eagle. Metis hid behind a pile of boulders deep in a cave, but Zeus, turning himself into a snake, managed to slither through a gap in the rocks and wrap his coils around her.

Metis had always loved Zeus and, both worn down and touched by his persistence, she finally consented. Yet even as they came together something bothered Zeus. A prophecy he had heard from Phoebe. Something about a child of Metis rising to overcome the father.

Afterward, as playful pillow talk, they fell into a conversation on the subject of transformations—metamorphoses as they are called in Greek. How a god or Titan might be able to turn others, or themselves, into animals, plants, and even solid objects, just as Zeus had done as he had chased Metis. She congratulated him on his skill at this art.

“Yes,” said Zeus, with some self-satisfaction. “I pursued you as bull, bear, lion, and eagle, but it was as a snake that I captured you. You have a reputation for cunning and guile, Metis, but I outsmarted you. Admit it.”

“Oh, I'm sure I could have beaten you. Why, if I had turned myself into a fly you could never have caught me, could you?”

Zeus laughed. "You think not? How little you know me."

“Go on, then,” Metis taunted. “Catch me now!” With a buzz and whizz she turned into a fly and darted about the cave. In a twinkle Zeus transformed himself into a lizard and with a quick flick of a long sticky tongue, Metis (along with any possible child of Zeus's that even now might be forming in her womb) had been safely transferred to his interior. His father Kronos's unkind habit of eating anyone prophesied to conquer him seemed to have been passed down to Zeus.

When he slipped back to Olympus in his own shape, congratulating himself at how much cleverer than the supposedly cunning Metis he was, the music and dancing were in full swing and his wife didn't seem to have noticed a thing.

The Mother of All Migraines

The King of the Gods had a headache. Not a hangover from the wedding feast, nor a headache in the sense of an annoying problem that needed solving—as a leader he always had plenty of those—but a headache in the sense of a real ache in the head. And what an ache. Each day the pain grew until Zeus was in the most acute, searing, blinding, pounding agony that had ever been suffered in the history of anything. Gods may be immune from death, aging, and many of the other horrors that afflict and affright mortals, but they are not immune from pain.

Zeus's roars, howls, and screams filled the valleys, canyons, and caves of mainland Greece. They rang around the grottoes, cliffs, and coves of the islands until the world wondered if the Hecatonchires had come up from Tartarus and the Titanomachy had started all over again.

Zeus's brothers, sisters, and other family members clustered concernedly about him on the seashore, where they had found him begging his nephew Triton, Poseidon's eldest, to drown him in seawater. Triton declined to do any such thing, so everyone racked their brains and tried to think of another solution while poor Zeus stamped and yelled in torment, squeezing his head in his hands as if trying to crush it.

Then Prometheus, Zeus's favorite young Titan, came up with an idea which he whispered to Hephaestus, who nodded eagerly before limping back to his smithy as fast as his imperfect legs could carry him.

What was happening inside Zeus's head was rather interesting. It was no wonder that he was suffering such excruciating pain, for crafty Metis was hard at work inside his skull, smelting, firing, and hammering out armor and weaponry. There was enough iron and other metals, minerals, rare earths, and trace elements in the god's varied, healthy, and balanced diet to allow her to find in his blood and bones all the ingredients, all the ores and compounds, she needed.

Hephaestus, who would have approved of her rudimentary but effective metalworking, returned to the crowded beach carrying a huge axe, double-bladed in the Minoan style.

Prometheus now persuaded Zeus that the only way to alleviate his agony was to take his hands away from his temples, kneel down, and have faith. Zeus muttered something about the trouble with being the King of the Gods was that there was no one higher to pray to, but he dropped obediently to his knees and awaited his fate. Hephaestus spat cheerfully and confidently on his hands, gripped the thick wooden haft and—as the hushed crowd looked on—brought it down in one swift swinging movement clean through the very center of Zeus's skull, splitting it neatly in two.

There was a terrible silence as everyone stared in stunned horror. The stunned horror turned to wild disbelief and the wild disbelief to bewildered amazement as they now witnessed, rising up from inside Zeus's opened head, the tip of a spear. It was followed by the topmost plumes of a russet crest. The onlookers held their breaths as slowly there arose into view a female figure dressed in full armor. Zeus lowered his head—whether in pain, relief, submission, or sheer awe nobody could be certain—and, as if his bowed head had been a ramp or gangway let down for her convenience—the glorious being stepped calmly onto the sand and turned to face him.

Equipped with plated armor, shield, spear, and plumed helmet, she gazed at her father with eyes of a matchless and wonderful grey. A grey that seemed to radiate one quality above all others—infinite wisdom.

From one of the pines that fringed the shoreline an owl flew out and perched on the shining she-warrior's shoulder. From the dunes an emerald-and-amethyst snake slid forward and coiled itself about her feet.

With a slightly unpleasant slurping sound Zeus's head closed up its wound and healed itself.

It was clear at once to all present that this new goddess was endowed with levels of power and personality that raised her above all the immortals. Even Hera, who realized that the newcomer could only be the issue of an adulterous affair that must have taken place very close to her wedding day, was nearly tempted to bend her knee.

Equipped with armor, shield, spear, and plumed helmet, Athena rises out of the head of her father, Zeus.

Zeus gazed at the daughter who had caused him so much pain and smiled a warm smile. A name came to him and he spoke it.

“Athena!”

"Father!" she said, smiling gently in return.

Athena

The qualities that Athena embodied were ones that would become the paramount virtues and accomplishments of the great city state that would bear her name: Athens. Wisdom and insight were inherited from her mother, Metis. Handicraft, warcraft, and statecraft were hers. Law and justice too. She took a share in what had been uniquely Aphrodite's domains of love and beauty. Athena's kind of beauty was expressed in aesthetics, in the apprehension of its ideal in art, representation, thought, and character, rather than in the more physical, obvious, and perhaps superficial kinds that would always be the business of Aphrodite. The love that Athena stood for had a less heated and physical emphasis too; it was the kind that would later become known as “Platonic.” The Athenians were to prize these attributes of Athena above all others, just as they prized her, their patroness, over all existing immortals. I say “existing” for—as we shall discover—two other Olympian deities, as yet unborn, would soon play their part in defining what it was to be an Athenian and a Greek.

In later years Athena and Poseidon would vie for the special patronage of the city of Cecropia. He struck his trident into the high rock on which they stood and produced a spring of seawater; an impressive trick, but its saltiness rendered it more or less useless as anything more than a picturesque public fountain. Athena's simple gift was the first olive tree. The citizens of Cecropia in their wisdom saw the manifold benefits of its fruit, oil, and wood and chose her as their presiding deity and protectress, changing the name of their city to Athens in her honor.

In Rome she was worshipped as Minervah, but without really that special personal connection that the Greeks felt for her. Her favored animals were the owl, that dignified symbol of watchful wisdom, and the serpent—in which guise her father had won her mother. The olive tree, whose soft and versatile fruit proved to be such a blessing to Greece, was sacred to her also.

The apparent gentleness of those grey eyes belied a new kind of ideal, one which combined physical power with strength of character and strength of mind. It was not wise to anger her. Besides, if you crossed Athena, you crossed Zeus. He was besotted with his daughter and she could do no wrong in his eyes. Ares, his least favorite child, made an interesting contrast to his new half sister.

They were both gods of war, but Athena's interests lay in planning, tactics, strategy, and the intelligent art of war, while Ares was a god of battles, combat, and all forms of fighting. He understood only violence, force, aggression, conquest, and coercion. It is distressing but essential to recognize that neither was as powerful when not allied with the other.

Pallas Athena, goddess of war

Athena was often given the forename Pallas, and as Pallas Athena she protected her city, Athens. The symbol of her guardianship was called the palladium, a word that has somehow found its way into the naming of theaters as well as giving us the element Pd. The original Pallas was a daughter of the sea god Triton and a dear childhood friend of Athena's. They would play semi-serious war games together. On one occasion, when Pallas was winning against Athena, Zeus (ever watchful and protective of his darling) intervened and, setting one of his thunderbolts to stun, knocked Pallas unconscious.

Athena, in the heat of the moment, administered the coup de grâce and killed her friend. Forever after, she bore Pallas's name as a sorrowful token of her enduring affection and remorse.

Athena, like Demeter, remained untouched by man. Her childless, single life and her youthful relationship with Pallas have led some to maintain that she should stand as a symbol of feminine same-sex love.

Metis Within

When Zeus had tricked Athena's mother into becoming a fly in order to use his lizard tongue to reel her in, Metis had been uncharacteristically foolish. Or so it seemed.

In fact she had not been tricked at all. She had done the tricking. Metis means “craft” and “guile” after all. She had quite deliberately allowed herself to be consumed by Zeus—more than that, she had duped him into doing so. She saw that, if she sacrificed her freedom and remained inside him always, she could assume the role of a wise counselor, a kind of consigliere, forever able to whisper advice to him. Whether he liked it or not.

Those who speak truth to power usually end up in chains or an early grave, but inside Zeus's head Metis could never be silenced. She would be a prudent check on the reckless excesses and headlong passions that often threatened to get the god of thunder into trouble. His storms of temper, lust, and jealousy needed to be balanced by her calm voice, a voice that could urge his instincts into more rational and enlightened channels.

Whether Metis sacrificed her freedom out of a sense of duty and responsibility, or out of love for the Zeus whom she had always adored, I cannot conclusively state. I like to think it was a mixture of the two. It was, as a Greek might say, her moira both to serve and to love.

Combined with Zeus's other positive characteristics—charisma, heart, native guile, and (usually) a strong sense of justice, fairness, and right—the shrewd inner guidance of Metis helped raise him into a great ruler whose attributes far outshone those of his father and grandfather, Kronos and Ouranos. In fact, so much a part of him did Metis become that Homer sometimes referred to Zeus as Metieta—“wise counselor.”

Seeking Sanctuary

Wisdom, in the form of Metis, may have whispered to Zeus in one ear, but in the other he always heard the hot urgings of passion. When beautiful girls and women —and sometimes youths—crossed his path, nothing could stop him from chasing them from one end of the earth to the other, even if he had to transform himself into any number of animals to do it. Once the lustful fit was on him, Metis could no more control him than a whisper can quieten a tempest, while Hera's wild shrieks of jealous rage had no more power to call him back than the wingbeats of a butterfly can blow a ship off course.

I have mentioned that Zeus's passionate glance had already fallen once on Leto, demure daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus. I should imagine that"demure" is an annoying word for a woman to hear applied to herself (one rarely hears of demure men after all), but Leto was to become a kind of minor deity representing precisely the quality of modest dignity that the word"demure" evokes. Nevertheless Zeus soon chased her down and had his way with her.

An unshowy Titaness, Leto (Latona to the Romans) was later worshipped as a goddess of motherhood as well as a paragon of modesty. Probably this was in honor of a pregnancy which, once Zeus had finished with her, turned out to be a most courageous triumph over adversity. For when Hera found out that her husband had got Leto with child, she commanded her grandmother Gaia to deny Leto any land on which to give birth. It was maddening enough to Hera that the baseborn Athena should have taken precedence in Zeus's affections over her noble and darling sons Hephaestus and Ares (she seemed to have forgotten, in her sudden burst of maternal feeling for her firstborn, that she had once hurled him down from heaven), and she was not about to let another bastard godling come muscling in to disturb Olympus's proper order. There is much about Hera that brings to mind the Roman emperor Augustus's wife Livia or the wives of certain English kings and mafia dons. Always looking to the dynasty and the bloodlines, always prepared to do anything for honor and family, lineage, and legacy.

denyed landfall, poor pregnant young Leto sailed the seas looking for somewhere to give birth. She tried to find shelter with the wild Hyperboreans, who dwelt beyond the North Wind, but fearing the wrath of Hera they would not let her stay. At sea in every sense, Leto cast up prayers to Zeus, who had got her into this dreadful pickle in the first place; but, as King of the Gods, his authority rested on accepting and endorsing the other gods' right to rule their own spheres and exercise their own will.

He could not interfere and countermand Hera's edict or undo her awful spell. Leaders, kings, and emperors always complain that they are the least free of their subjects, and there is some truth to this. Certainly Zeus, for all his might and majesty, was always constrained by the cabinet government principles of consensus and collective responsibility that allowed him to rule.

The best that he could manage for Leto now was to persuade his brother Poseidon to cause an upswell of waves to guide her boat to Delos, a small uninhabited island floating in the eddies and swirl of the Cyclades, unanchored to the seabed and therefore immune from Hera's curse.

Twins!

Leto made an exhausted landfall on the hospitable floating island of Delos with barely enough strength to crawl up beyond the dunes to shelter beneath a straggling line of pine trees that fringed the shore. The few pine nuts and grasses she could eat there would not feed the active life she felt kicking inside her and so she made her way to a green valley that she could see in the distance. There, beneath Mount Cynthia, she subsisted for a month on fruits and seeds, living like a wild creature but safe from the curse of Hera. Her stomach swelled so much during this time that she feared she was carrying a monster or giant. But still she foraged, ate, and rested, foraged, ate, and rested.

One day the pangs of hunger gave way to new and sharper stabs of pain. Alone and unaided Leto gave birth to a girl, the most lovely baby yet. Leto gasped out the name Artemis for her. Strong, endowed with a most astonishing silvery quickness and supple strength, the infant girl found herself put to immediate and miraculous work even on this, her first day alive. For Leto now understood why her pregnancy had been so hard and so heavy—there was another child inside her, and this younger twin had become lodged sideways in the birth canal, causing her terrible agonies. Artemis proved to have an instinctive sense of how a baby should most easily be delivered and assisted with the birth of a glorious twin brother.

Mother and daughter cried out with joyful surprise when the boy gave his first choking cries. For the hair on his head was not jet black like his sister's or mother's, it was blond—an inheritance from his maternal grandmother, the shining Phoebe. Leto named the child Apollo. "Delian Apollo," he was sometimes called in honor of his birthplace, and "Phoebus Apollo" in deference to his Titaness grandmother and his own radiant, golden beauty, for Phoebus means "shining one."

Artemis

Zeus loved Artemis almost as much as he loved Athena and took great pains to protect her from the wrath of Hera, who could not bear to look upon yet another child of adultery, especially one whom she loftily characterized as a hoydenish tomboy and a disgrace to the dignity of feminine divinity.

One afternoon, when Artemis was still a very young girl, Zeus found her playfully catching and releasing mice and frogs in the undergrowth down at the base of Mount Olympus. He sat on a rock beside her and hoisted her onto his knee.

She tugged at his beard for a while before she asked, "Father, do you love me?"

“Artemis, what a question! You know I do. You know I love you with all my heart.”

If you are the child of a faithless reprobate of a father there is almost nothing you cannot get him to agree to. Artemis now twisted Zeus around her fingers just as she twisted the hairs of his beard.

"Do you love me enough to grant me a wish?"

“Hm. Come to think, that's nothing. You grant wishes to the smallest and least significant nymphs and water sprites. Would you grant me several wishes?”

Inwardly Zeus groaned. The whole world seemed to believe that being the all-powerful one, sitting upon the throne of Olympus and commanding the heavens and the earth, was the easiest job there was. What did they know of paternal guilt, sibling rivalry, power struggles, and jealous wives? Please one member of the family and you maddened another.

“Several wishes? Goodness! Surely you have everything a girl could want? You are immortal and once you reach your moment of greatest beauty you will never age. You are strong, clever, swift, and—ow!” This last exclamation was in reaction to a hair that had been plucked with some violence from his chin.

“They aren't difficult wishes, Daddy. Just the smallest things.”

"Very well, let's hear them."

“I never ever want to have a boyfriend or husband or have a man touch me, you know, in that way—”

“Yes, yes ... er ... I fully understand.”

This may have been the first time Zeus ever blushed.

“Also, I want lots of different names, like my brother has. 'Appellations,' they're called. Also a bow, which I notice he has a whole collection of but I don't because I'm a girl which is totally unfair. I'm the older twin after all.

Hephaestus can make me a really special one as a birth present just like he did for Apollo, a silver bow with silver arrows please. And I want a knee-length tunic for hunting in, because long dresses are stupid and impractical. I don't want dominion over towns or cities, but I do want to rule mountainsides and forests.

And stags. I like stags. And dogs, hunting dogs anyway, not lap dogs which are useless. And, if you'd be very very kind, I'd like a choir of young girls to sing my praises in temples and a group of nymphs to walk the dogs and look after me and help protect me from men.”

“Is that it?” Zeus was almost giddy at this recitation.

“I think so. Oh, and I'd like the power to make childbirth easier for women. I've seen how painful it is. In fact, it is actually quite sincerely gross and I want to help make it better.”

“Goodness me. You don't ask for the moon, do you?”

“Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I'd love the moon, please. That will be all. I'll never ask for anything ever again ever.”

Zeus granted every wish. How could he not?

Goddess of the chase and the chaste, of the untutored and the untamed, of hounds and hinds, of midwives and the moon, Artemis duly became. The queen of archers and huntresses grew to value her independence and her celibacy above all things. The kindness with which she expressed her sympathy for women in childbirth was countered by the ferocity with which she pursued game and punished any man who presumed to come too near.

Feared, admired, and adored across the ancient world, she was sometimes known, in honor of the mountainside of her birth, as Sinthyah. The Romans called her DIANA. Her special tree was the cypress. Inasmuch as Athena was goddess of things cultivated, made, crafted, and thought through, Artemis—in her dominion over the natural, instinctive, and wild—stood as her opposite. They shared, however—along with Hestia—a passion for their own chastity.

Image summary: A bronze sculpture featuring two figures in a dynamic, strained composition. On the left, a muscular humanoid figure with a wolf's head is positioned upright, reaching upward with one arm. To the right, a nude human figure is sprawled diagonally, leaning back with one arm extended downward and the other raised, creating a sense of tension and struggle between the two forms.

