Mythos (2019 Re-Issue)

by Stephen Fry

  Charon the ferryman sculled his boat across and Sisyphus stepped aboard. As he poled the boat off the bank, Charon stretched out his palm.

  “Nothing doing,” said Sisyphus, patting his pockets.

  Without a word Charon pushed him overboard into the blackness of the Styx. It was cold, abominably cold, but Sisyphus managed to get across. The waters burned and blistered his skin almost beyond endurance, but once he was on the other side he knew that he presented just such a piteous sight as he had intended.

  Shades flitted past him, averting their eyes.

  “Which way to the throne room?” he asked of one. Following their directions he found himself in the presence of Persephone.

  “Dread queen,” Sisyphus inclined his head. “I beg an audience with Hades.”

  “My husband is in Tartarus today. I speak for him. Who are you and how can you dare stand before me in this condition?”

  Sisyphus was naked, an ear was torn off, and one of his eyes hung down from its socket. His spectral body was covered in bite marks, welts, bruises, gashes, and open sores, testimony to its physical counterpart’s rough treatment on the streets of Corinth above. His wife had obeyed his instructions.

  “Madam,” he bowed low before Persephone, “no one feels the impropriety of this as keenly as I. My wife, my spiteful, wicked, monstrous, blasphemous wife—it is she who has brought me to this pitiable state. Even as I lay dying I heard her say to her women, ‘We will not waste gold on burial rites. The gods of the underworld are nothing to us. Throw his body outside for the dogs to eat. Spend the money he set aside for his funeral on a great feast. The heifers he kept for sacrificing to Hades and Persephone shall be roasted for our pleasure.’ She laughed and clapped her hands, and those, dread queen, were the last sounds I heard in the world.”

  Persephone was outraged. “She dared? She dared? She shall be punished.”

  “Aye, majesty. But how?”

  “Flayed alive . . .”

  “Yes. Not bad. But I say, permit me, wouldn’t it be funny—” Sisyphus smiled as an idea struck him, “—wouldn’t it be funny if you returned me to the upper world alive? Imagine her shock!”

  “Hm . . .”

  “And I would make sure that every day she paid for her insolence and disrespect. No gold or feasting, nothing but harsh treatment, insults, and servitude. I can’t wait to see her face when I appear in front of her, alive and well and whole . . . and perhaps . . . perhaps even more youthful and vital and handsome than ever? She is only twenty-six, but imagine her torment if I outlived her! I would use her as my slave. Every day would be torture to her.”

  Persephone smiled at the thought and clapped her hands. “Let it be so.” The years spent in the underworld had given Persephone a regal pride and rigid belief in the proper running of the infernal kingdom.

  And thus it was that Sisyphus was led out to the upper world where he and his delighted queen lived happily ever after.

  His death, when it finally did come, was another matter.

  ROLLING THE ROCK

  Zeus, Ares, Hermes, and Hades had not been pleased when they found out how Sisyphus had evaded death for a second time. Persephone had made her decision, however, and the ruling of one immortal could not be undone by another.

  When, after nearly fifty more years of serene and prosperous living, Sisyphus’s wife’s mortal span came at last to its end, the contract between Persephone and Sisyphus expired with her. Thanatos paid him a third and final visit.

  This time Sisyphus gave Charon the fee and crossed the Styx in good order. Hermes awaited him on the farther bank.

  “Well, well, well. King Sisyphus of Corinth. Liar, fraud, rogue, and trickster. A man after my own heart. No mortal has managed to cheat death once—you contrived to do it twice. Clever you.”

  Sisyphus bowed.

  “Such an achievement deserves a chance at immortality. Follow me.”

  Hermes led Sisyphus down innumerable passageways and galleries to a vast underground chamber. A great ramp sloped up from the floor to the ceiling. A boulder stood at the bottom, lit by a shaft of light.

  “The upper world,” said Hermes indicating the source of the light.

  Sisyphus saw that the slope led up to a square inlet high in the roof through which a beam of daylight shone. As Hermes pointed the inlet closed up and the shaft of light disappeared.

  “Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live forever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” said Hermes. “Of course, if you don’t like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. Make your choice. An idyllic afterlife down here or a shot at immortality above.”

  Sisyphus examined the boulder. It was bulky, but not colossally so. The slope was steep, but not precipitously. Forty-five degrees of gradient, but no more.

  So. An eternity skipping though the fields of Elysium with the dull and well behaved or eternity up above in the real world of fun, filth, frolic, and frenzy?

  “No tricks?”

  “No tricks, no pressure,” said Hermes, putting his hand on Sisyphus’s shoulder and flashing his most dazzling smile. “Your choice.”

