Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  “I want to drive your horses.”

  “My horses?” said Apollo, not quite understanding. “Drive them? What do you mean?”

  “I want to steer the sun-chariot across the sky. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh no,” said Apollo, a smile spreading across his face. “No, no, no! Don’t be silly. No one can do that.”

  “You promised!”

  “Phaeton, Phaeton. It’s brave and splendid even to dream of doing such a thing. But no one, no one drives those animals but me.”

  “You swore by Styx!”

  “Zeus himself couldn’t control them! They are the strongest, wildest, most headstrong and unmanageable stallions ever born. They answer to my touch and mine alone. No, no. You can’t ask such a thing.”

  “I have asked it. And you have sworn!”

  “Phaeton!” The other eleven gods would have been astonished to hear such a pleading, desperate note in Apollo’s voice. “I beg of you! Anything else. Gold, food, power, knowledge, love . . . You name it, it’s yours in perpetuity. But not this. Never this.”

  “I have asked and you have sworn,” the stubborn youth replied.

  Apollo bowed his golden head and cursed inwardly.

  Oh, those gods and their quick tongues. Oh, those mortals and their foolish dreams. Will either ever learn?

  “Right. Let’s go and meet them then. But know this,” Apollo said as they neared the stables and the horsey smell grew stronger and sharper in Phaeton’s nostrils. “You can change your mind at any time. I won’t think any the less of you. Frankly, I’ll think a great deal the more of you.”

  At the god’s approach the four stallions, white with golden manes, stamped and shifted in their stalls.

  “Hey, Pyrois! Whoa there, Phlegon! Hush now, Aeos! Quietly, Aethon!” Apollo called to each in turn. “All right, come forward, boy, let them get to know you.”

  Phaeton had never seen such beautiful horses. Their eyes flashed gold and their hoofs struck sparks on the flagstones. He was filled with awe, but felt too a sudden stab of fear which he tried to play off as thrilled anticipation.

  Lined up before the massive gates of dawn was a golden quadriga, the great chariot to which the four stallions would soon be harnessed. A quiet female figure in saffron robes hurried past. Phaeton caught from her a fragrance which he could not name but which made him dizzy with delight.

  “That was Eos,” said Apollo. “It will soon be time for her to open the gates.”

  Phaeton knew all about Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She was called rhododaktylos—the “rosy-fingered one”—and admired everywhere for her sweetness and soft beauty.

  As he helped his father walk the stallions forward and into position at the head of the chariot, Phaeton suddenly felt himself pushed roughly aside.

  “What is this mortal doing?”

  A huge figure dressed in shining buff leather armor had taken the bridle of all four horses at once and was leading them forward.

  “Ah, Helios, there you are,” said Apollo. “This is Phaeton. My son Phaeton.”

  “So?”

  Phaeton knew that Helios was the brother of Eos and the moon goddess Selene and assisted Apollo in his daily duties with the chariot. Apollo seemed slightly awkward in the Titan’s presence.

  “Well, the thing is, Phaeton will be driving the chariot today.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, he might as well learn now, don’t you think?”

  “You are joking?”

  “I sort of promised.”

  “Well, sort of unpromise then.”

  “Helios, I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  Helios stamped his feet and gave a roar that caused the horses to rear and whinny. “You’ve never once let me drive, Apollo! Never. How many times have I asked and how many times have you told me I’m not ready? And now you let this . . . this shrimp take the reins?”

  “Helios, you will do as you’re told,” said Apollo. “I have spoken and so I have . . . er, spoken.”

  Apollo took the four leather traces from Helios and lifted Phaeton up and into the seat of the chariot. Helios gave a shout of laughter as he saw the youth slide back and forth.

  “He rolls in it like a little pea!” he said with a surprisingly high-pitched giggle.

  “He’ll be fine. Now, Phaeton. These reins—they are your lines of communication with the horses. They know the way, they run this course every day, but you must show them that you are their master, you understand?”

  Phaeton nodded eagerly.

