A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - R Is For Rhea And Renault

 Today, two people starting with R!

Rhea handing over a wrapped stone. Public Domain

The first is the Titan goddess Rhea. Rhea was the wife of Cronos, an early king of the gods, and the mother of several Olympian gods. There had been one of those prophecies that Cronos would be killed by one of his sons. He decided to swallow the children Rhea had borne him, including, for some reason, the daughters, Hestia, Hera and Demeter. After he had swallowed Hades and Poseidon, Rhea decided she had had enough and smuggled her third son, Zeus, away to be raised by some nymphs and gave her husband a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. To make sure his crying wasn’t heard, she arranged to have the noisy warriors, the  Curetes, dance around clashing their shields. 

When Zeus was grown up, she helped him give his Dad an emetic in his drink, so that he would vomit up the earlier children, as presumably gods can do this without digesting anything or harming the people inside.

Later on, Rhea persuaded Demeter to come off strike after her daughter Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, and come to a compromise. 

The lesson we learn in both cases is, never come between a mother and her children.

Mary Renault. Fair use.

And now, we come to Mary Renault, author of several books set in Ancient Greece,  two of them based  on the Greek myths. I discovered The King Must Die, the story of Theseus,  when I was in primary school. My copy over the years has become so worn with reading and rereading that I ended up buying the ebook.

Mary Renault was born in Essex in 1905. She became a nurse during World War II and met her partner Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse. Winning a large award gave the couple the chance to move to South Africa, where being gay wasn’t going to cause them the headaches it did in England. Before you say, “But apartheid!” she was very much against that and joined the Black Sash, a women’s group working against apartheid. 

Oddly, though, she was not keen on the gay rights movement. 

She died in 1983, of lung cancer.

Her Ancient Greece novels included a trilogy about Alexander the Great, starting with Fire From Heaven(I found a proof copy of that at a school fete). I also have a copy of her novel The Mask Of Apollo, about an actor in Athens at the time of Plato. That one made me feel as if I was there. 

However, the real power is in her two Theseus novels, The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea. Mary Renault’s Theseus is not tall, despite what the Greeks believed. The reason she suggests  is that if he had been tall he wouldn’t have been much use as a bull leaper. He is a king who believes fervently in his job, but a king of a patriarchal society; he certainly does overthrow a matriarchy on his way to Athens early in the first book. The title is based on the killing of the sacred king; he wrestles and kills one on his journey, takes his place and manages to avoid being killed himself at the end of his own year. 

The Bull From The Sea was the second part of Theseus’ life, going up to his death on Skyros, where, like his father Aegeus, he jumps off a cliff. He has had a stroke and doesn’t want to disappoint young Achilles, to whom he is a hero. 

I do like the way she works out how it might actually have happened, adapting the myth to a possible real-world setting. The only fantasy element in these books is Theseus’s ability to know when an earthquake is coming, a family ability. 

Both novels were adapted for radio, as an 11 part series, in 1883, by Michael Bakewell, who went on to adapt Lord Of The Rings. If you can get hold of either radio play, I do recommend them. If you just want the audiobook, the abridged version is narrated by the wonderful Michael York.

Theseus does appear in a number of other books, including one, The Sword Is Forged, by Evangeline Walton, best known for her four novels inspired by The Mabinogion. She wrote it about the same time as The King Must Die, but couldn’t sell it for some time because Mary Renault got in first. To be honest, I think her Celtic myth novels were her masterpiece, while I’m very glad Mary Renault did beat her into print with Theseus. The Walton book just wasn’t as good. 

Mary Renault wrote the classic based on this particular myth! 

Tomorrow, we will discuss the story of a young woman who just couldn’t leave well enough alone, Semele. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - Q Is For Quests

 Today we will talk about a few quests in Greek mythology. I have already mentioned some - Heracles’ Labours, Orestes’ quest for the image of Artemis that would enable him finally to escape the Erinyes, Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, Perseus’s quest for Medusa’s head(although that was from the viewpoint of Medusa), Bellerophon and his quest to slay the Chimaera.

A number of these quests are arranged by someone who doesn’t wish the hero well. 

