Of Gods and Men

by Daisy Dunn

  OF GODS AND MEN

  OF GODS

  AND MEN

  100 STORIES

  FROM ANCIENT GREECE & ROME

  Selected and introduced by

  Daisy Dunn

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  In the compilation and introductory material © Daisy Dunn

  The moral right of Daisy Dunn to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The list of individual titles and respective copyrights to be found on page 529 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is an anthology of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in each story are either products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB) 9781788546744

  ISBN (E) 9781788546737

  Author photo: © Horst A. Friedrichs

  Jacket art: © Amanda Short (www.amandashortdesign.com)

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Lucy Purcell

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Hesiod, Theogony, The Birth of Love

  2. Epic Cycle, Cypria, The Origins of the Trojan War

  3. Homer, Iliad, Book III, The Truce

  4. Homer, Iliad, Book XXII, Hector versus Achilles

  5. Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica, Book III, The Death of Achilles

  6. Homer, Odyssey, Book IX, The Cyclops

  7. Homer, Odyssey, Book VIII, The Song of Demodocus

  8. Homer, Odyssey, Book XXIII, And So To Bed

  9. Hesiod, Theogony & Works and Days, Prometheus and Pandora

  10. Sappho, ‘Fragment 16’, Whatever One Loves

  11. Anon., Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone and the Pomegranate Seeds

  12. Anon., The Life of Aesop, The Life of Aaesop

  13. Anon., Battle of Frogs and Mice, The Battle of the Frogs and Mice

  14. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, The Vengeance of Clytemnestra

  15. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, Educating Cyrus

  16. Herodotus, Histories, Book IV, Darius and the Scythians

  17. Herodotus, Histories, Book VII, Xerxes’ Choice

  18. Aeschylus, Persians, The Fall of the Barbarians

  19. Aelian, Various Histories, XII, The Fairest of them All

  20. Ctesias, Indica, A Beast of India

  21. Euripides, Bacchae, The Ecstasy

  22. Euripides, Hippolytus, Hippolytus and his Horses

  23. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, Euripides the Woman-hater

  24. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Learns the Truth

  25. Sophocles, Antigone, One Girl versus the Law

  26. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, The Plague at Athens

  27. Lysias, On the Murder of Eratosthenes, The Murder of Eratosthenes

  28. Plato, Symposium, The Power of Love

  29. Plato, Republic, The Ageing Process

  30. Theophrastus, Characters, Three Types

  31. Menander, Dyskolos, The Misanthrope

  32. Corinna, Fragmentary Poems, The Contest of Two Mountains

  33. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book IV, Hercules and the Twelve Labours

  34. Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander, Book III, Alexander the Great meets the Ram God

  35. Pseudo-Callisthenes, The Alexander Romance, The Death of Alexander

  36. Aratus, Phaenomena, The Constellation of the Maiden

  37. Plautus, The Merchant, The Merchant

  38. Moschus, ‘Idyll II’, Europa and the Bull

  39. Terence, The Brothers, Trouble Comes to Town

  40. Hyginus, Fabulae, Philoctetes

  41. Statius, Thebaid, Book V, Slaughter of the Husbands

  42. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, The Golden Fleece

  43. Euripides, Medea, Medea’s Revenge

  44. Catullus, ‘Poem 64’, Ariadne and Theseus

  45. Cornelius Nepos, Alcibiades, Alcibiades

  46. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book V, In the Beginning

  47. Sulpicia, Elegies, Sulpicia’s Birthday

  48. Virgil, Aeneid, Book II, The Trojan Horse

  49. Virgil, Aeneid, Book IV, Dido and Aeneas

  50. Livy, Ab urbe condita, Book I, Romulus and Remus

  51. Livy, Ab urbe condita, Book V, The Geese on the Capitol

  52. Silius Italicus, Punica, Book I, The Rise of Hannibal

  53. Catullus, ‘Poem 63’, Attis and the Mother Goddess

  54. Varro, De Re Rustica, III, A Country Villa

  55. Appian, Civil Wars, Spartacus

  56. Cicero, Pro Caelio, A Woman Scorned?

  57. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, Cicero: for his Daughter

  58. Lucan, Pharsalia, Book I, Caesar versus Pompey

  59. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, Divine Caesar

  60. Plutarch, Life of Antony, Antony and Cleopatra

  61. Attr. Galen, On Theriac to Piso, To Heal an Asp Bite

  62. Anon., Culex, The Gnat

  63. Virgil, Georgics, Book IV, Orpheus and Eurydice

  64. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, Narcissus

  65. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, Diana & Actaeon

  66. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, Pygmalion

  67. Ovid, Tristia, Book I, Ovid’s Defence

  68. Horace, Satires, II.6, The Town and the Country Mouse

  69. Phaedrus, Aesop’s Fables, The Emperor’s Slave

  70. Suetonius, Life of Caligula, The Riches of Caligula

  71. attr. Seneca the Younger, Apocolocyntosis, The Pumpkinification of Emperor Claudius

