Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [105]
Dispensing justice for dishonorable behavior seems a strange notion coming from a god best known for being a “serial adulterer.” His many notorious sexual escapades include both divine and mortal women. This makes him not only king of the gods, but father of quite a few of them as well. Among his lovers are the Titan Themis, with whom he has the three Horae (Seasons) and the Moirae (Fates); the goddess Mnemosyne (Memory), who produces the Nine Muses, who inspire poetry, dancing, music, and the other arts;* the grain goddess Demeter, who gives birth to Persephone; and the Titan Leto, mother of two of the greatest gods, Apollo and Artemis. Scholars believe that all of these affairs were allegorical tales meant to explain how the great “father” was responsible for creating the order of the world as it existed in the Greek mind.
But the tales that describe his exploits grew very colorful over the centuries. To seduce his many conquests, Zeus—a master of disguise—overcomes resistance by taking many different forms and shapes, perhaps most famously as a swan. That is how he appears to the queen of Sparta, Leda. Zeus mates with Leda in the form of a swan, and they conceive two children, one of them famed as Helen of Troy and the other Polydeuces (or Pollux). When Leda sleeps with her husband on the same night, she also conceives the mortals Castor (twin of Polydeuces) and Clytemnestra, who becomes the wife of King Agamemnon, commander in chief of the Greeks against Troy.
Among Zeus’s many mortal lovers are young boys—which strikes the modern mind as unnatural, but was not unusual among elite Greeks of the Classical Period. One of his most famous male lovers is Ganymede, a prince of the royal Trojan house and the most beautiful of mortals. In one legend, Zeus, in the form of an eagle, abducts Ganymede and carries him to Olympus, where he serves as a cup bearer to the gods. This was how handsome young boys functioned in the Greek drinking-and-sex parties called symposia, where older men initiated young boys into sexual knowledge, a practice known as pederasty, and the subject of Plato’s dialogue, Symposium.
MYTHIC VOICES
He bound Prometheus the schemer in inescapable fetters
a torment to bear, and through them he drove a mighty stone pylon,
and sent a long-winged eagle to gnaw his incorruptible liver.
By day the bird fed upon it, but each night as much was replenished
as was lost on the day before.
—HESIOD, Theogony
The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Besides its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe…it gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is a friend of man; stands between the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON on Prometheus
How did man get fire?
In Hesiod’s Creation story, not all of the Titans fought against Zeus. Prometheus—a Titan who was a fire god, master craftsman, and trickster whose name connoted “forethought”—joined Zeus in the war against the other Titans. But as time went by, Prometheus rebelled. He was offended when Zeus took a dislike to the first humans, whom Prometheus had molded out of clay. In an argument over sacrifices to the gods, Prometheus balked when Zeus decided to deprive men of fire.
Taking the side of man, Prometheus tricked Zeus into receiving only the bones