Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

THE FIRST ORDER

fn1 This trick of virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, 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.

fn2 Indeed ouranos is the Greek word for ‘sky’ to this very day.

THE SECOND ORDER

fn1 The brontosaurus or ‘thunder lizard’ got his name from Brontes. The novelist sisters from Yorkshire may have too. Their father was born ‘Brunty’ but changed it to Brontë, perhaps to lend a grand peal of classical thunder to his Irish name, perhaps in honour of Admiral Nelson who had been made Duke of Brontë – the dukedom was located on the slopes of Etna and is believed to have derived its name from the Cyclops slumbering beneath.

fn2 Pronounced heck-a-ton key-rays – the hecaton means ‘hundred’ and the chires ‘hands’ (as in ‘chiropractor’).

fn3 ‘Tethys’ is also the name palaeontologists give to the great ancient sea that was an ancestor of the Mediterranean.

fn4 Since there were perhaps three thousand Oceanids it would be fruitless to list them, even if all their names were known. But it is worth introducing CALYPSO, AMPHITRITE and the dark and fearful STYX who – like her brother Nilus – was to become the deity of a very significant river. One more Oceanid merits a mention, but only because of her name – DORIS. Doris the Oceanid. She went on to marry the sea god NEREUS and by him mother many NEREIDS, friendly nymphs of the sea.

fn5 Themis later became a personification of law, justice, custom – mores, the rules that govern how manners and things are or should be.

fn6 Typhon gave us typhus, typhoid and the deadly tropical storm, the typhoon. Later we will meet two of Typhon’s repulsive offspring by a half woman, half water snake, called ECHIDNA.

fn7 Momos (MOMUS to the Romans) would go on to be worshipped in a seriocomic literary way as the guiding spirit of Satire. Aesop incorporated him into some of his fables and he is the hero of a lost play by Sophocles.

fn8 The Romans, perhaps confusingly, called Nemesis INVIDIA, which is also the Latin for ‘envy’.

fn9 Neil Gaiman’s Sandman character, Dream, is also known as Morpheus, and formed the inspiration for the character Morpheus played by Laurence Fishburne in the Wachowskis’ Matrix films.

fn10 Four exceptions perhaps. Hypnos is not so bad after all. The longer you live, the fonder you become of him. And talking of living long – perhaps Geras isn’t too awful either. So five.

fn11 Their names signify not their size but their chthonic origins – generated from the earth, ‘Gaia-gen’ if you will. Gaia’s name, incidentally, became worn down to Ge in later Greek. She is still there in earth sciences like ‘geology’ and ‘geography’, not to mention the later environmental studies that have restored her full name – James Lovelock and his popular ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ being a prime example.

fn12 The sugars of the ‘manna ash’, which still grows in southern Europe, give their name to today’s sweetener Mannitol.

fn13 At least the deposed Sky Father has the consolation of the planet Uranus named in his honour – it being the convention that the planets take the Roman names of the gods they represent.

fn14 The females of the race can be called ‘Titanesses’.

fn15 In fact the area of central Greece where Mount Othrys stands is called Magnesia to this day: it gave its name to magnesium, magnets and, of course, magnetite. Manganese too, through a spelling mistake.

fn16 As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort.

fn17 The question of how long it took for immortals to be weaned, to walk, talk and grow into adulthood is a vexed one. Some sources maintain that Zeus grew from a baby into young manhood in a single year. Divine time and mortal time seem to have run differently, just like those of dogs and humans do, or elephants and flies, for example. It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

fn18 Zeus was often playful. The Romans called him JUPITER or JOVE, so he had quite literally a jovial disposition. ‘The Bringer of Jollity’, Gustav Holst calls him in his orchestral suite The Planets.

fn19 The potion was prepared by Metis and it would be nice to think that is where our word ‘emetic’ comes from, but I don’t think it does.

fn20 Although in birth order Hera had been the last to be born before Zeus, she now counted as the second child. A kind of reverse seniority operated as they emerged from Kronos’s gullet. Zeus became officially the eldest of the children while Hestia, having been the firstborn, was now considered the youngest. It makes sense if you are a god.

CLASH OF THE TITANS

fn1 Hesiod, in the eighth century BC, offers us the fullest extant account, but other poets also sang of it; an epic called the Titanomachia, by the eighth-century Eumelus of Corinth (or possibly the legendary blind bard Thamyris of Thrace), is tantalizingly mentioned in other texts, but remains lost to us. Hesiod describes the pitched battle that shook the earth like this: ‘The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and … reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods, and a heavy quaking reached dim Tartarus and the deep sound of their feet in the fearful onset and of their hard missiles. So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one another, and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to starry heaven; and they met together with a great battle-cry.’

fn2 See Appendix here.

fn3 The PIERIDES came from Pieria too. They were nine sisters who made the mistake of challenging the Muses, only to be turned into birds for their troubles. Alexander Pope refers to Pieria as the fount of all wisdom and knowledge in this well-known couplet from his Essay on Criticism:

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring …

fn4 To give the actors added height, and with it metaphorical stature too.

fn5 Which also gave us (via the word for a flourishing green shoot) the element thallium, a favourite of crime writers and criminal poisoners.

fn6 Sharing her name with the Muse of comedy.

fn7 Sometimes just Auxo.

fn8 Atropine, the poison derived from mandrakes and Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), gets its name from this last and most terrible of the sisters.

fn9 Later Greeks considered the Fates to be not daughters of Night, but of Necessity – ANANKE. They bear a very strong resemblance to the Norns of Norse mythology.

fn10 The TAGIDES were nymphs associated within just one river, the Tagus, but now that I’ve mentioned them we can forget all about them as we shan’t meet them ever again.

fn11 Atlas’s brother MENOETIUS, whose name means ‘doomed might’, had been a furiously powerful and terrible opponent too, but Zeus had destroyed him with one of the very first thunderbolts.

fn12 These later images, however, show him holding up not the sky but the world.

fn13 To some mythographers Kronos (the Titan) and Chronos (Time) are quite separate entities. I prefer the versions that unite them.

fn14 Astronomers consult classical scholars when they name the heavenly bodies in our solar system. The numerous moons of Saturn include Titan, Iapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion, Tethys, Rhea and Calypso. Then there are the Rings of Saturn. Perhaps they signify time, like the rings of a tree.

fn15 Some of the Titanides were very attractive and – as lustful, highly sexed and prone to falling in love as any being that has ever lived – Zeus already had designs on one or two of the more appealing ones.

fn16 And ‘prescience’ or ‘forethought’ is just what the name Prometheus means …