Greek Mythology, page 2
In the beginning came Chaos; next full-bosomed Gaia [Earth], an ever-safe foundation for all the deathless gods, who live on snowy Mount Olympus; and misty Tartarus in the bowels of the broad-pathed earth; and Eros [Desire], the most beautiful of all the deathless gods, who loosens limbs, seducing even the most clever minds and spirits of both gods and men.
Now that there was form and animating spirit, other entities quickly came into being. From Chaos came Night (Nyx) and Day; from Earth came ‘Ouranus, star-speckled sky, her equal, that he might cover her entirely’. Earth, too, was evolving. Hesiod tells how:
She gave rise to long mountain chains, the lovely home of Nymphs, who dwell high in the mountains’ wooded glens. With no recourse to pleasant lovemaking, she bore Pontus with its rolling waves – the barren sea. But afterwards she lay in love with Ouranus and so gave birth to Ocean with deep-drifting currents.
The fundamental cosmic form was now in place, imagined by early Greeks as a flat discus-shaped earth surrounded by the freshwater stream of Ocean. Beneath lay Tartarus or Hades, the Underworld, soon to be home to the dead, while above stretched Ouranus, the sky.
The Birth of the Titans
Impregnated by Ouranus’ rains, Earth gave birth to a succession of primal beings, called Titans (‘Stretchers’ or ‘Strainers’). Some, personifications of abstract ideas such as Themis (‘Divine Tradition’) and Mnemosyne (‘Memory’), would play an important role in Greek religious thought. Others, such as Rhea, brought forth future generations; still others were ferocious and malformed creatures. Such were the Cyclopes: ‘Arrogant and boastful … who gave Zeus thunder and forged his lightning-bolt. In all else they were like gods, but they had just one eye set in the middle of their foreheads. And so they called them Cyclopes [‘Round-Eyed’]…’. But deadliest of all was Cronus ‘of the twisted mind, his father’s bitterest enemy’.
But none of the children of Ouranus and Gaia had seen the light of day. No sooner were they born than Ouranus secreted them beneath the earth. So many offspring were returned into her womb, that Gaia stretched and strained in agony. At last in desperation she forged a sickle of the strongest stone and demanded which of her sons would help her. Only Cronus volunteered. Placing the sickle in his hands, Gaia instructed him to wait till nightfall, when Ouranus covered her, intent on making love. Hesiod imagined Cronus reaching out his left hand, ‘holding in his right the saw-toothed sickle, while he eagerly sliced off his father’s genitals and flung them far behind him’. From the gouts of blood were born the Giants and the avenging Furies, while from the genitals themselves, which splashed into the sea, came Aphrodite, goddess of sex and love, who in time was washed ashore near Paphos on her favoured island, Cyprus.
Now other gods appeared. Night gave birth to terrors: Old Age and Famine; Wars and Killing; Quarrels, Falsehoods, Blame; unerring Nemesis, who punishes wrongdoers; the ruthless Fates, ‘who at birth assign both good and bad to mortals, who hunt down the transgressions of both gods and men, goddesses whose anger never stills until they wreak a dreadful justice on the criminal’.
Some of Pontus’ children were more benign: his firstborn was Nereus (sometimes called ‘The Old Man of the Sea’), whose daughters, the Nereids, could calm the ‘sea-swell on the misty sea and soothe the screaming winds’. But others were truly terrifying: Briareus with a hundred hands; the Harpies [‘Snatchers’], bird-women who conveyed dead souls of heroes down to Hades; Echidna, half ‘fair-cheeked girl’, half blotchy, bloated snake; the Sphinx, the Hydra, the Chimaera, creatures who would plague the earth until heroic mortals killed them. Streams and rivers bubbled up. The breezes blew. Helios, the sun, came into being, and the moon, Selene. And the first Dawn broke.
The Coming of the Olympian Gods
Amid this welter of creation, Cronus forced himself incessantly on his sister Rhea. She bore five children – three daughters (Hestia, Demeter and Hera) and two sons (Haides and Poseidon). But as soon as each was born, Cronus ate them. For it was prophesied that his own son would overthrow him. Advised by her parents Ouranus and Gaia, Rhea, pregnant for a sixth time, fled to Crete. Here on a mountain top (identified in antiquity with both Mount Ida and Mount Dicte) she bore a son and hid him in a deep cave, around whose mouth she set Curetes, armoured youths, to mask the baby’s cries by clashing spears against their shields. Then she wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and presented it to Cronus as his child. Without a glance, he gulped it down.