Heracles is doing the Labours because he was driven mad and killed his family, but Eurystheus just wants him out of the way and gives him a series of quests that would be impossible to anyone else, to keep him busy. He does end up with a useful lion skin, I guess. But on the whole, he didn’t gain much by them.

Jason is sent on his quest for the Fleece by a king who has heard a prophecy involving himself and wants Jason out of his way and dead if possible. 

Still, he has an interesting time along the way. One adventure involved the women of Lemnos, who had killed off their men for sleeping with captive women. When the Argonauts arrived, the women realised that there was not going to be another generation on their island - whoops! - and asked Jason and his men to impregnate them; they were only too happy to oblige...

Phineus and the winged brothers. Public Domain

My favourite of their adventures on the way was the story of the blind king Phineus and the Harpies who were plaguing him, ruining every meal. Harpies are smelly women with bird bodies and wings (There is a short story by Aussie author Helen Sargeant in which the Harpies are in fact sea gulls). Jason had hoped to get some advice to help with his journey, but the two Harpies had to be dealt with first. Fortunately two of the Argonauts were Calais and Zetes, sons of the North Wind and Phineus’s brothers-in-law. They had wings, so were able to chase the Harpies away. Phineus’ advice for navigating the Bosphorus ends with telling them that once in Colchis Jason should rely on Aphrodite. Well...yes. Medea falls in love with him.

Public Domain

Perseus is after Medusa’s head for an unselfish reason: to help his mother out, though that’s not much comfort  to poor Medusa. His mother, Danae, had been thrown into a chest with Perseus, her baby by Zeus, and washed up in Seriphos,  the kingdom of Polydectes, who fancied her and tried to marry her by force. Perseus, now a grown young man, defends her. 

Polydectes says he is now going to marry another woman and asks his nobles for a horse each to present, except Perseus, who says he has nothing, but will get him anything he likes, even Medusa’s head. Oh, dear...

“Yes, please, that sounds great!” says Polydectes, happy to get rid of the boy. The quest begins with various gods helping out. It ends with Polydectes and his nobles being turned to stone. A dramatic end to that quest! 

Odysseus, of course, has a quest to get home, which sees him arrive after twenty years, alone, after storms and monsters, being a goddess’s toy boy, visiting the Underworld and even after reaching home having to clear out his wife’s suitors. 

The Roman tale of Cupid and Psyche has Psyche’s quest to get back her husband by obeying the orders of her mother-in-law, Venus, who makes her do some virtually impossible things, including  going to the Underworld. That story has a lot of elements later found in folk tales, including animal helpers and earning back her husband after making a big mistake.

There is Orpheus’s quest to the Underworld to bring back his wife, spoiled by an understandable error. I think I prefer the ending to the mediaeval version.

Quests in modern fiction do tend to end well for the heroes, more or less. They usually involve a group of heroes who travel together  to bring back the stolen gem or defeat the villain or whatever. Many of the ancient quests are individuals. Orestes has Pylades to go with him and, of course, there is the Argo quest, which is more like the ones we’re familiar with.

Quests in the Greek myths don’t always end well. Look at Jason and Bellerophon. 

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about Mary Renault, who wrote the definitive stories of Theseus.

 

 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - P Is For Prometheus

 

Public Domain

Today’s character from Greek mythology is Prometheus. Among all those nasty gods, here is one who got into trouble for sticking up for humans. He was a trickster figure we can like, and he is used as an icon for the arts and misunderstood artists. 

Prometheus was one of the Titans, a bunch of gods who were related to, and ruled the planet before, the Olympian gods. His father was the Titan Iapetus, his mother an Oceanid called Clymene. He had three brothers, Atlas(yes, that Atlas of the Eleventh Labour), Menoetius and Epimetheus. 

Menoetius was killed during a rebellion of the Titans against Cronos, who ruled before Zeus. Atlas, who looked after the Garden of the Hesperides and ruled Atlantis, escaped the flooded island and joined Cronos. Afterwards, he was condemned to hold up the heavens, which he did except briefly when Heracles took over, to give Atlas the chance to collect the Golden Apples for him. 

But Prometheus decided it was smarter to fight on Zeus’s side and talked Epimetheus into doing the same, so they looked set to prosper under the new regime.

