Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

fn18 Actually the gods did not have blood in their veins but a beautiful silvery-gold liquid called ICHOR. It was a paradoxical fluid because, while it retained all the eternal life-giving qualities of ambrosia and nectar, it was lethally and instantaneously poisonous to mortals.

fn19 Also Athene – there doesn’t seem to be any shade of meaning attached to the variant spelling.

fn20 Sea power, and the trade that it allowed, was to be the saving of Athens (it won them a startling victory over the Persians at Salamis). But the cultivation of the olive and the other crafts, arts and techniques that were the domain of Athena were arguably of even greater importance.

fn21 Besides her armour, Athena was always depicted with an AEGIS. No one is quite agreed as to precisely what an aegis looked like. It is sometimes described as an animal skin (originally goat: aiga is a word for ‘goat’ in Greek), though pelts of lion or leopard can later be seen in sculpture and ceramic representations. Zeus’s aegis is generally held to have been a shield, perhaps covered with goatskin and often showing the face of a Gorgon. Human kings and emperors keen to suggest semi-divine status would throw an aegis over their shoulders as a mark of their right to rule. The word these days suggests a badge of leadership or authority. Acts are performed and proclamations made ‘under the aegis’ of such and such a person, principle or institution.

fn22Parthenos, the Greek word for virgin, was often attached to her name – hence ‘the Parthenon’, her temple on the Acropolis.

fn23 We are permitted the use of that tired word here – it is Greek after all and allows us to picture Athena as embued with the grace of the Charities.

fn24 I looked it up in a thesaurus and was offered: ‘unassuming, meek, mild, reserved, retiring, quiet, shy, bashful, diffident, reticent, timid, shrinking, coy; decorous, decent, seemly, ladylike, respectable, proper, virtuous, pure, innocent, chaste; sober, sedate, staid, prim, goody-goody, strait-laced’. I don’t suppose many women would jump up and down in delight if those words were used of them.

fn25 In today’s Thrace, bounded by Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.

fn26 Aphrodite and Athena, who equalled her in beauty, were neither of them in the strict sense born, so the claim is good.

fn27 Why Apollo turned the raven black, and why the laurel also became sacred to him, we shall discover later on.

fn28 Along with the regular Nemean and Isthmian Games, the Pythian and Olympic meetings made up the four so-called ‘Panhellenic Games’. The prizes do not really compare with today’s lucrative purses and endorsements. An olive wreath for the winners of the Olympics, laurel for the Pythian, pine for the Isthmian and – most thrilling of all – wild celery for the lucky victor of the Nemean Games.

fn29 The name ‘Delphi’ is thought to derive from delphys, meaning ‘womb’. Of course it might be from adelphi, which means ‘siblings’ (because they come from the same womb). So perhaps the sacred place is named after Apollo the twin, perhaps after the womb of Gaia. There is another theory that suggests Apollo arrived at Pytho on a dolphin, delphis in Greek. A dolphin is, after all, a fish with a womb. But how he could have travelled so far over land on a dolphin I can’t quite say.

fn30 When the Pythia prophesied she was possessed by the god Apollo, the Titaness Themis or the goddess Gaia. Or perhaps all three. The Greek for ‘divine possession’ is enthusiasmos – enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be ‘engodded’, to be divinely inspired.

fn31 Some say that steam hissed out from the subterranean Castalian spring, which delighted the local goats, apparently. Perhaps this reminded people of a dolphin’s blowhole, offering yet another explanation for the change of the name from Pytho to Delphi. Castalia, incidentally, is the name of the future world in Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game.

fn32 Today’s Mount Kyllini.

fn33 Hermes’ natty headgear is known as the petasus. His staff, the kerykeion – or caduceus to the Romans – often appears as a worldwide symbol of medicine and ambulances, either as an alternative to or a confusion with the staff of ASCLEPIUS (of whom, more later).

fn34 Medieval and Renaissance alchemists called him Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Majestic). Since he is said to have been able magically to seal glass tubes, chests and boxes, a seventeenth-century invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres (which employed the power of atmospheric pressure and a vacuum to create an incredibly strong seal) was described as ‘hermetically sealed’, a phrase still much in use today.

fn35 This is its modern name – meaning literally ‘large kettles’ and to this day a rewarding sight for mountaineers who dare scale the heights of Olympus.