Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Appendices

The Brothers, a Sidebar

A final word about Epimetheus and Prometheus, the sons of Clymene (or Asia) the Oceanid and Iapetus the Titan, and younger brothers of sky-shouldering Atlas and thunderbolt-exploded Menoetius. It is generally held that Prometheus means ‘forethought’ and Epimetheus ‘afterthought’, from which it is usually inferred that Epimetheus blundered into things without considering consequences while his elder brother Prometheus deliberated with more perspicacity. It might be convincingly argued that there was nothing especially cautious, forward-thinking or prescient about Prometheus’s actions in bringing fire to man. It was impulsive, generous … loving even, but not especially wise. Epimetheus was a kindly, well disposed individual also, and his failings were only … I was going to say only human, but that can hardly be right, for he was a Titan. His failings were certainly titanic in their consequences. The perceived difference between the brothers is used to this day by philosophers to express something fundamental about us all.

In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras the title character suggests a creation myth somewhat different from the traditionally accepted one.

The gods (so Protagoras tells Socrates) decided to populate nature with new strains of mortal life, there being only immortals in the world at that time. Out of earth and water and with divine fire and divine breath they created animals and man. They charged Prometheus and Epimetheus with the task of allocating to these creatures all the attributes and characteristics that would enable them to live fulfilled and successful lives. Epimetheus said he would do the distributing and Prometheus could come and check up on his work. This the brothers agreed upon.

Epimetheus set to with a will. He gave armour to some animals – the rhinoceros, the pangolin and the armadillo, for instance. To others, almost at random it seemed, he handed out heavy weatherproof fur, camouflage, venom, feathers, tusks, talons, scales, claws, gills, wings, whiskers and goodness knows what else. He assigned speed and ferocity, he apportioned buoyancy and airworthiness – every animal was fitted out with its own cleverly designed and efficient speciality, from navigational skills to expertise in burrowing, nest-building, swimming, leaping and singing. He was just congratulating himself for providing the bats and dolphins with echolocation when he realized that this had been the very last of the available gifts. He had, with his characteristic lack of foresight, completely omitted to consider what he would bestow on man – poor, naked, vulnerable, smooth-skinned, two-legged man.

Epimetheus went guiltily to his brother and asked what they should do now that there was nothing left at the bottom of the gift basket. Man had no defences with which to arm himself against the cruelty, cunning and rapacity of these now superbly provisioned animals. The very powers that had been lavished on the beasts would surely finish off weaponless mankind.

Prometheus’s solution was to steal the arts from Athena and flame from Hephaestus. With these, man could use wisdom, wit and industry to pit himself against the animals. He might not swim as well as a fish, but he could work out how to build boats; he might not run as swiftly as a horse, but he could learn to tame, shoe and ride one. One day he might even construct wings to rival those of the birds.

Somehow then, by accident and error, man alone of all mortal creatures was given qualities from Olympus – not so that he could rival the gods, but merely so that he could fend off the more perfectly equipped animals.

Prometheus’s name means, as I have said, ‘forethought’. Forethought has far-reaching implications. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy (1945) has this to say:

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant … True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date … the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

This is perhaps a way of suggesting that Prometheus is father of our civilization in a way more subtle than as the provider of fire, whether real or symbolic. Prometheus also bequeathed us this quality of forethought, of being able to act beyond impulse. Was it Promethean forethought that raised us from being from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, town dwellers and traders? You do not toil and plant, plan and build, store and exchange unless you are capable of looking to the future.

Lest we take worship of the potentially Christlike and ideal Prometheus too far (a favourite Greek motto was, after all, mēdén ágan ‘nothing too much’), Russell reminds us that the Greeks seemed to be aware of a need to counter his influence with darker, deeper, less stable passions:

It is evident that this process [acting on prudence and forethought] can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought – which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least …

Hope

What Elpis being left behind in Pandora’s jar meant to the Greeks, and what it might mean for us today, have been matters of intriguing debate amongst scholars and thinkers since the invention of writing and perhaps even before that.

For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us.

Others have maintained that Elpis means more than ‘hope’, it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death and ultimate failure that looms over us all. Such an interpretation of the myth is, in a dark manner, optimistic.

Nietzsche looked at it in yet another, slightly different way. For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man’s existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration.

Hopefully, or hopelessly, we can decide for ourselves.

Giant Leaps

There are some stories in Greek myth of a GIGANTOMACHY, or ‘war with the giants’. A hundred of this warrior race (who, as I have mentioned, were not especially tall or gigantic in the modern sense) were born of Gaia and the blood of the gelded Ouranos. It may be that the war was Gaia’s last attempt at wresting control of the cosmos. In some sources there seems to be an overlap or fusion with the Titanomachy. What seems certain is that a violent uprising of some sort did take place and that it was led by the King of the Giants, EURYMEDON, against the gods.

We do not have the names of all the participants, but the fates of a few of the mightiest were certainly recorded. The most powerful of all, ENCELADUS (the noisy one) was buried by Athena under Mount Etna, from which prison he continues to grumble volcanically.fn1 POLYBOTES was crushed under Nisyrus, a section of the island of Cos that Poseidon broke off and thrust on top of him.fn2 DAMYSUS (the conqueror) was killed early in the struggle, but came to fame later, when his body was exhumed by the centaur Chiron for spare parts. Hephaestus emptied a vat of molten iron all over the unfortunate MIMAS (the imitator); CLYTIUS (the renowned) was consumed in the flames of Hecate’s torches; SYCEUS, with Zeus in hot pursuit, was saved from extinction when Gaia turned him into a fig tree.fn3 Hippolytus (the stampeder of horses) was slain by Hermes, who cheated by wearing his invisibility cloak; and Dionysus killed TYPHOEUS (the smoulderer), with his sacred thyrsus.

I have read of one giant, called ARISTAEUS (the best),fn4 who was spared from the war by being hidden away in the shape of a dung beetle by his mother, Gaia. But how THOON (the swift), PHOITIOS (the reckless), MOLIOS, EMPHYTOS (the rooted one) and goodness knows how many others of the giant race all met their ends remains, as far as we know, unrecorded.

Oddly one account tells how the ferocious giant PORPHYRION, (the purple one), in the act of trying to rape Hera was killed by Zeus and Hercules, which places his death much later in the timeline than the rest of the Gigantomachy. As if such a consistent and stable a device as a timeline could ever be used to delineate the complex, kaleidoscopic and disorderly unfolding of Greek myth.

Feet and Toes

Like us the Greeks used feet as a measurement. One pous (plural podes) was made up of about fifteen or sixteen toes (daktyla) and was approximately as long as a British or American foot. There were one hundred podes to a plethron (the width of a running track), six of those to a stadion (the length of a running track, from which we get our word ‘stadium’) and eight stadia to the mile, or milion. The foot business – podiatrists, octopuses (or octopodes), tripods and so on – shows the interesting journey of the letter ‘P’ as it strangely contorted to ‘F’ the further west it went: so pous became Fuss in German and foot in English. Pfennig, Pfeife and Pfeffer are still stuck in the middle in modern German but have become penny, pipe and pepper in English (though fife exists too). The early nineteenth-century philologist Friedrich von Schlegel first noticed this ‘Great Fricative Shift’, which subsequently became part of Grimms’ Law – so named in honour of the Brothers Grimm, who were the ones who really put in the work and showed how most of the languages of Europe and the Middle East could be traced all the way back to India and their notional Proto-Indo-European ancestor.