from
Mythos
The Greek Myths Reimagined
by
Stephen Fry

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.

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.

This trick of virgin birth, or parthogenesis, can be found in nature still. In aphids, some lizards, and even sharks, it is a reasonably common way to have young. There won’t be the variation that two sets of genes allow; this is the same in the genesis of the Greek gods. The interesting ones are all the fruit of two parents, not one.

Had Kronos the examples to go by, he would perhaps have identified with Hamlet at his most introspective, or Jaques at his most self-indulgently morbid. Konstantin from The Seagull with a suggestion of Morrissey. Yet there was something of a Macbeth in him too and more than a little Hannibal Lecter—as we shall see.

Kronos had been the first to discover that brooding silence is often taken to indicate strength, wisdom, and command.

Brooding, simmering, and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

Ares—MARS to the Romans—was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid. Nevertheless even Zeus acknowledged with grudging consent that he was a necessary addition to Olympus. War may be stupid, but it is also inevitable and sometimes—dare one say it?—necessary.

The Greeks still add pine resin to wine, call it retsina, and offer it to visitors. No one knows why a normally kind and hospitable people should do such a thing. It tastes like what it essentially is, the kind of turpentine artists use to thin their oil paints. I love it.

Apollo was lord of mathematics, reason, and logic. Poetry and medicine, knowledge, rhetoric, and enlightenment were his realm. In essence he was the god of harmony. The idea that the base material world and its ordinary objects had divine properties and could resonate with the heavens, this was Apollonian, whether expressed in the magical properties of squares, circles, and spheres or in the perfect modulation and rhythms of a voice or a chain of reasoning. Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift. Apollo had it in abundance, allied to an inability ever to lie. This made him a natural choice for taking charge of oracles and prophecy too.

The Greeks had at least four words for love:

AGAPE—this was the great and generous kind that we would describe as “charity” and which could refer to any holy kind of love, such as parents for their children or the love of worshippers for their god.

EROS—the strain of love named after the god, or after whom the god is named. The kind that gets us into most trouble. So much more than affectionate, so much less than spiritual, eros and the erotic can lead us to glory and to disgrace, to the highest pitch of happiness and the deepest pit of despair.

PHILIA—the form of love applied to friendship, partiality, and fondness. We see its traces in words like “francophile,” “necrophilia,” and “philanthropy.”

STORGE—the love and loyalty someone might have for their country or their sports team could be regarded as storgic.

He transformed Io into a cow, a beautiful plump young heifer with shivering flanks and large, gentle eyes. If he hid her in a field Hera would never spot her and he could visit her whenever he liked. Or so he imagined. When lust descends, discretion, common sense, and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.

It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress. Hera, to whom cows were sacred, and who possessed therefore a keen, expert eye for the species, noticed the animal and suspected its true identity straightaway.

There are those who like to suggest that the idea of Argus having a hundred eyes arose from a fanciful way of expressing his extreme watchfulness. It might just as well have been playfully said and then seriously believed, they maintain, that he had eyes in the back of his head. We repudiate such dull, unromantic propositions with the contempt they deserve. Argus had a hundred eyes. Fact.

Before this great Phoenician idea, writing took the form of visual symbols such as hieroglyphs and pictograms. Like our numbers, these bore no relation to their sound. The written “24,” for example, gives no clue to pronunciation at all and you’d say the sign differently according to the practices of your language. The alphabetical (i.e. phonetical) characters in twenty-four or vingt-quatre or vierunzwanzig tell you just how to say them. That was the crucial breakthrough. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks into the writing system more or less in use there today. Its close Cyrillic relation spread from Bulgaria in the ninth century A.D. to the Balkans, Russia, and many other areas of eastern Europe and Asia, while the Romans adapted the Greek alpha and beta into the alphabetic system you are interpreting so fluently at this minute. Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who lived in the fifth century B.C., still called such writing “Cadmean.”

It is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favored you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you. And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favorites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn’t mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others.

The pairing of Cadmus and Harmonia seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing, and trade represented by Cadmus—his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means “of the east”—can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both.

But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don’t quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.

Attica is the area of Greece that includes Athens. “Attic Greek” is the classical form of the language that comes down to us in the poetry, drama, oratory, and philosophy of the great Athenian writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C. To many Greeks from outside Attica it was perhaps what England is to the other countries of the United Kingdom, the snooty dominant region that outsiders tactlessly and lazily think of when they say “Greece.”

As a priestess, Hero was sworn to celibacy, but Leander persuaded her that the physical consummation of their love would be a holy thing, a consecration of which Aphrodite would approve. In fact, he said, it was surely an insult to devote herself to the goddess of love and yet remain a virgin. It would be like worshipping Ares but refusing to fight.