Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold Read online

  Stephen Fry

  * * *

  MYTHOS

  Contents

  Picture Credits

  Foreword

  Maps

  Part One: THE BEGINNING

  Out of Chaos

  The First Order

  The Second Order

  Part Two: THE BEGINNING

  Clash of the Titans

  The Third Order

  Part One: THE TOYS OF ZEUS

  Prometheus

  The Punishments

  Persephone and the Chariot

  Cupid and Psyche

  Part Two: THE TOYS OF ZEUS

  Mortals

  Phaeton

  Cadmus

  Twice Born

  The Beautiful and the Damned

  The Doctor and the Crow

  Crime and Punishment

  Sisyphus

  Hubris

  Arachne

  More Metamorphoses

  Eos and Tithonus

  The Bloom of Youth

  Echo and Narcissus

  Lovers

  Galateas

  Arion and the Dolphin

  Philemon and Baucis, or Hospitality Rewarded

  Phrygia and the Gordian Knot

  Midas

  Afterword

  Illustrations

  Appendices

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ΓΙΑ ΤΟΝ ΈΛΛΙΟΤΤ ΜΕ ΑΓΆΠΗ

  Picture Credits

  1. Gaia, Mother Goddess Greek relief. Ancient Art Architecture Collection Ltd / Alamy.

  2. Attic Red-Figure Cup, bpk / Antikensammlung Berlin.

  3. Polyphemus, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1802. Landesmuseum Oldenburg.

  4. Bronze head of Hypnos, c.275 BC. British Museum / Alamy.

  5. The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn by Giorgio Vasari, c.1560. Palazzo Vecchio, Room of the Elements.

  6. The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, c.1485. Uffizi Gallery. Florence / Bridgeman.

  7. Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, Francisco de Goya, c.1823. Prado Museum, Madrid / Alamy.

  8. Attic Red Figure attributed to the Nausicaa Painter, c.475 – 425 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  9. The Feeding of the Child Jupiter, Nicolas Poussin, c.1640. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. / Bridgeman.

  10. Marble Relief of the Battle of Giants, Gigantomachy. Getty Images / De Agostini Picture Library.

  11. Attic Black-Figured Hydria, c.540–530 BC. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.

  12. The Dance of the Muses, Joseph Paelinck, 1832. Private Collection / Alamy.

  13. Relief of the Three Moirai. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

  14. The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants, Joachim Antonisz Wtewael, c.1608. Art Institute of Chicago /Bridgeman.

  15. The Gods of Olympus, Sala dei Giganti, c.1528. Palazzo del Te / Bridgeman.

  16. Hierogamy, unknown artist, 1st Century AD. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples / Bridgeman.

  17. Vulcan Forging Jupiter’s Lightening Bolts, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636–38. Prado Museum, Madrid / Bridgeman.

  18. Head of Ares, after Greek original by Alkamenes, 420 BC. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia / Alamy.

  19. Venus and Mars, Sandro Boticelli, c.1485. National Gallery, London / Alamy.

  20. Black-figure Amphora, 6th century BC. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman.

  21. Minerva or Pallas Athena, Gustav Klimt, 1898. Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna / Bridgeman.

  22. Red-Figure Cup, 5th century BC. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman.

  23. Apollo, Italian School, 17th century. Musee Massey, Tarbes, France / Bridgeman.

  24. Diana, Paul Manship, 1925. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA / Alamy.

  25. Prometheus Bringing Fire to Mankind, Friedrich Heinrich Fuger, 1817. Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany / © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel / Ute Brunzel / Bridgeman.

  26. Prometheus Bound, Jacob Jordaens, c.1640. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Köln, Germany / Alamy.

  27. Charon Crossing the River Styx, Joachim Patenier or Patinir, 1515–24. Prado, Madrid, Spain / Bridgeman.

  28. Pandora, John William Waterhouse, 1896. Private Collection / Alamy.

  29. The Return of Persephone, Frederic Leighton, c.1891. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) UK / Bridgeman.

  30. Cupid and Psyche, Francois Edouard Picot, 1817. Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman.

  31. The Fall of Phaeton, Peter Paul Rubens, c.1604–8. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC / Bridgeman.

  32. Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs, Peter Paul Rubens (studio of), c.1620, National Gallery, London / Bridgeman.

