PERSEUS

fn1 One of the most important of all Greek city states. The name given to its people, the Argives, was often used by Homer simply to mean ‘Greek’. Philip II and his son Alexander the Great, although Macedonian, were said to originate from Argos.

fn2 Often rendered as Danaë, so it should, I suppose, be pronounced ‘Danaye’.

fn3 The Roman poet Horace, in his Odes, changed the bronze room to a bronze tower, and thenceforward it has often been portrayed as just such a fairytale Rapunzel-like minaret. The earlier sources insist, however, that it was a room, with slits in the roof to let in light and air.

fn4 We do not know whether or not Danaë enjoyed the experience. There are those, it is said, for whom the prospect of a golden shower is actually rather … well … quite.

fn5 Which simply means ‘net’.

fn6 Not the Italian Pisa of the Leaning Tower, but a city state in the northwestern Peloponnese. The quest for the hand of Hippodamia had repercussions that sounded down to the end of the mythic era and the aftermath of the Trojan War. But their details are for another time and place.

fn7 The description of the Gorgons in Mythos omits the idea of Medusa’s separate creation as a mortal Gorgon. There are, of course, many different accounts. The story Danaë tells Perseus is perhaps the most popular.

fn8 In later times a ‘consultation tax’ would have to be paid to the priestess, as well as the cost of the requisite sacrifices.

fn9 The priestess, known as the PYTHIA, would hold on to a sacred tripod that connected her to the ground. She would receive her messages from clouds of sulphurous steam that rose (and still do) from under the earth at Delphi.

fn10 By our standards at least. For a Greek he was more than usually clothed …

fn11 The Graeae’s names, as so often in Greek myth, have meanings. Pemphredo is ‘she who guides the way’, Enyo ‘warlike’ and Dino ‘terrible’ (as in dinosaur, which means ‘terrible lizard’). Dino was sometimes called Persis ‘the destroyer’. I’ve avoided that name on account of its similarity to Perseus. But it shows that Perseus and all the Pers- names carry ‘destructive’ meanings.

fn12 The two main (and multitudinous) families of sea nymphs, the Oceanids and Nereids were daughters and grand-daughters respectively of the sea Titans OCEANUS and TETHYS. As such they were cousins of Poseidon. See the first volume of Mythos (page 10).

fn13 Not to be confused with Ceto, mother of the two immortal Gorgons. Although the sea goddess does lend her name to all such sea monsters and, through them, our cetaceans.

fn14 Nilus was one of the more important of the river gods, the potamoi – his descendants bred with Aegyptus, Libya and Ethiopia. As with Asia and Europa, the names of these deities, demigods and mortals can still be found on our maps today.

fn15 Andromeda, like many mortals now, seems to show a distaste for incest. The gods are never so fussy.

fn16 Herms or hermai were square columns used as good-luck boundary markers and signposts. They had a carved head, typically of the god Hermes (though usually uncharacteristically bearded) on top and male genitals lower down, which were thought to bring good luck when stroked in … a certain way.

fn17 Strictly speaking the Peloponnese hadn’t yet earned its name, which was taken from that of King PELOPS, whom we shall encounter later on.

HERACLES

fn1 A daughter of Pelops and Hippodamia. It was Pelops who won the chariot race and the hand of Hippodamia that Polydectes had pretended he was going to try for. That story has to be told, but not just yet.

fn2 Similar to a well-known episode in Arthurian legend. Merlin disguises Uther Pendragon as Gorlois, husband of Igraine, and in that form he sleeps with her and fathers Arthur …

fn3 ‘Even though the sound of it produces consternation,’ as Mary Poppins and Bert the chimney-sweep might sing.

fn4 Also ‘Ilithyia’. I pronounce her name, probably wrongly, like ‘Alicia’ said with a lisp. Eileithyia was depicted as a woman wielding a torch, representing the burning pains of childbirth, or with her arms raised in the air to bring the child to the light. The Romans called her Lucina or Natio.

fn5 Eurystheus means ‘broad-shouldered’, which might suggest that his delivery gave Nicippe a twinge of pain as he emerged.

fn6 Historis somehow escaped her wrath. Perhaps she was smart enough to hide.

fn7 ‘Iphi-’ means ‘strong’ or ‘mighty’ (cf. Iphigenia, the ‘strong-born’) and ‘cles’ means ‘pride’ or ‘glory’. Apparently an ‘iphi’ is also a smallish Egyptian unit of dry measurement, familiar to the Greeks, and corresponding roughly to 1–1½ gallons. Perhaps he was dubbed ‘the Glorious Half-Pint’.

fn8 It would be pleasing to think that they were rattlesnakes and that this remarkable incident initiated the custom of giving newborn babies rattles to wave, but sadly there is no evidence that the species ever existed outside the Americas.

fn9 Sounds silly, but it is true. The Milky Way is a galaxy and the word galaxy is derived from the ancient Greek word gala, meaning ‘milk’. Hence galactic and, perhaps, Galaxy milk chocolate.

fn10 Hera, who was herself a mother, would have had breast milk; Athena, a virgin goddess, would not have been able to feed the baby.

fn11 While he was Hercules to the Romans and to many of us in everyday speech today, it has become the convention these days to render him Heracles.

fn12 See Mythos, Vol. I, for further information about Autolycus, rascally son of Hermes.

fn13 We will find out more of these twins, known as the Dioscuri, a little later on.

fn14 For nature and fate, the Greeks might have said physis and moira.

fn15 Variously an individual mountain and a mountain range. Sacred to Dionysus, it was here that Pentheus was torn to pieces by his mother and aunts, and Actaeon by his own hounds (see Mythos, Vol. I). Cithaeron will go on to play a vital role, as we shall see, in the life and tragic destiny of Oedipus.

fn16 Not to be confused with the historical Thespis, Greece’s first actor.

fn17 We will meet Creon again when we tell the story of Oedipus.

fn18 A practice of self-mortification that still goes on. I have seen with my own eyes penitents arriving on their knees at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. Some of them have kneel-walked hundreds of miles to get there. Far from being Herculean, they are usually ancient and diminutive old ladies.

fn19 Enthusiasm meant, originally, possession by a god. The verb ‘enthuse’ was a later American English back-formation.

