The second set of Horai was responsible for a more worldly kind of law and order. They were EUNOMIA, goddess of law and legislation, DIKÉ goddess of justice and the moral order (the Roman equivalent was JUSTITIA) and EIRENE, the goddess of peace (PAX to the Romans).
Moirai
The three MOIRAI, or Fates, were named CLOTHO, LACHESIS and ATROPOS. These daughters of Nyx are to be thought of as sitting round a spinning wheeclass="underline" Clotho spins the thread that represents a life, Lachesis measures out its length and Atropos (the relentless, remorseless one, literally the ‘un-turning’) chooses when to shear the thread and cut the life short.fn8 I picture them as sunken-cheeked crones, clothed in black rags, sitting in a cave cackling and nodding as they spin, but many sculptors and poets represented them as pink-cheeked maidens, dressed in white robes and smiling demurely. Their name derives from a word that means ‘portion’ or ‘lot’, in the sense of ‘that which is allotted to you’. ‘It was not her portion to be loved’, or, ‘It was his lot to be unhappy’, are the kinds of phrases Greeks employed to describe attributes or destinies apportioned by the Moirai. Even the gods had to submit themselves to the Fates’ cruel decrees.fn9
Keres
These carrion daughters of Nyx were the vile and rapacious spirits of violent death. Like the Valkyries of Norse and Germanic myth they collected the souls of warriors killed in battle. Unlike those benevolent warrior goddesses however, the Keres did not escort their heroic souls to the reward of a Valhalla. They flew from bleeding body to body, greedily sucking up the blood that flowed from them; then, when each corpse was thoroughly drained, they threw it over their shoulders and moved on to the next.
Gorgons
The primordial sea god Pontus had by Gaia a son, PHORCYS, and a daughter, CETO. The progeny of this brother and sister were three island-dwelling sisters, the Gorgons STHENO, EURYALE and MEDUSA. With hair of writhing venomous snakes, intense staring eyes, hideous fixed smiles, boar’s tusk teeth, clawed hands of brass and taloned feet, and scaly golden bodies, these monstrous sisters appeared frightful enough to freeze the blood. But anyone who caught a Gorgon’s eye – exchanged looks with her for just one fleeting second – would quite literally be turned instantly to stone. The word for that is ‘petrified’, which has come to mean scared stiff.
Spirits of Air, Earth and Water
These threesomes were not the only significant beings to spring into life at this time. All over the world, as the Titanomachy raged around them, nature sprites and spirits of all kinds began to multiply and claim their areas of sovereignty. One pictures them scampering for shelter and trembling behind bushes while the rocks and thunderbolts fly through the air and the earth shakes with the violence of war. Somehow these often fragile beings survived and thrived, to enrich the world with their beauty, dedication and charm.
Perhaps the best known of them are the NYMPHS, a major class of minor female deities, divided into clans or subspecies according to their habitats. The OREADS held court in the mountains, hills and grottoes of Greece and its islands, while the Nereids (like the Oceanids from whom they descended) were denizens of the deep. NAIADS, their freshwater counterparts, were found in lakes and streams of running water, or in the reeds that fringed them and on riverbanks. Over time some water nymphs began to associate themselves with ever more specific realms. Soon there were PEGAEAE, who looked after natural springs, and POTAMEIDES, who dwelt in and around rivers.fn10 On land the AULONIADES kept to pastures and groves, while the LEIMAKIDES lived in meadows. Woodland spirits included light-winged DRYADS and the HAMADRYADS, sylvan nymphs whose lives were tied to the trees they made their home. When their tree died or was cut down, they died too. More specialist wood nymphs populated just apple trees or laurels. The Meliae, nymphs of the sweet manna-bearing ash tree, we have already met.
The fate of the hamadryads shows that nymphs could die. They never aged or fell prey to diseases, but they were not always immortal.
And so, while the natural world ripened, rippled and replicated in this prodigiously bravura manner, seeding itself with ever more marvellous demigods and immortals, the earth trembled and shook with the violence and terror of war. But this proliferation ensured that, when the smoke and dust of battle at last cleared, the victors would rule a world filled with life, colour and character. The triumphant Zeus was set to inherit an earth, sea and sky infinitely richer than the ones into which he had been born.
Disposer Supreme and Judge of the Earth
Zeus now moved to make sure the defeated Titans could never rise again to threaten his order. His strongest and most violent opponent in the war had not been Kronos but ATLAS, the brutally powerful eldest son of Iapetus and Clymene.fn11 Atlas had been at the centre of every battle, rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity. This killed two birds with one stone. Zeus’s predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy. At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him. Legs braced, muscles bunched, his mighty body contorted itself with this supreme and agonizing effort. For aeons he groaned there like a Bulgarian weightlifter. In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day. His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honour we still call ‘atlases’.fn12 To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named ‘the Atlantic’ after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished.
As for Kronos – the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy – his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual and lonely exile. Every day and hour and minute was his to be marked out, for Zeus doomed Kronos to count infinity itself. We can see him everywhere even today, the gaunt sinister figure with his sickle. Now given the cheap and humiliating nickname ‘Old Father Time’, his sallow, drawn features tell us of the inevitable and merciless ticking of Cosmos’s clock, driving all to their end days. The scythe swings and cuts like a remorseless pendulum. All mortal flesh is as grass beneath the cruel sweep of its mowing blade. We find Kronos in all things ‘chronic’ or ‘synchronized’, in ‘chronometers’, ‘chronographs’ and ‘chronicles’.fn13 The Romans gave this saturnine, sallow husk of a defeated Titan the name SATURN. He hangs in the sky between his father Uranus and his son Jupiter.fn14
Not all the Titans were banished or punished. To many Zeus showed magnanimity and mercy, while on those few who had sided with him in the war he showered favours.fn15 Atlas’s brother Prometheus was chief amongst those who had had the prescience to fight for the gods against their own kind.fn16 Zeus rewarded him with his companionship, taking ever more delight in the young Titan’s presence until one day which was to have massive consequences for humankind, consequences we feel even now. The story of that friendship and its tragic end will be told soon.