Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Prometheus

I have mentioned Prometheus, son of Iapetus and Clymene, before. This far-sighted young Titan had all the attributes that charm. He was strong, almost distressingly good-looking, faithful, loyal, discreet, modest, humorous, considerate, well mannered and altogether the most engaging and captivating company. Everybody liked him, but Zeus liked him best. When Zeus’s packed schedule allowed, the pair would go rambling over the countryside together, talking of everything and nothing – of fortune, friendship and family, of war and destiny and of many silly and inconsequential things besides, as friends will.

In the days leading up to the inauguration of the dodecatheon, Prometheus – who was as fond of Zeus as Zeus was of him – had begun to notice a change in his friend. The god seemed moody and irritable, less inclined to go for walks, less silly and playful and more prone to sulks and outbursts of petulance that were unworthy of the kingly, humorous and self-controlled god that Prometheus knew and loved. He put it down to nerves and kept out of his way.

One morning, a week or so following the great ceremony, Prometheus, who had taken to sleeping in the long grass somewhere in the fragrant meadows of Thrace, felt himself being jerked awake by a persistent tweaking of his toes. He opened his eyes to see a lively and rejuvenated King of the Gods bouncing up and down in front of him like an impatient child on their birthday morning. The gloom had melted away like mist from a mountaintop and all the signature joviality had returned tenfold.

‘Up, Prometheus! Up and at ’em!’

‘Hwuh?’

‘We’re going to do something remarkable today, something that the world will shout about for aeons. It will ring down the ages, it will be the –’

‘Hunting for bears, are we?’

‘Bears? I have had the most extraordinary idea. Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’

Zeus gave no answer, but putting an arm round Prometheus he led him forcefully across the fields in a silence punctuated only by occasional barks of excited laughter. If Prometheus hadn’t known his friend better he might have thought him drunk on nectar.

‘This idea,’ he prompted. ‘Perhaps you could start at the beginning?’

‘Good, yes. The beginning. That’s right. The beginning is exactly where we should start. Sit there.’ Zeus indicated a fallen tree and paced up and down while Prometheus inspected the bark for ants before seating himself. ‘Now. Consider how everything began. En arche en Chaos. In the beginning was Chaos. Out of Chaos came the First Order – Erebus, Nyx, Hemera and their generation – followed by the Second Order, our grandparents Gaia and Ouranos, yes?’

Prometheus gave a cautious nod.

‘Gaia and Ouranos, who then unleashed upon creation the catastrophic aberration of you people, the Titans –’

‘Hey!’

‘– and next came all those nymphs and spirits, endless minor deities and monsters and animals and what have you, and finally the culmination. Us. The gods. Heaven and earth perfected.’

‘After a long and bloody war against my race. Which I helped you win.’

‘Yes, yes. But the end result – all is well. Peace and prosperity have broken out everywhere. And yet …’

Zeus left such a long silence that Prometheus felt obliged to break it.

‘You surely can’t mean that you miss the war?’

‘No, it’s not that …’ Zeus continued pacing up and down in front of Prometheus, like a teacher lecturing a class of one. ‘You must have noticed I’ve been out of sorts lately. I’ll tell you why. You know how sometimes I like to soar over the world in the form of an eagle?’

‘Scouting for nymphs.’

‘This world,’ Zeus went on, affecting not to hear, ‘is quite extraordinarily beautiful. Everything in its place – rivers, mountains, birds, beasts, oceans, groves, plains and canyons … But you know, when I look down, I find myself sorrowing at how empty it is.’

‘Empty?’

‘Oh Prometheus, you have absolutely no idea how boring it is to be a god in a complete and finished world.’

‘Boring?’

‘Yes, boring. For some time I’ve realized that I’m bored and I’m lonely. I mean “lonely” in the larger sense. In the cosmic sense. I am cosmically lonely. Is this how it’s going to be for ever and ever now? Me on a throne on Olympus, thunderbolt on lap, while everyone bows and scrapes, sings praises and begs favours? In perpetuity. Where’s the fun in that?’

‘Well …’

‘Be honest, you’d hate it too.’

Prometheus compressed his lips and thought for a while. It was true that he had never envied his friend the imperial throne and all its bothers and burdens.

‘Suppose,’ said Zeus, ‘suppose I were to start a new race.’

‘In the Pythian Games?’

‘No, not a running race. A race as in a species. A new order of beings. Like us in every particular, upright, on two legs –’

‘One head?’

