by Stephen Fry
52 See Mythos (page 268) for stories of the wicked Autolycus. Some sources give SISYPHUS – an equally twisty-turny trickster (see Mythos, page 264) – as one of Odysseus’s ancestors.
53 Cephalonia, or Cephallenia (Kefalonia to today’s Greeks), is the largest of the Ionian islands and was named for Cephalus, a lover of Eos the Dawn (see Mythos, page 309) and father of Odysseus’s father Laertes.
54 The Greek personification of chance.
55 In truth I cannot say what form the lottery took. It will not have been written tickets – perhaps plaques with the symbols of each suitor’s royal house inscribed; perhaps it was a blind draw of pebbles, all but one of which were black, for example.
56 In some versions of the story there is no lottery. The suitors swear the oath and then Tyndareus chooses Menelaus (who is not there, but represented by his brother Agamemnon).
57 Timelines are, as ever, exasperating when it comes to myth rather than history. Certain lines of narrative render very problematic the calculation of the ages of the protagonists or any consistent ordering of historical events. Some suggest that Menelaus took the throne of Sparta only after the deaths and catasterization of his twin brothers-in-law Castor and Polydeuces.
58 As mentioned before, Oceanids were children of the primal Titan of the sea, Oceanus. The children of Nereus were Nereids. Perhaps it was to be expected that there might be rivalries between these divinities. Nereus’s wife Doris was herself an Oceanid, of course, so the rivalry was presumably of a familial kind.
59 No one is agreed on the exact composition of ambrosia. The idea that nectar was the drink of the gods and ambrosia the food is suggested by references in Homer, but other writers in classical antiquity had it the other way round, with ambrosia as the liquid and nectar as the solid. Most are agreed that it smelled sweet and fragrant and probably contained an element of honey. The word ‘ambrosia’ itself seems to have derived from one that meant ‘immortal’ or ‘undead’.
60 The torso, head and arms of a centaur were human; they were four-legged horses from the waist down only. Hence they could talk and use their hands like any human.
61 Apollodorus thought that Achilles meant ‘lipless one’ (a-cheile) – a gloss that Sir James Frazer (author of the pioneering 1890 work of myth and folklore The Golden Bough) deemed ‘absurd’. Some writers, like Robert Graves and Alec Nevala-Lee, feel ‘lipless’ is appropriate for an ‘oracular hero’ – though why they think Achilles is ‘oracular’ I cannot quite work out. Other interpretations of the name include ‘sharp-footed’ and, perhaps by extension, swift-footed – a quality associated with Achilles by Homer and many others. Also ‘distressing to the people’, or maybe ‘whose people are distressed’ – a meaning that Homer also plays with, in a punning way that neither proves nor disproves that this is the true origin and ‘meaning’ of the name. It’s a derivation game philologists have long played and it is hard to give the palm to any clear winner. As with all names and titles, common use erodes both connotation and denotation and the name becomes the named and vice versa. ACHILLES, in every sense, stands alone.
62 See Heroes, page 289.
63 As many as fifty sons by Hecuba and previous wives, if you add the various sources together.
64 Morpheus was the god of dreams. His name is connected not just to the morph of ‘morphine’ but also to the morph of ‘morphing’ and ‘metamorphosis’. After all, dreams are transformations, shiftings of shapes, meanings and stories in the head.
65 About 630 feet … or 192 metres in today’s money. Our word ‘stadium’ derives from the unit of length, which was also used to describe the sprint race itself.
66 He didn’t strip right down. It wasn’t until the mid eighth century BC that full nudity became compulsory for athletic events. An idea introduced by the Spartans, probably. Gumnos is the Greek word for naked – hence ‘gymnasium’, a place in which to be naked. Modern gym management insists on a modicum of clothing these days and won’t listen to any arguments about the real origins of the word – I’ve given up trying and usually wear at least a little shred of something when I work out these days.
