Arcadian Nights Read online

  ARCADIAN NIGHTS

  THE GREEK MYTHS REIMAGINED

  JOHN SPURLING

  The classical Greek intellectual tradition pervades nearly every aspect of our modern Western civilization. Our logic and science, our philosophy, politics, literature, architecture, and art are all indebted to the ancient inhabitants of that small mountainous Mediterranean country. And the powerful myths of the Greeks, refined by Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and the great Greek dramatists, still resonate at the core of our culture.

  Taking as his starting point many of the famous tourist sites in the Peloponnese, where the stories are set, John Spurling, winner of the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, freshly imagines key narratives from the Greek canon, including tales of the doomed house of Atreus (notably Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks at Troy, murdered by his wife in his palace bathroom); of the god Apollo; goddess Athene; Theseus, scourge of the Minotaur; the Twelve Labors of Heracles; and Perseus, rescuer of Andromeda.

  In this vibrant, gripping and often grisly retelling of the Greek myths, stories of murder, power, revenge, love, and traumatic family relationships are made new again for our time with wit and relish by a gifted author. Spurling has added scene, dialogue, and context, while always staying true to the spirit of the original myth.

  JOHN SPURLING is the author of the novels The Ten Thousand Things (winner of the 2015 Walter Scott prize for Historical Fiction), The Ragged End, After Zenda and A Book of Liszts. He is a prolific playwright, whose plays have been performed on television, radio and stage, including at the National Theatre. Spurling is also the author of two critical books on Graham Greene’s novels and Samuel Beckett’s plays (with John Fletcher), has been a frequent reviewer for newspapers, magazines and BBC Radio, and was for twelve years the art critic of The New Statesman. He lives in London and Arcadia, Greece, and is married to the biographer Hilary Spurling.

  Copyright

  First published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2016 by

  Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected],

  or to write us at the above address.

  LONDON

  30 Calvin Street, London E1 6NW

  T: 020 7490 7300

  E: [email protected]

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected],

  or write to us at the above address.

  © 2015 by John Spurling

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1327-7

  In memory of my grandfather, J.C. Stobart,

  who died before I was born,

  and my grandmother, Molly Stobart,

  who taught me to admire him and share his love of Greece.

  I believe that our art and literature has by this time absorbed and assimilated what Greece had to teach, and that our roots are so entwined with the soil of Greek culture that we can never lose the taste of it as long as books are read and pictures painted.

  from the introduction to J.C. Stobart’s

  The Glory That Was Greece (1911)

  NOTES

  1. The Greek language has no letter ‘c’ or diphthong ‘ae’, which come from Latin. Greek uses ‘k’ and ‘ai’. For familiar names, such as Arcadia, Clytemnestra, Mycenae, I have used the Latin spelling, but for less familiar ones, the Greek. ‘Herakles’ is the main exception, since the Roman ‘Hercules’ is a composite figure, partly derived from the Greek hero, partly based on an old Italian deity.

  The word ‘Greek’ itself is, of course, a Latin usage, probably derived from the tribe of the Graeci who inhabited the north-western coast of Greece and were the first ‘Greeks’ encountered by the Romans. The ancient Greeks called themselves ‘Hellenes’ and their country ‘Hellas’, while modern Greeks, dropping the aspirate, call themselves ‘Éllenes’ (three syllables with the accent on the first and a long ‘e’ in the second) and their country ‘Elláda’.

  The long ‘e’ at the end of Greek names such as Athene, Antiope, Hippolyte, should always be sounded.

  2. ‘Human kind,’ said T.S. Eliot, ‘cannot bear very much reality,’ and their myths cannot bear very much real time. For example: Pelops and his bride Hippodameia seem to be contemporary with Perseus, the great-grandfather of Herakles; Herakles is contemporary with Theseus; Theseus marries the daughter of King Minos; yet Pelops’ son Atreus, who should be at least two generations senior to Theseus, marries Minos’ granddaughter.

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Notes

  Introduction

  AGAMEMNON

  1. The Murder

  2. The Curse

  3. The Brothers

  4. The Sacrifice

  5. The Matricide

  6. The Trial

  APOLLO

  1. The Rescue

  2. The Duel

  3. The Rape

  HERAKLES

  1. The Mares

  2. The Cowsheds

  3. The Hydra

  4. The Stag

  5. The Boar

  6. The Argonauts

  7. The Birds

  8. The Amazons

  9. The Apples

  10. The Dog

  11. The Ford

  12. The Shift

  PERSEUS

  1. The Chest

  2. The Nymphs

  3. The Graiai

  4. The Gorgons

  5. The Princess

  6. The Return

  7. The Grandfather

  THESEUS

  1. The Stone

  2. The Journey

  3. The Tribute

  4. The Bull-Jumpers

  5. The Minotaur

  6. The Island

  7. The Sails

  8. The Mistress

  9. The Stepson

  10. The Lies

  11. The Daughters

  12. The Estate

  Glossary of Names

  Maps on Endpapers

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Ti na kánoume; – pause for no answer – Den peirázei.’ (‘What are we to do? – It doesn’t matter.’) Our neighbour in Arcadia rounds off her conversations over the fence with these useful phrases. They might come straight out of a Greek tragedy by Aeschylus or Sophocles, the hand-wringing words of a Chorus of old men or women contemplating the catastrophic downfall of Agamemnon or Oedipus, and they apply equally well to the long, rocky history of Greece. From ancient times it has been a story of foreign invasions, wars between city-states, venal demagoguery playing on popular gullibility, military dictatorships, civil war. Romans, Slavs, Venetians, Franks, Byzantines, Turks, Germans and Italians have come and gone. Just over a century ago my grandfather, J.C. Stobart, published his history of Greek culture, The Glory That Was Greece, and remarked in his introduction:

