Olympus by Devdutt Pattanaik
Idomeneus of Crete was caught in a storm and promised the gods that he would sacrifice the first human who greeted him on shore if he survived. When the ship reached Crete, the first person to greet Idomeneus was his firstborn son. Idomeneus had no choice but to sacrifice the youth and keep his promise to the gods. Idomeneus then discovered that his wife had taken a lover, Leucus, in his absence. Heartbroken at having lost both his son and his wife, he decided to leave his city that was no longer home, and live the rest of his days in exile.
The Stri Parva, or the women’s chapter, in the Mahabharata speaks of the horrors of war: how the fighting between men makes widows and orphans.
The story of the Greek warlords returning comes from Nostoi, which forms part of the Epic Cycle of stories, dating back to 700 BCE.
The Greeks sacrifice Iphigenia before leaving Greece and they sacrifice Polyxena before leaving Troy. In each case, Achilles is involved. Iphigenia is brought to Aulis on the false promise that she will be married to Achilles and the ghost of Achilles demands the sacrifice of Polyxena at his grave.
In Mozart’s eighteenth century opera Idomeneo, Poseidon stops the sacrifice of the prince Idamante but demands that old Idomeneus abdicate his throne and let the next generation take over.
Dictys Cretensis was the legendary companion of Idomeneus who, as per lore, compiled a diary of the events during the Trojan War. A Latin version of this Greek work was made popular in the fourth century CE and was seen as the ‘authentic’ source of stories from the ancient Greek world.
Nauplius
During the Trojan War, Palamedes was falsely accused of accepting a bribe of gold from the Trojans and killed without a fair trial. His father, Nauplius, came to Troy and demanded justice for his son, but Agamemnon ignored him.
Enraged, Nauplius came up with a deadly plan. He lit beacons on rocky shores all along the sea route from Troy to Greece. As a result, many of the Greek ships that sailed from Troy crashed against the rocks and never reached home. Those men who did reach home found that their wives had taken second husbands because Nauplius, on his return to Greece, had told all these women that their husbands had abandoned them and settled in Troy with Trojan wives.
Diomedes was one of the unfortunate men whose wives had taken other lovers. She and her lover refused to let Diomedes enter his own city. So he took to the sea once again, determined to find a new home. But wherever he went, he was chased by birds. These birds were the ghosts of warriors who had fallen at Troy, who would cry all the time of their sorrow, driving Diomedes mad, until he sailed and made himself a home in faraway Italy. There he waited for a Trojan to whom he could return the Palladium stolen from Troy, for it had brought him nothing but bad luck.
The Trojan War lasts for ten years. This is considered a long time in Greek mythology. Hindu mythology also mentions forest exiles of fourteen years, or a drought of twelve years, but these are contrasted with much longer timelines of hundreds and thousands, even millions, of years. The Vedas are full of huge numbers denoting time that are of no practical value, and certainly not part of human experience. They are calculated in imagination. These epochs align with the Indian obsession with vastness and infinity (ananta, in Sanskrit), compared to which human mortal life, with its finite lifespan, is insignificant. Thus, there are stories of kings visiting gods for a day and returning to find that a thousand years have passed on earth, for a day in the divine realm is a thousand years in the mortal realm. Such concepts are not found in Greek mythology.
Nauplius descends from his namesake Nauplius, son of Poseidon, a great seafarer, who was part of the Argonaut expedition. Poseidon saved a maiden named Amymone from a satyr who was trying to rape her; he made love to her and she gave birth to Nauplius.
There are many tales of the fate of Diomedes, who was worshipped as a god by many in post-Homeric times. The Roman poet Virgil connects him with many Italian cities.
The Greek heroes all live within a few generations of each other. Minos, born of Europa, is a contemporary of Theseus, who is a contemporary of Oedipus. Cadmus is Minos’s uncle. Perseus, born of Io, is an ancestor of Heracles, who is a contemporary of Jason. Heracles’s follower, Philoctetes, who witnesses the hero’s death, plays a key role in the Trojan War. This was called the Heroic Age.