THE LABOURS OF HERACLES

fn1 In Greek they were variously called the erga or more commonly the athloi of Heracles. The word ergon simply means ‘work’ while athlos means more than labour, it carries a sense of ‘test’. Our words athlete and athletic derive from it.

fn2 At the risk of sending you mad by going over the family tree again, his father was Sthenelus, making Eurystheus a relative of Perseus. As was Heracles, whose parents Alcmene and Amphityron were cousins and each a grandchild of Perseus. But of course Zeus was really Heracles’ father, as he was Perseus’s. Therefore Perseus was both Heracles’ great-grandfather and half-brother. Those Greeks, eh?

fn3 For more about this beast, see the chapter devoted to the adventures of Bellerophon.

fn4 Greek ceramic representations of the Hydra tend to show a kind of upside-down octopus: a round, sometimes doughnut shaped body out of which extend nine snakes. Popular comic book art makes the creature more like a nine-headed dragon.

fn5 Pronounced ‘Serry-nay-uh’ I think. Ceryneia, or Keryneia, today lies in the north west of the Peloponnese in the region known as Achaea. ‘Achaean’ is the name Homer most commonly gave the Greek forces in the Trojan War.

fn6 What’s the difference between a hind and a doe? Your guess is as good as mine.

fn7 For the fraught circumstances of their birth see Mythos, Vol. I.

fn8 See Mythos, Vol. I, for the story of Ixion. There is more to come on Nephele and Chiron in Jason’s story, and we will meet the centaurs again with Theseus.

fn9 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn10 In some versions of this episode, Chiron himself was accidentally scratched by one of Heracles’ arrows and suffered the most appalling agony. He alone amongst his race, being a son of Kronos, was immortal. The prospect of living eternally in such pain was insupportable to him. He begged the gods to be released into death and Zeus granted his wish, casting him into the heavens as the constellation Sagittarius, the man-horse archer. This is an egregious example of timeline inconsistency since Chiron was later tutor to ACHILLES who was yet to be born.

fn11 Was this Greek satire against the gods? A way of suggesting that the immortals were more full of shit than mortals?

fn12 The southern Adriatic. Confusing because the name ‘Ionia’ refers to parts of Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, far to the other side of Greece.

fn13 Perhaps inspiring the phrase ‘to take the bull by the horns’.

fn14 See Mythos, Vol. I, Twice Born.

fn15 We will see more of Pelias in the story of Jason, where he is an important figure. Alcestis was one of the daughters who would make that unfortunate mistake with their father and the cooking pot.

fn16 See Mythos, Vol. I, pages 309 and 315.

fn17 Loosely taken from the fifth-century Athenian dramatist Euripides’ version of this story, Alcestis.

fn18 Also the name of the philosopher SOCRATES’ legendarily shrewish wife. Really Xanthos is yellow with a tinge of red, so perhaps it means ‘bay’ in the equine sense. Strange that although they are mares, all the sources give names with male endings. It should really be Podarge, not Podargos.

fn19 Cf. dinosaur, the ‘terrible lizard’, as mentioned in realtion to the Graeae.

fn20 Some sources claim they breathed fire, too.

fn21 Heracles, like most classical Greeks, was as happy to dine at the man-trough as at the lady-buffet. Iolaus his nephew and Hylas, his page during the quest for the Golden Fleece, were another two male lovers or eromenoi.

fn22 Abdera still stands and was notable in the great age of Greek philosophy for producing Democritus, whom some regard as the founder of the scientific method (I recommend the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s thoughts on him in his excellent book Reality Is Not What It Seems). The sophist Protagoras, famous for his dialogue with Socrates as recorded by Plato, was also born there. Earlier, in the sixth century BC, the lyric poet Anacreon found sanctuary there from the Persians. His life and work inspired the creation in eighteenth-century England of the Anacreontic Society of gentleman amateur musicians. The tune of the club’s song, ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’, was poached by the Americans in 1814 to fit the words of the poem ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, now their national anthem. Would that tune be heard at the start of every major sporting occasion in the United States if Abderus hadn’t been eaten by horses? Such speculations might well drive a person mad.

fn23 The name Amazon means or may mean ‘breastless’, and while later artists and sculptors often depicted the women as being either without breasts or single-breasted, it is now thought that the name derived from their matchless skill at archery. In that to draw back a bow to its full extent, the breast has to be tucked out of the way …

fn24 See under Atalanta, here.

fn25 Now the River Terme in northern Turkey.

fn26 An identical indignity to that suffered by Andromeda. The image of the helpless damsel tied to a rock awaiting her fate at the hands of a dragon is a pervasive one, not just in Greek myth and art. We can all, I dare say, offer interpretations according to our adherence to varying schools of psychology, gender politics and so on.

fn27 Two generations earlier Zeus had Ganymede, the beautiful Trojan prince, to be his lover and cupbearer. He sent magical horses to Tros by way of compensation.

fn28 The girdle of Hippolyta was successfully excavated from the ruins of the Temple of Hera at Mycenae by Dr Henry Walton ‘Indiana’ Jones Jnr., but currently languishes in a crate hidden in a vast US government warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant and a copy of the board game Jumanji.

fn29 The frequent appearances of bulls, cows, boars, sows, rams, ewes, stags, hinds and horses that feature in the heroic adventures are of course a reflection of the importance of these animals in ancient Greek economic, social and agricultural life. Their place in farming, commerce and civilisation contrasts with the threat to these elements of life posed by dragons, centaurs and other monsters. The class of mutant or savage boars and bulls might be said to represent a medial state between the tame and the monstrous. Snakes, sacred to Athena and Hera especially, might be said to exist in a class of their own. They can be lethal, they can be prophetic but they cannot be tame.

fn30 Erytheia’s name means ‘red’, or ‘reddish’, because by the time the sun had travelled that far west it was close to its red, sunset colouring. Some Greek and later Roman writers placed Erytheia in the Balearics. Maybe it was Ibiza. Others located it further west; the volcanic island of Madeira is a possibility. Given the presence of the fabled dog Orthrus, perhaps it was one of the Canary Islands – the word ‘canary’ deriving, of course, not from a bird but from the Latin canus, meaning ‘dog’. Lanzarote would be the best candidate, since the ‘rote’ in its name means ‘red’; though dull, factually obsessed historians will tell you that this is a coincidence.

fn31 India, most sources are agreed.

fn32 Ireland? Britain? Portugal? There are many theories.

fn33 Perhaps Helios’s western palace was in Wales and the bowl-shaped coracles that Welsh fisherman use are descendants of the Cup of Helios.

fn34 A favourite torment. She had done the same to Zeus’s lover Io. The moon goddess Selene also sent one down to sting Ampelos, the beloved of Dionysus (see Mythos, Vol. I, for both stories).

fn35 Perhaps the Rhine, possibly the Danube. Some even maintain that the river flowed in the legendary Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Islands’, which probably refer to the British Isles … If Heracles did visit Britain it is likely that in Cornwall he invented the sport of Tug of War.

