Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

During the war, the Cyclopes had, as mentioned, given Zeus in respectful homage the weapon with which he is always associated: the thunderbolt. Their brothers the Hecatonchires, whose tremendous strength had secured victory, were rewarded by being sent back to Tartarus – not as prisoners this time, but as guardians of the gates to those imponderable depths. The Cyclopes’ reward was to be appointed by Zeus his personal artificers, armourers and smiths.

The Third Order

The shattered world was still smoking from the savagery of war. Zeus saw that it needed to heal and he knew that his own generation, the Third Order of divine beings, must manage better than the first two had done. It was time for a new order, an order purged of the wasteful bloodlust and elemental brutality that had marked earlier times.

To the victors, the spoils. Like a chief executive who has just completed a hostile takeover, Zeus wanted the old management out and his people in. He allotted each of his siblings their own domain, their areas of divine responsibility. The President of the Immortals chose his cabinet.

For himself, he assumed overall command as supreme leader and emperor, lord of the firmament, master of weather and storms: King of the Gods, Sky Father, Cloud-Gatherer. Thunder and lightning were his to command. The eagle and the oak were his emblems, symbols then as now of fierce grace and unopposable might. His word was law, his power formidably great. But he was not perfect. He was very, very far from being perfect.

Hestia

Of all the gods, Hestia – ‘First to be devoured and the last to be yielded up again’ – is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus in his wisdom apportioned to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of ‘hearth and home’. Our word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart’, just as the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart’. In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like ‘economics’ and ‘ecology’. The Latin for hearth is focus – which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of words for a fireplace we have spun ‘cardiologist’, ‘deep focus’ and ‘eco-warrior’. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

Refusing offers of marriage from the other gods, Hestia devoted herself to perpetual maidenhood. Placid, contented, kind, hospitable and domestic, she tended to stay away from the everyday power struggles and political machinations of the other gods.fn1 A modest divinity, Hestia is usually depicted in a plain gown offering up flame in a bowl or sitting on a coarse woollen cushion on a simple wooden throne. It was the custom in Greece to say a grace to her before every meal.

The Romans, whose name for her was VESTA, considered her so important that they had a school of priestesses devoted to her, the celebrated Vestal Virgins. Their responsibility, aside from life-long celibacy, was to make sure that the flame representing her was never extinguished. They were the original guardians of the sacred flame.

You can imagine then that there are not many great stories about this gentle and endearing goddess. I only know one, which we will hear before long. Naturally she comes out of it very well.

The Lottery

Zeus turned next to his dark and troublesome brothers, Hades and Poseidon. They had acquitted themselves with equal skill, bravery and cunning in the war against the Titans and he thought it only fair that they should draw lots for the two most important unassigned provinces – the sea and the underworld.

You will recall that Kronos had wrested control of all things in, under and over the sea from Thalassa, Pontus, Oceanus and Tethys. Now, Kronos was gone and the saltwater realm was in Zeus’s gift. As for the underworld – which included Tartarus, the mysterious Meadows of Asphodel (of which more later) and the subterranean darkness controlled by Erebus – it was time for those also to be subject to a sole presiding deity, one of Zeus’s generation.

Hades and Poseidon had no love for each other, and when Zeus put his hands behind his back and brought them out before him in closed fists, they hesitated. In cases of fraternal dislike each brother will usually want what the other wants.

‘Does Hades hope for the sea or the underworld?’ Poseidon wondered. ‘If he wants the underworld then I want that too, just to infuriate him.’

Hades thought along the same lines. ‘Whichever I choose,’ he said to himself, ‘I will shout in triumph, just to annoy that prick Poseidon.’