  33. Apollo and Marsyas, Michelangelo Anselmi, c.1540. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC / Bridgeman.

  34. The Spinners, or The Fable of Arachne, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, 1657. Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman.

  Foreword

  I was lucky enough to pick up a book called Tales from Ancient Greece when I was quite small. It was love at first meeting. Much as I went on to enjoy myths and legends from other cultures and peoples, there was something about these Greek stories that lit me up inside. The energy, humour, passion, particularity and believable detail of their world held me enthralled from the very first. I hope they will do the same for you. Perhaps you already know some of the myths told here, but I especially welcome those who may never have encountered the characters and stories of Greek myth before. You don’t need to know anything to read this book; it starts with an empty universe. Certainly no ‘classical education’ is called for, no knowledge of the difference between nectar and nymphs, satyrs and centaurs or the Fates and the Furies is required. There is absolutely nothing academic or intellectual about Greek mythology; it is addictive, entertaining, approachable and astonishingly human.

  But where did they come from, these myths of ancient Greece? In the tangle of human history we may be able to pull on a single Greek thread and follow it back, but by picking out only one civilization and its stories we might be thought of as taking liberties with the true source of universal myth. Early human beings the world over wondered at the sources of power that fuelled volcanoes, thunderstorms, tidal waves and earthquakes. They celebrated and venerated the rhythm of the seasons, the procession of heavenly bodies in the night sky and the daily miracle of the sunrise. They questioned how it might all have started. The collective unconscious of many civilizations has told stories of angry gods, dying and renewing gods, fertility goddesses, deities, demons and spirits of fire, earth and water.

  Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence. The gods of Greece, if we are archaeological and palaeoanthropological about it all, can be traced back to the sky fathers, moon goddesses and demons of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia – today’s Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Babylonians, Sumerians, Akkadians and other civilizations there, which first flourished far earlier than the Greeks, had their creation stories and folk myths which, like the languages that expressed them, could find ancestry in India and thence westwards back to prehistory, Africa and the birth of our species.

  But whenever we tell any story we have to snip the narrative string somewhere in order to make a starting point. It is easy to do this with Greek mythology because it has survived with a detail, richness, life and colour that distinguish it from other mythologies. It was captured and preserved by the very first poets and has come down to us in an unbroken line from almost the beginning of writing to the present day. While Greek myths have much in common with Chinese, Iranian, Indian, Maya, African, Russian, Native American, Hebrew and Norse myths, they are uniquely –
as the writer and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it – ‘the creation of great poets’. The Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters and heroes.

  The arc of the Greek myths follows the rise of mankind, our battle to free ourselves from the interference of the gods – their abuse, their meddling, their tyranny over human life and civilization. Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

  Mythos begins at the beginning, but it does not end at the end. Had I included heroes like Oedipus, Perseus, Theseus, Jason and Herakles and the details of the Trojan War this book would have been too heavy even for a Titan to pick up. Moreover, I am only concerned with telling the stories, not with explaining them or investigating the human truths and psychological insights that may lie behind them. The myths are fascinating enough in all their disturbing, surprising, romantic, comic, tragic, violent and enchanting detail to stand on their own as stories. If, as you read, you cannot help wondering what inspired the Greeks to invent a world so rich and elaborate in character and incident, and you find yourself pondering the deep truths that the myths embody – well, that is certainly part of the pleasure.

  And pleasure is what immersing yourself in the world of Greek myth is all about.

  Stephen Fry

  The Second Order

  The Olympians

  Part One

  * * *

  THE BEGINNING

  Out of Chaos

  These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.

  The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.

  Was Chaos a god – a divine being – or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse?

  Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.

  Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

  Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your trousers began as chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over aeons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that sheathes your lovely legs. In time you will abandon your trousers – not now, I hope – and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned. In either case their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to cold Chaos. And what is true for your trousers is of course true for you.

  So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.

  Now, you might be the kind of person who asks, ‘But who or what was there before Chaos?’ or ‘Who or what was there before the Big Bang? There must have been something.’

  Well, there wasn’t. We have to accept that there was no ‘before’, because there was no Time yet. No one had pressed the start button on Time. No one had shouted Now! And since Time had yet to be created, time words like ‘before’, ‘during’, ‘when’, ‘then’, ‘after lunch’ and ‘last Wednesday’ had no possible meaning. It screws with the head, but there it is.

  The Greek word for ‘everything that is the case’, what we could call ‘the universe’, is COSMOS. And at the moment – although ‘moment’ is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase ‘just now’) – at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case. A stretching, a tuning up of the orchestra …

  But things are about to change very quickly.

  The First Order

  From formless Chaos sprang two creations: EREBUS and NYX. Erebus, he was darkness, and Nyx, she was night. They coupled at once and the flashing fruits of their union were HEMERA, day, and AETHER, light.

  At the same time – because everything must happen simultaneously until Time is there to separate events – Chaos brought forth two more entities: GAIA, the earth, and TARTARUS, the depths and caves beneath the earth.

  I can guess what you might be thinking. These creations sound charming enough – Day, Night, Light, Depths and Caves. But these were not gods and goddesses, they were not even personalities. And it may have struck you also that since there was no time there could be no dramatic narrative, no stories; for stories depend on Once Upon a Time and What Happened Next.

  You would be right to think this. What first emerged from Chaos were primal, elemental principles that were devoid of any real colour, character or interest. These were the PRIMORDIAL DEITIES, the First Order of divine beings from whom all the gods, heroes and monsters of Greek myth spring. They brooded over and lay beneath everything … waiting.

  The silent emptiness of this world was filled when Gaia bore two sons all on her own.fn1 The first was PONTUS, the sea, and the second was OURANOS, the sky – better known to us as Uranus, the sound of whose name has ever been the cause of great delight to children from nine to ninety. Hemera and Aether bred too, and from their union came THALASSA, the female counterpart of Pontus the sea.

  Ouranos, who preferred to pronounce himself Ooranoss, was the sky and the heavens in the way that – at the very beginning – the primordial deities always were the things they represented and ruled over.fn2 You could say that Gaia was the earth of hills, valleys, caves and mountains yet capable of gathering herself into a form that could walk and talk. The clouds of Ouranos the sky rolled and seethed above her but they too could coalesce into a shape we might recognize. It was so early on in the life of everything. Very little was settled.

  The Second Order

  Ouranos the sky covered his mother Gaia the earth everywhere. He covered Gaia in both senses: he covered her as the sky still covers the earth to this day and he covered her as a stallion covers a mare. When he did so, something remarkable happened. Time began.

  Something else began too – what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.

  Right from the start, the union of Ouranos and Gaia was gratifyingly productive. Twelve robust, healthy children came first – six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS and RHEA. These twelve were destined to become the S
econd Order of divine beings, earning themselves a legendary name.

  And somewhere, as Time crept into being the clock began, the clock of cosmic history that still ticks today. Perhaps one of these newborns was responsible, we can look into that later.

  Not content with these twelve strong beautiful brothers and sisters, Ouranos and Gaia gave the world yet more progeny – two distinctive, but distinctly not beautiful, sets of triplets. The three CYCLOPES came first, one-eyed giants who gave their father sky a whole new range of expressions and modulations. The eldest cyclops was called BRONTES, thunder,fn1 next came STEROPES, the lightning, and then ARGES, brightness. Ouranos could fill the heavens with flashes of lightning and crashing thunder. He gloried in the noise and spectacle. But the second set of triplets Gaia bore sent even greater shudders through him and all who saw them.

  Perhaps it is kindest to say that they were a mutational experiment never to be repeated, a genetic dead end. For these newborns – the HECATONCHIRESfn2 – each had fifty heads and a hundred hands and were as hideous, fierce, violent and powerful as anything that had yet been released into being. Their names were COTTUS the furious, GYGES the long-limbed and AEGAEON the sea goat, sometimes also called BRIAREOS the vigorous one. Gaia loved them. Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

  Filled with disgust, he cursed them: ‘For offending my eyes, you shall never see light again!’ As he roared these furious words, he pushed them and the Cyclopes back into Gaia’s womb.

  Gaia’s Revenge

  We have good cause to wonder here what ‘he pushed them into Gaia’s womb’ really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same.