  72. Tacitus, Agricola, The Story of Britain

  73. Tacitus, Annals, The Great Fire of Rome

  74. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, Dinner at Trimalchio’s

  75. Pliny the Younger, Letters, 6.16, The Eruption of Vesuvius

  76. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, On Lampstands, The Discovery of Glass, On the Dolphin

  77. Seneca the Younger, Hercules Furens, The Madness of Hercules

  78. Josephus, Jewish War, Book III, The Siege of Jotapata

  79. Juvenal, Satires, IV, The Colossal Turbot

  80. Juvenal, Satires, XV, Cannibals in Egypt

  81. Statius, Achilleid, Book I, Achilles Becomes a Girl

  82. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, The Importance of Breast Milk

  83. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, Do It Yourself

  84. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, Androcles and the Lion

  85. Apollodorus, The Library, Book II, Perseus and Medusa

  86. Apollodorus, The Library, Book I, War on the Giants

  87. Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses, The Metamorphosis of Cerambus

  88. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, First Love

  89. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, A Sham Sacrifice

  90. Lucian, Lucian: His Life or His Dream, The Dream of Lucian

  91. Pseudo-
Lucian, Erotes, Praxiteles and the Goddess

  92. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Cupid and Psyche

  93. Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, A Picture of Phaëthon

  94. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, The Wedding Feast

  95. Ausonius, Cupid Crucified, Cupid Crucified

  96. Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, A Classics Student

  97. Claudian, ‘Idyll 1’, The Phoenix

  98. Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Book VII, The Twice-Born God

  99. Procopius, Secret History, Intrigues at the Palace

  100. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A Meeting with Lady Philosophy

  Acknowledgements

  Extended Copyright

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  There are a few things to be done before the stories can begin. A slave must fetch a jug of water and pour it into a silver basin. The visitors shall wash their hands. A table is to be pulled up beside them and laid with bread and meat. Everyone shall eat and drink until they’re full. Then, and only then, will the hosts ask the guests about themselves. Who are they? Where have they come from? What is their story?

  When I read Homer’s Odyssey for the first time, more than twenty years ago, what struck me most was how trusting people could be. The most civilized characters in the poem welcome strangers into their homes before they know so much as their names. As a child I found this extremely worrying. What if they were thieves? What if they were murderers? What if they ate all the bread and left their hosts wanting? Students of Homer are taught that such generosity is in keeping with established laws of hospitality: treat strangers as if they are your friends. But over the years I’ve come to see these acts as also redolent of the fact that the Greeks considered a good story worth waiting for. The bread-and-basin rituals outlined above usually serve as a prelude to storytelling. Odysseus, tossed across the sea after his raft is shattered in a sea-storm, washes up on an island called Scheria, where he is welcomed into a royal palace, fed, and prompted to speak. Relieved that he has finally reached civilization, he settles in to tell his hosts of the terrifying beings he has encountered on his journey home from Troy: one-eyed Cyclopes and singing Sirens, sleepy Lotus-Eaters and cannibalistic Laestrygonians, tricksy temptresses Circe and Calypso, the whims of tempestuous gods.

  Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are at once products and celebrations of a history of storytelling. Two of the oldest works of literature from the Western world, they were passed down orally before being written down in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and continued to be performed down the centuries. It was in the course of assembling this anthology that I came to appreciate just how richly layered with stories they are. The Odyssey gives us stories as told by Odysseus, stories sung to Odysseus, stories told of Odysseus as he wends his way home to Ithaca. Many of the men who fight at Troy in the Iliad are skilled tellers of tales, not least of all Achilles, the mightiest fighter for the Greeks.

  The richness and variety of Homer’s storytelling were my inspiration as I set about compiling this collection of tales from antiquity. Homer marks the beginning but is also the thread that runs through so much of the literature of Greece and Rome, from the ‘Epic Cycle’ of poems which developed in his wake to provide continuations of his stories, to the tragedies of fifth-century BC Greece, and the poetry of the Roman Empire. Time and again classical authors challenged themselves to explore what became of Homer’s heroes after the Trojan War. It is partly as a result of this that ancient stories are seldom self-contained. Sharing common roots, such as Homer or the myths of his near contemporary, a poet from central Greece named Hesiod, they frequently weave into and out of each other like trees in a forest. A great number of the stories included in this anthology collide and overlap, even when separated by hundreds of years.

  One of the things that makes ancient tales so mesmerizing is the possibility that they were founded in reality – or at least contain a kernel of truth. When stories are as old as the ones in this collection it feels only natural to imagine the scenarios that might have inspired them. Did anything like the Trojan War take place? Was there ever a man who unwittingly fell in love with his own mother, as Oedipus did in Greek tragedy? So many characters seem thrillingly real. We cannot help but feel Oedipus’ pain in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, as he begins to comprehend who he really is. When a drunk man suggests to him that his father is not really his father, Oedipus questions his parents: ‘They were indignant at the taunt and that comforted me – and yet the man’s words rankled’. The line, elegantly rendered by W. B. Yeats, captures an important moment in Oedipus’ journey of self-discovery. The Oedipus story is dire and extreme but strangely relatable.