67 See the Labours of Theseus in Heroes (page 344).
68 In the later, classical, age such scoundrel behaviour was forbidden, but in these earlier times few holds were barred.
69 They could augment or supplement, but not undo.
70 ‘Inspiration’ literally means a ‘breathing in’ – to the ancients this would imply from a god, Muse or other external power.
71 See Mythos (page 381) for the story of the Gordian Knot.
72 Once again. Was it inspiration, or was it Aphrodite?
73 Zeus’s aunt, Aphrodite, was born from the seed of the castrated sky god Ouranus: see Mythos, page 24.
74 Aphrodite was officially the spouse of Hephaestus, the lame god of fire and the forge, but it was an open secret that she and the war god were lovers. Venus and Mars …
75 Usually pronounced ‘An-kai-sees’.
76 It is tempting but deceptive to think of the Greeks and Trojans as resembling medieval Europeans – feudal kings and lords feasting in their castles, while peasants and serfs toiled in the fields. In fact, the great and noble counted their riches, status and importance in livestock and never thought agriculture and pastoral labour beneath them. Just as the biblical King David had been a shepherd, so Odysseus could be seen at the plough, and royally born Anchises was quite content with his cattle and sheep. Homer often used the epithet ‘shepherd of the people’ to describe the kingly role of Agamemnon and other leaders.
77 Some versions of this story say that Zeus struck Anchises lame, or blind, or even dead, for daring to blab of his liaison with Aphrodite. It is hard to see why Zeus would be annoyed by his trick on Aphrodite becoming known, but it is accepted by most sources that Anchises was lame.
78 Idas and Lynceus, sons of their father Tyndareus’s brother Aphareus.
79 Possibly. Catreus was a son of Minos and Pasiphae (see Heroes, page 363, for their story) and the father of Aerope (Menelaus’s and Agamemnon’s mother); his death at the hands of his own son had in fact been foretold by a prophecy years earlier. Which does not disprove Aphrodite’s part in it, but certainly complicates it. The accidental slaying of Catreus by his son Althaemenes did occur at just the right time as far as Paris’s and Aphrodite’s plans were concerned. So convenient was the timing that the intervention of a divine hand might well be inferred.
80 Also called the Argolid, just to confuse us more.
81 Named after Danaus, a mythical Libyan who was considered one of the founder kings of Argos.
82 It could be pronounced ‘Di-om-ed-eez’ (to rhyme roughly with ‘my comedies’), or ‘Di-oh-mee-deez’, as the mood takes you.
83 Different sources tell different stories about Cinyras. As a major mythical King of Cyprus he is described by some as a pioneer of copper mining and smelting. The island was a major source of the ore for successions of Mediterranean civilizations. Copper was, of course, especially valued during the Bronze Age (bronze is an alloy of copper and tin): indeed, our word ‘copper’ and the chemical abbreviation for it, Cu, derive from the Latin for the island and the metal – cuprium. Although the island itself may have got its name from the Sumerian word for bronze, kubar. Or from the cypress tree. Or from an old word for the henna tree, kypros (henna as a dye yields a coppery colour: I dyed my hair that colour in a moment of student madness back in 1979, when the world was young and more forgiving). Cinyras, according to Ovid, fathered – by way of an incestuous relationship with his daughter Myrrha – the beautiful Adonis, with whom Aphrodite fell in love, the story Shakespeare retells in his extended poem Venus and Adonis (see Mythos, page 327).
84 See Mythos, pages 189 and 210.
85 See Heroes, page 239.
86 This practice, which the Greeks called oionistike, was known as ‘augury’ in Rome. Another word for this form of divination is ‘ornithomancy’. Not to be confused with ‘haruspicy’ and
‘extispicy’ – forecasting by the inspection of animal entrails.
87 An ephebe was a male adolescent who had reached the age – typically seventeen or eighteen – where he could begin full training in the arts of war.