‘One head. Two hands. Resembling us in every particular, and they would have – you’re the intellectual, Prometheus, what’s the name for that aspect of us that raises us above the animals?’

‘Our hands?’

‘No, the part that tells us that we exist, that makes us aware of ourselves?’

‘Consciousness.’

‘That’s the one. These creatures would have consciousness. And language. They wouldn’t be a threat to us, of course. They’d live down here on the land, use their wit to farm and feed and fend for themselves.’

‘So …’ Prometheus frowned in concentration as he tried to form a coherent picture in his mind. ‘A race of beings like us?’

‘Exactly! But not as big as us. And they’d be my creation. Well, our creation.’

‘Our creation?’

‘You’re good with your hands. Another Hephaestus. My idea is that you would model these creatures out of … out of clay, for example. They should be shaped in our image, anatomically correct in every detail, but on a smaller scale. Then we could animate them, give them life, replicate them and release them into nature to see what happens.’

Prometheus pondered this idea.

‘Would we engage with them, speak to them, move about with them?’

‘That would be exactly the point. To have an intelligent – well, semi-intelligent – species to praise and worship us, to play with us and amuse us. A subservient, adoring race of little miniatures.’

‘Male and female?’

‘Oh, good heavens no, just male. You can imagine what Hera would say otherwise …’

Prometheus could indeed imagine what Hera’s reaction might be if the world were suddenly filled with more females for her errant husband to involve himself with. He saw that Zeus was very excited by his grand scheme. Once he was set upon a course, Prometheus knew, even one as novel and strange as this, not even the Hecatonchires and Gigantes combined could sway his friend from it.

Not that Prometheus was against the idea. It was an exciting experiment, he decided. Playthings for the immortals. When you came to think of it, it was really rather an enchanting notion. Artemis had her hounds, Aphrodite her doves, Athena her owl and serpent, Poseidon and Amphitrite their dolphins and turtles. Even Hades kept a dog – albeit a perfectly disgusting one. It was only fitting that the chief of gods should design his own special kind of pet, more intelligent, loyal and endearing than the others.

Kneading and Firing

History does not agree on exactly where Prometheus and Zeus went to find the best clay for realizing the plan. Early sources, like the traveller Pausanias in the second century AD, claimed that Panopeus in Phocis was the place. Later scholars say that the pair journeyed east of Asia Minor, all the way down to the fertile lands that lie between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.fn1 The most recent scholarship maintains that the search took them right down past Nilus, crossing the Equator and ending up in East Africa.

Wherever it was, they found at last what Prometheus pronounced to be the perfect spot: a river whose slimy banks oozed with just the kind of mud and minerals he wanted for consistency, texture, durability and colour.

‘This is good clay,’ he told Zeus. ‘No, don’t settle down. I need to work in peace and free of all distraction. But before you go I shall require some of your saliva.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘If these creatures are to live and breathe they will need something of you in the composition.’

Zeus saw the justice of this and was happy enough to hawk up and fill a dried out waterhole with his divine spittle.

‘I’ll need to line up my little clay figures one by one on the riverbank to be baked in the heat of the sun,’ said Prometheus. ‘So be back by evenfall and they should be nicely ready.’

Zeus would have liked to watch, but he knew enough about the artistic temperament to leave Prometheus to it. Leaping upwards in the form of an eagle he flew away, leaving his friend alone with his art.

Prometheus began tentatively, first rolling out sausages of clay, each roughly four podes long.fn2 On top of these he stuck a ball of spit-moistened clay for a head. It was then a question of teasing, twisting and tweaking, mushing, moulding and massaging, pulling, prising and pinching, until something like a small version of a god or Titan appeared. The more he worked, the more excited he became. Zeus had not been exaggerating when he compared Prometheus to Hephaestus – he did possess real skill. In fact what he exhibited now as he pressed and shaped was more than skill, it was artistry.

Mixing the clay with different pigments he built up a diverse and colourful array of life-like masculine creatures. His first effort had been a small being whose skin closely matched the sun-kissed complexions of the gods. Next he made one in shining black, then another who was more a creamy ivory tinged with pink, then came figures of amber, yellow, bronze, red, green, beige, vivid purple and the brightest blue.

A Reduced Set

As evening fell Prometheus stood and stretched with a yawn and that special groan of weariness and satisfaction that follows a long session of concentrated labour.