  Something of his nervous excitement and Helios’s fury seemed to have been picked up by the horses, who bucked and snorted restlessly.

  “The most important thing,” continued Apollo, “is to fly neither too high nor too low. A middle course between the sky and the earth, yes?”

  Again Phaeton nodded.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot. Hold out your hands . . .” Apollo took a jar and poured oil from it into Phaeton’s outstretched palms. “Anoint yourself with that all over. It will protect you from the heat and light generated by the stallions as they gallop through the air. The earth below will be warmed and lit as you go, so keep a straight line westward toward the Garden of the Hesperides. It’s a twelve-hour drive. Be steady. Remember—the horses know. Call them by name, Aeos and Aethon, Pyrois and Phlegon.”

  As Apollo said their names Phaeton saw their ears prick up. “But it’s not too late, boy. You’ve seen them, you’ve handled them, I’ll give you gold sculptures of them cast by Hephaestus to take home. That should satisfy your school friends.”

  Another high-pitched titter from Helios sent a flush to Phaeton’s cheek.

  “No,” he said stiffly. “You gave a promise and so did I.”

  DAYBREAK

  As Phaeton spoke Eos came forward in a bright cloud of pearl and rose. She bowed smilingly to Apollo and Helios, looked a puzzled question at the blushing Phaeton in the chariot, and took up her position at the gates of dawn.

  To a traveler looking eastward and upward at the clouds in which the Palace of the Sun was hidden, the first sign that Eos was at work always came in the form of a flush of coral pink that suffused the sky. As she threw the gates wider, that soft pink hardened into a gleam of gold which grew ever brighter and fiercer.

  To Phaeton, inside the palace, the effect was reversed: The doors opened to reveal the dark world beyond, illumined only by the silver gleam from Eos and Helios’s sister, the moon goddess Selene, reaching the end of her nightly course. As Eos pushed the gates farther open Phaeton saw pink and gold light radiate outward, drowning the darkness of the night. As if that were a signal the four horses pricked their ears, shuddered, and reared. Phaeton was jerked back and the chariot beneath him began to roll forward.

  “Remember, boy,” shouted Apollo, “don’t panic. A firm hand. Don’t snatch at the reins. Just let the horses know you’re in control. Everything will be fine.”

  “After all,” cried Helios as the chariot began to lift from the ground, “what can possibly go wrong?” His squeals of falsetto laughter stung Phaeton like a lash.

  Switching points of view again to the traveler looking eastward from the road below, the gold gleam is now a great ball of fire that is becoming harder and harder to observe without squinting. The short flush of dawn is over and the day has begun.

  THE DRIVE

  Apollo’s horses charged upward, pawing the air. All was well. They knew what they were doing. They reached a certain height, leveled out, and charged forward. This was easy.

  Phaeton pulled himself upright, careful not to strain the traces, and looked around. He could see the curve that marked the separation of blue sky and star-filled darkness. He could see the effect of the light blazing out from the chariot. He was insulated, somehow magically safe from its heat and glare, but great clouds melted and fizzed into vapor as they approached. He looked down and saw the long shadows of mountains and trees contract as they flew forward. He saw the wrinkled sea send back a million sci
ntillations of light, and he saw the sparkle of dew rising into a shimmering mist as they neared the coast of Africa. Somewhere, just west of Nilus, Epaphus would be holidaying on the beach. Oh, this was going to be the greatest triumph ever!

  As the coastline swung more clearly into view Phaeton pulled at the reins, trying to nose down Aeos, the lead horse on his left-hand side. Aeos had perhaps been thinking of other things, of golden straw or pretty mares, he had certainly not been imagining a tug to pull him off course. In a panic he shied and dived, pulling the other horses with him. The chariot bucked in the air and plummeted straight for the earth. In vain Phaeton tugged the reins, which had somehow become tangled in his hands. The green earth screamed toward him and he saw his certain death. He took one final desperate yank at the reins, and at the very last minute—either in response to that pull or as an instinctive move to save themselves—the four steeds swooped upward and galloped blindly north. But not before Phaeton saw with terror and dismay that the terrible heat of the sun-chariot had set the earth on fire.