The Heroic Age of the Greeks (when the Trojan War was fought) and the Epic Age of the Hindus (the time of the Mahabharata) are located in the Bronze Age by rationalists who think of mythology as proto-history.
Palamedes invented dice games to help Greek soldiers pass the time during the war.
Clytemnestra
Agamemnon, unaware of the fates of many of his companions, returned home to Mycenae in triumph. He was welcomed by his wife Clytemnestra, who was relieved to learn of Helen’s rescue.
But all was not well.
While Agamemnon was away, Clytemnestra had had an affair with Aegisthus, son of Thyestes. She was angry with her husband for sacrificing her daughter, Iphigenia. She was angrier still when she learned that Agamemnon had brought back with him a Trojan concubine, Cassandra.
She welcomed the victorious Agamemnon and even Cassandra. But then, when they were bathing and refreshing themselves, she had them both killed. Thus the great conqueror of Troy, who had spent ten years away fighting, died at home, in his own bath, killed by his unfaithful wife.
Unfaithful wives are a common theme in Hindu mythology as well. Jamadagni orders the beheading of his wife, Renuka, because she desires another man momentarily. Ahalya is turned to stone by her husband, rishi Gautama. Ram sends his wife, Sita, to the forest as her reputation is soiled following her abduction by Ravana.
Hittite sources dating back to 1400 BCE mention an Akagamunas, ruler of Ahhiyawa (land of the Achaeans, or ancient Greeks).
The earliest reference of the killing of Agamemnon by his wife comes to us from Homer’s Odyssey, written in 800 BCE. Here, Odysseus encounters the shade (ghost) of Agamemnon who warns him against trusting women.
Orestes
Electra, another daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, was heartbroken when she learned that her mother had killed her father. She goaded her brother, Orestes, to kill their mother and her lover Aegisthus. With Apollo’s support, Orestes did as his sister asked, for he was furious too.
For the crime of killing his own mother, the deadly Furies chased Orestes around the world. No king of Greece was willing to give shelter to the son of Agamemnon. The only one to share his suffering was his dear friend, Pylades of Phocis.
The Furies, however, did not punish Electra. She begged the gods to save her brother and end the family curse. Moved by her entreaties, Zeus agreed that the curse on the House of Pelops had to end. And so Athena was sent to argue with the Furies, saying that the killing of Clytemnestra by her son was no blood crime. ‘A son is a father’s child, not a mother’s child. A woman is just the oven in which a man bakes his bread like a baker,’ she said. The argument made sense to the Furies who stopped chasing Orestes.
The concept of avenging angels like the Furies and Nemesis is not found in Hindu mythology. In righteous anger, the Hindu gods may assume fierce forms, like Shiva turning into Bhairava or Virabhadra, but there is no tale of punishment embodying itself into a being.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Furies are created from the blood of Uranus after Cronus castrated him. They are imagined as three vengeful goddesses. The Furies are referred to in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, famous playwrights who lived around 500–400 BCE. The Furies are also called Erinyes. After the trial of Orestes, Athena renames them as Eumenides, or good spirits. In Roman mythology, they are called Dirae.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy has three plays which tell the story of the tragedy in the House of Pelops. The theme of Agamemnon, the first play, is the murder of the Greek king by his unfaithful wife. In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Orestes murders his mother and her lover on Apollo’s orders. And in the final play, Eumenides, Orestes is troubled by the Furies
The story marks the end of Greek matriarchy. Athena, the defender of Orestes, is born from the head of Zeus, thus distancing herself from the female body. That Apollo, defender of his own mother Leto, tells Orestes to kill his mother is also indicative of that shift.
Hermione
When Orestes returned to Mycenae after his ordeal with the Furies, he found Aletes, son of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, sitting on the throne, with his sister, Erigone, by his side. Orestes proceeded to kill his half-brother and rape his half-sister, who then took her own life.
