Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  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 ATHENAfn19 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 honour.fn20

  In Rome she was worshipped as MINERVA, but without really that special personal connection that the Greeks felt for her. Her favoured 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.fn21

  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 favourite 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.

  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 theatres 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. For ever after she bore Pallas’s name as a sorrowful token of her enduring affection and remorse.

  Athena, like Demeter, remained untouched by man.fn22 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 counsellor, a kind of consigliere, for ever 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,fn23 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 counsellor’.

  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.fn24 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 honour 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 honour and family, lineage and legacy.

  Denied 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,fn25 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 Cynthos, 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.fn26 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 honour 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?’

  ‘Of course, my dear.’

  ‘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 honour of the mountainside of her birth, as CYNTHIA. 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.

  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.fn27

  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 belly-button, its spiritual centre 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 honour 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 despatched 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.