No such luck. Prometheus created humans and cared about their welfare. He taught them all the arts of civilisation, which he apparently got from Athene, whom he birthed from Zeus’s head. So, he had done Zeus two favours, right? He had fought on his side and cured him of a dreadful headache.

But this wasn’t considered quite good enough. And Zeus was annoyed at how well these beings were doing and considering wiping them out. Prometheus talked him out of it, but when the time came to decide what was the human share of sacrifices and what was the gods’ share, Prometheus got sneaky.

He sewed up two bags of the animal’s hide and put in one bag all the good stuff, covered by the yucky-looking stomach. In the other bag, he put bones wrapped in very tempting-looking fat. Then he invited Zeus to choose. Of course, he picked the yummy-looking share, which turned out to be nothing but bones. So humans sacrificing to the gods got to eat the meat while the gods were stuck with the useless bits of the animal.

As you can guess, Zeus was not impressed. 

“Fine,” he said, “they can eat their meat raw.” 

He withdrew fire. Rather than see his beloved humans freeze and eat food raw, Prometheus sneaked onto Olympus through the back door, with Athene’s help, and picked up a coal from the chariot of the Sun, which he hid in a giant fennel stalk, and hurried back to Earth with it.

Zeus was furious, but he had one more thing to try. He got the craftsman god, Hephaestus, to make a stunningly beautiful woman, had the Winds breathe life into her and the goddesses dress her. She was sent to Earth and offered to Epimethius as his wife.

Prometheus was understandably suspicious and told Epimetheus  to beware of any gift from Zeus. The lady’s name, Pandora, by the way, means “all gifts” and she seemed to be bringing yet another gift, a jar or box with something in it. She didn’t know what that was. 

This warning was the last straw as far as Zeus was concerned. He had Prometheus carried off to the Caucasus Mountains, chained down and tortured by having an eagle eat his liver every day. As he was immortal, of course, it grew back overnight, to be eaten again. There is a scene in Miller’s novel Circe in which the heroine meets Prometheus as he is being taken off to his torture. 

He was eventually rescued by Heracles(that event, by the way,is in an episode of the TV show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys).

But Epimetheus panicked and agreed to marry Pandora, who, as we know, opened that jar out of curiosity and let out all the world’s troubles, except Hope, which was locked in just in time.

It seems the Bible isn’t the only source that blames all our woes on a woman!

Tomorrow Q is for Quests! 

A to Z Challenge 2021 - O Is For Orpheus

 

Public Domain

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is probably one of the best known of the Greek myths. 

Still, I’ll share it here with you, because there is more than Eurydice here - and there has been so much inspiration from the story, which I will also share. 

Orpheus was a king of Thrace. His mother was the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope, who taught her son. Apollo gave the boy his first lyre. She had another son, Linus, also a genius with a lyre, but he was killed accidentally by his klutzy pupil Heracles.

Orpheus’s music was so beautiful that it could get animals and birds to stop and listen, and even the trees danced. Shakespeare wrote this for his play Henry VIII. 

Orpheus with his lute made trees, 

And the mountain tops that freeze, 

Bow themselves when he did sing:

To his music plants and flowers 

Ever sprung; as sun and showers 

There had made a lasting spring. 

Every thing that heard him play, 

Even the billows of the sea, 

Hung their heads, and then lay by. 

In sweet music is such art, 

Killing care and grief of heart 

Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

I’d say the Bard of Avon describes the Bard of Greek Myth pretty well.

Did you know Orpheus was an Argonaut? He was very useful on that voyage, especially when the Argo passed the land of the Sirens. Odysseus had his crew plug their ears to avoid the fatal singers luring them on to shore, and had himself tied to the mast so her could listen without risking death himself.

None of that was necessary with the Argonauts; Orpheus just played them through. His music was so much more beautiful than theirs that nobody needed earplugs or tying up. He drowned them out.

Afterwards, he married the beautiful Eurydice. When she was killed by a snakebite, he grieved so much for her, he went to the Underworld to get her back.  His music charmed both the ferryman of the Styx river, Charon, and Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of the realm of Hades, so that he got through. 

Hades was so touched by his music that he said, “Okay. You can take her back on one condition. Neither of you can look back till you reach the light.” I don’t think anyone has explained why, but there is always one deal breaker, whether in mythology or folk tales. Orpheus agreed and his wife followed him back towards the light. 

