Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

fn7 The Greek for ‘one who shows figs’ is sycophant – it seems that either sellers of the fruit in the streets and marketplaces were known for their fawning, flattering attentions, or showing a fig was the equivalent of a phallic gesture (figs have always been considered an erotic fruit after all) or it may have been something to do with the way figs are harvested. Whatever the reason, fig-showing/sycophancy became a word associated in Athenian legal contexts with those who brought frivolous, malicious or unjustified private prosecutions. Their toadying manner caused the word ‘sycophancy’ to take on its common meaning today.

fn8 Creon was that soul of pragmatism and good governance whose tragic family history was the subject of Sophocles Theban Cycle of plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. I played him when I was sixteen and received reviews. I’ll say no more.

fn9 In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom and his confused friends memorably mangle the names of these doomed lovers in their performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:

Pyramus (Bottom): Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.

Thisbe (Flute): As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.

fn10 It forms the subject of John Keats’s extended poem Endymion.

EOS AND TITHONUS

fn1 Laomedon was the son of Ganymede’s elder brother Ilos, the King of Troy.

fn2 A cicada in some versions. I was always taught a grasshopper perhaps because they are commonly found in Britain. Books for British children probably thought a cicada would be a harder insect for us to visualize. Oddly Tithonus’s name lives on biologically not as a cicada or grasshopper, but in a type of birdwing or swallowtail butterfly, Ornithoptera tithonus.

fn3 A happy thought inspired the geologist Albert Oppel to name one of the late Jurassic ages the Tithonian as a bow to Eos, for it is the age that marks the dawn of the Cretaceous. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ is one of his most loved and anthologized poems. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed to Eos, in which he begs her to deliver him from his senility.

… After many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream …

It contains a famous line that might be considered one of the great themes of Greek myth:

The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.

THE BLOOM OF YOUTH

fn1 ‘Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid.’ is her complaint, according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

fn2 Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis retells the myth, basing itself on the version Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. In Shakespeare’s rendition the death of Adonis causes Venus to curse love and decree that henceforward it should always be tinged with tragedy. As she prophesies in her grief:

Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend …

It shall be cause of war and dire events

And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire …

They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

A prophecy that seems to have come all too true.

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

fn1 Note the similarity of the offence to Actaeon’s crime of spying on Artemis. The modesty of the gods while bathing was prodigious.

T. S. Eliot makes memorable reference to Tiresias in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of his poem The Waste Land:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see …

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest …

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all …

fn2 The honour of being asked to adjudicate amongst the gods might seem great for a mortal, but as this story shows, and as the Trojan prince Paris was to discover, the results could be catastrophic.

fn3 The Moirai, you will remember, were the Fates. The Greeks felt that for every individual there was a personal, singular moira that could be expressed as a mixture of necessity, doom, justice and fortune. Something between luck and kismet.

fn4 Ameinias, according to some sources, became a sweet-smelling herb. Possibly dill. Perhaps cumin. Maybe anise.

fn5 No one we know, of course …

LOVERS

fn1 The remains of Babylon lie under, or poke through, the sands of Iraq, about fifty miles south of Baghdad.

fn2 In the farcical production in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pyramus (played by Bottom) cries out as he stabs himself:

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

Now am I dead,

Now am I fled;

My soul is in the sky.

Tongue, lose thy light;

Moon, take thy flight;

Now die, die, die, die, die.

GALATEAS

fn1 A word that covers moulting, shedding, casting off and re-evaluating. Slipping out of one thing and popping on another.