Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

More Metamorphoses

We have seen the gods transform men and women into animals out of pity, punishment or jealousy. But, just as they could be as proud and petty as humans, so the gods could be equally motivated by desire. Mortal flesh, as we have seen, was as appealing to them as immortal. Sometimes their urges were little more than primitive lust, but they could fall genuinely in love too. There are many stories of the gods chasing after and transforming the loveliest youths and young women into animals, new plants and flowers, and even rocks and streams.fn1

Nisus and Scylla

NISUS was a King of Megara, a city on the coast of Attica.fn2 He had been granted invincibility in the form of a single lock of purple hair which kept him immune from any human harm. For some reason his kingdom was attacked by the forces of King Minos of Crete. One day Nisus’s daughter, the Princess SCYLLA,fn3 caught sight of Minos on board one of his warships as it passed close to the walls of Megara and fell in love with him. So maddened by desire did she become that she decided to steal her father’s lock of purple hair and give it to Minos on board his ship; in return he would repay her generosity with love. But once she had stolen the lock Nisus became as vulnerable as any mortal. And while she was still secretly making her way to Minos, her father was killed in a palace uprising.

Minos, far from being pleased by Scylla’s act of disloyalty to her own father, was disgusted, and would have nothing to do with her. He kicked her off his ship, hoisted sail and left Megara, vowing never to return.

So overmastering was her passion that even now Scylla could not give up on the man she loved. She swam after Minos, calling pathetically. She mewed and cried so plaintively after him that she was turned into a gull. Such was the humour of the gods that at the same time her father Nisus was transformed into a sea-eagle.

In revenge he has relentlessly harried his daughter across the oceans ever since.

Callisto

Before he was turned into a wolf – as you may recall – during the early days of Pelasgian mankind, King Lycaon of Arcadiafn4 had a beautiful daughter called CALLISTO, who was raised as a nymph dedicated to the virgin huntress Artemis.

Zeus had long frothed with desire for this beautiful, unattainable girl and tricked her one day by transforming himself into the very image of Artemis herself. She readily fell into the arms of the great goddess she followed, only to find herself ravaged by Zeus.

Some time later, bathing naked in the river, she was seen by Artemis who, enraged by her follower’s state of pregnancy, expelled poor Callisto from her circle. Alone and unhappy she wandered the world, before giving birth to a son, ARCAS. Hera, never one to show mercy to even the most innocent and guileless of her husband’s lovers, punished Callisto further by transforming her into a bear.

Some years later Arcas, now a youth, was hunting in the forest when he came upon a great she-bear. He was just about to launch his javelin at her when Zeus intervened to prevent an inadvertent matricide and raised them up into the heavens as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the constellations of the Great Bear and the Little Bear. Hera, still angry, cursed these constellations so that they would never share the same waters which (I am told) explains their permanently opposing circumpolar positions.fn5

Procne and Philomela

King PANDION of Athens had two beautiful daughters, PROCNE and PHILOMELA. Procne, the elder, left Athens to marry King TEREUS of Thrace, by whom she had a son, ICTYS.

One year, her younger sister Philomela came to Thrace to stay with the family for the whole summer. The dark heart of Tereus, one of the darkest that ever beat, was fiercely disturbed by the beauty of his young sister-in-law and he dragged her to his chambers one night and raped her. Fearful that his wife and the world might discover the hateful crime, Tereus tore out Philomela’s tongue. Knowing that she was unable to read and write, he felt safe that she could never communicate to anyone the abominable truth of what had taken place.

But over the next week or so Philomela wove a tapestry in which she depicted for her sister Procne all the details of her violation. The wronged and raging sisters planned a revenge that would match the monstrous evil of the crime. They knew how to hurt Tereus most. He was a violent and repulsive man given to wild rages and unspeakable depravities, but he had one weakness – his deep love for his boy Ictys. This unbounded affection Procne and Philomela knew well. Ictys was Procne’s son too, but what maternal love she once felt had been quite overwhelmed by hatred and an unquenchable lust for revenge. Abandoning all pity, the sisters went to the child’s bedchamber and murdered him in his sleep.

‘Philomela will be leaving for Athens soon,’ Procne told her husband the next morning. ‘Why don’t we hold a banquet tonight to bid her farewell and to honour the kindly hospitality you have offered her?’

Philomela whimpered and nodded her head vigorously.

‘She seems to think it would be a good idea too.’

Tereus grunted his assent.

At the feast that night a succulent stew was served which the king greedily consumed. He soaked up all its juices with hunks of bread, but found he still had room for more. Just out of arm’s reach lay a dish covered by a silver dome.

‘What’s under that?’

Philomela pushed the dish towards him with a smile. Tereus lifted the dome and gave a shout of horror when he saw his dead son’s head grimacing up at him. The sisters screeched with laughter and exultation. When he realized what had been done to him, and understood why the stew was so deliciously tender, Tereus gave a great roar and snatched down a spear from the wall. The two women ran from the room and cried out to the gods for aid. As King Tereus chased them out of the palace and down the street he found himself suddenly rising into the air. He was being transformed into a hoopoe bird, and his yells of pain and fury began to sound like forlorn whoops. At the same time, Procne was changed into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.

Although nightingales are famous for the melodious beauty of their song, it is only the male of the species that sings. The females, like tongueless Philomela, remain mute.fn6 Many species of swallow are named after Procne to this day and the hoopoe bird still wears a kingly crown.

Ganymede and the Eagle

In the northwest corner of Asia Minor there lay a kingdom called Troad, or Troy, in honour of its ruler King TROS. Troy looked across the Aegean Sea westwards to mainland Greece; behind it lay the whole of what is now Turkey and the ancient lands to the east. To the north were the Dardanelles and Gallipoli and to the south the great island of Lesbos. The principal city Ilium (which was to become known simply as the city of Troy) derived its name from ILOS, the eldest son of Tros and his queen CALLIRRHOË, a daughter of the local river god SCAMANDER. Of the royal couple’s second boy, ASSARACUS, little is recorded, but it was their third son, GANYMEDE, who took the eye and indeed the breath of all who encountered him.

No more beautiful youth had ever lived and moved upon the earth than this Prince Ganymede. His hair was golden, his skin like warm honey, his lips a soft, sweet invitation to lose yourself in mad and magical kisses.

Girls and women of all ages had been known to scream and even to faint when he looked at them. Men who had never in all their lives considered the appeal of their own sex found their hearts hammering, the blood surging and pounding in their ears when they caught sight of him. Their mouths would go dry and they found themselves stammering foolish nonsense and saying anything to try to please him or attract his attention. When they got home they wrote and instantly tore up poems that rhymed ‘thighs’ with ‘eyes’, ‘hips’ with ‘lips’, ‘youth’ with ‘truth’, ‘boy’ with ‘joy’ and ‘desire’ with ‘fire’.

Unlike many born with the awful privilege of beauty, Ganymede was not sulky, petulant or spoiled. His manners were charming and unaffected. When he smiled the smile was kind and his amber eyes were lit with a friendly warmth. Those who knew him best said that his inner beauty matched or even exceeded his outer.

Had he not been a prince it is likely that more fuss would have been made of his startling looks and his life would have been made impossible. But because he was the favoured son of a great ruler no one dared try to seduce him, and he lived a blameless life of horses, music, sport and friends. It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all.

They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumours of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn’t known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus.

It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus.

Zeus despatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss.

‘Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,’ Hermes told him. ‘He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.’

Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him …

But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. He is usually represented as smiling and happy. He became a symbol of that particular kind of same-sex love which was to become so central a part of Greek life. His name, it seems, was a kind of deliberate word play, deriving as it did from ganumai ‘gladdening’ and medon ‘prince’ and/or medeon ‘genitals’. ‘Ganymede’, the gladdening prince with the gladdening genitals became twisted over time into the word ‘catamite’.

Zeus and Ganymede stayed together as a happy couple for a very long time. Of course the god was as unfaithful to Ganymede as he was to his own wife, but they became almost a fixture nonetheless.

When the reign of the gods was coming to an end Zeus rewarded this beautiful youth, his devoted minion, lover and friend, by sending him up into the sky as a constellation in the most important part of the heavens, the Zodiac, where he shines still as Aquarius, the Cupbearer.

Moon Lovers

A word about two immortal sisters. We have met in passing Eos, or AURORA as the Romans called her, and know that her task was to begin each day by flinging wide the gates that let first the god Apollo and then her brother Helios drive the sun-chariot through. Their sister Selene (LUNA to the Romans) drove the nocturnal equivalent, the moon-chariot, across the night sky. By Selene, Zeus had fathered two daughters, PANDIA (whom Athenians celebrated every full moon) and ERSA (sometimes HERSE), the divine personification of the dew.

