Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  Herakles was amused by Lichas’ careful rendering of Deïaneira’s message.

  ‘These women,’ he said, ‘full of absurd ideas which they addle each other’s heads with and then try to addle our heads with.’

  ‘Are you not going to wear it, then?’ asked Lichas.

  ‘Of course I shall wear it. How can one ever be sure what’s false and what’s true in these superstitions? It can’t do any harm to adhere to them, but it might do harm not to. And if I didn’t wear it, Deïaneira would take it that I didn’t love her and didn’t care about her love. That’s how it is with women. They take everything personally – everything has an emotional meaning, everything is a test of how much you care about them. It’s often tiring and even tiresome, but it gets a lot more tiring and tiresome if you ignore it.’

  ‘Best not to have more than one woman at a time, then?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Lichas, and, do you know, I think you’ve given me the very answer I was looking for. My father Zeus must have put it into your head. Lovely as Iole is, engaged to marry her as I am, I cannot have two wives and I cannot desert Deïaneira. Therefore I must find another husband for Iole. My mind is quite clear now.’

  With that, he put on the white robe, took the sacrificial knife in his hand and approached the altar he had built on a promontory overlooking the sea, while attendants brought forward the many fine bulls he was to sacrifice and lit the fire on the altar. But as he cut the first bull’s throat and carved off the parts of its body to be thrown on the flames, the heat of his body activated the poisoned blood of Nessos still smeared on Deïaneira’s shift, the inner layer of the robe, and he suddenly threw down his knife and began to dance with agony. Those around him thought at first that he had fallen into one of his fits of madness and began to scatter in all directions.

  ‘Help me, help me, Lichas!’ he cried. ‘Get this robe off me!’

  Lichas, terrified, did try to help him, but though between them they managed to tear off most of the robe itself, breaking the threads that held it to the inner layer, Deïaneira’s shift itself stuck to his skin.

  ‘What is this thing she sewed inside?’ he shouted.

  ‘It was something of hers, some kind of underclothing. You know more about women’s underclothes than I do.’

  But as Herakles tore pieces of it away, his skin came with it and the poison entered even more potently into his own bloodstream. Now he became truly mad with pain, and believing Lichas had conspired with Deïaneira to kill him, seized him by the ankles and threw him down the cliff on to the rocks below. Then he tore up pine trees and made a huge pile of timber and brushwood beside the altar, on to which he climbed, ordering his attendants to set light to it. But they were all keeping their distance and wouldn’t come near him after what he had done to Lichas. Finally, as he screamed and threw himself about on top of his pyre, unable to die – partly from his own great strength, partly because the Hydra’s poison had lost some of its strength after so long – a shepherd, who had come up the hill to see what the trouble was, went to the fire still burning on the altar, took a brand from it and lit Herakles’ pyre.

  As it flamed up and the smoke billowed round Herakles, concealing him from the watchers, he ceased to scream, whether because the poison had already killed him or because, as later stories claimed, he was taken up by his father Zeus in a cloud, with peals of thunder, and made an immortal on Olympos. There, according to these softer storytellers, he was reconciled to Hera, married her daughter Hebe and became the gods’ gatekeeper. But Homer thought he died like any other mortal and makes Odysseus meet his shade in the underworld.

  As for Deïaneira, when the news was brought to her and she realised how she had been tricked by Nessos, she hanged herself. Some said that Iole married Hyllos, the eldest son of Herakles and Deïaneira, but he cannot have been more than four or five years old at the time. It was Hyllos who later led the Herakleidai, the sons of Herakles, in their first invasion of the Peloponnese, and slew his father’s former taskmaster, his usurping cousin King Eurystheus. But this invasion was ultimately unsuccessful, as was a second, in which Hyllos himself was slain. It was not until several generations later that the Herakleidai finally became masters of most of the Peloponnese, and historians suggest that this legend reflects the triumph of the Dorians over the Achaeans.

