The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

*To which Homer alludes, but which seems to have been mentioned first in a work composed prior to the Iliad: the lost “Cyprian verses.” The story is repeatedly aired thereafter, not least in the fables attributed to Hyginus, a Roman grammarian and poet of Spanish origin who lived in the first century BC. It is Hyginus’s account that I follow here.

*Namely Thetis, a sea goddess, and Peleus, the human ruler of a city in Thessaly.

*Recounted in one of the Homeric Hymns, mistakenly attributed by tradition to Homer.

*Or at least the branch of philosophy that is concerned with wisdom, and that extends from Parmenides to the Stoics via Plato and Aristotle. As with all interpreters of Greek thought, I distinguish this tradition from another, which could be described as already “deconstructive,” and which exists in a “countercultural” relation to the first: a lineage that essentially passes through the Atomists, the Epicureans, and the Sophists.

*These two volumes will be followed by three more: on ancient sages and Christian thinkers (volume three), on the foundations of humanism (four), and on the birth of contemporary philosophy (five). The first volume of Learning to Live therefore constitutes the general outline of a larger project attempting a wider exploration of philosophy and its major historical trends, in order to explore current developments.

*The origin of this expression, perhaps less familiar than the others, is entertaining. I often wondered why—all things considered—a carter should be thought of as swearing more than a plowman or a blacksmith. The answer derives from an episode in one of the twelve labors of Heracles, for which Apollodorus is our main source (The Library, Book II, 118): “After passing through Asia, Heracles put in at Thermydrai, the harbour of Lindos. After releasing one of the bullocks from the cart of a cowherd, he sacrificed it and feasted on its flesh. The carter, unable to defend himself, stood on a certain mountain and cursed Heracles; (because of which, even to this day, when they sacrifice to Heracles they do so to the accompaniment of curses).” The unfortunate carter who went up the mountain was unwilling to provoke the anger of that other mountain, made of muscle, namely Heracles himself!

*The adjective “secular” may seem surprising, given the quantity of gods and goddesses in classical mythology. It is nonetheless justified by the fact that Greek wisdom, as embodied by the major myths, accepts death as a nonnegotiable fact of the human condition, so that these gods have none of the consolatory and salvational function that they represent in the great monotheist religions: with very rare exceptions, the Greek gods leave mortals to get on with their mortality.

*The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Perennial, 2001).

*Familles je vous aime: politique et vie privée à l’âge de la mondialisation (Paris: XO Editions, 2007).

*With the exception of the children of Chaos, from whom there spring two other divinities, whom we shall leave aside for the moment: Erebus, the personification of darkness, and Nyx, the Night, which embodies a different darkness. Erebus is first and foremost the obscurity that reigns in the lower depths, for example in Tartarus. Night, on the other hand, is the obscurity of outdoors, above ground, beneath the sky. Rather than absolute, the latter is therefore relative—and relative to the day that precedes and succeeds it . . . an everyday phenomenon! Erebus and Night make love and promptly give birth to two other divinities. Ether is the luminous fog that drapes the tops of mountains, forever clothed in brilliance and situated above the clouds. It is this light that will illuminate the seat of the gods, Mount Olympus, and that constitutes the absolute contrary to Erebus, the blackness of the deeps. And then, born next to Ether, there is Hemera, the Day, which every morning succeeds or dethrones Night.

*Here are their names—but it is the youngest of them all, Cronus, whom we must remember, for he will play one of the key roles in the story that follows. In order of appearance: Oceanus, the great stream of water described in mythology as encircling the world; then Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, followed by Cronus, who is always referred to by Hesiod as “crooked-scheming,” for reasons we shall understand in a moment. And on the female side there is Theia (whose name in Greek means “divine one”), Rhea, Themis (“justice”), Mnemosyne (“memory”), Phoebe (“luminous one”), and Tethys, queen of the sea, who inspires love.

*Hesiod tells us neither their number nor their names. We have to wait six centuries to discover a little more about them, thanks to Virgil (first century BC). I mention this detail in passing to give a sense of the time needed for these famous mythological stories to take their full shape: they were not created in a single narrative act, nor by a single author, but were constantly modified by poets and philosophers over the course of centuries.

