Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

by Stephen Fry

  Her coral, pearl, agate, marble and jasper apartments within the Palace of the Sun became their home. Few couples had ever been happier. Their lives were complete. They shared everything. They read poetry to each other, went on long walks, listened to music, danced, rode horses, sat in companionable silence, laughed and made love. Every morning he watched with pride as she threw open the gates to let Helios and his chariot thunder through.

  The Boon

  A problem nagged at Eos, however. She knew that one day her beautiful beloved mortal youth must be taken from her, as Cleitus had been. The thought of his death caused her an inner despair that she could not quite conceal.

  ‘What is it my love?’ Tithonus asked one evening, surprising her fair countenance in a frown.

  ‘You trust me, don’t you, darling boy?’

  ‘Always and entirely.’

  ‘I am going away tomorrow afternoon. I shall return as soon as I can. Do not ask me where or why I go.’

  Her destination was Olympus and an audience with Zeus.

  ‘Immortal Sky Father, Lord of Olympus, Cloud-Gatherer, Storm-Bringer, King of all the …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. What do you want?’

  ‘I crave a boon, great Zeus.’

  ‘Of course you crave a boon. None of my family visits me for any other reason. It’s always boons. Boons, boons, boons and nothing but boons. What is it this time? Something to do with that Trojan boy, I suppose?’

  A little flustered by this, Eos pressed on. ‘Yes, dread lord. You know how it is when we consort with a mortal youth …’ she allowed herself a look towards Ganymede, who was standing behind Zeus’s throne, ever ready to refill his cup of nectar. At her glance Ganymede smiled and dropped his gaze, blushing prettily.

  ‘Yes … and?’ Zeus had started drumming his fingers on the arm of his throne. Never a good sign.

  ‘One day Thanatos will come for my Prince Tithonus and that I can not bear. I ask that you grant him immortality.’

  ‘Oh. Do you? Immortality, eh? That’s all? Immortality. Hm. Yes, I don’t see why not. Immunity from death. That really is all you want for him?’

  ‘Why, yes, lord, that is all.’

  What else could there be? Had she caught him in a good mood? Her heart began to leap with delight.

  ‘Granted,’ said Zeus clapping his hands. ‘From this moment on, your Tithonus is immortal.’

  Eos sprang from her prostrate position of supplication with a squeal of joy and rushed forward to kiss Zeus’s hand. He seemed mightily pleased too and laughed and smiled as he accepted her thanks.

  ‘No, no. Such a pleasure. I’m sure you’ll be coming back to thank me soon enough.’

  ‘Of course, if you would like me to?’ It seemed an odd request.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll be along before we know it,’ said Zeus, still unable to stop himself from grinning. He didn’t know what had planted the imp of mischief in his mind. But we know it was the curse of Aphrodite doing its implacable work.

  Eos hurried back to the Palace of the Sun where her adored spouse was waiting patiently for her return. When she told him the news he hugged her and hugged her and they danced around the palace making so much noise that Helios banged on the walls and grumbled that some people had to be up before dawn.

  Be Careful What You Wish For

  Eos bore Tithonus two sons: EMATHION, who was to rule Arabia, and MEMNON, who grew up to become one of the greatest and most feared warriors in all the ancient world.

  One evening, Tithonus lay with his head in Eos’s lap while she idly twisted his golden hair around her fingers. She was humming softly but broke off with a sudden hiss of surprise.

  ‘What is it, my love?’ murmured Tithonus.

  ‘You trust me, don’t you, darling one?’

  ‘Always and entirely.’

  ‘I am going away tomorrow afternoon. I shall return as soon as I can. Do not ask me where or why I going.’

  ‘Haven’t we had this conversation before?’

  Her destination was Olympus and another audience with Zeus.

  ‘Ha! I said you’d be back, didn’t I? Didn’t I, Ganymede? What were my very words to you, Eos?’

