Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  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 practising 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 straight away 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.

  Temptation loses much of its power when removed from sight. Pandora went to the small back garden and – next to a sundial that a neighbour 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 honour. 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; DYSNOMIA, Anarchy; PSEUDEA, Lies; NEIKEA, Quarrels; AMPHILOGIAI, Disputes; MAKHAI, Wars; HYSMINAI, Battles; ANDROKTASIAI and PHONOI, Manslaughters 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 for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.fn3

  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 PYRRHA. Prometheus too fathered a child, a son called DEUCALION, 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,fn4 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, LYCAON, 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 NYCTIMUS 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.fn5 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 artefacts, so that when the deluge finally receded and their vessel was able to settle on Mount Parnassus they could survive in the post-diluvian mud and slime.fn6

  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.fn7

  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 favourite 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 onwards 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.

  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 humour. Though, as the human population grew, only the most important dead were granted the honour 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.fn8 When he had taken his fee, Charon would pull the dead soul aboard and pole his rust-coloured punt or skiff over the black, Stygian waters to the disembarkation stage, hell’s muster point.fn9 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 aeacus, Judges of the Underworld. They decided whether an individual had lived a heroic, average or punishably wicked life.fn10

  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.fn11 Later descriptions place the Elysian Fields within the kingdom of Hades itself.fn12 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 SISYPHUS, 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 EURYNOMOS 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’ 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 AI 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.