*This story derives for the most part from Apollodorus, a mythographer of the second century BC.

*For the sake of completeness, here is the lineage of offspring “generated” by Chaos, and that of Gaia, likewise self-engendered. From Chaos descends Erebus, the darkness that reigns inside the earth, and Nyx, the night that reigns above it. The courtship of Erebus and Nyx results in the first grandchildren of Chaos: Ether, the luminous fog that will enshroud the future home of the gods on the summit of Mount Olympus, and Hemera, goddess of the day, which succeeds night. This line of descent will play no particular role in the war of the gods, and can be left to one side; I mention it here for the record.

*According to myth, the Moirai are three sisters—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—who decide the span of each individual life by means of a thread that the first goddess spins, the second measures, and the third cuts at the moment of death. In Latin the Moirai were called the Parcae.

*Notably in the first Nemean ode, where he remarks that Gaia has warned the gods that they can only win this war with the help of two demigods, in this case Dionysus and Heracles.

*In his Pythian odes, strophe 12, verses 6–8.

*Very brief allusion to the story (four lines only) is made by Herodotus (Histories, VII, 26) and Xenophon (Anabasis, II, 8); on the other hand there are complete accounts of it in Ovid and Hyginus.

*Moreover, in another version (Hyginus’s Fable, 191), it is not the Muses but Midas who is the arbiter of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas—proof that, in the minds of the mythographers, the two stories are in effect one and the same myth: “King Midas was chosen as judge, at the time when Apollo contested with Marsyas, or Pan, on the pipes . . .” Whereas some gave the victory to Apollo, Midas preferred Marsyas. Angered, Apollo then said to Midas, “ ‘You shall have the ears that match your judgement,’ and promptly gave him the ears of an ass.” Why does Hyginus conflate the two myths, that of Midas/Pan and that of Marsyas, given that none of the archaic sources link them? The answer is quite simple: as in the work of “condensation” described by Freud in relation to dreams, there are several points of resemblance that support the association of Midas with the affair. Firstly, the flute (whether of Marsyas or of Pan), unlike Apollo’s lyre, is not a harmonic instrument: it can imitate the sound of the human voice, the wind in the trees, the cry of a wild creature—but not by harmonic progression. Secondly, the action takes place in Phrygia, of which Midas is king, and the earliest poem to refer to the story—or at least the earliest to have survived—is Pindar’s Pythian ode 12, which is dedicated to “the flautist Midas.” Finally, both Marsyas and Pan are “Dionysiac” beings, in other words lords of chaos, of feasting, madness, and disorder, not (like Apollo) Olympian guarantors for the cosmic labors of the founding father Zeus.

*As so often, a vividly pointed version of the myth appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

*As has been shown magisterially by Jean-Pierre Vernant, upon whom I rely for the essence of my interpretation of these three myths.

*Hesiod also refers to this age of gold as the age of Cronus, which may seem strange, given the famous war between Zeus and the Titans. But we must understand that, according to Hesiod, Cronus—despite his subsequent infamy—was the first ruler, the first master of the cosmos, before being vanquished by Zeus and cast into the pit of Tartarus. Moreover, as Hesiod subsequently tells us, Zeus will even end by forgiving his father and rehabilitating him.

