Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

fn4 Some sources claim that Ares and Aphrodite were Harmonia’s parents. Her later ascent to the status of goddess of harmony (CONCORDIA to the Romans) certainly hints at a more divine pedigree. Given what Ares was about to do to her, you might think him a most unnatural father – so loyal to his water dragon, so cruel to his human daughter. Other mythographers, notably Roberto Calasso, an Italian writer whose creative interpretations of myth are well worth reading, have elegantly compromised and suggested that Harmonia was indeed the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, but was given to be suckled and adopted by Electra of Samothrace.

fn5 It forms the wedge of land that separates Turkey from Syria and is now called Çukurova.

fn6 A central region of Greece, north of the Gulf of Corinth. Without giving too much away it is worth relating that it once bore the name ‘Cadmeis’ …

fn7 Ovid calls the Ismenian Dragon Anguis Martius, the ‘Snake of Mars’. It seems (ap)ophis (snake) and drakon (dragon) were pretty much undifferentiated in Greek myth, much as Wurm (worm) and Drachen (dragon) are interchangeable in Germanic legend.

fn8 Chthonius had the name that defined them all as chthonic beings.

fn9 The polis or ‘city state’ was to become the defining unit of government in ancient Greece. Athens was the best known, but Sparta, Thebes, Rhodes, Samos and many others flourished around the Greek world, forming alliances, trading and fighting with each other. Despite Greek giving us the word ‘democracy’, the polis could also be ruled either by a king (tyrannos in Greek, so when we say ‘tyrant’ we don’t always mean ‘despot’) or by the ‘rule of the few’, which in Greek is oligarchy. From polis come all those words like ‘polite’, ‘politics’ and ‘police’.

fn10 I’m damned if I can find a convincing definition of ‘girdle’. Some think it’s a belt, others a device more like a Playtex panelled support or corset – others yet have described it as a ‘mythical Wonderbra’. Calasso calls it ‘a soft deceiving sash’.

fn11 ‘A garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground’ is Roberto Calasso’s excellent description in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

fn12 Scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. The Dalmatae (a name ultimately deriving from an early Albanian word for ‘sheep’) were an Illyrian tribe to the northwest of the region who gave their name to this Dalmatian coast (and the dog).

fn13 Being from Tyre, Cadmus probably used the word for ‘let it be so’ most commonly used throughout the Middle East: Amen.

TWICE BORN

fn1 Cadmus and Harmonia’s sons Polydorus and Illyrius were too young to rule. In time Polydorus would go on to reign in Thebes, and Illyrius would rule over the kingdom that bore his name, Illyria, as we have already seen.

fn2 The real Beroë, an Oceanid who had indeed nursed the young gods, gave her name to the city of Beirut.

fn3 Another word for the appearance and revelation of a god to a mortal is ‘theophany’.

fn4 It was common, as you may remember from Apollo’s promise to Phaeton, for gods to swear by this dark and hateful river.

fn5 An astonishing story. As Ovid himself says of it: ‘If man can believe this …’

fn6 The name probably couples ‘god’ (Dio, meaning Zeus) with the Nysus, the birthplace.

fn7 A grateful Zeus rewarded them by adding them to the heavens as the Hyades, a spiral constellation whose rising and setting the Greeks believed presaged rain.

fn8 Books 10, 11 and 12 of the sprawling forty-eight-book epic poem the Dionysiaca, written by the Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis in the fifth century AD, details this relationship and its aftermath at great length.

fn9 Nonnus interrupts the action here (a thing he does a lot: his poem is astonishingly dull, given its superb subject matter) by having Eros come to comfort Dionysus with tales of other great male lovers. He tells of KALAMOS and KARPOS (the latter being son of Zephyrus the West Wind and CHLORIS, nymph of greenery and new growth – as in ‘chlorophyl’ and ‘chlorine’), two beautiful youths passionately in love with each other. During a swimming contest (athletics and hunting seem to be a theme with beautiful youths coming to a sticky end, as we shall see in the tales of HYACINTHUS, ACTAEON, CROCUS and ADONIS, amongst others), Karpos dies, and a desolated, grief-stricken Kalamos commits suicide. Kalamos is then changed into reeds and Karpos into fruit: they are the Greek words for ‘reed’ and ‘fruit’ to this day.

fn10 It is said that he gave the secrets of the vine to every known land except Britain and Ethiopia. It is sadly true that neither country has a great reputation for winemaking, although that is changing and these days English wines are making a name for themselves. Perhaps the same is true of Ethiopian vintages.