STRAIGHTENING OUT GREEK MYTHS
Straightening out Greek Myths
THE TROJAN WAR
Achaeans (Greeks):
Achilles: best fighter, a bloodthirsty, aggressive, young man, immortal except for his heel
Agamemnon: Commander, king of Mycenae, married to Helen’s sister Clytemnestra
Menelaus: Helen’s husband, king of Sparta
Patroclus: Achilles’ best friend
Odysseus: King of Ithaca, married to Penelope, very smart. Main character in Odyssey
Trojans:
Priam and Hecuba are the elderly king and queen. They have 50+ kids. The oldest and most heroic is
Hector, but Cassandra and Paris are also theirs
Hector: possibly the most heroic of all, does not want to fight but must, as the greatest fighter and the
undisputed leader of Troy
Paris: sometimes called Alexandros or Alexander—kills Achilles
Cassandra: princess, priestess, and prophetess, cursed by Apollo
After 9 years of indecisive fighting, a quarrel arises between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis, Achilles’ war-prize of the moment. Agamemnon, as the leader, takes the girl, and Achilles sulks in his tent, refusing to fight. The Greeks start to lose, so Patroclus, wearing Achilles’ armor, goes into battle and is killed by Hector. Achilles goes nuts, bent on revenge. He slices and dices a great many Trojans, finally killing Hector with help from Athena.
Instead of doing the right thing and returning Hector to his family for proper burial, Achilles ties Hector to the back of his chariot and drags him around the city every day until finally he is forced to give him back. Eventually, Achilles is killed, Paris is killed and Odysseus thinks up the horse idea. Despite Cassandra’s warning, the Trojans welcome the horse into the walled city and get drunk, thinking the war is over. Instead, the Achaeans sneak out while the Trojans sleep and destroy the city. They kill, plunder, rape, pillage, and burn Troy to the ground. The women are taken prisoner, Cassandra by Agamemnon after being raped by Ajax in the temple of Athena. The baby prince, Astyanax, is hurled off the tower of Ilion.
Aftermath:
• Agamemnon goes home to Mycenae to be murdered by his wife and her lover; they kill Cassandra also. (House of Atreus story)
• Odysseus find his way home over the next ten years, finally reunited with his wife and son, after he slaughters the suitors that have been living in his palace.
• Menelaus forgives Helen and takes her back to Sparta.
OTHER IMPORTANT CHARACTERS, NOT IN TROY STORY
Jason
He is the rightful heir to the throne, but his evil uncle Pelias has usurped it, depriving Jason of his birthright. Pelias sends Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece which is in a wild country (Colchis) near the Black Sea. Many heroes go with him on the ship the ARGO.
Jason fits the definition of a hero because his quest to capture the golden fleece is beyond anything most humans set out to accomplish. His heroic journey fits the traditional pattern of departure, fulfillment, and return. He departs on a quest, experiences a journey on which he needs to overcome various temptations, and reaches fulfillment when he achieves his goal and returns a victor to claim his throne. However, Jason has several large flaws in his character which doesn’t fit our cultural idea of hero. Much of his accomplishment comes to him through the help of Medea, the beautiful sorceress princess of Colchis. He promises to marry her in return. Years later, he breaks an oath to the gods, dumps Medea for a politically-advantageous pretty young bride, and she goes mad, killing their children and then flying away to Athens in a chariot pulled by dragons. In Euripides’s Medea, Jason is depicted as cocky and foolish.
Theseus
The Athenian hero and legendary king. He is born in exile, though his father left him a sword and pair of sandals under a boulder. When he is a teen, he rolls the boulder away, and sets off with the goods to claim his birthright. Meanwhile, the Athenians are being forced by King Minos of Crete to send 14 young people to Crete every year to be eaten by the Minotaur, a nasty half-man/half-bull monster that is the result of a union between a sacred bull and Minos’s wife.
Theseus, newly reunited with Aegeus, volunteers to go and kill the Minotaur. So off he goes. Ariadne, the princess of Knossos, falls for and helps him -- again, he promises to marry her, but somehow leaves her behind on the island of Naxos in his rush to get home. Also he forgets to put up a white sail to signal to Aegeus that he is returning safely, and Aegeus flings himself into the sea we call the Aegean. Theseus has many other adventures, and gets old and wise; Athens becomes famous as a very enlightened and good place.
