Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

by Stephen Fry

  He felt both sick and supercharged with life at one and the same time. He jumped up and down. He shouted out loud. He groaned. He laughed. He sang. He swore. He exhibited all the wild, deranged, furious, euphoric and despairing behaviours of a young man tempestuously and frighteningly in love.

  At last he threw himself at his Galatea, encircled her with his arms and with his legs, nuzzled himself against her, kissing and pawing and rubbing until everything inside him exploded.

  The madness that consumed his soul did not abate after that first frenzy. He now devoted himself to Galatea with all the ardour and attentive tenderness of a true lover. He called her affectionate names. He went out to the market and bought her gowns, garlands and trinkets. He adorned her wrists with bangles and bracelets and her throat with necklaces and pendants of jasper and pearl. He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

  His love was passionate and generous but – except to his fevered imagination in its most optimistic moods – wholly unreciprocated. This was a one-way wooing and in the depths of his bursting heart he knew it.

  The day came for the festival of Aphrodite. Pygmalion kissed the cold but lovely Galatea goodbye and left the house. All of Cyprus and thousands of visitors from the mainland had gathered in Amanthus for this annual holiday. The great square in front of the temple was crowded with pilgrims who came to pray to the goddess of love and beauty for success in matters of the heart. Garlanded heifers were sacrificed, the air was thick with frankincense and every column of the temple had been entwined with flowers. The prayers came thick, fast and loud.

  ‘Send me a wife.’

  ‘Send me a husband.’

  ‘Improve my performance.’

  ‘Slow me down.’

  ‘Take these feelings away from me.’

  ‘Make Menander fall for me.’

  ‘Stop Xanthippe from cheating on me.’

  Beseeching cries and wails filled the air.

  Pygmalion shouldered blindly through the press of pedlars and petitioners. He reached the temple steps, bribed the guards, coaxed the priestesses and at last was led into the inner sanctum where only the richest and most influential citizens were allowed to pray directly in front of a great statue of Aphrodite. He fell to his knees before it.

  ‘Great goddess of love,’ he whispered. ‘It is said that you grant wishes to ardent lovers on this your festal day. Grant the wish of a poor artist who begs that you might …’

  At the altar rail important men and women were babbling their imprecations to Aphrodite, and although the chances of Pygmalion being overheard were slim, some kind of modesty or shame stopped him from uttering his real desire.

  ‘… poor artist who begs that you might provide him with a real living girl just like the one he fashioned from marble. Grant this, dread goddess, and you will have won a devoted slave whose life and art will be devoted always to the service and praise of love.’

  An amused Aphrodite saw through the prayer. She knew perfectly well what Pygmalion really wanted. The candles on the altar in front of him flared up and leapt in the air nine times.

  Pygmalion flew home. To his dying day he could not tell you the way he went or how long he took. He may have knocked over one person or forty as he charged through the crowds.

  The lifeless statue is lying on its gorgeous couch just as he left it. Never has the carved figure seemed less accessible or more icily remote. Yet, with the faith and demented fury of the lovestruck, Pygmalion kneels down and kisses the cold brow. He kisses it once, twice … twenty times. Then he kisses its neck, its cheeks … and, wait! Is it just that the fire of his kisses has warmed the marble, or can he feel a growing heat beneath his hungry lips? He can! Beneath the touch of his mouth the unyielding stone is easing into flesh, into quick, warm delicious flesh!

  Again and again he kisses, and as the wax from the honeycomb softens and melts in the sun, so the cold ivory of his beloved softens from each gentle caress of mouth and hand.

  He is amazed. He cannot believe it. He puts a finger to the veins of her arm and feels the surge and pulse of hot human blood! He stands. Can it be true? Can it be true? He cradles Galatea in his arms and feels her frame expanding as she takes in her first breaths of air. It is true! She lives!

  ‘Aphrodite I bless you! Aphrodite greatest of all the gods, I thank you and pledge myself to serve you always!’

