by Laura Miller
Humbaba is a king with an unfamiliar court. He is partly the personification of the eternal life-force of the ancient trees themselves, but he also has elephantine features: His trumpeting is heard from afar, he leaves great tracks in the undergrowth, his face is ugly with wrinkles, and he has tusks. In the episode of Humbaba and the cedars, familiar human responses react to imposing forces of nature: terror and wonder, cupidity and remorse. Humbaba is awesome and dangerous, but killing him, stealing his tusks, and felling his cedars are momentous acts, not done without prevarication, pity, and shame. The forest is a “Heart of Darkness” presenting contemporary moral dilemmas. May invaders kill a ruler and steal his resources in the name of civilization? The episode expresses the heroes’ ambivalence to the destruction of the forest. “My friend,” says Enkidu to Gilgamesh, “we have reduced the forest to a wasteland; how shall we answer our gods at home?” The gods accounted the slaughter of Humbaba a sin, one reason why, eventually, Enkidu must die. Enkidu’s death precipitates in Gilgamesh an unbearable grief, but also a terrible fear for himself. Must he, too, die like his friend? He travels to the ends of the earth in search of the only man known to have escaped the mortal doom that the gods laid on humankind after the great flood. The scenes are truly bizarre: a mountain-top cave whose entrance is guarded by monstrous beings, part human, part scorpion; a magic garden where trees and their fruits are precious stones; a grove where docks a ferry whose crew of stone propel it across the Waters of Death.
The poet uses imaginary landscapes to confront his hero with realities that looked unproblematic from home, things that were easier said than done. The poem’s end brings the audience back to the familiar city of Uruk. Enclosed within its wall the observer can see the multifarious activities of mankind and know that, while the individual perishes, the race is eternal. To understand this simple truth, Gilgamesh had first to acquire wisdom in exotic and imaginary places.
HOMER
THE ODYSSEY (c.725–675 BCE)
One of the most celebrated and influential stories ever told, this epic poem describes Odysseus’s long voyage home, beset by fantastical creatures and mythic foes in a grand evocation of the human journey through life.
The oldest known works of European literature are the Greek epics the Iliad and The Odyssey. Nothing is known for sure about their author, known from antiquity as “Homer.” Many places have claimed the honor of his birth, including the island of Chios, a few miles off the coast of Asia Minor, but he may also have come from the mainland, in what is now Turkey. The poems were first written down in Athens in the sixth century BCE, but were orally composed probably two centuries earlier, while the events they describe—the Greek expedition against Troy and the hero Odysseus’s return from it—are set in an age even older, before the fall of the great civilizations of Crete and Mycenae.
The main subject of the poem is the journey home of the Greek hero Odysseus after the fall of Troy. He is away so long (the war itself lasts ten years and the voyage another ten) that it is assumed he is dead, but his wife Penelope remains faithful and fends off an army of suitors.
Odysseus recounts eleven different adventures, as well as his long detention on the island of the nymph Calypso. The third is his encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. The one-eyed giant–shepherd captures the hero and his companions by trapping them with his sheep in his cave, which is closed every evening by an enormous rock. Polyphemus eats one or more of the companions every night. Odysseus and his men cannot kill the giant, because they need him to roll the stone aside in the morning; so Odysseus takes an olive branch, sharpens it, and—having given Polyphemus strong wine to make him sleep—drives it into the giant’s eye. In the morning, the blinded giant rolls the stone aside to let his sheep out, and Odysseus and his men escape, clinging to the underside of the sheep as Polyphemus runs his hands over them.
In another version that must have predated Homer, the giant roasts his victims on an iron spit and Odysseus uses that to blind him. This other version seems to run a little more naturally and hints of it within Homer serve to illustrate that he was not inventing the story, but repeating it, and likely conflating details from various versions as he did so.