Perseus
Danae’s father has been warned that she will bear a son who will be the death of him. So he locks her away in a tower; however, Zeus sees her and falls in lust. Making himself into a golden rain, Zeus impregnates Danae, and she has a son. Her father nails her and her baby into a crate and throws it into the sea. They wash up on a distant shore, where they are taken in by the kindly fisherman Dictys, and Perseus grows up. Dictys’ evil brother Polydectes wants to marry Danae but she doesn’t like him. He wants to get rid of the young hero so he can have his way with Danae, so he sends him to get the head of Medusa, a Gorgon with snakes for hair who turns men to stone.
Perseus, with a lot of help from various gods, brings back Medusa’s head, turns Polydectes and his men to stone, puts Dictys on the throne, and goes triumphantly back home to claim his birthright -- with his lovely bride Andromeda whom he rescued from a dragon. Years later, he accidentally kills his grandfather in a discus contest.
Heracles (Hercules)
This is a long and complicated story. On one level, it is a narrative of big adventures, and a hero who surpasses all mortals in strength, courage, and stamina. On another, it is a metaphor-rich tale of the relationship of one demigod to a more powerful force, his father’s wife, Hera, who sends him great sorrow and suffering in order to give him a test that will be worthy of his birthright, the son of the god.
1. Conception and birth: Zeus disguises himself as Alkmene’s absent husband in order to satisfy his desire for her. When Alkmene’s husband arrives home, he too has relations with her, and she bears twins, one of whom is Hercules.
2. Hercules grows up and gets married and has some kids. Hera then makes him go crazy (his fit of madness is connected to alcohol) and slaughters his family. Obviously, this horrible sin must be atoned for in a manner as extreme as the sin itself. He is turned over to his bully of a cousin, Eurystheus, who sends him on twelve quests, called the Labors of Hercules. Each one takes the hero further from the known and familiar, until the final one sends him “to hell and back,” making him the hero whose adversary is death itself.
3. Hercules shoots Nessos, a centaur, with his famous poison arrow. As he dies, Nessos gives Hercules’ new wife, Deineira, his blood and tells her to smear it on a robe, to be used at any time she fears she is losing the love of her husband. Years later she gets worried about a rumor that Hercules is fooling around with Iole, and sends him the robe as a gift. He is immediately engulfed in terrible burning pain, which would have killed any regular mortal, but it won’t kill him. Finally he has his friends lay a big funeral pyre, he climbs up on it, and as the fire burns his MORTAL parts it releases the part of him that is immortal. He becomes a real god, ascends into Olympus and takes the place that was his by birthright. Hera forgives him, since he dedicated all his victories to her. The gods marry him off to Hebe, the pretty young goddess of Youth.
WOMEN IN CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
Mythology is full of women who display courage, wisdom, strength, and endurance; however, there are few women who follow the traditional hero’s journey. There are a few reasons why we don’t see females fulfilling this destiny.
1. Although women may often have divine parents (Helen), the male lineage is far more significant in Greece (remember what the Furies decided about Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra). Men were kings, women were their “consorts.” A woman’s destiny is in the kingdom of her husband.
2. Biological destiny: because of their function as mothers, women were more tied to the home, and frequently their strength is endurance rather than action. Penelope, for example, shows her fidelity to a husband whose absence lasts twenty years.
3. Men wrote the stories down. According to their values, heroism consisted of physical prowess and dauntless courage in the face of life-threatening situations.