88 He threw Theseus off one of Skyros’s cliffs. See Heroes, page 402.
89 Different sources credit Lycomedes with a different quantity of daughters: anything between eight and a hundred.
90 Some sources say Achilles had another son by Deidamia, called Oneiros, which is the Greek for ‘dream’. If true, Oneiros seems to have been disregarded by mythographers, unlike his brother Pyrrhus, whose life, as we shall see, was fully recorded under his later name of NEOPTOLEMUS. While on the subject of names, the issue of Achilles’ name while on Skyros is of great interest and worth a diversion. There is a much-quoted passage from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658): ‘What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.’ The questions derived from speculation by the Roman biographical writer Suetonius, but Browne took them up again as a way of (ironically) comparing the real possibility of acquiring the full details of a non-historical myth with the near impossibility of piecing together the stories behind the bones, memorial urns and other articles left behind by real life – hence Edgar Allan Poe famously using this passage as an epigraph for his story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, considered by some to be the first detective story, which is all about piecing together truths. The matters Browne raises are indeed ‘not beyond conjecture’. As for the name Achilles took, well, most writers and commentators go with Pyrrha – the ‘flame-haired one’. But according to Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars, the Emperor Tiberius (who loved to twit scholars on these matters, as we noted when discussing Hecuba’s lineage) came up with a variety of contenders aside from Pyrrha. Cercysera (or Kerkysera) was one, derived from the Greek for a spinning wheel’s distaff, long a symbol of femininity, as in the ‘distaff side’ of a family, and the word ‘spinster’ – although kerkos means ‘tail’ or ‘penis’, so some think this name was a later joke, one scholar going so far as to suggest that it comes from kerkouros, which means ‘he who urinates through his tail’ (given Tiberius’s notoriously dark and sick sense of humour he may well have preferred this option). Another suggested name was Issa or Aissa, referring to Achilles’ speed (aisso means ‘I sprint, dash or dart’). Robert Graves has this to say: ‘My conjecture is that Achilles called himself Dacryoessa (“the tearful one”) or, better, Drosoessa, (“the dewy one”), drosos being a poetic synonym for tears.’ Aspetos, meaning ‘limitless’ or ‘vast’, is also suggested by some, although this seems to have been a soubriquet used later, once Achilles’ reputation had been made.
91 A hecatomb was a sacrifice of a hundred cattle. One source suggests that Menelaus had promised Aphrodite he would offer her a hecatomb in thanks after he won Helen in the lottery, but that in all the excitement he forgot. Her anger at this slight is given as a reason for Aphrodite selecting Helen as Paris’s offered reward at the Judgement on Mount Ida.
92 Eudoros was a son of Hermes. Prince Phoenix ruled Dolopia, a subject kingdom of Phthia, and had been responsible for raising Achilles when he had removed from Chiron’s cave to Phthia. After Patroclus, he was the man Achilles loved most.
93 This was true. The god Hermes saw Polymele dancing for Artemis and was entranced by her grace and beauty. Eudoros was born of their union. Artemis had not been pleased at the loss of her votary. Had Eudoros not been under the protection of Hermes she would certainly have killed him or transformed him into something beastly.
94 These are the words attributed to her by Euripides in his tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis. That play and the story of Iphigenia’s sacrifice were the basis of the excellent Yorgos Lanthimos film The Killing of a Sacred Deer, starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman.
95 A penteconter was a vessel rowed by fifty oarsmen. Not all the ships in the Homeric account had so many men at oar, however. Some are described as having twenty; perhaps they were smaller ships, or perhaps thirty of their rowing benches were left vacant. For example, we are told in the ‘Catalogue’ that each ship of the Boeotian contingent held 120 men, which would mean they had an additional seventy non-rowing warriors on board. We know from the Odyssey that the Ithacan ships held fifty men each. The counting game is fun if you’re that kind of person, but naturally it proves nothing. It’s enough for our purposes to know that the fleet was a large one.
96 Sources like Apollodorus and Hyginus, for example, offer slightly lower numbers. Most agree that the total number of fighting men was somewhere between 70,000 and 130,000.
97 A common appellation for the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus – it means ‘the sons of Atreus’. Noble and royal Greeks liked to address each other in such terms.
98 See Heroes, page 127.
99 Sophocles in his tragedy Philoctetes has Poeas, Philoctetes’ father, doing the actual lighting of the pyre.
100 So many, indeed, that one is given to wonder how many arrows there can have been. He must have knelt beside the Hydra coating arrow tips for hours, or even days, if one is to account for all the damage they were subsequently to do. Some killjoy historians and spoilsport commentators suggest that the Greeks were in the habit of using a mixture of snake venom and excrement to make their arrows and spears either rapidly fatal or slowly and viciously infectious, and that Heracles had probably re-envenomed his arrows many times using this method, rather than relying exclusively on his stock of Hydra-tainted tips. I prefer to believe otherwise. The deadly blood has a direct link to the Hydra’s father, the ancient snakelike chthonic monster TYPHON, son of primordial Gaia and Tartarus, and is thereby linked to Python too, the snake slain by the young god Apollo (see Mythos, page 97). Pytho, the location of this slaying, was later called Delphi, and its oracle’s priestess was known as the Pythia; it would be the Delphic oracle that commanded Heracles to undertake his Labours. Typhon once fought with Zeus for the very control of the cosmos. While the most important destiny of Zeus’s son Heracles was to save Olympus and the gods from destruction at the hands of Gaia’s offspring the giants, which he accomplished with the blood of Typhon’s Hydra-child envenoming his arrows (see Heroes, page 124). In a similar manner Heracles rid the world of many of Typhon’s other spawn, and defeated countless further adversaries; and then, through the cruel irony of the shirt of Nessus, that same venom caused his own agonizing death. The destiny of those very arrows, as we shall see, was to determine the course of the Trojan War too. What this rambling excursion is trying to suggest is that the Hydra venom is woven through the tapestry of Greek myth, from beginning to end, like a serpentine thread. The painful symmetry of its final use to end the Trojan War and bring down the curtain on the Olympian Age – gods, heroes and all – calls to mind the ouroboros: the serpent that eats its own tail. Typhon was to have his revenge after all.
101 Indeed, it seems that Chryse (the ‘golden island’) was small enough to be wholly submerged by a rise in sea level around the time of the Roman Empire. An amateur archaeologist in the 1960s claimed to have found its underwater ruins, temple and all.
102 A deserted island according to Sophocles, at least. Perhaps after Jason had fathered the Minyae (see Heroes, page 210) they left Lemnos and sought habitation elsewhere.
Ilium
1 In Homer’s account certain minor gods, often associated for obvious reasons with Ares, are also numbered on the Trojan side. They are Phobos (Fear and Panic) and Deimos (Dread) – in reality they are little more than personifications of the human emotions that naturally run high in battle. Eris too, goddess of strife and discord, whose golden apple led to Helen’s abduction, is sometimes counted in the Trojan ranks. The river god Scamander naturally aligns himself with Troy and will have a role in trying to repel the greatest of the Achaean warriors.
2 As mentioned, Odysseus is a great-grandson of Hermes through his mother Anticlea, a daughter of
Hermes’ son Autolycus.
3 See Heroes, page 124.
4 Bellerophon, for one, had tried to place himself up there: see Heroes, pages 124 and 163.
5 In some sources, the Dardanians are the original inhabitants of the country around the city of Troy and governed by the junior branch of the Trojan royal family headed by Anchises and Aeneas.
6 Sometimes called the more pleasing ‘Luish’.
7 And a distant relative too: at least according to sources later than Homer.
8 ‘Peleides’ means ‘son of Peleus’ – I shan’t use this formulation much. Homer and the other poets of the Trojan War use it all the time, and of every hero. Diomedes is Tydides, Odysseus Laertides, etc. As we know Agamemnon and Menelaus are the Atreides.