You know what happened next. Poor Orpheus. Poor Eurydice. 

But life goes on. And Orpheus’s did. Thrace was a pretty wild land, very committed to Dionysus, god of wine, whose followers were crazy women, the Maenads. They had a tendency to literally tear their victims apart in a fit of madness. And Orpheus, that follower of Apollo, was not popular. A bunch of Maenads ripped him apart, a very painful way to go.

His head was undamaged, though, and when it was thrown in the water, with his lyre, it floated away to Lesbos, still singing. There, it was given a shrine and did oracles for some time. The lyre was placed in the stars, becoming a constellation, Lyra. The Muses, his aunts, gathered up the rest of him and buried them. Orpheus became the subject of a mystery religion. The story of the head rather reminds me of the one in the Mabinogion, with the head of Bran the Blessed, which went right on talking to his followers for eighty years after his death.

He has inspired a lot of art, music and film. There was an opera by Gluck, and the delightfully funny operetta by Offenbach, which you can find on YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nbv8idUiASQ&t=7s

In that version, Eurydice is not keen on his music and is attracted by a handsome shepherd who is not what he seems, and runs off with him. Orpheus really doesn’t want to go after her, but is forced to go by Public Opinion. The can-can tune so familiar to all of us is a dance of the gods.

A 1959 film, Black Orpheus, tells the story set in Brazil, during the Rio Carnival. 

Finally for this post there is Sir Orfeo, a Middle English poem translated by, among others, Tolkien. That version is set in England, of course, Winchester to be specific, which the poet explains was called Thrace in those days. 

Eurydice, his Queen, is called Herodis, and is kidnapped by the King of Faerie, after sleeping under an “ympe tree”. The grieving Orfeo goes into the wilderness, leaving his kingdom in the charge of a steward. One day, he sees a Faerie hunt going by, with his wife among the riders. He manages to get into the Otherworld - the world of Faerie, which is also the Underworld. Outside the castle of the Faerie King, he sees people as they were when they died. Herodis is asleep under that tree. Inside, he plays movingly for the King, who offers him a wish. You can guess what he wishes. 

But this is where the ending changes. There is no condition attached and the lovers get back safely to Winchester - er, Thrace - where he leaves his wife in the town, while he goes to find out what has happened since he left.

He sees the steward ride by and the steward sees his harp. Orfeo is a bit shabby after all these years, so isn’t recognisable, but the steward says, “I see you’re a musician like my old master. For his sake, do come back to the castle and have something to eat.”

Back at the castle, Orfeo is entertained and the steward says, “That harp looks familiar, where did you get it?” 

Testing him, Orfeo says, “I found it with a dead body out in the wilderness.”

The steward bursts into tears, Orfeo now knows he is loyal and reassures him, then sends for his lovely Queen and everyone lives happily ever after.

Pity the myth didn’t end that way. 

See you on Monday, when P is for Prometheus!

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - N Is For Nausicaa And Narcissus

 

Public Domain

Who would have thought that washing clothes could be fun? A social occasion even? But this is what happens in the Odyssey when a bunch of girls go out to the river to do the laundry and run into a stranded hero. 

Not that it’s quite by chance. 

Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king, has a dream - or, rather, a Dream - in which she is told to get the laundry and go to the river to wash. The dream is from the goddess Athene, who wants to help Odysseus, and takes the form of Nausicaa’s best friend, Dynas. 

So, in the morning, Nausicaa and her friends go off down to the river, not far from the beach, with all the palace laundry in a cart driven by our heroine, plus a picnic lunch and wine packed by Nausicaa’s Mum, Queen Arete, and cheerfully wash everything in the river before settling down for lunch and playing ball while they wait for the clothes to dry.

See what I mean about washing clothes being fun? 

As they play games, a badly thrown ball wakes up the shipwrecked Odysseus, who stands and asks Nausicaa where he is and please, could he borrow some clothes to get into town. 

The Princess obliges, as well as feeding him and letting him get washed, and soon Odysseus is at the palace, where he is made welcome and tells the story of his adventures. Eventually the Phaeacians take him the rest of the way home and leave him on the beach at Ithaca with some gifts. 

