Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes by Rick Riordan
Zeus was sitting in his throne room, engrossed in the latest issue of GQ (God Quarterly), but when he heard so many humans calling his name he glanced out of the window.
‘Holy me!’ He saw cities burning, people dying, seas boiling, his temples crumbling to dust. ‘My temples! Noooo! Who’s driving the sun?’
He used his super godly vision to zoom in on the chariot. He quickly realized that the scrawny dude at the reins was not Helios. ‘Oh, I hate student drivers. Hey, Ganymede! Get in here!’
The king’s cup-bearer poked his head around the corner. ‘Yeah, boss?’
‘Bring me one of my lightning bolts. They’re over by the end table in the hallway, next to my keys.’
‘What size lightning bolt?’
‘Bring me a number ten.’
Ganymede’s eyes widened. Zeus hardly ever busted out the number tens. They were for special occasions, like weddings and Armageddon. A minute later, Ganymede came back, lugging a Celestial bronze cylinder the size of a booster rocket.
Zeus hefted it and took careful aim. He would need to hit the driver without destroying the chariot. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he blew up the sun, but he doubted it would be good. Still … that chariot was out of control. It was destroying his temples and some of his favourite statues of himself. Drastic measures were called for.
Phaethon’s last thought as he was blasted out of the sky?
AHHHHHHHHHH!
Though maybe, just a little, he was also thinking: Thank the gods.
At the end, he knew his joyride had to stop. He was endangering his family and the entire human race. He was scared out of his mind. No roller coaster can go on forever, even a super-terrifying adrenalin rush of fiery doom.
A bright flash and it was all over for Phaethon. Zeus knocked the kid clean out of the chariot. His body fell to earth as a fiery comet.
Without their annoying driver, the horses dragged the sun chariot back to their stables. Blaze, Dawn, Fire and Flame figured they would be rewarded for a good day’s work with fiery carrots and molten oats.
After the Day of the Loopy Sun, life was never the same.
The gods held an emergency council to review safety regulations for drivers. Helios mourned his son. His heart turned bitter. Rather than blaming himself for letting Phaethon drive, he blamed Zeus for killing the boy. Funny how gods (and people) do that sometimes.
‘I will never drive the sun again!’ Helios declared. ‘Let someone else take over this stupid job!’
Maybe that’s when people started thinking of Apollo as the sun god, because Helios quit without unemployment benefits or a severance package or anything. Or maybe the gods pleaded and threatened and Helios kept his job for a while longer. Either way, Helios never again let one of his kids borrow the chariot or mess with his CD collection.
As for Phaethon’s burning body, his poor mother and seven sisters watched it fall past the northern horizon.
Clymene knew her son was dead. No one survives Zeus’s lightning. But the seven Heliades decided they couldn’t rest until they found their brother’s body.
For months they travelled until they arrived in the wilds of northern Italy. There, near the swampy mouth of the Po River, they found their brother’s final resting place.
Zeus’s lightning had somehow turned the demigod into a never-ending fuel source. His body smouldered and smoked but never disintegrated. He had plunged into a small lake and become lodged at the bottom. There he lay, boiling eternally, heating the lake and generating bubbles of noxious gas that popped on the surface and made the whole area poisonous. Even birds that flew over the lake would drop dead.
The seven Heliades stood at the shore and wept. There was no way they could retrieve Phaethon’s body, but they refused to leave. They wouldn’t eat or drink. Finally Zeus took pity on them. Even though Phaethon had been kind of an idiot, the king of the gods appreciated the sisters’ loyalty to their brother.
‘You will stay with him forever,’ Zeus decided. ‘You will stand as a reminder of what happened on the Day of the Loopy Sun.’
The sisters changed shape. Their clothes hardened into tree bark. Their toes elongated, turning into roots. Their hair stretched out, reaching skyward to become branches and leaves. Their tears became golden sap, which hardened into amber.
That’s why the Greeks called amber ‘the stone of light’ – because it was formed from the tears of the daughters of the sun.
