Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

The complexity and ambiguity of Prometheus is remarkable. He gave us fire, the creative fire, but he also gave us civilizing forethought – which tamped down another, wilder, kind of fire. It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying. To me at least …

Hope

What Elpis being left behind in Pandora’s jar meant to the Greeks, and what it might mean for us today, have been matters of intriguing debate amongst scholars and thinkers since the invention of writing and perhaps even before that.

For some it reinforces the terrible nature of Zeus’s curse on man. All the ills of the world were sent to plague us, they argue, and we were denied even the consolation of hope. The abandoning of hope, after all, is often used as a phrase that preludes the end to caring or striving. Dante’s gates of hell commanded all who entered there entirely to abandon hope. How terrible then to believe that hope might abandon us.

Others have maintained that Elpis means more than ‘hope’, it suggests expectation and not only that but expectation of the worst. Foreboding, in other words, dread, an impending sense of doom. This interpretation of the Pandora myth submits that the final spirit locked in the jar was in fact the most evil of them all, and that without it man is at least denied a presentiment of the awfulness of his own fate and the meaningless cruelty of existence. With Elpis locked away, in other words, we are, like Epimetheus, capable of living from day to day, blithely ignorant of, or at least ignoring, the shadow of pain, death and ultimate failure that looms over us all. Such an interpretation of the myth is, in a dark manner, optimistic.

Nietzsche looked at it in yet another, slightly different way. For him hope was the most pernicious of all the creatures in the jar because hope prolongs the agony of man’s existence. Zeus had included it in the jar because he wanted it to escape and torment mankind every day with the false promise of something good to come. Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise. Without it we can at least try to get on and live free of delusional aspiration.

Hopefully, or hopelessly, we can decide for ourselves.

Giant Leaps

There are some stories in Greek myth of a GIGANTOMACHY, or ‘war with the giants’. A hundred of this warrior race (who, as I have mentioned, were not especially tall or gigantic in the modern sense) were born of Gaia and the blood of the gelded Ouranos. It may be that the war was Gaia’s last attempt at wresting control of the cosmos. In some sources there seems to be an overlap or fusion with the Titanomachy. What seems certain is that a violent uprising of some sort did take place and that it was led by the King of the Giants, EURYMEDON, against the gods.

We do not have the names of all the participants, but the fates of a few of the mightiest were certainly recorded. The most powerful of all, ENCELADUS (the noisy one) was buried by Athena under Mount Etna, from which prison he continues to grumble volcanically.fn1 POLYBOTES was crushed under Nisyrus, a section of the island of Cos that Poseidon broke off and thrust on top of him.fn2 DAMYSUS (the conqueror) was killed early in the struggle, but came to fame later, when his body was exhumed by the centaur Chiron for spare parts. Hephaestus emptied a vat of molten iron all over the unfortunate MIMAS (the imitator); CLYTIUS (the renowned) was consumed in the flames of Hecate’s torches; SYCEUS, with Zeus in hot pursuit, was saved from extinction when Gaia turned him into a fig tree.fn3 Hippolytus (the stampeder of horses) was slain by Hermes, who cheated by wearing his invisibility cloak; and Dionysus killed TYPHOEUS (the smoulderer), with his sacred thyrsus.

I have read of one giant, called ARISTAEUS (the best),fn4 who was spared from the war by being hidden away in the shape of a dung beetle by his mother, Gaia. But how THOON (the swift), PHOITIOS (the reckless), MOLIOS, EMPHYTOS (the rooted one) and goodness knows how many others of the giant race all met their ends remains, as far as we know, unrecorded.

Oddly one account tells how the ferocious giant PORPHYRION, (the purple one), in the act of trying to rape Hera was killed by Zeus and Hercules, which places his death much later in the timeline than the rest of the Gigantomachy. As if such a consistent and stable a device as a timeline could ever be used to delineate the complex, kaleidoscopic and disorderly unfolding of Greek myth.

Feet and Toes