Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

‘I’m not their god,’ said Prometheus, gazing down on them with an intense feeling of love and pride. ‘I am their friend.’ He knelt so that he was lower than them. ‘I shall teach them how to farm, how to mill wheat and rye so that they can make bread. How to cook and forge tools and –’

‘No!’ Zeus gave a sudden roar that sent the startled creatures milling in panic again. Zeus’s roar was answered by a great rumble of thunder in the sky. ‘You can befriend them as much as you like, Prometheus, and I have no doubt that Athena and all the other gods will do so too. But one thing they are not to have. Ever. And that is fire.’

Prometheus stared at his friend in astonishment. ‘But … but why ever not?’

‘With fire they could rise up to challenge us. With fire they could think themselves our equals. I feel it and know it. They must never be given fire. I have spoken.’

A long peal of thunder in the distance affirmed his words.

‘But,’ Zeus smiled now, ‘everything else in the world is theirs to enjoy. They may travel to every corner. They can sail Poseidon’s oceans, seek Demeter’s help in sowing seeds and growing food, learn from Hestia the arts of keeping a home, discover how to keep animals for their milk, fur and labour, and they can learn the arts of hunting from Artemis. Hermes can teach them guile, Apollo can instruct them in the arts of music and knowledge. Athena will teach them how to be wise and contented. And Aphrodite will share with them the arts of love. They will be free and happy.’

‘What shall we call them?’ Athena asked.

‘ “That which is below”,’ said Zeus after some thought. ‘Anthropos.’fn3

He clapped his hands and the huddle of hand-crafted humans became a hundred and the hundred became a horde and the horde, spreading ever outwards, became a multitude, until the human population, numbering now in the hundreds of thousands, was on its way to finding a home in every corner of the world.

And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia’s clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. But something was missing. Something very important.

The Golden Age

Alma Mater, the bountiful Mother Earth, made fertile and fruitful by Demeter, was a sweet paradise for the first men. They knew no disease, poverty, famine or war. Life was an idyll of innocence and light pastoral duties. It was a time of happy worship of, and familiarity and even friendship with, the deities who moved amongst them in easy, unfrightening shapes and dimensions. It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay.

Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory.

It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals.

It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do.

The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it.

The Fennel Stalk