Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  19. The question of how long it took for immortals to be weaned, to walk, talk, and grow into adulthood is a vexed one. Some sources maintain that Zeus grew from a baby into young manhood in a single year. Divine time and mortal time seem to have run differently, just like those of dogs and humans do, or elephants and flies, for example. It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

  20. Zeus was often playful. The Romans called him Jupiter or Jove, so he had quite literally a jovial disposition. “The Bringer of Jollity,” Gustav Holst calls him in his orchestral suite The Planets.

  21. The potion was prepared by Metis and it would be nice to think that is where our word “emetic” comes from, but I don’t think it does.

  22. Although in birth order Hera had been the last to be born before Zeus, she now counted as the second child. A kind of reverse seniority operated as they emerged from Kronos’s gullet. Zeus became officially the eldest of the children while Hestia, having been the firstborn, was now considered the youngest. It makes sense if you are a god.

  THE BEGINNING

  Part Two

  CLASH OF THE TITANS

  At the summit of Mount Othrys, Kronos lay stretched out on the ground. The other Titans had not yet learned of Zeus’s rescue of his brothers and sisters, but it seemed likely that when they did they would react with furious violence. Under cover of the night Rhea and her six children slipped away, putting as great a distance between themselves and Titan country as they could.

  War, Zeus understood clearly, was inevitable. Kronos would not rest as long as his children lived, and Zeus was just as determined to dethrone his father. He heard louder than ever the sound he had heard within him since infancy: a softly insistent whisper from Moros telling him that it was his destiny to rule.

  The bloody, violent and destructive conflict that followed is known to historians as the TITANOMACHY.23 While most of the details of this ten-year war may be lost to us, we do know that the heat and fury, the explosive power and colossal energy released by the battling Titans, gods, and monsters caused mountains to bellow fire and the ground itself to quake and crack. Many islands and landmasses were formed by these battles. Whole continents shifted and reshaped themselves and much of the world as we know it now owes its geography to these seismic disturbances, to this literally earth-shaking conflict.

  In a straight fight it is almost certain that the combined strength of the Titans would have been too much for their young adversaries. They were stronger and more remorselessly savage. All but Clymene’s sons Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with Kronos, far outnumbering the small group of self-styled gods ranged against them under Zeus’s generalship. But just as Ouranos had paid dearly for his crime of imprisoning the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires inside Gaia, so Kronos was about to pay for the blunder of imprisoning them in the caverns of Tartarus.

  It was the wise and clever Metis who advised Zeus to go down and release his three one-eyed and three hundred-handed brothers. He offered them freedom in perpetuity if they would help him defeat Kronos and the Titans. They needed no further encouragement. The Gigantes too chose to side with Zeus and proved themselves brave and tireless fighters.24

  The gods battle the Titans during the ten-year conflict known as the Titanomachy.

  In the final decisive battle, the pitiless ferocity of the Hecatonchires—not to mention their surplus of heads and hands—combined quite marvelously with the wild electric power of the Cyclopes whose names were, if you recall, Brightness, Lightning, and Thunder: Arges, Steropes, and Brontes. These gifted craftsmen hammered their mastery of storms into thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, which he learned to fling with pinpoint accuracy at his enemies, blasting them to atoms. Under his direction the Hecatonchires picked up and hurled rocks at furious speed, while the Cyclopes harried and dazzled the enemy with lightning shows and terrifying peals of thunder. The hundred hands of the Hecatonchires scooped and launched, scooped and launched innumerable rocks at the enemy like so many demented windmilling catapults until, bludgeoned and battered, the Titans called for a ceasefire.

  We will leave them, their great bloodied heads bowed in full and final surrender, and take a moment to look at what else had been going on in the world while battle raged for those ten terrible years.

  THE PROLIFERATION

  The fire and fury of war had scorched, enriched, and fertilized the earth. New growth burst through to create a fresh, green world for the triumphant gods to inherit.

  If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into lifeforms of ever greater diversity, variety, and richness. The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form, and what you might call resolution. High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being.

  I like to picture the first stage of creation as an old-fashioned TV screen on which a monochrome game of Pong played. You remember Pong? It had two white rectangles for rackets and a square dot for a ball. Existence was a primitive, pixellated form of bouncing tennis. Some thirty-five to forty years later there had evolved ultra hi-res 3-D graphics with virtual and augmented reality. So it was for the Greek cosmos, a creation that began with clunky and elemental lo-res outlines now exploded into rich, varied life.

  Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing, and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

  THE MUSES

  One of the original Titans, Mnemosyne (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed.25

  We think of the Muses today as patron saints of the arts in general, and private sources of inspiration in particular. “O for a Muse of fire!” cries the Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He or she is “my muse” we might say of those who fire our creativity and spur us on to greatness. The Muses can be found in “music,” “amusements,” “museums,” and general “musings.” W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet’s ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. Sometimes she gives you gold, sometimes you read back what she has dictated and see that it is dross. The Muses’ mother might be Memory, but their father is Zeus, whose faithless inconstancy is the subject of many stories yet to come.

  But let us meet these nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to their own particular art form.

  Calliope

  Rather an undignified linguistic end meets CALLIOPE, the Muse of epic poetry. Somehow she became a steam-powered organ commonly played in fairgrounds, which are just about the only places where you will hear her name spoken today. To the Roman poet Ovid she was the chief of all the Muses. Her name means “beautiful voice,” and she gave birth to ORPHEUS, the most important musician in all Greek history. The finest poets, Homer, Virgil, and Dante included, invoked her aid when embarking on their great epics.

  Clio

  Now relegated to a model of Renault motorcar and a series of awards
in the advertising industry, CLIO or Kleio (famous) was the Muse of history. She was responsible for proclaiming, for noising abroad, and making famous the deeds of the great. America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

  The Muses: nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to her own particular art form.

  Erato

  ERATO was the Muse of lyric and love poetry. Her name is related to Eros and the erotic and she has sometimes been represented in art with a golden arrow to suggest the connection. Turtle doves and the myrtle are common symbols associated with her, as is the lute.

  Euterpe

  The Muse of music itself, the “delightful” and “joyous” EUTERPE bore, by the river god STRYMON, the Thracian king RHESUS who went on to play a very minor part in the Trojan War. Whether he gave his name to the monkeys that in turn went on to describe types of human blood factor is not agreed upon.

  Melpomene

  The tragic Muse, MELPOMENE (whose name derives from a Greek verb meaning “to celebrate with dance and song”), represented originally the chorus and then the whole of tragedy—a very important fusing of music, poetry, drama, mask, dance, song, and religious celebration. Tragic actors wore a type of thick-soled boot,26 called a “buskin” in English and the cothurnus in Greek; and Melpomene is usually depicted either holding or wearing these, as well as, of course, the famous tragic mask with its unhappy down-curved lips. Along with her sister Terpsichore, she was a mother to the Sirens, whose time will come.

  Polyhymnia

  Hymnos is the Greek for “praise,” and POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as—slightly randomly one might think—agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her “the Muse of mindfulness.” She is usually portrayed as a rather serious figure, finger held pensively to her mouth in an attitude of solemn rumination. She is another contender, along with Calliope, for mother of the hero Orpheus.

  Terpsichore

  Cheese Shop Owner: Oh, I thought you were complaining about the bouzouki player.

  Customer: Oh, heaven forbid. I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse.

  This dialogue from Monty Python’s immortal “Cheese Shop Sketch” introduced many, myself included, to TERPSICHORE, the Muse of dance.

  Thalia

  The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for “to flourish.”27 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors’ boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

  Urania

  URANIA derives her name from Ouranos, the primal god of the heavens (and a great-grandfather of the nine sisters); she is the Muse who presides over astronomy and the stars. She is also considered a figure of Universal Love, a kind of Greek version of the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit.

  THREESOMES

  The three-times-three Muses remind me to introduce more triads. Gaia and Ouranos gave birth, as we know, to three Hecatonchires, three Cyclopes, and four-times-three Titans. We have already encountered the three Erinyes, also called the Eumenides—those vengeful Furies who sprang from the bloodsoaked earth at the moment of the castration of Ouranos. Three seems to have been a very magic number to the Greeks.

  The Charites

  During the course of the ten-year Titanomachy, apocalyptic as it was, Zeus always found time to fulfill his desires. Perhaps he saw it as discharging his duty to populate the earth. It is certainly the case that Zeus liked to discharge.

  One day Zeus’s eye fell on the most beautiful of all the Oceanids—EURYNOME, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. Hidden in a cave while the battle roared outside, Eurynome bore Zeus three ravishing daughters, AGLAEA (which means “splendor”), EUPHROSYNE also known as EUTHYMIA (glee, merriment, mirth) and THALIA28 (cheerfulness). Together they were known as the CHARITES or, to the Romans, the GRATIAE. We call them the Three Graces, favored throughout history by sculptors and painters seeking an excuse to render perfect female nudes. Their sweetness of nature gave the world something to counteract the horrible malice and cruelty of the Erinyes.

