Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘You there!’ said Herakles. ‘Where is everybody? What’s going on? Is there some festival in the town to which I haven’t been invited?’

  ‘No festival, sir,’ said the one of the women, still goggling at the man’s enormous dimensions, ‘but a funeral, alas!’

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  ‘The queen’s, of course. She died in the night.’

  ‘The queen’s? I don’t understand. You can’t mean the queen of this city, Admetos’ wife Alcestis?’

  And so it all came out and Herakles learnt the truth about Apollo’s deal with Death, Admetos’ escape and Alcestis’ self-sacrifice. Now Herakles could perfectly understand why he had not been properly entertained and was even more ashamed of his own behaviour. He discovered from the women where the tomb was, went back into his wrecked room and knotted his green and purple snakeskin round his loins. His parents had preserved the colourful skins of the two snakes strangled by their infant in his cradle, and when he grew to manhood his mother had lovingly sewn them into a loincloth, which he wore only for public appearances and is never depicted in his statues or the pictures of his exploits, since he preferred to be naked when in action. Then he threw his outsize lion skin (taken from the Nemean Lion) over his head and, with his massive club balanced on one shoulder, strode down through the city to its outer gate. He paid no attention at all to the crowds of people who came out of their houses to watch this great celebrity pass and who assumed, having already heard from the palace servants about his disgraceful drunken fury in a house of mourning, that the king must have expelled him from the city.

  It was now nearly twilight and the gatekeeper warned Herakles that the gate would not be opened again until dawn. Herakles glanced at the gate and remarked that the keeper was not to worry.

  ‘You won’t be returning, then?’

  ‘Very likely. But if I need to come in, I can open it myself.’

  ‘I doubt it, sir. Not from outside. Look at the timber it’s made of! Look at the bronze bolts!’

  ‘Yes, I just have. No problem.’

  Admetos, meanwhile, had remembered his guest and decided that he would have to tell him of Alcestis’ death and apologise for his failure to look after him in due form. But when he heard that Herakles had left the city just as night was coming on, he was appalled and immediately ordered a groom to ride after him and bring him back. The groom returned an hour or two later to say that he had ridden far along the road but seen no sign of Herakles. He reported that the gatekeeper had seen him go out of the city and that he had said he might return, threatening to break down the gate if it was closed. The gatekeeper, he said, was worried sick about what damage might be done to his gate and would keep watch all night. If Herakles did return, the gate would be opened to him.

  ‘What can he be doing?’ asked Admetos. ‘Can he have turned off the road and be sleeping somewhere in the open rather than spend another night in my unlucky palace?’

  The poor king spent another sleepless night, pacing up and down his private room, blaming himself alternately for the death of his wife and the injury to his guest. But just before dawn, when he was seated in his chair, his head dropping on to his chest and his eyes closing at last, he heard what sounded like a roll of thunder and woke up thinking wretchedly that now his ill-treated guest would be soaked in the storm. Then there was an urgent rapping on his door and a servant opened it.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Admetos, weary and confused. ‘Was that thunder I heard?’

  ‘No, sir, it was Herakles at the outer door of the palace.’

  ‘Well, let him in, let him in at once!’

  ‘I did, sir. He’s here now.’

  He stood aside and Herakles entered the room carrying Alcestis in her winding sheet.

  ‘Why, why, what?’ cried Admetos. ‘Oh, my poor dead wife!’

  ‘She’s not dead,’ said Herakles, drawing back the sheet from her face. ‘See, there’s even a little colour in her cheeks! She must be put to bed immediately and given a little warm milk and honey and a finger of wine. Fetch her women!’ he said to the servant. ‘And cancel the funeral!’ he said to Admetos.

  But when the women had taken Alcestis from him, he sank down on a stool.

  ‘It took all I had,’ he said, ‘all that even I, Herakles, had. That time I wrestled the Nemean Lion to the ground and strangled him, that other time I cut off the myriad heads of the Hydra, they were nothing to this.’

  ‘But how can she be alive?’ asked the bewildered Admetos. ‘Death had already claimed her.’

  ‘Claimed but not collected,’ said Herakles. ‘When I reached the tomb and made your guard admit me, he was already there and just about to take her.’

  ‘Who, what?’