Nausicaa is such a delightful teenager, complete with best friends, and gets on with everyone. It must be such a relief for Odysseus to finally meet some nice people and a young woman who isn’t trying to keep him as her lover. 

Robert Graves has suggested that not only did a woman probably write the Odyssey, because of all the domestic detail(Nausicaa’s mother is already busy weaving when she gets up in the morning and goes to ask her parents if she can go clothes washing), but that the author was Nausicaa. He wrote a novel about it, Homer’s Daughter.

The 1950s film Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas, is worth a watch.

Here it is on YouTube. 

It was a pleasant break to find our hero not being menaced by monsters or held prisoner by some goddess wanting him as a toy boy. But now, back to the standard Greek myth! The story of Narcissus! 

Narcissus. Public Domain

Narcissus is a beautiful young man who has never seen his reflection. His mother has had some advice from the seer Tiresias that Narcissus will live a good long life as long as he never sees himself.

Echo is a nymph with a pretty voice who got into trouble with Hera for distracting her with funny stories while Zeus was busy with other women. Hera lets her keep her voice, but only allows her to repeat what other people have said.

So - a woodland. A beautiful boy and a girl who is smitten with him, but can’t tell him so. And - fatally - a pool. No, nobody drowns. But fatal anyway.

Echo lets Narcissus see her. He gets annoyed with her for repeating him and he certainly isn’t interested in a romance. Flinging her aside, he turns to the pool. 

You probably heard this story in primary school and know what happens next, but I’ll say it anyway. The boy sees his reflection in the pool and, like a budgie in front of a mirror, falls deeply in love, thinking it’s someone else looking back at him. Unlike a budgie, he doesn’t get distracted, and keeps staring at himself till some god turns him into a flower. 

This is what we call a narcissus flower today, the humble daffodil. 

Public domain

Whether the flower was named for the myth or not, I don’t know, but we certainly use the term narcissist for someone who thinks more about himself than others and has no empathy for anyone else. I’m sure we can all think of someone who fits this description! 

As for poor sad Echo, she faded away till there was nothing left of her but her voice, still only able to repeat what someone else says.

Tomorrow we will meet Orpheus, a King of Thrace who went on the voyage of the Argo, but is best known for what happened to his wife... 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - M Is For Medusa

 Today’s mythical person is the Gorgon Medusa, the lady with the snaky hair. You probably know that story about Perseus killing her, but did you know there were three Gorgons? Medusa and her sisters Stheno and Euryale were the daughters of sea gods Phorcys and Ceto, as were the three Graeae, the sisters with one eye and one tooth between them, who also come into the story of Perseus.

Public Domain

Two of the three Gorgons were immortal; Medusa was the poor sod who got stuck with mortality and so was the subject of young heroes trying their luck at slaying a monster.

In most stories Medusa was punished by Athene for having sex with Poseidon in her temple. Poseidon may have been getting back at Athene for winning the job of patron of Athens. It was rape, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so not her fault, but Athene must have found it easier to get revenge on Medusa than Poseidon, so turned the beautiful girl into a monster with snakes for hair; anyone who looked into her face turned to stone. 

Her sisters were there at the time, so were also turned into monsters, but remember, they were immortal. 

Poor Medusa! Stuck with those snakes for hair and taking refuge in a cave, she surely wasn’t harming anyone where she was, but the same sort of young heroes who, centuries later, would be chasing dragons, came charging up to her cave to slay her and ended up as sculptures.

And lying there asleep, minding her own business, she wakes up to find another one of these heroes getting ready to lop her head off, and this time he has equipment to help him finish her, supplied by the gods, including Athene, who was responsible for her troubles in the first place! Furious? You bet! I would be too.

Medusa has been the inspiration for a lot of creativity. Did you know there is a Gorgon on the flag of Sicily, by the way? 

British horror film, The Gorgon, was made in 1964, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, with a future Time Lord(Patrick Troughton)as a police inspector. The Gorgon of the title is in human form most of the time, in between turning into a snake-haired being turning people into stone. This Gorgon is called Megaera and is supposed to be a sister of Medusa.

There is a short story by an Aussie author in which Medusa is still around and making a living as a sculptor, though she cheats by taking men home, petrifying them and selling them as art works! 