"Of course, my dear."

Artemis, goddess of the chase and the chaste, of hounds and hinds, queen of archers and hunters

Apollo

If Artemis was silver, her twin Apollo was all gold. If Artemis was the moon, he was the sun. His radiant features captivated all who beheld them.

His proportions and lineaments remain to this day the very ideal of a certain kind of male beauty. I say “a certain kind,” for Apollo was striking not only in his fair complexion but in his beardless face and hairless chest, a rarity amongst Greeks or their gods. Like Jacob in the Bible he was a smooth man, but no less manly for that.

Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason, and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric, and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony. The idea that the base material world and its ordinary objects had divine properties and could resonate with the heavens, this was Apollonian, whether expressed in the magical properties of squares, circles, and spheres or in the perfect modulation and rhythms of a voice or a chain of reasoning. Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift.

Apollo had it in abundance, allied to an inability ever to lie. This made him a natural choice for taking charge of oracles and prophecy too. The python was sacred to him, of course, and the laurel. His particular animals were the dolphin and the white raven.

It would be a fool who mistook Apollo's golden beauty for a sign of weakness. He was a supreme archer and when necessary as fierce and fiery a warrior as any on Olympus: Like all his close relations he was capable of cruelty, meanness, jealousy, and spite. Unusually for a god, he was worshipped by the Romans under his Greek name without any alterations. Apollo was Apollo wherever you went in the ancient world.

The Wrath of Hera

On the floating island of their birth, the newborn twins Apollo and Artemis had found themselves the focus of the Queen of Heaven's continuing fury. Hera had done everything possible to prevent the birth of these living reminders of Zeus's infidelity, and her frustrated rage at her failure knew no bounds. So she tried again.

When the twins were just days old she sent the snake Python to consume them. You remember the magnetite stone the pregnant Rhea had duped Kronos into swallowing instead of the infant Zeus? The one that he had later vomited up and which Zeus cast far from Othrys? Well, it had landed at a place called Pytho on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Lodged fast in the earth it would in time become the Omphalos or navel-stone of Greece—the Hellenic bellybutton, its spiritual center and point of origin. From exactly the spot where it fell, at the command of Gaia, for whom this place was already sacred, there had emerged out of the ground a huge dragon-like serpent to serve as the stone's guardian. Taking the name of his birthplace he was called Python, as have been many snakes in his honor since.

Hera in her anger now sent Python to the isle of Delos to kill Leto and her children. Zeus took the risk of incensing Hera even further by secretly whispering this news to the wind, which passed it on to the infant Apollo, who in turn sent a desperate message to Hephaestus, begging for the best bow and arrow his half brother could fashion. Hephaestus toiled at the forge for seven days and seven nights, at the end of which time a matchlessly beautiful and powerful weapon and a set of golden arrows were dispatched to Delos, just in time for Apollo to take delivery of them, conceal himself behind the dunes, and await the great serpent's arrival. The moment Python emerged from the sea and slithered onto the sand Apollo stepped from his hiding place and shot him through the eye with an arrow. He sliced the dead body into pieces there on the beach and sent up a great cry of triumph to the sky.

You might think Apollo had every justification to protect his sister, his mother, and himself from such a deadly creature, but Python was chthonic—he sprang from the earth—making him a child of Gaia and as such under divine protection. Zeus knew that he must punish Apollo for the slaying of the serpent or lose all authority.

In truth, the punishment he chose for Apollo was not so very harsh. Zeus exiled the young god for eight years to the snake's birthplace beneath Mount Parnassus to atone for his crime. As well as replacing the snake-monster Python as guardian of the Omphalos, Apollo was tasked with organizing a regular athletics tournament there. The Pythian Games were duly held every four years, two on either side of the Olympic meeting.

Apollo also established at Pytho (whose name he changed to Delphi ^{67} ) an oracle where anyone could come to ask the god or his appointed priestess (known sometimes as a SIBYL or the Pythia) questions about the future. In a trancelike state of prophetic ecstasy the priestess would sit out of sight of her interrogator, above a chasm in the ground which channelled down to the womb of the earth itself, and call her ambiguous prognostications up into the chamber above where the anxious petitioner awaited her proclamation. In this way Apollo and the Sibyl were seen to draw their oracular powers in part from Gaia herself, Apollo's great-grandmother. Vapors were said to rise from beneath the ground that many took to be Gaia's actual breath. The spring of Castalia bubbles up here, whose waters are said to inspire poetry in those who drink them or hear their whispers.

So Delian Apollo became Delphic Apollo too. People still travel to Delphi to ask him about their future. I have done so myself. Apollo never lies, but nor does he ever give a straight answer, finding it amusing to reply with another question or a riddle so obscure as only to make sense when it is too late to act upon it.

To atone for his grievous assault on the proper way of things and to allow the slain Python to sleep the eternal sleep of death in the arms of his mother Gaia, Zeus finally fixed the serpent's resting place, the island of Delos, to the earth. While it no longer floats free, those who visit the island can testify to this day that it is tough to sail to, being beset by violent Etesian winds and treacherous meltemi currents. Anyone who travels there is likely to suffer the most awful seasickness. It is as if Hera has still not forgiven Delos for the part it played in the birth of the Letoydees, the glorious twins Artemis and Apollo.

Maia Maia

How many Olympians were there now? Let's do a quick headcount.

Zeus sat on the throne, with Hera at his side, that's two. Around them were ranged Hestia, Poseidon (who liked to come inland and keep an eye on Zeus), Demeter, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Ares, Athena, Artemis, and Apollo—that's eleven. Hades doesn't count because he spent all his time in the underworld and had no interest in taking a seat in the dodecatheon. Eleven. One more then, before Olympus reaches its quorum of twelve.

Hardly had the dust settled, and the shrieking recriminations from the Python debacle abated to sulks and glowers, than Zeus saw the path of his duty clear before him. He must father the twelfth and final god. Or, to put it another way, his sex-crazed glance fell on yet another appetizing immortal.

During the Titanomachy, Atlas, the most ferocious champion of the Titans, had fathered seven daughters by the Oceanid Playone. In her honor the Seven Sisters were known as the Playadeez, although sometimes, out of respect for their father, they might be addressed as the Atlantideez too.

The eldest and loveliest of these dark-eyed sisters was called MAIA. She lived as a shy and happy oread on the pleasant Corinthian slopes of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Happy, that is, until the night the great god Zeus appeared to her and got her with child. With great stealth—for word of Hera's attitude to Zeus's bastard children had got out and struck fear into every beautiful girl in Greece and beyond—Maia in due time gave birth in a remote and hidden cave to a healthy boy, whom she named Hermees.

The Infant Prodigy

Hermes proved himself to be the most extraordinarily pert and precocious baby that ever drew breath. Within a quarter hour of his birth he had crawled from one side of the cave to the other, throwing out comments to his startled mother as he did so. Five minutes later he had requested a light so that he might better examine the cave's walls. Being offered none he struck two stones together over twists of straw and kindled a flame. This had never been done before. Now standing upright (and still not half an hour old), this remarkable infant announced that he was going for a walk.

“The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,” he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of “-phobia” words as he spoke. “I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there's a good mother.”

As he ambled down the slopes of Mount Cyllene, this singular and sensational prodigy began to hum to himself. His humming turned into tuneful singing, which the nightingales in the woods around him immediately began to copy and have been trying to recapture ever since.

After he had traveled he knew not how far he found himself in a field where he was met by the wondrous sight of a herd of pure white cattle cropping the grass and lowing gently in the moonlight.

“Oh!” he breethd, entranced. “What beautiful moo-moos.” For all his precocity he was still not above baby-talk.

Hermes looked at the cows and the cows looked at Hermes.

“Come here,” he commanded.

The cows stared for a while then lowered their heads and continued to graze.

“Hm. So it's like that is it?”

Hermes thought quickly and gathered up long blades of grass which he plaited together into something like a bovine version of horseshoes, attaching one to each hoof of every cow. Around his own tiny plump feet he wrapped laurel leaves. Finally he snapped off a branch of young willow and stripped it down into a long switch with which he easily and expertly tickled and stung the cows into a tight and maneuverable herd. As an extra precaution he drove them backward, all the way up the slope and back to the mouth of the cave, where his astonished and alarmed mother had been worriedly standing ever since he had wandered so very calmly away.

Maia had had no experience of motherhood before this, but she was certain that the striking style and eccentric behavior of her son were not usual—even amongst gods. Apollo, she knew, had defeated Pytho while still an infant, and Athena of course had been born fully armed, but creating fire out of nothing but stones? Driving cattle? And what was this he was dangling before her eyes—a tortoise? Was she dreaming?

“Now, Mother,” said Hermes. “Listen. I've had an idea. I'd like you to stun the tortoise, scoop out the flesh and cook it. I expect it will make a delicious soup. I'd recommend adding plenty of wild garlic if I were you and perhaps a suspicion of fennel? And then there'll be beef for mains, which I shall see to now. I'll just borrow this knife and be with you again before you know it.”

With those words he disappeared to the back of the cave, off whose stone walls rang the appalling screams of a cow having its throat cut by a plump-fisted baby.

After what Maia had to confess was a truly delicious supper she summoned up the courage to ask her son what he might be up to now, for he was hanging out stringy lines of cow gut in front of the fire. While he waited for these foul-smelling strips to dry he busied himself with boring little holes along the edges of the tortoiseshell.

“I've had an idea,” was all he would tell her.

Apollo Reads the Signs

Hermes may or may not have known it, but on his first night on earth he had traveled quite a distance. All the way from his birthplace on Mount Cyllene north through the fields of Thessaly and as far as Pieria, where he had found and rustled the cattle. And back again. In baby steps that is quite a distance.

What Hermes certainly could not have known was that the white cattle belonged to Apollo, who prized them highly. When news reached the god of their disappearance he set off in fury to Pieria in order to follow what he assumed was a vicious gang of thieves to their lair. Wild dryads or fauns gone to the bad, he imagined. They would regret taking property from the god of arrows. He lay down in the cattle's field to examine the ground with all the thoroughness of an experienced tracker.

To his astonishment the brigands had left no useful traces at all. All he could see were random brush marks, meaningless whorls and swirls and—unless he was going mad—one tiny infant footprint. Any impressions that might have been formed by cow's hoofs seemed to be heading, not away from the field, but toward it!

Whoever had stolen the cattle was mocking Apollo. They were practiced and expert thieves, that much was clear. His sister Artemis was the most skilled hunter he knew: Would she dare? Perhaps she had devised some cunning way to conceal her tracks.

Ares didn't have the wit. Poseidon wouldn't be interested. Hephaestus? Unlikely. Who then?

He noticed a thrush preening on a branch not far away and in one smooth action drew his bow and brought the creature down. Slitting open its crop the god of oracles and augury peered forward to read the entrails.

From the coloration in the lower intestine, the kink in the right kidney, and the unusual disposition of the thymus gland it was clear at once that the cattle were somewhere in Arcadia, not far from Corinth. And what was that clot of blood on the liver saying to him? Mount Cyllene. And what else? So! It had been a baby's footprint after all.

Apollo's usually smooth brow was drawn into a frown, his blue eyes blazed, and his rose-red lips compressed themselves into a grim line.

Revenge would be his.

Half Brothers

By the time Apollo arrived at the foot of Mount Cyllene his temper had frayed almost to a breaking point. The world knew the cows were sacred to him. It was obvious that they were a rare and valuable breed. Who would dare?

A hamadryad drooping herself from the branches of her aspen could offer no clue but informed him that farther up an assorted gaggle of nymphs had gathered around the mouth of Maia's cave. Maybe he would find his answer there? She would go herself if only she could leave her tree.

When Apollo reached the top of the mountain he saw that the whole population of Cyllene had congregated at the cave. As he drew nearer he became aware of a sound emerging from it—a sound such as he had never heard before. It was as if sweetness and love and perfection and all that was beautiful had come to life and were gently coursing through his ears and into his very soul.

Just as the scent of ambrosia enticed a god to table and made him sigh with glorious anticipation, just as the sight of a comely nymph caused the hot ichor in his veins to sing and fizz until he felt he could burst, just as the warm touch of skin on skin thrilled him to his deeps—so now these invisible noises seduced and bewitched the god until he thought he might go mad with joy and desire. If only he could pluck them from the air and absorb them into his breast, if only ...

The magical sound abruptly stopped and the spell was broken.

The crowd of naials and dryads and other spirits that had clustered around the cave's entrance now dispersed, shaking their heads in wonder as they went, as if emerging from a trance. Shouldering through them, Apollo saw that, beside the mouth of the cave, on piles of stone, two vast sides of beef were on display, sliced into neat steaks. His furious outrage resurfaced.

“Now you will pay!” he roared as he rushed inside. “Now you will—”

“Sh!”

Apollo's cousin, the oread Maia, was sitting in a basket chair sewing. She put a finger to her lips and inclined her head in the direction of a crib by the fire in which a rosy-cheeked baby gurgled in its sleep.

Apollo was not to be put off. “That demonic child stole my cattle!”

"Are you mad?" said Maia. "My little angel is not so much as a day old."

“Little angel my foot! I know how to read a thrush's entrails. Besides, I can hear the beasts stamping and lowing in the back. I'd know their moo anywhere. That baby is a thief and I demand—” “You demand what?” Hermes had sat up and was now staring at Apollo with a quelling eye. “Can't a boy get a wink of sleep? I had a heavy night of it transporting cattle and the last thing I need is for—”

“You admit it!” yelled Apollo, striding toward him. “By Zeus, I'll strangle the life out of you, you little—”

But as he picked Hermes up, ready to do who knows what to him, a strange device made of wood and tortoiseshell fell from the crib. In falling it made a noise that instantly recalled the magical sound that had so transfixed Apollo when he stood outside the cave.

He dropped Hermes back into his cot and snatched up the device. Two thin bars of wood had been attached to the tortoiseshell and lines of cattlegut strung tightly across them. Apollo picked at one string with his thumb and again the marvelous sound came to him.

"How ... ?"

“What, this old thing?” said Hermes, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “Just a little nonsense I put together last night. I call it a 'lyre.' You can get some interesting effects from it though. If you pluck it just right. Or you can strum if you like. You press down on a couple of strings and—here, give it me, I'll show you.”

They were soon picking, plucking, slapping, strumming, twanging, and swapping new chords like excited teenagers. Hermes was in the process of demonstrating the principle of natural harmonics when Apollo, entranced as he was by the feelings stirred in him by this extraordinary device, came to himself. "Yes, that's all very well," he said, "but what about my bloody cattle?"

Hermes eyed him quizzically. “You must be, let me see . . . don't tell me . . . Apollo, right?”

Not to be recognized was a new experience for Apollo and one that he found he didn't quite like. Being spoken to in superior tones by a day-old baby was another on his list of least favorite experiences. He was about to crush this cocky little squirt with a cutting remark and possibly a swift right hook to the chin when he found himself facing a dimpled outstretched hand.

“Put it there, Pol. Delighted to meet you. Hermes, latest addition to the divine roster. You'll be my half brother, I think? Mother Maia here took me through the family tree last night. What a nutty bunch we are, eh? Eh?”

Another new sensation for Apollo was being playfully poked in the ribs. He felt he was losing control of the situation.

“Look, I don't care who you are, you can't go round stealing my cattle and not expecting to pay for it.”

“Oh, I'll pay you back, don't worry about that. But I just had to have them. Best quality guts. If I was going to make a lyre for my beloved half brother I wanted only the finest strings.”

Apollo looked from Hermes to the lyre and from the lyre to Hermes. “You mean ...?”

Hermes nodded. “With my love. Yours are the lyre and the art that lies behind it. I mean you're already god of numbers, reason, logic, and harmony. Music fits into that portfolio rather well, don't you think?”

"I don't know what to say."

“You can say, 'Thank you, Hermes,' and, 'By all means keep the cattle, brother mine.'”

“Thank you, Hermes! And by all means, yes, keep the cattle.”

“Kind of you, old man, but I actually only needed two. You can have the rest back.”

Apollo pressed a bewildered hand to his perspiring brow. “And why did you need only two?”

Hermes hopped down onto the floor. “Maia told me how gods love to be worshipped, you see, and how much animal sacrifices mean to them. So I butchered two of the cattle and offered up eleven slices of burning meat from one of them to Olympus. Mum and I shared the twelfth steak last night. There's some left over if you'd like it cold? Very good with a preparation of mustard-seed paste I've developed.”

“Thank you, no,” said Apollo. “It was thoughtful of you to send up smoke to the gods like that,” he added. Apollo loved a votive offering as much as the next god. “Very proper.”

“Well,” said Hermes, “let's see if it's worked, shall we?” Without warning he leapt up into Apollo's arms, gripping him by the shoulders.

This remarkable baby's lightning fast mind, body, and manner were making Apollo dizzy. “See if what has worked?”

“My plan to ingratiate myself to our father. Take me up to Olympus and introduce me around,” said Hermes. “That vacant twelfth throne has got my name on it.”

Apollo, entranced by Hermes's gift to the god of music

The Twelfth God

Everything about Hermes was quick. His mind, his wit, his impulses, and his reflexes. The gods of Olympus, already flattered by the fine savory smoke that had risen to their nostrils the previous night from Mount Cyllene, were entranced by the newcomer.

Even Hera presented a cheek to be kissed and declared the child enchanting. He was on Zeus's lap and pulling at his beard before anyone had noticed. Zeus laughed, and all the gods laughed along with him.

Image summary: An ancient Greek red-figure pottery painting depicting the god Hermes. He is shown in profile, wearing a petasos hat and a chlamys cloak draped over his shoulder. Hermes holds a caduceus in his right hand and has winged sandals on his feet. He is positioned within a circular frame decorated with a meander pattern and Greek crosses. The word HERMES is inscribed in Greek letters beside him.

