Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The Gods Take Pity

Echo ran and ran up the hillside, sobbing with grief and desolation. She hid in a cave high above the river by whose banks the lovely Narcissus lay.

Inside her head Echo framed the words of a prayer to her favourite goddess, Aphrodite. In mute despair she begged to be relieved of the pain of love and the intolerable burden of her cursed existence.

Aphrodite answered the nymph’s prayers as best she could. She freed the nymph of her body and most of her physical self. She did not have the power to lift Hera’s curse, so the voice remained. The voice that had got Echo into all that trouble in the first place, the voice that was doomed to repeat and repeat. Nothing more was left of the once beautiful nymph, just the answering voice. You can hear Echo still, returning your last few words when you call out near caves, canyons, cliffs, hills, streets, squares, temples, monuments, ruins and empty rooms.

And Narcissus? Day after day he lay by the river, passionately and hopelessly in love with his own reflection, gazing at himself, filled with love for himself and longing for himself, with eyes only for himself, and consideration for no one and nothing but himself. He drooped down over the water, pining and pining until at last the gods turned him into the delicate and beautiful daffodil that bears his name and whose lovely head always bows down to look at itself in puddles, pools and streams.

You can choose to think of the characteristics these doomed young people have bequeathed us and our language as common human traits or as problematic afflictions. Narcissistic personality disorder and echolalia (the apparently mindless repetition of what is said) are both classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which medically and legally defines mental illnesses. Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image. The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviours.fn5

Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another’s eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?

Lovers

Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Sue Ellen and J.R. – the doomed lovers we know all owe a great debt to the tragic Greek tradition that preceded them.

Pyramus and Thisbe

When we hear the name ‘Babylon’ we think of a Middle Eastern civilization famed for ribaldry and excess. Its Hanging Gardens were one of the original Seven Wonders of the World and for a time Babylon was the largest city in the world.fn1 The Babylonian Empire took in much of Asia Minor, indeed some believe that this story really took place in Cilicia, the kingdom that Cilix founded before he joined Cadmus and the other sons of Agenor in their quest for Europa. Ovid, however, in his version of the tale, is happy to locate the action plum in the centre of Babylon and so that is where I have placed it too.

In Babylon, then, lived two families who had been feuding, no one quite remembers why, for generations. Their great palaces stood next to each other on the main street of the city, but the children of each household were raised as enemies, forbidden so much as to speak, write or sign to one another.

One of the families had a son called PYRAMUS and the other a daughter called THISBE who somehow fell in love with each other despite the obstacles in their way. They had discovered a small hole in a shared wall between their adjoining homes. Through this aperture they whispered, swapping views of life, poetry and music until they found themselves falling very deeply in love. The hole in the wall was too small to allow them to touch, but the heat of their young and ardent passion could be breathed from one mouth to another through that benevolent chink, intensified by the forbidden nature of their feelings and their thrillingly unbridgeable proximity.

This exchange of hot, youthful breath enflamed them so much that one night, maddened beyond endurance, they arranged each to escape their respective palaces and meet at night in the grounds of the tomb of Pyramus’s ancestor, the Assyrian King NINUS, founder of the great city of Nineveh.