Today, nobody knows exactly where that lake is. Maybe it sank into the sea or the marshes. But back in the day, maybe a hundred years after the Loopy Sun incident, another hero named Jason sailed up the River Po on his ship, the Argo. During the night, he heard the trees weeping – a ghostly wail that drove his crew insane with fear. The fumes from the lake were as poisonous as ever. An eerie golden light glowed at the bottom of the lake, where the body of Phaethon still smouldered. But we’ll talk more about Jason later.
Anyway, now you know why Phaethon never got his driver’s licence.
Moral of the story? Destroying the earth will get you pulled over real fast.
Or maybe: Don’t make stupid promises to your kid.
Or maybe: If your mom seems overprotective, it’s possible she knows you better than you think. (I had to put that in there. My mom is nodding and muttering, ‘Thank you.’)
So that’s Phaethon. A nice unhappy ending with tons of death.
Feel better?
Good.
Because we’re not done yet. The male heroes didn’t have a monopoly on carnage and destruction. Let’s go out to Amazon country and meet a sweetheart of a killer named Otrera.
Otrera Invents the Amazons (with free Two-Day Shipping!)
We don’t know much about Otrera from the old stories.
Those Ancient Greek dudes didn’t care where Otrera came from or what made her tick.
Why would that be?
1) She was a woman.
2) She was a scary woman.
3) She was a scary woman who killed Ancient Greek dudes.
Originally she lived in the northern lands around the Black Sea – the same general area that would later produce great humanitarians like Attila the Hun. Who were Otrera’s people? We don’t know. That’s probably because she killed them all. We just know that at some point she decided her life as a Bronze Age housewife sucked. She decided to do something about it.
Maybe you’re wondering: what would make an average lady go crazy, kill all the men of her tribe and found a nation of homicidal women?
Did I mention that being a Bronze Age housewife sucked?
If you were a woman back then, this was your best-case scenario: you might be born in Sparta. Any time Sparta is your best-case scenario, you are truly stranded up Poop Creek without a paddle. At least in Sparta women could own property. They were respected as the mothers of warriors. Young girls could serve as acolytes in the temple of Artemis and, to please the goddess, help whip the male human sacrifices so their blood stained the altar. (For more details, see: Spartans: Complete Freakazoids.)
If you were born female in Athens, the cradle of democracy, you were almost as badly treated as a slave (and yeah, they had slaves). You couldn’t own property. You couldn’t vote in the assembly. You couldn’t run a business. You weren’t even supposed to go to the agora – the community market and outdoor mall – though a lot of women did anyway, because, you know, the lemon chicken at the food court was pretty tasty.
Basically, women couldn’t do anything except stay home, cook food, clean the house and look pretty – preferably all at the same time. Now, me – being an awesome modern demigod dude – I can do all that easily. But not everybody can pull it off.
(My girlfriend, Annabeth, is reading this over my shoulder and laughing. Why are you laughing?)
Athenian women couldn’t even choose who they married. That was true for most women back then. When you were a child, your parents were your guardians (read: your dad was your guardian, because your mom was ju
Oh, you don’t like his decisions? Well, your options are getting beaten, killed or sold into slavery. Take your time choosing.
Once you were old enough to marry – and by that I mean like twelve or thirteen – your dad would pick your husband for you. The lucky guy might be older. He might be ugly. He might be fat. But don’t worry! Your dad would make sure your husband had the proper social standing so it would reflect well on your dad’s reputation. Your dad would pay your husband a dowry – a price for taking you. In exchange, your husband would be your dad’s ally in his political and business dealings. So, while you’re sitting at home, cooking and looking pretty for your old, ugly, fat husband, you can take comfort in knowing it was the best match for your father’s interests.
As a married woman, your husband became your guardian. He made all the decisions for you, just like your dad used to do.
Oh, you don’t like his decisions? See your options for punishment above.
Starting to feel like a homicidal woman yet?
Then maybe you can understand what motivated Otrera. Because the stuff I just described for Athens and Sparta? In the northern lands, where Otrera was born, life was harsher and conditions for women were ten times worse.
