Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

by Stephen Fry

  Unlike many born with the awful privilege of beauty, Ganymede was not sulky, petulant or spoiled. His manners were charming and unaffected. When he smiled the smile was kind and his amber eyes were lit with a friendly warmth. Those who knew him best said that his inner beauty matched or even exceeded his outer.

  Had he not been a prince it is likely that more fuss would have been made of his startling looks and his life would have been made impossible. But because he was the favoured son of a great ruler no one dared try to seduce him, and he lived a blameless life of horses, music, sport and friends. It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all.

  They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumours of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn’t known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus.

  It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus.

  Zeus despatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss.

  ‘Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,’ Hermes told him. ‘He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.’

  Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him …

  But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai ‘gladdening’ and medon ‘prince’ and/or medeon ‘genitals’. ‘Ganymede’, the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word ‘catamite’.

  Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

  When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.

  Moon Lovers

  A word about two immortal sisters. We have met in passing Eos, or AURORA as the Romans called her, and know that her task was to begin each day by flinging wide the gates that let first the god Apollo and then her brother Helios drive the sun-chariot through. Their sister Selene (LUNA to the Romans) drove the nocturnal equivalent, the moon-chariot, across the night sky. By Selene, Zeus had fathered two daughters, PANDIA (whom Athenians celebrated every full moon) and ERSA (sometimes HERSE), the divine personification of the dew.

  After Zeus tired of Selene, she fell in love a number of times. A fine, heroic youth called CEPHALUS caught her eye and she abducted him. She gave no thought to the fact that he was already spoken for – married, in fact, to PROCRIS, a daughter of Erechtheus, first King of Athens (the issue of Hephaestus’s spilled semen), and his queen, PRAXITHEA. Despite Selene’s radiant beauty and the luxurious moon palace she installed him in, the kidnapped Cephalus found himself missing his wife Procris dreadfully. No matter what silvery arts of love the goddess of the moon employed, she failed to arouse him. Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife. All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold …

  With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind.

  ‘Aiee,’ she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, ‘it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘How little you know her!’ Cephalus returned with some heat, ‘She is as faithful as she is lovely.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Selene. ‘All it takes is honey and money.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.’

  ‘How cynical you are.’

  ‘I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That’s not cynicism, it’s realism.’

  ‘But you don’t know Procris,’ Cephalus insisted. ‘She’s not like other people. She is faithful and true.’

  ‘Pah! She’d leap into bed with anyone when your back’s turned. I tell you what …’ Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. ‘If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets – I bet she’d be all over you.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Up to you, but …’ Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. ‘Oh look – there’s a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too …’

  Selene vanished and at that very moment Cephalus found that he was indeed bearded. The change of wardrobe that had inexplicably appeared by the roadside seemed to beckon to him.

  Despite his protestations to the contrary, Selene’s words had planted a seed of doubt. In putting on this absurd costume, Cephalus told himself that he was not yielding to this doubt, but rather setting out to show Selene that her cynicism was misplaced. He and Procris would call up to her that very night as she glided by in her chariot, ‘How wrong you were, goddess of the moon!’ they would cry, ‘how little you understand a loving mortal heart.’ Words to that effect. That would show her.

  A short while later, Procris opened the door to a handsome bearded, helmeted, gowned stranger. She was looking a little haggard and drawn. The sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband had hit her hard. Before she had time to enquire of her visitor, however, Cephalus shouldered his way into the house and dismissed the servants.

  ‘You are a very beautiful woman,’ he said in a thick Thracian accent.

  Procris blushed. ‘Sir, I must …’

  ‘Come, let us seat ourselves on this couch.’

  ‘Really, I cannot …’

  ‘Come now, no one’s looking.’

  She knew that it was pushing the boundaries of hospitable xenia a little further than was called for, but Procris complied. The man was so forceful.

  ‘What’s a beauty like you doing all alone in such a big house?’ Cephalus picked a fig from a copper bowl, took a lascivious bite from it and dangled the soft juicy half that remained in front of Procris.fn7

  ‘Sir!’

  As her mouth opened to remonstrate, Cephalus pushed in the squashy fig.

  ‘A sight to enflame the gods themselves,’ he said. ‘Be mine!’

  ‘I’m married!’ she tried to say th
rough the seeds and pulp.