  ‘You said, “I’m sure you’ll be coming back to thank me soon enough.” ’

  ‘So I did. What’s this you’re showing me?’

  Eos’s hand was outstretched towards Zeus. She was holding something between trembling rosy forefinger and trembling rosy thumb. It was a single filament of silver.

  ‘Look!’ she said in throbbing accents.

  Zeus peered down. ‘Looks like a hair.’

  ‘It is a hair. It came from my Tithonus’s head. It is grey.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘My lord! You promised me. You swore that you would grant Tithonus immortality.’

  ‘And so I did.’

  ‘Then how do you explain this?’

  ‘Immortality was the boon you asked for and immortality was the boon I granted. You didn’t say anything about ageing. You never requested eternal youth.’

  ‘I … you … but …’ Eos staggered backwards, appalled. This could not be!

  ‘ “Immortality” you said. Isn’t that right, Ganymede?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘But I assumed … I mean, isn’t it obvious what I meant?’

  ‘Sorry, Eos,’ said Zeus, rising. ‘I can’t be expected to interpret everyone’s requests. He won’t die. That’s the thing. You’ll always be together.’

  Eos was left alone, her hair wiping the floor as she wept.

  The Grasshopper

  The faithful Tithonus and their two bouncing children welcomed Eos back on her return. She did everything she could to hide her woe, but Tithonus sensed something was distressing her. When the boys had been put down to sleep for the night he took her through to the balcony and poured her a cup of wine. They sat and watched the stars for a while before he spoke.

  ‘Eos, my love, my life. I know what it is that you aren’t telling me. I can see it for myself. The looking glass tells me every morning.’

  ‘Oh Tithonus!’ she buried her head against his chest and sobbed her heart out.

  Time passed. Each morning Eos did her duty and opened the doors to a new day. The boys grew up and left home. The years succeeded each other with the remorseless inevitability that even gods cannot alter.

  What scant hair that remained on Tithonus’s head was now white. He had become most dreadfully wrinkled, shrunken and weak with extreme old age, yet he could not die. His voice, once so mellow and sweet to the ear had become a harsh, dry scrape of a sound. His skin and frame were so shrivelled that he could barely walk.

  He followed the beautiful, ever young Eos around as faithfully and lovingly as ever. ‘Please, pity me,’ he would screech in his hoarse, piping tones. ‘Kill me, crush me, let it all end, I beg.’

  But she could no longer understand him. All she heard were husky cheeps and chirps. Inside, however, she guessed well enough what he was trying to say.

  Eos may not have had the ability to grant immortality or eternal youth, but she was gifted with enough divine power to do something to end her beloved’s misery. One evening, when she felt neither of them could take any more, she closed her eyes, concentrated hard and watched through hot tears as Tithonus’s poor shrunken body made the very few changes necessary to turn him from a withered, old man into a grasshopper.fn2

  In this new form Tithonus hopped from the cold marble floor onto the ledge of the balcony before leaping out into the night. She saw him in her sister Selene’s cold moonlight, clinging to a long blade of grass that swayed in the night breeze. His back legs scraped out a sound that might have been a grateful chirrup of loving farewell. Her tears fell and somewhere, far away, Aphrodite laughed.fn3

  The Bloom of Youth

  The story of Eos and Tithonus can be considered a kind of domestic tragedy. Greek myth offers us many more stories of love between gods and mortals that more often fit into the genre �
�doomed romance’, sometimes with an element of rom-com, farce or horror thrown in. In these love affairs the gods seem always to say it with flowers. The Greek for flower is anthos – so what follows is, quite literally, a romantic anthology.

  Hyacinthus

  Hyacinthus, a beautiful Spartan prince, had the misfortune to be loved by two divinities, Zephyrus, the West Wind, and golden Apollo. Hyacinthus himself much preferred the beautiful Apollo and repeatedly turned down the wind’s playful but increasingly fierce advances.