  ‘He looked easy game – thin, smoky white, something the wind could blow away, but when I hit him with my club he just drifted aside. I had to drop the club and take him in my arms. Gods above, what cold! And how he fought to escape! All night I wrestled him and every so often I had to let him go, my hands were frozen, my arms, my whole body lumps of ice. But every time he tried to take Alcestis I went for him again and at last I got my hands round his throat – something between bone and a nasty soft ooze – and my knee into his pelvis and he began to rattle and wheeze and I thought to myself, “What will happen if Death dies? Shall we all live for ever? What will become of the world then? There’ll soon be too many of us. And too many evil monsters, if I can’t kill any of them any more.” So I let him go and he was off in an instant. There I was alone in the tomb with your wife and it was growing lighter and she was definitely breathing, so I picked her up and brought her to you. Send somebody to fetch my club, would you? I left it in the tomb. Yes, I think I gave Death a real fright.’

  He tumbled off the stool and immediately fell asleep on the floor. For a moment Admetos feared that he was dead, but then the dust he’d disturbed as he hit the floor got into his nose and made him sneeze. Admetos pulled his lion skin over him to keep him warm and hurried away to see Alcestis and sit beside her.

  2. THE DUEL

  Apollo has the strange habit of going north every winter, just when all the birds are flying south. The Argonauts on their journey to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis (now Georgia), once caught sight of Apollo on his way north. They had landed on the small island of Thynias in the Black Sea and suddenly saw the beautiful god taking off into the air, his golden hair blown across his cheeks, a silver bow in his left hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. Nothing is said of his clothes, so presumably, like his statues, he wore none. The whole island quaked as his feet leapt off it, and a tidal wave rushed high up the beach. None of the heroes dared look him in the face or meet his eyes, but they all bowed their heads as he passed over them and headed away across the sea.

  Mortals rarely see gods except in the outward appearance of men or women, and when they do are astonished by their giant size, something like the great statues of Zeus or Athene which once occupied their temples at Olympia or Athens. When Demeter, disguised as an old woman, entered the palace of the king of Eleusis and threw off her disguise, she touched the palace ceiling. On another occasion, according to a man who had been cutting down sacred trees and incurred her anger, ‘her footsteps touched the ground, but her head touched Mount Olympos’. When Ares, the god of war, was helping the Trojans on the plain of Troy, he attacked Athene, who was helping the Greeks, with his spear. She hurled a stone at him and knocked him down, and his prone body, according to Homer, covered sixteen acres.

  Apollo spends the winter with the Hyperboreans, people ‘beyond the influence of the north wind’. Where do they live? In Britain, according to one source, but we are not so lucky. The land of the Hyperboreans is a place of perpetual sunshine, producing plentiful fruits, and its people are vegetarians who enjoy long lives in peace, knowing nothing of violence or war. They neither work nor suffer from anxiety or disease, but dance and sing and worship Apollo. Perhaps he flies over the Arctic Circle and down the other s
ide of the globe to a secret island in the South Pacific, but it’s difficult these days to imagine where exactly he would find the Hyperboreans.

  It was Arcadia that became Western literature’s idea of a classical Eden, but that was mainly due to the Roman poet Virgil in the first century BC. The ancient Greeks saw Arcadia as the back of beyond, a wilderness given over to wild animals, sheep, goats and savage yokels. Long before Elijah took over from Apollo on our hilltop, Apollo the Shepherd and god of music must have taken over from Hermes the Shepherd, inventor of the lyre, who had taken over from Pan, inventor of the pipes named after him, the goat-god of the original inhabitants, known as Pelasgians. Later generations rearranged this succession in the opposite order: Hermes, they said, was the younger brother of Apollo and Pan was Hermes’ son. But the people of our village, who now worship Christ and his prophet Elijah, still speak a dialect called Tsakonika and this dialect is probably that of the Pan-worshipping Pelasgians, since its structure predates the Dorian dialect of the last wave of Greek speakers to invade the Peloponnese. Dorian Greek was the language spoken by the Spartans of classical Greece. The previous waves of invaders, Achaeans or Ionians, perhaps brought the worship of Hermes with them and the Dorians the worship of Apollo.