  The line between story and history was frequently indeterminate. Ancient history books brim with accounts which are, to our eyes, patently mythical. Herodotus, a writer born in Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in Turkey) in the fifth century BC, earned the sobriquet ‘Father of History’ for his celebrated Histories of Greece’s wars with Persia in spite of his numerous flights of fancy. Herodotus wove into his accounts what was known in Greek as ‘logoi’ – stories, spoken things, words which might be fictional or might equally be factual. While there is no doubt that the Persian Wars took place, and that much of what Herodotus wrote of them is true, there are also passages in his books which read like pure fiction. Inspired by Herodotus, I have included in this anthology a number of stories from the ancient history books, regardless of whether they are wholly or only partially fictional. It can be so difficult to separate fact from fiction that there is much to be said for enjoying passages in these books on their own terms as vivid stories.

  The Romans were particularly partial to this blending of history and story as they sought to establish their own place in the world. In order to trace the origins of their people to the heroes of Homer’s epics, they developed the myth that Aeneas, one of the Trojans who fought in the Iliad, had led a band of refugees free from burning Troy to found a new home in Italy. The Aeneid, a Latin epic by the poet Virgil, provided the Romans with an exciting foundation story. Even Roman historians such as Livy were willing to incorporate it into their accounts of Rome’s past. Such was the power of the story.

  Myth, the basis for much storytelling, was the common language through which the ancients defined themselves. Even scientists who rejected myths and the gods who populated them found that they were a useful means of communicating their ideas. Lucretius, a Roman philosopher and atomicist of the first century BC, drew on stories surrounding the love goddess Venus to explain his theories of genesis on earth. The ideas in his account are very different from those proffered by Hesiod in the seventh century BC, but the mythology surrounding Venus provided a link between ancient Greece and late-Republican Rome.

  We speak of ‘The Greeks and Romans’ even though the Greek and Roman world extended far beyond Greece and Rome. I hope this anthology will reveal something of its scale. Included are stories by authors from Alexandria and Panopolis (Akhmim) in Egypt, Carthage and Libya in North Africa, Samosata (Samsat), Smyrna (İzmir) and Halicarnassus (Bodrum) in what is now Turkey, Lesbos, Rhodes and Sicily, and an account by the Jewish historian Josephus, who defected to the Romans in the Jewish War of the first century AD. I’ve frequently broken the chronological arrangement of the stories in this anthology in order to reflect the development of themes between authors across time and space. The superiority of the countryside over the city, for instance, is a theme that occupies the fables of Aesop, who is thought to have been born in the sixth century BC, a second-century BC comedy by a Carthage-born former slave, and the Latin poetry of Horace.

  The two youngest stories in this collection sit on the cusp of a new world. One is taken from the rather saucy mid-sixth-century AD Secret History by an historian named Procopius. The other comes from the Consolation of Boethius, who was born in Rome at around the same time the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed
. These texts, though written by Christians, are still pagan enough to warrant a place in a collection of classical literature. For Boethius, in particular, it was almost a case of clinging on to the achievements of classicism lest they fell with Rome itself.

  This anthology features many of the celebrated writers of Greece and Rome – but not every single one of them. My guiding principle has been to select from only such works as provide interesting and arresting stories. Classical literature, it must be said, requires us to widen our expectations of what a story is. The short story, for instance, was not a genre the Greeks and Romans recognised. Even the novel was a late development and comparatively rare. Far more common was literature written in dialogue form: tragedies, comedies, philosophical discussions, legal speeches, all of which typically extended to thousands of lines. This means that, while this anthology contains a number of complete, standalone stories, it also features plenty of extracts from longer works, some of which conform more readily than others to what we may imagine a ‘story’ to be.

  Every piece of literature is different and demands its own treatment. I found that an ancient novel, for example, can be précised in a series of episodes. A speech in a play often tells a story in itself; it can hold its own. A section of dialogue can provide a window onto a longer tale. I have also selected a few stories from ancient books of myths told in summary. These are typically very short. Extracting from something longer, such as the Aeneid or Argonautica – an epic tale of Jason and the Argonauts – has its challenges, but I have tried through my selections to give a flavour of the whole. I decided not to include fragments from ancient anthologies and the Greek lyric poets on the grounds that they seldom of themselves tell satisfyingly complete or accessible stories, but broke my own rules on a couple of occasions, primarily to give a taste of some of the women writers of antiquity. So little of their work survives that a fragmentary poem by Sappho, while not possessed of the liveliest story, is the more tantalizing for its rarity.

  The principal joy of working on this anthology has been the opportunity to read the breadth of Greek and Latin literature and moreover to discover the most appealing translations of the hundred stories I liked most. The pages ahead contain a mixture of the familiar and the esoteric. Samuel Butler’s translation of Homer’s story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, ‘a horrid creature, not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain’, has an early starring role. While following the Greek closely, Butler was unafraid of omitting the odd word (for example ‘sitophagus’ – ‘corn-eating’ – before ‘human being’) to maintain the story’s pace.