  One afternoon Apollo and Hyacinth were competing in athletic events and Zephyrus, in a fit of jealous rage, blew Apollo’s discus off course, sending it skimming at speed straight towards Hyacinth. It struck him hard on the forehead, killing him stone dead.

  In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth’s soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one’s brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. This heady juice dropped into the soil and from it bloomed the exquisite and sweet-smelling flower that bears Hyacinth’s name to this day.

  Crocus and Smilax

  Crocus was a mortal youth who pined without success for the nymph SMILAX. Out of pity, the gods (we don’t really know which one) turned him into the saffron flower that we call crocus, while she became a brambly vine, many species of which still flourish under the name Smilax.

  According to another version of this myth, Crocus was the lover and companion of the god Hermes, who accidentally killed him with a discus and in his sorrow turned him into the crocus flower. This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

  Aphrodite and Adonis

  There was an early King of Cyprus called THEIAS who was renowned for his remarkable good looks. He and his wife CENCHREIS had a daughter SMYRNA, also known as MYRRHE or MYRRHA, who grew up harbouring secret incestuous love for her handsome father.

  Now, Cyprus was sacred to Aphrodite, being the island on which she first set foot after her birth from the foam of the sea, and it was a spiteful Aphrodite who had breathed into Smyrna this unnatural desire for her own father. It seems that the goddess had of late been aggrieved by the inadequacy of King Theias’s prayers and sacrifices to her. He had displayed the temerity to open a new shrine dedicated to Dionysus, a cult which was proving popular amongst the islanders. Aphrodite regarded the neglect of her temples as the worst possible crime, far worse than incest. In the minds of mortals, though, even those of the notoriously laissez-faire and decadent Cyprus, incest was a taboo of the gravest kind. An anguished Smyrna attempted to smother her guilty feelings. But Aphrodite, who really seemed determined to sow mischief, bewitched Smyrna’s maid HIPPOLYTE and brought the whole business to a disturbing crisis.

  One evening, when Theias had got himself good and drunk, as he liked to do since his discovery of the vinous virtues of the god Dionysus, Hippolyte, under the spell of Aphrodite, led Smyrna to his chamber and into his bed. The king made greedy love to his daughter there, too intoxicated to question his good fortune. In the dark of night and the fog of wine he failed to recognize the fruit of his own loins; he only knew that a young, desirable, and passionately obliging girl had appeared to pleasure him like some kind of divine succubus.

  After a week of these intense and joyful visitations Theias awoke one morning with a determination to know more about her. He put out word that he would reward with a mountain of gold anyone who could discover the identity of the mysterious stranger who had lately made his nights so wildly pleasurable.

  Smyrna had been acting out her passion in a kind of mad dream of lust, but when she heard that all Cyprus was now trying to find out the secret of her nightly visits to Theias, she ran from the palace to hide in the woods. She wanted to die, but she could not forsake the child that she already felt growing inside her. Railing at the laws of man that made her love criminal, she begged heaven to take pity on her.fn1 In answer to her prayer, the gods transformed Smyrna into a weeping myrrh tree.

  After ten months the tree burst open and disgorged a mortal baby boy. Naiads anointed the child with the soft tears that wept from the myrrh – a balm which remains the source of the most important birth and coronation oils to this very day – and he was given the name Adonis.

  Smyrna’s baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I’ve written this too many times for you to believe me again. But it’s true that all who looked upon him were smitten for ever and true also that his name lives on as a descriptor of paragons of male beauty. At the very least it’s necessary for us to know that Adonis was lovely enough to attract, as no other mortal ever had, the one who had done so much to bring about his birth: the goddess of love and beauty herself, Aphrodite.

  They became lovers. It had been a wild and tortuous path to this coupling: the goddess, in a spirit of malicious revenge, had caused a father to commit a forbidden act with his daughter which brought forth a child whom Aphrodite loved perhaps more completely than any other being. A lifetime of therapy could surely not clear up such a psychic mess as that.