  He bends down to meet warm lips that eagerly return his kisses. Soon the pair are in each other’s arms laughing, weeping, sighing and loving.

  Nine times the moon changes before the union of this happy pair is blessed with the birth of a child, a boy they call PAPHOS, and whose name will be given to the town in which Pygmalion and Galatea live out the remainder of their loving and contented lives.

  Just once or twice in Greek myth mortal lovers are granted a felicitous ending. It is that hope, perhaps, that spurs us on to believe that our quest for happiness will not be futile.fn4

  Hero and Leander

  The Greek Sea, or ‘Hellespont’, is called the Dardanelles in our age and is best known as the scene of some of the most furious fighting around Gallipoli during the Great War. As part of the natural boundary that separates Europe and Asia, these straits have always been strategically important for war and trade. Despite the size of the symbolic gap between them, they are in reality narrow enough to be crossed by a strong swimmer.

  LEANDER’sfn5 home was in Abydos, on the Asian side of the Hellespont, but he was in love with a priestess of Aphrodite called HERO, who lived in a tower in Sestos on the European side. They had met during the yearly festival of Aphrodite. Many youths had been smitten by ‘the meadow of roses in her limbs’fn6 and her face as pure as Selene, but it was only the handsome Leander who awoke a like passion in her. In the brief time they had together at the festival they hatched a plan that would allow them to see each other once they were back home and separated by the straits. Each night Hero was to set a lamp in the window of her tower and Leander, eyes fixed on this point of light in the darkness, would breast the currents of the Hellespont, climb up and be with her.

  As a priestess, Hero was sworn to celibacy, but Leander persuaded her that the physical consummation of their love would be a holy thing, a consecration of which Aphrodite would approve. In fact, he said, it was surely an insult to devote herself to the goddess of love and yet remain a virgin. It would be like worshipping Ares but refusing to fight. This excellent argument won Hero over and each night the lamp was lit, the straits swum and love made. They were the happiest couple in all the world.

  All summer long this blissful state of affairs prevailed, but summer all too soon turned to autumn and before long the equinoctial gales blew. One night the three winds Boreas, Zephyrus and Notus – the North, West and South Winds – howled together, sending blusters and gusts all around, one of which blew out the lamp in Hero’s window. With nothing to guide him across the Hellespont and with the winds stirring up the waves into heaving walls of water, Leander lost his way, got into trouble and drowned.

  Hero waited up all night for her lover. The next morning, as soon as Eos had cast open the gates of dawn and there was light enough to see, she looked down to see Leander’s broken body spread out over the rocks beneath her tower. In an agony of despair she leapt from her window and dashed herself on those same rocks.fn7

  Since Leander many others have swum the Hellespont. None more notably than the poet Byron, who managed it on 3 May 1810 – at the second attempt. In his journal he proudly recorded a time of one hour and ten minutes. ‘Did it with little difficulty,’ he noted. ‘I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.’

  Lord Byron swam in the company of one Lieutenant William Ekenhead of the Royal Marines who obtained his own share of immortality with his inclusion in this stanza from By
ron’s mock epic masterpiece, Don Juan. Praising his hero’s prowess in swimming across the Guadalquivir in Seville, Byron writes of Juan:

  He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,

  As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)

  Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.fn8

  Shakespeare seems to have been especially fond of the ancient lovers’ story, giving a character in Much Ado About Nothing the name Hero and putting these wonderfully cynical anti-romantic words into the mouth of Rosalind in As You Like It:

  Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

  Arion and the Dolphin

  The Greeks, like all great civilizations, set a great price on music – placing it so high in the arts that it took its name from all nine of the daughters of Memory. Music festivals and music prizes, so ubiquitous a feature of our cultural life today, were quite as important in the Greek world.

  Few earned a finer reputation in their lifetime as singer, minstrel, bard, poet and musician than ARION, from Methymna on the island of Lesbos.fn1 He was the son of Poseidon and the nymph ONCAEA, but despite this parentage he chose to devote his musical talent to the celebration and praise of the god Dionysus. His instrument of choice was the kithara, a variation of the lyre.fn2 He is accepted everywhere as the inventor of the poetic form known as the dithyramb, a wild choral hymn dedicated to wine, carnival, ecstasy and delight.

  With his dreamy brown eyes, sweet voice and bewitching ability to cause the toes to tap and hips to rotate, Arion soon became something of an idol around the Mediterranean world. His patron and most enthusiastic supporter was the tyrant of Corinth, PERIANDERfn3 and it was he who found out about a big music festival being held in Tarentum, a prosperous port city set in the instep of Italy’s heel. Periander gave Arion the money to get himself across the sea and take part in the competitive elements of the festival on the condition that he agreed to split the prize money on his return.

  The outward journey was uneventful. Arion arrived in Tarentum, entered the competitions and easily won first prize in every category. The judges and members of the public had never heard such thrilling and original music. A treasure chest of silver, gold, ivory, precious stones and exquisitely wrought musical instruments was his reward. In gratitude for so generous a prize Arion gave a free concert for the townspeople the following day.

  The Tarentum region was famous for the great wolf-spiders commonly found in the countryside all around. The locals called them, after their town, ‘tarantulas’. Arion had heard that tarantula venom could provoke hysterical frenzy and so he improvised for the crowd a variation on his wild dithyrambs that he called a tarantella. The delirious rhythms of this folk dancefn4 maddened the excitable Tarentines, but towards the end he tamed them with a medley of his softest, most romantic airs. By the early hours he could have had his pick of any girl, boy, man or woman in southern Italy and it is reported that, like the successful musician he was, he did.

  A large crowd was there to see Arion off the next morning, many of the people blowing kisses and a good few sobbing their hearts out. He and his luggage, including the box of treasure, were rowed out to sea in a tender, where a small but serviceable brig crewed by a sea-captain and nine civilian sailors was standing off. Arion was soon comfortably settled aboard. The crew hoisted sail and the captain set a course for Corinth.

  Overboard

  As soon as land was out of sight and they were in the open sea, Arion sensed that something was wrong. He was used to being stared at – he was after all as outrageously beautiful as he was talented – but the looks that were being directed at him by the crew were of a different order. Days passed in this sullen and threatening atmosphere and he grew more and more uncomfortable. There was something in the sailors’ eyes that resembled lust, but suggested a darker purpose. What could be wrong? Then one hot afternoon, the ugliest and meanest looking of the sailors approached him.

  ‘What you got in that chest you’re sitting on, boy?’

  Of course. Arion’s heart sank. That would account for it. The sailors had heard tell of his treasure. He supposed they wanted some of it, but he was damned if he was going to share his hard-won prize with anyone but Periander. He had earlier planned in his mind to tip the crew generously at the end of the voyage, but now his heart hardened.

  ‘My musical instruments,’ he replied. ‘I am a kitharode.’

  ‘You’re a what?’

  Arion shook his head sorrowfully and repeated slowly, as if to a child. ‘I – play – the – kith – ara.’

  Such a mistake.

  ‘Oh – do – you? Well – play – us – a – tune – then.’

  ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ The captain of the brig approached.

  ‘Snotty kid says he’s a musician but won’t play. Says he’s got a kithara in that box of his.’

  ‘Well now, I’m sure you won’t mind showing it to us, will you, young man?’

  The full ship’s complement had circled round him now.

  ‘I – I’m not feeling well enough to play. Perhaps tonight I’ll be in better shape.’

  ‘Why don’t you go below and rest in the shade?’

  ‘N-no, I prefer the fresh air.’

  ‘Seize him, lads!’

  Rough hands lifted Arion up as easily as if he were a newborn puppy. ‘Let me go! Leave it alone. That’s not your property!’

  ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘I’ve … I’ve lost it.’

  ‘Find it, boys.’

  ‘No, no! Please I beg you …’

  The key was easily found and wrenched from round Arion’s neck. Low whistles and murmurs arose as the captain loosened the latch and raised the lid. Light from the glitter of gold and flash of gemstones danced on the sailors’ greedy faces. Arion knew he was lost.

  ‘I am quite p-prepared to sh-share my treasure with you …’

  The sailors seemed to find the offer highly amusing and laughed heartily.

  ‘Kill him,’ said the captain, taking out a long rope of pearls and holding it up to the light.

  The ugliest sailor took out a knife and approached Arion with an evil smile.

  ‘Please, please … may I – may I at least sing one last song? My threnody, my own funeral dirge. You owe me that, surely? The gods would punish you if you dared send me to my death without a cathartic obsequy of some kind …’

  ‘I’ll stop you spouting those bloody words,’ snarled the ugly sailor, drawing closer.

  ‘No, no,’ said the captain. ‘He does have a point. We’ll let our Cygnus sing his swan song. I suppose you’ll need this lyre.’ He fished the kithara from the chest and gave it to Arion who tuned it, closed his eyes and began to improvise. He dedicated the song to his father Poseidon.

  ‘Lord of the Oceans,’ he sang, ‘King of Tides, Earth Shaker, beloved father. Often have I neglected you in my prayers and sacrifices, but you, O great one, will not neglect your son. Lord of the Oceans, King of Tides, Earth Shaker, beloved –’

  Without warning, clutching his kithara tightly to him, Arion leapt overboard and dropped into the waves. The last thing he heard was the laughter of the crew and the captain’s dry voice: ‘That was easy! Now for the spoils.’

  If any of them had bothered to look down, a remarkable sight would have met their eyes. Arion had plunged below the surface and was fully intending to open his mouth and let the seawater in without a struggle. Someone had told him that drowning is a sweet and pleasant death, a slow passing into sleep, as long as you don’t fight it. Choking is a terrible panicky nightmare, but true drowning is a serene and painless release. So he had been tol
d. Despite this comforting knowledge, Arion kept his mouth firmly clamped, and with bulging cheeks he kicked at the water, hugging his kithara.

  And then, just as his lungs were ready to burst, something amazing happened. He felt himself being pushed upwards. Pushed hard and fast. He was surging through the water. He had broken the surface! He could breathe! What was going on? It must be a dream. The rush of the water, the bubbles and spray, the tilting, rocking horizon, the booming in his ears, the soaking, the roar and the dazzle – it all prevented him from understanding what was happening until he dared look down and through stinging eyes saw that … that … he was on the back of a dolphin! A dolphin! He was riding it over the waves! But its skin was slippery and he began to slide off. The dolphin barrelled and twisted and Arion was somehow righted again. The animal had deliberately manoeuvred to keep him safe! Would it mind if he stretched out one hand and held onto the dorsal fin, much as a horseman might grip the horn of a saddle? The dolphin did not mind, indeed it bucked a little, as if in approval, and increased its speed through the water. Arion slowly reached for the strap of his kithara and swung the instrument behind him so that he could enjoy the ride with two hands on the fin.

  The brig was out of sight now. The sun shone down, dolphin and man ploughed furrows through the sea, sending up plumes of iridescent spray. Where were they going? Did the dolphin know?

  ‘Hey, dolphin. Set your course for the Gulf of Corinth. I’ll direct you when we get there.’

  The dolphin gave a series of squeaks and clicks that seemed to indicate understanding and Arion laughed. On and on they went, chasing the never-nearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed.

  At length they reached the gulf. The dolphin negotiated this busy shipping lane with graceful, zipping ease. Sailors on the busy barques, barges and small boats turned to stare at the remarkable sight of a young man riding a dolphin. Arion steered on the fins with gentle tugs this way and that and they did not stop until they had reached the royal docks.