For the messenger of the gods, Hephaestus fashioned what would become Hermes's signature footwear, the talaria—a pair of winged sandals.

What were to be this god's duties? His fleetness of mind and foot suggested one immediate answer—he should become the messenger of the gods. To make Hermes even faster, Hephaestus fashioned what would become his signature footwear, the talaria—a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to zip from one place to another more swiftly than an eagle. Hermes was so unaffectedly delighted with them, and clasped Hephaestus to him with such warm and grateful affection, that the god of fire and forges immediately limped back to his workshop and, after a day and a night's furious work, returned with a winged helmet with a low crown and a flexible brim to go with the talaria.

This lent Hermes a touch of grandeur and showed the world that this pert and handsome youth represented the dread majesty of the gods. For extra élán and glamour Hephaestus presented him with a silver staff topped with wings and entwined with two snakes.

The stories of Hermes's exploits tickled Zeus greatly, then and thenceforward. The guile and duplicity he had shown in stealing Apollo's cattle made Hermes a natural choice for god of rascals, thieves, liars, conmen, gamblers, hucksters, jokers, storytellers, and sportsmen. The grander side to liars, jokers, and storytellers gave him a share in literature, poetry, oratory, and wit too.

His skill and insight allowed him to hold sway in the fields of science and medicine. He became the god of commerce and trade, of herdsmen (of course), and of travel and roads. Despite music being his invention he did, as promised, present the divine responsibility for it as a gift to Apollo. Apollo simplified the lyre's structure by replacing the tortoiseshell with the elegant bracketed frame of gold with which we associate the classic instrument.

In the same way that I suggested Artemis and Athena might be considered to represent opposites (wild v. cultivated, impulsive v.considered, etcetera) so the mutability, swiftness, and energetic impulses of traffic and exchange personified by Hermes might be said to present an exact counter to the serenity, permanence, order, and centered domestic sufficiency of Hestia.

Aside from the staff, hat, and winged sandals that Hephaestus fashioned for Hermes, his symbols included the tortoise, the lyre, and the cockerel. The Romans called him Mercury and worshipped him with almost as much fervor as the Greeks. He was smooth of skin like his favorite half brother Apollo (they were now the firmest of friends), and like him he was a deity of light. His light was not golden like Apollo's, but silver—quicksilver. Indeed the element named “mercury” after him is still sometimes called “quicksilver,” and all things mercurial remind us of this most delightful of gods. Later, Hermes would take on perhaps his most important divine responsibility, but for the moment we will seat him in the twelfth chair and survey the grandeur of Megala Kazania, the great stage at the summit of Mount Olympus.

The Olympians

Two great thrones face ten smaller ones. Each is now occupied by a god or goddess. Zeus reaches out his left hand for Hera to take.

Megala Kazania, the amphitheater scooped out of Olympian rock by the Hecatonchires during their great battering of the Titans, is spread out before the gods. A great cheer goes up from the crowd of immortals gathered there to witness this great occasion, Zeus's supreme moment.

The Queen of Heaven takes his hand. She is content. She and her wayward husband have had a Conversation. There are to be no new gods. There will be no more seduction and impregnation of nymphs or Titanesses. The dodecatheon is complete, and Zeus will now turn to the serious business of establishing his rule in perpetuity. She, Hera, will always be there to support and guide him, to uphold order and decorum.

As he surveys the ten smiling gods ranged in front of them Zeus feels Hera squeezing his hand and understands just what that firm pressure means. He salutes the crowd of pardoned Titans and swooning nymphs massed below. Cyclopes, Gigantes, Meliae, and Oceanids jostle each other to get a good view.

The Charites and Horai shimmer shyly. Hades, the Erinyes, and other dark creatures of the underworld bow low. The three hundred hands of the Hecatonchires wave their fierce loyalty.

Now, to signify the start of the Reign of the Twelve, Hestia steps down from her throne and sets light to the oil in a great gleaming bowl of beaten copper. A huge cheer rings around the mountain. An eagle flies overhead. Thunder rumbles across the sky.

Hestia returns to her throne. Zeus watches her calmly smoothing the skirt of her gown and transfers his gaze to the others, one by one—Poseidon. Demeter. Aphrodite. Hephaestus. Ares. Athena. Artemis. Apollo. Hermes. These gods and all creation are bowing down before him. All his enemies are scattered, destroyed, imprisoned, or tamed. He has created an empire and a rule the like of which the world has never seen. He has won. Yet he feels nothing.

He looks up and on the far edge of the mountain sees silhouetted against the sky a figure whose dark clothes billow in the wind. His father Kronos has come. The blade of his scythe catches the light of the flames below as he slowly swings it back and forth like a pendulum. Although even Zeus cannot possibly make it out so far away in such poor light he is sure that there is a cruel, taunting grimace on his father's gaunt and ravaged face.

“Wave, Zeus. And for heaven's sake, smile!” Hera's hissed undertone jerks him away. When he looks back the dark silhouette of his father has gone. Perhaps he only imagined it.

More cheers arise. To the growl of thunder is added a rumble from the earth itself. Gaia and Ouranos are adding their congratulations.

Or perhaps their warnings. The cheering will not stop. Everything alive worships and adores him. This should be the happiest day of his life.

Something is missing. Something ... he frowns and thinks. Suddenly a great lightning bolt stabs down from the sky and strikes the ground, sending up a violent puff of smoke and burnt dust.

"Don't do that, dear," says Hera.

But Zeus isn't listening. He has had an idea.

39. Hospitality, or xenia, was so extraordinarily esteemed in the Greek world that Hestia shared the care of it with Zeus himself, who was on occasion given the name Zeus Xenios. Sometimes the gods tested human “guest friendship,” as we shall see in the story of Philemon and Baucis. This was known as theoxenia. Xenophobes, of course, do not extend the hand of friendship to strangers...

40. You will sometimes see the name Dis (a Latin word for “rich”) used for him or his Judeo-Christian descendant, Lucifer. Dante in his Inferno called the city of hell Dis. Today only cryptic crossword setters use the name with any frequency.

41. Or “dwarf planet” as it is now disrespectfully designated. The moons of Pluto are Styx, Nyx (or Nix), Charon, Kerberos, and Hydra.

42. Which is strange, as naids, of course, were freshwater nymphs, unlike the salty Nereids and Oceanids. Perhaps the astronomers in this case failed to consult a classicist before allocating names.

43. Proteus, the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, herded seabeasts and knew much. To get information from him you had to wrestle him, which was tricky as he could quickly and frustratingly change himself into any number of new shapes—from lizard to leopard, from dolphin to dormouse. From this slippery ability we get the word “protean.”

44. Not to be confused with Arion the singer-songwriter, whom we will meet later.

45. De-meter is often translated as “barley mother” or “corn mother,” although it is now thought more likely that it originally signified “earth mother,” showing just how thoroughly Zeus's generation of gods had wrested the reins from Gaia.

46. Anagrammatically “Rhea” does indeed come out of “Hera”; at least so I hear, but we won't chase that hare.

47. We shouldn't forget that Gaia is a planet too: she is our home world. Latinized as Tellus or Terra Mater she is Saxonized for us as “Earth” (cognate with the Germanic goddess Erde, Erda, Joeth, or Urd).

48. I would suggest that Marie Dressler, Lady Bracknell, and Aunt Agatha, to name three great examples, can all trace their lineage back to Hera.

49. Since Zeus took that decision, the number twelve seems to have taken on important properties. It is divisible by two, three, four, and six of course, making it twice as composite as the stupid number ten. The dozen can still be seen around us in the Zodiac, the day's hours, in months and inches, and pennies (well, when I was a boy, it was twelve pennies to the shilling, anyway) not to mention the Tribes of Israel, Disciples of Jesus, Days of Christmas, and the Asian twelve-year cycle. It's a duodecimal world.

50. The gods were—if you think it through—Aphrodite's nephews and nieces. They were born of Kronos and she was the direct issue of the ejaculate of Ouranos.

51. An important principal is demonstrated here, one that we will encounter many times. No god can undo the spells, transformations, curses, or enchantments of another.

52. Vulcan the planet and its people—notably Commander Spock—are not connected, so far as I can establish. The Romans sometimes referred to Vulcan as Mulciber, smelter, in recognition either of his power to soften metal for working or his ability to soothe the anger of volcanoes.

53. The Greeks still add pine resin to wine, call it retsina, and offer it to visitors. No one knows why a normally kind and hospitable people should do such a thing. It tastes like what it essentially is, the kind of turpentine artists use to thin their oil paints. I love it.

54. Of course, this is not the last time we shall witness Zeus playing with oaths and wriggling out of commitments.

55. Or Cos, home of the type of romaine lettuce that bears its name and is one of the essential ingredients of a Caesar salad.

56. Actually the gods did not have blood in their veins but a beautiful silvery-gold liquid called ICHOR. It was a paradoxical fluid because, while it retained all the eternal life-giving qualities of ambrosia and nectar, it was lethally and instantaneously poisonous to mortals.

57. Also Athene—there doesn't seem to be any shade of meaning attached to the variant spelling.

58. Sea power, and the trade that it allowed, was to be the saving of Athens (it won them a startling victory over the Persians at Salamis). But the cultivation of the olive and the other crafts, arts, and techniques that were the domain of Athena were arguably of even greater importance.

59. Besides her armor, Athena was always depicted with an AEGIS. No one is quite agreed as to precisely what an aegis looked like. It is sometimes described as an animal skin (originally goat: aiga is a word for “goat” in Greek), though pelts of lion or leopard can later be seen in sculpture and ceramic representations. Zeus's aegis is generally held to have been a shield, perhaps covered with goatskin and often showing the face of a Gorgon. Human kings and emperors keen to suggest semi-divine status would throw an aegis over their shoulders as a mark of their right to rule. The word these days suggests a badge of leadership or authority. Acts are performed and proclamations made “under the aegis” of such and such a person, principle, or institution.

60. Parthenos, the Greek word for virgin, was often attached to her name—hence “the Parthenon,” her temple on the Acropolis.

61. We are permitted the use of that tired word here—it is Greek after all and allows us to picture Zeus as embued with the grace of the Charites.

62. I looked it up in a thesaurus and was offered: “unassuming, meek, mild, reserved, retiring, quiet, shy, bashful, diffident, reticent, timid, shrinking, coy; decorous, decent, seemly, ladylike, respectable, proper, virtuous, pure, innocent, chaste; sober, sedate, staid, prim, goody-goody, straitlaced.” I don't suppose many women would jump up and down in delight if those words were used of them.

63. In today's Thrace, bounded by Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

64. Aphrodite and Athena, who equalled her in beauty, were neither of them in the strict sense born, so the claim is good.

65. Why Apollo turned the raven black, and why the laurel also became sacred to him, we shall discover later on.

66. Along with the regular Nemean and Isthmian Games, the Pythian and Olympic meetings made up the four so-called “Panhellenic Games.” The prizes do not really compare with today's lucrative purses and endorsements. An olive wreath for the winners of the Olympics, laurel for the Pythian, pine for the Isthmian, and—most thrilling of all—wild celery for the lucky victor of the Nemean Games.

67. The name “Delphi” is thought to derive from delphys, meaning “womb.” Of course it might be from adelphi, which means “siblings” (because they come from the same womb). So perhaps the sacred place is named after Apollo the twin, perhaps after the womb of Gaia. There is another theory that suggests Apollo arrived at Pytho on a dolphin, delphis in Greek. A dolphin is, after all, a fish with a womb. But how he could have traveled so far over land on a dolphin I can't quite say.

68. When the Pythia prophesied, she was possessed by the god Apollo, the Titaness Themis, or the goddess Gaia. Or perhaps all three. The Greek for “divine possession” is enthusiasm—enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be “engodded,” to be divinely inspired.

69. Some say that steam hissed out from the subterranean Castalian spring, which delighted the local goats, apparently. Perhaps this reminded people of a dolphin's blowhole, offering yet another explanation for the change of the name from Pytho to Delphi. Castalia, incidentally, is the name of the future world in Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game.

70. Today's Mount Kyllini.

71. Hermes' natty headgear is known as the petasus. His staff, the kerykeion—or caduceus to the Romans—often appears as a worldwide symbol of medicine and ambulances, either as an alternative to or a confusion with the staff of Asklepeeus (of whom, more later).

72. Medieval and Renaissance alchemists called him Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Majestic). Since he is said to have been able magically to seal glass tubes, chests, and boxes, a seventeenth-century invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres (which employed the power of atmospheric pressure and a vacuum to create an incredibly strong seal) was described as “hermetically sealed,” a phrase still much in use today.

73. This is its modern name—meaning literally “large kettles”—and to this day a rewarding sight for mountaineers who dare scale the heights of Olympus.

74. It was either the action of the Hecatonchires or of glacial moraines. No one can say for absolute certain. ♦ Part One ♦

Prometheus

I have mentioned Prometheus, son of Iapetus and Clymene, before. This farsighted young Titan had all the attributes that charm. He was strong, almost distressingly good-looking, faithful, loyal, discreet, modest, humorous, considerate, well mannered, and altogether the most engaging and captivating company. Everybody liked him, but Zeus liked him best. When Zeus's packed schedule allowed, the pair would go rambling over the countryside together, talking of everything and nothing—of fortune, friendship, and family, of war and destiny, and of many silly and inconsequential things besides, as friends will.

In the days leading up to the inauguration of the dodecatheon, Prometheus—who was as fond of Zeus as Zeus was of him—had begun to notice a change in his friend. The god seemed moody and irritable, less inclined to go for walks, less silly and playful, and more prone to sulks and outbursts of petulance that were unworthy of the kingly, humorous, and self-controlled god that Prometheus knew and loved. He put it down to nerves and kept out of his way.

One morning, a week or so following the great ceremony, Prometheus, who had taken to sleeping in the long grass somewhere in the fragrant meadows of Thrace, felt himself being jerked awake by a persistent tweaking of his toes. He opened his eyes to see a lively and rejuvenated King of the Gods bouncing up and down in front of him like an impatient child on their birthday morning. The gloom had melted away like mist from a mountaintop, and all the signature joviality had returned tenfold.

“Up, Prometheus! Up and at 'em!”

"Hwuh?"

“We're going to do something remarkable today, something that the world will shout about for eons. It will ring down the ages, it will be the—”

“Hunting for bears, are we?”

“Bears? I have had the most extraordinary idea. Come on.”

"Where are we going?"

Zeus gave no answer, but putting an arm round Prometheus he led him forcefully across the fields in a silence punctuated only by occasional barks of excited laughter. If Prometheus hadn't known his friend better he might have thought him drunk on nectar.

“This idea,” he prompted. “Perhaps you could start at the beginning?”

“Good, yes. The beginning. That's right. The beginning is exactly where we should start. Sit there.” Zeus indicated a fallen tree and paced up and down while Prometheus inspected the bark for ants before seating himself. “Now. Consider how everything began. En arche en Chaos. In the beginning was Chaos. Out of Chaos came the First Order—Erebus, Nyx, Hemera, and their generation—followed by the Second Order, our grandparents Gaia and Ouranos, yes?”

Prometheus gave a cautious nod.

“Gaia and Ouranos, who then unleashed upon creation the catastrophic aberration of you people, the Titans—”

"Hey!"

“—and next came all those nymphs and spirits, endless minor deities and monsters and animals and what have you, and finally the culmination. Us. The gods. Heaven and earth perfected.”

“After a long and bloody war against my race. Which I helped you win.”

“Yes, yes. But the end result—all is well. Peace and prosperity have broken out everywhere. And yet ….”

Zeus left such a long silence that Prometheus felt obliged to break it.

"You surely can't mean that you miss the war?"

“No, it's not that . . .” Zeus continued pacing up and down in front of Prometheus, like a teacher lecturing a class of one. “You must have noticed I've been out of sorts lately. I'll tell you why. You know how sometimes I like to soar over the world in the form of an eagle?”

"Scouting for nymphs."

“This world,” Zeus went on, affecting not to hear, “is quite extraordinarily beautiful. Everything in its place—rivers, mountains, birds, beasts, oceans, groves, plains, and canyons … But you know, when I look down, I find myself sorrowing at how empty it is.”

“Empty?”

“Oh Prometheus, you have absolutely no idea how boring it is to be a god in a complete and finished world.”

“Boring?”

“Yes, boring. For some time I've realized that I'm bored and I'm lonely. I mean 'lonely' in the larger sense. In the cosmic sense. I am cosmicly lonely.

Is this how it's going to be forever and ever now? Me on a throne on Olympus, thunderbolt on lap, while everyone bows and scrapes, sings praises, and begs favors? In perpetuity. Where's the fun in that?”

“Well...”

“Be honest, you'd hate it too.”

Prometheus compressed his lips and thought for a while. It was true that he had never envied his friend the imperial throne and all its bothers and burdens.

“Suppose,” said Zeus, “suppose I were to start a new race.”

“In the Pythian Games?”

“No, not a running race. A race as in a species. A new order of beings. Like us in every particular, upright, on two legs—”

“One head?”

“One head. Two hands. Resembling us in every particular, and they would have —you're the intellectual, Prometheus, what's the name for that aspect of us that raises us above the animals?”

“Our hands?”

“No, the part that tells us that we exist, that makes us aware of ourselves?”

“Consciousness.”

“That's the one. These creatures would have consciousness. And language. They wouldn't be a threat to us, of course. They'd live down here on the land, use their wit to farm and feed and fend for themselves.”

“So …” Prometheus frowned in concentration as he tried to form a coherent picture in his mind. “A race of beings like us?”

"Exactly! But not as big as us. And they'd be my creation. Well, our creation."

“Our creation?”

“You're good with your hands. Another Hephaestus. My idea is that you would model these creatures out of … out of clay, for example. They should be shaped in our image, anatomically correct in every detail, but on a smaller scale. Then we could animate them, give them life, replicate them, and release them into nature to see what happens."