Several of Odysseus’s other adventures have the same sort of ancestry. The story of the Cyclops is followed by that of Aeolus, who gives Odysseus a magic bag of winds to help him on his journey. This works well until—as in many versions of the tale—the disobedient crew decide to open the bag to see what’s in it. Odysseus is blown back to the land of the Laestrygonians, another set of cannibal giants, where his ship is the only one to escape as the giants hurl stones into the bay. Homer then tells the tale of Circe, the witch who turns men into swine. Odysseus’s crew is transformed, but he rescues them, protected by the magic herb “moly,” which is brought to him by Hermes, messenger of the gods, by order of Odysseus’s protector, the goddess Athene.
Homer not only drew upon handed-down myths, but also delved into accounts of foreign lands brought back by early Greek travelers. In Homer’s time, Greeks were already familiar with the Near Eastern coastline, from Turkey to Egypt, and were probing east into the Black Sea, and west across the Mediterranean to Italy and even Spain. There are traces of all these, locations suitably exaggerated and embroidered, in Odysseus’s long narration, and scholars have tried for many centuries to pin down exact references.
One clear case is Odysseus’s tale of “the Lotus-eaters.” These are perfectly harmless themselves, but anyone who eats the lotus-fruit loses all interest in anything else and no longer wants to return home. There is a hint here of the traditional fairy-tale caution against eating or drinking in unknown climes, but the fruit of two kinds of lotus are eaten in both India and Egypt and Homer had probably heard of the latter. When Circe gives Odysseus sailing directions, she warns him against “the Clashing Rocks” and says specifically that the only ship ever to traverse them was the Argo commanded by Jason. Homer knew, then, of the voyage of the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece, which has often been explained as a trip into the then-unknown waters of the Black Sea, where the inhabitants used sheepskins to pan for gold.
Circe also warns about the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla is a barking, many-headed monster who snatches sailors from her cliff, while those who steer to avoid her run the risk of the giant maelstrom Charybdis, which would suck their ship down. The currents in the Straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily still create whirlpools dangerous to small craft, and Scilla is still the name of a village on the facing Italian shore, by cliffs honey-combed with caves, where the wind creates strange cries. The Sirens, who draw men to destruction by their song, have often been located not far off in the Bay of Capri; Odysseus survives them by plugging his sailors’ ears with beeswax, having himself lashed to the mast, and ordering them not to release him no matter how hard he struggles.
The gods of Greek myth play a prominent and active part in Homer’s imaginary world in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Poseidon the sea-god persecutes Odysseus for blinding his son Polyphemus, and Helios the sun god troubles them, too, because Odysseus’s men ate his sacred oxen. He is, however, protected by Athene, who intercedes for him with the supreme deity Zeus, and sends her messenger Hermes to guide and advise him and his son Telemachus. Humans, nymphs, gods, and goddesses interact on a basis, not of equality, but something closer to it than in later mythologies. The deities appear as a constant presence in heroic life.
Study of the Homeric poems has formed the basis of a Classical education from postmedieval Europe to the present day. Their poetic power, arguably never matched in almost 3,000 years, has had a perennial and immeasurable influence on Western art and literature. The stories have infiltrated numerous works of celebrated literature; Dante, for example, revisits the tale in The Divine Comedy (c.1308–21, here), but perhaps the greatest evocation in the twentieth century belongs to James Joyce’s modernist master-piece Ulysses, which assigns a chapter to each adventure in The Odyssey.
> OVID
METAMORPHOSES (c.8)
Ovid’s fifteen-book poem weaves a kaleidoscope of colorful narratives from Greek and Roman myths on the theme of change and transformation, in which the fates of both man and gods echo the never-ending mutability of life itself.
The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–CE 17/18), or Ovid, is a long Latin poem of almost 12,000 lines. It was written in the first years of the Christian era, and completed about CE 8. Each book tells stories—more than a hundred in total, casually linked and with no obvious chronological order—which together form our best surviving guide to the world of Greek and Roman mythology.