  As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched.

  He was now terribly out of control. The horses knew for certain that the familiar firm hand of Apollo was not there to guide them. Was it wild joy at their freedom or panic at the lack of control that maddened the four? Having plunged down close enough to make the earth catch fire now they leapt up so far toward the purple curve that separated the sky from the stars that the world below grew cold and dark. The sea itself froze and the land turned to ice.

  Phaeton had begged his father Apollo to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky.

  Thrashing, swaying, swooping, and careering onward, without any control or sense of direction, the chariot bounced and bucketed in the air like a leaf in a storm. Far below, the people of the earth looked up in wonder and alarm. Phaeton was screaming at the horses, begging them, threatening them, jerking at the reins . . . but all in vain.

  THE FALLOUT

  On Olympus news of the devastation being wrought upon the surface of the earth reached the gods and, at last, the ears of Zeus himself.

  “Look what’s happening,” cried a distraught Demeter. “The crops are being sunburned or frostbitten. It’s a disaster.”

  “The people are afraid,” said Athena. “Please, Father. Something must be done.”

  With a sigh Zeus reached for a thunderbolt. He looked where the chariot of the sun was now plunging in a mad tumble toward Italy.

  The thunderbolt, as all Zeus’s thunderbolts did, hit its mark. Phaeton was blasted clear of the chariot and fell flaming to earth, where he dropped like a spent rocket into the waters of the River Eridanos with a hiss and a fizz.

  The great sun-steeds were pacified by the absence of the panicky boy’s yells and violent tugs at their traces and at last settled into their proper altitude and course, making their way instinctively to the land of the Hesperides in the far west.

  Phoebus Apollo was not a good or affectionate father, but the death of his son hit him very hard. He vowed never again to drive the chariot of the sun, passing the duty on to the grateful and enthusiastic Helios, who forever after became the sun’s sole charioteer.115

  Phaeton’s affectionate friend Cygnus went to the River Eridanos, into whose waters poor dead Phaeton had plunged. He sat there on the bank mourning the loss of his lover with such a plaintive wail that a distraught Apollo struck him dumb and finally, out of pity and remorse for the youth’s ceaseless but now silent and inconsolable suffering, transformed him into a beautiful swan. This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honor of Cygnus the young of all swans are called “cygnets.”

  And what of Epaphus? Did he look up and see Phaeton high above him steering the great chariot, or was he too busy eating dates and flirting with nymphs on board the ship sailing him and his friends to their holiday beach in North Africa? One would like to think that he did look up and that the glare of the chariot blinded him, a suitable punishment for his cruel taunts. In fact Epaphus went on to become a great patriarch. He married Nilus’s daughter MEMPHIS, after whom he named the city that he had founded. They had a daughter, LIBYA, and his line, which included his great-grandson AEGYPTUS, went on to rule Egypt for generations.

  Phaeton himself was eventually placed amongst the stars in the consolation constellation called Auriga, the Charioteer.116 The French named a very sporty, lightweight, dangerous racing carriage the phaéton in his honor. It was the preferred conveyance of hot-headed young men of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who, unwittingly re-enacting the myth of Phaeton in their youthful impetuosity, very often overturned their carriages, to the fury of their long-suffering fathers.

  The American classicist and teacher Edith Hamilton offered this as Phaeton’s epitaph:

  Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared.

  And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

  111. Phaeton (like Apollo’s alternative name Phoebus) means “shining one.” Sometimes rendered as Phaethon, Phaëton, or Phathon, it is usually pronounced to rhyme with “Satan” or “Nathan,” though you can, if you prefer, rhyme it with “Titan” or “Python.”