Gods quickly grow to adulthood, so it was not long before the boy left Crete and came disguised into his father’s court to serve as cupbearer. With cunning guile he made the old god violently drunk. Retching, Cronus vomited first the swaddled stone, then each of his five (mercifully undigested) children. Only now did he realize the truth. Even he could not trick fate. His sixth child – Zeus – had come to topple him.
The gods (with Themis in her chariot drawn by lions) fight the giants on the north frieze of the late sixth- / early fifth-century BC Siphnian Treasury, Delphi.
Battle was joined. On Cronus’ side were the Titans, with Atlas as their general. Against them stood Zeus, his five siblings and the Cyclopes, whom Cronus had imprisoned deep in Tartarus, but Zeus had since set free. Only after ten years did Zeus prevail. Most of the Titans were consigned to Tartarus, though some say Cronus, pardoned, was allowed to rule the blessed dead in the Elysian Fields.
But the Titans had powerful cousins – twenty-four Earth-born Giants – and in time they sought vengeance. As the Giants tore up mountains, piling Mount Pelion on top of nearby Ossa in an attempt to scale Olympus, another war engulfed the cosmos. It was only with the help of Heracles that the gods defeated their gross rivals. No more attempts were made to overthrow them.
The Olympian Gods
In popular Greek imagination there were twelve gods and goddesses specifically associated with Olympus, each living in a palace of their own built on bronze foundations in the high mountain valleys. For the most part they were imagined in human form – which prompted the late sixth- / early fifth-century BC philosopher Xenophanes to observe: ‘If oxen, horses or lions had hands, with which they could draw and work as men do, horses would draw gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would make their bodies like their own.’
The gods possessed human emotions and their hierarchy reflected that of Bronze Age Greece – with an autocratic king, a queen, lords, princes and princesses; but they were as far removed from mankind as the most powerful mortal ruler from his lowest slave. There were other differences, too. Most crucially the gods were immortal. Ichor (divine blood) pulsed through their veins. They dined exclusively on ambrosia (literally, ‘not mortal [food]’), washed down with nectar (‘deathly [drink]’). And they could assume whatever shape they liked – bird or animal, man or woman – travelling effortlessly across the earth, interacting with humankind for good or ill.
In the imagination Olympus, too, could assume different forms. Mostly it was the mountain in northeast Greece, but at other times it was something altogether more remote and less substantial. In the Iliad, Homer pictures Hera harnessing her chariot and driving with Athene to find Zeus on a journey that appears to take them from this more ethereal realm to the physical mountain.
Raising her veil, Hera turns towards Zeus on the frieze from Athens’ fifth-century BC Parthenon.
Quickly Hera flicked her lash across the horses, and the gates of heaven opened of their own accord, groaning on their hinges. The Horae [‘Hours’] are their gate-keepers, and to them are entrusted the mighty heavens and Olympus, for they decide whether to release the rolling clouds or close them in. So, through these gates they urged their horses, which responded to the goad, and they found Zeus, the son of Cronus, sitting on his own, far from the other gods, on the peak of many-ridged Olympus.
On Olympus the gods are often envisaged in assembly or banqueting. Perhaps the most stunning representation of this divine assembly appears on the Parthenon frieze (inspired by a frieze on the earlier Siphnian Treasury at Delphi). On it, Hera receives news from her divine messenger Iris, while beside her, seated on a throne, her husband looks on in majesty. He is Zeus, the undisputed ruler of the gods.
Zeus
Drawing lots with his brothers, Haides and Poseidon, to see who should rule each of creation’s three zones – the land (together with the heavens); the sea; and the Underworld (or Hades) – Zeus won the earth and sky. Enthroned on the ridge of Mount Olympus, which is today called Stefani, and holding in his right hand a golden sceptre, he ruled both gods and men. A passage from the Iliad, said to have inspired his celebrated statue at Olympia, describes the sheer power of his presence: ‘Zeus, the son of Cronus, spoke, and he inclined his head with his dark brows, and the mighty king’s hair, anointed with ambrosial oil, fell forward from his immortal head. And great Olympus trembled.’ As well it might. For the great sky-god was armed with an all-powerful weapon, the lightning bolt, whose blast wreaked total devastation. Some imagined that the lightning bolt was Zeus’ true essence – pure blazing, blinding energy, concealed and contained within his (safer) anthropomorphic form.
With an eagle perching on his left hand, Zeus wields his thunderbolt. (Attic red figure vase, c. 470–460 BC.)
All gods had avatars. Zeus’ was the eagle, his special messenger, which could soar so effortlessly and so resplendently. The fifth-century BC lyric poet Bacchylides encapsulates the bond between god and bird:
Lightning-fast on tawny wings, the eagle, confident in its immeasurable strength, cleaves the vast unfathomable sky – the messenger of Zeus, the thunder-god, whose rule is wide. And all the little birds, shrill-chattering, scatter in terror. The high peaked mountains cannot check him nor the pounding storm-waves of the tireless sea, but on outstretched wings he soars across the vastness of the earth, his feathers gently ruffled in the western breeze. And all men see him.
Zeus, Hera & Their Children
Once established as the king of the newly victorious Olympians, Zeus (following Cronus’ example) pursued his own sister Hera and, after seducing her near Argos, made her his wife. But although celebrated on Olympus, theirs was not a marriage made in heaven. Zeus’ serial philandering wounded Hera deeply. Indeed, she was not the only god to find his rule at times intolerable. Homer tells how Hera and the other gods once tied Zeus up, and it was only when the sea-nymph Thetis summoned Briareus, whose hundred hands made light work of even complicated knots, that he was freed. Zeus’ wrath was terrible. He enslaved Poseidon and Apollo for their part in the conspiracy, forcing them to build the walls of Troy, and took his revenge on Hera. In the Iliad Zeus reminds her:
Do you not recall how you were hung from a great height, with an anvil suspended from each ankle, and I fastened golden handcuffs to your wrists, unbreakable. And you hung there in the misty air, and far and wide across Olympus the gods were angered. But they could not free you.
Only when the gods swore a great oath never again to rebel against him did Zeus set Hera free.
Of their three children, only their daughter, Hebe (‘Youth’), was entirely undemanding. One son, Ares, was the god of war, of whom (in the Iliad) Zeus declares: ‘I hate you more than any of the gods on Mount Olympus. Conflict is your chief delight – and war and violence. You have the harsh inflexibility of your mother Hera, which I cannot bear. Indeed, I can only just control her by my words.’
Their other son, Hephaestus, was (to his parents at least) even more troublesome. When he was born lame, Hera considered him so unattractive that she flung him from the peaks of Mount Olympus far out to sea. Two sea-nymphs, Thetis and Eurynome, rescued him and brought him up, in return for which Hephaestus made them ‘beautiful bronze goods, brooches, spiral arm-bands, cups and chains, there in their hollow cave, while the roaring stream of Ocean gushed, foaming, by’. In time, Hera discovered her lost son and, appreciating his potential, reinstated him on Mount Olympus, put him to work on enhancing her jewelry collection and gave him Aphrodite as his wife. In another version of the myth Hephaestus took revenge by constructing a throne, which clamped Hera tight and held her captive. Only thanks to Dionysus’ persuasive words and wine did Hephaestus set his mother free.
Zeus was even less enamoured of his son. Once, when Hephaestus took Hera’s side, Zeus seized him by the foot and again threw him off the mountain. The Iliad describes Hephaestus falling for a whole day before crashing to earth on Lemnos. But he was reprieved. Homer imagined him working in his smithy on Olympus, assisted by golden automata formed like beautiful young women, with ‘sense, mind, voice and strength’, creating wheeled tripods, which could move of their own volition. (Later authors placed Hephaestus’ forge in Sicily, beneath Mount Etna.) Despite his skill, Hephaestus was a figure of fun. The gods laughed ‘merrily’ not only as they watched him hobbling around their banqueting hall, but when they discovered that his brother Ares had cuckolded him.
Despite their feisty relationship, Zeus was susceptible to Hera’s blandishments. Indeed, he magically extended their wedding night on Samos to last three hundred years, and Homer describes how Hera, having dressed alluringly in her bedchamber on Mount Olympus, later seduced Zeus on a mountaintop near Troy:
He took Hera in his arms, and beneath them from the earth rose fresh young grasses and clover, jewelled with dew, and crocuses and hyacinths so plentiful and soft that they cushioned them from the hard earth. And they lay down together, and a golden cloud – it was sublime – rolled over them and drops of dew dripped down.