fn36 A title also given to the minor sea deity Proteus, who shared with Nereus the gifts of prophecy and shapeshifting. Hence ‘protean’. NEREUS is perhaps most familiar as the progenitor – along with his wife, the Oceanid DORIS – of the numerous friendly sea nymphs named Nereids in his honour.

fn37 Tunisia and Algeria, we must suppose.

fn38 Aegyptus, you will recall, was the grandson of Poseidon and Libya, and the uncle of Andromeda. Heracles’ descent from Perseus and Andromeda made Busiris a distant relative.

fn39 The ruins of Thebes, Egypt, are contained within the cities of Luxor and Karnak.

fn40 The Greeks usually called the Mediterranean just The Sea, or sometimes The Great Sea or Our Sea.

fn41 Or a vulture. See Mythos, Vol. I, page 147.

fn42 Ananke is the Greek personification of Necessity. Like Moros (Doom) and Dike (Justice) the laws of these gods are more powerful than the will of the gods. To call them personifications is perhaps stretching it a bit. They can be talked about as if they are deities, but in reality they are treated as ineluctable elements of fate.

fn43 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn44 Another version says he went to Attica for the ceremony and that he needed to be made a citizen of Athens to undergo the ritual. This may be the people of Athens wishing to claim the greatest of all heroes, greater even than their beloved Theseus, as one of their own.

fn45 Perhaps more familiar nowadays under its other name of Cape Matapan.

fn46 The disgraceful adventures of Pirithous and Theseus are coming soon.

fn47 The disturbing fate of Meleager will be revealed when we reach the story of Atalanta.

fn48 Most accounts of the Twelfth Labour use this, later, name for Hades. Plouton became fused with the Roman PLUTO, the god of wealth. Precious metals and precious crops come from under the ground, so it was a natural elision.

fn49 They say that where Cerberus’s drool fell aconite grew, the deadly poison sometimes called wolf’s bane.

fn50 He seems to have forgotten his plan to bring his own wife back and, for the moment, his promise to seek out Meleager’s sister Deianira as a bride.

fn51 Pronounced ‘Eekaylia’.

fn52 See the ‘Rages of Heracles’ afterword for thoughts on this.

fn53 We don’t know which gods. It seems a bit direct for Hera, so perhaps it was Zeus, for whom xenia was sacred.

fn54 Neleus was the brother of King Pelias of Iolcos, and so the father of Alcestis.

fn55 An especially apt name, given Heracles’ crime against xenia or guest friendship. Xenoclea is a name that glorifies the stranger or guest.

fn56 Omphale’s name might be considered to be related to omphalos, meaning ‘navel’, it also can mean ‘button’ which plays into the cross-dressing narrative. It also means ‘boss’ which is apt enough – but the name had no such double meaning to the Greeks, of course.

fn57 One of the judges in the musical competition between Pan and Apollo in which Midas made such an ass of himself. See Mythos, Vol. I, page 390.

fn58 According to Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, who lived in the fifth century BC, the descendants of this son (the name is variously given as AGELAUS or LAMAS), ruled Lydia for twenty-two generations. The most famous monarch of this dynasty was the sixth-century King CROESUS, who was as rich as … as rich as himself.

fn59 Fine heroes in their own right, Peleus and Telamon also joined Heracles in the quest for the Golden Fleece, as we shall see. But they are now most remembered as the fathers of the two mightiest Greek heroes of the Trojan War: AJAX, son of Telamon, and Achilles, son of Peleus. The son of Telamon and Hesione was the legendary bowman TEUCER, who fought beside his half-brother Ajax at Troy.

fn60 Some say it was in revenge for the abduction of his sister Hesione that, many years later, Priam sent his son PARIS to carry off Helen of Sparta, thus sparking the cataclysmic conflict which brought ruin upon both Greeks and Trojans. But that dreadful tale is for another day.

fn61 Confusing, but not the same Eurytus whose son, Iphitus, Heracles threw from the walls of Tiryns.

fn62 Not many words or names begin with ‘Ct-’, do they? The twins were sons of Poseidon and MOLIONE (hence their joint name of the MOLIONIDES). Molione was married to Augeas’s brother ACTOR, hence their loyalty to him.

fn63 Presumably at the head of some sort of force or army: the mythographers aren’t very clear on this. Though such was his strength and temper that he certainly could do the work of one hundred armed men.

fn64 Known to this day as Pylos-Nestoras (Navorino to the Italians across the Adriatic Sea).

fn65 Consider, for instance, the stories told of Hermes and of his son Autolycus in Mythos, Vol. I, pages 101 and 268. Or, more recently, the quarrel of Eurytus and Heracles that we have just heard.

fn66 As Odysseus and his men would discover to their cost one day.

fn67 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 22.

fn68 Thus ‘giant’ and ‘gigantic’ really mean ‘earthborn’ and have nothing to do with size, despite the way the words are now used and how the ‘giga-’ was taken from ‘gigantic’ to mean ‘huge’.

fn69 The Greek word is pharmakon, as in ‘pharmacy’ and ‘pharmaceutical’.

fn70 Pronounced ‘Die-an-era’.

fn71 Like most water divinities he could change his shape at will – witness those Old Men of the Sea, Nereus, Proteus and later Thetis.

fn72 At least so says Sophocles, the Athenian tragedian of the fifth century BC in his play Women of Trachis, which tells the story of Deianira and of the later life and death of Heracles.

fn73 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 32.

fn74 You meet one person whose name begins with ‘Ct’ and then another pops up ten minutes later.

fn75 Pronunciation? Your guess is as good as mine. Kay-uhx perhaps, or maybe Cakes. I assume Alcyone is pronounced to rhyme with Hermione.

fn76 In Philoctetes’ possession, the arrows of Heracles would play a crucial part in the climax of the Trojan War. The gods move in mysterious ways to achieve their ends.

fn77 In The Odyssey, Homer places Heracles in Hades, a discrepancy that caused later mythographers to offer confusing and rather unconvincing explanations. His mortal shade went to the Underworld, they suggested, while the immortal one rose up to Olympus. There hadn’t been a suggestion before this, so far as I know, that anyone could be endowed with two souls, whether they had a divine parent or not. The Greeks, if the truth be told, were far too wise to have a consistent eschatology that presumed infallible knowledge of an afterlife. They had noted that no one ever returned from death and took the sane and sensible view that those who claimed to know what happened to a person after they died were either fools or liars. Thus there was no ‘system’ to Elysium, Tartarus, Erebus, the Fields of Asphodel and the Underworld. Nor is there any such consistent law of the afterlife in either testament of the Bible, come to that. All the threats of hell and punishment and promises of heaven and reward came much, much later in our history.

fn78 Hebe would be Heracles’ half-sister of course, but that’s nothing. Perseus was simultaneously his great-grandfather and half-brother.

fn79 Athenian exceptionalism at the height of the classical era was as unpopular with the rest of the world as British exceptionalism in the days of the Raj or American and Russian exceptionalism are today.

BELLEROPHON

fn1 Usually pronounced with the emphasis on the second ‘e’ – ‘Bell-er-ophon’. The early Greeks tended to call him Bellerophontes.

fn2 As we shall discover in due course, Theseus had a similarly problematic paternity.

fn3 The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: ‘A marvellous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes.’ No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

fn4 Poseidon was a god not just of the wide oceans, but of springs and fountains too. His offspring Pegasus, after flying free from the severed neck of Medusa, made landfall first on Mount Helicon. He struck his hoof on the ground and water bubbled up to become the famous Hippocrene, which means horse fountain. Helicon, like Parnassus, was one of the places where the nine MUSES liked to live (see Mythos, Vol. I, page 46). To drink from the Hippocrene became a metaphor for poetic inspiration (as in Keats’s longing for ‘the true, the blushful Hippocrene’ in his Ode to a Nightingale). But Pegasus did not linger there, he flew on to Corinthian Pirene, another place sacred to the Muses.

fn5 Pronounced Sthen-a-bee-a or perhaps Stheneebia. Up to you. The name means ‘strong cow’ – or, if one is feeling kinder, ‘one made strong through their possession of cows’. Earlier sources, like Homer, called her ANTEIA.

fn6 A not uncommon mythic trope or ‘mytheme’. You may remember in the Bible (or the musical) that Potiphar’s wife made the same false accusation against Joseph after failing to seduce him. Achilles’ father Peleus was to suffer similarly at the hands of ASTYDAMEIA, wife of King ACASTUS, who – in just the same way that Proetus was purifying Bellerophon – was cleansing Peleus of the crime of accidental fratricide at the time. Make of these repetitions what you will.

fn7 Often given the rather more handsome name Amphianax (pronounced ‘Amph-eye-an-ax’).

fn8 When Homer has Bellerophon’s grandson GLAUCUS tell this story in the Iliad, the letter is actually not written but composed of ‘symbols’ or ‘murderous signs’ enclosed, not in a letter, but a ‘folding tablet’ … Homer pre-dated paper and alphabets (or at the most coincided with the very beginning of the Phoenician alphabet), but he would have been aware of the Linear B syllabary and other early scripts. The tablets would have been of clay.

fn9 Usually pronounced ‘kai-meera’, though the Greeks say something closer to ‘heemera’, with a hissy opening ‘h’.

fn10 Almost certainly a literal meandering. He was over Caria, through which the River Maeander, eponym of all wandering streams, still winds its lazy course.

fn11 Home of the wise centaur Chiron, master of the healing arts. See the story of Jason (here, here).

fn12 Cheimarrhus was said to sail in a ship with a lion’s figurehead for the prow and a serpent for the sternpost which, taken with the similarity of his name to that of the Chimera (both derive from a Greek word for ‘goat’), makes one wonder if he wasn’t just another version of the monster’s story. See the Afterword for a discussion of this kind of ‘Euhemerism’, or historical interpretation.

fn13 Another version says that Bellerophon returned to Tiryns, made a show of forgiving Stheneboea and offered her a ride on Pegasus. Once they were far out at sea he pushed her off.

ORPHEUS

fn1 Who would certainly have been father of Heracles’ unfortunate music teacher, Orpheus’s brother or half-brother Linus.

fn2 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn3 Now Cape Matapan.

fn4 The Asphodel Meadow was sometimes given as the place where ordinary, non-heroic mortals resided in the underworld. As I mentioned in a footnote on the death of Heracles, there is little consistency across the sources and poets as to what happened to the dead. An asphodel, incidentally, is a white heathland flowering plant. Homer’s Odyssey seems to have the first mention of such a flower carpeting the Elysian Fields of Hades, but it later entered the poetic language across Europe and wider. William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ is a notable example.

fn5 Charon liked to use old-fashioned words like ‘Avaunt’, ‘Nay’ and ‘Forsooth’. He believed they enhanced his dignity.

fn6 The three judges were sons of Zeus, mortal kings famed for the righteousness of their rule, who determined on behalf of Hades the fates of the dead in the underworld. Heracles sensibly avoided them during his visit. See the first volume of Mythos (page 143).

fn7 The Greeks even had a word for this Dionysian tearing apart, this frenzied dismemberment – they called it sparagmos.

JASON

fn1 And are capitalised.

fn2 Helios was also Gaia’s son, so she stood as both mother and grandmother to Bisaltes. This is nothing compared to the far more bizarre double and triple relationships of some.

fn3 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 257.

fn4 Usually pronounced ‘Bee-oh-shuh’.

fn5 Although often called ‘the First Hero’, Cadmus more properly belongs in the first volume of Mythos, where you will find his story (page 210).

fn6 The tragic effect that Euripides dramatised in his play The Bacchae, and the best known example of Dionysian sparagmos.

fn7 In the Book of Genesis, you may remember, the patriarch Abraham was tested by God and told to sacrifice his son Isaac. Just as Abraham’s knife was descending God showed him a ram caught in a nearby thicket and told him to kill the animal in place of his son. One version of the story of Iphigenia and Agamemnon, which helped set in motion both the Trojan War and its tragic aftermath, is another example of this mytheme – but it is not yet time to hear that particular tale.

fn8 Today the straits are known as the Dardanelles, which is another name derived from a figure of Greek myth – in this case DARDANUS, son of Zeus and ELECTRA (one of the seven heavenly sisters known as the PLEIADES). Dardanus was the father of Tros, the founder of Troy; it is because of him that Homer sometimes refers to the Trojans as ‘Dardanians’.

fn9 Axeinos in Greek. Latterly, the Greeks gave it the wistfully optimistic name Euxinos – the ‘Euxine Sea’ – which means ‘hospitable’. In the same way the ‘Cape of Torments’ had its name changed to the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ by Portuguese navigators in the late fifteenth century.

fn10 This backstory takes place before Heracles frees Prometheus of course.

fn11 Yet another child of Typhon and Echidna, or (according to Apollonius Rhodus) of Gaia and Typhon.

fn12 Some say that the madness that overtook him was sent by Hera, who never tired of punishing anyone who had anything to do with the raising, succouring and support of Dionysus, born of one of Zeus’s most brazen and outrageous affairs. It was enough for Hera that Athamas was married to Ino, and Ino had nursed the young Dionysus.

fn13 Ino/Leucothea plays a key role generations later in the adventures of Odysseus.

fn14 Athamas did have time to marry again: Themisto, his third wife, bore him four children, one of whom was Schoeneus, who went on to father (and abandon) Atalanta, whose story is told soon.

fn15 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn16 We have already encountered both brothers, at a later stage in their careers, in the story of Heracles (here and here).

fn17 Sometimes she is called Polymede.

fn18 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 251.

fn19 Not the same ARGUS PANOPTES whom Hera once turned into a peacock (see the first volume of Mythos, page 191), but Argus the Argive from Argos. His father Danaus was king of Argos and (according to Apollodorus) the possessor of the first ship ever to set sail on the seas.

fn20 Idmon did die, as we shall see. But he also achieved his prophesied fame – for here I am, thousands of years later, writing about him.

fn21 It is generally held that, in historical ancient Greece, many grand families from Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes and all over the Greek world laid claim to Argonaut ancestors. Over the generations, poets and historians were paid to include such ancestors in ‘definitive’ accounts of the voyage in order to lend prestige to the pedigrees of the rich and powerful. For this reason there is no single, authoritative, universally recognised crew list or manifest for the Argo.

fn22 Although all heroes are, of course, imperfect.

fn23 Not to be confused with the Cyclops of the same name whom Odysseus encountered on his way home from the Trojan War. This Polyphemus was married to Heracles’ half-sister Laomene. He was a Lapith, and helped Theseus and Pirithous defeat the centaurs: see the story of Theseus (here).

fn24 See the story of Atalanta (here).

fn25 Pronounced ‘Calayiss’ and ‘Zee-tees’.

fn26 Other versions of or references to the quest for the Golden Fleece have Atalanta playing an enthusiastic role in the voyage and its subsidiary adventures, but the main source on which I and most mythographers rely (the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius) tells that she was turned away.

fn27 In some tellings he was accompanied by Theseus, but this messes too much with chronology, as the end of Jason’s story will show.

fn28 At the inception and conclusion of which the sisters of the Dioscuri – Helen of Sparta and CLYTEMNESTRA, wife of Agamemnon – were to play such crucial roles.

fn29 Pronounced ‘Hip-sipperly’.

fn30 Hypsipyle’s father THOAS found his way to Tauris on the Crimean peninsula, where he was to play a part in the aftermath of the Trojan War and the fraught destiny of Agamemnon’s family.

fn31 Unusual for Heracles, who was capable of spreading his seed far and wide, as the huge number of his descendants, the Heracleides, testifies. Perhaps it was because at this period in his life he had eyes only for Hylas.

fn32 The kingdom which Heracles rid of its monstrous lion for his First Labour.

fn33 A top score in Scrabble. He is pronounced ‘Sizzy-kuhss’ (while his wife Clite rhymes with ‘high tea’ rather than ‘bite’).

fn34 The tribe who attacked them are often called the Gegeneis, but that is just another way of saying giants. The word has same root as ‘gigantic’. The -geneis means ‘birth’ or ‘born’ as in ‘genes’, ‘genesis’, ‘generation’, etc. The Ge- is like the geo- in ‘geography’ and ‘geology’ and derives from Gaia the earth. Thus ‘giant’, ‘gigantic’ and ‘Gegeneis’ really mean ‘earthborn’ or ‘chthonic’ and have nothing to do with size, despite the way the words are now used and how the ‘giga’ was taken from ‘gigantic’ to mean ‘huge’.

fn35 Of course strictly speaking the Greeks didn’t have aitches, only the asper, or rough, ‘breathing’.

fn36 This is how Apollonius Rhodius, a Greek poet of the third century BC, describes it in his Argonautica, the fullest surviving ancient narrative of the voyage of the Argo. In other sources Heracles joins Jason’s crew after the completion of his Labours.

fn37 Telamon had his revenge though. On his return from the quest he told his friend Heracles of the twins’ insistence that they sail on and not turn back to pick him and Polyphemus up. Heracles never forgot the insult, and when he came upon the twins on the island of Tenos he didn’t think twice about killing them. He constructed two pillars to mark their graves, which were said to sway whenever their father the North Wind blew.

fn38 The city of Cius became an important chain on the ancient Silk Road, but is now a ruin.

fn39 See Mythos, Vol I, page 301.

fn40 A scene beloved of artists ever since, most notably the post-Pre-Raphaelite (if that makes sense) J. W. Waterhouse.

fn41 In Apollonius Rhodius’ version they first stopped off at the kingdom of the Bebryces, on the Asian shore, where Polydeuces defeated their king and champion AMYCUS in a boxing match.

fn42 Not the Phineus of Egypt pertrified by Perseus, of course.

fn43 Their names were Aello (‘storm’) and Ocypete (‘swift of flight’). Homer mentions a third, Podarge, (‘flashing foot’ – the same name as one of the Mares of Diomedes. Harpy itself means ‘snatcher’.

fn44 Anyone who has observed the behaviour of seagulls in seaside towns will wonder if they were the inspiration for the story of the Harpies. They snatch ice-cream cones from children and their droppings cake the promenades and seafronts.

fn45 Stamphani and Arpia, two islets of the Heptani archipelago, or Ionian Islands, west of mainland Greece. The Strophades remain important sites for birds to this day.

fn46 Like Hermes, Iris was a messenger of the gods. Her colourful qualities give us the name of the iris of the eye and all words that refer to the iridescence of the rainbow – petrol in water, that sort of thing. Like the Harpies, she was a daughter of the Titaness Electra.

fn47 The Black Sea to us.

fn48 See Mythos, Vol. I, page 189.

fn49 For that reason they were sometimes called the Cyanean Rocks. Of course, few questions are more moot, vexed and thorny than whether or not the Greeks really saw blue, had a word for blue, or even knew what blue was. Famously, Homer often refers to the sea as oinops pontos ‘the wine-looking sea’, usually translated as ‘wine dark’. William Gladstone, finding time while serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain, wrote a book on Homer which included the first serious study of Greeks and colour. It has recently re-emerged as an interesting element in the renewed Sapir-Whorf debate in academic linguistics. If you are interested, I recommend Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

fn50 The story of ‘Arion and the Dolphin’ is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 363).

fn51 The name Jason actually means ‘healer’.

fn52 They were not so far, after all, from Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics were held.

fn53 According to some they were the birds who had flown from Lake Stymphalia when Heracles disturbed them with Athena’s rattle during his Sixth Labour.

fn54 I’ve spelled his name this way to avoid confusion with Argus the shipwright.

fn55 In today’s Republic of Georgia the river is now the Rioni and the port is Poti, headquarters of the Georgian navy.

fn56 Now Kutaisi, Georgia’s legislative capital.

fn57 Should you so wish, you can be introduced to the twelve original Titans in the first volume of Mythos (page 7).

fn58 See under Theseus for the story of Pasiphae (here). Circe will feature in the story of Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War.

fn59 Pronounced ‘ee-dee-ya’ I would think. She was Aeëtes’ aunt, being an Oceanid, and therefore a sister of his mother Perseis.

fn60 If you’re anything like me, you’ll find all these relationships wildly confusing, although they are probably no more complicated than those in your own family. Save that you are less likely to be so incestuously connected to Titans, sea nymphs and enchantresses.

fn61 Aeëtes is thought to be a form of the Greek word for ‘eagle’.

fn62 Hecate, goddess of witchcraft and potions, was a daughter of the second generation Titans Perses and Asteria. She features in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

fn63 Unless you are fortunate enough to possess the wisdom of Nestor, you might find his plan easier to understand after a look at the map here. I don’t mind waiting.

fn64 On their way through, Jason established Ljubljana, the capital of today’s Slovenia. The people there celebrate him as a founder hero. They say he killed a dragon in a lake and saved the inhabitants. That dragon remains the city’s emblem (although the story was later Christianized and Jason was replaced by St George).

fn65 As Odysseus was to discover many years later, during his decade-long struggle to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

fn66 Lilybaeum is today’s Marsala, famous for its honey-sweet wine. Butes and Aphrodite became lovers. Some say it was around the time of her affair with ADONIS (see Mythos, Vol. I, page 325), and that she only did this to make Adonis jealous. She bore Butes a son, ERYX, who grew up to be one of the finest boxers of his generation. Not fine enough to survive a bout with Heracles, however. Even in his later years the great hero was too much for Eryx. He knocked him dead with one punch. Doubtless, being Heracles, he was filled with remorse and tried to put him back together again.

fn67 Planets are ‘wandering rocks’ too – they get their name from the same Greek source word planetai meaning ‘wanderers’. Early astronomers were alerted to their difference from other heavenly bodies when they observed them roaming apparently randomly across the sky and called them planetes asteres, wandering stars.

fn68 Or like the Millennium Falcon trying to steer through an asteroid field.

fn69 Today’s Corfu.

fn70 The Southern Adriatic. Confusing because the name ‘Ionia’ refers to parts of Asia Minor, today’s Turkey far to the other side of Greece.

fn71 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn72 Ichor, the silvery-gold blood that ran in the veins of the gods was deadly poison to mortals.

fn73 The word he used must have been ‘thaumaturge’. A lifetime ago, when I was learning ancient Greek as an eight-year-old, the textbook the school used liked to remind one of the English words that derived from Greek: ‘graph’ and ‘graphic’ from grapho, ‘telephone’ from phonos, that sort of thing. I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: ‘thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word “thaumaturge”.’ And I suppose that was true, since I’ve never forgotten it.

fn74 Also known as Chandax.

fn75 This is where the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius comes to an end (as does the Argonautica Orphica, a Byzantine Greek retelling of the fifth or sixth century AD ostensibly narrated by Orpheus). Whether Apollonius failed to finish, or whether he felt he had best remain true to his title and deal only with the voyage and not with the repercussions and aftermath, is not known.

fn76 Not to be confused with the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, daughters of Atlas and Pleione. See the first volume of Mythos (page 100). Euripides wrote a tragedy called the Peliades, but it is lost.

fn77 She was later won by Admetus, and offered to die in his place. Heracles wrestled Death for her soul if you recall.

fn78 Same name as Jason’s mother, which is confusing.

fn79 I know, that name rather stands out amongst the others, doesn’t it? It’s the only one the spell-checker didn’t challenge. Evadne means ‘very holy’ which makes me think, wrongly, of Evander Holyfield.

fn80 ‘Looking for a ewe’s teat to suckle from’ as Ovid rather endearingly puts it.

fn81 It is far more likely to have been a magic trick than real witchcraft. I don’t doubt my friends the magnificent Penn and Teller could reproduce the effect perfectly. It’s very much in their wheelhouse – their frequently sordid and spectacularly sick wheelhouse. They are, in some respects, the Medeas of our time.

fn82 Acastus is often listed as one of the Argonauts, which would mean that Pelias was either willing to sacrifice him – for he never believed the Argo would return – or perhaps that Acastus was there to ensure the Fleece, if found, would be returned to him.

fn83 Half-uncle if my calculations are correct. Can there be such a thing as a half-uncle? At any rate, Pelias was a half-brother of Jason’s father Aeson, sharing Tiro as a mother.

fn84 Samos was famous for the quality of its wine. It is celebrated by Byron in the glorious ‘Isles of Greece’ section of his epic poem Don Juan. ‘Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!’

fn85 His words were Πολλὰ μεταξὺ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου (Polla metaxu pelei kulikos kai cheileos akrou) according to Jenny March in her excellent Dictionary of Classical Mythology. If you put that into Google Translate however, it comes out as ‘A lot of people are screaming and screaming’ – go figure.

fn86 What follows is based on Euripides’ version of the story in his tragedy Medea.

fn87 No relation to the Theban royal of the same name in the stories of Heracles and Oedipus. This Creon was a descendant of Sisyphus which suggests some kind of family tie to Jason, which may explain his offer of sanctuary.

fn88 Euripides doesn’t give them names, but according to Apollodorus they were Thessalus, Mermerus and Pheres.

fn89 The eldest of the three, Thessalus, was away being tutored by Chiron and survived. He would return from Chiron’s cave to rule over Iolcos and Greater Aeolia, which we now call Thessaly in his honour.

fn90 It seems that almost all the actresses who play the part win Tony or Olivier Awards these days.

fn91 Translation by C. A. E. Luschnig.

fn92 See the story of Theseus (here). It is Medea’s presence in Athens, as we shall see, that makes it impossible for Theseus to have been an Argonaut.

ATALANTA

fn1 As in the lovers HERO and LEANDER, whose tragic tale is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 359) – and the daughter of Leonato in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

fn2 Minyas was the founder king of Orchomenos in Boeotia, the great rival city state of Thebes. Heracles defeated Minyas’ descendant Erginos and was given the hand of Megara in marriage as a reward.

fn3 Pronounced ‘Skeenius’ to rhyme with ‘genius’.

fn4 The name means, so far as I can tell, ‘equal in weight’ – which is a strange thing to call someone. But perhaps she got the name because the men who found her believed her to be a man’s equal.

fn5 The same that had done for King Ancaeus of Samos before he had a chance to taste his wine.

fn6 His name means ‘Man of Wine’.

fn7 It’s not entirely clear when in Jason’s busy life this adventure took place. It is usually assumed to be between the return of the Argo and the flight from Iolcos after the death of Pelias.

fn8 It means, according to Robert Graves, ‘excessive wooing’.

fn9 The Deianira who was to go on and play such a fateful role in the life and death of Heracles.

fn10 But Meleager is married already, to a very beautiful girl called CLEOPATRA (no relation to the one we know) the daughter of Prince IDAS and Princess MARPESSA).

fn11 Toxeus actually means ‘bowman’, as in toxophily.

fn12 To this day there are species of guinea fowl and turkey that bear the scientific name meleagrididae.

fn13 See under Heracles for the fate of Deianira. Her sister Gorge had a child by her own father, Oeneus, who grew up to feature in the Trojan War.

fn14 And never was, until Achilles …

fn15 See the story of Oedipus (here). Parthenopaeus was described by most sources as long-haired, fast-running and outstandingly beautiful, like his mother. He figures prominently as a heroic figure in Statius’s Thebiad.

fn16 Cybele was a Phrygian deity associated with both Artemis and Gaia.

OEDIPUS

fn1 The foundation of Thebes, as befits its precedence, is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 224).

fn2 The story of Tantalus is treated in Mythos (page 261): the fate of House of Atreus belongs to the story of the Trojan War.

fn3 See the first volume of Mythos (page 230).

fn4 Pronounced Lie-us.

fn5 The curse of Ares had lain on the royal house of Thebes ever since Cadmus slew the Ismenian water dragon. See the first volume of Mythos (pages 220 and 244).

fn6 They were responsible for finishing the construction of Thebes’ walls and its acropolis, the Cadmeia. See the first volume of Mythos (page 225).

fn7 As previously pointed out, not the Italian Pisa, but a city state in the Peloponnese (which hadn’t yet earned that name from Pelops), the large peninsula to the south west of Greece joined to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth. It was inherited by Pelops when he won the hand of Hippodamia in marriage. See the story of Perseus (here).

fn8 Another version of the story maintains that Chrysippus was killed by his half-brothers Atreus and THYESTES out of jealousy at their father’s love for him. Euripides wrote a play about the life and fate of Chrysippus that is sadly lost to us.

fn9 The Greek for that is ‘anagram’.

fn10 Zeus’s mother RHEA had fooled her husband Kronos into eating the stone, thinking it was the infant Zeus. When Kronos later vomited up the stone, Zeus threw it so that it landed at Pytho/Delphi. See the first volume of Mythos (page 97).

fn11 And of course, in Greek letters Python and Typhon are not anagrams, but we’ll pretend we don’t know that.

fn12 The Sphinx is usually given as a child of Echidna and Typhon, though some sources suggest she was their grandchild – a daughter of Orthrus and Chimera.

fn13 An asclepion was a cross between a health spa, a hospital and a temple to Asclepius.

fn14 See the first volume of Mythos for the full story (page 330).

fn15 Oedipus Tyrannos in its original Greek, but often confusingly given the Latin title Oedipus Rex. I was a perfectly dreadful Oedipus in a production (the W. B. Yeats translation) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1979. The unhappy citizens of Edinburgh still talk about it in hushed, disbelieving tones. One of Laurence Olivier’s most celebrated feats was his double bill as Oedipus and as Mr Puff in Sheridan’s The Critic. They say Olivier’s scream as Oedipus when he suddenly realises the truth about himself – the cascade of truths – was one of the great moments in theatrical history. They don’t say that of my performance.

fn16 As in the third state of man in the Sphinx’s riddle …

fn17 Literally rivals, since their plays were submitted in competition, only the prizewinning texts going into production.

fn18 There was also a fourth work by Aeschylus, a comic companion piece or ‘satyr’ play, called Sphinx. They are sometimes collectively referred to as Aeschylus’s Oedipodea.

fn19 I sometimes dream that a great find will restore thousands of the great lost works of antiquity to us. Many perished in the catastrophic fire (or fires) at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, but who knows? – maybe one day a huge repository of manuscripts will be uncovered. We have eighteen or nineteen plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost a hundred. Only seven of Aeschylus’s eighty remain, while just seven plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of a hundred and twenty known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.

THESEUS

fn1 The same Aethra to whom Bellerophon had once been engaged.

fn2 In Euripides Heracleidae or ‘Children of Heracles’, it is given that Aethra was the daughter of Pelops’s son Pittheus, making him the common grandfather of Heracles and Theseus. Hence my occasional use of the word ‘cousin’ when talking of the two heroes.

fn3 See the story of Heracles (here).

fn4 How Medea acquired such a dreadful reputation, and how she came to be in Athens, you will recall, is told in the story of Jason (here and here).

THE LABOURS OF THESEUS

fn1 Some say that the Crommyonian Sow was the mother of the Calydonian Boar. See the story of Atalanta (here).

fn2 Kore, meaning the ‘maiden’, was the embodiment of Persephone when she rose up from the underworld in the spring and summer months as per her mother Demeter’s arrangement with Hades.

fn3 The Athenians believed that Theseus invented wrestling. His use of wit, technique and skill to turn Cercyon’s brute strength against him exemplified everything ancient Athens valued. The specific art he developed, what we might call ‘mixed martial arts’ was called by the Greeks pankration … ‘all strength’. If you recall, Heracles had picked up some of the technique and employed it on Antaeus during his Eleventh Labour.

fn4 Other interpretations of this confrontation would have it that the story was reverse-engineered to fit the myth of Theseus’ youthful Labours, and that it actually had its origins in a later and more routine political takeover. This reading has it that Cercyon was a real king and that Theseus wrested, rather than wrestled, his realm – Eleusis – from him in later days, when Theseus was by that time a king himself.

fn5 We even know the day of Theseus’s arrival in Athens. It was, according to Plutarch, the eighth day of the month of Hecatombaion, somewhere around July and August in our calendar. It was the month in the Attic calendar when each year a hundred cattle were ritually sacrificed to the gods.

fn6 According to Plutarch and Pausanias, they were the sons of PHYTALUS (‘butterfly’, perhaps?) who had once shown great kindness to Demeter. In recompense, the goddess granted his descendants the power to expiate those who broke the laws of hospitality.

fn7 Known as the Palliantidae.

fn8 See the story of Heracles (here). But don’t think too hard about timelines and the relative ages of Theseus and Heracles or we’ll all go mad.

fn9 Here again Theseus invented an art, that of bull-leaping. It may sound comical, but plenty of archaeological evidence has been uncovered showing this mixture of sport and entertainment. It can be considered a forerunner of modern bullfighting. Both techniques rely on finesse and timing and aim to tire the bull out rather than engage with it fairly. So different from dear, honest Heracles.

fn10 The same Plain of Marathon saw the soldiers of Athens win their startling victory against the Medes and Persians in 490 BC. Pheidippides was said to have run the 25 or so miles from Marathon to Athens to break the news of the victory, shouting the word ‘nenikekamen!’ – ‘we won!’ – before expiring the ground of exhaustion at having run the first ‘marathon’.

fn11 It sprang from where Cerberus’s drool hit the ground when Heracles took him to the Upper World.

fn12 Just as Perseus’s son Perses gave us Persia and the Persians, so Medus went on to give us the Medes. Medes and Persians in turn, went on to attempt to get their revenge on Theseus’s city of Athens many, many generations later when they launched an invasion under Darius the Great and then Xerxes. One man’s Mede, as Dorothy Parker observed, is another man’s Persian. As for Medea, little more of her is heard, which is a pity. There was a tradition that had her in the Meadows of Asphodel marrying Achilles in the afterlife.

fn13 The zoological name for the genus is still perdix, the Latin for partridge.

fn14 See Mythos, Vol. I.

fn15 That bull ascended to the heavens as the constellation Taurus.

fn16 This was an especially cutting remark for Aegeus’s name means ‘goatlike’.

fn17 A spring month.

fn18 The Greek poet Bacchylides tells in one of his lyrics, his ‘dithyrambs’, that when the ship arrived Minos tried it on with one of the Athenian girls, Eriboia, and that Theseus defended her. Minos claimed that as a son of Zeus (in this version he is the first Minos, issue of Europa and Zeus) he had the right. Theseus countered that he was a son of Poseidon. Minos tested him by throwing a golden ring into the sea and telling Theseus to fetch it back. Theseus dived in and was taken by a dolphin to Poseidon’s palace where Nereids gave him the ring and all kinds of gifts besides. He then emerged from the sea and presented the ring and other treasures to an astonished Minos. All this is charming but it seems odd that Minos would then imprison Theseus with the others as if nothing had happened. He would surely be wary that Theseus might be the first Athenian to prove himself a match for the beast and the labyrinth itself.

fn19 The story of Daedalus and Icarus has long been a favourite with artists. The combined brilliance of Pieter Breugel the Elder and W. H. Auden has given us the latter’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, one of his finest. Sculptures and paintings on the subject abound. My favourite use of the myth is in the relief representation of the falling Icarus on the wall outside the bankruptcy court of Amsterdam. Rembrandt might well have looked up at it during the proceedings against him and been reminded of the perils of soaring ambition. So far as I know he never painted an Icarus picture himself but scores, hundreds, of artists and sculptors have.

fn20 He federated Megara (a region, not to be confused with Heracles’ first wife), for example, and installed Cercyon’s son Hippothoon on the throne of Eleusis, which extended the reach of Athens as far as Corinth.

fn21 Usually pronounced ‘Pirry-tho-us’ with an unvoiced ‘th’, as in ‘thistle’ – think, ‘Pirry-throw-us’ without the R.

fn22 The Lapiths were credited with inventing the bit for greater control of the horse’s mouth.

fn23 Issue, some say, of the Marathonian Bull who fathered them before Theseus tamed him and took him to Athens to be sacrificed. The Marathonian Bull that had been the Cretan Bull that fathered the Minotaur, of course. The baleful influence of that animal seems to have no end.

fn24 They were children of Ixion and Nephele, the cloud goddess in the shape of Hera that was created by Zeus to prove Ixion’s wickedness. The same Nephele who went on to send down the Golden Ram to rescue Phrixus.

fn25 Her name means ‘tamer of horses’. Horses gallop all the way through the story of Pirithous.

fn26 Similar to its effect on the centaurs including, fatefully, Nessus, who drank wine in Pholus’s cave during Heracles’ Fourth Labour.

fn27 ‘War’ rather than ‘battle’ really, but battle sounds better in English somehow. The accidental rhyme in ‘War of the Centaurs’ or ‘Centaur War’ seems inelegant.

fn28 See the story of Heracles (here).

fn29 In some versions (including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Theseus is married to Hippolyta herself. In these tellings Theseus accompanies Heracles on the Ninth Labour, and instead of Heracles killing Hippolyta, he gives her to Theseus.

fn30 For more on the Amazonian lifestyle see Heracles’ Ninth Labour (here).

fn31 Sited just below the heights of the Acropolis, the Areopagus was the meeting place of the Athenian Council of Elders, and later the site of the court where serious crimes were tried. John Milton invoked it in his great polemic against censorship, the Areopagitica.

fn32 The German classicist Bruno Snell puts it very well: ‘For the Greeks, the Titanomachy and the battle against the giants remained symbols of the victory which their own world had won over a strange universe; along with the battles against the Amazons and Centaurs they continue to signalize the Greek conquest of everything barbarous, of all monstrosity and grossness.’

fn33 See the first volume of Mythos (page 43).

fn34 See the story of Heracles (here).

fn35 For example, the Parthenon in Athens prominently featured sculptures depicting the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy and the Centauromachy. Examples of the latter can still be seen to this day, as can the Centauromachy that once adorned another of the most important buildings of classical Greece, the temple of Zeus at Olympia.

fn36 This story is better told another time …

fn37 See Heracles’ Twelfth Labour (here).

fn38 Think Mick Jagger.

fn39 The twins not only returned Helen to Sparta, but they forcibly took Theseus’s mother Aethra along with her to act as her nurse and companion. This position she held into extreme old age. Her grandsons Acamas and Demophon would finally rescue her during the fall of Troy. But that too is a story for another time.

fn40 The versions by Euripides in Hippolytus (the surviving play of two that he wrote on the story) and in Phaedra by the Roman playwright Seneca both alter this a little. She never speaks of her love, but commits suicide and leaves a note implicating Hippolytus.

fn41 The Grandfather’s Axe, its blade and handle regularly replaced, presents a similar ontological conundrum in the field of study known as the Metaphysics of Identity.

ENVOI

fn1 See the story of Heracles (here, here and here).

THE RAGES OF HERACLES

fn1 The Benoit case has resulted in a much stricter regime of testing and a zero-tolerance of drug taking in the WWE, I am told.

fn2 Perhaps comic book fans will also want to draw a comparison with Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk.

AFTERWORD

fn1 And dreams, ‘private myths’.

LIST OF CHARACTERS

fn1 Hades spent all of his time in the underworld, so technically he is often not regarded as one of the twelve Olympians.

fn2 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

fn3 In some but not all versions of Heracles’ Eleventh Labour.

fn4 But not by Odysseus on a later occasion.

fn5 It was Zeus’s punishment for this appalling crime that immortalized Tantalus’s name. See the first volume of Mythos (page 263).

fn6 See the first volume of Mythos (page 224).