The Greek Myths

by Robin Waterfield

  “But this cannot be,” replied the cautious queen. “Where is the herald to announce his return? We’ve had no news here in the palace. The only visitor—apart from those presumptuous suitors, curse them!—was the unfortunate beggar to whom my son gave hospitality.”

  Eurycleia smiled and said, “No, he’s here, all right. And what’s more, he’s rid us of those cursed suitors, one and all! And the disloyal servants—all delivered to the fate allotted them by the gods. But now, please, my lady, please! I promised to bring you down to him straight away.”

  “I’m still dreaming, that’s it,” mused Penelope. “All right, nurse dear; I’ll come along as you insist. I am anxious to converse with my long-lost husband, even in a dream.”

  She had her maids dress her and arrange her hair. Athena ensured that she would appear lovelier than ever, to dazzle Odysseus with her grace and beauty. She descended the long staircase with her attendants and took a seat in the hall near her son and the poor beggar with whom she had spoken before.

  The queen sat staring at the stranger, silent, waiting. In his frustration Telemachus rose and stood between them, and there were harsh words on his tongue for his mother: “Well, mother, here he is at last! Have you no word of welcome for your husband and king? Come now, any man has earned a joyful reception from his loved ones after a long journey! How much more does my father deserve, after twenty years of suffering and loneliness?”

  Penelope spoke nothing but gentle words in response to her son’s admonitions: “Dearest Telemachus, it’s not that I’m not glad. The shock has left me speechless. If this were only a dream or a trick of the gods at my expense I wouldn’t be surprised. I nearly lost all hope of seeing my beloved husband again, your dear father, after so many years apart.”

  Odysseus patiently allowed her to finish speaking and then said to Telemachus: “Leave us alone, my son. There are things that a couple share only between themselves, and it is through these things that we shall know each other at last. Go on, there’s nothing to worry about.” He smiled encouragingly at the young man, who took the hint and left. Then Odysseus turned back to his circumspect wife, who eyed him warily from her polished chair.

  “Perhaps, dear lady,” he said, “I should bathe and dress appropriately before we speak again. In the meantime, preparations for a feast should be made ready, and all the sights and sounds of a celebration should emanate from the palace, the better to distract the community from discovering the carnage of the day before we’ve come up with a plan.”

  When he returned from his bath it was as though he had been transformed. It was not just that he had shed his beggar’s rags. Before Penelope stood a man glowing with strength and virility. He seemed somehow younger and more handsome than ever, and her heart lurched in her breast as he seated himself once more across from her.

  The smells and sounds of celebration filled the air around them. Yet the queen eyed him with suspicion, still believing that she dreamt or had simply gone mad. When she still had nothing to say, the godlike Odysseus shook his head and sighed wearily: “Well, then, if you have nothing to say, I’ll have a maid make a bed for me in the hall.”

  “Please, you must understand that this is all very hard to believe!” cried Penelope in distress. “So many years of waiting, longing, hoping for your return! I had almost given up, and was steeling myself for the unpleasant task of choosing a new husband. And now here you are—or so you claim. Come, I’ll have the women move your old bed out here, so you can sleep at last in some comfort, and I will retire to my chamber, to ponder all these amazing events.”

  “You dare to say such a thing to me?” cried lion-hearted Odysseus. “With my own two hands I crafted that great four-pillared bed. One of the posts was the trunk of a living olive tree, around which I built the entire room. If you can move our marriage bed then you have struck me a stinging blow by cutting that tree.”

  Wrapped in the warmth of their loving reunion, Penelope and Odysseus each told their tale.[92]

  In a moment Penelope had flown to her husband. She threw her arms around his neck, showering kisses on his neck and shoulders as the tears of joy streamed from her eyes.

  “I’m not dreaming … not dreaming,” she sobbed. With shining eyes she met his gaze, softening now because he understood that he’d been tested. And he was filled with admiration for this woman who had waited so long, so patiently, out of duty, respect, and love. His heart melted and he held her in his arms, and finally he wept, joy and relief filling his soul. They held on tightly to each other even as they ascended the stairs to their bedchamber.

  Eurycleia the wise old nurse had summoned the housekeepers and together they had strewn the floor of the chamber with sweetsmelling herbs, and laid the bed with fresh linen as if it were once more the royal couple’s wedding day. Odysseus and his queen entered the room, and the servants withdrew.

  The lovers held each other close through the night, and the wise goddess Athena instructed golden Dawn to stay her approach, in order to give them more time to renew their love in each other’s arms.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE END OF HOPE

  Pandora

  So the heroes lived and died as playthings of the gods. The greater the hero, the greater his suffering. Heracles was tormented by fits of madness that led him to kill his own children; Achilles and countless others died young in wartime agony; those who survived Troy lost sons and brothers, and returned to find families torn apart. Generation after generation, the curses afflicting the noble houses of Mycenae and Thebes created men with monstrous minds, weaving evil schemes against their own kin. Banishment from home and family, hard travel, uncertainty, wounds, the frequent prospect of imminent death—these, not just their human or inhuman opponents, are the obstacles that heroes face and strive to overcome. Heroes must be better than themselves, and prevail against the most powerful natural and supernatural forces the gods hurl against them. But many do not return. In truth, life is a vale of tears.

