Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

On the garden wall, in the shape of a wolf, Zeus looked on, smiling the most terrible and wicked smile as, like a cloud of locusts, the shrieking, wailing creatures clawed the air and circled the garden below them in a great vortex before flying up and away over the town, over the countryside and around the world, settling like a pestilence wherever man had habitation.

And what were they, these shapes? They were mutant descendants of the dark and evil children of both Nyx and Erebus. They were born of Apate, Deceit; Geras, Old Age; Oizys, Misery; Momos, Blame; Keres, Violent Death. They were the offshoots of Ate, Ruin, and Eris, Discord. These were their names: PONOS, Hardship; LIMOS, Starvation; ALGOS, Pain; DYSNOMIA, Anarchy; PSEUDEA, Lies; NEIKEA, Quarrels; AMPHILOGIAI, Disputes; MAKHAI, Wars; HYSMINAI, Battles; ANDROKTASIAI and PHONOI, Manslaughters and Murders.

Illness, Violence, Deceit, Misery and Want had arrived. They would never leave the earth.

What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.fn3

The Chest, the Waters and the Bones of Gaia

And so the Golden Age came to a swift and terrible end. Death, disease, poverty, crime, famine and war were now an inevitable and eternal part of humanity’s lot.

But the Silver Age, as this epoch was to be known, wasn’t all despair. It differed from our own in that gods, demigods and monsters mingled with mankind, interbred with us and fully involved themselves in our lives. With fire on man’s side, and now women to allow propagation as well as a full sense of family and completeness, some of the evils of Pandora’s jar were offset. Zeus looked down and saw this. Inside him the voice of Metis seemed to whisper that nothing he could do would stop humanity from one day standing on its own two feet, in more than just the obvious sense. This troubled him deeply.

For the meantime, people were duly in awe of the gods and used their new-found affinity with fire to send burnt offerings up to Olympus as a mark of their obedience and devotion.

Pandora, the first woman, bore several children by Epimetheus, including a daughter PYRRHA. Prometheus too fathered a child, a son called DEUCALION, possibly by Prometheus’s own mother, Clymene, or, if other sources are to believed, by HESIONE, an Oceanid. And so the race of men and women multiplied.

Prometheus, whose gift of foresight never deserted him,fn4 was keenly aware that Zeus’s anger had yet to be assuaged. He brought Deucalion up to be prepared for the worst kinds of divine retribution. When the boy was old enough he taught him the art of building in wood. Together they constructed an enormous chest.

The brother Titans were overjoyed when their children Pyrrha and Deucalion fell in love and married. Prometheus and Epimetheus could now think of themselves as patriarchs of a new, independent human dynasty. Yet always there lurked the threat from the Thunderer, brooding on his Olympian throne.

Time passed and humanity continued to breed and spread, in Zeus’s eyes more like a plague than the beloved playthings he had once adored. The excuse he needed to visit a second punishment on mankind was furnished by one of their first rulers, LYCAON, King of Arcadia – son of the Pelasgos who gave the Pelasgians their name. This Pelasgos had been one of the original clay figures formed by Prometheus and animated by Athena. Pelasgos was what we would consider ethnically Hellenic, with brownish skin, hair and eyes. Later Greeks regarded these people, their language and practices, as barbaric; and, as we shall see, this first race was not fated to populate the Mediterranean for long.

Lycaon, either to test Zeus’s omniscience and discrimination or for other brutal reasons, killed and roasted the flesh of his own son NYCTIMUS which he served to the god, who had come as a guest to a feast at his palace. Zeus was so revolted by this unspeakably gross act that he brought the boy back to life and turned Lycaon into a wolf.fn5 Nyctimus had little time to reign in his father’s stead, however, as his forty-nine brothers ravaged the land with such violence and behaved so disgustingly that Zeus decided it was time for the whole human experiment to be brought to a close. To that end he gathered the clouds into a storm so intense that the land was flooded and all the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world were drowned.