  Horai

  The HORAI, or Hours, consisted of two sets of triplet sisters. These daughters of THEMIS (the embodiment of law, justice, and custom) originally personified the seasons. There seem to have been two to begin with, summer and winter, AUXESIA29 and CARPO. The classical first triad of Horai was made up by the later addition of THALLO (FLORA to the Romans), bringer of flowers and blossoms, the embodiment of spring. The Horai’s most valuable quality derived from their mother: their gift of the propitious moment, the benign relationship between natural law and the unfolding of time—what you might call “divine serendipity.”

  The second set of Horai was responsible for a more worldly kind of law and order. They were EUNOMIA, goddess of law and legislation, DIKÉ, goddess of justice and the moral order (the Roman equivalent was JUSTITIA), and EIRENE, the goddess of peace (PAX to the Romans).

  Moirai

  The three MOIRAI, or Fates, were named CLOTHO, LACHESIS, and ATROPOS. These daughters of Nyx are to be thought of as sitting round a spinning wheel: Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos (the relentless, remorseless one, literally the “un-turning”) chooses when to shear the thread and cut the life short.30 I picture them as sunken-cheeked crones, clothed in black rags, sitting in a cave cackling and nodding as they spin, but many sculptors and poets represented them as pink-cheeked maidens, dressed in white robes and smiling demurely. Their name derives from a word that means “portion” or “lot,” in the sense of “that which is allotted to you.” “It was not her portion to be loved,” or, “It was his lot to be unhappy,” are the kinds of phrases Greeks employed to describe attributes or destinies apportioned by the Moirai. Even the gods had to submit themselves to the Fates’ cruel decrees.31

  The three Moirai, or Fates. Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length, and Atropos chooses when to cut the life off.

  Keres

  These carrion daughters of Nyx were the vile and rapacious spirits of violent death. Like the Valkyries of Norse and Germanic myth they collected the souls of warriors killed in battle. Unlike those benevolent warrior goddesses however, the Keres did not escort their heroic souls to the reward of a Valhalla. They flew from bleeding body to body, greedily sucking up the blood that flowed from them; then, when each corpse was thoroughly drained, they threw it over their shoulders and moved on to the next.

  Gorgons

  The primordial sea god Pontus had by Gaia a son, PHORCYS, and a daughter, CETO. The progeny of this brother and sister were three island-dwelling sisters, the Gorgons STHENO, EURYALE, and MEDUSA. With hair of writhing venomous snakes, intense staring eyes, hideous fixed smiles, boar’s tusk teeth, clawed hands of brass and taloned feet, and scaly golden bodies, these monstrous sisters appeared frightful enough to freeze the blood. But anyone who caught a Gorgon’s eye—exchanged looks with her for just one fleeting second—would quite literally be turned instantly to stone. The word for that is “petrified,” which has come to mean scared stiff.

  SPIRITS OF AIR, EARTH, AND WATER

  These threesomes were not the only significant beings to spring into life at this time. All over the world, as the Titanomachy raged around them, nature sprites and spirits of all kinds began to multiply and claim their areas of sovereignty. One pictures them scampering for shelter and trembling behind bushes while the rocks and thunderbolts fly through the air and the earth shakes with the violence of war. Somehow these often-fragile beings survived and thrived, to enrich the world with their beauty, dedication, and charm.

  Perhaps the best known of them are the NYMPHS, a major class of minor female deities, divid
ed into clans or subspecies according to their habitats. The OREADS held court in the mountains, hills, and grottoes of Greece and its islands, while the NEREIDS (like the Oceanids from whom they descended) were denizens of the deep. NAIADS, their freshwater counterparts, were found in lakes and streams of running water, or in the reeds that fringed them and on riverbanks. Over time some water nymphs began to associate themselves with ever more specific realms. Soon there were PEGAEAE, who looked after natural springs, and POTAMEIDES, who dwelt in and around rivers.32 On land the AULONIADES kept to pastures and groves, while the LEIMAKIDES lived in meadows. Woodland spirits included light-winged DRYADS and the HAMADRYADS, sylvan nymphs whose lives were tied to the trees they made their home. When their tree died or was cut down, they died too. More specialist wood nymphs populated just apple trees or laurels. The Meliae, nymphs of the sweet manna-bearing ash tree, we have already met.

  The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.

  And so, while the natural world ripened, rippled, and replicated in this prodigiously bravura manner, seeding itself with ever more marvelous demigods and immortals, the earth trembled and shook with the violence and terror of war. But this proliferation ensured that, when the smoke and dust of battle at last cleared, the victors would rule a world filled with life, color, and character. The triumphant Zeus was set to inherit an earth, sea, and sky infinitely richer than the ones into which he had been born.