  Why should it be like this? Why are we born, only to suffer and die? All things are the gods’ doing, and this is no exception. When Prometheus ensured the survival and continuation of the human race by stealing fire from heaven, he knew the consequences. He was a Titan, one of the old gods. He knew that his human wards would be punished and tormented no less savagely than he, but he still saw this as the preferable course. He knew the obstacles and difficulties that the gods would place in the way of human life—but he also knew that it was only in the fire of transcending these obstacles that we humans could purge the dross from our souls and, perhaps, emerge as heroes ourselves. Our founding father Prometheus enjoins us not to become bogged down in the soul-sucking mire of moaning and complaint, but to seek always to enlarge our lives.

  Zeus, for his part, did his best to bury and embroil us in so many woes that we would forget our potential as human beings and live our lives at the level of dumb beasts, looking only to the gods, not to ourselves, for salvation. And he found an exceptionally economical way to go about this. He didn’t want to spend his time constantly inventing new woes for humans—disease one week, famine the next, and so on. He found just a single instrument that would do it all at once, and he made it so that, far from trying to avoid their bane, men would actively seek to embrace it. And when he had dreamt up his device, he laughed out loud, and the roots of Olympus shook at his mirth.

  He ordered great Hephaestus to fashion dumb clay and imbue it with all the faculties that Prometheus’ men already had, with one difference. This new human was to be female, not male, patterned on the irresistible beauty of the Olympian goddesses. Athena taught her the womanly skills and Aphrodite shrouded her with grace and allure, but, on Zeus’ orders, cunning Hermes gave her the mind of a lying bitch and the temperament of a thief.

  When all the gods had finished their work, the beautiful product stood there motionless, a lifeless mannequin, until our common father Zeus breathed life into her. And he named the beautiful bane Pandora, “Al
lgift,” for all the gods had made her and all mischief in the lives of men was her gift.

  Pandora unleashed all the ills that trouble mankind, to the endless amusement of the immortal gods.[93]

  Prometheus had stolen fire as a way of making up for his brother’s mistake in failing to assign humans the powers they needed to survive. With Prometheus out of the way, pinned to the Caucasus mountains, his brother, Epimetheus, had no one to protect him from himself. Prometheus had warned him not to accept any gifts from the Olympian gods, for a great gulf of enmity was set between them and the Titans, but when Zeus sent him fair Pandora, to be his wife, Epimetheus forgot his brother’s words and gladly took her in.

  Up until then, men had lived free of crime and labor and illness, under the reign of Cronus. But Pandora, the first woman, with the malign curiosity of a thief, removed the great lid from the jar of evils and let them out into the world. All the human emotions—constructive, destructive, and futile—were released, except for hope alone. Only hope remains in the jar, by the will of Zeus, so that men live without the promise it brings. And this was the cruelest act, for Prometheus’ gift of fire had offered us hope.

  There can be no better future. Just as every day the eagle ate Prometheus’ liver, so each new dawn brings fresh toil and pain for mortal men in an endlessly repeating cycle. The Titan is bound no longer, but we are pinned by Pandora, now and forever, to the endless, wearisome cycle of procreation and production, of domesticity and death. Nevertheless, from time to time within this bitter existence a sweet fire blazes—a life that burns more brightly with a lust for glory, adventure, or vengeance, and is branded on the collective memory of humankind. These are the stories the Muse inspires in the hearts and minds of bards, to ignite our imaginations and allow us to bring our audience relief, however brief, from a world run by fickle gods. Praise be to the Muses, daughters of Zeus! Praise to all the gods!

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The myths were formed early in Greek history—between, say, 1500 and 500 BCE. On the whole, then, and wherever possible, in this book we have stuck to the earliest extant versions of the stories (starting with Homer in the eighth century BCE), and have used later authors (such as the Roman poet Ovid, a brilliant storyteller from the beginning of the first century CE) sparingly and with caution.

  Good, or adequate, translations of the ancient Greek and Roman authors who preserve or reflect the myths—such as Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, the tragedians, pseudo-Apollodorus, Hyginus, and Ovid—are readily available, especially in the Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics series. Gaps in these two series may be filled by the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press, though the Loeb translations may be old-fashioned. Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Library of Greek Mythology is the most thorough source (though written late, perhaps in the second century CE), and there are three newer translations: Keith Aldrich, Apollodorus: The Library of Greek Mythology (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1975); Michael Simpson, Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976); and—containing two of the most important texts—R. Scott Smith and Stephen Trzaskoma, Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). There is also a good anthology, containing extracts from many literary sources in translation: Stephen Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet (eds.), Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).

