Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths

by Bernard Evslin

  “Oh, please, do not deny me your love,” she said. “I will do as you say.”

  The next morning when the Royal Guard led Theseus out of the tower and forced him into the outer lane of the Labyrinth, Ariadne was around the first bend, waiting. She tied one end of the thread to a branch of the hedge, then dropped the ball to the ground. It rolled slowly, unwinding; they followed, hand in hand. It was pleasant, walking in the Labyrinth. The hedge grew tall above their heads and was heavy with little white sweet-smelling flowers. The lane turned and twisted and turned again, but the ball of thread ran ahead, and they followed it. Theseus heard a howling.

  “Sounds like the wind,” he said.

  “No, it is not the wind. It is my mad mother, howling.”

  They walked farther. They heard a rumbling, crashing sound.

  “What’s that?”

  “That is my brother. He’s hungry.”

  They continued to follow the ball of thread. Now the hedges grew so tall the branches met above their heads, and it was dark. Ariadne looked up at him, sadly. He bent his head and brushed her lips in a kiss.

  “Please don’t go to him,” she said. “Let me lead you out now. He will kill you. He has the strength of a bull and the cunning of a man.”

  “Who knows?” said Theseus. “Perhaps he has the weakness of a man and the stupidity of a bull.” He put his hand over her mouth. “Anyway, let me think so because I must fight him, you see, and I’d rather not frighten myself beforehand.”

  The horrid roaring grew louder and louder. The ball of thread ran ahead, ran out of the lane, into an open space. And here, in a kind of meadow surrounded by the tall hedges of the Labyrinth, stood the Minotaur.

  Theseus could not believe his eyes. The thing was more fearsome than in his worst dreams. What he had expected was a bull’s head on a man’s body. What he saw was something about ten feet tall shaped like a man, like an incredibly huge and brutally muscular man, but covered with a short dense brown fur. It had a man’s face, but a squashed, bestialized one, with poisonous red eyes, great blunt teeth, and thin leathery lips. Sprouting out of its head were two long heavy polished horns. Its feet were hooves, razor sharp; its hands were shaped like a man’s hands, but much larger and hard as horn. When it clenched them they were great fists of bone.

  It stood pawing the grass with a hoof, peering at Theseus with its little red eyes. There was a bloody slaver on its lips.

  Now, for the first time in all his battles, Theseus became unsure of himself. He was confused by the appearance of the monster. It filled him with a kind of horror that was beyond fear, as if he were wrestling a giant spider. So when the monster lowered its head and charged, thrusting those great bone lances at him, Theseus could not move out of the way.

  There was only one thing to do. Drawing himself up on tiptoe, making himself as narrow as possible, he leaped into the air and seized the monster’s horns: Swinging himself between the horns, he somersaulted onto the Minotaur’s head, where he crouched, gripping the horns with desperate strength. The monster bellowed with rage and shook its head violently. But Theseus held on. He thought his teeth would shake out of his head; he felt his eyeballs rattling in their sockets. But he held on.

  Now, if it can be done without one’s being gored, somersaulting between the horns is an excellent tactic when fighting a real bull; but the Minotaur was not a real bull; it had hands. So when Theseus refused to be shaken off but stood on the head between the horns trying to dig his heels into the beast’s eyes, the Minotaur stopped shaking his head, closed his great horny fist, big as a cabbage and hard as a rock, and struck a vicious backward blow, smashing his fist down on his head, trying to squash Theseus as you squash a beetle.

  This is what Theseus was waiting for. As soon as the fist swung toward him, he jumped off the Minotaur’s head, and the fist smashed between the horns, full on the skull. The Minotaur’s knees bent, he staggered and fell over; he had stunned himself. Theseus knew he had only a few seconds before the beast would recover his strength. He rushed to the monster, took a horn in both hands, put his foot against the ugly face, and putting all his strength in a sudden tug, broke the horn off at the base. He leaped away. Now he, too, was armed, and with a weapon taken from the enemy.