Prometheus pondered this idea.

"Would we engage with them, speak to them, move about with them?"

“That would be exactly the point. To have an intelligent—well, semi-intelligent—species to praise and worship us, to play with us and amuse us. A subservient, adoring race of little miniatures.”

“Male and female?”

“Oh, good heavens no, just male. You can imagine what Hera would say otherwise . . .”

Prometheus could indeed imagine what Hera's reaction might be if the world were suddenly filled with more females for her errant husband to involve himself with. He saw that Zeus was very excited by his grand scheme. Once he was set upon a course, Prometheus knew, even one as novel and strange as this, not even the Hecatonchires and Gigantes combined could sway his friend from it.

Not that Prometheus was against the idea. It was an exciting experiment, he decided. Playthings for the immortals. When you came to think of it, it was really rather an enchanting notion.

Artemis had her hounds, Aphrodite her doves, Athena her owl and serpent, Poseidon and Amphitrite their dolphins and turtles. Even Hades kept a dog—albeit a perfectly disgusting one. It was only fitting that the chief of gods should design his own special kind of pet, more intelligent, loyal, and endearing than the others.

Kneading and Firing

History does not agree on exactly where Prometheus and Zeus went to find the best clay for realizing the plan. Early sources, like the traveler Pausanias in the second century A.D., claimed that Panopeus in Phocis was the place. Later scholars say that the pair journeyed east of Asia Minor, all the way down to the fertile lands that lie between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The most recent scholarship maintains that the search took them right down past Nilus, crossing the Equator and ending up in East Africa.

Wherever it was, they found at last what Prometheus pronounced to be the perfect spot: a river whose slimy banks oozed with just the kind of mud and minerals he wanted for consistency, texture, durability, and color.

“This is good clay,” he told Zeus. “No, don't settle down. I need to work in peace and free of all distraction. But before you go I shall require some of your saliva.”

“Excuse me?”

“If these creatures are to live and breathe they will need something of you in the composition.”

Zeus saw the justice of this and was happy enough to hawk up and fill a dried out waterhole with his divine spittle.

“I'll need to line up my little clay figures one by one on the riverbank to be baked in the heat of the sun,” said Prometheus. “So be back by evenfall and they should be nicely ready.”

Zeus would have liked to watch, but he knew enough about the artistic temperament to leave Prometheus to it. Leaping upward in the form of an eagle he flew away, leaving his friend alone with his art.

Prometheus began tentatively, first rolling out sausages of clay, each roughly four podes long. On top of these he stuck a ball of spit-moistened clay for a head. It was then a question of teasing, twisting, and tweaking, mushing, molding, and massaging, pulling, prizing, and pinching, until something like a small version of a god or Titan appeared. The more he worked, the more excited he became. Zeus had not been exaggerating when he compared Prometheus to Hephaestus—he did possess real skill. In fact what he exhibited now as he pressed and shaped was more than skill, it was artistry.

Mixing the clay with different pigments he built up a diverse and colorful array of lifelike masculine creatures. His first effort had been a small being whose skin closely matched the sun-kissed complexions of the gods. Next he made one in shining black, then another who was more a creamy ivory tinged with pink, then came figures of amber, yellow, bronze, red, green, beige, vivid purple, and the brightest blue.

A Reduced Set

As evening fell Prometheus stood and stretched with a yawn and that special groan of weariness and satisfaction that follows a long session of concentrated labor.

The afternoon sun had warmed his work into the supple, malleable consistency known in the world of ceramics as “cheese-ware.” This was perfect timing on Prometheus's part, for if the finished creations had been exposed to fiercer midday heat they would have dried into “biscuit-ware,” rendering them too friable and frangible for any of the last-minute modifications that his royal and divine patron would be sure to demand. Longer ears, twice the number of genitals, that kind of thing. Gods are nothing if not capricious.

And here, unless his own ears deceived him, came the King of the Gods now, crashing through the thicket in loud conversation with someone. Prometheus could make out an answering voice, female, low and measured. Zeus had brought along Athena, his favorite child.

“Your father the emperor god, the world knows,” Prometheus could hear him saying. “Zeus the all-powerful, yes. Zeus the all-conquering, certainly. Zeus the all-knowing, of course. Zeus the—”

“Zeus the all-modest?”

“—Zeus the creator, though. Doesn't that have a ring?”

“Quite a ring.”

“Now then, the riverbank should be just over there. Let's call him. Oh, Prometheus!”

Roosting weaver-birds rocketed into the air, squawking in alarm. “Promeeetheus!”

“Over here,” Prometheus called. “But be careful because—”

Too late!

Breaking out through the trees into the clearing Zeus had, in his excitement, stepped onto the row of exquisitely fashioned figures drying on the bank. With a cry of fury and despair Prometheus hurried forward to survey the damage.

“You clumsy oaf!” he cried. “You've destroyed them. Look!”

No one else in creation could get away with talking to Zeus like that. Athena was astonished to see her father bow his head in meek apology.

On inspection things were not quite as bad as Prometheus had feared. Only three of the figures were beyond repair. He pried these from the mud, the squashed clay still bearing the imprint of Zeus's enormous toes.

“Oh good,” said Zeus cheerfully, “the rest are fine, that's plenty. Let's get on, shall we?”

“But look at these!” said Prometheus holding up the squashed and ruined statuettes. “The little green, violet, and blue creatures were just about my favorites.”

“We've still got the black, brown, ivory, yellow, reddish, and what have you. That's enough, surely?”

“I really loved that shade of cobalt blue.”

Athena was looking down at the intact figures which lay glowing in the dying rays of the sun. “Oh Prometheus, they're perfect,” she said in the mild voice that commanded more attention than the roars and screams of the other Olympians.

Prometheus cheered up at once. Praise from Athena meant everything.

“Well, I did pretty much put my heart and soul into them.”

“Fine job, really fine,” said Zeus. “Formed by a great Titan from Gaia's clay, they are held together by my royal saliva and fired by the sun and shall be brought to life by the gentle breath of my daughter.”

It was Metis, always inside Zeus, who had sparked the thought in him that it should be Athena who brought these creatures to life. She would breathe into each one, literally inspiring them with some of her great qualities of wisdom, instinct, craft, and sense.

A Name Is Found

Kneeling down on the bank of the river Athena breethd her warm sweet breath into each of the little statues. When she had finished she stood to join Prometheus and her father, looking on to see what would transpire.

It all happened quite slowly.

At first one of the darker figures gave a twitch and let out a kind of gasping moan.

At the other end of the row a yellow one wriggled, sat up, and gave a small cough.

Within seconds all the little beings were alive and moving. Just moments later they were trying out their limbs, eyes, and other senses, looking at each other, smelling the air, chattering, and shouting. Before long they were standing and even taking their first wobbling steps.

Zeus took Prometheus by both his hands and danced him round and round.

“Look!” he shouted. “Look! Aren't they beautiful! They're wonderful, quite wonderful!”

Athena raised a finger to her lips. "Sh! You're frightening them." She pointed down at the tiny men who were now staring up with looks of fear and consternation on their faces. The tallest of them didn't quite come up to the level of her knees.

“It's all right, little ones,” said Zeus stooping down and addressing them in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “There's no need to be afraid!”

But the colossal booming sound that emerged seemed to alarm the little creatures further and they began to flail and whirl about in alarm.

“Let's reduce ourselves to their size,” said Prometheus. As he spoke he shrank himself down so that he was only a foot or so taller than his creations. Zeus and Athena did the same.

With embraces, smiles, and soft words, the scared and bewildered beings were slowly pacified and befriended. They clustered around the three immortals, bowing and prostrating themselves.

“There's no need to bow,” said Prometheus, touching one of them and marveling at the texture and life he could feel pounding within. Athena's breath had turned the clay into such quick, warm flesh. The eyes of them all were bright with life and energy and hope.

“Excuse me,” said Zeus, “there is every need to bow. We are their gods and they are not to forget it.”

“I'm not their god,” said Prometheus, gazing down on them with an intense feeling of love and pride. “I am their friend.” He knelt so that he was lower than them. “I shall teach them how to farm, how to mill wheat and rye so that they can make bread. How to cook and forge tools and—”

“No!” Zeus gave a sudden roar that sent the startled creatures milling in panic again. Zeus's roar was answered by a great rumble of thunder in the sky. “You can befriend them as much as you like, Prometheus, and I have no doubt that Athena and all the other gods will do so too. But one thing they are not to have. Ever. And that is fire.”

Prometheus stared at his friend in astonishment. "But . . . but why ever not?"

“With fire they could rise up to challenge us. With fire they could think themselves our equals. I feel it and know it. They must never be given fire. I have spoken.”

A long peal of thunder in the distance affirmed his words.

“But—" Zeus smiled now “—everything else in the world is theirs to enjoy. They may travel to every corner. They can sail Poseidon's oceans, seek Demeter's help in sowing seeds and growing food, learn from Hestia the arts of keeping a home, discover how to keep animals for their milk, fur, and labor, and they can learn the arts of hunting from Artemis. Hermes can teach them guile, Apollo can instruct them in the arts of music and knowledge. Athena will teach them how to be wise and contented. And Aphrodite will share with them the arts of love. They will be free and happy."

“What shall we call them?” Athena asked.

“That which is below,” said Zeus after some thought. “Anthropos.”

He clapped his hands and the huddle of handcrafted humans became a hundred and the hundred became a horde and the horde, spreading ever outward, became a multitude, until the human population, numbering now in the hundreds of thousands, was on its way to finding a home in every corner of the world.

And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo, and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia's clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo), and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.

The Golden Age

Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine, or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans, and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay.

Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory.

It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.

It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition, and character and in its inability to breed and create new types.

His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged, and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion, and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare, and do.

The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it.

The Fennel Stalk

Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb—the toughest of all—from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen.

Prometheus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus.

Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice.

By the time he had scaled Skolio's sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo's chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheater of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus's forge several hundred podes or so farther off.

Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo's lyre, Hermes's fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares, and the snarling of Artemis's hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge, the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire.

Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for.

At the very mouth of the forge he saw a narthex plant, sometimes called the laserwort or giant fennel (Ferula communis)—not quite the same bulbous vegetable we use today to impart a pleasant aniseedy flavour to fish, but a near enough relation. Prometheus leaned forward and picked a long, vigorous specimen. Tightly packed within there was a thick, lint-like pith.

Stripping the stem of its outer leaves, Prometheus stretched out and pushed the stalk across the forecourt, over Brontes's slumbering, mumbling form and toward the fire. The heat emanating from the furnace was enough to cause the end of the stalk to catch at once. Prometheus pulled it back in with as much care as he could, but he could not prevent a spark from falling from its sputtering end straight down onto Brontes's torso. The skin on the Cyclops's chest sizzled and hissed, and he awoke with a roar. of pain. As Brontes looked groggily down at his chest, trying to understand where this pain was coming from and what it could mean, Prometheus hauled in the stalk and fled.

The Gift of Fire

Prometheus clambered back down Olympus, the fennel stalk clenched between his teeth, its pith burning slowly. Every five minutes or so he would take it from his mouth and blow gently, nursing its glow. When he at last reached the safety of the valley floor he made his way to the human settlement where he and his brother had made their home.

Prometheus brings fire to mankind.

You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place.

When he showed men the leaping, dancing, darting demon they initially cried out in fear and backed away from its flames. But their curiosity soon overcame their fear, and they began to delight in this magical new toy, substance, phenomenon—call it what you will. They learned from Prometheus that fire was not their enemy but a powerful friend which, once tamed, had ten thousand thousand uses.

Prometheus moved from village to village demonstrating techniques for the fashioning of tools and weapons, the firing of earthen pots, the cooking of meat, and the baking of cereal doughs, all of which quickly let loose an avalanche of advantages, raising man above the animal prey that had no answer to metal-tipped spears and arrows.

It was not long before Zeus chanced to look down from Olympus and saw points of dancing orange light dotting the landscape all around. He knew at once what had happened. Nor did he need to be told who was responsible.

His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage.

Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible.

75. The Greek for “between rivers” is Mesopotamia, which is how that area was always known to the Greeks.

76. See Appendix on p. 317.

77. That is one theory as to the origin of the word anthropos, which does strictly mean “man.” It is unfortunate that many words for our species seem to refer only to the male. “Human,” for example, is cognate with homo, the Latin for “man.” Thus “humanity” rudely leaves out half the species. “Folk” and “people” aren't so specific. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that “man” is actually connected to mens (mind) and manus (hand), and was in fact gender neutral until perhaps a thousand years ago.

The Punishments

The Gift

Zeus's wrath was so overwhelming that all Olympus feared Prometheus would be blasted with such power that his atoms would never reassemble. It is possible that just such a fate might have befallen the once-favored Titan had not the wise and stabilizing presence of Metis inside Zeus's head counselled a subtler and more dignified revenge. The intensity of his rage was in no way dimmed, but rather it was now focused, channeled into clearer lines of retribution. He would leave Prometheus for the time being and unleash his cosmic fury upon man, puny impudent man, the creature he had taken such delight in and for whom now he felt nothing but resentment and cold contempt.

For a whole week, watched by a grave and concerned Athena, the King of the Gods paced up and down in front of his throne considering how best humans should pay for daring to appropriate fire, for presuming to ape the Olympians. A voice within him seemed to whisper that one day, no matter what vengeance he took, mankind would reach ever upward until they came level with the gods—or, perhaps more terribly, until they no longer needed the gods and felt free to abandon them. No more worship, no more prayers sent up to heavenly Olympus. The prospect was too blasphemous and absurd for Zeus to entertain, but the fact that such a scandalous idea could even enter his mind served only to fuel his rage.

Whether the magnificent scheme that was finally put into operation was his or Metis's or even Athena's is unclear, but it was, Zeus believed, a screamer of a plan. There was a golden symmetry to it that appealed to his very Greek mind. He would show Prometheus and, by heaven, he would show mankind.

First he commanded Hephaestus to do as Prometheus had done, to shape a human being from clay moistened by his spittle. But this was to be the figure of a young female. Taking his wife Aphrodite, his mother Hera, his aunt Demeter, and his sister Athena as models, Hephaestus lovingly sculpted a girl of quite marvelous beauty into whom Aphrodite then breethd life and all the arts of love.

The other gods joined together to equip this girl uniquely for the world. Athena trained her in the household crafts, embroidery, and weaving, and dressed her in a glorious silver robe. The Charites were put in charge of accessing this with necklaces, brooches, and bracelets of the finest pearl, agate, jasper, and chalcedony.

The Horai plaited flowers around her hair until she was so beautiful that all who saw her caught their breath. Hera endowed her with poise and self-possession. Hermes schooled her in speech and the arts of deception, curiosity, and cunning.

And he gave her a name. Since each of the gods had conferred upon her a notable talent or accomplishment, she was to be called “All-Gifted,” which in Greek is Pandora.

Hephaestus bestowed one more gift upon this paragon, which Zeus presented himself. It was a container filled with … secrets.

Now, you probably think I am going to say the container was a box, or perhaps a chest of some description, but in fact it was the kind of glazed and sealed earthenware jar that is known in Grecian lands as a pitbos.79

“Here you are, my dear,” said Zeus. “Now, this is purely decorative. You are never ever to open it. You understand?”

Pandora shook her lovely head. "Never," she breethd with great sincerity. "Never!"

“There's a good girl. It is your wedding gift. Bury it deep below your marriage bed, but you must not open it. Ever. What it contains . . . well, never mind. Nothing of interest to you at all.”

Hermes took Pandora by the hand and transported her to the little stone house where Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus lived, right in the center of a prosperous human town.

The Brothers

Prometheus knew that Zeus would seek some kind of retribution for his disobedience and warned his brother Epimetheus that, while he was away teaching the newly sprung-up villages and towns how to use fire, he should on no account accept any gift from Olympus, no matter in what guise it presented itself.

Epimetheus, who always acted first and considered the consequences later, promised to obey his more perspicacious brother.

Nothing could prepare him for Zeus's gift, however.

Epimetheus answered a knock at the door one morning to see the cheerful smiling face of the messenger of the gods.

“May we come in?” Hermes stepped nimbly aside to reveal, cradling a stoneware jar in her arms, the most beautiful creature Epimetheus had ever seen. Aphrodite was beautiful, of course she was, but too remote and ethereal to be considered as anything other than a subject of veneration and distant awe. Likewise Demeter, Artemis, Athena, Hestia, and Hera. Their loveliness was majestic and unattainable. The prettiness of nymphs, oreads, and Oceanids, while enchanting enough, seemed shallow and childish next to the blushing sweetness of the vision that looked up at him so shyly, so winningly, so adorably.

“May we?” repeated Hermes.

Epimetheus gulped, swallowed, and stepped backward, opening the door wide.

“Meet your wife to be,” said Hermes. “Her name is Pandora.”

When It's a Jar

Epimetheus and Pandora were soon married. Epimetheus had an inkling that Prometheus—who was far away teaching the art of casting in bronze to the people of Varanasi—would not approve of Pandora. A quick wedding before his brother returned seemed a good idea.

Epimetheus and Pandora were very much in love. That could not be denyed. Pandora's beauty and attainments were such as to delight him every day, and in return his facile ability to live always for the moment and never to fret about the future gave her a sense of life as a light and lovely adventure.

But one little itch tickled her, one little fly buzzed around her, one little worm burrowed inside.

That jar.

She kept it on a shelf in their bedroom. When Epimetheus had asked about it she laughed. “Just a silly thing that Hephaestus made to remind me of Olympus. It's of no value.”

"Pretty though," said Epimetheus, giving it no further thought.