  112. A daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, the Oceanid Clymene might be regarded as one of the most influential mothers in all Greek myth. From her couplings with the Titan Iapetus she was, on the one side, the mother of Atlas and Menoetius (two of the Titans who furiously opposed the gods during the Titanomachy and were duly punished) and, on the other, of Epimetheus and Prometheus. These offspring alone establish Clymene’s importance as a great matriarch of the early world. Some, though, say that the Oceanid Clymene and the Clymene who was Phaeton’s mother were not the same woman at all, and that actually the mother of Atlas and the other Titans should be called ASIA, so as not to muddle her with the mortal Clymene, mother of Phaeton. It all gets very confusing and is best left to academics and those with time on their hands.

  113. Even the nature of Phaeton’s father is debated. In some versions of the story his father is the sun Titan, Helios. I shall go along with Ovid and attribute the fatherhood of Phaeton to the god Apollo.

  114. Or Cycnus.

  115. Sole indeed—SOL was Helios’s Roman name. When you breathe in the gas named after him—helium—it makes you giggle with exactly the same mocking, high-pitched, hysterical squeak that Helios himself made when he jeered at Phaeton.

  116. The rather pleasing word for being placed amongst the stars, the classical equivalent of canonization perhaps, is “catasterism.” A mostly lost ancient prose work called the Catasterismi, telling of the mythological origins of the constellations, is credited to one Pseudo-Eratosthenes of Alexandria.

  CADMUS

  THE WHITE BULL

  Thanks to Phaeton desert wastes and icy polar regions now gave mankind extremes of temperature to cope with, on top of the cycle of seasons caused by Persephone’s stay in the underworld. The lesson of Phaeton did not stop humankind from reaching ever higher, however. No lesson, no matter how grim, ever seems to deter us. All over Greece kingdoms continued to rise and fall. The Grecian world encompassed Asia Minor too in those days, that bulge of land east of Greece that encompasses what we now call Turkey, as well as Syria and the lands of the Levant (modern-day Lebanon). The influence of this part of the world on Greek culture and myth was immense, bringing great trade, alphabetic writing, and eventually the founding of the first example of the polis, the city-state that was to reach its greatest pitch with the establishment of Troy, Sparta, and Athens. It is a story of Ze
us, transformations, a dragon, snakes, a city, and a marriage.

  The King of the Levantine city of Tyre, AGENOR (a son of Poseidon and Libya), and his Queen TELEPHASSA (a daughter of Nilus and the cloud nymph NEPHELE) had five children: a daughter, Europa, and four sons, CADMUS (or sometimes, in the more Greek spelling, KADMOS), CILIX, PHOENIX, and THASOS.

  The children of Agenor were playing in a flower-filled meadow one afternoon when Europa wandered off and became separated from her brothers. Her eye had been caught by a beautiful white bull grazing in the long grass. As she approached, the animal lifted its head to look at her. Something in its gaze fascinated her. She moved closer. The bull’s breath was sweet and its nose soft and strokeable. She threaded garlands of flowers around its horns and ran her fingers through its thick, warmly inviting coat. Then, without quite knowing why, she lifted herself onto its back. She leaned forward and took a horn in each hand.

  “Oh, you beautiful thing,” she breathed into its ear. “So strong and wise and kind.”

  With a toss of its huge head the animal started to trot forward. The trot soon became something close to a gallop. Europa laughed and urged him on.

  Cadmus and his younger brothers had been competing against each other to see who could throw a rock the greatest distance (Cadmus always won—he was an especially gifted thrower of stones, discuses, and javelins). They turned just in time to watch their sister being carried out of sight on the back of a bull. They ran after it as fast as they could, but the bull possessed unbelievable speed. It seemed to the brothers, impossible as it must be, that the animal’s hoofs were no longer touching the ground.

  Panicking, they called out Europa’s name and shouted to her to throw herself off, but she either didn’t hear or didn’t heed them. The bull rose higher and higher in the air until it had vanished from sight.

  Cadmus returned home and broke the news to his parents King Agenor and Queen Telephassa. Loud was the lamentation and great the recrimination.