  The pain of the breaking horn goaded the Minotaur out of his momentary swoon. He scrambled to his feet, uttered a great choked bellow, and charged toward Theseus, trying to hook him with his single horn. Bone cracked against bone as Theseus parried with his horn. It was like a duel now, the beast thrusting with his horn, Theseus parrying, thrusting in return. Since the Minotaur was much stronger, it forced Theseus back—back until it had Theseus pinned against the hedge. As soon as he felt the first touch of the hedge, Theseus disengaged, ducked past the Minotaur, and raced to the center of the meadow, where he stood, poised, arm drawn back. For the long pointed horn made as good a javelin as it did a sword, and so could be used at a safer distance.

  The Minotaur whirled and charged again. Theseus waited until he was ten paces away, and then whipped his arm forward, hurling the javelin with all his strength. It entered the bull’s neck and came out the other side. But so powerful was the Minotaur’s rush, so stubborn his bestial strength, that he trampled on with the sharp horn through his neck and ran right over Theseus, knocking him violently to the ground. Then it whirled to try to stab Theseus with its horn; but the blood was spouting fast now, and the monster staggered and fell on the ground beside Theseus.

  Ariadne ran to the fallen youth. She turned him over, raised him in her arms; he was breathing. She kissed him. He opened his eyes, looked around, and saw the dead Minotaur; then he looked back at her and smiled. He climbed to his feet, leaning heavily on Ariadne.

  “Tell your thread to wind itself up again, Princess. We’re off to Athens.”

  When Theseus came out of the Labyrinth there was an enormous crowd of Cretans gathered. They had heard the sound of fighting, and, as the custom was, had gathered to learn of the death of the hostages. When they saw the young man covered with dirt and blood, carrying a broken horn, with Ariadne clinging to his arm, they raised a great shout.

  Minos was there, standing with his arms folded. Phaedra was at his side. Theseus bowed to him and said, “Your majesty, I have the honor to report that I have rid your kingdom of a foul monster.”

  “Prince Theseus,” said Minos. “According to the terms of the agreement, I must release you and your fellow hostages.”

  “Your daughter helped me, king. I have promised to take her with me. Have you any objection?”

  “I fancy it is too late for objections. The women of our family haven’t had much luck in these matters. Try not to be too beastly to her.”

  “Father,” said Phaedra, “she will be lonesome there in far-off Athens. May I not go with her and keep her company?”

  “You too?” said Minos. He turned to Theseus. “Truly, young man, whether or not Poseidon has been working for you, Aphrodite surely has.”

  “I will take good care of your daughters, king,” said Theseus. “Farewell.”

  And so, attended by the Royal Guard, Theseus, his thirteen happy companions, and the two Cretan princesses, walked through the mobbed streets from the Palace to the harbor. There they boarded their ship.

  It was a joyous ship that sailed northward from Crete to Athens. There was feasting and dancing night and day. And every young man aboard felt himself a hero too, and every maiden a princess. And Theseus was lord of them all, drunk with strength and joy. He was so happy he forgot his promise to his father—forgot to tell the crew to take down the black sail and raise a white one.

  King Aegeus, keeping a lonely watch on the Hill of the Temple, saw first a tiny speck on the horizon. He watched it for a long time and saw it grow big and then bigger. He could not tell whether the sail was white or black; but as it came nearer, his heart grew heavy. The sail seemed to be dark. The ship came nearer, and he saw that it wore a black sail. He knew that his son was dead.

>   “I have killed him,” he cried. “In my weakness, I sent him off to be killed. I am unfit to be king, unfit to live. I must go to Tartarus immediately and beg his pardon there.”

  And the old king leaped from the hill, dived through the steep air into the sea far below, and was drowned. He gave that lovely blue, fatal stretch of water its name for all time—the Aegean Sea.

  Theseus, upon his return to Athens, was hailed as king. The people worshipped him. He swiftly raised an army, wiped out his powerful cousins, and then led the Athenians forth into many battles, binding all the cities of Greece together in an alliance. Then, one day he returned to Crete to reclaim the crown of Minos which once he had recovered from the sea.

  Atalanta

  ATALANTA’S BAD LUCK BEGAN when she was born, for her father, the king of Arcadia, wanted a son. In his rage at being given a girl, he ordered that she be left on a mountainside to die. The nearest mountain, as it happened, was in the neighboring country of Calydon so the infant girl was taken there. She was stuck in a cleft of rock and left under the cold stars.