One afternoon, when her husband was away practicing the discus with his friends, Pandora approached the jar and ran her finger round the rim of its sealed lid. Why had Zeus even mentioned that there was nothing interesting inside it? He would never have said such a thing if truly there weren't. She pieced the logic of it together in her mind.

If you give a friend an empty jar you would never concern yourself with mentioning that the jar was empty. Your friend might look inside one day and see that for themselves. So why should Zeus take the trouble to repeat that this jar contained nothing of any interest?

There could be only one explanation. There was something of great interest inside. Something of value or power. Something either enchanting or enchanted.

But, no—she had sworn never to open it. “A promise is a promise,” she told herself, and straightaway felt very virtuous. She believed it her duty to resist the spell of the jar which now, really, seemed almost to be singing out to her in the most alluring way. It was excessively vexing to have an object so bewitching in her bedroom where it could taunt and tempt her every morning and every night.

The Golden Age of gods and mankind came to an end when Pandora opened the pithos, releasing Illness, Violence, Deceit, Misery, and Want into the world.

Temptation loses much of its power when removed from sight. Pandora went to the small back garden and—next to a sundial that a neighbor had given them as a wedding gift—she dug a hole and buried the jar deep in the ground. She patted the earth flat and wheeled the heavy sundial on its plinth over the hiding place. There!

For the next week she was as gay and skittish and happy as a person had ever been. Epimetheus fell even more in love with her and invited their friends over to feast and hear a song he had written in her honor. It was a happy and successful party. The last festival that the Golden Age was ever to know.

That night, perhaps a little flushed with the praise that had flowed so freely in her direction, Pandora found it hard to sleep. Through the window of her bedroom the moonlight shone down on the garden. The sundial's gnomon gleamed like a silver blade, and once again she thought she heard the music of the jar.

Epimetheus was sleeping happily beside her. The moonbeams danced in the garden. Unable to stand it any longer Pandora leapt from her matrimonial bed and was out in the garden, unrolling the base of the sundial and scrabbling at the earth, before she had time to tell herself that this was the wrong thing to do.

She pulled the jar from its hiding place and twisted at the lid. Its waxen seal gave way and she pulled it free. There was a fast fluttering, a furious flapping of wings, and a wild wheeling and whirling in her ears.

Oh! Glorious flying creatures!

But no … they were not glorious at all. Pandora cried out in pain and fright as she felt something leathery brush her neck, followed by a sharp and terrible prick of pain as some sting or bite pierced her skin. More and more flying shapes buzzed from the mouth of the jar—a great cloud of them chattering, screaming, and howling in her ears. Through the swirling fog of these dreadful creatures she saw the face of her husband as he came outside to see what was happening.

It was white with horror and fright. With a great cry Pandora summoned up the courage and strength to close the lid and seal the jar.

On the garden wall, in the shape of a wolf, Zeus looked on, smiling the most terrible and wicked smile as, like a cloud of locusts, the shrieking, wailing creatures clawed the air and circled the garden below them in a great vortex before flying up and away over the town, over the countryside, and around the world, settling like a pestilence wherever man had habitation.

And what were they, these shapes? They were mutant descendants of the dark and evil children of both Nyx and Erebus. They were born of Apate, Deceit; Geras, Old Age; Oizys, Misery; Momos, Blame; Keres, Violent Death. They were the offshoots of Ate, Ruin; and Eris, Discord. These were their names: Ponos, Hardship; Limos, Starvation; Algos, Pain; Disnomia, Anarchy; Pyoodia, Lies; Nee-ke-uh, Quarrels; Amphilojiyaay, Disputes; Makhay, Wars; Hisminey, Battles; Androktasyaay and Phonoy, Manslaughter and Murders.

Illness, Violence, Deceit, Misery, and Want had arrived. They would never leave the earth.

What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she forever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar forever. Its name was Elpis, Hope.

The Chest, the Waters, and the Bones of Gaia

And so the Golden Age came to a swift and terrible end. Death, disease, poverty, crime, famine, and war were now an inevitable and eternal part of humanity's lot.

But the Silver Age, as this epoch was to be known, wasn't all despair. It differed from our own in that gods, demigods, and monsters mingled with mankind, interbred with us and fully involved themselves in our lives. With fire on man's side, and now women to allow propagation as well as a full sense of family and completeness, some of the evils of Pandora's jar were offset.

Zeus looked down and saw this. Inside him the voice of Metis seemed to whisper that nothing he could do would stop humanity from one day standing on its own two feet, in more than just the obvious sense. This troubled him deeply.

For the meantime, people were duly in awe of the gods and used their new-found affinity with fire to send burnt offerings up to Olympus as a mark of their obedience and devotion.

Pandora, the first woman, bore several children by Epimetheus, including a daughter Pirra. Prometheus too fathered a child, a son called Dyookalyon, possibly by Prometheus's own mother, Clymene, or, if other sources are to believed, by Hesione, an Oceanid.

And so the race of men and women multiplied.

Prometheus, whose gift of foresight never deserted him, was keenly aware that Zeus's anger had yet to be assuaged. He brought Deucalion up to be prepared for the worst kinds of divine retribution. When the boy was old enough he taught him the art of building in wood. Together they constructed an enormous chest.

The brother Titans were overjoyed when their children Pyrrha and Deucalion fell in love and married. Prometheus and Epimetheus could now think of themselves as patriarchs of a new, independent human dynasty. Yet always there lurked the threat from the Thunderer, brooding on his Olympian throne.

Time passed and humanity continued to breed and spread, in Zeus's eyes more like a plague than the beloved playthings he had once adored. The excuse he needed to visit a second punishment on mankind was furnished by one of their first rulers, Lykaon, King of Arcadia—son of the Pelasgos who gave the Pelasgians their name. This Pelasgos had been one of the original clay figures formed by Prometheus and animated by Athena. Pelasgos was what we would consider ethnically Hellenic, with brownish skin, hair, and eyes. Later Greeks regarded these people, their language and practices, as barbaric; and, as we shall see, this first race was not fated to populate the Mediterranean for long.

Lycaon, either to test Zeus's omniscience and discrimination or for other brutal reasons, killed and roasted the flesh of his own son Niktimus which he served to the god, who had come as a guest to a feast at his palace. Zeus was so revolted by this unspeakably gross act that he brought the boy back to life and turned Lycaon into a wolf. Nyctimus had little time to reign in his father's stead, however, as his forty-nine brothers ravaged the land with such violence and behaved so disgustingly that Zeus decided it was time for the whole human experiment to be brought to a close. To that end he gathered the clouds into a storm so intense that the land was flooded and all the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world were drowned.

All, save Deucalion and Pyrrha who—thanks to the perspicacity of Prometheus—survived the nine days of high water aboard their wooden chest, which floated safely on the flood. Like good survivalists they had kept their chest well provisioned with food, drink, and a few useful tools and artifacts, so that when the deluge finally receded and their vessel was able to settle on Mount Parnassus, they could survive in the postdiluvian mud and slime.

When the world had dried enough for Pyrrha and Deucalion (who is said to have been eighty-two years old at this time) to travel safely down the mountainside, they made their way to Delphi, which lies in the valley below Parnassus. There they consulted the oracle of Themis, the prophetic Titaness whose special quality was an understanding of the right thing to do.

“O Themis, Mother of Justice, Peace, and Order, instruct us, we beseech you,” they cried. “We are alone in the world now and too advanced in years to fill this empty world with offspring.”

“Children of Prometheus and Epimetheus,” the oracle intoned. “Hear my voice and do as I command. Cover your head and throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder.”

Not a word more could the perplexed couple induce the oracle to utter.

“My mother was Pandora,” said Pyrrha, sitting on the ground. “And I must presume she is drowned. Where could I find her bones?”

“My mother is Clymene,” said Deucalion. “Or, if you believe variant sources, she is the Oceanid Hesione. In either case they are both immortals and therefore alive and surely unwilling to give up their bones.”

“We must think,” said Pyrrha. “The bones of our mother. Can that have another meaning? Our mother's bones. Maternal bones … Think, Deucalion, think!”

Deucalion covered his head with a folded cloth, sat down next to his wife, whose head was already covered, and pondered the problem with creased brow. Oracles. They always paltered and prevaricated. Moodily he picked up a rock and sent it rolling down the hillside. Pyrrha grabbed his arm.

“Our mother!”

Deucalion stared at her. She had started slapping the ground with the palms of her hands. “Gaia! Gaia is mother of us all,” she cried. “Our Mother Earth! These are the bones of our mother, look . . .” She started to gather up rocks from the ground. “Come on!”

Deucalion got to his feet and scrabbled around, collecting rocks and stones. They made their way across the fields below Delphi, casting them over their shoulders as instructed, but not daring to look back until they had covered many stadia.

When they turned the sight that greeted them filled their hearts with joy.

From out of the ground where Pyrrha's stones had landed sprang girls and women, hundreds of them, smiling and healthy and fully formed. From the earth where Deucalion's stones had fallen boys and men grew up.

So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora, and—most importantly of course—from Gaia.

And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.

Death

Our human race, now satisfactorily comprised equally of males and females, bred and spread about the world building cities and establishing nation states. Ships and chariots, cottages and castles, culture and commerce, merchants and markets, farming and finance, weapons and wheat. In short, civilization began.

It was an age of kings, queens, princes, and princesses, of hunters, warriors, shepherds, potters, and poets. An age of empires, slaves, warfare, trade, and treaties. An age of votive offerings, sacrifices, and worship.

Towns and villages chose their favorite gods and goddesses to be guardian deities, patrons, and protectors. The immortals themselves were not shy to come down in their own forms, or in the forms of humans and animals, to have their way with such humans as appealed to them or to punish those that aggravated them and reward those that most fawned on them. The gods never tired of flattery.

Perhaps most importantly the plague of sorrows that had flown from Pandora's jar ensured that from this point onward humanity would have to face the inevitability of death in all its forms. Sudden death, slow lingering death, death by violence, death by disease, death by accident, death by murder, and death by divine decree.

Image summary: A wide landscape painting depicting a stark contrast between a lush, green paradise on the left and a dark, volcanic wasteland on the right. In the center, a small wooden boat carrying a single nude figure floats on a calm sea that divides these two realms. To the left, rolling hills, dense forests, and a distant white structure sit under a bright sky. To the right, jagged black cliffs, smoke, and fire lead to a dark architectural structure with an arched entrance.

The instant that human spirits departed their bodies, they were led to where the River Styx (Hate) met the River Acheron (Woe). There the grim and silent Charon held out his hand to receive his payment for ferrying the souls across the Styx.

The god Hades found, to his great delight—or the closest to delight that gloomy god could ever manage—that the shades of more and more dead humans began to arrive at his subterranean kingdom. Hermes was assigned a new role—that of Arch Psychopomp, or “chief conductor of souls”—a duty he discharged with his customary sprightliness and puckish humor. Though, as the human population grew, only the most important dead were granted the honor of a personal escort by Hermes, the rest were taken by Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.

The instant that human spirits departed their bodies, Hermes or Thanatos would lead them to the underground cavern where the River Styx (Hate) met the River Acheron (Woe). There the grim and silent Charon held out his hand to receive his payment for ferrying the souls across the Styx. If the dead had no payment to offer they would have to wait on the bank a hundred years before the disobliging Charon consented to take them. To avoid this limbo it became a custom amongst the living to place some money, usually an obolus, on the tongue of the dying to pay the ferryman and assure safe and swift passage. When he had taken his fee, Charon would pull the dead soul aboard and pole his rust-colored punt or skiff over the black, Stygian waters to the disembarkation stage, hell's muster point. Once dead, no mortal could go back to the upper world. Immortals, if they tasted so much as a morsel of food or drink in Hades, were fated to return to the infernal kingdom.

And what was their final destination? It seems that this rather depended on the kind of life they had led. At first Hades himself was the arbiter, but in later years he delegated the Great Weighing Up to two sons of Zeus and Europa—Minos and Rhadamanthus who, after their own deaths, were appointed, along with their half brother Ee-ay-kus, Judges of the Underworld. They decided whether an individual had lived a heroic, average, or punishably wicked life.

The heroes and those deemed exceedingly righteous (as well as the dead who had some divine blood in them) found themselves transported to the Elysian Fields, which lay somewhere on the archipelago known as the Fortunate Isles, or Isles of the Blessed. There is no real agreement as to where this might actually be. Perhaps they are what we now call the Canaries, perhaps the Azores, the Lesser Antilles, or even Bermuda. Later descriptions place the Elysian Fields within the kingdom of Hades itself. In these accounts souls who reincarnated three times, on each occasion leading a heroic, just, and virtuous life, then earned themselves a transfer from Elysium to the Isles of the Blessed.

The blameless majority, whose lives were neither especially virtuous nor especially vicious, might expect to be parked for eternity in the Meadows of Asphodel, whose name derived from the white flowers that carpeted its fields. These souls were guaranteed a pleasant enough afterlife: Before they arrived they drank of the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe so that a blithe and bland eternity could be passed, untroubled by upsetting memories of earthly life.

But the sinners—the debauched, blasphemous, wicked, and dissolute—what of them? The least of them flitted in the halls of Hades, eternally without feeling, strength, or any real consciousness of their existence, but the most profane and unpardonable were taken to the Fields of Punishment, which lay between the Meadows of Asphodel and the abysmal depths of Tartarus itself. Here tortures that fitted their crimes with diabolical exactness were inflicted on them for all eternity. We will meet some of the more celebrated of these sinners at a later date. Names like Sisisifus, IXION, and Tantalus still ring through the ages.

While Homer describes the spirits of the departed as keeping the faces and appearance they had in life, alternative accounts tell of a hideous demon called Yurinomos who met the dead and, like the Furies, stripped the flesh from their bones. Other poets suggest that the souls of the underworld were capable of speech and given to relating their life stories to each other.

Hades was the most jealous of all his jealous family. Not one soul could he bear to lose from his kingdom. Cerberus the three-headed dog patrolled the gates. Few, very few, heroes circumvented or duped Thanatos and Cerberus and managed to visit Hades's realm and return alive to the world above.

And so death became a constant in human life, as it remains to this day. But the world of the Silver Age, it should be understood, was very different from our own. Gods, demigods, and all kinds of immortals still walked amongst us. Intercourse of the personal, social, and sexual kind with the gods was as normal to men and women of the Silver Age as intercourse with machines and A.I assistants is to us today. And, I dare say, a great deal more fun.

Prometheus Bound

With simmering fury Zeus watched the survival of Pyrrha and Deucalion and the rise of a new race of men and women from the stones of the earth. No one, not even the King of the Gods, could interfere with the will of Gaia. She represented an older, deeper, more permanent order than that of the Olympians, and Zeus knew that he was powerless to prevent the repopulation of the world. But he could at least turn his attention to Prometheus. The day dawned when Zeus decided the Titan should pay for his betrayal. He looked down from Olympus and saw him in Phocis, assisting in the laying out of a new town, meddling as ever in the affairs of men.

Humankind had propagated in the twinkling of an immortal eye, which we would call the passage of several centuries. All this while Prometheus had, with titanic patience, encouraged the spread of civilization amongst Mankind 2.0—once again teaching people all the arts, crafts, and practices of agriculture, manufacture, and building.

Adopting the form of an eagle, Zeus swooped down and perched on the timbers of a half-built temple that was to be dedicated to himself. Prometheus, who had been carving scenes from the life of the young Zeus into the pediment, looked up and knew at once that the bird was his old friend. Zeus assumed his proper shape and inspected the carving.

“If that's supposed to be Adamanthea with me there, you've got the proportions all wrong,” he said.

“Artistic license,” said Prometheus, whose heart was beating fast. It was the first time the two had spoken since Prometheus stole the fire.

“The time has come to pay for what you have done,” said Zeus. “Now, I could call up the Hecatonchires to carry you forcibly to your destination, or you can choose to bow to the inevitable and come without fuss.”

Prometheus laid down his hammer and chisel and wiped his hands with a leather cloth. "Let's go," he said.

They did not speak or pause for rest or refreshment until they reached the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where the Black and Caspian Seas meet. Along the journey Zeus had wanted to say something, had longed to take his friend by the shoulder and embrace him. A weeping apology might have allowed him to forgive and make up. But Prometheus remained silent. Zeus's stinging sense of being wronged and ill-used flared up anew. "Besides," the god told himself, "great rulers cannot be seen to exhibit weakness, especially when it comes to betrayal by those close to them."

Prometheus shaded his eyes and looked up. He saw the three Cyclopes standing on a great sloping wall of rock that formed one side of the tallest mountain.

“I know you're good at climbing up the sides of mountains,” Zeus said with what he hoped was icy sarcasm, but which emerged even to his ears as something more like sulky muttering. “So climb.”

When Prometheus reached the place where the Cyclopes were, they bound and fettered him and stretched him out on his back, hammering his shackles into the rock with mighty pegs of unbreakable iron. Two beautiful eagles swept down from the sky and glided close to Prometheus, blocking the sunlight. He could hear the hot wind ruffling their feathers.

Zeus called up to him. “You will lie chained to this rock forever. There is no hope of escape or forgiveness, not in all perpetuity. Each day these eagles will come to tear out your liver, just as you tore out my heart. They will eat it in front of your eyes.

Since you are immortal it will grow back every night. This torture will never end. Each day the agony will seem greater. You will have nothing but time in which to consider the enormity of your crime and the folly of your actions. You who were named 'foresight' showed none when you defied the King of the Gods.” Zeus's voice rang from the canyons and ravines. “Well? Have you nothing to say?”

Prometheus sighed. “You are wrong, Zeus,” he said. “I thought my actions through with great care. I weighed my comfort against the future of the race of man. I see now that they will flourish and prosper independently of any immortals, even you. Knowing that is balm for any pain.”

Zeus stared at his former friend for a long time before speaking.

“You are not worth eagles,” he said with an awful coldness. “Let them be vultures.”