  You know the rest. Sisyphus put his shoulder to the boulder and began to push it up the slope. Halfway there and he was confident that life eternal was assured. Three-quarters done and he was tired, but not blown. Four-fifths and . . . damn, this was hard work. Five-sixths, pain. Six-sevenths, agony. Seven-eighths . . . He was within an inch of the top now, within a fingernail’s length, just one more supreme effort and . . . Noooooooo! The stone slipped, bounced over Sisyphus and rolled down to the bottom. “Well, not bad for a first effort,” Sisyphus thought to himself. “If I take my time, if I conserve my strength, I can get there. I know I can. I’ll discover a technique. Maybe I’ll go up backward, taking the weight on my back. I can do this . . .”

  Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free.

  Painters, poets, and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance, and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.

  155. The rascally entertainer, pickpocket, tinker, and “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is called Autolycus.

  156. This violation of Amphithea gave rise to the rumor that Sisyphus was the true father of Autolycus’s daughter ANTICLEA. Anticlea begat LAERTES and Laertes begat the great hero ODYSSEUS aka Ulysses, who was known above all for his wiliness and resource.

  157. Asopos had charge of at least two rivers. There was the one in Boeotia that watered Thebes, and this one, which ran through Corinth.

  HUBRIS

  To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods’, who are too jealous, petty, and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them.

  ALL TEARS

  You may remember that Pelops was not the only child of Tantalus and Dione. They also had a daughter, Niobe. Despite the terrible fate that befell her father and the bleak adventures of h
er brother, she was a proud, confident woman. She had met and married Amphion, the son of Zeus and Antiope. He was a former lover of Hermes, you may recall, one of the twins who had constructed the walls of Thebes, enchanting the stones with his singing and strumming of the lyre.158 Between them Niobe and Amphion had seven daughters and seven sons, the Niobids.

  Swollen with dangerous levels of conceit and self-regard, Niobe liked to tell all who would listen how important she was and just how royal and divine her bloodlines were.

  “On my mother’s side I claim descent from Tethys and Oceanus—they’re first-generation Titans, you know. On my father’s side, well there’s TMOLUS, of course, the most highborn of all the Lydian mountain deities. My dear husband Amphion is a son of Zeus, and of Antiope, the daughter of King NYCTEUS, himself a son of one of the original Theban Spartoi who sprang from the dragon’s teeth. So my darling sons and daughters really can boast the most distinguished lineage, one feels justified in saying, of any family in the world. Not that I ever allow them to boast, of course. The well bred are never puffed up.”

  Such foolishness might have been no more than faintly sad were it not that Niobe even presumed to compare herself to the Titaness Leto, mother of gods. On the very day that the people of Thebes gathered annually to sing Leto’s praises and tell the story of Artemis and Apollo’s miraculous birth on Delos—on that very day, sacred to the Titaness and her dignity—Niobe unburdened herself of her haughtiest broadside.

  “I mean, I’d be the first to admit that Leto’s dear twins Artemis and Apollo are charming and fully divine, of course they are. But only two children? One girl and one boy? Good heavens, how she can even call herself a mother I fail to understand. And who’s to say that of my seven sons and seven daughters there won’t be some, if not all, who will ascend to divine and immortal rank?159 Given their birth I think it rather more likely than not, don’t you? In my view, celebrations of such a lazy, vulgar, and unproductive mother as Leto are in extremely poor taste. Next year I shall make sure the festival is canceled altogether.”

  When word reached Leto that this jumped-up Theban was insulting her in such a fashion, and daring to set herself up over her, she burst into tears in front of her sympathetic twins.

  “That terrible, boastful, conceited woman,” she choked. “She called me lazy for having only two children . . . She said I was unproductive . . . and she called me vulgar. She said she would prevent the people of Thebes from celebrating my f-f-festal day . . .”

  Artemis put an arm round her while Apollo paced up and down, slamming the ball of his fist into his palm.

  “She has fourteen children,” wailed Leto, “so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate . . .”

  “Enough!” said Artemis. “Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.”

  Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion’s and Niobe’s fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword. Niobe’s grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud, and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. But not even solid rock had the power to hold back such tears as these. Niobe’s weeping pushed her tears through the stone and sent them cascading in waterfalls down the mountainside.

  Even today, visitors to Sipylus, now called Mount Spil, can see the rock formation in which the outlines of a female face can still be discerned. In Turkish this is known as Ağlayan Kaya or “Weeping Rock.”160 It looks down on the city of Manisa, the modern name for Tantalis. The waters that gush from this rock will flow forever in their grief.

  APOLLO AND MARSYAS: PUFFED CHEEKS

  Mortal humans were not the only beings capable of exhibiting excessive pride. The goddess Athena’s injured self-regard led, indirectly, to the downfall of a conceited creature called MARSYAS.