The afternoon sun had warmed his work into the supple, malleable consistency known in the world of ceramics as ‘cheese-ware’. This was perfect timing on Prometheus’s part, for if the finished creations had been exposed to fiercer midday heat they would have dried into ‘biscuit-ware’, rendering them too friable and frangible for any of the last-minute modifications that his royal and divine patron would be sure to demand. Longer ears, twice the number of genitals, that kind of thing. Gods are nothing if not capricious.

And here, unless his own ears deceived him, came the King of the Gods now, crashing through the thicket in loud conversation with someone. Prometheus could make out an answering voice, female, low and measured. Zeus had brought along Athena, his favourite child.

‘Your father the emperor god, the world knows,’ Prometheus could hear him saying. ‘Zeus the all-powerful, yes. Zeus the all-conquering, certainly. Zeus the all-knowing, of course. Zeus the –’

‘Zeus the all-modest?’

‘– Zeus the creator, though. Doesn’t that have a ring?’

‘Quite a ring.’

‘Now then, the riverbank should be just over there. Let’s call him. Oh, Prometheus!’

Roosting weaver-birds rocketed into the air, squawking in alarm. ‘Promeeeetheus!’

‘Over here,’ Prometheus called. ‘But be careful because –’

Too late!

Breaking out through the trees into the clearing Zeus had, in his excitement, stepped onto the row of exquisitely fashioned figures drying on the bank. With a cry of fury and despair Prometheus hurried forward to survey the damage.

‘You clumsy oaf!’ he cried. ‘You’ve destroyed them. Look!’

No one else in creation could get away with talking to Zeus like that. Athena was astonished to see her father bow his head in meek apology.

On inspection things were not quite as bad as Prometheus had feared. Only three of the figures were beyond repair. He prised these from the mud, the squashed clay still bearing the imprint of Zeus’s enormous toes.

‘Oh good,’ said Zeus cheerfully, ‘the rest are fine, that’s plenty. Let’s get on, shall we?’

‘But look at these!’ said Prometheus holding up the squashed and ruined statuettes. ‘The little green, violet and blue creatures were just about my favourites.’

‘We’ve still got the black, brown, ivory, yellow, reddish and what have you. That’s enough, surely?’

‘I really loved that shade of cobalt blue.’

Athena was looking down at the intact figures which lay glowing in the dying rays of the sun. ‘Oh Prometheus, they’re perfect,’ she said in the mild voice that commanded more attention than the roars and screams of the other Olympians. Prometheus cheered up at once. Praise from Athena meant everything.

‘Well, I did pretty much put my heart and soul into them.’

‘Fine job, really fine,’ said Zeus. ‘Formed by a great Titan from Gaia’s clay, they are held together by my royal saliva and fired by the sun and shall be brought to life by the gentle breath of my daughter.’

It was Metis, always inside Zeus, who had sparked the thought in him that it should be Athena who brought these creatures to life. She would breathe into each one, literally inspiring them with some of her great qualities of wisdom, instinct, craft and sense.

A Name Is Found

Kneeling down on the bank of the river Athena breathed her warm sweet breath into each of the little statues. When she had finished she stood to join Prometheus and her father, looking on to see what would transpire.

It all happened quite slowly.

At first one of the darker figures gave a twitch and let out a kind of gasping moan.

At the other end of the row a yellow one wriggled, sat up and gave a small cough.

Within seconds all the little beings were alive and moving. Just moments later they were trying out their limbs, eyes and other senses, looking at each other, smelling the air, chattering and shouting. Before long they were standing and even taking their first wobbling steps.

Zeus took Prometheus by both his hands and danced him round and round.

‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘Look! Aren’t they beautiful! They’re wonderful, quite wonderful!’

Athena raised a finger to her lips. ‘Sh! You’re frightening them.’ She pointed down at the tiny men who were now staring up with looks of fear and consternation on their faces. The tallest of them didn’t quite come up to the level of her knees.

‘It’s alright, little ones,’ said Zeus stooping down and addressing them in what he hoped was a soothing voice. ‘There’s no need to be afraid!’

But the colossal booming sound that emerged seemed to alarm the little creatures further and they began to flail and whirl about in alarm.

‘Let’s reduce ourselves to their size,’ said Prometheus. As he spoke he shrank himself down so that he was only a foot or so taller than his creations. Zeus and Athena did the same.

With embraces, smiles and soft words, the scared and bewildered beings were slowly pacified and befriended. They clustered around the three immortals, bowing and prostrating themselves.

‘There’s no need to bow,’ said Prometheus, touching one of them and marvelling at the texture and life he could feel pounding within. Athena’s breath had turned the clay into such quick, warm flesh. The eyes of them all were bright with life and energy and hope.

