Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [123]
After being blown off course, Odysseus sails on to the island of the enchantress Circe, who changes all of the crewmen into pigs but wants Odysseus for a lover. Protected from the spell of Circe by a magical herb, Odysseus beds Circe and subsequently learns how to return his crewmen to human form and sail past the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. The sorceress also tells Odysseus how to navigate past the Sirens, sea nymphs who use their beautiful singing to lure sailors to death on a magic island. Finally, she warns the men not to eat the sacred cattle of Helius (the sun).
Odysseus’s ship survives most of these dangers and seems ready to reach Ithaca without further trouble until some of his men ignore Circe’s warnings and eat the sacred cattle of the sun. As punishment, the ship is destroyed by a thunderbolt. All the men drown, except Odysseus, and he is washed up on the island of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who promises Odysseus eternal life if he marries her. After seven years on Calypso’s island, Odysseus goes to the shore one day and weeps for his beloved wife, Penelope. Seeing this, Athena takes pity on him and asks Zeus to release Odysseus from his suffering. Odysseus builds a raft and lands on the island of the Phaeacians, where the young princess Nausicaa discovers him, naked, save for a strategically placed tree branch. The princess takes Odysseus to her father’s court, where he begins to recount his adventures.
After Odysseus finishes his story, he returns home. Reunited with his son, Telemachus, Odysseus goes to the palace, dressed in beggar’s rags. Penelope has spent years tricking her suitors by promising that she will choose one of them when she finishes a weaving, a project she unravels each night. The exasperated suitors demand that she finally choose among them, and she finally agrees to marry the man who can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes. Taking the bow himself, the disguised Odysseus wins the contest, then kills all 108 of the unarmed young suitors and is reunited with Penelope.
Did the Romans take all their myths from the Greeks?
The “Greek Miracle” in Athens—highlighted in the works of the three tragedians who based most of their works on the myths—soon came crashing down. A series of wars with rival Sparta began in 431 BCE. A great plague struck Athens, killing Pericles, among many others, in 429 BCE. In 404 BCE, Athens surrendered to Sparta, concluding the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars that had split Greece. Oligarchy, the rule of a few wealthy aristocrats, returned to Athens.
The doom of the Golden Age was sealed in 338 BCE, when King Philip from the northern province of Macedonia united all Greece under his rule. An era had ended. The curtains and lights had gone down on the glorious age of the city-state and all its remarkable accomplishments. But a new act was about to open in the drama of Greek glory when Philip was assassinated and replaced by his ambitious son, Alexander, a student of Aristotle, who, as Alexander the Great, spread Greek culture, language, and ideas throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Establishing his namesake city, Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander made it the center of Greek culture, a position it held for the next three hundred years. In the Hall of the Muses there, the classics of Greek literature were gathered, and science flourished as scholars took up the serious study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. In Alexandria, Greek-speaking Jews translated the ancient Hebrew writings into the first Greek version of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, and Apollodorus collected his library—the most complete and straightforward accounting of Greek myths from the creation of the world to the death of Odysseus. Alexander