Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Perhaps the best known of them are the NYMPHS, a major class of minor female deities, divided into clans or subspecies according to their habitats. The OREADS held court in the mountains, hills and grottoes of Greece and its islands, while the Nereids (like the Oceanids from whom they descended) were denizens of the deep. NAIADS, their freshwater counterparts, were found in lakes and streams of running water, or in the reeds that fringed them and on riverbanks. Over time some water nymphs began to associate themselves with ever more specific realms. Soon there were PEGAEAE, who looked after natural springs, and POTAMEIDES, who dwelt in and around rivers.fn10 On land the AULONIADES kept to pastures and groves, while the LEIMAKIDES lived in meadows. Woodland spirits included light-winged DRYADS and the HAMADRYADS, sylvan nymphs whose lives were tied to the trees they made their home. When their tree died or was cut down, they died too. More specialist wood nymphs populated just apple trees or laurels. The Meliae, nymphs of the sweet manna-bearing ash tree, we have already met.

The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.

And so, while the natural world ripened, rippled and replicated in this prodigiously bravura manner, seeding itself with ever more marvellous demigods and immortals, the earth trembled and shook with the violence and terror of war. But this proliferation ensured that, when the smoke and dust of battle at last cleared, the victors would rule a world filled with life, colour and character. The triumphant Zeus was set to inherit an earth, sea and sky infinitely richer than the ones into which he had been born.

Disposer Supreme and Judge of the Earth

Zeus now moved to make sure the defeated Titans could never rise again to threaten his order. His strongest and most violent opponent in the war had not been Kronos but ATLAS, the brutally powerful eldest son of Iapetus and Clymene.fn11 Atlas had been at the centre of every battle, rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity. This killed two birds with one stone. Zeus’s predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy. At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him. Legs braced, muscles bunched, his mighty body contorted itself with this supreme and agonizing effort. For aeons he groaned there like a Bulgarian weightlifter. In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day. His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honour we still call ‘atlases’.fn12 To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named ‘the Atlantic’ after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished.

As for Kronos – the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy – his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual and lonely exile. Every day and hour and minute was his to be marked out, for Zeus doomed Kronos to count infinity itself. We can see him everywhere even today, the gaunt sinister figure with his sickle. Now given the cheap and humiliating nickname ‘Old Father Time’, his sallow, drawn features tell us of the inevitable and merciless ticking of Cosmos’s clock, driving all to their end days. The scythe swings and cuts like a remorseless pendulum. All mortal flesh is as grass beneath the cruel sweep of its mowing blade. We find Kronos in all things ‘chronic’ or ‘synchronized’, in ‘chronometers’, ‘chronographs’ and ‘chronicles’.fn13 The Romans gave this saturnine, sallow husk of a defeated Titan the name SATURN. He hangs in the sky between his father Uranus and his son Jupiter.fn14

Not all the Titans were banished or punished. To many Zeus showed magnanimity and mercy, while on those few who had sided with him in the war he showered favours.fn15 Atlas’s brother Prometheus was chief amongst those who had had the prescience to fight for the gods against their own kind.fn16 Zeus rewarded him with his companionship, taking ever more delight in the young Titan’s presence until one day which was to have massive consequences for humankind, consequences we feel even now. The story of that friendship and its tragic end will be told soon.