Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Whether Metis sacrificed her freedom out of a sense of duty and responsibility, or out of love for the Zeus whom she had always adored, I cannot conclusively state. I like to think it was a mixture of the two. It was, as a Greek might say, her moira both to serve and to love.

Combined with Zeus’s other positive characteristics – charisma,fn23 heart, native guile and (usually) a strong sense of justice, fairness and right – the shrewd inner guidance of Metis helped raise him into a great ruler whose attributes far outshone those of his father and grandfather, Kronos and Ouranos. In fact so much a part of him did Metis become that Homer sometimes referred to Zeus as Metieta – ‘wise counsellor’.

Seeking sanctuary

Wisdom, in the form of Metis, may have whispered to Zeus in one ear, but in the other he always heard the hot urgings of passion. When beautiful girls and women – and sometimes youths – crossed his path, nothing could stop him from chasing them from one end of the earth to the other, even if he had to transform himself into any number of animals to do it. Once the lustful fit was on him, Metis could no more control him than a whisper can quieten a tempest, while Hera’s wild shrieks of jealous rage had no more power to call him back than the wingbeats of a butterfly can blow a ship off course.

I have mentioned that Zeus’s passionate glance had already fallen once on Leto, demure daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus. I should imagine that ‘demure’ is an annoying word for a woman to hear applied to herself (one rarely hears of demure men after all), but Leto was to become a kind of minor deity representing precisely the quality of modest dignity that the word ‘demure’ evokes.fn24 Nevertheless Zeus soon chased her down and had his way with her.

An unshowy Titaness, Leto (LATONA to the Romans) was later worshipped as a goddess of motherhood as well as a paragon of modesty. Probably this was in honour of a pregnancy which, once Zeus had finished with her, turned out to be a most courageous triumph over adversity. For when Hera found out that her husband had got Leto with child, she commanded her grandmother Gaia to deny Leto any land on which to give birth. It was maddening enough to Hera that the baseborn Athena should have taken precedence in Zeus’s affections over her noble and darling sons Hephaestus and Ares (she seemed to have forgotten in her sudden burst of maternal feeling for her firstborn that she had once hurled him down from heaven), and she was not about to let another bastard godling come muscling in to disturb Olympus’s proper order. There is much about Hera that brings to mind the Roman emperor Augustus’s wife Livia or the wives of certain English kings and mafia dons. Always looking to the dynasty and the bloodlines, always prepared to do anything for honour and family, lineage and legacy.

Denied landfall, poor pregnant young Leto sailed the seas looking for somewhere to give birth. She tried to find shelter with the wild Hyperboreans, who dwelt beyond the North Wind,fn25 but fearing the wrath of Hera they would not let her stay. At sea in every sense, Leto cast up prayers to Zeus, who had got her into this dreadful pickle in the first place; but, as King of the Gods, his authority rested on accepting and endorsing the other gods’ right to rule their own spheres and exercise their own will. He could not interfere and countermand Hera’s edict or undo her awful spell. Leaders, kings and emperors always complain that they are the least free of their subjects, and there is some truth to this. Certainly Zeus, for all his might and majesty, was always constrained by the cabinet government principles of consensus and collective responsibility that allowed him to rule.

The best that he could manage for Leto now was to persuade his brother Poseidon to cause an upswell of waves to guide her boat to Delos, a small uninhabited island floating in the eddies and swirl of the Cyclades, unanchored to the seabed and therefore immune from Hera’s curse.

Twins!

Leto made an exhausted landfall on the hospitable floating island of Delos with barely enough strength to crawl up beyond the dunes to shelter beneath a straggling line of pine trees that fringed the shore. The few pine nuts and grasses she could eat there would not feed the active life she felt kicking inside her and so she made her way to a green valley that she could see in the distance. There, beneath Mount Cynthos, she subsisted for a month on fruits and seeds, living like a wild creature but safe from the curse of Hera. Her stomach swelled so much during this time that she feared she was carrying a monster or giant. But still she foraged, ate and rested, foraged, ate and rested.