Greek Mythology

A Traveller's Guide from Mount Olympus to Troy

David Stuttard, Lis Watkins

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773307
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Greek myths have a universal appeal, reaching far beyond the time and physical place in which they were created. But many are firmly rooted in specific settings: Thebes dominates the tragedy of Oedipus; Mycenae broods over the fates of Agamemnon and Electra; Knossos boasts the scene of Theseus's slaying of the Minotaur; Tiryns was where Heracles set out from on each of his twelve labours.

Here, the reader is taken on a tour of 22 destinations in Greece and Turkey, from Mount Olympus to Homer's Hades, recounting the tales from Greek mythology and the history associated with each, evoking their atmosphere and highlighting features that visitors can still see today. Drawing on a wide range of Classical sources, with quotations newly translated by the author and freshly illustrated with specially commissioned drawings, this book is both a useful visitor's guide to famous sites connected with Greek mythology and an enthralling imaginative journey for the armchair traveller.

1

Mount Olympus: Dion & the Home of the Gods

They say that Mount Olympus is the everlasting home, immutable, of the immortal gods. Gales cannot shake it, nor rainstorms drench it, and no snow clouds come near; but, rather, the high air opens out, serene and cloudless, bathed in the purest light. Here every day for all eternity the blessed gods lead lives of happiness.

Homer, Odyssey, 6.41f.

On the fertile plain between the sea and Mount Olympus, Dion thrums with life. Tall clumps of trees – oak, ash and poplar, cypress, plane and agnus castus – chitter with the busyness of birds that flit between the branches with a sudden chirr of wings before alighting on a cluster of bamboo. Doves murmur in the tree-tops. Distant crows abrade the air. Iridescent dragonflies hover over the flat surface of the lake or dance around the pillars of a sunken temple, where water flows clear over weathered stones and tortoises loll, lazy in the sun. Straight paved streets stride off with an initial confidence, only to be overcome by lush vegetation, distracted by wild roses and entangled in a sea of asphodel. Elsewhere, anemones and poppies stud the rippling meadows as they flow towards the theatre. And rising up behind the ranks of benches – so close and yet remote, at once forbidding and apparently benign, its high peaks crowned with clouds, its slopes already burgeoning with grapes – is Mount Olympus, the legendary dwelling place of Greece’s gods.

In the Beginning

For the Greeks, Mount Olympus was the ultimate seat of power. The gods whose home it was controlled the earth and skies, and all that lived there. Theirs was an extended ruling family, often beset by arguments and egos, sometimes capricious, sometimes fiercely loyal, but always jealous of their own authority and merciless against any who opposed it.

But the Olympians did not always rule the cosmos. Nor was there always a cosmos to rule. At first there was only Chaos, a yawning void, infinite and empty, a lifeless place of endless darkness. Hesiod described the process of creation:

In the beginning came Chaos; next full-bosomed Gaia [Earth], an ever-safe foundation for all the deathless gods, who live on snowy Mount Olympus; and misty Tartarus in the bowels of the broad-pathed earth; and Eros [Desire], the most beautiful of all the deathless gods, who loosens limbs, seducing even the most clever minds and spirits of both gods and men.

Now that there was form and animating spirit, other entities quickly came into being. From Chaos came Night (Nyx) and Day; from Earth came ‘Ouranus, star-speckled sky, her equal, that he might cover her entirely’. Earth, too, was evolving. Hesiod tells how:

She gave rise to long mountain chains, the lovely home of Nymphs, who dwell high in the mountains’ wooded glens. With no recourse to pleasant lovemaking, she bore Pontus with its rolling waves – the barren sea. But afterwards she lay in love with Ouranus and so gave birth to Ocean with deep-drifting currents.

The fundamental cosmic form was now in place, imagined by early Greeks as a flat discus-shaped earth surrounded by the freshwater stream of Ocean. Beneath lay Tartarus or Hades, the Underworld, soon to be home to the dead, while above stretched Ouranus, the sky.