The two eagles immediately changed into rank, ugly vultures who circled the outstretched body once before falling upon it. Their razor-sharp talons sliced open the Titan's side, and with hideous screeches of triumph they began to feast.

Prometheus, mankind's chief creator, advocate, and friend, taught us, stole for us, and sacrificed himself for us. We all possess our share of Promethean fire, without it we would not be human. It is right to pity and admire him but, unlike the jealous and selfish gods, he would never ask to be worshipped, praised, and adored.

And it might make you happy to know that, despite the eternal punishment to which he was doomed, one day a hero would arise powerful enough to defy Zeus, unbind humanity's champion, and set him free.

Image summary: A dramatic painting depicting the myth of Prometheus. In the foreground, a muscular, chained man lies on his back, his body twisting in agony as a large eagle descends to tear at his torso. In the upper right, another figure stands aloft, looking down upon the scene.

Zeus called to Prometheus: "You will lie chained to this rock forever. Each day these eagles will come to tear out your liver, just as you tore out my heart. Since you are immortal, it will grow back every night. This torture will never end."

78. It is a subtler name than that, for pan-dora can mean “all-giving” as well as “all-given.”

79. It is said to have been Erasmus of all people, the great sixteenth-century scholar and Prince of Humanists, who misread Pandora's pithos (jar) into pyxis (box).

80. See Appendix, p. 314.

81. Foresight, but not prophecy...

82. Another English word for a werewolf is lycanthrope, Greek for “wolf-man.”

83. According to Ovid at least. Other sources suggest Mount Etna or Mount Athos. Round about the same time Noah was landing on Mount Ararat. Archaeology confirms, it seems, that there really was a Great Flood.

84. See Appendix on p. 312.

85. Charon was also happy to receive a danake or danace, the Persian equivalent, later incorporated into ancient Greek currency.

86. Virgil's description of Aeneas's visit to the underworld tells of the color of Charon's boat.

87. The story of how Zeus seduced Europa will be told a little later on.

88. The Canaries were Byron's candidate for the Isles of the Blessed in his Don Juan.

89. But not in France, despite the name of Paris's grand thoroughfare, the Champs Elysées.

Persephone and the Chariot

The world over which Zeus ruled as sovereign lord of heaven was a bountiful mother to mankind. Men, women, and children helped themselves to the fruit of the trees, the grains of the grasses, the fish of the waters, and the beasts of the fields without effort or much labor. Demeter, goddess of fertility and the harvest, blessed the natural world. If there was hunger or deprivation, it came about only as a result of human cruelty and the workings of those terrible creatures let loose from Pandora's jar, not as a result of divine neglect.

All this was to change, however. Hades had a part in it and—who knows?—perhaps his plan all along was to hasten and increase death in the world and so increase the population of his kingdom. Intricate are the workings of Moros.

Demeter had a daughter, Persephone, by her brother Zeus. So beautiful and pure and lovely was she that the gods took to calling her Kore, or CORA, which means simply “the maiden.” The Romans called her Proserpina. All the gods, especially the unattached Apollo and Hermes, fell dizzily in love with her and even offered marriage. But the protective (some might say overprotective) Demeter hid her away in the remote countryside, far from the hungry eyes of gods and immortals, honorable and dishonorable alike, intending for her to remain—like Hestia, Athena, and Artemis—forever virgin and unattached. There was one powerful god, however, who had laid his covetous eyes upon the girl and had no intention of respecting Demeter's wishes.

There was nothing the sweet and artless Persephone liked to do more than commune with nature. Very much her mother's daughter, flowers and pretty growing things were her greatest source of joy. One golden afternoon, a little separated from the companions appointed by her mother to protect her, Persephone was chasing butterflies as they flitted from blossom to blossom in a sun-dappled, flowery meadow. Suddenly she heard a deep rending and roaring sound.

It was like thunder yet seemed to be coming, not from the sky above, but from the ground beneath her feet. She looked about her in fear and bewilderment. The earth was shaking and the hillside in front of her split apart. From out of the opening there thundered a great chariot. Before the terrified girl had a chance to turn and run, the driver had scooped her up, swung the chariot round, and driven it back through the cleft in the hillside. By the time Persephone's alarmed companions had reached the place, the opening had sealed itself up, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

Persephone's disappearance was as inexplicable as it was sudden and complete. One minute she had been happily gambling through the meadow, the next she had vanished from sight, leaving not a trace behind.

Demeter's despair can hardly be described. We have all lost something precious to us—animal, vegetable, or mineral—and passed through the agonizing stages of grief, fright, and anger that sudden dispossession can cause. When the loss is so personal, unforeseen, absolute, and impossible to understand, those feelings are amplified to the most terrible degree. Although, as the days went by it became more and more difficult to believe that Persephone would ever be seen again, Demeter vowed that she would find her daughter if it took the eternity of her immortal span.

Demeter called upon her Titaness friend Heckate for aid. Hecate was a goddess of potions, keys, ghosts, poisons, and all manner of witchcraft and enchantments. She was the possessor of two torches that could illuminate all the corners of the earth. She and Demeter searched those corners, once, twice, a thousand times.

They shone light into every cavern and dark place they could find. They scoured the world with no success.

Months passed. All this time Demeter neglected her responsibilities. The corn, the harvests, the ripening of fruit, and the sowing of crops—all were abandoned, and in the earth nothing germinated. No seeds sprouted, no buds opened, no shoots grew, and the world began to desertify.

The gods were safe on Olympus, but the cries of the famished and despairing people on earth reached the ears of Zeus. Only when he and the other gods, one night, were making much of the mystery of Persephone's disappearance did the sun Titan Helios speak up.

“Persephone? Oh, I saw what happened to her. I see everything.”

“You saw? Then why didn't you say something?” demanded Zeus. “Demeter has been dementedly wandering the earth looking for her, frantic with worry, and the world is turning into a desert. Why the hell didn't you speak up?”

“No one asked me! No one ever asks me anything. But I know a lot. The eye of the sun sees all,” said Helios, repeating a line that Apollo had often used during his days in charge of the sun-chariot.

“What happened to her?”

“The earth opened and who should come out in his chariot and seize her but ... Hades!”

“Hades!” chorused the gods.

The Pomegranate Seeds

Zeus immediately went down to the underworld to fetch Persephone back. But the King of the Underworld was in no mood to take orders from the King of the Overworld.

"She stays. She is my queen."

"You dare to defy me?"

“You are my younger brother,” said Hades. “My youngest brother in fact. You have always had everything you've ever wanted. I demand the right to keep the girl I love. You cannot deny me.”

“Oh, can't I?” said Zeus. “The world is in famine. The cries of starving mortals keep us awake. Refuse to return Persephone and you will soon discover the force and reach of my will. Hermes will bring no more spirits of the dead to you. Not one single soul shall ever be sent here. All will be dispatched to a new paradise, or perhaps never even die. Hades will become an empty realm drained of all power, influence, or majesty. Your name will become a laughingstock.”

The brothers glared at each other. Hades was the first to blink.

“Damn you,” he growled. “Give me one more day with her and then send Hermes to fetch her.”

Zeus traveled back up to Olympus well pleased.

The next day Hades knocked on the door of Persephone's chamber. You might be surprised that he knocked, but the fact is, in her dignified and assured presence, even such a power as Hades found himself uncertain and shy. He loved her with all his heart, and although he had lost the battle of wills with Zeus he was sure that he could not let her go. Besides, he detected in her something . . . something that gave him hope. A small flicker of returned love?

“My dear,” he said with a gentleness that would have astonished anyone who knew him. “Zeus has prevailed upon me to send you back into the world of light.”

Persephone raised her pale face and gazed steadily at him.

Hades gazed earnestly back. "I hope you do not think ill of me?"

She did not reply, but Hades thought he could detect a little color flushing her cheeks and throat.

"Share some pomegranate seeds with me to show there is no ill-feeling?"

Listlessly Persephone took six seeds from his outstretched hand and sucked slowly at their sharp sweetness.

When Hermes arrived the trickster god found that he and Zeus had themselves been tricked.

“Persephone has eaten fruit from my kingdom,” said Hades. “It is ordained that all who have tasted the food of hell must return. She has tasted six pomegranate seeds so she must come back to me for six months of every year.”

Hermes bowed. He knew that this was so. Taking Persephone by the hand he led her up out of the underworld. Demeter was so overjoyed to see her daughter that the world immediately began to spring into bloom. It was a joy that was to last for half the length of the year, for six months later, in accordance with ineluctable divine law, Persephone was forced to return to the underworld.

Demeter's distress at this parting caused the trees to shed their leaves and a dead time to creep over the world. Another six months passed, Persephone emerged from Hades's domain, and the cycle of birth, renewal, and growth began again. In this way the seasons came about, the autumn and winter of Demeter's grieving for the absence of her daughter and the spring and summer of her jubilation at Persephone's return.

As for Persephone herself . . . well, it seems that she grew to love her time below as much as her time above. For six months she was no prisoner in Hades but the contented Queen of the Underworld, a loving consort who held imperious sway over the dominion of death with her husband. For the other six months she reverted to the laughing Kore of fertility, flowers, fruit, and frolic.

The world had found a new rhythm.

For six months, Persephone was Queen of the Underworld. For the other six months, she returned to her mother Demeter as the Kore of fertility, flowers, and frolic.

Hermaphroditus and Silenus

As the men and women of the Silver Age became accustomed to the striving and toiling and suffering that seemed now to be their common lot, so the gods continued to breed. Hermes, who had grown swiftly into handsome but eternally youthful manhood, fathered the goat-footed nature god Pan by the nymph Dryope. Behind the back of Hephaestus and Ares he also coupled with Aphrodite, a union blessed by the birth of a son of quite transcendent loveliness named—in honor of each parent—Hermafroditus.

This beautiful boy grew up in the shadow of Mount Ida, cared for by naials. When he reached the age of fifteen he left them to wander the world. Traveling in Asia Minor he met one bright afternoon a naiad called Salmasis who was splashing in the clear waters of a spring near Halicarnassus. Hermaphroditus, who was as shy as he was lovely, became greatly confused and unhappy when this forward creature, stunned by his beauty, tried to seduce him.

Unlike most of her kind—modest, hardworking nymphs who attended with diligence to the maintenance of the streams, pools, and watercourses over which they had charge—Salmacis had a reputation for vanity and indolence. She would rather swim lazily around admiring her own limbs in the water than hunt or exercise with the other naiads. But her peace and self-esteem were shattered by the beauty of this Hermaphroditus, and she exerted herself mightily to win him.

The more she tried—revolving naked in the water, winningly rubbing her breasts, blowing coy bubbles under the surface—the less comfortable the boy became, until he shouted at her to leave him alone. She departed in a sulky surge, shocked and humiliated by the new and unwelcome experience of rejection.

It was a fine day, though, and Hermaphroditus, hot and sweaty from the excitement of fighting off this tiresome sprite and thinking she was safely out of the way, stripped off his clothing and plunged into the cool waters of the spring to refresh himself.

Almost immediately Salmacis, who had swum back under the cover of the reeds, leapt on him like a salmon and clung fast to his naked body. Revolted he wiggled and wriggled and jiggled to be set free, while she cried up to the heavens, “O gods above, never let this youth and me part! Let us always be one!”

The gods heard her prayer and answered with the callous literalness that seemed ever to delight them. In an instant Salmacis and Hermaphroditus did indeed become one. The pair fused into a single body.

One body, two sexes. No longer the naiad Salmacis and the youth Hermaphroditus, but now intersex, male and female coexisting in one form. Although the Romans were to regard this state of being as a disorder that threatened the strict militaristic norms of their society, the more open-minded Greeks prized, celebrated, and even worshipped the hermaphrodite gender.

Statuary and representations on pottery and temple friezes show us that what the Romans feared, the Greeks seemed to find admirable.

In this new state Hermaphroditus joined the retinue of Erotes whose nature and purpose we will describe very soon.

By an unknown nymph, Hermes also fathered the snubnosed, donkey-tailed lecher Silenus, who grew up to become a bearded, potbellied, pucker-browed old drunk, a popular subject in paintings, sculptures, and carved drinking vessels, and whom we shall also encounter before too long.

As the gods bred, so man bred. But the divine fire that was now as much a part of our nature as the gods meant that we shared with them the capacity not just for lust, copulation, and reproduction, but the capacity for love.

Love, as the Greeks understood, is complicated.

90. She features prominently in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

91. Helios could be as dull and slow in the wits as he was bright and swift in the sun-chariot. How he came to take over these duties from Apollo will be revealed later.

92. Although some say this, I tend to believe that Pan (Faunus to the Romans) was older than the Olympians. Perhaps as old as nature itself. We will encounter him from time to time as we move forward.

93. There were two Mount Idas—the Cretan one, Zeus's birthplace, and another in Phrygia, Asia Minor—today's Turkish Anatolia. This was the one from which Hermaphroditus hailed.

94. The great museums of the world have hidden away treasures that represent intersex figures like Hermaphroditus. Many of these have only recently come to light, with exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and other leading institutions setting a trend for rediscovery of this neglected area. It coincides with a greater, society-wide understanding of the fluidity of gender.

95. Or possibly Pan.

Cupid and Psyche

Erotes

The Greeks untangled love's complexity by naming each separate strand and providing divinities to represent them. Aphrodite, the supreme goddess of love and of beauty, was attended by a retinue of winged and naked godlings called Erotes. Like many deities (Hades and his underworld cohorts, for example) the Erotes suddenly found themselves with much to do once humanity established itself and began to flourish. Each of the Erotes had a special kind of amatory passion to promulgate and promote.

Anteros—the youthful patron of selfless unconditional love.

Eros—the leader of the Erotes, god of physical love and sexual desire.

Hedylogos—the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentine cards, love letters, and romantic fiction.

Hermafroditus—the protector of effeminate males, mannish females, and those of what we would now call a more fluid gender.

Himeros—the embodiment of desperate, impetuous love, love that is impatient to be fulfilled and ready to burst.

Himenayos—the guardian of the bridal chamber and wedding music.

Pothos—the personification of languorous longing, of love for the absent and the departed.

Of these the most influential and devastating was Eros, in his power and his capacity to sow mischief and discord. There are two stories concerning his origin and identity. In one telling of the birth of the cosmos he was hatched from a great egg laid by Nyx and sprang from it to seed all life in the universe. He could therefore be counted amongst the very first of the primordial spirits that kickstarted the cascade of creation. In a view perhaps more commonly held across the classical world, he was the son of Ares and Aphrodite. Under his Roman name of Cupid he is usually represented as a laughing winged child about to shoot an arrow from his silver bow, a very recognizable image to this day, making Eros perhaps the most instantly identifiable of all the gods of classical antiquity.

Cupidity and erotic desire are associated with him, as is the instant and uncontrollable falling in love that results from being pierced by his dart, the arrow that compels its victims to fall for the first person (or even animal) they see after being struck. Eros can be as capricious, mischievous, random, and cruel as love itself.

Love, Love, Love

The Greeks had at least four words for love:

Agape—this was the great and generous kind that we would describe as “charity” and which could refer to any holy kind of love, such as parents for their children or the love of worshippers for their god.

Eros—the strain of love named after the god, or after whom the god is named.

The kind that gets us into most trouble. So much more than affectionate, so much less than spiritual, eros and the erotic can lead us to glory and to disgrace, to the highest pitch of happiness and the deepest pit of despair.

Filia—the form of love applied to friendship, partiality, and fondness. We see its traces in words like “francophile,” “necrophilia,” and “philanthropy.”

Storge—the love and loyalty someone might have for their country or their sports team could be regarded as storgic.

Eros himself, while later portrayed by Renaissance and Baroque artists in the manner I have described—a giggling, pert, and dimpled cherub (sometimes wearing a blindfold to signify the wayward and arbitrary nature of his marksmanship)—was to the Greeks a fully grown young man of great accomplishment. An artist, an athlete (both sexual and sporting), he was regarded as a patron and protector of gay male love as well as a presiding presence in the gymnasium and on the running track. He was associated with dolphins, cockerels, roses, torches, lyres, and, of course, that bow and quiverful of arrows.

Perhaps the best-known myth involving Eros and Psyche—Physical Love and Soul—is almost absurdly ripe for interpretation and explanation. I think, however, that it is best told like all myths, not as an allegory, symbolic fable, or metaphor, but as a story. Just a story. It has many of the rhythms and plot turns we associate with later quest narratives and fairy tales, perhaps because it comes down to us from what many regard as the strongest candidate for First Ever Novel: The Golden Ass, by the Roman writer Apuleius. The story's influence on so much Western thought, folk literature, and art—not to mention its charm—justify, I hope, its retelling in long form.

Psyche

Once upon a time, in a land whose name is now lost to us, lived a king and queen and their three beautiful daughters. We will call the king Aristideez and the queen Damaris. The two eldest girls, Calanthe and Zona, were lovely enough to be admired everywhere; but the youngest, whose name was Sykee, was so entirely beautiful that many in the kingdom abandoned the cult of Aphrodite and worshipped this young girl in her place. Aphrodite was a jealous and vengeful goddess and could bear no rivalry, least of all from a mortal. She summoned her son Eros.

“I want you to find a pig,” she said to him, “the ugliest and haliriest in all the land. Go to the palace where Psyche lives, shoot your arrow into her, and make sure that the pig is the first thing she sees.”

Used to his mother's charming ways Eros set off on his errand cheerfully enough. He bought an especially bristly and foul-smelling boar from a swineherd who lived not far from the palace and led it that evening to the window of the room where Psyche slept. More clumsily than you might think of a slim athletic god, he tried to clamber through the window with the pig under his arm without making a noise.

A number of things happened very quickly. Eros landed safely in the moonlit room.

Psyche slumbered peacefully on.

Eros wedged the pig firmly between his legs.

