The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [442]
To learn how he can expiate this dreadful crime, he visits Delphi to consult the oracle of Apollo. This again always symbolises the obtaining of wisdom from the unconscious, because Apollo, the god of light and consciousness, is served by priestesses who pass up messages from that mysterious dark underworld with which they are in contact. The oracle tells him the only way he can remedy his offence is to embark on the series of 12 tasks for which he is famous (the Greek for these is athloi, meaning `ordeals which offer a great prize, from which we derive `athlete'). He nominally has to carry these out at the behest of Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, in the north-east Peloponnese, who is presented as an unmanly, cowardly creature, the negative opposite of the fully-masculine figure Hercules is to become. The pattern of these ordeals, to show how Hercules is growing in stature as they progress, is that they gradually widen out geographically from Tiryns. The first five, including the slaying of several monsters, such as the Nemean lion and the many-headed Hydra of the Lernean marshes, all take place not far from Tiryns. The sixth, the cleansing of the Augean stables at Elis, takes Hercules to the other side of the Peloponnese; and from here the circle grows ever wider. He is taken in turn to Crete, to Thrace in the north of Greece, to the Black Sea, to win the girdle of the queen of the Amazons; to the westernmost end of the Mediterranean (hence `the Pillars of Hercules' as the ancient name for the straits of Gibraltar); and then even further to the west, the direction of the setting sun and of death, to seize the golden apples from the remote Garden of the Hesperides (this also requires him to visit Africa to see the giant Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, hence, of course, our word `atlas'). Hercules's final ordeal takes him down to the underworld itself, to seize the monstrous Cerberus, which he does with the aid of both Hermes and Athene, the god and goddess who supremely represent that those powers of intuition and wisdom only available to those who are most closely in harmony with the unconscious.
In mastering the terrifying guardian of the kingdom of Hades, Hercules has conquered death. And although in his mortal self he must eventually die, poisoned by the blood of the Hydra, he is taken up into heaven. Here he is finally reconciled with Hera, who gives him in marriage her daughter Hebe, the handmaiden of the gods, associated with eternal youth. United with his anima, he has become one of the immortals.
All these myths emerge from the mists of Greek prehistory, anonymous products of the Greek collective unconscious. But we finally come to the two epics which are the first Greek stories ascribed to a named author, dating back to the dawn of post-Mycaenean Hellenic civilisation at the end of the Bronze Age. One of these, like Gilgamesh the individual story of a great hero, we have already looked at many times in this book, as the first and greatest of all stories based on the archetype of the Quest. Homer's other epic poem, the Iliad, concentrates on only a comparatively small part of what had become the central collective legend of the Greek peoples, as it describes how they united, under the leadership of kings and heroes from all over Greece, to fight a mighty war with their greatest external enemy. Despite archaeological evidence that there was a succession of cities on the site of Troy in Asia Minor, there is no historical evidence that a war such as that described in the story ever took place. But what is significant is the basic symbolism behind it.
The story of this great conflict begins with rivalry on Olympus when the three leading goddesses, Hera, Athene and Aphrodite, decide to ask the young Trojan prince, Paris, to judge which of them is most beautiful. For him, as a handsome young man, love is to be preferred above motherhood or wisdom, and he awards the prize to Aphrodite. This provokes Hera to vengeful