Greece - Korina Miller [29]
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THESEUS
The Athenian hero volunteered himself as a one of seven men and maidens in the annual sacrifice to the Minotaur, the crazed half-bull–half-man off- spring of King Minos of Crete (see also opposite). Once inside its forbidding labyrinth (from which none had returned) Theseus, aided by Princess Ariadne (who had a crush on him courtesy of Aphrodite’s dart) loosened a spool of thread to find his way out once he’d killed the monster.
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ICARUS
Along with Deadalus (his father and a brilliant inventor), Icarus flew off the cliffs of Crete pursued by King Minos and his troops. Using wings made of feathers and wax, his father instructed him to fly away from the midday sun. Boys will be boys, Icarus thinks he’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull…glue melts, feathers separate, bird-boy drowns. And the moral is: listen to your father.
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TOP FIVE MYTHICAL CREATURES
Medusa: She of the bad hair day, punished by the gods for her inflated vanity. even dead, her blood is lethal.
Cyclops: One-eyed giant. Odysseus and his crew were trapped in the cave of one such cyclops, Polyphemus.
Cerberus: The three-headed dog of hell, he guards the entrance to the underworld – under his watch no-one gets in or out.
Minotaur: This half-man–half-bull mutant leads a life of existential angst in the abysmal labyrinth, tempered only by the occasional morsel of human flesh.
Hydra: Cut one of its nine heads off and another two will grow in its place. Heracles solved the problem by cauterizing each stump with his burning brand.
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PERSEUS
Perseus’ impossible task was to kill the gorgon, Medusa (see above). With a head of snakes she could turn a man to stone with a single glance. Armed with an invisibility cap and a pair of flying sandals from Hermes, Perseus used his reflective shield to avoid Medusa’s stare. Having cut off her head and secreted it in a bag, it was shortly unsheathed to save Andromeda, a princess bound to a rock in her final moments before being sacrificed to a sea monster. Medusa turns it to stone, Perseus gets the girl.
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OEDIPUS
You can run but you can’t hide…having been abandoned at birth, Oedipus learned from the Delphic oracle that he would one day slay his father and marry his mother. On the journey back to his birthplace, Thiva (Thebes), he killed a rude stranger and then discovered the city was plagued by a murderous Sphinx (a winged lion with a woman’s head). The creature gave unsuspecting travellers and citizens a riddle; if they couldn’t answer it they were dashed on the rocks. Oedipus succeeded in solving the riddle, felled the Sphinx and so gained the queen of Thiva’s hand in marriage. On discovering the stranger he’d killed was his father and that his new wife was in fact his mother, Oedipus ripped out his eyes and exiled himself.
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The Culture
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THE GREEK PSYCHE
THE GOOD LIFE
PEOPLE & SOCIETY
ARTS
SPORT
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THE GREEK PSYCHE
Greeks have long lived in the shadow of their ancient ancestors’ illustrious cultural and artistic legacy. If history is a country’s burden, then the baggage of centuries of foreign occupation, colonisation, war, political turmoil, isolation, poverty and mass emigration also weighs heavily on the Greek psyche. The exotic 1960s image of Greece as a nation of carefree pleasure-seeking Zorbas may have reflected their resilience and spirit, but not the complexity of the