The Medusa scene in the 1981 Clash Of The Titans is breathtakingly scary. It was stop motion master Ray Harryhausen’s last film and while the story was pretty silly, there is no doubt the Medusa scene is a classic to stand alongside the same artist’s skeleton scene in Jason And The Argonauts(which, by the way, is up on YouTube if you want to see it). Medusa is a snake herself, though with a human face and torso under the hissing snakes of her hair. It’s hard to believe she was ever beautiful or even human.

Here is a link to that scene on YouTube. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7W-oPhY48

Look it up and enjoy. There is a 2010 remake, which has a cheeky reference in one scene to the original, and it’s fun, but nothing can beat the artistry of Ray Harryhausen.

Tomorrow, we meet Narcissus and Nausicaa! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - L Is For Lamia, Laomedon And Laocoon

 Today’s Greek myths involve some lesser known characters. Two of them are connected with the story of Troy, the other is a nursery bogey(and more). 

Lamia. Public Domain 

Lamia was, in the beginning, a beautiful woman, a Queen of Libya. She was so beautiful, in fact, that she scored Zeus for a lover. He gave her a party trick which enabled her to pull out her eyes and pop them back in. No idea why she wanted that particular super power, but there you are. It sounds a bit like St Lucy, a virgin Christian martyr who dealt with a particularly annoying suitor by pulling out her eyes and saying, “You like my eyes? There you are, have them!”

But Lamia was anything but a virgin or a martyr. She and her godly lover had several children. Predictably this affair annoyed Hera, who killed off all her children except Scylla(you know - the girl who was turned into a monster for stealing Circe’s boyfriend?). Personally I would have thought that it would make more sense to kill off Lamia, so Zeus couldn’t sleep with her any more, but gods don’t have a lot of logic in their make-up. As her revenge, Lamia started killing and eating other people’s children, and eventually became as ugly on the outside as on the inside, something to scare kids with - “Behave or I’ll call Lamia to eat you!” She must have been able to hide that, though, because she became an incubus, hanging around with the Empusae, daughters of Hecate, who seduced and vampirised young men. The Empusae were apparently easy to get rid of, if you knew what you were dealing with; you just had to be rude to them!

Public Domain

Laomedon was a king of Troy. At one stage, he needed walls built, and what was better than having them built by gods? As it happened, two of them were available. Poseidon and Apollo were in trouble with Zeus for getting on the wrong side of a quarrel with Hera and participating in an unsuccessful rebellion against Zeus. 

The problem was, Laomedon was cheap. Like an idiot, he didn’t pay them the agreed rate for building the walls, and, this being Greece, not the Norse myths, he didn’t have Loki to fix it for him.. Yet another idiot moral trying to cheat gods! Apollo sent a plague and Poseidon a sea monster, to which he had to sacrifice his daughter, Hesione(sound familiar?). She was rescued by Heracles, who jumped into the monster’s throat and spent three days struggling with it. The price was Laomedon’s immortal white horses. 

But even with his daughter safe, he still tried to cheat Heracles by fobbing him off with ordinary horses. A bit like promising Shadowfax and handing over Bill the pony instead. There are other versions of the story, but this one is how I see Laomedon.

Anyway, Troy suffered for his behaviour, with Heracles sacking it and killing Laomedon and all his sons except for Priam, who had argued  for honesty with the mares. So Priam was put on the throne, presumably to get the city back in shape, at least till the Trojan War ended it, and Hesione was taken away to Salamis, where she became the wife of Heracles’ good pal Telamon. That’s what happens when you try to cheat gods and demigods.

Laocoon and his sons. Public Domain 

Finally, for today, we will meet Laocoon. Laocoon was a priest of Apollo, who also had to take over the priesthood of Poseidon, which had been out of action for nine years while the war was going on. But the Greeks had built the Wooden Horse in hopes of ending the war their way, and put their heroes in it. And those gods were not on the side of the Trojans. 

There was a debate going on about whether or not they should take the Horse into the city. They had “captured” a Greek spy, Sinon, who spun them a plausible yarn about why it was there. Laocoon was highly suspicious. He stuck a spear into the Horse’s side, nearly skewering a Greek hero. He said he was going away to do a sacrifice to Poseidon and hoped that they would have the sense to burn it in the meantime. 

