fn10 I’m damned if I can find a convincing definition of ‘girdle’. Some think it’s a belt, others a device more like a Playtex panelled support or corset – others yet have described it as a ‘mythical Wonderbra’. Calasso calls it ‘a soft deceiving sash’.
fn11 ‘A garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground’ is Roberto Calasso’s excellent description in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
fn12 Scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales. The Dalmatae (a name ultimately deriving from an early Albanian word for ‘sheep’) were an Illyrian tribe to the northwest of the region who gave their name to this Dalmatian coast (and the dog).
fn13 Being from Tyre, Cadmus probably used the word for ‘let it be so’ most commonly used throughout the Middle East: Amen.
TWICE BORN
fn1 Cadmus and Harmonia’s sons Polydorus and Illyrius were too young to rule. In time Polydorus would go on to reign in Thebes, and Illyrius would rule over the kingdom that bore his name, Illyria, as we have already seen.
fn2 The real Beroë, an Oceanid who had indeed nursed the young gods, gave her name to the city of Beirut.
fn3 Another word for the appearance and revelation of a god to a mortal is ‘theophany’.
fn4 It was common, as you may remember from Apollo’s promise to Phaeton, for gods to swear by this dark and hateful river.
fn5 An astonishing story. As Ovid himself says of it: ‘If man can believe this …’
fn6 The name probably couples ‘god’ (Dio, meaning Zeus) with the Nysus, the birthplace.
fn7 A grateful Zeus rewarded them by adding them to the heavens as the Hyades, a spiral constellation whose rising and setting the Greeks believed presaged rain.
fn8 Books 10, 11 and 12 of the sprawling forty-eight-book epic poem the Dionysiaca, written by the Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis in the fifth century AD, details this relationship and its aftermath at great length.
fn9 Nonnus interrupts the action here (a thing he does a lot: his poem is astonishingly dull, given its superb subject matter) by having Eros come to comfort Dionysus with tales of other great male lovers. He tells of KALAMOS and KARPOS (the latter being son of Zephyrus the West Wind and CHLORIS, nymph of greenery and new growth – as in ‘chlorophyl’ and ‘chlorine’), two beautiful youths passionately in love with each other. During a swimming contest (athletics and hunting seem to be a theme with beautiful youths coming to a sticky end, as we shall see in the tales of HYACINTHUS, ACTAEON, CROCUS and ADONIS, amongst others), Karpos dies, and a desolated, grief-stricken Kalamos commits suicide. Kalamos is then changed into reeds and Karpos into fruit: they are the Greek words for ‘reed’ and ‘fruit’ to this day.
fn10 It is said that he gave the secrets of the vine to every known land except Britain and Ethiopia. It is sadly true that neither country has a great reputation for winemaking, although that is changing and these days English wines are making a name for themselves. Perhaps the same is true of Ethiopian vintages.
fn11 The violent mysteries of these extreme worshippers were depicted in all their shocking savagery by the Athenian playwright Euripides in the fifth century BC in the Bacchae. In this bloody tragedy Dionysus returns to Thebes to wreak his revenge on those of his mother’s sisters who refused to believe Semele’s claim to be carrying Zeus’s child. The god sends King Pentheus mad and causes his own bewitched aunts, Agave, Ino and Autonoë, to tear the poor man apart, limb from limb.
fn12 Ovid, in his retellings of Dionysus’ myths, commonly uses the name LIBER for him. It carries the sense of ‘freedom’ and of ‘libertine’ – as well as, unconnectedly, ‘book’.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED
fn1 If you want to impress your friends, you can learn the following list of the male and female hounds as given by Ovid in his version of the myth. If nothing else they might serve as useful names for online passwords.
Dogs: Melampus, Ichnobates, Pamphagos, Dorceus, Oribasos, Nebrophonos, Lailaps, Theron, Pterelas, Hylaeus, Ladon, Dromas, Tigris, Leucon, Asbolos, Lacon, Aello, Thoos, Harpalos, Melaneus, Labros, Arcas, Argiodus, Hylactor.
Bitches: Agre, Nape, Poemenis, Harpyia, Canache, Sticte, Alce, Lycisce, Lachne, Melanchaetes, Therodamas, Oresitrophos.
THE DOCTOR AND THE CROW
fn1 Although, on a BBC TV adaptation of the Gormenghast books, I worked with an albino crow called Jimmy White.
fn2 koronis is a Greek word for ‘crow’ or ‘rook’. Its original meaning is ‘curved’, whether in reference to the curves of the princess or of the bird’s beak I cannot say.
fn3 Some use the staff of Asclepius (or Hippocratic staff) – a rough wooden stick, entwined with a single serpent. Others use the caduceus of Hermes – a more slender and elegant staff entwined by two serpents whose heads meet at the top and are surmounted by a pair of wings. There does not seem to be any professional or clinical significance in the choice; it is purely a matter of preference.
fn4 The poet and scholar Callimachus, who lived in the third century BC, suggested that Apollo and Admetus became enthusiastic lovers during this period of servitude.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
fn1 Only one such equine–human hybrid had been seen on earth before: the great Chiron, tutor to Asclepius, Achilles and many others. Chiron’s birth could be traced back to the time of Kronos, son of Ouranos and Gaia, father of Zeus and Hera. During a lull in the Titanomachy, Kronos fell for PHYLIRA, an Oceanid of great beauty. She repelled his advances until, tiring of her bashfulness, he transformed himself into a great black stallion and took her against her will. Chiron was the offspring of this union and – despite pre-dating Centauros by many hundreds of years – he is referred to as a centaur by convention.
fn2 Athamas was a brother of Sisyphus, the reason for whose infamy we shall soon see.
fn3 Shakespeare’s King Lear cries out:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
fn4 There was another son, BROTEAS, who liked to hunt and whose life seems to have been uneventful compared to that of his siblings. He is said to have carved a figure of Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess, into the rock of Mount Sipylus. Parts of it are still visible to the tourist today.
fn5 The Olympians may have subsisted on ambrosia and nectar, but they took great delight in the variety offered by mortal diets too.