Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (30 page)

The other significant role of Dionysus is as a resurrected god. In one legend, Dionysus is ripped into seven parts by the Titans at Hera’s request. They throw the parts into a cauldron, cook them, and eat them. But Dionysus is immortal and returns to life—though the exact method of his resurrection is unclear. His return from death connects Dionysus to the earlier resurrection gods, such as the Egyptian Osiris, as well as early Christian worship when it eventually spread to Greece.

Hades
(
Pluto
) Son of Cronus and Rhea, the ruler of the underworld, Hades did not live on Mount Olympus, and he is not usually counted among the twelve Olympians. But he shared in ruling the universe with his two brothers, Zeus and Poseidon. His name, which originally meant “invisible” or “unseen,” was considered unlucky, and the Greeks often referred to him instead as Pluton (“the rich one”) or by other honorific names.
Although a grim figure, Hades is not considered evil, and his underworld realm, also called Hades, is not a hellish place, but a kingdom where Hades administers justice. Nor is he actually death, which the Greeks personified in the god Thanatos, a child of the goddess of night. The Greeks believed that the dead arrived in the underworld domain after being brought by Hermes to the banks of the River Styx (which meant “hateful”). The arrivals were expected to give the boatman, Charon, a coin to ferry them across the river—ancient Greeks buried their dead with a coin in their mouth as payment to Charon. Those who did not receive proper funeral rites were forced to wander along the riverbank for one hundred years before obtaining passage from Charon. The entrance to the underworld was guarded by the terrible three-headed dog Cerberus, who wagged his tail to welcome new arrivals but devoured those who tried to leave and return to the land of the living.
Unlike the later Christian version of hell, Hades was not originally a place of terror, but a hilly landscape, dotted with trees and flowing with rivers. One of these was the River Lethe, or Oblivion, where the events of life could be forgotten. In later Greek traditions, some of the dead went to the Elysian Fields, a paradise reserved for the distinguished, and to the Fields of Asphodel, where most souls wandered in the gloom, looking for flowers.
But then there was also Erebus, one of the original elements of the Creation, which was a region of the deep, dark Tartarus, reserved for the grossest sinners who had violated some divine law or otherwise crossed Zeus. One of these was a king named Tantalus, who commited the cardinal sin of talking about having once dined with the gods, or, in another version of the myth, having cooked his own son and served him to the gods to see if they could detect this forbidden food. This mythic moment may mark the rejection of both cannibalism and human sacrifice. For his crime, Tantalus was sentenced to stand in a pool of water, which drained away when he tried to drink, and with fruit dangling before his eyes, which was whisked away as soon as he reached to eat it. Tantalus was, in other words, eternally “tantalized.”
The other famed denizen of Tartarus was Sisyphus, a clever king and founder of Corinth, who saw Zeus seduce a nymph and made the mistake of talking about it. Angry at Sisyphus for revealing his secret, Zeus told Thanatos to capture Sisyphus and place him in chains. But Sisyphus pulled a very old trick by convincing Thanatos to demonstrate how to put the chains on himself. With Thanatos out of action, “death takes a holiday,” and no one could die in the land of mortals. Upset that nobody was dying in battle, the war god Ares stepped in, killing Sisyphus and freeing Thanatos.
But Sisyphus had one more trick up his sleeve. He had earlier instructed his wife not to bury him if he died. Since he hadn’t been buried, he convinced Persephone that he shouldn’t be in Hades, and she freed him, supposedly to attend his own funeral. Realizing that the gods had been tricked once more, Hades dragged Sisyphus back to the underworld, where three judges of the dead ordered his punishment. He was forced to push a boulder up a hill. Every time he reached the top, the stone would roll back down again, and Sisyphus had to start again—pushing the same stone up the hill for all eternity. The story of Sisyphus was converted into one of the great twentieth-century allegories of existentialism by Albert Camus, who saw the plight of modern man in
The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942). Camus wrote, “The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.”
The only mortal to defeat Hades and death was the fabled singer Orpheus, whose songs had supernatural powers. When his beloved wife, Eurydice, dies of a snakebite, Orpheus descends to the underworld and enchants Hades and Persephone with his singing. They allow Eurydice to leave, only Orpheus is instructed not to look back at her before leaving the underworld. But Orpheus can’t resist a backward glance at his beloved, and she is lost forever.

Hephaestus
(
Vulcan
) God of fire, blacksmiths, and metalwork, Hephaestus is the son of Hera, and something of a trickster god, a typical role for gods of smiths and crafts in other mythologies as well. The identity of his father is a mystery, and at birth, he is dwarfish and disfigured with a limp, so his mother, Hera, throws him from Mount Olympus, and he falls into the sea. Another version blames Zeus, angry at apparently being cuckolded, for throwing Hephaestus into the sea, which cripples him.
Raised for years in a cave by nymphs who teach him the arts of metalwork, Hephaestus creates a magical golden throne as a gift for his mother. As soon as Hera sits in it, she is trapped in a fine golden mesh. Hephaestus only agrees to release her when Dionysus, the god of wine, gets him drunk and brings him back to Olympus. Hephaestus releases Hera on the promise that he can marry the beautiful Aphrodite, which makes them the odd couple of Olympus: beautiful, sexy Aphrodite and the crippled dwarf Hephaestus.
The divine craftsman, he also builds the palaces of the gods and plays a key role in a very important myth—the creation of the first woman, Pandora (see below,
What was in Pandora’s “box”?
).