  They did everything together, Adonis and Aphrodite. She knew that the other gods hated the boy – Demeter and Artemis could not bear to see so many girls sickening with love for him, Hera stonily disapproved of the issue of so shamefully and flagrantly indecent an affront to the sacred institutions of marriage and family, while Ares was stormily jealous of his lover’s intense infatuation. Aphrodite sensed all this and determined to keep Adonis safe from the harm her resentful family might do him.

  Because her precious mortal lover, like most Greek boys and men, showed a great passion for hunting, the protective Aphrodite told him that while he was free to chase prey of manageable size and limited ferocity – hares, rabbits, doves and pigeons, for example – he was absolutely forbidden from pursuing lions, bears, boars and the larger stags. But boys will be boys, and when the girls are away they cannot resist reverting to type and showing off. And so it came about that, one afternoon, Aphrodite’s beloved found himself alone on the trail of a great boar (some say the boar was actually Ares himself in disguise). Adonis cornered the beast and was just pulling back his spear ready for the kill when it turned on him with a savage roar, tusks bristling. Adonis dropped his spear in fright as he leapt back, but he was a brave young man and managed to steady himself and plant his feet firmly enough to meet the boar’s charge. As it rushed forward, Adonis spun his body round in a graceful turn like a dancer – the brute missed him and Adonis seized it by the neck as it passed. But the boar was cunning. It dropped its head to the ground, letting the boy think he had subdued it. Kneeling down Adonis pushed with one hand against the animal’s head, feeling with his spare hand for the knife he kept in his belt. The boar sensed its chance and pulled its head up with a snarl, lifting and twisting its great tusks. They tore Adonis’s stomach open and he fell, mortally wounded, to the ground.

  Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar – or was it Ares? – grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.fn2

  Echo and Narcissus

  Tiresias

  The best known of all the stories that involve the transformation of a youth into a flower begins with a worried mother taking her son to see a prophet. As well as the soothsayers and Sibyls who spoke on behalf of the divine oracles, there existed certain select mortal beings whom the gods also privileged with the gift of prophecy. Arranging a consultation with one of these was not unlike making an appointment to see a doctor.

  The two most celebrated seers of Greek myth were CASSANDRA and TIRESIAS. Cassandra was a Trojan prophetess whos
e curse was to be entirely accurate in her prognostications yet always just as entirely disbelieved. The Theban Tiresias underwent an equally stressed existence. Born male, he was turned female by Hera as a punishment for striking two mating snakes with a stick, something which annoyed her greatly at the time, for reasons best known to herself. After seven years of serving Hera as a priestess, Tiresias was returned to his original male form, only to be struck blind by Athena for looking on her naked while she bathed in the river.fn1 That is one story that explains his blindness, but I prefer the variant that tells how he was brought up to Olympus to arbitrate in a wager between Zeus and Hera. They had been arguing over which gender enjoyed sex the most. Since Tiresias, having been both male and female, was in a unique position to answer this question, it was agreed that his judgement would be final.

  Tiresias declared that in his experience sex was nine times more enjoyable for females than males. This enraged Hera, who had bet Zeus that men got the most pleasure from the act. Perhaps she was basing her opinion on the inexhaustible libido of her husband and her own more moderate sex drive. For his pains Hera rewarded Tiresias by striking him blind. One god can never reverse the effects of another, so the best Zeus could do for Tiresias was to award him the compensatory faculty of second sight, the gift of prophecy.fn2

  Narcissus

  There was once a naiad called LIRIOPE, who coupled with the river god CEPHISSUS and gave birth to a son, NARCISSUS, whose beauty was so remarkable that she worried for his future. Liriope had seen enough of life to know that extreme beauty was an awful privilege, a dangerous attribute that could lead to dire and even fatal consequences. When Narcissus reached the age of fifteen and started to attract unwanted attentions, she decided to act.