  It all began when Athena proudly invented a new musical instrument which she named the aulos. It was a double-reeded pipe of what we would call the woodwind family, not unlike the modern oboe or cor anglais.161 There was one problem with this splendid instrument: whenever Athena played it—gorgeous as the music that emerged undoubtedly was—it elicited from her fellow Olympians nothing but roars of laughter. There was no way for Athena to get a good sound from it without blowing so hard that her cheeks bulged. To see this goddess, the very personification of dignity, going all pink and swelling up like a bullfrog was more than her disrespectful family could take without howling out loud. Wise as Athena was, and free (for the most part) of affectation and conceit, she was not entirely without vanity and could not bear to be mocked. After three attempts to win the gods over with the mellifluous sounds of her new instrument, she cursed it and cast it down from Olympus.

  The aulos fell to earth in Asia Minor, in the kingdom of Phrygia, near the source of the Maeander river (whose winding course lends its name to all mazy, wandering streams), where it was picked up by a satyr called Marsyas. As a follower of Dionysus, Marsyas was gifted with curiosity as well as many more disreputable traits. He dusted the aulos off and blew into it. A small peep was the only result. He laughed and scratched at the tickling buzz in his lips. He puffed and blew hard again until a long, loud musical note was produced. This was fun. He went on his way, blowing and blowing until he could, after a surprisingly short time, play a real tune.

  Within a month or two his fame had spread around all of Asia Minor and Greece. He became celebrated as “Marsyas the Musical,” whose skill on the aulos could make trees dance and stones sing.

  He reveled in the fame and adulation that his musicianship brought. Like all satyrs he required little more than wine, women, and song to make him happy, and his mastery of the third ensured a ready supply of the other two.

  One evening, the fire crackling, Maenads at his feet gazing up adoringly at him, he called drunkenly to the heavens. “Hey there, Apollo! You, god of the lyre! You think you’re so musical, but I bet if there was a compishon . . . a compention . . . a condition . . . What’s the word?”

  “Competition?” suggested a drowsy Maenad.

  “One of them, yes. If there was . . . what she said . . . I’d win. Easy. Hands down. Anyone can strum a lyre. Boring. But my pipes. My pipes beat your strings any day. So there.”

  The Maenads laughed, Marsyas laughed too, belched, and fell into a contented sleep.

  THE COMPETITION

  The next day Marsyas set off with his many followers to Lake Aulocrene. They had arranged to meet other satyrs there for a great feast at which Marsyas would play wild, corybantic dances of his own composition. He would pluck some reeds from the shores of the lake (whose very name testified to their abundance—aulos means “reed” and krene is “fountain” or “spring”) and cut himself a new mouthpiece for his aulos. Piping and dancing he led his followers in a merry trail of music until he turned a corner to find his way blocked by a dazzling and disturbing spectacle.

  In the meadow a stage had been erected on which sat the nine Muses in a broad semicircle. At the center of the stage, lyre in hand, stood Apollo, a grim smile playing on his beautiful lips.

  Marsyas skidded to a halt, the assorted satyrs, fauns, and Maenads behind bumping into him and each other in a concertina of confusion.

  “Well, Marsyas,” said Apollo. “Are you ready to put your brave words to the test?”

  “Words? What words?” Marsyas had forgotten his drunken boast of the night before.

  “‘If there was a competition between me and Apollo,’ you said, ‘I would beat him hands down.’ Now is your chance to find out if that is true. The Muses themselves have traveled from Parnassus to hear us and judge
. Their word is final.”

  “B-b-but . . . I . . .” Marsyas’s mouth was suddenly very dry and his legs suddenly very wobbly.

  “Are you or are you not a finer musician than I?”

  Marsyas heard behind him a murmur of doubt from his followers and the flames of his pride flared up again.

  “In a fair contest,” he declared with a burst of bravado, “I can certainly outplay you.”

  Apollo’s smile widened. “Excellent. Join me up on the stage here. I shall start. Here is a little air. See if you can reply to it.”

  Marsyas took up a position next to Apollo, who bent to tune his lyre. When this was done he gently strummed and delicately plucked. The most beautiful melody emerged—subtle, sweet, and seductive. It came in four phrases, and as the last one sounded, Marsyas’s followers broke into appreciative applause.

  Immediately Marsyas put the aulos to his mouth and repeated the phrases. But he gave each a little tweak and modulation—a shower of grace notes here, a riffle of accidentals there. A gasp of admiration from his followers and even a nod from Calliope herself encouraged him to end with a flourish.

  Apollo replied at once with a variation on the phrases in double time. The complexity of his picking and strumming was marvelous to the ear, but Marsyas responded with even greater speed, the melody bubbling and singing from his pipes with a magical splendor that provoked yet more applause from the audience.

  Now Apollo did something extraordinary. He turned his lyre upside down and played the phrases backward—they still held up as a tune, but now they were imbued with a mystery and a strangeness that enthralled all who heard. When he finished Apollo nodded to Marsyas.

  Marsyas had an excellent ear and he started to play the inverted tunes just as Apollo had, but the god interrupted him with a sneer. “No, no, satyr! You must turn your instrument upside down as I did mine.”