Again - Apollo and Poseidon were not on his side. He had annoyed them both. When he waded into the water, a couple of serpents wound themselves around him - and his sons - and killed them. 

I’m sure you can figure out what happened next. His death was so obviously a Sign! A Portent! Obviously the Horse had to go into the city. 

Mind you, Helen was also suspicious and took a look around, later that evening, calling out to the men she just knew were in there, mimicking their wives’ voices. She nearly succeeded, but they managed to keep quiet.

It’s not for nothing “Trojan Horse” is still used as a computer term and for anything else that sneaks in something you really don’t want there!  

Tomorrow, we will meet Medusa.

A To Z Blogging Challenge - K Is For Kassiopeia

 Today, I’m grabbing the chance to use the spelling most convenient to me. I could have spelt it with a C, the most common spelling, but then I’d have to think about another K word, and that might be Kassandra, whose name is also most commonly spelt with a C, anyway. 

Anyway, today’s focus is on a woman who was part of someone else’s story, that of Perseus, and her daughter, Andromeda’s.  

Public Domain. Notice that Pegasus is in there?

Kassiopeia is one of those Mums of Mythology who say something that upsets a god or more than one and pays for it. In fact, their kids usually pay for it. 

There is, for example, Niobe, a woman who bragged that she was much better off than Leto, the mother of Artemis and Apollo, because she had fourteen kids and Leto only had two. You can guess what happened next - Leto’s kids wiped them out. Niobe turned into a rock that kept weeping for them, ie a spring, but poetic.

There is the mother of Psyche in Lucius Apuleius’s charming novel The Golden Ass. She bragged that her girl was lovelier than Venus. And yes, was ordered to tie up Psyche where she could be carried off by a monster. Fortunately, the “monster” turned out to be Cupid, so that was okay, but Psyche went through a lot in a story not unlike the fairytale “East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon”.

Kassiopeia was the wife of Cepheus, the Ethiopian King of Joppa, which is now Jaffa, right near Tel Aviv. I’ve been there! 

For some reason, artists of the past never seem to paint her as black. And the role, in the original Clash Of The Titans,  was played by Sian Phillips. Oh, well.

She had some godly relatives, being the daughter of a sea nymph, so she may even have been related to the goddesses she offended, but then again, she had been living a normal mortal life and you just don’t tell everyone that your daughter is more beautiful than the Nereids, daughters of the sea god Nereus, even if she is! (One of them, by the way, was Thetis, mother of Achilles).

Next thing the people of Joppa knew, there was a flood, organised by Poseidon, to whom the girls complained, and it was not going to stop until a naked Andromeda was sacrificed to the sea monster which he also sent. 

So, the poor girl was stripped and tied to a rock to await her doom. But the young hero Perseus was flying overhead with his winged sandals, after killing the Gorgon, and immediately fell for her. 

If you think he was just helping out of kindness, think again. Perseus flew down to the distraught parents first, and offered to rescue their daughter provided they agreed to let him marry her and take her home to Greece with him. 

“Yes, yes, anything, just save her!” they scream.

So, Perseus flies up again and, according to the account I’ve read, instead of using Medusa’s head right away, cuts off the monster’s head, but stone was in there somewhere, after his heroic achievement, and he freed Andromeda and took her back to shore. 

At this point, Kassiopeia is not crazy about the idea of marrying her daughter to some flying stranger who wants to take her away, and anyway, she was actually betrothed to someone else. 

“Let’s get married now!” says Andromeda, who knows her mother very well, besides which, who’d want to stick around till the next idiocy that comes out of Kassiopeia’s mouth? 

The someone else turns up demanding his bride. Kassiopeia tells everyone that the agreement with Perseus was made under duress, so doesn’t count. She does have a point there, but there is a huge fight, during which Perseus uses Medusa’s head to wipe out 200 men, then flies off with his bride. 

The whole family ended up as constellations in the sky, but Kassiopeia is shown sometimes as upside down in her chair, to make her look ridiculous.

Public Domain

I mentioned that I was in Jaffa. That was years ago, but I saw the rock of Andromeda, though at the time I was told it was supposed to be the monster turned into stone; apparently that was taken to Rome! Still, it was fascinating to be right where it all happened. 

Come back tomorrow for some L people from the myths!