The Birth of the Titans

Impregnated by Ouranus’ rains, Earth gave birth to a succession of primal beings, called Titans (‘Stretchers’ or ‘Strainers’). Some, personifications of abstract ideas such as Themis (‘Divine Tradition’) and Mnemosyne (‘Memory’), would play an important role in Greek religious thought. Others, such as Rhea, brought forth future generations; still others were ferocious and malformed creatures. Such were the Cyclopes: ‘Arrogant and boastful … who gave Zeus thunder and forged his lightning-bolt. In all else they were like gods, but they had just one eye set in the middle of their foreheads. And so they called them Cyclopes [‘Round-Eyed’]…’. But deadliest of all was Cronus ‘of the twisted mind, his father’s bitterest enemy’.

But none of the children of Ouranus and Gaia had seen the light of day. No sooner were they born than Ouranus secreted them beneath the earth. So many offspring were returned into her womb, that Gaia stretched and strained in agony. At last in desperation she forged a sickle of the strongest stone and demanded which of her sons would help her. Only Cronus volunteered. Placing the sickle in his hands, Gaia instructed him to wait till nightfall, when Ouranus covered her, intent on making love. Hesiod imagined Cronus reaching out his left hand, ‘holding in his right the saw-toothed sickle, while he eagerly sliced off his father’s genitals and flung them far behind him’. From the gouts of blood were born the Giants and the avenging Furies, while from the genitals themselves, which splashed into the sea, came Aphrodite, goddess of sex and love, who in time was washed ashore near Paphos on her favoured island, Cyprus.

Now other gods appeared. Night gave birth to terrors: Old Age and Famine; Wars and Killing; Quarrels, Falsehoods, Blame; unerring Nemesis, who punishes wrongdoers; the ruthless Fates, ‘who at birth assign both good and bad to mortals, who hunt down the transgressions of both gods and men, goddesses whose anger never stills until they wreak a dreadful justice on the criminal’.

Some of Pontus’ children were more benign: his firstborn was Nereus (sometimes called ‘The Old Man of the Sea’), whose daughters, the Nereids, could calm the ‘sea-swell on the misty sea and soothe the screaming winds’. But others were truly terrifying: Briareus with a hundred hands; the Harpies [‘Snatchers’], bird-women who conveyed dead souls of heroes down to Hades; Echidna, half ‘fair-cheeked girl’, half blotchy, bloated snake; the Sphinx, the Hydra, the Chimaera, creatures who would plague the earth until heroic mortals killed them. Streams and rivers bubbled up. The breezes blew. Helios, the sun, came into being, and the moon, Selene. And the first Dawn broke.

The Coming of the Olympian Gods

Amid this welter of creation, Cronus forced himself incessantly on his sister Rhea. She bore five children – three daughters (Hestia, Demeter and Hera) and two sons (Haides and Poseidon). But as soon as each was born, Cronus ate them. For it was prophesied that his own son would overthrow him. Advised by her parents Ouranus and Gaia, Rhea, pregnant for a sixth time, fled to Crete. Here on a mountain top (identified in antiquity with both Mount Ida and Mount Dicte) she bore a son and hid him in a deep cave, around whose mouth she set Curetes, armoured youths, to mask the baby’s cries by clashing spears against their shields. Then she wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and presented it to Cronus as his child. Without a glance, he gulped it down.

Gods quickly grow to adulthood, so it was not long before the boy left Crete and came disguised into his father’s court to serve as cupbearer. With cunning guile he made the old god violently drunk. Retching, Cronus vomited first the swaddled stone, then each of his five (mercifully undigested) children. Only now did he realize the truth. Even he could not trick fate. His sixth child – Zeus – had come to topple him.

The gods (with Themis in her chariot drawn by lions) fight the giants on the north frieze of the late sixth- / early fifth-century BC Siphnian Treasury, Delphi.

Battle was joined. On Cronus’ side were the Titans, with Atlas as their general. Against them stood Zeus, his five siblings and the Cyclopes, whom Cronus had imprisoned deep in Tartarus, but Zeus had since set free. Only after ten years did Zeus prevail. Most of the Titans were consigned to Tartarus, though some say Cronus, pardoned, was allowed to rule the blessed dead in the Elysian Fields.

But the Titans had powerful cousins – twenty-four Earth-born Giants – and in time they sought vengeance. As the Giants tore up mountains, piling Mount Pelion on top of nearby Ossa in an attempt to scale Olympus, another war engulfed the cosmos. It was only with the help of Heracles that the gods defeated their gross rivals. No more attempts were made to overthrow them.