It is, however, a skewed selection, for Ovid announces that he purposefully chose stories that ended in metamorphosis or transformation. Many of these remain familiar, and have even brought words to modern language. The story of Echo and Narcissus, in Book III, tells of how the nymph Echo was punished by the goddess Juno for continually delaying her with chatter while Juno was trying to catch her husband Jupiter with other nymphs. She decreed that from then on Echo would only be able to repeat the last few words of whatever was said to her. Echo fell in love with the handsome boy Narcissus, who scorned her, and she wasted away until only her voice was left—leaving only the “echo” we know today. Narcissus was then in turn cursed to fall in love only with himself, which he did gazing at his own reflection in a pool until he too wasted away, and his body turned into a flower—a bloom that we still call the narcissus. One more character name that has become a modern word is that of the youth Hermaphroditus. The water nymph (or Naiad) Salmacis fell in love with him, came upon him while bathing, and dived in to join him. Her embrace was so fierce that they fused together, becoming both male and female—a “hermaphrodite.”
These three stories show several things about the world of the Metamorphoses. It is a Mediterranean world, but seems much lusher, greener, and far less populated than the one we know. Events commonly take place in the forest, by streams, and pools, where gods and men hunt deer and boar. And in this world humans and divinities mix freely, along with the nymphs, fauns, and goat-legged satyrs that populate the tales. Furthermore, most of the stories are love stories, and the most powerful deity in the Metamorphoses seems not to be Jupiter, father of gods and men, but Amor—a personification-turned-deity, who rules all the others and continually involves them in frustration, disaster, or disgrace.
The work also contains extended hero stories, such as those of Perseus, son of Jupiter and Danaë; the Athenian Theseus, conqueror of the Minotaur; Jason the Argonaut and his disastrous affair with the Thessalian witch Medea; and Hercules, Orpheus, Aeneas, and Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Near the end, Ovid includes some judicious flattery, introducing Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus himself.
Many of Ovid’s heroes are still the subject of film and literary adaptations today and persist as household names—and naturally so are the monsters that they must defeat. Perseus must battle the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa, whose eyes can turn men to stone. A feat he follows up by rescuing the maiden Andromeda from the Godzilla-like sea-monster Cetus. Theseus defeats the bull-headed Minotaur and is also involved in the wedding feast turned bloody battle between Lapiths and Centaurs, the latter half-horse, half-man. Among the many feats of Hercules are the chaining of Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell.
The irreverence of Ovid’s tales caused anger and uncertainty among pious pagans of his own time (and pious Christians in later eras); he was eventually exiled to the shores of the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus. Another response to the Metamorphoses, however, was to regard the whole collection as an allegory that would teach morality, resulting in the medieval French Ovide Moralisé, or “Moralized Ovid,” the form in which the work was best known throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
The overall effect of the work has been incalculable. In one form or another, often censored or allegorized, his stories became part of the school curriculum for many centuries. Chaucer’s poem The House of Fame derives from Ovid’s home of Fama (the source of all rumor), while The Manciple’s Tale derives from the story of Phoebus and the crow. Shakespeare’s poem “Venus and Adonis” draws on several stories from the Metamorphoses. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the comic workmen attempt to put on their play of Pyramus and Thisbe before Theseus and his Amazon bride-to-be, Hippolyta.
Ovid’s dramatic and provocative scenes also made him a favorite for painters, including Caravaggio, Tiepolo, and Velázquez. In the sixteenth century, Titian painted Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, while in the seventeenth century Rembrandt chose The Rape of Ganymede and The Abduction of Europa. In England, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, John Waterhouse more decorously painted Circe and Thisbe.
In later years the stories that draw on Ovid are too numerous to list, especially when mingled with second- or third-hand references. C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950, here) for example, mentions fauns, dryads, centaurs, the god Bacchus, and the goddess Pomona. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1912)—inspired by Ovid’s tale of a king who fell in love with a statue—later became the 1964 musical My Fair Lady. And in the twenty-first century, J. K. Rowling draws heavily from Ovid’s mythology in the Harry Potter series (1997–2007, see here): Dudley Dursley sprouts the tail of a pig, Centaurs roam the Forbidden Forest, and a three-headed dog (“Fluffy”) guards the Philosopher’s Stone, to name but three examples.
