Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [1]
Zeus didn’t give up so easily. He struck back by sending the god Hermes to lull Argus to sleep and free Io. In one version of the story (many Greek myths have variations), Hermes tried to put Argus to sleep by playing on his magical pipe, but that didn’t work. So he bored Argus to sleep with a long, tedious story—then cut off his head. To honor Argus, the grieving Hera placed his many eyes on the tail of her favorite bird, the peacock—and that’s why the peacock’s tail looks the way it does. Hera, however, wasn’t finished. Poor Io, still in the form of a heifer, was freed. But Hera just tormented Io with a gadfly that drove her, itching madly, on a wild gallop across Europe and Asia until she finally dove into the sea (the Ionian Sea, which is named for her). Io swam to Egypt, where Zeus returned her to human form and she bore what the tabloids call a “love child.” But that’s another story. With the Greeks, there’s almost always another story.
For me, the link between the monstrous Argus and the newspaper I carried every day was now clear—our local daily was supposed to be the ever-watchful eyes of the community. I’m not sure how accurate that was, but I did become a newspaper junkie from about that time—and this connection between a commonplace, everyday item like a newspaper and ancient myths just made me love the subject all the more.
Myths continue to fascinate me—and millions of others. Only most of us don’t call it “mythology.”* We like to call it “going to the movies.” For instance, on a cold Vermont night a few years ago, I went to see the second installment in The Lord of the Rings trilogy with my two teenagers and another friend. We were lucky to get tickets, as they sold out quickly. As we took our seats, people were scrambling futilely to find places, and I envisioned one of my worst personal fears: a raucous crowd of kids on Christmas break talking throughout the show.
But as soon as the lights went down, the extraordinary occurred. There was complete silence in this small Rutland theater. When the nearly-three-hour-long movie was over, the silence continued for a moment. And then the crowd exploded with loud and sustained applause.
There was some debate among the legions of Tolkien lovers about the faithfulness of these screen versions to their source. (Confession: I was one of those die-hard fans. When I was fourteen, I read all three books straight through while on a sick leave from school, which I extended a few days beyond the illness.) Merits of the film aside, I was struck at how reverent the audience was.
Chances are, a good many people in that audience were not churchgoers, and sitting in this darkened theater may have been as close to some form of collective spiritual encounter as any they might ever have experienced. And I thought further that this experience probably connected this twenty-first-century collection of strangers back to something much deeper, the act of sitting around a campfire three thousand years ago as someone recounted timeless exploits of heroes and monsters, Good versus Evil.
Looking at some of the box-office hits of the past few years merely confirms this idea. Recently, theaters have been filled with hits like The Matrix, Finding Nemo, X-Men, and the Terminator trilogy. To a large degree, all of these Hollywood blockbusters tap into ancient myths and tales of legendary heroes and epic quests. In the spring of 2004, the enduring appeal of myth got a fresh