  Many ancient Greeks worshipped Herakles, whose cult had originally been brought by the Phoenicians and was derived partly from their own god Melkart and partly from the Babylonian sun god Baal, the bane of the Israelites and rival of their god Jehovah (or Yahweh) in the Old Testament. The Roman conquerors of Greece and the whole Mediterranean world combined Herakles with an ancient Italian deity, named him Hercules and believed that he guarded the household as well as the state, gave victory and enforced good behaviour and the faithful keeping of oaths. In those days, before the arrival of Christianity, people did not swear on the Bible, but by Hercules.

  Looking up at his constellation, between Ophiuchus the serpent and Draco the dragon, from our terrace in Arcadia, I wondered about the coincidence of the first part of his Greek name with the name of the goddess Hera, whose anger pursued him all his life without ever being more than a dangerous irritation and goad. Of course, that was the point. Without Hera’s interference at his birth, Herakles would have been king of Tiryns and the territory of Argos. No doubt he would have conquered the rest of the Peloponnese, but he would not have performed the deeds which made him so famous. Fate required that Hera should goad him; fate required that he should overcome all the dangers she put in his way; fate required Eurystheus. Without Hera there could have been no Herakles as we know him, no story. Little wonder, then, that their names should be so similar or that if, after his cremation, he became an immortal himself, he should be reconciled with the necessarily jealous wife of his father Zeus.

  PERSEUS

  1. THE CHEST

  Herakles was born into the Perseid dynasty. His Argive ancestor Perseus belonged to a generation whose chosen mortals were still in easy touch with the immortals, saw them more often, albeit disguised, and were even employed from time to time on the gods’ business. Tantalos, the father of Pelops, was one of these until he transgressed by inviting the gods to dinner and serving up his son in a casserole. Semele was another. All the Olympian gods attended the wedding feast of her parents, Cadmus and Harmonia, who was herself the daughter of Ares the god of war and Aphrodite the goddess of love. Semele became the mistress of Zeus and bore him the god Dionysos, but, like Tantalos, her vanity, or at least misunderstanding of the relationship, was her destruction. Persuaded by Hera, Zeus’ perennially offended wife, that if she was sleeping with a god she ought to have the satisfaction of seeing him in all his glory, Semele nagged at Zeus night after night to throw off his disguise and appear as he really was. Finally, exasperated and perhaps by now tired of her, he did and she was vaporised. It was no doubt their bad experiences with these two, Tantalos and Semele, that made the gods wary of getting too close to the mortals of later generations.

  Perseus was another son of Zeus, conceived not by a three-night stand in the absence of the husband, like Herakles, but perhaps even more flamboyantly in an inaccessible dungeon. Zeus may have been a serial inseminator, but there was nothing repetitive about his methods. Some of the Greek stories, however, are repetitive, so I will quickly pass over Perseus’ remoter ancestry: the twin brothers from Egypt, Aigyptos and Danaos, who had 50 sons and 50 daughters respectively and got on so badly with each other that Danaos fled to Argos with his daughters and was there elected king. When Aigyptos sent his 50 sons in a fifty-oar ship to marry their 50 cousins, Danaos seems to have suspected his brother of trying to seize his kingdom by remote control. At any rate he took drastic action, giving each of his daughters a knife with instructions to use it on their husbands on the wedding night – a story similar to that of the ladies of Lemnos who, having murdered their husbands, received the Argonauts with such enthusiasm. And just as in that st
ory, one Danaïd daughter, Hypermnestra, disobeyed and spared her husband, Lynkeus.

  Their son Abas succeeded to the throne of Argos, but all the other daughters ended up in the punishment section of the underworld, for ever pouring water into jars with holes in the bottom. Tantalos reaching for fruit and water that always eluded him, Sisyphos rolling his stone uphill only for it to roll down again, the Danaïds with their leaking jars: futile effort, rather than flames and devils with pitchforks, seems to have been the ancient Greek idea of hell.