The Olympian Gods

In popular Greek imagination there were twelve gods and goddesses specifically associated with Olympus, each living in a palace of their own built on bronze foundations in the high mountain valleys. For the most part they were imagined in human form – which prompted the late sixth- / early fifth-century BC philosopher Xenophanes to observe: ‘If oxen, horses or lions had hands, with which they could draw and work as men do, horses would draw gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would make their bodies like their own.’

The gods possessed human emotions and their hierarchy reflected that of Bronze Age Greece – with an autocratic king, a queen, lords, princes and princesses; but they were as far removed from mankind as the most powerful mortal ruler from his lowest slave. There were other differences, too. Most crucially the gods were immortal. Ichor (divine blood) pulsed through their veins. They dined exclusively on ambrosia (literally, ‘not mortal [food]’), washed down with nectar (‘deathly [drink]’). And they could assume whatever shape they liked – bird or animal, man or woman – travelling effortlessly across the earth, interacting with humankind for good or ill.

In the imagination Olympus, too, could assume different forms. Mostly it was the mountain in northeast Greece, but at other times it was something altogether more remote and less substantial. In the Iliad, Homer pictures Hera harnessing her chariot and driving with Athene to find Zeus on a journey that appears to take them from this more ethereal realm to the physical mountain.

Raising her veil, Hera turns towards Zeus on the frieze from Athens’ fifth-century BC Parthenon.

Quickly Hera flicked her lash across the horses, and the gates of heaven opened of their own accord, groaning on their hinges. The Horae [‘Hours’] are their gate-keepers, and to them are entrusted the mighty heavens and Olympus, for they decide whether to release the rolling clouds or close them in. So, through these gates they urged their horses, which responded to the goad, and they found Zeus, the son of Cronus, sitting on his own, far from the other gods, on the peak of many-ridged Olympus.

On Olympus the gods are often envisaged in assembly or banqueting. Perhaps the most stunning representation of this divine assembly appears on the Parthenon frieze (inspired by a frieze on the earlier Siphnian Treasury at Delphi). On it, Hera receives news from her divine messenger Iris, while beside her, seated on a throne, her husband looks on in majesty. He is Zeus, the undisputed ruler of the gods.

Zeus

Drawing lots with his brothers, Haides and Poseidon, to see who should rule each of creation’s three zones – the land (together with the heavens); the sea; and the Underworld (or Hades) – Zeus won the earth and sky. Enthroned on the ridge of Mount Olympus, which is today called Stefani, and holding in his right hand a golden sceptre, he ruled both gods and men. A passage from the Iliad, said to have inspired his celebrated statue at Olympia, describes the sheer power of his presence: ‘Zeus, the son of Cronus, spoke, and he inclined his head with his dark brows, and the mighty king’s hair, anointed with ambr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction: Greek Mythology in Context
• 1. Mount Olympus: Dion & the Home of the Gods
• 2. Sunium: Poseidon’s Cliff-Top Temple
• 3. Eleusis & the Mysteries of Demeter & Persephone
• 4. Delos: Sacred Island of Leto, Artemis & Apollo
• 5. Delphi: Seat of Apollo’s Oracle, Haunt of Dionysus
• 6. Ephesus: Artemis & the Cult of the Mother Goddess
• 7. Paphos: Garden of Aphrodite
• 8. Pylos: Where Nestor Ruled & Hermes Hid the Cattle of Apollo
• 9. Olympia: Pelops & the Games
• 10. Thebes: City of Dionysus, Oedipus & Heracles
• 11. Tiryns & the Labours of Heracles
• 12. Iolcus & Mount Pelion: Centaurs, Weddings & the Voyage for the Golden Fleece
• 13. Corinth & False Promises of Love
• 14. Argos: Land of Hera, Home of Heroes
• 15. Athens: Prize of Athene, Kingdom of Theseus
• 16. Knossos: King Minos & the Labyrinth
• 17. Calydon: A Boar Hunt & Golden Apples
• 18. Sparta & the Haunts of Helen
• 19. Mycenae & the Curse on Agamemnon’s Family
• 20. Troy: A City Contested by Gods & Men
• 21. Ithaca & the Wanderings of Odysseus
• 22. Hades: Ephyra & the Gateway to the Underworld
• Acknowledgments
• Recommended Reading
• Index
• Copyright