Orestes then learned that the woman he was supposed to marry, his cousin Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen, had been given instead to Pyrrhus, son of Achilles and Deidamia, for he had been deemed unworthy following his crime of matricide. Determined to have Hermione, Orestes challenged Pyrrhus to a duel.
Pyrrhus had returned home from Troy with Hector’s widow, Andromache, as his concubine. His wife, Hermione, hated her, accusing her of being a Trojan witch who cast spells that prevented her from conceiving a child. To keep peace, he had given Andromache away to Helenus, son of Priam, also brought back to Greece as a slave. But Hermione kept grumbling.
Whether it was to escape the household quarrels, or because he enjoyed fighting, or because he felt the House of Agamemnon had wronged the House of Achilles at Troy, Pyrrhus accepted Orestes’s challenge. Like their fathers who had fought over a concubine in Troy, the sons now fought over a wife in Greece. But in the duel that followed, Pyrrhus was killed; the House of Agamemnon thus prevailed over the House of Achilles.
Orestes married Hermione and eventually became king of all of Peloponnese. His sister, Electra, married his beloved friend, Pylades.
Marriage often challenges the rivalries and friendships of war. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna, the Pandava, and Duryodhana, the Kaurava, are bitter enemies, but the two are related through marriage. Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu, marries Vatsala, Balarama’s daughter, while Duryodhana’s daughter, Lakshmana, marries Shamba, Balarama’s nephew, and Krishna’s son.
Euripides wrote a play in which Apollo tells Orestes to go to Tauris and bring to Athens the image of Artemis that had fallen there from the heavens. Pylades accompanies Orestes to Tauris where they are captured by locals who are intent on sacrificing them to Artemis. The priestess of Artemis promises to let one of the two live if they deliver a letter to Athens for her. Both friends want the other to take the letter and survive. This story of each friend trying to save the other indicates a deep bond, emotional if not physical, between the two. However, the story takes a dramatic turn when the contents of the letter reveal that the priestess of Artemis is none other than Iphigenia, Orestes’s sister, who had allegedly been sacrificed to Artemis by their father Agamemnon just before the Greek ships sailed to Troy. She had been saved by the goddess and taken to Tauris. Brother and sister have a joyous reunion, and all of them escape from Tauris and return to Athens, carrying the image of Artemis with them.
Pylades of Phocis was the son of Agamemnon’s sister. That made him Orestes’s cousin. They were the best of friends, and many writers assumed they were lovers, such is the intensity of their relationship. When Orestes, chased by the Furies, was denied shelter by Pylades’ father, Pylades left his home and accompanied his friend, sharing his misery, until the intervention of Athena. In Erotes (Affairs of the Heart), Lucian presents the relationship of Orestes and Pylades as the principal representative of homoerotic friendship.
Helen
The ship carrying Menelaus and Helen was caught in storms, forcing them to take refuge in Egypt for years. Finally, Menelaus managed to overpower Proteus, the shape-shifting old man from the sea, who revealed to him the safest and shortest passage to Sparta.
On returning home Menelaus lived out the rest of his days rather unremarkably with Helen by his side. It was not a happy life, for he was haunted by the death of the Greeks at Troy and those who never made it home. He regretted that Helen could not give him a son, and preferred the company of his son Megapenthes, born of his Trojan concubine. When Menelaus died, Megapenthes became king and he exiled Helen, considered the cause of so much misery.
Helen found shelter at Rhodes, where lived her friend Polyxo, who had lost her husband Tlepolemus at Troy. People expected Helen to give a lock of her hair at the shrine for their fallen king, a common practice of mourning among Greeks. But when Helen failed to do so and remained seemingly distant, indifferent to the tragedy she was responsible for, Polyxo had her hanged from a tree.
The famous line ‘the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium’ comes from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, published in 1604.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, visits Sparta and finds Menelaus and Helen there.
In Euripides’s play Helen, written around 400 BCE, the real Helen is whisked away to Egypt by Hera and Athena, while the Greeks and Trojans fight over a phantom Helen. After the war, when Menelaus passes through Egypt, he is reunited with the real Helen.