  ‘Marriage? What’s that? I’m a rich man and will give you whatever jewels or ornaments you ask for, if only you will yield. You are so beautiful. And I love you.’

  Procris paused. It may have been that she was trying to swallow the remains of the fig. It may have been that she was tempted by the offer of precious things. Perhaps she was touched by this sudden and intense declaration of love. The pause was long enough to cause Cephalus to rise in fury, cast off his disguise and reveal himself.

  ‘So!’ he thundered, ‘This is what happens when you are alone! Dishonourable, deceitful woman!’

  Procris stared in disbelief. ‘Cephalus? Is that you?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, it is your poor husband! This is how you behave when I am away. Go! Leave my sight, faithless Procris. Away with you!’

  He lunged forward, shaking his fist, and the terrified Procris fled. Out of the house she ran, out into the woods, never stopping until she collapsed with exhaustion on the fringes of a grove sacred to Artemis.

  The goddess discovered Procris lying there the next morning and coaxed from her the story of what had happened.

  For a year and a day she stayed with the divine huntress and her retinue of fierce maidens, but at last she could bear it no longer.

  ‘Artemis, you have looked after me, tutored me in the arts of the chase and shown me how men are always to be shunned. But I cannot lie to you: in my heart I love my husband Cephalus as much as ever I did. He wronged me, but the wrong he did came from his great love for me and I yearn to forgive him and lie in his arms, his wife once more.’

  Artemis was sorry to see her go, but she was in a charitable mood. Not only did she let Procris return to her husband without first plucking her eyes out or feeding her to the pigs (actions that were by no means alien to her) but she bestowed upon her two remarkable gifts to present to Cephalus as a peace offering.

  Lailaps and Alopex Teumesios

  One of the gifts that Procris received was a remarkable dog called LAILAPS which had the power to catch anything, absolutely anything that it pursued. Set it to chase a deer, boar, bear, lion or even human being and it could never fail to bring its quarry down. The second gift, of equal value, was a javelin that would always hit its mark. Whosoever was possessed of both could rightly call themselves the greatest mortal hunter in the world. Little wonder that Cephalus was pleased to welcome his wife, laden with such gifts, back to hearth and home, bosom and bed.

  The reputation of Cephalus now grew and grew – tales of his hunting skills were whispered in awe from kingdom to kingdom. News reached the ears of the Theban regent, CREON.fn8 As so often in its benighted history, Thebes at this time was being laid low by a scourge, in this instance a ferocious fox, called locally the Cadmean Vixen and feared throughout the Greek World as ALOPEX TEUMESIOS, the Teumessian Fox, a marauder whose special gift was that it was divinely ordained never to be caught, no matter how many dogs, horses or men were on her trail or set in position to trap her. It was thought this vulpine terror was unleashed by Dionysus, still thirsting for revenge upon the city that had shunned and mocked his mother Semele.

  An increasingly desperate Creon, having heard tell of the almost supernatural gifts of Cephalus and his wonderdog, Lailaps, sent word to Athens begging to borrow it. Cephalus was happy enough to lend Creon the marvellous hound, which was soon set on the fox’s trail.

  The ensuing debacle reveals a marvellous quality of the Greek mind: their fascination with paradox. What happens when an uncatchable fox is set upon by an inescapable hound? This is akin to the problem of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

  Round and round dashed the Cadmean Vixen, while hot on her tail flew Lailaps, from whom no prey could escape. They would still be caught in that logic loop now I suppose, if Zeus hadn’t done something about it.

  The King of the Gods looked down at the sight and pondered the strange self-contradicting problem that presented such an affront to all proper reason and sense, and so vexingly subverted the notions embodied in that splendid Greek word nous. Zeus’s authority was underwritten by a deep law that said no god had the power to undo the divine enchantments of another. This meant that the dog and the vixen were fated to be locked in this impossible condition for ever, making a public mockery of the order of things. Zeus solved the conundrum by turning the fox and the dog to stone. In this way they stayed frozen in time, their perfect possibilities unachieved for eternity, their destinies for ever unreconciled. At length, even this locked state seemed to him to challenge common sense, so he catasterized them – removed them to the heavens – where they became the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.