After Zeus tired of Selene, she fell in love a number of times. A fine, heroic youth called CEPHALUS caught her eye and she abducted him. She gave no thought to the fact that he was already spoken for – married, in fact, to PROCRIS, a daughter of Erechtheus, first King of Athens (the issue of Hephaestus’s spilled semen), and his queen, PRAXITHEA. Despite Selene’s radiant beauty and the luxurious moon palace she installed him in, the kidnapped Cephalus found himself missing his wife Procris dreadfully. No matter what silvery arts of love the goddess of the moon employed, she failed to arouse him. Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife. All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold …

With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind.

‘Aiee,’ she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, ‘it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.’

‘What can you mean?’

‘Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘How little you know her!’ Cephalus returned with some heat, ‘She is as faithful as she is lovely.’

‘Ha!’ said Selene. ‘All it takes is honey and money.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.’

‘How cynical you are.’

‘I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That’s not cynicism, it’s realism.’

‘But you don’t know Procris,’ Cephalus insisted. ‘She’s not like other people. She is faithful and true.’

‘Pah! She’d leap into bed with anyone when your back’s turned. I tell you what …’ Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. ‘If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets – I bet she’d be all over you.’

‘Never!’

‘Up to you, but …’ Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. ‘Oh look – there’s a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too …’

Selene vanished and at that very moment Cephalus found that he was indeed bearded. The change of wardrobe that had inexplicably appeared by the roadside seemed to beckon to him.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Selene’s words had planted a seed of doubt. In putting on this absurd costume, Cephalus told himself that he was not yielding to this doubt, but rather setting out to show Selene that her cynicism was misplaced. He and Procris would call up to her that very night as she glided by in her chariot, ‘How wrong you were, goddess of the moon!’ they would cry, ‘how little you understand a loving mortal heart.’ Words to that effect. That would show her.

A short while later, Procris opened the door to a handsome bearded, helmeted, gowned stranger. She was looking a little haggard and drawn. The sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband had hit her hard. Before she had time to enquire of her visitor, however, Cephalus shouldered his way into the house and dismissed the servants.

‘You are a very beautiful woman,’ he said in a thick Thracian accent.

Procris blushed. ‘Sir, I must …’

‘Come, let us seat ourselves on this couch.’

‘Really, I cannot …’

‘Come now, no one’s looking.’

She knew that it was pushing the boundaries of hospitable xenia a little further than was called for, but Procris complied. The man was so forceful.

‘What’s a beauty like you doing all alone in such a big house?’ Cephalus picked a fig from a copper bowl, took a lascivious bite from it and dangled the soft juicy half that remained in front of Procris.fn7

‘Sir!’

As her mouth opened to remonstrate, Cephalus pushed in the squashy fig.

‘A sight to enflame the gods themselves,’ he said. ‘Be mine!’

‘I’m married!’ she tried to say through the seeds and pulp.

‘Marriage? What’s that? I’m a rich man and will give you whatever jewels or ornaments you ask for, if only you will yield. You are so beautiful. And I love you.’

Procris paused. It may have been that she was trying to swallow the remains of the fig. It may have been that she was tempted by the offer of precious things. Perhaps she was touched by this sudden and intense declaration of love. The pause was long enough to cause Cephalus to rise in fury, cast off his disguise and reveal himself.

‘So!’ he thundered, ‘This is what happens when you are alone! Dishonourable, deceitful woman!’

Procris stared in disbelief. ‘Cephalus? Is that you?’

‘Yes! Yes, it is your poor husband! This is how you behave when I am away. Go! Leave my sight, faithless Procris. Away with you!’

He lunged forward, shaking his fist, and the terrified Procris fled. Out of the house she ran, out into the woods, never stopping until she collapsed with exhaustion on the fringes of a grove sacred to Artemis.

The goddess discovered Procris lying there the next morning and coaxed from her the story of what had happened.

For a year and a day she stayed with the divine huntress and her retinue of fierce maidens, but at last she could bear it no longer.

‘Artemis, you have looked after me, tutored me in the arts of the chase and shown me how men are always to be shunned. But I cannot lie to you: in my heart I love my husband Cephalus as much as ever I did. He wronged me, but the wrong he did came from his great love for me and I yearn to forgive him and lie in his arms, his wife once more.’

Artemis was sorry to see her go, but she was in a charitable mood. Not only did she let Procris return to her husband without first plucking her eyes out or feeding her to the pigs (actions that were by no means alien to her) but she bestowed upon her two remarkable gifts to present to Cephalus as a peace offering.

