Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Tantalus himself was despatched straight to Tartarus and punished in a manner befitting one who dared tempt the gods into feasting on the flesh of the victim of a blood crime. He was placed in a pool of water up to his waist. Above his head waved the bough of a tree from which hung luscious and appetizing fruits. Hunger and thirst raged within him, but every time he stretched up to take a bite, the branch would swing out of his reach. Every time he stooped to drink, the waters of the pool would shrink back to deny him. He could not move away, for above him, threatening to crush him if he dared try to escape, hovered a great stone of the hard glaucus element that would one day be called ‘tantalum’.fn7

There Tantalus stands to this day, agonizingly close to satisfaction, but always denied it, enacting the tortured frustration that bears his name – tantalized, but never satisfied, until the end of time.fn8

Sisyphus

Brotherly Love

The eternal punishment Sisyphus endures in Hades has also entered language and lore, but there is much more to his story than the famous stone he is doomed endlessly and fruitlessly to push uphill. Sisyphus was a wicked, greedy, duplicitous and often cruel man, but who cannot find something appealing – heroic even – in the unquenchable zest and fist-shaking defiance with which he lived (in fact outlived) his life? Few mortals dared to try the patience of the gods in so reckless a fashion. His foolhardy contempt and refusal to apologize or conform put one in mind of a Grecian Don Giovanni.

Deucalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of the Great Flood, had had a son named HELLEN, after whom the Greeks to this day call themselves Hellenes. Hellen’s son AEOLUS had four sons – Sisyphus, SALMONEUS, Athamas and CRETHEUS. Sisyphus and Salmoneus hated each other with as visceral and implacable a hatred as the human world had yet witnessed. Rivals in their parents’ affections, rivals in everything, from the cradle neither could bear to see the other succeed. The two princes outgrew their father’s realm of Aeolia, as Thessaly was called in those days, and moved south and west to found their own kingdoms. Salmoneus ruled over Elis and Sisyphus established Ephyra, later called Corinth. From these fastnesses, they glared at each other across the Peloponnese, their bitter enmity growing with each passing year.

Sisyphus hated Salmoneus so much it robbed him of his sleep. He wanted him dead, dead, dead. The desire was so agonizing he stabbed himself repeatedly in the thigh with a dagger to relieve himself of it. But there was nothing he could do. The Furies would avenge themselves terribly if he dared murder a brother. Fratricide was amongst the worst of the blood crimes. Eventually he decided to consult the oracle at Delphi.

‘Sons of Sisyphus and Tyro rise to slay Salmoneus,’ intoned the Pythia.

This was sweet music to Sisyphus’s ears. TYRO was his niece, daughter of his hated brother Salmoneus. All Sisyphus had to do was marry and get sons from her. Sons who would ‘rise to slay Salmoneus’. Uncles could marry nieces without raising any eyebrows in those days and so he set about beguiling and seducing Tyro with horses, jewels, poems and oceans of personal charm, for Sisyphus was nothing if not captivating when he chose to be. In due course his wooing won her, they wed and she bore him two bouncing boys.

One day some years later, Sisyphus was out fishing with his friend MELOPS. Sunning themselves on the banks of the River Sythas, they fell into conversation. At exactly the same time, Tyro set out from the palace with a maid, the two boys – now aged five and three – and a hamper of food and wine, with the idea of surprising Sisyphus with a family picnic.

Back on the riverbank, Melops and Sisyphus talked lazily about horses, women, sport and war. Tyro’s group made their way across the fields.

‘Tell me, sire,’ said Melops, ‘it has always surprised me that despite your bitter feud with King Salmoneus, you chose to marry his daughter. For all that I can tell, you still dislike him as much as ever.’

‘Dislike him? I abominate, loathe, despise and abhor him,’ said Sisyphus with a loud laugh. A laugh that allowed the approaching Tyro to draw a bead on his exact position. As her party drew nearer she could now hear every word her husband spoke.

‘I only married that bitch Tyro because I hate Salmoneus so much,’ he was saying. ‘You see, the oracle at Delphi told me that if I had sons by her they would grow up to kill him. So when he dies by the hand of his own grandchildren I will be rid of my vile pig of a brother without fear of the pursuit of the Erinyes.’

‘That is …’ Melops tried to find the word.

‘Brilliant? Cunning? Ingenious?’

Tyro checked her sons, who were about to run to the spot from which they could hear their father’s voice. Turning them round she pushed them at speed towards a bend in the river, the maid following behind.