In the second century CE, Pausanias the Greek traveller and geographer wrote of how Helen was killed in Rhodes and how she shared her afterlife with Achilles.
As a daughter of Zeus, Helen’s character is mysterious and unfathomable. All men fall in love with her, but she does not seem to love them back. She seems manipulative at times, and indifferent at other times. One is never sure if she cares more for her lover or her husband, the Trojans or the Greeks. That is why perhaps it was concluded that she was also the daughter of Nemesis, created to destroy arrogant mortals.
House of Tantalus
Book Seven
Odysseus
‘What terrible retribution! Victors who never return home, or return to broken homes with unfaithful wives,’ said the gymnosophist, shaken by the tales of Achilles and Agamemnon. ‘Did no one return to a happy life?’
‘Odysseus did, but after twenty years, ten of those spent battling Trojans, and ten surviving the sea.’
Recruitment
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, had descended from Hermes. In his veins flowed the blood of the master thief Autolycus and the trickster Sisyphus, who had exasperated even the Olympians.
Although he was obligated to help Menelaus in his quest to bring Helen back from Troy, he did not want to go because it had been foretold that if he left his home, he would not return for twenty years. The thought of not seeing his wife, Penelope, and their son, Telemachus, for so long was unbearable. Thus when Palamedes came to recruit him on behalf of the Greeks, Odysseus pretended to be mad, tilling the land with a plough yoked to an ass and a bullock, sowing salt in the field. Suspecting trickery, Palamedes snatched Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and placed him in the field before the plough. The ‘mad’ Odysseus immediately reined in the plough, revealing his deception.
Thus recruited, Odysseus sailed grudgingly with the Greeks to Troy, serving Agamemnon well with his cunning. He hoped that he would succeed in ending the war soon and return earlier than prophesied. But that was not to be.
When the Trojan War stretched on for ten years, Odysseus blamed Palamedes, his recruiter, for his misfortune. Frustrated, he wrongfully accused Palamedes of accepting Trojan gold as a bribe and encouraging the Greeks to end the siege of Troy and return home. Without a fair trial, Palamedes was stoned to death, a crime for which the Greeks suffered greatly later, at the hands of Palamedes’ father, Nauplius.
The contrast between the straightforward Achilles and the cunning Odysseus, who are central characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey, mirrors that between the rule-following Ram and rule-breaking Krishna of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The Odyssey is one of the earliest Greek epics written by Homer and dates back to around the seventh century BCE.
Based on astronomical references found in the epic, it is assumed that the events that inspired the epic took place around 1200 BCE.
The idea of leaving home, one’s comfor
While the Greeks admired Odysseus for his cunning, the Romans found him dishonourable, especially in the way he avoided being recruited and the way he avenged himself on Palamedes. The Romans knew him as Ulysses.
Odysseus was jealous of Palamedes who was known for his intelligence. Besides games of dice, Palamedes invented counting, currency, a game like chess called ‘pessoi’ and even jokes.
Lotus-eaters
Thanks to the wooden horse that Odysseus designed, the Greeks were finally able to breach the mighty Trojan walls. And with that, at long last, the war came to an end and the Greeks sailed home. But as he and his crew set out for Ithaca, Odysseus did not know that another ten years of adventure awaited him.
Odysseus and his fellow sailors had got so used to war, of grabbing supplies rather than trading for them that in Cicona, their first port of call on their way to Ithaca, they plundered the city, killed the men, enslaved the women, and took what they wanted. The men felt no remorse as the Cicones were Trojan allies. This misdeed angered Zeus so much that he caused a storm to take Odysseus’s ship completely off course to the land of the Lotus-eaters, where people did nothing but eat the lotus fruit, which filled them with so much tranquillity that they desired for nothing, not even home. Many sailors loved the idea and succumbed to the lotus fruit, offering it to Odysseus as well. But Odysseus was determined to go home, so he dragged his men back to the ship, bound their feet with chains to stop them from jumping off and swimming back to the island, and set out for Ithaca once again.