Thisbe (Flute): As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.
fn10 It forms the subject of John Keats’s extended poem Endymion.
EOS AND TITHONUS
fn1 Laomedon was the son of Ganymede’s elder brother Ilos, the King of Troy.
fn2 A cicada in some versions. I was always taught a grasshopper perhaps because they are commonly found in Britain. Books for British children probably thought a cicada would be a harder insect for us to visualize. Oddly Tithonus’s name lives on biologically not as a cicada or grasshopper, but in a type of birdwing or swallowtail butterfly, Ornithoptera tithonus.
fn3 A happy thought inspired the geologist Albert Oppel to name one of the late Jurassic ages the Tithonian as a bow to Eos, for it is the age that marks the dawn of the Cretaceous. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ is one of his most loved and anthologized poems. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed to Eos, in which he begs her to deliver him from his senility.
… After many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream …
It contains a famous line that might be considered one of the great themes of Greek myth:
The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.
THE BLOOM OF YOUTH
fn1 ‘Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid.’ is her complaint, according to Ovid in his Metamorphoses.
fn2 Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis retells the myth, basing itself on the version Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. In Shakespeare’s rendition the death of Adonis causes Venus to curse love and decree that henceforward it should always be tinged with tragedy. As she prophesies in her grief:
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend …
It shall be cause of war and dire events
And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire …
They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.
A prophecy that seems to have come all too true.
ECHO AND NARCISSUS
fn1 Note the similarity of the offence to Actaeon’s crime of spying on Artemis. The modesty of the gods while bathing was prodigious.
T. S. Eliot makes memorable reference to Tiresias in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of his poem The Waste Land:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see …
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest …
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all …
fn2 The honour of being asked to adjudicate amongst the gods might seem great for a mortal, but as this story shows, and as the Trojan prince Paris was to discover, the results could be catastrophic.
fn3 The Moirai, you will remember, were the Fates. The Greeks felt that for every individual there was a personal, singular moira that could be expressed as a mixture of necessity, doom, justice and fortune. Something between luck and kismet.
fn4 Ameinias, according to some sources, became a sweet-smelling herb. Possibly dill. Perhaps cumin. Maybe anise.
fn5 No one we know, of course …
LOVERS
fn1 The remains of Babylon lie under, or poke through, the sands of Iraq, about fifty miles south of Baghdad.
fn2 In the farcical production in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pyramus (played by Bottom) cries out as he stabs himself:
Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.
Now am I dead,
Now am I fled;
My soul is in the sky.
Tongue, lose thy light;
Moon, take thy flight;
Now die, die, die, die, die.
GALATEAS
fn1 A word that covers moulting, shedding, casting off and re-evaluating. Slipping out of one thing and popping on another.
fn2 For more on this fascinating subject, see David D. Leitao, ‘The Perils of Leukippos: Initiatory Transvestism and Male Gender Ideology in the Ekdusia at Phaistos’, in Classical Antiquity, vol. 14, no. 1 (1995).
fn3 Daphne should not be confused with DAPHNIS, a Sicilian youth of great beauty who was found as a baby under the laurel bush that gave him his name. Both Hermes and Pan fell in love with him, the latter teaching him to play the pipes. He became so proficient that later generations credited him with the invention of pastoral poetry. In the second century AD Longus, an author from Lesbos, wrote a romance (like The Golden Ass a contender for the title First Ever Novel) called Daphnis and Chloë which tells of two bucolic lovers who undergo all kinds of ordeals and adventures to test their love. Offenbach composed an operetta based on this tale. Even better known is the revolutionary 1912 ballet with music by Maurice Ravel, choreographed by Fokine and danced by Nijinsky.
fn4 Paphian became a word to describe Aphrodite and the arts of love. George Bernard Shaw chose Pygmalion as the title for his play about a man who tries to turn a cockney girl into a Mayfair lady.
fn5 Little is known about Leander. Christopher Marlowe’s poem tells us nothing much more than that he was a youth who met Hero and fell in love. Leigh Hunt wrote another, which is no more informative.
fn6 In Marlowe’s poem she wears a veil of flowers so realistically embroidered that she has to swat bees away …
fn7 Leander’s name lives on in England’s venerable and exclusive rowing club, whose candy pink socks, tie and oar-blades are such an alarming feature of the Henley Regatta.
fn8 The achievement clearly meant a lot to the club-footed but superbly athletic poet. He wrote this to his friend Henry Drury: ‘This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous; – so much so, that I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise.’
Six days after his feat Byron even wrote a mock heroic poem on the subject, ‘Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’ (overleaf):
If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
If, when the wintry tempest roared,
He sped to Hero, nothing loth,
And thus of old thy current poured,
Fair Venus! how I pity both!
For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I’ve done a feat to-day.
But since he crossed the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo, – and – Lord knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory;
’Twere hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest:
For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague.