Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

fn2 For more on this fascinating subject, see David D. Leitao, ‘The Perils of Leukippos: Initiatory Transvestism and Male Gender Ideology in the Ekdusia at Phaistos’, in Classical Antiquity, vol. 14, no. 1 (1995).

fn3 Daphne should not be confused with DAPHNIS, a Sicilian youth of great beauty who was found as a baby under the laurel bush that gave him his name. Both Hermes and Pan fell in love with him, the latter teaching him to play the pipes. He became so proficient that later generations credited him with the invention of pastoral poetry. In the second century AD Longus, an author from Lesbos, wrote a romance (like The Golden Ass a contender for the title First Ever Novel) called Daphnis and Chloë which tells of two bucolic lovers who undergo all kinds of ordeals and adventures to test their love. Offenbach composed an operetta based on this tale. Even better known is the revolutionary 1912 ballet with music by Maurice Ravel, choreographed by Fokine and danced by Nijinsky.

fn4 Paphian became a word to describe Aphrodite and the arts of love. George Bernard Shaw chose Pygmalion as the title for his play about a man who tries to turn a cockney girl into a Mayfair lady.

fn5 Little is known about Leander. Christopher Marlowe’s poem tells us nothing much more than that he was a youth who met Hero and fell in love. Leigh Hunt wrote another, which is no more informative.

fn6 In Marlowe’s poem she wears a veil of flowers so realistically embroidered that she has to swat bees away …

fn7 Leander’s name lives on in England’s venerable and exclusive rowing club, whose candy pink socks, tie and oar-blades are such an alarming feature of the Henley Regatta.

fn8 The achievement clearly meant a lot to the club-footed but superbly athletic poet. He wrote this to his friend Henry Drury: ‘This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous; – so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.’

Six days after his feat Byron even wrote a mock heroic poem on the subject, ‘Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’ (overleaf):

If, in the month of dark December,

Leander, who was nightly wont

(What maid will not the tale remember?)

To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,

He sped to Hero, nothing loth,

And thus of old thy current poured,

Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,

Though in the genial month of May,

My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,

And think I’ve done a feat to-day.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,

According to the doubtful story,

To woo, – and – Lord knows what beside,

And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

’Twere hard to say who fared the best:

Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!

He lost his labour, I my jest:

For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague.

A later work of Byron which refers to Leander’s home, although unrelated to the myth, is The Bride of Abydos (1813).

ARION AND THE DOLPHIN

fn1 Only Orpheus, whose story belongs to the later Age of Heroes, exceeded Arion in skill and fame.

fn2 The word ‘guitar’ derives from the word kithara.

fn3 ‘Tyrant’ is just the Greek word for ‘autocratic ruler’, sometimes a self-appointed king. Periander was a real historical figure, cited as one of the so-called ‘Seven Sages of Greece’, who were mentioned by Socrates as exhibiting all the qualities of gnomic wisdom to which mankind should aspire.

fn4 The tarantella is still popular throughout Europe.

PHILEMON AND BAUCIS, OR HOSPITALITY REWARDED

fn1 This theoxenia, this divine testing of human hospitality, is notably similar to that told in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. Angels visit Sodom and Gomorrah and only Lot and his wife show them decency and kindness. The debauched citizens of Sodom of course, rather than setting the dogs on the angels wanted to ‘know them’ – in as literally biblical a sense as could be, giving us the word ‘sodomy’. Lot and his wife, like Philemon and Baucis, were told to make their getaway and not look back while divine retribution was visited on the Cities of the Plain. Lot’s wife did look back and she was turned, not into a linden, but into a pillar of salt.

PHRYGIA AND THE GORDIAN KNOT

fn1 Sabazios was a horse-riding incarnation of Zeus worshipped by the Thracians and Phrygians