  Her cries attracted the attention of a she-bear who was prowling the slope looking for a lost cub. The huge blunt-headed furry beast came nosing up to the squalling infant. It was not her cub, but it was alive; its tiny hand came out and clutched the shaggy ruff of the bear. She lifted the baby gently in her jaws and carried it off to her cave.

  Across the valley from the she-bear’s cave stood a castle belonging to the king of Calydon, whose son named Meleager also had a curious infancy. When he was three days old, his mother, Queen Althaea, was visited by a tall, gray-faced old woman carrying a pair of long silver shears in her hand. The queen knew it was Atropos, one of the three Fates, and she was afraid. The old woman said to her, “We are being kind to you. We usually strike without warning. See that stick of wood at the edge of the fire, just beginning to burn? Your son’s life will last just as long as that stick remains un-burned.”

  Atropos then disappeared.

  Althaea leaped to the fireplace, snatched the stick out of the flames, and locked it in a great brass chest.

  The prince was not the same as other children; from the time he could run he was interested in nothing but hunting. His father was delighted with the boy. He had his smith make a tiny spear and a bow that shot arrows no larger than darts, but they were not toys. Meleager practiced with them constantly and learned to use them well. As soon as he could sit on a pony, he followed his father on the hunt; and by the time he was a young man, he was accounted the best hunter in all Greece. He had taken enough pelts to cover the floors of the huge castle…skin of lion, wolf, and bear. The walls were hung with stag-horns and bear-tusks. He hunted on horseback in the lowlands; on foot among the hills.

  However, Meleager was a worry to his parents in one respect because he snubbed all the eligible maidens of Calydon.

  “Father, please,” he said. “I can’t stand them…soft, squealing little things; no good with spear or bow, hopeless on horseback. I’ll not marry until I find a girl who can hunt by my side.”

  One day, on the slope of a near mountain, he cornered an enormous bear. It lashed out with its great paw and struck Meleager’s javelin from his hand. Then the bear charged so swiftly that the lad barely had time to draw his dagger before the beast was upon him. He slipped under the swinging paws and stabbed the bear in the back of its neck, and then was knocked off his feet by its backward lurch. As he sprang up, he was just in time to see the bear charging away up the slope, the dagger still stuck in his neck, blood welling from the wound. Meleager scrambled after it.

  Despite his terrible wound, the beast moved swiftly, and Meleager soon lost sight of him; but he followed the trail of blood, knowing that it was only a question of time till the animal dropped. It had been early morning when he fought the bear; now the burning summer sun was directly overhead, and he was panting with heat as he followed the trail of blood. Then, rounding a spur of rock, he saw an amazing sight: a tall, bare-legged maiden came running down the hill with long strides, wearing a great shaggy fur cloak. Just as he thought, “Why is she wearing that heavy cloak in all this heat?” he saw that blood was dripping from her and realized that it was not a fur cloak she was wearing, but that on her back was the huge bear he had fought. The animal’s head was lolling on her shoulder, its blood was dripping on her; he saw the hilt of his dagger still protruding from its neck.

  He stood in the path. The girl stopped. Gently she slid the body of the bear to the ground, straightened, and faced him. He was dazed by her beauty. She was as tall as he, long-legged as a deer, clad in a brief tunic of wolf-skin, her rich brown hair hanging to her thighs. Her face was streaked with dirt, her bare arms and shoulders blotched with blood; he knew instantly that this was the one girl in the world for him.

  “That’s my bear,” he said. “But I give him to you.”

  “Your bear?”

  “My kill. That’s my dagger sticking from his neck. I’ve been tracking him all day. But you can…”

  He was interrupted by her hoarse cry of rage. She stooped swiftly, picked up a huge stone as if it were a pebble, and hurled it at his head. He ducked but felt it graze his hair. He saw her bend again and pull his dagger from the bear’s neck. Then, holding the dagger, she came slowly toward him.

  “This bear is my brother,” she said. “You have killed my brother. Now I must kill you.”