  Apollo, the golden-haired god of order, light and the arts of music and poetry, whose famous inscriptions at Delphi are ‘Nothing in excess’ and ‘Know yourself’, who protected Orestes from the Erinyes, who lived on earth for a year as Admetos’ servant and saved his master from death, also has a less attractive side. His encounter with Marsyas, the subject of a gruesome late painting by Titian, is a lesson in the basic relationship between mortals and immortals. What they dislike above all are pushy people, those so pleased with their own accomplishments that they presume to compare themselves to the gods. Not that the Olympians demand the same abject humility in their worshippers as the Middle Eastern monotheistic religions. The Olympians respect human pride and do not require the kneeling and self-abasement that Christians and Muslims go in for. Ancient Greeks worshipped their gods standing up, with their arms raised to heaven. But if ancient Greek mortals are not expected, like Christians, to feel permanently guilty, to be constantly acknowledging their sins and failings, they must always be aware of their limitations.

  Marsyas, depicted by Titian as a satyr, half-human, half-goat – but usually by ancient artists as a silenos, with the tail, ears and hooves of a horse – was a talented player of the flute. This was not the transverse flute we are used to, but the ancient aulos, a pair of long pipes joined at the mouthpiece. He was so pleased with his music that he boasted it was more beautiful than anyone else’s and far surpassed any music that could be played on that new-fangled stringed instrument, the lyre. Foolish creature! Gods hear such boasts and don’t take them lightly. Marsyas was invited by Apollo, master of the lyre, to prove his claim. The judges of the competition were a Phrygian king called Midas and the nine Muses, who, as Apollo’s followers, might be considered to be biased, but Marsyas, convinced of the superiority of his instrument and his playing of it, does not seem to have objected. Nor did he object to the terms of the competition, which was really more like a duel. There was no prize for the winner, but for the loser a penalty to be imposed by the winner.

  Marsyas played first. It was a lovely, lively, liquid sound like a stream rushing down a rocky bed, and the Muses could hardly keep from dancing to it. They even joined hands and swayed to and fro, but Apollo’s stern eye on them prevented them moving their feet. Then Apollo played. His music was gentler, more mysterious, its rhythms more complicated, suggesting poplars rustling in a breeze with bars of sunlight breaking through and sprinkling the ground with the darting shadows of their foliage. The Muses, no longer trying to dance, stood entranced. Apollo stopped playing and demanded sternly:

  ‘Name the winner!’

  Midas voted for Marsyas, but the Muses said they needed to hear more before deciding. Marsyas played a slower, sadder tune, a kind of lament, mostly in the deeper notes of his instrument, and the Muses again wanted to dance, but more torpidly, as a wide river flows between high banks. Marsyas smiled as he took his instrument from his horsey lips and thought about what penalty he would impose on Apollo. But Apollo also smiled as he re-tuned his lyre. He began with a simple skipping beat, then started to sing to his own accompaniment; a song of joy at nature’s fertility, a song of lovers walking through fields of flowers as they looked lustfully into each other’s eyes, at last lying down together surrounded by autumnal asphodels and the wild irises of springtime, seasons and sexual opposites merging in this magical meadow. Now the Muses couldn’t help dancing, holding hands and moving sideways in a sinuous line, first one way, then the other, as Greek dancers still do. And as they moved, new flowers sprang up under their feet, the trees grew new leaves, birds perched silently on their branches, deer and foxes, mice and moles, lizards and snakes came out of their hiding places in bushes and under rocks to listen. Even the cicadas went quiet and the butterflies settled on the ground with their many-coloured wings spread in the sun.

  Apollo stopped singing and laid his instrument aside. The audience of animals, birds, reptiles and insects looked at each other with astonishment and quickly ran, flew, scuttled, slid out of each other’s way, but Marsyas could not run anywhere and knew he’d had it. Midas voted for him again – he was certainly biased, perhaps because the aulos came originally from his own country, Phrygia. Are the judges for modern musical, literary or artistic prizes any less swayed by their own prejudices and loyalties? The Muses, of course, voted for Apollo, who pronounced the penalty. Midas was to grow ass’s ears and Marsyas was to be skinned alive, or to use the technical term, ‘flayed’. As Titian depicts it, he was tied upside-down to a tree and servants performed the excruciating operation on his hairy pelt.

