Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The Bloom of Youth

The story of Eos and Tithonus can be considered a kind of domestic tragedy. Greek myth offers us many more stories of love between gods and mortals that more often fit into the genre ‘doomed romance’, sometimes with an element of rom-com, farce or horror thrown in. In these love affairs the gods seem always to say it with flowers. The Greek for flower is anthos – so what follows is, quite literally, a romantic anthology.

Hyacinthus

Hyacinthus, a beautiful Spartan prince, had the misfortune to be loved by two divinities, Zephyrus, the West Wind, and golden Apollo. Hyacinthus himself much preferred the beautiful Apollo and repeatedly turned down the wind’s playful but increasingly fierce advances.

One afternoon Apollo and Hyacinth were competing in athletic events and Zephyrus, in a fit of jealous rage, blew Apollo’s discus off course, sending it skimming at speed straight towards Hyacinth. It struck him hard on the forehead, killing him stone dead.

In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth’s soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one’s brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. This heady juice dropped into the soil and from it bloomed the exquisite and sweet-smelling flower that bears Hyacinth’s name to this day.

Crocus and Smilax

Crocus was a mortal youth who pined without success for the nymph SMILAX. Out of pity, the gods (we don’t really know which one) turned him into the saffron flower that we call crocus, while she became a brambly vine, many species of which still flourish under the name Smilax.

According to another version of this myth, Crocus was the lover and companion of the god Hermes, who accidentally killed him with a discus and in his sorrow turned him into the crocus flower. This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Aphrodite and Adonis

There was an early King of Cyprus called THEIAS who was renowned for his remarkable good looks. He and his wife CENCHREIS had a daughter SMYRNA, also known as MYRRHE or MYRRHA, who grew up harbouring secret incestuous love for her handsome father.

Now, Cyprus was sacred to Aphrodite, being the island on which she first set foot after her birth from the foam of the sea, and it was a spiteful Aphrodite who had breathed into Smyrna this unnatural desire for her own father. It seems that the goddess had of late been aggrieved by the inadequacy of King Theias’s prayers and sacrifices to her. He had displayed the temerity to open a new shrine dedicated to Dionysus, a cult which was proving popular amongst the islanders. Aphrodite regarded the neglect of her temples as the worst possible crime, far worse than incest. In the minds of mortals, though, even those of the notoriously laissez-faire and decadent Cyprus, incest was a taboo of the gravest kind. An anguished Smyrna attempted to smother her guilty feelings. But Aphrodite, who really seemed determined to sow mischief, bewitched Smyrna’s maid HIPPOLYTE and brought the whole business to a disturbing crisis.

One evening, when Theias had got himself good and drunk, as he liked to do since his discovery of the vinous virtues of the god Dionysus, Hippolyte, under the spell of Aphrodite, led Smyrna to his chamber and into his bed. The king made greedy love to his daughter there, too intoxicated to question his good fortune. In the dark of night and the fog of wine he failed to recognize the fruit of his own loins; he only knew that a young, desirable, and passionately obliging girl had appeared to pleasure him like some kind of divine succubus.

After a week of these intense and joyful visitations Theias awoke one morning with a determination to know more about her. He put out word that he would reward with a mountain of gold anyone who could discover the identity of the mysterious stranger who had lately made his nights so wildly pleasurable.

Smyrna had been acting out her passion in a kind of mad dream of lust, but when she heard that all Cyprus was now trying to find out the secret of her nightly visits to Theias, she ran from the palace to hide in the woods. She wanted to die, but she could not forsake the child that she already felt growing inside her. Railing at the laws of man that made her love criminal, she begged heaven to take pity on her.fn1 In answer to her prayer, the gods transformed Smyrna into a weeping myrrh tree.

After ten months the tree burst open and disgorged a mortal baby boy. Naiads anointed the child with the soft tears that wept from the myrrh – a balm which remains the source of the most important birth and coronation oils to this very day – and he was given the name Adonis.

Smyrna’s baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I’ve written this too many times for you to believe me again. But it’s true that all who looked upon him were smitten for ever and true also that his name lives on as a descriptor of paragons of male beauty. At the very least it’s necessary for us to know that Adonis was lovely enough to attract, as no other mortal ever had, the one who had done so much to bring about his birth: the goddess of love and beauty herself, Aphrodite.

They became lovers. It had been a wild and tortuous path to this coupling: the goddess, in a spirit of malicious revenge, had caused a father to commit a forbidden act with his daughter which brought forth a child whom Aphrodite loved perhaps more completely than any other being. A lifetime of therapy could surely not clear up such a psychic mess as that.

They did everything together, Adonis and Aphrodite. She knew that the other gods hated the boy – Demeter and Artemis could not bear to see so many girls sickening with love for him, Hera stonily disapproved of the issue of so shamefully and flagrantly indecent an affront to the sacred institutions of marriage and family, while Ares was stormily jealous of his lover’s intense infatuation. Aphrodite sensed all this and determined to keep Adonis safe from the harm her resentful family might do him.

Because her precious mortal lover, like most Greek boys and men, showed a great passion for hunting, the protective Aphrodite told him that while he was free to chase prey of manageable size and limited ferocity – hares, rabbits, doves and pigeons, for example – he was absolutely forbidden from pursuing lions, bears, boars and the larger stags. But boys will be boys, and when the girls are away they cannot resist reverting to type and showing off. And so it came about that, one afternoon, Aphrodite’s beloved found himself alone on the trail of a great boar (some say the boar was actually Ares himself in disguise). Adonis cornered the beast and was just pulling back his spear ready for the kill when it turned on him with a savage roar, tusks bristling. Adonis dropped his spear in fright as he leapt back, but he was a brave young man and managed to steady himself and plant his feet firmly enough to meet the boar’s charge. As it rushed forward, Adonis spun his body round in a graceful turn like a dancer – the brute missed him and Adonis seized it by the neck as it passed. But the boar was cunning. It dropped its head to the ground, letting the boy think he had subdued it. Kneeling down Adonis pushed with one hand against the animal’s head, feeling with his spare hand for the knife he kept in his belt. The boar sensed its chance and pulled its head up with a snarl, lifting and twisting its great tusks. They tore Adonis’s stomach open and he fell, mortally wounded, to the ground.

Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar – or was it Ares? – grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty.fn2