  The traveller is struck with the small scale of Greek geography…. From your hotel window in Athens you can see hill-tops in the heart of the Peloponnese…. In that radiant sea-air the Greeks of old learnt to see things clearly. They could live, as Greeks still live, a simple, temperate life … the modern Greek still reminds us of his predecessors as we know them in ancient literature. He is still restless, talkative, subtle and inquisitive, eager for liberty without the sense of discipline
which liberty requires, contemptuous of strangers and jealous of his neighbour.

  Now, as I write, the cosy embrace of the European common currency has turned into a strangling squeeze of impossible debt, austerity and looming economic collapse unless the Greeks can meet the terms and make the sacrifices demanded by the Eurocrats and in particular the Germans (the Greeks’ most recent invaders).

  But whatever the hardships in the cities, where a large proportion of the population works for the government, the village people here in the Peloponnese go on much as they have for millennia. Their life was always hard and still is – based on their olive trees, a few goats, a donkey, chickens, and home-grown fruit and vegetables. True, they now have electricity, to which the government adds tax – probably the only way it can be easily collected from people who view the state chiefly as a source of unwelcome interference with their family-centred life – and piped water, though some, including our neighbour, have gone back recently to using the well behind our house. They still bake their bread in outside bread-ovens, wash their clothes and cook their meals over open fires in the courtyards and warm themselves in winter at the fireplaces built into the back of the houses, their fuel being the branches they prune from their olive trees after gathering the olives in January. But these days, of course, since most of the villagers are old – their children having migrated in better times to easier lives in the cities – they have pensions, so long as the government can contrive to pay them.

  My wife Hilary and I came to visit this hill-side village, staying in an Athenian friend’s holiday house, in 2006 and, seduced by the beauty of the sea below and the mountains behind, as well as the friendliness of the people, bought a house for ourselves. There were several for sale, in various stages of decay, as there had been since the 1970s, when a few German visitors acquired the more inaccessible houses and restored them. By the time we bought ours the village population of about three hundred was roughly sixty per cent Greek and forty per cent foreign, mostly Germans, who had somehow by their good manners and contribution to the prosperity of the village redeemed their nation’s reputation and earned the goodwill of people their fathers had crushed and persecuted.

  Our house – a traditional rectangular box with stone walls a metre thick – and its courtyard below and terraces above were completely redesigned and rebuilt by a young architect, son of a Greek father and German mother. He employed and worked with local artisans – builder, plumber, electrician, carpenter, blacksmith, plasterers and decorators – and Albanian labourers to do the heavy work, and, contrary to all the bad stories about foreigners’ houses never being finished and costing twice the original budget, finished the job in a year at the agreed price. When it was nearly ready – sufficiently for us to move in – we held a ceremony on one of the newly built stone terraces above the house. I made a brief speech and poured a libation of Greek wine ‘to the gods of this place’ on the earth round a newly planted lemon tree.

  The Greeks present at the ceremony looked surprised. They had, after all, been Orthodox Christians for about fifteen hundred years. But for me Greece was still the land of its ancient gods and their myths. I studied Greek, Latin and ancient history at school, visited Greece for the first time as a student in 1959 and, driving these days along the new roads from Athens to Arcadia, passing signs to Eleusis, Thebes, Corinth, Nemea, Mycenae, and through the narrow streets of Argos, still feel as much part of a world of myth and ancient history as of modern reality. I was against buying the house at first on perfectly rational grounds – I dislike travelling and we didn’t have enough money – but on a sudden instinct changed my mind overnight.

  When we got home to London and I unearthed the diary I kept on my first visit to Greece in 1959, I found an entry I had entirely forgotten: over a drink at a café, my friends and I speculated about where we would be living when we were old, and I said I would be living in Greece. At that time I was under the spell of Lawrence Durrell’s four-volume novel, The Alexandria Quartet, and his travel books, and when I visited Greece again three years later, newly married to Hilary, we still had Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus in our rucksack. But we did not go there again until 44 years later and, whatever her motives for buying the house, my own must have included an element of home-coming, of partly belonging to a place which I had spent my teens studying and where so much of our Western civilisation began. The Ancient Greeks, after all, laid the foundations of our logic, philosophy, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, astronomy, history, art, architecture, literature, drama, politics, and even religion, since the New Testament was written in Greek and much of its story and teaching is Greek-inspired.

  Mine was probably the last generation to be educated in the Classics as standard and the last, therefore, to be on easy terms with the innumerable references to and recycling of the Greek myths in Western art, literature, drama, music and opera. Many people have retold them with many variations, and they remain, because of the way they were honed and refined by the great originators of Western literature – Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – the most profound, sophisticated and humane myths produced by any culture anywhere. And the point about myths of this quality is that they become ageless and universal. Their interpretation of human behaviour and motivation becomes exemplary, in the true sense ‘classical’, even when the characters involved, whether gods or mortals, are recognised to be fictional and possessed of powers which later ages understand to be impossible in reality. Stories have their own rules and the best stories, like these, create a world the reader can live in as long as the story lasts. The Greek gods, for all their superhuman powers, are swayed by human emotions, which makes them peculiarly fascinating to us ordinary mortals. We study animals and birds to see how less powerful creatures than ourselves manage their lives, but how would we do if we were also more powerful than humans and lived for ever? The Greek myths provide a sometimes charming, sometimes alarming study of the question. As for the heroes and heroines, playthings of destiny and the gods, they are larger than life, men and women we might like to be – bold, brave, clever, handsome, humorous, temperamental, vengeful, chivalrous, austere, cool – but equally powerless against death. Achilles, Odysseus, Orpheus, Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, Jason, Orestes, Medea, Elektra, Antigone, Helen, Penelope are the original patterns for most fictional and many real heroes and heroines, and we still call masterful women Amazons. The very words ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ come from ancient Greek.

  The cities associated with the heroes and heroines are specific, as are most of the places where their heroic deeds were done, and even the gods’ principal locations are defined. Zeus was born and brought up in Crete, Apollo and his twin-sister Artemis were born on the island of Delos, Hermes in a cave on Mount Kyllene in Arcadia, Aphrodite the goddess of love from the sea foam off the island of Kythera (Cythera), the sea-god Poseidon’s palace was deep under the Corinthian gulf off the north coast of the Peloponnese, and they all live on Mount Olympos. Many of the gods and heroes are specially associated with the Peloponnese, no doubt because the myths date back to a time long before the Classical period dominated by the city-state of Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, to that at least of Mycenaean (Peloponnesian) dominance in the late Bronze Age, nearly a thousand years earlier. And since it is in the Peloponnese that I have landed so unexpectedly in my old age, I have concentrated on the stories of the Peloponnesian heroes, Agamemnon and his ill-fated family, Herakles (more often known by his Latin name Hercules), Perseus and Theseus, only alluding in passing to such other classic stories as the voyage of the Argonauts, the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus. I have also included some stories about Apollo, since although he was not a specifically Peloponnesian god, he had a shrine on the hill behind our village and the local football team is named after him.

  Why tell these well-known stories again? Because I’ve found that they are no longer so well-known – or only in the barest outline. And I’ve en
joyed making my own interpretation of them, adding details and dialogue, clarifying obscurities. For instance, Herakles is always depicted naked, except for his lion-skin, but surely when he was staying in a city or passing through one he must have worn something round his genitals so as to avoid shocking the fully-dressed citizens? I have provided a suitably mythical loincloth. I have also added a new twist to Theseus’ triumphant defeat of the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth and cleared up the vexed question of why he abandoned his loving collaborator Ariadne on the island of Naxos. Those who know the stories well can perhaps enjoy spotting my variations and those who don’t can be assured that the main thrust of the stories – the tune, as it were – is authentic. Apart from the original sources – Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Pindar and the Greek dramatists – my three main secondary sources were The New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Sir William Smith’s A Smaller Classical Dictionary and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. This last incorporates so many ancient variations chased up by his assiduous assistants, Janet Seymour-Smith and Kenneth Gay, and circling dizzily like a swarm of bees from myth to myth, that the brain reels and the reader longs to be back in the straightforward child’s version provided by Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes. My version is for readers of all ages and for entertainment not reference.

  Greece for many people is simply one of the Mediterranean holiday resorts, with sea, sun, beaches, mountains carpeted with flowers in spring, good food and drink, friendly and hospitable natives, and a lot of famous ruins. For me it is all that, plus an intense, intangible atmosphere of magical narrative into which the real landscape dissolves and re-emerges as something strange and wonderful and perhaps unique in the world, a place that is at once both fiction and reality. Yes, I can even claim that in Arcadia with a little imagination and some help from these stories, one can still ascribe the thunderbolt to Zeus, the earthquake to Poseidon, the rainbow to Iris, the course of the sun to Apollo, the olive trees to Athene, a sudden love affair to Aphrodite and perhaps an economic disaster to Hades, god of the underworld and keeper of the earth’s riches. But none of these gods could look kindly on those who offend the quintessentially Greek maxim, inscribed on Apollo’s temple at Delphi, ignored at their peril by mythical heroes and heroines, vote-hungry politicians, greedy bankers and the over-optimistic creators of the Eurozone: ‘Meden agan’, literally ‘Nothing in excess’, or ‘Don’t overdo it!’