Lailaps and Alopex Teumesios

One of the gifts that Procris received was a remarkable dog called LAILAPS which had the power to catch anything, absolutely anything that it pursued. Set it to chase a deer, boar, bear, lion or even human being and it could never fail to bring its quarry down. The second gift, of equal value, was a javelin that would always hit its mark. Whosoever was possessed of both could rightly call themselves the greatest mortal hunter in the world. Little wonder that Cephalus was pleased to welcome his wife, laden with such gifts, back to hearth and home, bosom and bed.

The reputation of Cephalus now grew and grew – tales of his hunting skills were whispered in awe from kingdom to kingdom. News reached the ears of the Theban regent, CREON.fn8 As so often in its benighted history, Thebes at this time was being laid low by a scourge, in this instance a ferocious fox, called locally the Cadmean Vixen and feared throughout the Greek World as ALOPEX TEUMESIOS, the Teumessian Fox, a marauder whose special gift was that it was divinely ordained never to be caught, no matter how many dogs, horses or men were on her trail or set in position to trap her. It was thought this vulpine terror was unleashed by Dionysus, still thirsting for revenge upon the city that had shunned and mocked his mother Semele.

An increasingly desperate Creon, having heard tell of the almost supernatural gifts of Cephalus and his wonderdog, Lailaps, sent word to Athens begging to borrow it. Cephalus was happy enough to lend Creon the marvellous hound, which was soon set on the fox’s trail.

The ensuing debacle reveals a marvellous quality of the Greek mind: their fascination with paradox. What happens when an uncatchable fox is set upon by an inescapable hound? This is akin to the problem of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

Round and round dashed the Cadmean Vixen, while hot on her tail flew Lailaps, from whom no prey could escape. They would still be caught in that logic loop now I suppose, if Zeus hadn’t done something about it.

The King of the Gods looked down at the sight and pondered the strange self-contradicting problem that presented such an affront to all proper reason and sense, and so vexingly subverted the notions embodied in that splendid Greek word nous. Zeus’s authority was underwritten by a deep law that said no god had the power to undo the divine enchantments of another. This meant that the dog and the vixen were fated to be locked in this impossible condition for ever, making a public mockery of the order of things. Zeus solved the conundrum by turning the fox and the dog to stone. In this way they stayed frozen in time, their perfect possibilities unachieved for eternity, their destinies for ever unreconciled. At length, even this locked state seemed to him to challenge common sense, so he catasterized them – removed them to the heavens – where they became the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Cephalus and Procris, I am sorry to say, did not prosper long. Deprived of Lailaps, but still armed with the enchanted javelin that could never fail to find its target, Cephalus loved nothing better than rambling about the hills and valleys that surrounded Athens, taking what prey he happened on. One fiercely hot afternoon, after three hours of chasing and spearing, tired and drenched in sweat, he lay down to doze. The heat of the day, even in the shade of his favourite great oak, made him uncomfortable.

‘Come Zephyrus,’ he called up lazily to the West Wind, ‘let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, calm me, ease me, soothe me, play on me …’

By the greatest misfortune, Procris had come out to where Cephalus was, to surprise him with a dish of olives and some wine. Just as she drew near she heard her husband’s last few words, ‘let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, ease me, soothe me, play on me …’ After all that show of possessive rage he was now betraying her? Procris could not believe her ears! The dish and the wineskin fell from her nerveless fingers and she gave an involuntary gasp.

Cephalus sat up. What was that stumbling in the undergrowth? That snuffle! A pig, by heaven! He reached for his spear and threw it towards the bushes from which the noise had come. He had no need to be careful in his aim. The enchanted javelin would do all the work.

It did. Procris expired in his grieving arms.

A charmingly strange and unhappy tale.fn9 It all came about, we should remind ourselves, merely because Selene had decided to abduct an appetizing mortal.

Endymion

Cephalus was not the only young man to catch the moon goddess’s eye. One night, as Selene sailed her silver chariot across the sky over western Asia Minor, she spotted far below ENDYMION, a young shepherd of great beauty lying naked and fast asleep on the hillside outside a cave on Mount Latmos. The sight of his lovely limbs all silvered by her moonbeams and the enticingly seductive smile that played on his lips as he dreamed so filled Selene with desire that she cried out to Zeus, Endymion’s father, to ensure that he would never change. She wanted to see him in exactly that attitude every night. Zeus granted the wish. Endymion stayed just where he was, locked in eternal slumber. Each new moon, the one day in the lunar month when her chariot could not be seen, Selene would come down and make love to the sleeping boy. This unconventional conjugal practice did not prevent her from bearing fifty daughters by him. I will let you picture the physical practicalities, postures and positions which allowed that.

An odd relationship, but one which worked and made Selene happy.fn10