fn6 Named by historical convention the house of Atreus, after one his sons. The fall of the house of Pelops and Atreus involves the destinies of many heroes and warriors right down to the Trojan war and its aftermath. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes were all descended from Pelops and said to have inherited his and Tantalus’s curse. Pelops’s name lives on, of course, in the Peloponnese, the great peninsula to the south west of the Grecian mainland.
fn7 Tantalum is one of those refractory metals that is essential these days in the manufacture of many of our electronic devices.
fn8 A tantalus is a small cabinet containing two or three drinks decanters, usually of brandy, whisky or rum. The drinks are on display but the cabinet is locked, and thus tantalizingly out of the reach of the children of the household.
SISYPHUS
fn1 The rascally entertainer, pickpocket, tinker and ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is called Autolycus.
fn2 This violation of Amphithea gave rise to the rumour that Sisyphus was the true father of Autolycus’s daughter ANTICLEA. Anticlea begat LAERTES and Laertes begat the great hero ODYSSEUS aka Ulysses, who was known above all for his wiliness and resource.
fn3 Asopos had charge of at least two rivers. There was the one in Boeotia that watered Thebes, and this one, which ran through Corinth.
HUBRIS
fn1 Once he had married Niobe and taken her to Thebes, the city he helped found, Amphion added three strings to that lyre’s original four, so that, in honour of her birthplace in Asia Minor, he could play music in what is still called the Lydian mode.
fn2 At this time, as in the subsequent Age of Heroes, there was always the possibility of humans attaining immortal rank. It was to happen to HERAKLES. In later civilizations Roman emperors could be deified, Roman Catholics sanctified and film actors catasterized in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
fn3 The rock is limestone, but the element niobium, very similar in composition and characteristics to tantalum, is named after the queen of tears.
fn4 It is a pleasing coincidence that one of the chief uses of palladium, the element named in Pallas Athena’s honour, is in the manufacture of woodwind instruments. Or is it a coincidence? Hm …?
fn5 Now, if you really cannot stomach the idea of such cruelty from an otherwise so admirable god, you might prefer another reading of the story. The Hungarian philologist and mythographer Károly Kerényi, one of the great pioneers of the study of Greek myth, pointed out that satyrs customarily dressed themselves in pelts of animal skin. He maintains that what Apollo actually did was confiscate the hide from Marsyas so that he had to go naked. That was all. The punishment was no greater than that. This is an amiable and convincing interpretation but not one that generations of artists ever believed.
fn6 One version of the myth maintains it was a capricious and sulky Apollo who challenged the gifted Marsyas, not the other way around, making the fable more about divine jealousy than mortal hubris.
ARACHNE
fn1 Lydia is a common setting for many of the myths. The Greeks colonized the area they called Ionia, which included Lydia, and which today we would recognize as the Anatolian region of Turkey.
fn2 The gods later took pity on her and changed her into a stork. Storks ever after ate snakes, apparently. This was not the Theban ANTIGONE, daughter of OEDIPUS, but a Trojan girl of the same name.
fn3 Daughters of Minyas, a King of Boeotia. They were LEUCIPPE, ARSIPPE and ALCATHOE. A recently discovered species of European bat is named the Myotis alcathoe in her honour. The sisters’ fate was often used as a warning to those who were tempted away from a life of Dionysian revelry – we are more likely to expect warnings in the other direction these days.
MORE METAMORPHOSES
fn1 Sometimes these myths can be regarded as aetiological – in other words, offering explanations for how things got to be the way they are. Arachne could be seen as a story that explains why the spider weaves, Melissa tells us why the bee makes honey, and so on. Sort of ‘How the Elephant Got Its Trunk’ fables. Certainly the names of flowers and animals that relate to many of these types of myth have come down to us in Latinate scientific nomenclature such as ‘Daphne Laureola’ for the spurge laurel, or the common or garden names, Narcissus, Hyacinth, etc.
fn2 Attica is the area of Greece that includes Athens. ‘Attic Greek’ is the classical form of the language that comes down to us in the poetry, drama, oratory and philosophy of the great Athenian writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries BC. To many Greeks from outside Attica it was perhaps what England is to the other countries of the United Kingdom, the snooty dominant region that outsiders tactlessly and lazily think of when they say ‘Greece’.
fn3 Not to be confused with SCYLLA the cruel sea monster that, with the whirlpool CHARYBDIS, formed such an impassable barrier to sailors in the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland.
fn4 Who was turned by Zeus into a wolf you may recall, during the early days of Pelasgian mankind.
fn5 In fact Callisto does double duty in the heavens as she lives on as one of Jupiter’s moons.
fn6 The Greeks thought the sound the hoopoe made was pou? pou? which means ‘where? where?’ – perhaps indicating the distraught Tereus calling for his son. Shakespeare called the nightingale ‘Philomel’ in Sonnet CII – ‘As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing’ – but confusingly Philomela’s name is most commonly seen in the scientific name for the song-thrush: Turdus philomelos.
fn7 The Greek for ‘one who shows figs’ is sycophant – it seems that either sellers of the fruit in the streets and marketplaces were known for their fawning, flattering attentions, or showing a fig was the equivalent of a phallic gesture (figs have always been considered an erotic fruit after all) or it may have been something to do with the way figs are harvested. Whatever the reason, fig-showing/sycophancy became a word associated in Athenian legal contexts with those who brought frivolous, malicious or unjustified private prosecutions. Their toadying manner caused the word ‘sycophancy’ to take on its common meaning today.
fn8 Creon was that soul of pragmatism and good governance whose tragic family history was the subject of Sophocles Theban Cycle of plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. I played him when I was sixteen and received reviews. I’ll say no more.
fn9 In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom and his confused friends memorably mangle the names of these doomed lovers in their performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:
Pyramus (Bottom): Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.