*Here is a summary: The race of silver, likewise created directly from the hands of the Olympian gods, does not grow old. However, their extended youth possesses an entirely other significance to what we might suppose: for the first hundred years, the progeny of the silver age are like small children. In other words, rather than full-fledged adults—like the men of the golden age—they are infantile beings who, as soon as they reach maturity, live for a very brief time because the most extreme forms of hubris guide their actions and lead them straight to their deaths: not only are they unspeakably violent toward each other, but they also refuse to honor the gods or to offer up sacrifices. Exasperated by their lack of dikè, their willful ignorance of the proper hierarchy of beings, Zeus decides to extinguish them. One might say that this race is fashioned entirely in the image of bad divinities: like Typhon or like the Titans when they made war on Olympus, these men are not on the side of constructing a just and harmonious cosmic order. On the contrary, they despise the thought and labor toward its destruction—which is why Zeus is constrained to get rid of them—as opposed to the denizens of the golden age, who act out a well-regulated and well-governed order under the aegis of the Olympians, and who therefore exist in perfect harmony with the gods. When the inhabitants of the silver age perish, by the will of Zeus, they, too, become “daimons,” but in this case are consigned to the underworld, belowground, like the bad and “chaotic” divinities. This is their punishment. Third is the race of bronze: beings of a lesser breed than their predecessors since their entire existence is reduced to one dimension only, given over to the sheer and unadulterated violence of war. They know nothing except to fight with one another, and their brutality is unsurpassed. Their strength is terrifying, their weapons are of bronze, and they even inhabit houses of bronze: their world knows of nothing warm or comfortable. Their habitations are fashioned in their own image: hard, metallic, cold, empty. If the first race was a reflection of good divinities favorable to the establishment of a cosmos, and the second race corresponded to dark and chaotic divinities, the third corresponds to the giants: like the latter, moreover, the bronze race is vowed to anonymous death, which for the Greeks was the most frightful death of all, which reigns over the dark depths of the earth and from whose clutches no one ever escapes. From fighting with one another incessantly, the men of bronze end by annihilating their race, so Zeus has no need even to act in order to rid the cosmos of them. The fourth race, the race of heroes, is also devoted to war—with the profound difference that, unlike the men of bronze, they wage war in the name of dikè, of justice and honor, and not with the hubris that characterizes violence for its own sake. Achilles, Heracles, Theseus, Odysseus, and Jason: these are the exemplars of the heroic age, whose glorious and courageous deeds have made them celebrated for all time—rather than rendered anonymous, like the men of bronze. They, too, are soldiers, clearly, but above all they are men of honor, careful to respect the gods and mindful of finding their proper place in the order of the cosmos. This is why these heroes, who are also termed “demigods” by Hesiod, resemble somewhat the inhabitants of the golden age, in that they never truly die. The most valorous, when they have served their time, are settled by Zeus at the ends of the earth, in the Isle of the Blessed Ones, where, under the aegis of Cronus (now liberated and pardoned by Zeus), they live on as in the golden age, without labor, without cares, without illness or pain, in a land whose abundance provides all that is needed for a happy and easeful existence.

*As does Jean-Pierre Vernant, and to such lucid effect, in The Universe, the Gods, and Men.

*It resurfaces initially at the outset of fifteenth-century humanism, in Pico della Mirandola, then in Rousseau, then in Kant, and even in Sartre.

*This episode appears nowhere in Hesiod, and the problem, of course, is deciding at which stage this famous flood is supposed to have occurred. Relying on later sources—probably The Library of Apollodorus—some mythographers simply placed the destruction of a corrupt humanity in the age of bronze. It should, however, be clear that, within the perspective opened by Hesiod, this hypothesis makes no sense, since men of the bronze age are characterized primarily by their natural impulse to self-destruct through unremitting warfare with one another, so Zeus has no need whatsoever to intervene in order to rid the cosmos of them.

*Before the outbreak of the Trojan War—even before the goddess of discord, Eris, arrives to spoil the marriage feast of Thetis and Peleus and set in motion the beginnings of the conflict (namely the love of Paris and Helen)—a baleful destiny is already shaping itself for the Greeks: the curse of the House of Atreus. This curse is itself the subject of a protracted history, passed from generation to generation over the course of centuries. . . . It all begins with Tantalus, who has defied the gods, for which he suffers appalling torment in the underworld: not only is he forever dying of hunger and thirst, but an enormous and precariously balanced rock is suspended just above his head, threatening at every moment to fall and crush him—just to remind him that he is but a finite mortal who thought he could measure himself against the gods. But the gods are not content with this punishment, and it is his entire lineage—itself hardly respectful of the Immortals, to say the least—that must expiate his crimes. The children of his daughter, Niobe, will be massacred by the twin archers Artemis and Apollo on account of her disrespect toward their mother, Leto. His son Pelops will have two sons, Atreus and Thyestes, who will detest each other—to the point that Atreus will kill his brother’s children, boil them, and serve them up to him for dinner. . . . Atreus himself will have two children, Menelaus and Agamemnon, who will command the Greeks during the Trojan War. But on Agamemnon’s return, his wife, Clytemnestra—infuriated by his having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia—has begun an affair with Aegisthus, and he is murdered by the couple. Orestes, his son, will avenge his father in turn by murdering his mother and Aegisthus. Orestes will be judged and finally acquitted, which will put an end to this terrible curse upon the lineage of Atreus, which provided the subject for numerous Greek tragedies. . . .

*An aspect of the poem that Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has richly explored.

*In Socrates already, this formula (which has no “psychological” dimension whatsoever) takes on a slightly different meaning to what it originally had in archaic Greek culture: it becomes linked to a very particular concept of truth that Plato pursues, in its multiple and profound consequences, a doctrine according to which we formerly knew the truth but have forgotten it, such that knowledge now arrives in a third stage as a form of “anamnesia,” an “unforgetting” or “re-membering” of something that was within us without our having knowledge of it. It is in terms of this concept of truth, as a “re-cognition,” that Socrates answered the famous Sophist paradox that he who seeks the truth can never find it: in effect, if he is looking for it, this means that he does not already have it. He would need, in order to tell a true opinion from the false opinions that are everywhere to be found, a criterion . . . which is itself a truth criterion! He would need therefore, in this slightly specialized sense, already to possess the true, in order to distinguish it from the false. Now this is precisely what the Platonic theory of knowledge as recollection affirms: yes, we already have the true within us! We have simply forgotten it, so all knowledge is a recognition, a recollection. And this Platonic vision of truth will run through the entire history of Western philosophy.

*There is, of course, in the major religions a concern for the world and its well-being, but sin is almost invariably presented as a matter of “personal” fault.

*Ixion. At his marriage to Dia, the daughter of Deioneus, Ixion promises his father-in-law that he will offer her magnificent gifts. Under this pretext, he leads him into a garden in which he has dug a deep ditch full of burning coals—and into which he dispatches his father-in-law. A crime so appalling that no one will agree to its purification . . . except Zeus, who takes pity on Ixion and decides to give him a second chance. Invited to Olympus, Ixion can think of nothing better, by way of gratitude toward his benefactor and savior, than to try and seduce Hera, who in turn complains to her husband. Zeus, so as to be clear in his own mind, creates a cloud in the shape of Hera. Ixion falls into the trap and makes love to the cloud, thinking that it is the goddess herself. This is finally too much for Zeus, who expedites him by thunderbolt to the underworld, where Ixion is attached by serpents for all eternity to a wheel of fire, ceaselessly turning in Tartarus. . . .

Salmoneus. Here is Apollodorus’s account, and a good example of his dryness and compression:

Salmoneus lived in Thessaly at first, but later went to Elis and founded a city state there. A man of great hubris, he wanted to put himself on a level with Zeus and suffered punishment for his impiety. For he claimed that he himself was Zeus, and depriving the god of his sacrifices, he ordered that they should be offered to himself instead. And he dragged dried animal skins and bronze kettles behind his chariot, saying that he was making thunder; and he hurled flaming torches into the sky, saying that he was making lightning. Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt, and destroyed the city that he had founded, with all its inhabitants.

End of story!

Phaeton. The story of Phaeton is told notably by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, with profuse detail. But despite the best efforts of the poet, the story retains a disarming simplicity. Phaeton is the suspected son of Helios, god of the sun. He boasts of this, but his friends refuse to believe him. So he asks his mother to intercede for him, so that he may meet his father, whom he asks (out of vanity) to prove that he is indeed his father. Helios promises to grant him any wish. So Phaeton asks to be allowed to drive the chariot of the sun for one entire day, from east to west, from sunrise to sunset. Helios is apprehensive, for he knows just how difficult it is to control this chariot, and how the prospect represents a potential danger for the entire cosmic order. The inevitable happens: the divine horses run away with the headstrong Phaeton and gallop too close to the earth. Crops are scorched, rivers run dry, and animals are charred as he skims recklessly across the ground. Faced with a dire situation, Zeus as always intervenes with extreme prejudice, striking the miscreant with lightning and turning him into the constellation Auriga (the Charioteer).

Otus and Ephialtes. Here is Homer’s account, in the Odyssey, of the brief lives of these two giants:

Godlike Otus and far-famed Ephialtes—men whom the earth, the giver of grain, reared as the tallest, and most beautiful of her sons, after the famous Orion. At nine years of age they were nine cubits in breadth and in height nine fathoms. And they threatened to raise the din of furious war against the immortals in Olympus. They would have piled Mount Ossa on Olympus, and Mount Pelion, with its waving forests, on Ossa, so that heaven might be scaled. And this they would have accomplished, had they reached the age of manhood; but the son of Zeus, whom fair-haired Leto bore [namely Apollo], slew them both before the down covered their chins with a full growth of beard.

Niobe. Niobe is the daughter of Tantalus, and the sister of Pelops. Like her father, she is very prone to hubris, and at a ceremony in honor of Leto, goddess of motherhood, she boasts that she is worthier than Leto (mother of the twins—and divine archers—Apollo and Artemis) to be a recipient of the sacrifices offered to these Olympian divinities. She demands that henceforth a cult should be initiated in her own honor, asserting that she is far more fertile than the goddess, with six sons and six daughters (some say she has ten sons and ten daughters, which is beside the point). Leto does not take this insult lightly and asks her twins to settle the matter. Apollo and Artemis do so gladly: their arrows transpierce all twelve children of Niobe. They die before her eyes in atrocious agonies. Zeus transforms Niobe into a rock, down which it is said that her tears continue to fall. . . .

Bellerophon. Grandson of Sisyphus, Bellerophon is at the start a sympathetic and courageous young man. But like his grandfather he ends in the clutches of hubris, for which he will likewise pay dearly. After killing the tyrant of Corinth, Bellerophon finds asylum with Proetus, king of Tyrins, and becomes his friend. Unfortunately, the queen falls in love with him. He rejects her advances, so she accuses him falsely, in front of her husband, of trying to seduce her. Stupidly, Proetus believes his wife but refuses to kill Bellerophon himself. So he sends him to his father-in-law, the king of Lycia, with the request that he dispatch Bellerophon instead. But the Lycian, seeing the honest face of the latter, is equally reluctant to kill him. He decides to set the young hero an impossible task, in the course of which he will assuredly lose his life: he demands that Bellerophon kill the Chimera. To accomplish that he must first tame Pegasus, the winged horse that sprang from the blood of Medusa after Perseus cut off her head. Athena helps Bellerophon, however, and he succeeds in killing the Chimera . . . but success goes to his head, and he starts to “believe in himself,” whereas in reality he owes everything to the gods. He now feels that because of his victory over the Chimera he deserves to fly to Mount Olympus, the realm of the gods, and become immortal. His presumption angers Zeus, who sends a gadfly to sting the horse, causing Bellerophon to fall all the way back to earth, with fatal consequences. . . .

Cassiopeia. She will be punished for boasting that she and her daughter are even more beautiful than the Nereids, daughters of Nereus the sea god. . . .

*Namely, the story of Alcestis, a young woman who volunteers to die in place of her husband, Admetus—and whose sacrifice so moves Persephone, the wife of Hades, that she chooses to allow Alcestis to return to earthly life. Heracles, Orpheus, and Odysseus do, of course, also return from their time in the underworld, but they are there as members of the living rather than the dead. There is also the case of Semele, mother of Dionysus, who dies in childbirth but is then rescued from the underworld by her son before being herself deified in turn. But Semele is already the daughter of a goddess, Harmonia, and as mother of an Olympian she is herself destined to become divine: her case is therefore less desperate from the outset than that of Alcestis. . . .