  Abas, the sole descendant of those 50 murderous marriages, had twin sons, Akrisios and Proetos, who like their twin great-grandparents as well as those later brothers of the Pelopid dynasty, Atreus and Thyestes, were always up against each another. Akrisios got the throne and Proetos fled to Lycia on the eastern coast of the Aegean, only to return with the help of Lycia’s ruler and, like Thyestes, take control of Tiryns. Akrisios, meanwhile, had married Eurydice (not the same Eurydice as married Orpheus), who bore him a single and exceptionally beautiful daughter. They called her Danaë after her great-great-grandfather. But distressed at getting no other children, especially no sons, Akrisios consulted the oracle at Delphi and was told that although this was the only child he would have, he could rely on being succeeded by his daughter’s son, who would also be the cause of his death.

  This was not what anyone would want to hear about their grandson, so Akrisios took the only action he could think of to prevent his daughter having any child at all, short of killing her. He locked her in a windowless dungeon in the cellars of his palace. The only access was by a trapdoor which covered a grating in the ceiling, with a ladder leading down into the cell itself. Apart from the lack of daylight and freedom, her life was made as comfortable as possible. She had a bed and lamps, she could wash, she wore the fine clothes of a princess, she had a loom on which to weave pretty textiles – she enjoyed weaving – she was given good food from her father’s table and was visited regularly by both her parents. But she was served and guarded exclusively by women. No man, apart from her father, was allowed anywhere near the dungeon and the women who guarded her were always in pairs – one old and one young – so that they could keep watch on each other and not be seduced into letting Danaë out of the cell or any man into it. The guards even had separate keys, one of which opened the trapdoor and the other the grating below it. These were all useless precautions, of course, since the unknown son-in-law – or son-out-of-law – whom Akrisios was trying to avoid was no man but a god, Zeus himself.

  The guards gave Akrisios the first inkling of trouble one morning when he went to visit his daughter.

  ‘A very strange thing, sir,’ said the elder woman, ‘when we were about to close up last night.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ asked the king, immediately sniffing danger.

  ‘We had closed and locked the grating – she did that …’ indicating the younger woman.

  ‘Yes, yes?’

  ‘But the trap was still open – I had the key for that …’

  ‘Yes, yes?’

  ‘And suddenly … it was like …’

  ‘Like gold,’ said the younger woman.

  ‘What was like gold?’

  ‘It poured past us, through the grating …’

  ‘Coming from somewhere over our heads and going straight down …’

  ‘Through the grating, like rain …’

  ‘Like a cloud …’

  ‘Like a shower of rain.’

  ‘Not exactly rain. It wasn’t wet.’

  ‘No, more like dust than rain, but gold.’

  ‘Yes, it was gold dust. A cloud of gold.’

  ‘I don’t understand you at all,’ said Akrisios. ‘A cloud of gold dust? It’s not possible. It must have been a sudden burst of sunlight.’

  ‘No, sir, it was evening. The sun had already gone down.’

  ‘A flash of lightning, then?’

  ‘But there was no storm last night.’

  ‘And it was definitely more of a cloud than a flash.’

  ‘You were imagining things,’ said Akrisios. ‘Or dreaming. You must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Not both of us. We both saw it, didn’t we?’

  After that, Akrisios came on several successive nights to see his daughter’s cell closed up, in case the phenomenon should reappear, but of course it never did. Zeus had been and gone and the consequence was not manifest for some months.

  In the erotic painting by Correggio in the Villa Borghese in Rome, a just pre-pubescent Eros (pronounced, unlike the statue in Piccadilly Circus, rose with a short ‘e’ in front of it, erose) is helping to uncover Danaë as she lies back on her well-bolstered bed spreading her legs for the descending golden cloud. Titian’s painting in Naples (stolen by the fat Nazi Hermann Goering in the Second World War) depicts a more passive Danaë and a much younger Eros, while the descending cloud contains gold coins. But since her prison was by then sealed and there were no observers, it’s more likely that the shower turned quickly into the form of a handsome young man and that Danaë enjoyed a wonderful night of passion with a very experienced lover. Did she ask his name? Surely she did, and surely he told her, since she had many ordeals still to go through and would need the courage of knowing that her lover was a god and that their child was destined to be a hero.