Hera
(
Juno
) Hera, the queen of the gods, is presented in Hesiod’s poems as the daughter of Cronus, but she may have originated as a pre-Greek earth goddess, and in the view of some modern scholars, may have been a widely worshipped deity in Greece before Zeus arrived with the Mycenaean invaders. Chiefly a goddess of marriage, women’s sexuality, and fertility, like the Egyptian Hathor, Hera is associated with cattle and was often called “cow-eyed.”
As Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera is usually most preoccupied with his constant sexual misadventures. In wooing Hera, Zeus had disguised himself as a cuckoo bird in a rainstorm to win her sympathy. When she picks up the pitiful, wet bird, Zeus drops his disguise and rapes her. It was the beginning of their frequently stormy relationship, which is at the center of so many of the Greek myths. Yet, in the face of Zeus’s many affairs, Hera never wavers in her commitment to her husband, and her fidelity has been taken to represent the ideal Greek wife, upholding monogamy—at least on the part of wives—and the orderly inheritance of property and rank in Greek culture. She has three children with Zeus: Ares, one of the Olympians; Eileithyia, a patron of midwives and childbirth; and Hebe, the embodiment of youth.
Hera and Zeus are also supposed to be the parents of the smith god Hephaestus. But in Hesiod’s account of his origins, Hera conceives Hephaestus on her own, in an act of jealous revenge, so typical of the motivating force at the heart of many of the myths about Hera. Frequently betrayed by Zeus, Hera often turns her anger toward his lovers and many offspring. One lover, Semele, was burned up. Another, the young princess Io, whom Zeus had turned into a heifer to conceal her from Hera, is tormented by a gadfly and gallops all over the world with a perpetual itch. Hera may have reserved her greatest anger for the hero Heracles (see below,
What kind of hero kills his wife and children?
), the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, princess of Thebes.

Hermes
(
Mercury
) Messenger of the gods, famed for his winged feet and helmet, Hermes is also the patron of travelers. His name has been thought to derive from the ancient word
herm
, for “stone heap,” as it was a common practice for travelers to mark their trails by piling up stones, not as a guide to return but simply as a symbol of having passed by. (A common worldwide tradition, such stone piles, or cairns, appear in the Bible, ancient America, the British Isles, and elsewhere in the ancient world. Such markers are still traditionally left by modern hikers who “mark trail” by adding to stone piles.) But he is also a trickster, and from the moment of his birth, Hermes gets into mischief, starting by stealing the sacred cattle of his brother Apollo, an act which also cast him as the patron of thieves.
Hermes is the messenger of the gods, as well, and the protector of human messengers—men who had the dangerous but important job of traveling between hostile communities, delivering diplomatic messages. In ancient times, messengers were not supposed to be harmed, just as modern diplomats are supposed to travel with immunity.
Additionally, as god of travel, Hermes has the job of escorting the dead in their journey to Hades.
His most notable offspring is
Pan (Faunus)
, the pastoral god of woods and pastures and the protector of shepherds and their flocks. Half-man and half-goat, Pan is one of the few Greek deities who is not all human, but is also one of the most popular gods. Believed to have a wild, unpredictable—and especially lusty—nature, he can fill humans and animals with sudden, unreasoning terror, which is why the word “panic” comes from his name. Pan has many love affairs with nymphs and other minor deities, but when he pursues the nymph Syrinx, she runs away from him in terror and begs the gods to help her. The gods change her into a bed of reeds, from which Pan makes a musical instrument called the panpipe (though another myth credits Pan’s father, Hermes, with that invention).
Eventually Hermes became the protector of merchants and was considered an important god as the Greeks moved from farming to more commercial pursuits.

Hestia
(
Vesta
) The eldest child of Cronus and Rhea, Hestia is the sister of Zeus and the first child swallowed by Cronus. Her name means “hearth,” and she is the traditional Greek protectress of the home and also guards the hearth fire, one of the crucial duties of a woman in a Greek home. Although she was worshipped in the home of every Greek, Hestia is perhaps the least significant of the Olympians, and there are few stories about her. She is, in essence, the first “stay at home” woman. As a result, she has little chance for adventure—or mischief. In later times, Hestia’s place in Olympus among the twelve is taken by Dionysus.
Hestia was considered far more important in Rome, where she had been adopted as Vesta, and served as symbol of the city. Residing at her shrine in a temple in the Roman Forum were six vestal virgins, who tended an eternal flame. Chosen when they were between six and ten years old, they served for thirty years, and the punishment for losing their virginity was severe. A vestal virgin who broke the taboo was whipped and buried alive in a small chamber with only a bed. Over a thousand years, about twenty vestals were known to have been punished this way.