Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

fn1 She gave her name to the city of Mycenae.

fn2 A heifer is to a cow as a filly is to a mare.

fn3 ‘Argive’ meant ‘citizen of Argos’, but in later times was often used to mean any Greek – especially as distinct from a Trojan.

fn4 There are those who like to suggest that the idea of Argus having a hundred eyes arose from a fanciful way of expressing his extreme watchfulness. It might just as well have been playfully said and then seriously believed, they maintain, that he had eyes in the back of his head. We repudiate such dull, unromantic propositions with the contempt they deserve. Argus had a hundred eyes. Fact.

fn5 Painters and sculptors often depicted Hera on a chariot drawn by peacocks, and there is, of course, the Sean O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock.

fn6 Strange that ‘Oxford’ and ‘Bosporus’ mean exactly the same thing.

fn7 The very hero who would one day unchain Prometheus and set him free.

fn8 The name ‘Erechthonius’ is sometimes used of both Erechtheus and various of his descendants. His chthonic birth out of Gaia can be seen in both names.

fn9 As for Pandrosos, the obedient sister who resisted looking into the basket, a temple was raised to her near that of Minerva, and a festival instituted in her honour called Pandrosia.

PHAETON

fn1 Phaeton (like Apollo’s alternative name ‘Phoebus’) means ‘shining one’. Sometimes rendered as Phaethon, Phaëton or Phathon, it is usually pronounced to rhyme with ‘Satan’ or ‘Nathan’, though you can, if you prefer, rhyme it with ‘Titan’ or ‘Python’.

fn2 A daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, the Oceanid Clymene might be regarded as one of the most influential mothers in all Greek myth. From her couplings with the Titan Iapetus she was, on the one side, the mother of Atlas and Menoetius (two of the Titans who furiously opposed the gods during the Titanomachy and were duly punished) and, on the other, of Epimetheus and Prometheus. These offspring alone establish Clymene’s importance as a great matriarch of the early world. Some, though, say that the Oceanid Clymene and the Clymene who was Phaeton’s mother were not the same woman at all, and that actually the mother of Atlas and the other Titans should be called ASIA, so as not to muddle her with the mortal Clymene, mother of Phaeton. It all gets very confusing and is best left to academics and those with time on their hands.

fn3 Even the nature of Phaeton’s father is debated. In some versions of the story his father is the sun Titan, Helios. I shall go along with Ovid and attribute the fatherhood of Phaeton to the god Apollo.

fn4 Or Cycnus.

fn5 Sole indeed – SOL was Helios’s Roman name. When you breathe in the gas named after him – helium – it makes you giggle with exactly the same mocking, high-pitched, hysterical squeak that Helios himself made when he jeered at Phaeton.

fn6 The rather pleasing word for being placed amongst the stars, the classical equivalent of canonization perhaps, is ‘catasterism’. A mostly lost ancient prose work called the Catasterismi, telling of the mythological origins of the constellations, is credited to one Pseudo-Eratosthenes of Alexandria.

CADMUS

fn1 Before this great Phoenician idea, writing took the form of visual symbols such as hieroglyphs and pictograms. Like our numbers, these bore no relation to their sound. The written ‘24’, for example, gives no clue to pronunciation at all and you’d say the sign differently according to the practices of your language. The alphabetical (i.e. phonetical) characters in twenty-four or vingt-quatre or vierundzwanzig tell you just how to say them. That was the crucial breakthrough. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks into the writing system more or less in use there today. Its close Cyrillic relation spread from Bulgaria in the ninth century AD to the Balkans, Russia and many other areas of eastern Europe and Asia, while the Romans adapted the Greek alpha and beta into the alphabetic system you are interpreting so fluently at this minute. Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who lived in the fifth century BC, still called such writing ‘Cadmean’.

fn2 Not the tragic ELECTRA, daughter of AGAMEMNON and CLYTEMNESTRA, but another much earlier one. The name is interesting; it is the female form of electron, the Greek word for ‘amber’. The Greeks noticed that if you rub amber vigorously with a cloth it magically attracts dust and fluff. They called this strange property ‘amberiness’, from which all our words ‘electric’, ‘electricity’, ‘electron’, ‘electronic’, and so on, ultimately derive.

fn3 He gave his name to the Dardanelles, site of the ill-fated Gallipoli landings in the First World War.