*One more point to make before going further: Although very ancient, the myth of Orpheus in the underworld is found neither in Homer nor in Hesiod. Clearly it was in circulation as early as the sixth century BC, but it was above all the Romans of the first century, Virgil and Ovid, who have left us the most detailed and coherent versions of the story. Essentially it is these that I follow here, even if at various points it has been necessary to consult older Greek sources for completeness—notably Alcestis by Euripides and the works of Apollonius of Rhodes, Diodorus and even Plato. As always, The Library of Apollodorus has been a precious resource.

*The myth is described in the Homeric Hymns, a collection of poems that were for a long time attributed to Homer himself but whose true authorship is unknown. This is essentially the text I follow here, as it is not only one of the most ancient but also the richest and most interesting.

*For a more complete presentation of this wisdom, see A Brief History of Thought.

*Or at least Pindar seems to have been the first to relate it.

*This legend appears very early on in fragmentary form, but more developed versions of it are to be found in Pausanias, Diodorus, and Hyginus.

*I follow the narrative established by Apollodorus, which seems to reflect the broadest “consensus.”

*Having said this, one final small detail concerning his equipment: Heracles himself makes his favorite weapon, the one that he is so frequently depicted wielding on Greek figure vases, namely the famous club made out of olive wood, with which he will massacre so many monsters.

*With the exception of a few details, and to avoid getting lost among the variant versions, I follow the accounts in Diodorus—who is the earliest historian (first century BC) to offer an overall narrative, coherent and complete, of all twelve labors—and in Apollodorus, which is largely consistent (even if the order of the labors is not always the same in both authors).

*Eurystheus will end up being killed in the course of a war against the Athenians. It was said that after his death his head was brought to Alcmena, the mother of Heracles—who scratched out its eyes.

*The earliest account, at least among those that have come down to us, is that of the Greek poet Bacchylides (fifth century BC), which was happily rediscovered in the nineteenth century, when the British Museum made the chance acquisition of two rolls of papyrus containing twenty or so poems in a state of perfect preservation. Among these were what are termed “dithyrambs,” namely odes dedicated to the glory of the god Dionysus, which were sung in the great open-air amphitheaters during the poetry competitions to which the Greeks of this epoch were devoted. Among these recovered dithyrambs is a narrative relating five of the earliest exploits of Theseus. As far as the rest of his career is concerned, we must rely once more on Apollodorus, as well as the accounts found in two other authors: Plutarch (first century AD) and Diodorus Siculus (first century BC).

*This episode is the only one of the six that does not figure in the dithyramb of Bacchylides.

*Cadmus likewise sowed the dragon’s teeth and witnessed these same terrifying spartoi spring from the earth. He hurled a stone between them, causing them to fight among themselves like imbeciles . . . to the point that only five of them were left alive. It was these five who would serve to populate the city of Thebes—the companions of Cadmus having been decimated by the dragon guarding the celebrated fountain of Ares.

*For the archaic period—fifth century BC and earlier—we find a few precious references to the Oedipus myth in Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar. The Phoenician Women, by Euripides, brings a very different emphasis than Sophocles to some aspects of the story. For later accretions, we must as always consult our two “default” mythographers, Apollodorus and Hyginus, as well as referring to Pausanias and Diodorus Siculus.

*See the chapter on Stoicism in my Brief History of Thought.

*Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Am So Clever,” Ecce Homo.

*For the essentials of which I follow Apollodorus, although it is useful to complement this with reference to the Homeric Hymns and the famous Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis.

*Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men, 143–4.

*What Hegel calls “being there” (Dasein), in his triad of “in itself” (an sich), “being there,” and “for itself” (für sich).

*See the chapter on Nietzsche in my Brief History of Thought.

*A theme broached in La sagesse des modernes (1998), chapter 10, but also in Qu’est-ce qu’une vie réussie? (2002).

*Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Boston: Zone Books, 1990).

*Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men.

*Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book II, 64.

*As I have argued elsewhere, notably in The Wisdom of the Moderns.