Eros reached behind his shoulder to pluck an arrow from his quiver.

The pig squealed.

A flustered Eros scratched his own arm with the point of his arrow as he drew the bow.

Psyche woke up with a start and lit a candle. Eros saw Psyche and fell deeply in love with her.

What a business. The god of love himself lovestruck. You might imagine that the next thing he would do is fire an arrow at Psyche and that all would end happily. But here Eros comes out of the story rather well.

So real, pure, and absolute was his love that he could not think of cheating Psyche out of her own choice. He took one last longing look at her, turned, and leapt out of the window and back into the night.

Psyche saw the pig running round in wild, snuffling circles on her bedroom floor, concluded that she must be dreaming, blew out the candle and went back to sleep.

Prophecy and Abandonment

The next morning King Aristides was alarmed to be told by a servant that his youngest daughter seemed to have turned her bedroom into some kind of piggery. He and Queen Damaris had been worried enough already that, unlike her sisters Calanthe and Zona who had allied themselves to rich landowners, Psyche had stubbornly refused to marry. The news that she was now consorting with pigs made up his mind. He traveled to the oracle of Apollo to find out what the girl's future might be.

After the correct sacrifices and prayers had been offered up, the Sibyl made this answer. “Garland your child with flowers and carry her to a high place. Lay her on a rock. The one that will come to take her for its bride is the most dangerous being of earth, sky, or water. All the gods of Olympus fear its power. So it is ordained, so it must be. Fail in this and the creature will lay waste all your kingdom, and discord and despair shall come in its train. You, Aristides, will be called the destroyer of your people's happiness.”

Ten days later a strange procession wound its way out of the town. Carried high on a litter, festooned with flowers and dressed in the purest white, sat a gloomy but resigned Psyche. She had been told of the oracle's pronouncement and had accepted it. Her so-called beauty had always been a source of irritation to her. She hated the fuss and stir it caused, how oddly it made people behave in her presence and how freakish and set apart it made her feel. She had planned never to marry, but if she had to then a rapacious beast would be no worse than a tedious fawning prince with mooncalf eyes. The agony of its attentions would at least be over quickly.

With piteous wails of grief and sorrow the crowd labored up the mountainside until they came to the great basalt rock on which Psyche was to be laid for sacrifice. Her mother Damaris howled, shrieked, and sobbed. King Aristides patted her hand and wished himself elsewhere. Calanthe and Zona, their dull, elderly, but rich husbands at their sides, each tried their best to conceal the deep satisfaction they felt at the knowledge that they were soon to be the unchallenged fairest in the land.

As she was bound to the rock Psyche closed her eyes and breethd deeply, waiting for everyone to have done with indulging in their lamentations and shows of grief. Soon all suffering and pain would be over.

Singing hymns to Apollo the crowd wound its way down the hill, leaving Psyche alone on the rock. The sun shone down upon her. Larks called in the blue sky. She had pictured boiling clouds, shrieking winds, lashing rain, and dreadful thunder as accompaniments to her violation and death, not this glorious idyll of late-spring sunshine and rippling birdsong.

Who or what could this creature be? If her father had reported the oracle correctly then even the high Olympians feared it. But she had heard of no such terrible monster in all the legends and rumors of legends on which she had been raised. Not even Typhon or Echidna had the power to alarm the mighty gods.

Suddenly a warm breath of wind ruffled her white ceremonial robes. The breath became a gust that pushed a cushion of air between her and the cold basalt on which she lay. To her great surprise Psyche felt herself being lifted up. The wind seemed to be an almost solid thing—it supported her, holding her fast and carrying her up into the air.

The Enchanted Castle

Psyche was flying high above the ground, safe in the strong but gentle arms of Zefirus, the West Wind.

“This cannot be the beast we are all meant to fear,” she thought to herself. “This wind must be the beast's messenger and herald. He is taking me to my doom. Well, at least it's a comfortable way to travel.”

She looked down on the city in which she had grown up. How small and neat and trim everything looked. So unlike the overgrown, ill-smelling, and ramshackle township she knew and hated. Zephyrus gained speed and height and soon they were swooping over hills and along valleys, soaring over the blue ocean and flashing past islands, until they were in a country she did not recognize.

It was fertile and densely wooded, and as they made a gradual descent she saw, set in a clearing, a magnificent palace, cornered by round towers and crowned with turrets. Gently and easily Psyche was lowered, until she landed with a gliding step on the flowered grass in front of a pair of golden gates. With a fizz and a sigh the wind flew away and she found herself alone.

She heard no growls, roars, or rapacious snarls, only a distant music floating from the palace's interior. As she made her tentative approach the gates swung open.

The royal palace in which Psyche grew up was—to the ordinary citizen of her country—ornate, opulent, and overwhelming, but next to the gorgeous and fantastical edifice she was entering it was nothing but a crude hovel. As she made her way inside, her amazed eyes passed over columns of gold, citron-wood, and ivory, silver-relief panels carved with an intricacy and artistry she had never dreamed possible, and marble statues so perfectly rendered that they seemed to move and breathe. The light glittered in the shimmering gold halls and passageways, the floor she stepped over was a dancing mosaic of jewels, and the mysterious music grew louder and louder as she penetrated deeper inside.

She passed fountains where crystal waters played in miraculous arcs, shaping and reshaping and quite defying gravity. She became aware of low female voices. Either she was dreaming or this palace was divine. No mortal, and surely no monster, could have ordained so fabulous a habitation.

She had arrived at a square central room whose painted panels showed scenes of the birth of the gods and the war with the Titans. The air was perfumed with sandalwood, roses, and warm spices.

Voices, Visions, and a Visitor

The whispers and music seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but all at once they ceased. In the loud silence left behind, a quiet voice called to her.

“Psyche, Psyche, don't be shy. Don't stare and twitch like a startled faun. Don't you know that all this is yours? All this beauty, all these gemstones, this grand palace and the lands around it—all yours. Go through that doorway and bathe yourself.

The voices you hear are your handmaidens, here to do your bidding. When you are ready a great feast will be laid out. Welcome, beloved Psyche, welcome and enjoy.”

The dazed girl made her way into the next room, a vast chamber hung with tapestries and silks, lit by flaming torches in bronze brackets. At one end was a gleaming copper bathtub and in the center a simply colossal bed whose myrtlewound frame was of polished cypress and whose linen was strewn with rose petals. Psyche was so tired, so befuddled, and so unable to make sense of things that she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, in the confused hope that sleep might wake her up from this wild dream.

But when she awoke she was still inside the dream. She got up from the soft brocaded cushions and saw that there was steam rising from the bath. She stepped from her clothes into the water.

This is when things became entirely strange.

A silver flask by the side of the bath rose up, danced in the air, and tipped its contents into the water. Before she had time to scream out her surprise a glorious cloud of unknown fragrances assailed her senses. Now an ivory-handled brush was scrubbing her back and a ewer of hot water was being emptied over her hair.

Invisible hands kneaded, stroked, pummeled, teased, and pressed. Psyche giggled like a little girl and allowed it all to happen. Whether this was a dream inside the real world or a moment of reality inside a dream no longer seemed important. She would enjoy the adventure and see where it took her.

Damasks, silks, satins, and gossamer tissues flew from concealed closets and glided down onto the bed to shimmer beside her, rustling in anticipation of being chosen. She selected a chiffon gown of lapis blue—loose, comfortable, and exciting.

The doors of her chambers opened, and with shy uncertain steps she made her way back to the main hall. A great feast was laid out on the table. Unseen hands were moving backward and forward with platters of fruit, cups of fermented honey, dishes of exotic roast birds, and plates of sweetmeats. Never had Psyche seen or imagined such a banquet. Beside herself with joy, she dipped her fingers into dishes of such exquisite deliciousness that she could not help crying out in delight. The swine in the piggeries of her parents' farms did not snuffle and truffle at their wooden troughs with more uninhibited abandon than she did at the magical vessels of crystal, silver, and gold that filled and refilled themselves as fast as she could empty them.

Napkins flew up to dab her wine-stained lips and food-smeared chin. An invisible choir sang soft ballads and hymns to human love as she gorged and guzzled in ecstasy.

Finally she was done. A feeling of great warmth and wellbeing stole over her. If she was being fattened up for an ogre then so be it.

The candles on the table now rose up and led Psyche back to the bedchamber. The flickering torches and soft oil lamps had died down and the room was in almost complete darkness. The unseen hands pushed her gently to the bedside and her chiffon gown lifted up and away. Naked she lay back between the satin sheets and closed her eyes.

An instant later she gasped in shock. Someone or something had slipped into bed beside her. She felt her body being gently pulled toward this figure. Sweet warm breath mingled with hers.

Her skin met the body, not of a beast, but of a man. He was beardless and—she knew this without being able to see him—beautiful. She could not see even the outline of him, only feel his heat and youthful firmness. He kissed her lips and they entwined.

Eros and Psyche ... Cupid and Anima ... Love and Soul ...

Next morning the bed was empty and Psyche was bathed once more by the invisible handmaidens. As the long day passed she at last summoned the courage to ask them questions.

“Where am I?”

"Why, you are here, your highness."

“And where is here?”

“Far from there but close to nearby.”

“Who is the master of this palace.”

"You are the mistress."

Never a straight answer. She did not press. She knew that she was in an enchanted place and could sense that her handmaidens were slaves to its rules and requirements.

That night, in pitch darkness, the beautiful young man came to her bed again. She tried to speak to him, but he placed a finger to her lips and a voice sounded inside her head.

"Hush, Psyche. Ask no questions. Love me as I love you."

And slowly, as the days passed, she realized that she did love this unseen man very much. Every night they made love. Every morning she awoke to find him gone.

The palace was glorious and there was nothing Psyche's handmaidens would not do for her. She had everything she could ever want, the best to eat or drink and music to accompany her everywhere. But what long, lonely days stretched out between the evenings of delicious love, how hard she found it to pass the time.

The “monster” with whom she slept every night was, you will have guessed, the god Eros whose self-inflicted dart had caused him to fall in love with Psyche, a love now magnified by their repeated nights of mutual bliss. The oracle had been right to say that Eros was a being whose powers frightened all the gods, for there was not one Olympian who had not been conquered by Eros at some time.

Perhaps he was a monster after all. But he could be sensitive and sweet as well as capricious and cruel. He saw that Psyche was not entirely happy and one night, as they lay together in the darkness, he quizzed her tenderly.

“What ails you, beloved wife?”

“I hate to say this when you have given me so much, but I get lonely during the day. I miss my sisters.”

“Your sisters?”

“Calanthe and Zona. They believe me to be dead.”

“Only unhappiness can come from consorting with them. Misery and despair for them and for you.”

“But I love them . . .”

"Misery and despair, I tell you."

Psyche sighed.

“Please believe me,” he said. “It is for the best that you do not see them.”

“What about you? May I not see you? May I never look into the face of the one I love so well?”

“You must not ask me that. Never ask me that.”

The days passed and Eros saw that Psyche—for all the wine and food, for all the music and magical fountains and enchanted voices—was pining.

“Cheer up, beloved! Tomorrow is our anniversary,” he said.

A year! Had a whole year passed already?

“My present to you is to grant your wish. Tomorrow morning my friend Zephyrus will await you outside the palace and take you where you need to be. But please be careful. Do not allow yourself to become too involved in the lives of your family. And you must promise never to tell them about me. Not one word about me.”

Psyche promised and they fell into each other's arms for a night of anniversary love. Never had she felt more passionate adoration or physical delight, and she sensed equal feelings of ardor and love in him too.

The next morning she awoke, as ever, to an empty bed. In a great fever of impatience she allowed herself to be dressed and served breakfast by the handmaidens before running excitedly to the great gate at the front of the palace. She had barely stepped out before Zephyrus swept down and flew her away in his strong, supportive arms.

Sisters

Meanwhile, back in the land of Psyche's birth, the populace had been marking the anniversary of her capture by the fabled unseen monster. King Aristides and Queen Damaris had led the procession of mourning up the hillside to the basalt slab on which their daughter had been bound—since named "the Rock of Psyche" in her honor. Now there remained at the monument only the two princesses, Calanthe and Zona, who had loudly made it known to all that they wished to stay behind and lament in private.

Once the crowd died away they pulled back their mourning veils and began to laugh.

"Imagine what sort of creature it was that took her away," said Zona.

“Winged like a Fury …” suggested Calanthe. “With iron claws …”

"And fiery breath..."

“Great yellow fangs…”

“Snakes for hair . . .”

“A great tail that—What was that?”

A sudden gust of wind made them turn round. What they saw made them shout in fright.

Their sister Psyche was standing before them, radiant in a shimmering white gown edged with gold. She looked appallingly beautiful.

“But …” began Calanthe.

“We thought …” stammered Zona.

And then both together: “Sister!”

Psyche came toward them, her hands held out and the sweetest smile of tender sisterly love lighting up her face. Calanthe and Zona each took a hand to kiss.

“You are alive!”

“And so … so ….”

“This dress—it must have cost, that is to say it looks . . ."

“And you look …” said Zona, “so … so … Calanthe, whatever is the word?”

“Happy?” suggested Psyche.

"Something," her sisters agreed. "You definitely look something."

“But tell us, Psyche, dearest . . ."

“What happened to you?”

"Here we are mourning, sobbing our hearts out for you."

"Who gave you that dress?"

“How did you get off the rock?”

“Is it real gold?”

"Did a monster come for you? A beast? An ogre?"

“And that material.”

“A dragon perhaps?”

“How do you keep it from creasing?”

“Did it take you to its den?”

“Who does your hair?”

“Did it try to chew your bones?”

“That can't be a real emerald can it?”

Laughing, Psyche held up a hand. “Dear sisters! I will tell you everything. Better, I will show you everything. Come, wind, take us there!”

Before the sisters knew what was happening the three of them were lifted from their feet and were traveling swiftly through the air, safe in the arms of the West Wind.

“Don't fight it. Relax into it,” said Psyche as Zephyrus swept them up over the mountain. Zona's howls began to subside and Calanthe's muffled sobs softened to a whimper. Before long they were even able to open their eyes for a few seconds without screaming.

When the wind finally set them down on the grass in front of the enchanted palace Calanthe had decided that this was the only way to travel.

“Who needs a stupid horse pulling a rickety rackety old chariot?” she said.

“From now on I catch the wind . . .”

But Zona wasn't listening. She was staring transfixed at the walls, the turrets, and the silver-studded door of the palace, all glittering in the morning sun.

“Come in,” said Psyche. What an exciting feeling, to show her dear sisters around her new home. It was a pity they couldn't meet her darling husband.

To say that the girls were impressed would be criminally to understate the matter. Naturally therefore they sniffed, yawned, tittered, shook their heads, and generally tut-tutted their way from golden apartment to golden apartment by silver-paneled corridors and jewel-encrusted passageways. Their tilted, wrinkled noses seemed to suggest that they were used to better.

“Just a little vulgar, don't we feel, darling?” Zona suggested. Inside she said to herself, “This is the home of a god!”

Calanthe was thinking, “If I just stop and pretend to fix the laces of my sandals I could break off one of the rubies encrusting that chair . . .”

When the invisible staff of stewards, footmen, and handmaidens began serving lunch the sisters found it harder to mask their wonder and astonishment.

Afterward they each took turns to be oiled, bathed, and massaged.

Pressed for details of the castle's lord, Psyche remembered her promise and hastily made something up.

“He's a handsome huntsman and local landowner.”

“What's his name?”

“The kindest eyes.”

"And his name is . . . ?"

“He's so sorry to miss you. I'm afraid he always takes to the field with his hounds by day. He wanted so much to greet you personally. Perhaps another time.”

“Yes, but what's he called?”

“He—he doesn't really have a name.”

“What?”

“Well, he has a name. Obviously he has a name, everyone has a name, Zona, I mean really! But he doesn't use it.”

“But what is it?”

“Oh my goodness, quick! It'll be dark soon. Zephyrus won't fly you at night . . . Come, dear sisters, help yourselves to some little things to take home.

Here's a handful of amethysts. These are sapphires. There's gold, silver . . . Be sure to take gifts for Mother and Father too.”

Loaded with precious treasures the sisters allowed themselves to be transported back to the rock. Psyche, who had stood and waved them off, was both relieved and sorry to see them go. While she welcomed their company and the chance to show them round and give them presents, her determination to keep the promise she had made to her husband had made the evasion of all their questions an exhausting business.

Back home the sisters—despite the fabulous treasures they now possessed—were eaten up with envy, resentment, and fury. How could their younger sister, the stupid, selfish Psyche, now find herself in the position more or less of a goddess? It was so appallingly unfair. Spoiled, vain, ugly creature!

Well, not ugly, perhaps. Possessed of a certain obvious and rather vulgar prettiness, but scarcely a match for their queenly beauty. It was all too monstrously unjust: There was almost certainly witchcraft and wickedness at the bottom of it. How could she not even know the name of her lord and master?

“My husband Sato's rheumatism,” said Calanthe, “is getting so bad that every night I have to rub his fingers one by one, then apply plasters and poultices. It's disgusting and demeaning.”

“You think your life is hell?” said Zona. “My Charion is as bald as an onion, his breath stinks, and he has all the sex drive of a dead pig. While Psyche . . ."

“That selfish slut...”

The sisters clung to each other and sobbed their hearts out.

That night Psyche's lover Eros had momentous news for her. She was pouring out all her gratitude to him, and explaining how well she had managed to avoid describing him to her sisters, when he placed his finger on her lips.

“Sweet, trusting child. I fear those sisters and what they may do to you. But I am glad you are happy. Let me make you happier still.” She felt his warm hand slide down her front and gently stroke her belly. “Our child is growing there.”

Psyche gasped and hugged him close, stunned with joy. "If you keep this secret," he said, "the child will be a god. If you tell a living soul, it will be mortal."