  Cephalus and Procris, I am sorry to say, did not prosper long. Deprived of Lailaps, but still armed with the enchanted javelin that could never fail to find its target, Cephalus loved nothing better than rambling about the hills and valleys that surrounded Athens, taking what prey he happened on. One fiercely hot afternoon, after three hours of chasing and spearing, tired and drenched in sweat, he lay down to doze. The heat of the day, even in the shade of his favourite great oak, made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Come Zephyrus,’ he called up lazily to the West Wind, ‘let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, calm me, ease me, soothe me, play on me …’

  By the greatest misfortune, Procris had come out to where Cephalus was, to surprise him with a dish of olives and some wine. Just as she drew near she heard her husband’s last few words, ‘let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, ease me, soothe me, play on me …’ After all that show of possessive rage he was now betraying her? Procris could not believe her ears! The dish and the wineskin fell from her nerveless fingers and she gave an involuntary gasp.

  Cephalus sat up. What was that stumbling in the undergrowth? That snuffle! A pig, by heaven! He reached for his spear and threw it towards the bushes from which the noise had come. He had no need to be careful in his aim. The enchanted javelin would do all the work.

  It did. Procris expired in his grieving arms.

  A charmingly strange and unhappy tale.fn9 It all came about, we should remind ourselves, merely because Selene had decided to abduct an appetizing mortal.

  Endymion

  Cephalus was not the only young man to catch the moon goddess’s eye. One night, as Selene sailed her silver chariot across the sky over western Asia Minor, she spotted far below ENDYMION, a young shepherd of great beauty lying naked and fast asleep on the hillside outside a cave on Mount Latmos. The sight of his lovely limbs all silvered by her moonbeams and the enticingly seductive smile that played on his lips as he dreamed so filled Selene with desire that she cried out to Zeus, Endymion’s father, to ensure that he would never change. She wanted to see him in exactly that attitude every night. Zeus granted the wish. Endymion stayed just where he was, locked in eternal slumber. Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy. This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures and positions which allowed that.

  An odd relationship, but one which worked and made Selene happy.fn10

  Eos and Tithonus

  The love life of Selene’s sister Eos was no less tumultuous. Some time ago the goddess of the dawn had emerged from a dramatically disastrous affair with the god of war. When Aphrodite, Ares’ jealous lover, found out about the liaison she ordained in her heart that Eos would never find joy in the one realm in which Aphrodite was sovereign – love.

  Eos was a full-blooded Titaness with all the appetites of that race. Moreover, as bringer of the dawn, she believed in the hope, promise and opportunity heralded by each new day. And so, over the years, Eos stumbled with tragic optimism from relationship to relationship, each one doomed by Aphrodite’s curse, of which she was blithely unaware.

  The cougarish Eos was especially drawn to young mort
al men: Just as Selene had abducted Cephalus, so Eos tried to do the same thing to a youth called CLEITUS. This led to heartbreak, for he was mortal and died in what to her was the twinkling of an eye.

  There must have been something in the air of Troy in those days. LAOMEDON, the nephew of Zeus’s beloved cupbearer, Ganymede,fn1 had a son called TITHONUS, who grew up to be quite his great-uncle’s equal in beauty. Tithonus was perhaps a little slighter, slimmer and smaller in stature than Ganymede, but this made him no less desirable. He had a laughing sweetness that was entirely his own and made him enchanting and irresistible. You just wanted to put an arm round him and own him for ever.

  One afternoon Eos saw this exquisite young man walking on the beach outside the walls of Ilium. All her numberless dalliances, abductions, crushes and flings, even the affair with Ares … all these, she now realized, had been but childish whims, meaningless infatuations. This was the real thing. This was it.

  Love at First Sight

  As Eos approached along the sand, Tithonus looked up and fell in love with her quite as instantly and entirely as she had fallen in love with him. They held hands straight away, without even having exchanged a word, and walked up and down on the shoreline as lovers do.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Tithonus.’

  ‘I am Eos, the dawn. Come away with me to the Palace of the Sun. Live with me and be my lover, my husband, my equal, my ruler, my subject, my all.’

  ‘Eos, I will. I am yours for ever.’

  They laughed and made love with the waves crashing around them. Eos’s rosy fingers found ways to drive Tithonus quite mad with joy. For her own part she knew that this time she could make it work.