Deucalion & Dion’s Altar to Zeus
On earth long generations passed – a Golden Age, free from disease, when the fields brought forth crops without the need for farming, and a Silver Age of bitter arguments. An Age of Bronze followed, when human beings were first created, but they were soon found to be degenerate. One of their number, Lycaeus, either sacrificed his son to Zeus on an Arcadian mountaintop or served him to the god in a barbaric banquet. Repelled, Zeus turned Lycaeus into a wolf, incinerated his fifty lawless sons and resolved to destroy the human race.
So Zeus amassed the inky storm clouds and rain fell in torrents. The great plains of Greece were inundated and the rivers roared. Mankind was drowning, but the Titan Prometheus was not prepared to see his mortal son, Deucalion, die. He advised him to build a chest, fill it with food and embark with Pyrrha, his wife, Pandora’s daughter. The chest bobbed safely on the rising water until Deucalion and Pyrrha were the only mortals left alive. When Zeus saw them, his anger melted. Both were pious. Neither must be destroyed. So after nine days and nights the waters abated, and on the peak of Mount Parnassus the chest came to land. On Zeus’ advice, the two survivors picked stones from the mountainside and threw them over their shoulders. From Deucalion’s sprang men, from Pyrrha’s women, and so a nobler human race was born. In time Deucalion and Pyrrha had children. One of their daughters, Thyia, bore a son to Zeus: Macednos, from whom Macedonia was named.
In thanks for their salvation Deucalion erected an altar to Zeus at Dion in the shadow of Mount Olympus – the first altar of the new age. In Classical and Hellenistic times it marked out Dion as a site of special sanctity. Indeed, ‘Dios’ is the possessive case of ‘Zeus’. Dion quite literally belongs to Zeus.
The Muses
Other divinities, too, lived on Mount Olympus, most notably the Muses, daughters of Zeus by the Titan Mnemosyne. One of their homes was on the mountain’s northern flanks, in Pieria, near Dion. Pausanias says that originally there were three Muses, though by Hellenistic times their number had expanded to nine, and specific roles were assigned to each. Thus Calliope became the muse of epic poetry, Clio of history, Terpsichore of dance and so on.
The Muses, too, were swift to punish rivals. When Hera persuaded the winged Sirens to compete with them in song, the Muses tore out the Sirens’ feathers and crowned their own heads with them. Another time, the nine mortal daughters of Pieros (king of Pieria) challenged the Muses to a contest. When the Muses sang all creation held its breath in wonder; but when the mortal girls performed vast darkness cloaked the world. Triumphant, the Muses changed them into birds as punishment. Another musician, an accomplished Thracian lyre-player Thamyris, issued his own challenge: if he defeated them in song the Muses must let him sleep with each of them in turn. He lost. The Muses blinded him and removed his musicality.
Hesiod claimed to have experienced a more benign encounter with the Muses on Mount Helicon near Thebes, where they commanded him to sing of the birth of the gods (in his poem Theogony). He describes them:
delighting the great spirit of their father Zeus on Mount Olympus, singing in harmony of things that are and things that still shall be and things that came before. Their sweet voice pours untiring from their lips, and the house of father Zeus the thunderer smiles, filled with the Muses’ voice, as fragrant as a lily, and the snowy peaks of Mount Olympus echo back, and the palaces of the immortals.
The Muses’ inspiration was invaluable. It was only thanks to them that poets could speak with any confidence about the gods and heroes of the distant past.
The Muses appear at many of the great communal events of Greek mythology. Accompanied by Apollo on his lyre, they sing and dance at the weddings of Cadmus and Harmonia in Thebes, and Peleus and Thetis on Mount Pelion. They regularly perform at funerals, too, most memorably mourning Achilles in the Iliad, while in a tantalizing fragment from Pindar’s Dirges:
They lulled to rest the corpses of their sons. The first sighed her lament for Linus; the second sang the song of grief for Hymenaeus, whom Fate despatched when first he lay in wedlock; and the third performed her threnody for Ialmenus, whose strength was drained when he was stricken by a merciless disease. But for Orpheus of the golden sword…
