Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold

by Stephen Fry

  But secrets are terrible things to have to keep. Especially such juicy ones as that to which the royal barber was privy. Every day he would wake up and feel that the knowledge was writhing and swelling inside him. The barber loved his wife and family and was in any case loyal enough to his monarch not to have any wish to humiliate or embarrass him. But that bulging, ballooning secret had to be released somehow before he burst. No unmilked cow with swollen udders, no mother of overdue twins, no gut-stuffed gastronome straining on the privy, could ever feel such a desperate need for relief from their agonies than this poor barber.

  Finally he hit upon a scheme which he felt sure would rid him of his burden without endangering his family. Awaking from a tortured night in which he had dreamed that he revealed the secret to the gaping populace of Gordium from a balcony in the main square, he went out at first light deep into the remote countryside. In a lonely place by a stream he dug a deep trench in the ground. Looking about him in all directions to make sure that he was alone and that there was no possibility of being overheard, he knelt down, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted these words into the hole:

  ‘Midas has ass’s ears!’

  Scrabbling frantically to close up the hole before the words could escape, he failed to notice one tiny seed floating down and settling at the bottom …

  When the backfilling was done, the barber stamped fiercely up and down on the earth to seal in the dreadful secret. He skipped all the way back to Gordium, headed straight for his favourite tavern and ordered a flagon of the house’s best wine. He could drink now without fear that the wine might loosen his tongue. It was as if he were Atlas and the sky had finally been lifted from his shoulders.

  Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, back in the remote field by the stream that tiny seed, warmed by the soft breath of Gaia below, began to germinate. Soon, a delicate little reed was shouldering its way through the topsoil and pushing its delicate head into the air. As the breeze caught the reed it softly whispered ‘Midas has ass’s ears.’

  The faint words reached the rushes and sedges that fringed the riverbank. ‘Midas has ass’s ears …’

  The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

  ‘Midas has ass’s ears,’ sighed the branches.

  ‘Midas has ass’s ears,’ sang the birds.

  And at last the news reached the city.

  ‘Midas has ass’s ears!’

  King Midas woke with a start. There was laughter and shouting in the street outside the palace. He crept to the window, crouched down and listened.

  The humiliation was too much for him to bear. Without stopping to wreak his vengeance on the barber and the barber’s family, he mixed a poisonous draught of ox-blood, raised his eyes heavenwards, gave a bitter laugh and a shrug, drained the drink and died.

  Poor Midas. His name will always mean someone fortunate and rich, but truly he was unlucky and poor. If only he had kept to his roses. Green fingers are better than gold.

  Afterword

  I have assembled below a few thoughts on the nature of myth and a brief outline of some of the sources I have had recourse to in the writing of this book.

  I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the ‘ages of man’, for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories ‘wrong’ I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions. In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive.

  Myth v. Legend v. Religion

  Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure.fn1 The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning ‘to be read’.fn2

  Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.

  Symbolical rather than historical in origin as myths and mythical figures might be, they underwent the same fictional remodelling and embellishments as more factually rooted legends. They too were written down, and the Greek myths especially, thanks to Homer, Hesiod and those that followed, were chronicled and detailed in ways that have granted us the timelines, genealogies and character histories that allow for story-telling of the kind I have attempted with this book.

  Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can’t be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. Most of those who told and retold the myths would have been aware, I think, at some level of their consciousness, that they were telling fictional tales. They might have thought the world was once peopled with nymphs and monsters, but they could be fairly certain that such beings no longer existed.

  Prayer, ritual and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things. At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion. It moves from stories told around the fire to a systematized set of beliefs to which obedience is owed. Priestly castes arose who ordained how people should behave. How myths become codified into scriptures, liturgies and theologies is a subject for another book and quite beyond my scope. We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur’an. There were ‘mysteries’ and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons.fn3

  The Greeks

  It is always a mistake to think of the Greeks as superior human beings uniquely endowed with enlightened wisdom and rational benevolence. We would find much in ancient Greece alien and distasteful to us. Women could play no real part in affairs outside the home, slavery was endemic, punishments were harsh and life could be brutal. Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. ‘Know thyself’ was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people – if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings – they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim.

  So while they may hav
e been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world and themselves with greater candour and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own.