  ‘You play the flute very well,’ said Apollo graciously as they made the first cut, ‘however, next time you boast about its beautiful sound remember that you can’t play it and sing at the same time.’

  But poor foolish Marsyas was never going to boast again, or play the flute.

  King Midas perhaps deserved his new ears. This was his second unfortunate encounter with a god and a silenos. His first was with Apollo’s artistic counterpart Dionysos, the god of wine and stimulants, of deafening music with cymbals and drums, of sexual orgies and drunken disorder. One of Dionysos’ followers, an old, fat, Falstaffian silenos who had been the god’s guru, had somehow got into Midas’ palace garden and been found there totally drunk, thrashing about among the rose bushes. He was trussed up with garden twine by Midas’ gardeners and brought before the king for punishment. But Midas treated him well, had him de-thorned, bandaged and put to bed until he sobered up, then wined and dined him. Dionysos, coming to collect his old teacher and pleased with Midas’ kindness, told him to ask any favour he wanted. The king, who was a big spender and whose finances were in Dionysian disorder, asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. The god, if he had been more compassionate – but gods are seldom compassionate – might have cautioned him. No doubt he was slyly amused by the man’s stupidity. Midas couldn’t take a bath or pick a fruit from his orchard or go to bed with his wife or mistress or try to eat a piece of bread and cheese without the inevitable consequence. Finally, rich but starving, he appealed to the god to release him and was told to wash in the source of the river Paktolos. The treatment was successful and the river ran with gold for a long time.

  After his second mishap Midas went back to his kingdom across the Aegean and concealed his huge pointed ears under his Phrygian cap, swearing the man who cut his hair to keep the secret on pain of instant execution. Hairdressers, however, are professional gossips and in those days the equivalent of journalists today. Even in recent times Greek village hairdressers would cut men’s hair in the cafe and the news they passed on would be an important part of the cafe’s attractions. Midas’ barber was so tormented by this succulent item of news he dared not reveal that he w
ent out to a lonely spot in the country, dug a deep hole, whispered the secret into it and filled up the hole. That seems to have relieved him of his anxiety, but one might ask how the secret nevertheless got out. Perhaps it was not until after Midas’ death, when his body was being prepared for cremation or burial, or perhaps it was because, as the story says, a clump of reeds grew out of the hole made by the barber and, rustling in the slightest breeze, whispered Midas’ embarrassing secret to all who passed by.

  3. THE RAPE

  Apollo’s twenty or so known children, by nymphs, muses or mortals, were all male. There were presumably some girls too, whose names are not recorded because they didn’t become the founding fathers of dynasties or cities. Our own reigning monarch’s pedigree in my old copy (1953) of Burke’s Peerage begins with the Norse god Woden, ancestor of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and includes for good measure Noah and Adam. Indeed, any of the several hundred thousand people alive today who are descended from King Edward III can claim the same pedigree, and if there’s any truth in the widespread stories of creation and the flood, we must all be descended from Noah and his wife or, in the Greek version, from Prometheus’ son Deukalion and his wife Pyrrha.

  The Greek stories never suggest that the Olympian gods created the human race; rather, according to Pindar, ‘men and gods are of the same family; we owe the breath of life to the same mother’. According to Hesiod, until Zeus ousted his father Cronos ‘meals were taken in common; men and the immortal gods sat down together’. Zeus, however, having castrated his father, taken his place as ruler of heaven and earth and put him into retirement somewhere beyond the earth, was afraid of sharing Cronos’ fate and ran a strict regime of absolute power over both gods and men. When several of the senior gods, including his wife Hera, his brother Poseidon and his son Apollo, rebelled and tried to tie him up he summoned a giant with a hundred arms and fifty heads to his aid and swiftly quelled the revolt. Poseidon and Apollo were punished with a year’s hard labour for the king of Troy. But Zeus was more severe with mortal dissidents and when the Titan Prometheus stole fire and gave it to mortals, he unleashed a nine-day flood in order to eliminate the human race altogether. Prometheus, however – his name means ‘one who foresees’ – warned his son Deukalion, who built an ark, survived the flood with his wife, and disembarking on top of Mount Parnassos as the flood receded, offered a sacrifice to Zeus. Zeus was mollified and responded by promising to grant Deukalion his first wish. Deukalion asked for the renewal of the human race.