  “Sweet maiden…”

  “Sweet? You’ll find me bitter as death. Come, pick up your spear and fight.”

  He picked up his spear and hurled it in the same motion. It sang through the air and split a sapling neatly in two. He turned and stood facing her with empty hands.

  “Why have you disarmed yourself?” she said. “I mean to kill you.”

  “Come ahead then. Use the dagger, by all means. It will make things more even.”

  She howled with rage, and flung the dagger away. “I need no favors from you!” she cried. “I’ll do it with my bare hands.”

  She rushed upon him. He caught her by the arms and tried to handle her gently; but it was impossible as she was as strong as a wild mare. She caught him in a great bear-hug that almost cracked his spine. Grunting, twisting, he broke her hold and then wrestled in earnest. There, under the hot sun, before the glassy dead eyes of the bear, they wrestled.

  Atalanta was a powerful fighter because she had been adopted by the she-bear, raised in the bear’s cave, and treated like a cub. She had grown up among successive litters of bear cubs, wrestling with them, hunting with them; she had grown into a gloriously tanned, supple, fleet-footed young woman, strong as a she-bear herself. Wrestling Meleager seemed an easy matter to her. She planned to crush him in her hug and hurl him over the cliff.

  However, as she wrestled with Meleager under the hot sun among the fragrance of thyme and crushed grass, something new happened. She had been used to wrestling shaggy bears, noticing with wonder how smooth her own arms and legs seemed against their mass of fur. She had wondered why she was so different, so hairless, and yet glad somehow that she was different. And now, as she held the young man in her mighty clutch, she felt his smoothness; and it was as though she were touching herself for the first time. Her own body seemed strange to her, yet deeply familiar. As she struggled, she found she could no longer know where his body ended and hers began. When she realized this, it seemed to her that the fragrance of the crushed grass rose like a sweet fog, making her dizzy. She found her knees buckling. She who could run miles up the steep slope of a mountain, outrunning even the mountain goats, felt her legs weakening. Her last thought, as her mind swooped and darkened was, “It’s magic. He’s doing some magic. He’s fighting me with magic.”

  When her head cleared, she found they were sitting with their backs against a twisted olive tree near the edge of the cliff and looking out onto a great gulf of blueness where a brown eagle turned. Their arms were still about each other as if they were wrestling, but their bodies were still. She was telling
her name.

  “I am Atalanta. I belong to this mountain, to the clan of mountain bears.”

  “I am Meleager,” he said. “I belong to Atalanta.”

  So Meleager found the huntress he had dreamed of; they hunted together on hill and lowland, in forest and swamp and field, on foot and horseback, with dogs, or with long-legged hunting cats brought over from Egypt called Cheetahs, but more often, by themselves. They hunted so happily together and brought back so much game that word came to Artemis, Goddess of the Chase, Lady of the Wild Things; word came of Meleager, the handsome prince, the great spearman, and of his companion Atalanta, so tall and fleet and strong that people were saying she was Artemis herself come to earth. The goddess grew very angry.

  “I’ll show them there is only one Artemis,” she cried. “I will set them a hunt they will never forget.”

  She dug her hands into the muck of the river Scamander and molded a huge boar, mud-colored, with evil red eyes. Far larger than any boar seen by man, large as a rhinoceros, armed with tusks, so long, heavy, and sharp he could shear down a tree with a toss of his head. She made this huge beast, filled him with a raging blood-thirst, and set him in Calydon to ravage the countryside.

  THE HUNT

  Immediately the beast began to spread death and terror throughout the land. He uprooted crops, killed horses, cattle, goats—and also those who tended them. He attacked men working in the fields, goring and trampling them into bloody rags. And, in a rage, the beast charged a farmhouse, knocking it over, and rooted among the rubble, killing those who had not been crushed by the falling beams. Shepherds and goatherds refused to graze their flocks on the hills; farmers feared to harvest their crops. The king, Meleager’s father, was desperate. He asked his son’s advice. Meleager was mad with excitement. He swore to his father that he would kill the boar.

  “Just I, myself, and one companion. We can do it, Father. No beast can escape us.”