by Stephen Fry
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 honor? “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 favor. I made no promise that such a request would be granted.”
Melissa’s wings drooped in disappointment.54
“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 labor 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 marvelously 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 honor 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.55 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.56 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.
Afterward, 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, aging, 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 favorite 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 armor 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 effective 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 center 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 armor. 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 armor, 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.
Equipped with armor, shield, spear, and plumed helmet, Athena rises out of the head of her father, Zeus.
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 ATHENA57 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 honor.58
In Rome she was worshipped as MINERVA, but without really that special personal connection that the Greeks felt for her. Her favored 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.59
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 favorite 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.
Pallas Athena, goddess of war
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 theaters 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. Forever after, she bore Pallas’s name as a sorrowful token of her enduring affection and remorse.
Athena, like Demeter, remained untouched by man.60 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 counselor, a kind of consigliere, forever 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,61 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 counselor.”