Some interesting female archetypes
1. The first woman, Pandora, brings suffering to the world because of her curiosity and beauty.
2. The helper
In many stories, the hero depends upon a girl to fulfill his quest. Frequently this takes the following sequence
a. Aphrodite inspires the girl to fall so completely in love with the hero that she is willing to abandon all previous loyalties and moral precepts to help him. Often he will promise her undying love in exchange for her help.
b. She betrays her country in order to assist her lover. In some cases (Medea), she engages in evil acts to accomplish this deed. Once the girl has changed her loyalty, she can never go back to her family again.
c. Once the hero is victorious, they depart together. Since the girl is a foreigner in most stories, she depends upon the kindness of her lover for survival. Often she is treated disrespectfully and even abandoned. (Theseus and Ariadne)
2. The wife and the mother
a. Clytemnestra is an example of a wronged wife who avenges herself violently. Among other grievances, she is unforgiving of the fact that Agamemnon was willing to sacrifice Iphigenia, their daughter, in order to obtain the favorable winds he wanted to set sail for Troy with his armies. He lied to her in order to get her to send the child to him, telling her he was negotiating with a royal family to arrange an advantageous marriage for the girl. While he is at war, having a great time slaughtering Trojans and engaging in sexual relationships with young Trojan girls, Clytemnestra takes a lover, and together they plot to kill Agamemnon when he returns.
b. Penelope is the archetype of the loyal and loving wife and mother. She bravely withstands the siege of the many suitors who woo her because they are convinced that Odysseus will never return, and they are anxious to obtain both his beautiful and charming wife and the kingdom of Ithaka. She is submissive to her son Telemachus when he obtains his manhood and begins to order her about as her husband would have. She is clever and skilled, weaving and unweaving an elaborate tapestry in order to delay making a decision as to which of the suitors she would choose. She shows her wisdom by putting Odysseus to several tests upon his return, in order to ascertain his true identity.
c. Helen is both a disloyal wife and a model of the gracious hostess. Her divine beauty is given as the cause of the Trojan War. The question is, does Helen choose to leave Sparta with her lover or is she helplessly in the power of Aphrodite? In the Iliad, she calls herself a whore. In the Odyssey, she is reconciled to her kind husband Menelaus, serving as the queen of Sparta and hostess to many travelers. She has learned about various drugs during a sojourn in Egypt, and she soothes the men who are lamenting their losses in the war by dropping a benign remedy into their wine.
3. The Priestess/ Enchantress/ Sorceress/Monster
• These are interesting because they possess powers that both aid and hinder men. Some (the Sirens) tempt men to their deaths. Some (Circe) have the power to transform men into beasts. Medea is a witch; she has the power to restore youth but she is not above killing her own little brothers and her children. Cassandra is a priestess whose power is destroyed by Apollo, whose desire she rejected because of her devotion to religious life. The Priestesses or Sybils at the Oracular sites such as Delphi did exist historically; and they had tremendous influence on events. The power of prophecy and sorcery is mostly confined to females, and for this they are both respected and feared.
• Many of the monsters who seem to exist mainly to provide dangers for heroes to overcome are female: Scylla and Charybdis, the Gorgons, Harpies, the Sphinx, etc. In some stories, these creatures were once beautiful, but were turned into monsters because of some wrong they committed. The avenging spirits of the gods are female: the Furies. They stand for the pursuit of the sinner by the spirit of divine righteousness.
• It must be remembered, finally, that the FATES, or Moirai, are female. They are depicted as three: Clotho, who spins the thread of a life, Lachesis, who measures it, and Atropos, who cuts the thread when that life is to end. No god is as powerful as the Fates; they decide what our lives are to be. These entities are inexorable, though not evil. They are not subject to any kind of influence.
4. The victims of lust and war
Zeus did not particularly care if women wanted him or not; he did not accept rejection. Sometimes fathers tried to protect their daughters from the loving attention of a god, since generally these poor girls came to a bad end, at Hera’s hands or in other ways. Danae, who became the mother of Perseus, was sealed up in a bronze chamber, but Zeus reached her as a shower of gold. Leda was ravaged by Zeus in the shape of a swan. Europa was tempted by a sweet white bullock, climbed upon his back, and was whisked away, never to be seen again. Virtually all the women in a conquered state like Troy are victims of war. They are utterly helpless. They are raped, killed, and enslaved. Their children, most notably the young son of Hector and Andromache, are brutally murdered.
5. A real heroine: Antigone
Antigone is cursed because her father is Oedipus. We will learn more about their family in our next unit!
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