Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  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 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 VULCAN, which lives on in volcanoes and vulcanized rubber.fn14

  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 honour.

  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 favour 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 mould. All things sweet, salty, bitter, sour and savoury 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.

  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-coloured goo.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Zeus, dipping his finger in with a knowledgeable and approving nod. ‘Pine resin.’fn15

  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 travelling 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 honour?

  ‘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 favour. I made no promise that such a request would be granted.’

  Melissa’s wings drooped in disappointment.fn16

  ‘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 labour 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 marvellously 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 AMBROSIA, which became the name of the specially blessed honey. Its fermented drinkable form, a kind of mead, they called NECTAR in honour of the flowers whose sweet gift it was.

  Bad Zeus

  Hera’s cup was running over – literally, at the moment, for an attentive naiad 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.fn17 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.fn18 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.

  Afterwards, 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, ageing 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 favourite 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 armour 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 effectiv
e 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 centre 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 armour. 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 armour, 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.