  Location, Location

  Greece. What and where is that? It was no kind of a nation at the time of the myths. There is a politically identifiable sovereign landmass and collection of islands we can now visit, but the Greek world of Mythos includes much of Asia Minor, incorporating Turkey, parts of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as well as areas of North Africa, Egypt, the Balkans, Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The story of ‘Arion and the Dolphin’ takes us to southern Italy and other myths deal with people who might at times have described themselves as Hellenic, Ionian, Argive, Attic, Thracian, Aeolian, Spartan, Doric, Athenian, Cypriot, Corinthian, Theban, Phrygian, Sicilian, Cretan, Trojan, Boeotian, Lydian … and much more besides. It is all, I am well aware, confusing and probably irritating to anyone but a scholar or a Greek citizen. There is the map to consult, but otherwise I really hope you don’t bust a boiler trying to work it all out. Goodness knows I bust mine often enough and I wouldn’t wish the same confusion and worry on you.

  Sources Ancient

  To retell Greek mythical stories is to tread in the footsteps of giants. In the Foreword to this book I shared Edith Hamilton’s observation that Greek myth is ‘the creation of great poets’. While its deepest origins lie in prehistory and unrecorded folklore, in preparing material for this book I have been able, as any one of us can, to consult the very first poets of the Western tradition, who just happened to be Greek and whose subject matter just happened to be myth.

  There is a unique treasury of extant sources that chart the chronology of Greek myth from the creation of the universe and birth of the gods all the way to the end of their interaction and interference in human affairs. It begins with homer, who may or may not have been a single (blind) Ionian bard, but whose name is attached to the two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, that were put together some time, it is thought, in the eighth century bc. Their setting is the siege of Troy and its aftermath, but Homer makes countless useful references back to earlier myths. His approximate contemporary, the poet hesiod (undoubtedly an individual), did the most to create what might be called a timeline for Greek mythology. His Theogony (Birth of the Gods) narrates the creation, the rise of the Titans, the origin of the gods and the establishment of Olympus. His Erga kai Hemerai (Works and Days) tells the great human creation stories of Prometheus and Pandora as well as laying out mankind’s Five Ages – Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron.

  Other Greek and subsequent Roman poets, writers and travellers filled in gaps, elaborated, embroidered, fused, confused and just plain fabricated Greek mythical stories that mostly descended from Hesiod’s genealogical plan. Of these the Bibliotheca (Library), a great dictionary of myth is perhaps the most valuable source. It was originally thought to have been the work of the scholar APOLLODORUS OF ATHENS, who worked in the second century BC, but this is now doubted; these days the work is attributed to an unknown who goes by the demeaning soubriquet of PSEUDO-APOLLODORUS and dated to the first or second century AD. Other compelling and/or reliable sources – all of them probably from the second century AD – include the Greek traveller and guide-book compiler PAUSANIAS, the ‘novelists’ LONGUS (who wrote in Greek) and APULEIUS (who wrote in Latin) and the Latin prose writer HYGINUS.

  Towering above them all is the Roman poet ovid (43 bc–ad 17), whose Metamorphoses (Transformations) tells of those mortals, nymphs and others who were changed by the gods into animals, plants, rivers or even stones as a punishment or out of pity. His other works, principally the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Heroides (Heroines) also contain recastings of Greek myth, using always the Latin names for the gods – ‘Jove’ or ‘Jupiter’ for Zeus, ‘Diana’ for Artemis, ‘Cupid’ or ‘Amor’ for Eros. and so on. Ovid is prolific, profuse, irreverent, saucy and cinematic in his energy and restless switching of points of view. It is clear from the wealth of references in his plays and poems that Shakespeare, amongst many other writers and artists, was hugely influenced by him. Ovid was happy to add, subtract and invent, and this has influenced and emboldened me to be – shall we say imaginative? – in some of my retellings too.

  Sources Modern

  Many children on both sides of the Atlantic grew up, as I did, on classic collections of the Greek myths by four enduringly popular Americans. Two were nineteenth-century writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave us A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel, Tanglewood Tales (1853); and Thomas Bulfinch, whose The Age of Fable (1855), later incorporated into the compendious Bulfinch’s Mythology (1881), has run through dozens and dozens of editions in its 160 years of life. The twentieth century was dominated by the matchless Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942), which is still happily in print, and by Bernard Evslin’s evergreen Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (1967). British equivalents include Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and L. S. Hyde’s Favourite Greek Myths (1905), this last being a great favourite of mine when I was a boy.