“I will keep the secret,” said Psyche. “But before my condition becomes obvious let me at least see Calanthe and Zona one more time and say goodbye to them.”

Eros was troubled but could not see how he might deny so decent and sisterly a request, and so he assented.

“Zephyrus will send them a sign and they will come,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her. “But remember, not a word about me or about our baby.”

A Drop of Oil

The next morning Calanthe and Zona awoke to feel the breath of Zephyrus ruffling at them like a hungry pet dog panting and pawing at the bedclothes. When they opened their eyes and sat up the wind departed, but their instinct, greed, and inborn cunning told them what the signal meant, and they hurried to the rock to await their transport. This time they were determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of their sister's lover.

Psyche was there to welcome them when they were set down in front of the palace. Embracing her fondly, the sisters hid the furious envy they felt at Psyche's good fortune, presenting instead a flurry of solicitous clucking and tutting, accompanied by much head shaking.

“Whatever is the matter, Calanthe?” a puzzled Psyche asked as she sat them down to a great breakfast of fruit, cakes, and honey-wine. “Why so sorrowful, Zona? Are you not happy to see me?”

“Happy?” groaned Calanthe.

"If only," Zona sighed.

“What can be worrying you?”

“Ah, child, child,” said Calanthe with a moan. “You are so young. So sweet. So guileless.”

“So easy to take advantage of.”

“I don't understand.”

The sisters looked at each other as if weighing up whether to reveal harsh truths.

“How well—if at all—do you know this . . . this thing that comes nightly to visit you?”

“He's not a thing!” protested Psyche.

"Of course he's a thing. He's the monster foretold by the oracle."

"Scaly, I'll bet," said Zona. "Or, if not scaly, hairy."

“He's nothing of the sort,” said Psyche indignantly.

“He's young and beautiful and kind. Soft skin, firm muscles—”

“What color are his eyes?”

“Well...”

“Is he blond or dark?”

“Darling sisters,” said Psyche, “can you keep a secret?”

Calanthe and Zona craned in close and pawed their sister lovingly.

"Can we keep a secret? What a question!"

“The thing is,” said Psyche, “well, the thing is I don't actually know what he looks like. I've never seen him, only … well … felt him.”

“What?” Calanthe was shocked.

“You mean you've never so much as looked upon his face?”

“He insists that I must not see him. He comes to me in the blackest black of night, slips between the sheets, and we … well, we … you know ….” Psyche blushed. “But I can trace his outlines and what I feel is not the body of a monster. It is the body of a splendid and marvelous man. Just, in the morning, he's gone.”

“Oh, you silly goose!” tittered Zona. “Don't you know—” She broke off here as if afraid to go on.

The sisters exchanged sorrowful and knowing glances. “Oh dear …”

"Psyche doesn't know!"

Calanthe responded with a sound that was something between a titter and a sigh.

Psyche looked from one to the other in perplexity. "Know what?"

Calanthe put her arms around her and explained, with Zona interposing her own observations and affirmations. The worst and most dreadful monsters—indeed the very kind that Apollo's oracle had predicted would devour her!—possessed powers—always have done, were known for having, were celebrated the world over for having them!—the power, for example, to transform themselves, to take on deceitful shapes—forms that might seem thrilling and attractive to the touch of a young girl—but this was only to win the trust of the innocent—the innocent and foolish!—so as one day to plant their demonic seed inside her—poor girl, she doesn't understand these things, but men can do this—and cause her to give birth to a new abomination, an even more terrible monster—a mutation—it's how they breed, how they propagate their vile species.

Psyche held up a hand. “Stop! Please! I know you mean well, but you don't know how tender, how kind, how gentle . . ."

“That's their way! That's exactly their way!”

“Don't you see? If anything proves this monster's ferocious cruelty it's this very tenderness and gentleness!”

“A sure sign that it must be a hideous fiend.”

Psyche thought of the new life growing inside her and of her husband's insistence that she tell no one of it. And of his refusal ever to show himself. Oh dear. Perhaps her sisters were right.

They saw that she was wavering and they pounced.

“Here's what you do, my love. When he comes to you tonight you allow him to have his beastly way with you—”

“Ugh!”

“—and then let him fall asleep. But you must stay awake.”

"On all accounts, stay awake."

“When you're satisfied that he's absolutely fast asleep you must rise and fetch a lamp.”

“And that razor that your handmaidens use to cut your hair.”

“Yes, you'll need that!”

“Light the lantern in the corner of the room and cover it so as not to wake him.”

“Then steal over to the bed...”

“Lift your lantern . . ."

“And slice his scaly dragon's neck...”

“Saw away at his knotty veins...”

“Kill him . . .”

“Kill the beast . . .”

“Then gather up all the gold and silver . . ."

“And the gemstones, that's most important . . ."

On and on the sisters talked until Psyche was fully persuaded.

And so that night it came about that, with Eros sleeping peacefully in the bed, Psyche found herself standing over him, a hooded lantern in one hand and a razor in the other. She raised the blinds from the lamp. Light fell on the curled-up naked form of the most beautiful being she had ever beheld. The warm glow danced on smooth, youthful skin—and on the most wonderful pair of feathered wings.

Psyche could not hold back a gasp of amazement. She knew at once whom she was looking at. This was no dragon or monster, no ogre or abomination. This was the young god of love. This was Eros himself. To think that she could have dreamed of harming him. How beautiful he was. His full, rosy lips were slightly parted and the sweetness of his breath came up to her as she leaned down to gaze more deeply. Everything about him was so perfect! The gentle heave and swell of muscles gave his youthful beauty a manly cast, but without that hard, bulging ungainliness she had seen on the bodies of her father's champion athletes and warriors.

His tousled hair gleamed with a warm color that lay between the gold of Apollo and the mahogany of Hermes. And those wings! Folded beneath his body they had the fullness and whiteness of a swan's. She reached out a trembling hand and ran her finger down the line of feathers. The soft fluttering whisper they returned hardly made a sound, yet it was enough to cause the sleeping Eros to shift and murmur.

Psyche pulled back and shaded the lantern, but within a few moments an even rhythmic breathing reassured her that Eros was still deeply asleep. She unmasked the lantern again and saw that he was now turned away from her. She saw too that his movement had caused a curious object to be brought into view.

The lamplight fell on a silver cylinder that lay beneath his wings. His quiver!

Hardly daring to breathe, Psyche leaned forward and pulled out a single arrow. Turning it in her hand she slowly fingered its shaft of shining ebony. The arrowhead itself was affixed by a band of gold ... Holding the lantern high in her left hand she ran her right thumb along the head and then—ouch! So sharp was the tip that it drew blood. The moment it did a feeling washed over her, a feeling of such intense love for the sleeping Eros, such heat, passion, and desire, such complete and eternal devotion, that she could not refrain from moving to kiss the curls on the nape of his neck.

Alas! As she did so, hot oil from the lantern dripped onto his right shoulder. He awoke with a yelp of pain which, when he saw Psyche standing over him, grew into a great roar of disappointment and despair. His wings opened and began to beat the air. As he rose Psyche launched herself forward and clung to his right leg, but his strength was too great and he shook her off without a word and flew away into the night.

The moment he left, everything fell apart. The walls of the palace rippled, faded, and dissolved into the night air. A despairing Psyche watched the gold columns around her shiver into a dark colonnade of trees and the jeweled mosaic tiles beneath her feet churn into a mess of mud and gravel.

Before long, palace, precious metals, precious stones—all had vanished. The sweet singing of the handmaidens turned into the howling of wolves and the screeching of owls, and the warm, mysterious perfumes whipped into chill and unrelenting winds.

Alone

A frightened, unhappy girl stood in a cold and desolate wood. She slipped down the trunk of a tree until she sat on the hard roots. The only thought in her mind was to end her life.

She was awoken by a beetle scuttling over her lips. She sat up with a shiver and unpeeled a damp leaf from her brow. She had not dreamed the horrors of the night before.

She really was alone in a wood. Perhaps everything before was a dream and this had always been the reality? Or she had awoken inside another episode of a wider dream? It was hardly worth the bother of trying to puzzle it all out. Dream or reality, everything was intolerable to her.

“Don't do it, pretty girl.”

Shocked, Psyche looked up to see the god Pan standing before her. The humorous frown, the thick curling hair from which two horns sprouted, the wide hairy flanks tapering down to goats' feet—it could be no other figure, mortal or immortal.

“No, no,” said Pan, stamping the muddy ground with his hoofs. “I can read it in your face and it is not to be. I won't allow it.”

"You won't allow what?" said Psyche.

“I won't allow you to dash yourself onto the rocks from off a high cliff. I won't allow you to court the deadly attentions of a wild animal. I won't allow you to pick belladonna and drink its poisonous juices. I won't allow any of that.”

“But I can't live!” cried Psyche. “If you knew my story you would understand and you would help me die.”

“You should ask yourself what brought you here,” said Pan. “If it's love, then you must pray to Aphrodite and Eros for guidance and relief. If your own wickedness caused your downfall then you must live to repent. If it was caused by others then you must live to revenge.”

Revenge! Psyche suddenly understood what needed to be done. She rose to her feet. "Thank you, Pan," she said. "You've shown me the way."

Pan bared his teeth in a grin and bowed. His lips blew a flourish of farewell across the top of the set of pipes in his hand.

Four days later Psyche knocked on the gates of the grand mansion of her brother-in-law Sato, the husband of Calanthe. A servant ushered her into her sister's receiving room.

"Psyche! Darling! Did all go as planned? You look a little—"

“Never mind me, dear sister. I will tell you what happened. I followed your instructions to the letter, shone a lamp over the sleeping form of my husband, and who should he be but the great god Eros. Eros himself!”

“Eros!” Calanthe clutched at her amber necklace.

“Oh sister, imagine my heartbreak and disappointment when he told me that he had only taken me to his palace as a means of securing you.”

“Me?”

“That was his dark plan. 'Fetch me your beautiful sister Calanthe,' he said to me. 'She of the green eyes and russet hair.'”

“More auburn than russet—”

“Fetch her. Tell her to go to the high rock. Launch herself onto Zephyrus, who will pick her up and bring her to me. Tell the beautiful Calanthe all this, Psyche, I beg.' This is his message which I have faithfully relayed.”

You can imagine with what speed Calanthe prepared herself. She left a scrawled message for her husband explaining that they were not husband and wife after all, that their marriage had been a calamitous mistake, that the officiant who wed them had been drunk, incapable, and unqualified, that she had never loved him anyway and that she was now a free woman, so there.

At the high basalt rock she heard the rustle of a breeze and, with a moan of ecstatic joy, launched herself onto what she thought was Zephyrus.

But the spirit of the West Wind was nowhere near. With a scream of frustration, rage, disappointment, and fear, Calanthe tumbled down the hillside, bouncing from sharp rock to sharp rock until her whole body was turned inside out and she landed at the bottom as dead as a stone.

The identical fate befell her sister Zona, to whom Psyche told the same story.

The Tasks of Afrodite

With her revenge meted out, Psyche had the rest of her life to consider. Every waking moment was filled with the love and longing she felt for Eros and with the pangs of misery that stabbed her, knowing she was doomed never to see him again.

Eros, meanwhile, lay in a secret chamber, racked by the agony of the wound on his shoulder. You and I could endure with ease the slight nuisance of a lamp-oil burn, but for Eros, immortal though he was, this was a hurt inflicted by the one he loved. Such wounds take a very long time to heal, if indeed they ever do.

With Eros indisposed the world began to suffer. Youths and maidens stopped falling in love. There were no marriages. The people began to murmur and grumble. Unhappy prayers were raised to Aphrodite. When she heard them, and learned that Eros was hiding away and neglecting his duties, she became vexed. The news that a mortal girl had stolen her son's heart and caused him such harm turned her vexation to anger. But when she discovered that it was the very same mortal girl that she had once commanded Eros to humiliate, she grew livid. How could her plan to make Psyche fall in love with a pig have backfired so terribly? Well, this time she would personally and conclusively ensure the girl's downfall.

Through enchantments that she did not know were being worked upon her, Psyche found herself knocking one day on a great palace door. Terrible creatures pulled her in by the hair and cast her into a dungeon. Aphrodite herself visited her, bringing sacks of wheat, barley, millet, poppyseed, chickpeas, lentils, and beans, which she emptied onto the stone floor and stirred together.

“If you want your freedom,” she said, “separate out all the different grains and seeds and sort them into their own heaps. Finish this task before next sunrise and I will free you.”

With a laugh that—unbecomingly for a goddess of love and beauty—fell somewhere between a cackle and a screech, Aphrodite left, slamming the cell door behind her.

Psyche fell sobbing to the floor. It would be impossible to separate those seeds, even if she had a month to do it.

Just then an ant, making its away across the flagstones, was engulfed by a hot, salt tear falling from Psyche's cheek.

“Watch out!” he cried angrily. “It may be a little tear to you, but it's a deluge to me.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Psyche. “I'm afraid I didn't see you. My misery got the better of me.”

“What misery can be so great that it causes you to go about half drowning honest ants?”

Psyche explained her plight and the ant, who was of an obliging and forgiving nature, offered to help. With a cry inaudible to human ears he summoned his great family of brothers and sisters, and together they set about sorting the seeds.

With the tears drying on her cheeks Psyche watched in amazement as ten thousand cheerful ants shuttled and scuttled back and forth, sifting and separating the seeds with military precision. Well before rosy-fingered Eos had cast open the gates of dawn, the job was done and seven neat and perfect piles awaited Aphrodite's inspection.

The frustrated fury of the goddess was something to behold. Another impossible chore was instantly devised.

“You see the grove yonder, on the other side of the river?” said Aphrodite, yanking Psyche by the hair and forcing her to look out of the window. “There are sheep there, grazing and wandering unguarded. Special sheep with fleces of gold. Go there at once and bring me back a tuft of their wool.”

Psyche made her way out to the grove willingly enough, but with no intention of carrying out this second task. She resolved to use her freedom to escape not just the prison of Aphrodite's hateful curse but the prison of hateful life itself. She would throw herself into the river and drown.

But as she stood on the bank, breathing hard and summoning up the courage to dive in, one of the reeds nodded—although there wasn't a breath of breeze—and whispered to her.

“Psyche, sweet Psyche. Harrowed by great trials as you are, do not pollute my clean waters with your death. There is a way through your troubles. The sheep here are wild and violent, guarded by the most ferocious ram, whose horns could tear you open like a ripe fruit.

You see them grazing there under that plane tree on the farther bank? To approach them now would mean a swift and painful death. But if you lie down to sleep, by evening they will have moved to new pastures and you will be able to swim across to the tree where you will find tangles of golden wool clinging to its lower branches.”

That night an enraged and baffled Aphrodite cast the golden wool aside and insisted that Psyche descend to the underworld to beg a sample of beauty cream from Persephone. Since she had thought of little else but death since Eros had left her, the poor girl consented willingly and followed Aphrodite's directions to Hades, where she fully intended to stay and see out a miserable, lonely, and loveless eternity.

The Union of Love and Soul

One day a garrulous swallow told Eros about the tasks which Psyche had been set by his jealous and intemperate mother. Trying to ignore the still agonizing pain of his wound, he rose up and with a mighty effort opened his wings. He flew straight to Olympus, where he demanded an immediate audience with Zeus.

Eros told his story to an enraptured audience of fascinated Olympians. His mother had always hated Psyche. Aphrodite's dignity and honor as an Olympian had been threatened by the girl's beauty and the willingness of a handful of foolish humans to venerate the mortal maiden ahead of the immortal goddess. And so she had sent Eros to cause Psyche to fall in love with a pig. He put his case well.

Zeus sent Hermes down to the underworld to fetch Psyche and an eagle to summon Aphrodite. When they were present before the heavenly company, Zeus spoke.

“This has been an extraordinary and undignified entanglement. Aphrodite, beloved one. Your position is not threatened; it never can be. Look down at the earth and see how your name is everywhere sanctified and praised.

Eros, you have too long been a foolish, impudent, and irresponsible boy. That you love and are loved will be the making of you and may save the world from the worst excesses of your mischievous and misdirected arrows. Psyche, come and drink from my cup. This is ambrosia, and now that you have tasted it you are immortal.

Here, witnessed by us all, you will forever be yoked with Eros. Embrace your daughter-in-law, Aphrodite, and let us all be merry.”

All was laughter and delight at the wedding of Eros and Psyche. Apollo sang and played on his lyre, Pan joined in with his syrinx. Hera danced with Zeus, Aphrodite danced with Ares, and Eros danced with Psyche. And they dance together still to this very day.

96. The well-known aluminum statue by Alfred Gilbert that forms the focus of the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, is actually not of Eros but of Anteros, deliberately chosen to celebrate the selfless love that demands no return. This was considered an appropriate commemoration of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury's great philanthropic achievements in hastening the abolition of child labor, reforming lunacy laws, and so on.

97. Cupid draw back your bow

And let your arrow go

Straight to my lover's heart for me, for me...

Sam Cooke

98. The King James Bible renders the conclusion of the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (written in Greek of course) as: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." In modern translations "charity" is rendered simply as "love."

99. You might notice strong resemblances to Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, for instance.

100. Apuleius, who flourished in the second century A.D., was from North Africa but wrote in Latin and so used the names Cupid (interchangeably with Amor) for Eros, Venus for Aphrodite, and Anima for Psyche, a translation that conveys the word's sense not just of "soul" but of "breath of life"—"that which animates." If you were to translate Apuleius literally you would get a very allegorical tale indeed. "Love said to Soul, you must not look at me," "Soul fled from Love," etcetera

101. In due time Psyche gave birth to their child: a daughter, Hedone, who was to be the spirit of pleasure and sensual delight. The Romans called her Voluptas. Hedonism and voluptuousness, unsurprisingly, are hers.