Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

One day the pangs of hunger gave way to new and sharper stabs of pain. Alone and unaided Leto gave birth to a girl, the most lovely baby yet.fn26 Leto gasped out the name ARTEMIS for her. Strong, endowed with a most astonishing silvery quickness and supple strength, the infant girl found herself put to immediate and miraculous work even on this, her first day alive. For Leto now understood why her pregnancy had been so hard and so heavy – there was another child inside her, and this younger twin had become lodged sideways in the birth canal, causing her terrible agonies. Artemis proved to have an instinctive sense of how a baby should most easily be delivered and assisted with the birth of a glorious twin brother.

Mother and daughter cried out with joyful surprise when the boy gave his first choking cries. For the hair on his head was not jet black like his sister’s or mother’s, it was blond – an inheritance from his maternal grandmother, the shining Phoebe. Leto named the child APOLLO. ‘Delian Apollo’, he was sometimes called in honour of his birthplace, and ‘Phoebus Apollo’ in deference to his Titaness grandmother and his own radiant, golden beauty, for Phoebus means ‘shining one’.

Artemis

Zeus loved Artemis almost as much as he loved Athena and took great pains to protect her from the wrath of Hera, who could not bear to look upon yet another child of adultery, especially one whom she loftily characterized as a hoydenish tomboy and a disgrace to the dignity of feminine divinity.

One afternoon, when Artemis was still a very young girl, Zeus found her playfully catching and releasing mice and frogs in the undergrowth down at the base of Mount Olympus. He sat on a rock beside her and hoisted her onto his knee.

She tugged at his beard for a while before she asked, ‘Father, do you love me?’

‘Artemis, what a question! You know I do. You know I love you with all my heart.’

If you are the child of a faithless reprobate of a father there is almost nothing you cannot get him to agree to. Artemis now twisted Zeus around her fingers just as she twisted the hairs of his beard.

‘Do you love me enough to grant me a wish?’

‘Of course, my dear.’

‘Hm. Come to think, that’s nothing. You grant wishes to the smallest and least significant nymphs and water sprites. Would you grant me several wishes?’

Inwardly Zeus groaned. The whole world seemed to believe that being the all-powerful one, sitting upon the throne of Olympus and commanding the heavens and the earth, was the easiest job there was. What did they know of paternal guilt, sibling rivalry, power struggles and jealous wives? Please one member of the family and you maddened another.

‘Several wishes? Goodness! Surely you have everything a girl could want? You are immortal and once you reach your moment of greatest beauty you will never age. You are strong, clever, swift and – ow!’ This last exclamation was in reaction to a hair that had been plucked with some violence from his chin.

‘They aren’t difficult wishes, daddy. Just the smallest things.’

‘Very well, let’s hear them.’

‘I never ever want to have a boyfriend or husband or have a man touch me, you know, in that way –’

‘Yes, yes … er … I fully understand.’

This may have been the first time Zeus ever blushed.

‘Also, I want lots of different names, like my brother has. “Appellations”, they’re called. Also a bow, which I notice he has a whole collection of but I don’t because I’m a girl which is totally unfair. I’m the older twin after all. Hephaestus can make me a really special one as a birth present just like he did for Apollo, a silver bow with silver arrows please. And I want a knee-length tunic for hunting in, because long dresses are stupid and impractical. I don’t want dominion over towns or cities, but I do want to rule mountainsides and forests. And stags. I like stags. And dogs, hunting dogs anyway, not lap dogs which are useless. And, if you’d be very very kind, I’d like a choir of young girls to sing my praises in temples and a group of nymphs to walk the dogs and look after me and help protect me from men.’

‘Is that it?’ Zeus was almost giddy at this recitation.

‘I think so. Oh, and I’d like the power to make childbirth easier for women. I’ve seen how painful it is. In fact it is actually quite sincerely gross and I want to help make it better.’

‘Goodness me. You don’t ask for the moon, do you?’

‘Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I’d love the moon, please. That will be all. I’ll never ask for anything ever again ever.’

Zeus granted every wish. How could he not?