  When it was clear that she was pregnant – though, as he many times exclaimed, ‘God knows how!’ – her father had to make another difficult decision. He was not a ruthless or wholly selfish man, but he really did not want to be killed by his grandson. Perhaps it would not be a boy but a girl. In that case he could rest easy. No doubt persuaded by his wife and his undoubted love for his daughter, he decided to take the risk. Although he could get no satisfactory explanation from Danaë, who resolutely denied that any man had been near her, he released her from the dungeon and allowed her back into the relative luxury of the women’s quarters in the palace. But when she finally bore the child and it was a boy, Akrisios began to fear that the oracle could not be circumvented. Nevertheless, he still shrank from directly taking his daughter’s and his grandson’s lives to preserve his own, so he devised another scheme with an outside chance of preserving all three. He had his shipbuilders in Nauplia construct a small sea-going chest large enough to hold both mother and child, a kind of miniature ark. Much the same fate, millennia later, but in ‘a rotten carcass of a butt’ rather than a custom-made chest, awaited Prospero and his daughter Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest.

  If we had been on our terrace in Arcadia on that day long ago in the Bronze Age, we might have seen the ship carrying this chest sailing down the Gulf of Argos, but it would have passed out of our view into the Myrtoan Sea by the time the sailors lowered the chest into the water and watched it float away eastwards, before swinging their own vessel round to return to Nauplia. Akrisios had ordered that food and water for at least a week be placed in the chest, but in fact they were hardly needed. A brisk Zephyr from over our mountains blew the strange craft due east for only about a hundred kilometres before it reached a small island called Seriphos, in the Western Cyclades. There, washed to and fro in the white-crested waves breaking on the beach, it was spotted by a fisherman called Diktys, who caught it in his net and dragged it ashore. When he broke open the chest and discovered its contents, he realised immediately not only that this was no ordinary flotsam or jetsam but no ordinary single mother either. This woman had the soft skin and wore the clothes and jewels of a princess and was more beautiful than any he had ever seen. As for the baby, in spite of being tossed about for several days by the waves, he was as calm as if he had been lying in a padded cradle and, as Diktys told his friends in the village, ‘he has a strange kind of glow about him, something not quite earthly’.

  Diktys’ brother Polydektes was the king of Seriphos – not a particularly grand position since the island even in modern times has less than two thousand inhabitants – and as soon as Danaë had recovered from her voyage, Diktys took her and baby Per
seus on a mule to his brother’s house on the far side of the island, no more than about five kilometres over a not very high mountain. Polydektes was as impressed as his brother with Danaë’s beauty, and hoping to make her his wife immediately found room for her and the baby in his own house.

  Years passed and Perseus grew into a young man, handsomer and stronger than any of the other youths on Seriphos. He didn’t arouse their envy or hostility since he was a friendly, helpful and modest person, joining in all their activities, sharing their games and their skills at fishing, mending nets and boats, repairing roofs and building huts. His mother had a much harder time, for she was constantly fending off Polydektes and could not so easily make friends with the village women. She occupied herself, as she had in her father’s dungeon, by weaving textiles. She was lonely and often sad, but the thought that she’d been singled out by Zeus and the sight of Perseus growing into his full strength and manhood kept her from despair.

  Polydektes, however, was losing patience. Beautiful as Danaë still was, she was nearly middle-aged and if she went on rejecting him she would soon be too old to bear his children. He began to think of ways to get rid of Perseus, whose upbringing had been her excuse for not wishing to marry while he was still a boy and who now as a man protected her. He was also afraid that Perseus’ popularity and superior gifts might eventually lead the people of Seriphos to prefer him as king. So when word came that the king of Elis on the far side of the Peloponnese was advertising for suitors for his daughter Hippodameia, Polydektes announced that he intended to be one of them. But, he said, he was too poor to compete with the rich suitors from larger and more fertile kingdoms, unless his more prosperous subjects could each contribute a horse or its equivalent in gold to his dowry. Several of them, primed by Polydektes in advance, promised to.