My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day. (I:1–5)
ANONYMOUS
BEOWULF (c.700–1100)
The oldest surviving epic poem in Old English centers on three battles pitting the Scandinavian hero Beowulf against monstrous giants and a dragon in a classic depiction of the ambiguous triumph of good over evil.
The 3,000 lines of the epic poem Beowulf (composed in Old English between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE) are dense with meaning and give rise to multiple interpretations; some see early appreciation of Christian values, while others observe a gripping tale of pagan heroism. Its position in the canon of English literature, however, is in no small part due to the novelist and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien, who argued the poem’s powerful value as a work of art to the British Academy in 1936.
Beowulf is set in southern Scandinavia around CE 400 to 600, at the start of the Dark Ages and at the heart of the Northern Heroic Age. As such, Beowulf is a period piece, and readers today listen in on a sophisticated tale told to a Christian Anglo-Saxon audience about their heroic, pagan predecessors living in violent lands terrorized by warrior bands and (sometimes) monsters. In the world of the poem, the monstrous Grendel, his vengeful mother, and the dragon are characters as real as Beowulf; for audiences more recent than the Dark Ages, these monsters remain “fantastically real” but take on symbolic possibilities. We are told that Grendel and his mother are descendants of the biblical first murderer, Cain; and for educated Christian listeners the terrifying dragon might suggest “that ancient serpent” described in Revelation 20:2, “who is the devil and Satan.”
The poem also alludes to history and legends that audience members would have known well, and looks back to a time of military aristocracy where a real man is a professional warrior who serves and protects his lord, a lord who protects him in turn and equitably distributes the bloodily won loot. In the twenty-first century, we have not outgrown warlords, nor social ranks nor machismo, but we may look back at Norse- and Germanic-age heroes as being part of a time of both barbaric splendor and squalor. At the courts of King Alfred the Great (CE 849–99) or King Canute (CE 99–1035), Beowulf would have described a world that was still familiar, but more parochial and basic (and more bother
ed by monsters).
The first great battle of the poem sees Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a northern Germanic tribe occupying part of what is now Sweden) defeat the horrifying Grendel who has terrorized a neighboring land ruled by King Hrothgar. After the defeat, there is much celebrating in King Hrothgar’s great hall, Heorot, but Grendel’s mother (never awarded her own name) wreaks a brutal attack on the hall in revenge for her son’s death. Beowulf once again seeks out and slays the monster in the poem’s second battle and his bravery is rewarded with gifts and celebration from Hrothgar’s people. Beowulf ’s grand heroic actions, however, are set against a background of human betrayal and warfare that will eventually destroy Heorot and Hrothgar’s dynasty.
In the final episode, fifty years later, when Beowulf is now King of the Geats, a dragon attacks his kingdom. Against good advice, Beowulf chooses to fight the dragon alone. When he falters, only one of his followers, Wiglaf, comes to his aid. At that exciting moment, the poem pauses to remind listeners of the history of Wiglaf’s sword—inherited from his father, Weohstan, who had taken it and other war gear, from the body of a Swedish prince he killed in battle—and hints at a feud between the Swedish king and whoever owns the sword, shield, and armor. The action then resumes for Beowulf to kill the dragon, but leaves Beowulf mortally wounded.
Wiglaf succeeds Beowulf, and in the conclusion of the poem it’s clear that in addition to traditional Swedish hatred of the Geats, now made personal against Wiglaf, there is the enmity of the powerful Franks, attacked by Beowulf ’s predecessor. Like Beowulf ’s heroism and generosity, Wiglaf ’s will be futile; like Heorot and Hrothgar’s line, the Geats are also doomed.
The poem ends as it begins, with a pagan funeral, this time Beowulf ’s: mourned as mild and good, a heroic warrior of the old time, striving for fame. But Beowulf ’s heroic deeds in life will be undone, and in any life to come he may be damned as a pagan, of all men lofgeornost (the last word of the poem): proudly, hence sinfully (for hard-nose Christians), yearning for glory.