  Estimable as all of these were, and still are, they tend shyly to skirt round or bowdlerize the erotic and violent episodes that form such an essential part of the Greek mythic world. The poet and novelist Robert Graves had no such compunctions, but his two eccentrically structured and narrated volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), while meticulous, scholarly and inspiring, chart a more literary and mythographical course – often with a view to highlighting his obsession with cults of a ‘white goddess’. The approaches of James Frazer and those who came after, including Joseph Campbell, valuable as they are, also have other, less specifically Greek and more academic, psychological, comparative and anthropological, fish to fry. Online these days there are plenty of sites devoted to helping the young ‘find’ Greek myth – though you may feel like a lie-down after reading those that describe Cadmus as ‘a homie’, Hermes as ‘cool’ and Hades as ‘a dude with issues’.

  The one website I would most heartily recommend is theoi.com – a simply magnificent resource entirely dedicated to Greek myth. It is a Dutch and New Zealand project that contains over 1,500 pages of text and a gallery of 1,200 pictures comprising vase paintings, sculpture, mosaics and frescoes on Greek mythological themes. It offers thorough indexing, genealogies and subject headings. The bibliography is superb, and can lead one on a labyrinthine chase, hopping from source to source like an excited butterfly-collector.

  Spelling the Names

  Because many Greek myths and the characters in them come down to us by way of Latin writers, and because our alphabet is more Roman than Greek, the spelling of personalities and places can be rather hit and miss. I could have chosen only to offer Greek spellings, so that Kerberos, Iason and Kadmos are used instead of Cerberus, Jason and Cadmus. Should I have given ‘Cronus’ instead of Kronos? Maybe I ought to have favoured ‘Aktaion’ over Actaeon? ‘Narkissos’ seems bloody-minded when we all know Narcissus so well. In the end I’ve been inconsistent, but consistently so.

  Saying the Names

  My advice is to pronounce them in your head the way that seems most comfortable to you. The Greek letter kappa covers hard ‘k’ sounds, and the letter chi covers the more aspirated and guttural fricatives found in the ‘ch’ of ‘loch’ and ‘Bach’, though you are quite safe pronouncing all ‘ch’ instances as if they are standard ‘k’ sounds. The eta, or long Greek ‘e’, was sounded as ‘ee’ when I was taught ancient Greek at school – so the letter itself was pronounced ‘eater’. Nowadays it’s taught to rhyme with ‘waiter’. I get the sense that this modern pronunciation has entered American English more readily than British. Americans will tend to say ‘baiter’ for beta where we say ‘beater’, for example.

  So is Thetis ‘Theetis’, ‘Thettis’ or ‘Thaytis’? Is it ‘Maytis’, ‘Mettis’ or ‘Meetis’ for Metis, and ‘Hearer’ or ‘Hairer’ for Hera? ‘Ahr
-ease’ or ‘Air-ease’ for Ares? Modern Greeks pronounce it one way, English and American academics their ways and common usage, inasmuch as there is common usage, goes its way. Anyone who tells you that there is a definitive right or wrong can be doubted, in my opinion.

  Illustrations

  1. Gaia, a primordial goddess and the personification of Earth, brought into being at the dawn of creation.

  2. Themis, the Titan goddess who became the embodiment of law, justice and order. She is shown here seated on the Delphic tripod, holding a cup in one hand and a sprig of laurel in the other.

  3. The Cyclopes had a single, orb-shaped eye in the middle of their forehead.

  4. Hypnos, the personification of sleep. He would father Morpheus, who shaped and formed dreams.

  5. Kronos (Cronus) uses a scythe to mutilate his father, Ouranos (Uranus).

  6. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus shows Aphrodite as she makes landfall in Cyprus.

  7. Kronos devouring one of his sons.

  8. Kronus receives the Omphalos stone from Rhea.

  9. The infant Zeus being fed by nymphs and the she-goat Amalthea on Crete.

  10. Two giants battling the gods during the Gigantomachy.

  11. Zeus aims a thunderbolt at the winged and snake-legged monster, Typhon.

  12. The Muses: nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to her own particular art form.