Zeus’s eyebrows gathered in a dark and troubled frown. There was a rumbling in the sky and black clouds began to bank and billow above. The animals fidgeted, watching in alarm as the light dimmed and frets of wind flapped the festive tablecloths and ruffled the goddesses’ shimmering gowns.
Zeus, like most busy and important beings, had no patience with fussiness or self-pity. This silly, flighty dot of a creature was demanding a mortal sting, was she? Well, he would show her.
‘Wretched insect!’ he thundered. ‘How dare you demand so monstrous a prize? A talent like yours should be shared out, not jealously hoarded. Not only shall I deny your request –’
Melissa broke in with a high-pitched drone of displeasure. ‘But you gave your word!’
There was a gasp from the whole assembly. Could she really have dared to interrupt Zeus and question his honour?
‘I beg your pardon, but I think you’ll find that I proclaimed …’ growled the god with an icy self-restraint that was far more terrifying than any outburst of temper ‘… that the winner could ask any favour. I made no promise that such a request would be granted.’
Melissa’s wings drooped in disappointment.fn16
‘However,’ Zeus said, raising his hand, ‘from this moment forward the gathering of your honey will be made easier by my decree that you shall not labour alone. You will be queen of a whole colony, a whole swarm of productive subjects. Furthermore, I shall grant you a fatal and painful sting.’
Melissa’s wings pricked up perkily.
‘But,’ Zeus continued, ‘while it will bring a sharp pain to the one you sting, it is to you and your kind that it will bring death. So let it be.’
Another rumble of thunder and the sky began to clear.
Immediately Melissa felt a strange movement inside her. She looked down and saw that something long, thin and sharp like a lance was pushing its way out of the end of her abdomen. It was a sting, as finely pointed as a needle but ending in a wicked and terrible barb. With a wild twitch, a buzz and a final droning wail she flew away.
Meliss is still the Greek word for the honeybee, and it is true that its sting is a suicide weapon of last resort. If it should try to fly away after the barb has lodged in the pierced skin of its victim, a bee will tug out its own insides in the effort of freeing itself. The much less useful and diligent wasp has no such barb and can administer its sting as many times as it likes without danger to itself. But wasps, annoying as they are, never made selfish, hubristic demands of the gods.
It is also true that science calls the order of insects to which the honeybee belongs Hymenoptera, which is Greek for ‘wedding wings’.
Food of the Gods
Perhaps it was more than just temper and impatience that caused Zeus to punish Melissa – whose honey really was quite marvellously delicious – with such severity. Perhaps it had been policy. The whole assembled world of immortals was there to witness the moment. It had been a lesson for them in the implacability of the King of the Gods.
The silence that now fell on the wedding feast was as dark and forbidding as the storm clouds that had massed earlier. Zeus raised the amphora of honey high above his head.
‘For my queen and my beloved wife, I bless this amphora. It shall never empty. Eternally shall it feed us. Whosoever tastes its honey shall never grow old or die. It shall be the food of the gods and, when mixed with the juice of fruits, it shall be the drink of the gods.’
A great cheer went up, doves flew overhead, the clouds and the silence were dispelled. The Muses Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore stepped forward and clapped their hands. Music played, hymns of praise were sung and the dancing began. Many plates were broken in ecstasy, a tradition that is carried on to this day wherever Greeks gather to eat, celebrate and earn tourist money.
The Greek for ‘immortal’ is ambrotos and ‘immortality’ itself is AMBROSIA, which became the name of the specially blessed honey. Its fermented drinkable form, a kind of mead, they called NECTAR in honour of the flowers whose sweet gift it was.
Bad Zeus
Hera’s cup was running over – literally, at the moment, for an attentive naiad was filling her goblet with nectar up to and over the brim – but figuratively too. Her oldest son had made a brilliant marriage and Zeus had sworn oaths of fidelity and fealty to her before all who mattered in the world.
She did not notice that, even now, her insatiable lord was watching with lustful eyes the dancing of LETO, a most beautiful nymph from the island of Kos.fn17 Leto was a daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus, themselves grateful recipients of Zeus’s recent amnesty and present at the feast.
A voice murmured in Zeus’s ear. ‘You are thinking that my cousin Leto owes you her life and should therefore be willing to share her bed with you.’
Zeus looked up into the wise, humorous eyes of his tutor Metis, the Oceanid whose wit, guile and insight were unmatched anywhere. Metis, whom he still loved and who he was sure loved him. His blood, already warmed by nectar and ambrosia, had been heated further by the dancing and the music.fn18 The spark that had always jumped between him and Metis threatened to burst into a great fire.
She saw this and raised a hand. ‘Never, Zeus, never. I have been like a mother to you. Besides, this is your wedding day – are you lost to all sense of decency?’
All sense of decency was exactly what Zeus was lost to. He touched Metis under the table. Alarmed, she moved away. Zeus got up and followed her. She quickened her pace, turned a corner and darted down the mountainside.
Zeus ran in pursuit, transforming himself first into a bull, then a bear, next a lion and then an eagle. Metis hid behind a pile of boulders deep in a cave, but Zeus, turning himself into a snake, managed to slither through a gap in the rocks and wrap his coils around her.
Metis had always loved Zeus and, both worn down and touched by his persistence, she finally consented. Yet even as they came together something bothered Zeus. A prophecy he had heard from Phoebe. Something about a child of Metis rising to overcome the father.
Afterwards, as playful pillow talk, they fell into a conversation on the subject of transformations – metamorphoses as they are called in Greek. How a god or Titan might be able to turn others, or themselves, into animals, plants and even solid objects, just as Zeus had done as he had chased Metis. She congratulated him on his skill at this art.
‘Yes,’ said Zeus, with some self-satisfaction. ‘I pursued you as bull, bear, lion and eagle, but it was as a snake that I captured you. You have a reputation for cunning and guile, Metis, but I outsmarted you. Admit it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I could have beaten you. Why, if I had turned myself into a fly you could never have caught me, could you?’
Zeus laughed. ‘You think not? How little you know me.’
‘Go on, then,’ Metis taunted. ‘Catch me now!’ With a buzz and whizz she turned into a fly and darted about the cave. In a twinkle Zeus transformed himself into a lizard and with a quick flick of a long sticky tongue Metis (along with any possible child of Zeus’s that even now might be forming in her womb) had been safely transferred to his interior. His father Kronos’s unkind habit of eating anyone prophesied to conquer him seemed to have been passed down to Zeus.
When he slipped back to Olympus in his own shape, congratulating himself at how much cleverer than the supposedly cunning Metis he was, the music and dancing were in full swing and his wife didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.