‘Excuse me,’ said Zeus, ‘there is every need to bow. We are their gods and they are not to forget it.’

‘I’m not their god,’ said Prometheus, gazing down on them with an intense feeling of love and pride. ‘I am their friend.’ He knelt so that he was lower than them. ‘I shall teach them how to farm, how to mill wheat and rye so that they can make bread. How to cook and forge tools and –’

‘No!’ Zeus gave a sudden roar that sent the startled creatures milling in panic again. Zeus’s roar was answered by a great rumble of thunder in the sky. ‘You can befriend them as much as you like, Prometheus, and I have no doubt that Athena and all the other gods will do so too. But one thing they are not to have. Ever. And that is fire.’

Prometheus stared at his friend in astonishment. ‘But … but why ever not?’

‘With fire they could rise up to challenge us. With fire they could think themselves our equals. I feel it and know it. They must never be given fire. I have spoken.’

A long peal of thunder in the distance affirmed his words.

‘But,’ Zeus smiled now, ‘everything else in the world is theirs to enjoy. They may travel to every corner. They can sail Poseidon’s oceans, seek Demeter’s help in sowing seeds and growing food, learn from Hestia the arts of keeping a home, discover how to keep animals for their milk, fur and labour, and they can learn the arts of hunting from Artemis. Hermes can teach them guile, Apollo can instruct them in the arts of music and knowledge. Athena will teach them how to be wise and contented. And Aphrodite will share with them the arts of love. They will be free and happy.’

‘What shall we call them?’ Athena asked.

‘ “That which is below”,’ said Zeus after some thought. ‘Anthropos.’fn3

He clapped his hands and the huddle of hand-crafted humans became a hundred and the hundred became a horde and the horde, spreading ever outwards, became a multitude, until the human population, numbering now in the hundreds of thousands, was on its way to finding a home in every corner of the world.

And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.

The Golden Age

Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay.

Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory.

It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.

It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do.

The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it.

The Fennel Stalk

Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb – the toughest of all – from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen.

Prometheus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus.

Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice.

By the time he had scaled Skolio’s sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo’s chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheatre of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus’s forge several hundred podes or so further off.

Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo’s lyre, Hermes’ fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares and the snarling of Artemis’s hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire. Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for.

At the very mouth of the forge he saw a narthex plant, sometimes called the laserwort or giant fennel (Ferula communis) – not quite the same bulbous vegetable we use today to impart a pleasant aniseedy flavour to fish, but a near enough relation. Prometheus leaned forward and picked a long, vigorous specimen. Tightly packed within there was a thick, lint-like pith. Stripping the stem of its outer leaves Prometheus stretched out and pushed the stalk across the forecourt, over Brontes’ slumbering, mumbling form and towards the fire. The heat emanating from the furnace was enough to cause the end of the stalk to catch at once. Prometheus pulled it back in with as much care as he could, but he could not prevent a spark from falling from its sputtering end straight down onto Brontes’ torso. The skin on the Cyclops’s chest sizzled and hissed and he awoke with a roar of pain. As Brontes looked groggily down at his chest, trying to understand where this pain was coming from and what it could mean, Prometheus hauled in the stalk and fled.

The Gift of Fire

Prometheus clambered back down Olympus, the fennel stalk clenched between his teeth, its pith burning slowly. Every five minutes or so he would take it from his mouth and blow gently, nursing its glow. When he at last reached the safety of the valley floor he made his way to the human settlement where he and his brother had made their home.

You may say that Prometheus could surely have had the wit to teach man to strike stones together, or rub sticks, but we have to remember that what Prometheus stole was fire from heaven, divine fire. Perhaps he took the inner spark that ignited in man the curiosity to rub sticks and strike flints in the first place.

When he showed men the leaping, dancing darting demon they initially cried out in fear and backed away from its flames. But their curiosity soon overcame their fear and they began to delight in this magical new toy, substance, phenomenon – call it what you will. They learned from Prometheus that fire was not their enemy but a powerful friend which, once tamed, had ten thousand thousand uses.

Prometheus moved from village to village demonstrating techniques for the fashioning of tools and weapons, the firing of earthen pots, the cooking of meat and the baking of cereal doughs, all of which quickly let loose an avalanche of advantages, raising man above the animal prey that had no answer to metal-tipped spears and arrows.

It was not long before Zeus chanced to look down from Olympus and saw points of dancing orange light dotting the landscape all around. He knew at once what had happened. Nor did he need to be told who was responsible. His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage. Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible.