THESE WERE THE FIRST STORIES I ever heard. I was four years old, and my young uncle was practicing his Greek on me. He read me the Iliad and the Odyssey, translating as he went. The unknown words poured over me like dark music, and when he turned to English it was always a letdown. I was very glad to hear what was happening, and wanted to know what happened next—but still there seemed something missing, the golden hero voices, sea whispers, spear shock. I had been bitten by poetry in the dark, and didn’t know it.
Later, modeling myself after my uncle, I studied Greek and Latin and read the stories the way Hesiod told them; and Herodotus, Homer, Vergil, Ovid…and knew the old enchantment. Then I went to them in most of their English versions, and again felt this terrible loss.
So I began to tell them myself.
What are they then, these stories so often retold?
In Greek mythology heroes and monsters alike are spawned by the gods. The Gorgons, those snake-haired horrors, are grand-daughters of Rhea, mother of Zeus, which makes them cousins of their arch-enemy, Perseus. In other words, both good and evil come from the gods. Good is the divine enemy expressing itself through men of high deeds. Evil is the same energy, twisted. When hero confronts monster in these myths it is apt to be a family quarrel.
This pagan idea has influenced all the religions that came after.
The birth of the monster is attended by rage, and that is what makes him monstrous, the wrath of a god—or, more often, a goddess—carving a dangerous, ugly form for itself out of living flesh.
These Greek myths are drenched in sunlight, and this sunlight is more than weather; it is a moral quality. Heroes love to cavort in the open air, to fly, to cleave the burning sea, race on the hills, hunt over the fields. But monsters belong to darkness. Where the Gorgons live it is always winter. Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guards the gate of dark Tartarus, the land of the dead. Scylla and Echidne, the dreaded serpent-women, lurk in a sea-cave waiting to swallow the tides, make shipwrecks, catch sailors and crack their bones. The Minotaur howls in a maze of shadows. The monsters wait in darkness, and when heroes hunt them, they must come in out of the sun, and the ordeal starts right there.
So we see a great religious theme—the eternal struggle between the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness embodied in these simple stories in a way that has branded itself on man’s consciousness forever.
Bernard Evslin