  General Reference

  Simon Price and Emily Kearns (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). This consists of lightly edited essays extracted from the third edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), which is a treasure trove of information on all aspects of the ancient world.

  Greek Religion in General

  Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, trans. by Paul Cartledge (2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Jon Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

  The World of the Heroes

  Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956).

  John V. Luce, Homer and the Heroic Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).

  Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  Ancient Sources for the Myths

  The standard reference work on the iconography of ancient Mediterranean myth is the 16-volume Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, popularly referred to as LIMC (Zurich: Artemis, 1981). Far more accessible are:

  Gudrun Ahlberg-Cornell, Myth and Epos in Early Greek Art: Representation and Interpretation (Jonsered: Paul Åströms, 1992).

  Thomas Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).

  Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; 2-vol. paperback edn., 1996).

  H. Alan Shapiro, Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (London: Routledge, 1994).

  Later Artistic Reception of the Myths

  Apart from what can be found online, the following books are recommended:

  Colin Bailey, The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1992).

  Jane Davidson Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s (2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  Maria Moog-Grünewald (ed.), The Reception of Myth and Mythology: Classical Mythology in Literature, Music and Art (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

  Discussion

  Jan Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London: Croom Helm, 1987).

  Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology (London: Routledge, 1992).

  Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone (eds.), A Companion to Greek Mythology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

  Lowell Edmunds (ed.), Approaches to Greek Myth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

  Richard Gordon (ed.), Myth, Religion and Society: Structuralist Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

  Geoffrey Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

  Helen Morales, Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  Martin Nilsson, The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (2nd edn., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

  Picture References

  1. Atlas and Prometheus. Archesilas II Painter. Black-figure cup, Interior. Greek, 560–550 BCE (Photo Scala, Florence)

  2. Prometheus. Scott Eaton. Digital sculpture, 2006 CE

  (Scott Eaton/www.scott-eaton.com)

  3. The Fall of Phaethon. Michelangelo. Pencil drawing, 1533 CE

  (The Bridgeman Art Library/British Museum, London UK)

  4. The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn (Cronus). Giorgio Vasari. Oil painting, 1556 CE

  (Photo Scala, Florence)

  5. Saturn Devouring One of His Children. Peter Paul Rubens. Oil Painting, 1636–1638 CE

  (Scala, Florence/BPK, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte)

  6. The Three Fates. Francesco Salviati. Oil painting, 16th century CE

  (Photo Scala, Florence—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali)

  7. The Great Altar of Pergamum. North Frieze Detail. Marble relief sculpture. Greek, 2nd century CE

  (akg-images)

  8. Triumph of Neptune (Poseidon). Mosaic floor from Tunis. Roman, 3rd century CE

  (The Bridgeman Art Library/Giraudon/Musée Archeologique, Sousse, Tunisia.)

  9. Athena. Bronze sculpture, detail. Gr
eek, 350–340 bc

  (The Art Archive/Archaeological Museum Piraeus/Gianni Dagli Orti)

  10. The Punishment of Ixion. Wall painting, from Pompeii. Roman, 1st century CE

  (Photo Scala, Florence/Fotografica Foglia—courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturai)

  11. The Return of Persephone. Sir Frederic Leighton. Oil painting, 1891 CE

  (The Bridgeman Art Library/Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) U.K.)

  12. The Birth of Venus (Aphrodite). Sandro Botticelli. Tempera painting, 1486 CE

  (The Art Archive/Galleria degli Uffizi Florence/Collection Dagli Orti)

  13. Pygmalion and Galatea. Jean-Léon Gérome. Oil painting, 1890 CE

  (Photo Scala, Florence/Art Resource/Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  14. The Three Graces. Antonio canova. Marble sculpture group, 1812–1816 CE

  (The Art Archive/Victoria and Albert Museum London/V&A Images)

  15. Venus and Mars (Ares). Sandro Botticelli. Tempera painting, 1485 CE

  (The Art Archive/National Gallery London/Eileen Tweedy)

  16. The Return of Hephaestus. Polychrome vase, side A. Greek, c. 530 BCE

  (akg-images/Erich Lessing)

  17. The Flaying of Marsyas. Titian. Oil painting, c. 1576 CE

  (The Bridgeman Art Library/Archbishop’s Gallery, Kromeriz/© Mondadori Electa)

  18. Apollo. Pistoxenos Painter or Euphronius. Red-figure cup, interior. Greek, 500–450 BCE

  (Photo Scala, Florence)

  19. Orpheus. Jean Delville. Oil painting, 1893 CE

  (The Bridgeman Art Library/Giraudon/© DACS/Private Collection)

  20. The Death of Actaeon. Titian. Oil painting, 1559–75 CE

  (The Art Archive/National Gallery London/John Webb)

  21. Apollo confronts Hermes and Maia. Black-figure vase. Greek, c. 530 BCE

  (The Art Archive/Musée du Louvre/Gianni Dagli Orti)

  22. Abduction of Gaymede. Terracotta sculpture group. Greek, c. 470 BCE