When Otrera snapped, she snapped in a big way.
Ever since she was a kid, Otrera’s favourite gods were Artemis and Ares. Artemis was the protector of young maidens, so that makes sense. Artemis didn’t need no stinking man to take care of her, which appealed to Otrera. If her people were anything like the Spartans, I bet when Otrera was young she served as a junior priestess for Artemis. I can totally see her whipping human-sacrifice guys until they bled all over the altar.
Hey, she would’ve thought, this whipping men and making them bleed? This is fun!
Otrera didn’t want to become a full-time follower of Artemis, though. That would’ve meant swearing off men forever. Nuh-uh. Otrera liked guys – when they weren’t ordering her around. Later she would have plenty of boyfriends. She even gave birth to a couple of daughters. More on that in a sec …
Her other favourite god was Ares, the war dude. A god like Ares made sense to Otrera. She lived in a harsh country. Life was brutal. You want something, you kill for it. You get angry, you punch someone in the face. Simple. Direct. Bloody. Fun!
Like most places back then, Otrera’s town was controlled by men. Women had no rights. They definitely weren’t allowed to fight, but at some point Otrera got frustrated being her husband’s laundress/cook/floor scrubber/eye candy. She decided to teach herself self-defence just in case … well, in case she needed it some day.
At night she sneaked off into the woods with her husband’s sword and bow. She taught herself to spar by hacking at trees, imitating the moves she’d seen the young male soldiers use. She taught herself to shoot until she could take down a wild animal in the dark at two hundred yards. Once Otrera felt confident in her abilities, she sought out other townswomen who were just as frustrated as she was. They were tired of their old, smelly, fat husbands telling them what to do, beating them or killing them or selling them into slavery if they complained.
Otrera secretly began teaching her friends how to fight. In the woods at night, they learned the hunting skills of Artemis, but they also prayed to Ares for strength and courage in battle. Worshipping both gods together was an unusual mix, like, Artemis tells us men are stupid brutes. Therefore, let us worship Ares, the stupidest manly brute of all. But the combo was effective. Otrera and her followers soon became vicious and fearless.
For a while, they pretended everything was normal at home. Then one day something happened that made Otrera go nuclear. I don’t know what. Maybe her husband ordered her to get him a beer from the fridge one too many times. Maybe he yelled at her for not being pretty enough while she was scrubbing the floor.
Otrera calmly retrieved her husband’s sword from the closet. She hid the blade behind her skirts and walked over to where her husband was sitting.
‘I want a divorce,’ she said.
Her husband belched. ‘You can’t have a divorce. I make all the decisions for you. You belong to me. Also, nobody has invented divorce yet!’
‘I just did.’ Otrera whipped out the sword and cut off her husband’s head. He never asked her for another beer, but he did get blood all over the floor that Otrera had just finished mopping. She hated it when that happened.
Her sword in hand, Otrera stepped outside her hut. She made a cawing sound like a raven – the sacred bird of Ares. Her followers heard the signal. They retrieved their swords and daggers and meat cleavers, and being a man suddenly became the most dangerous occupation in town.
Most of the males were either killed or put in chains. A few lucky ones escaped. They ran to the nearest town and explained what had happened.
You can imagine how that conversation went:
‘My wife pulled a sword on me!’
‘And you ran away?’
‘She was crazy! The ladies killed everyone!’
‘Your housewives killed all your best warriors? What kind of men are you? We’ll go teach them a lesson!’
The guys from the neighbouring town marched to Otrera’s village, but they didn’t take the expedition very seriously. After all, they were going to fight women. They figured they’d walk in, administer a few spankings, have a few beers, then take the prettiest women as slaves and go home.
It didn’t work out that way. Otrera had set tripwires and snares along the road. She’d built a barricade at the gates, fully manned (or womanned) by her best archers and sword fighters. The guys showed up. Otrera’s followers slaughtered them.
Otrera marched to the neighbouring town. She liberated the women, recruiting those who wanted to join her and letting the rest go free. The remaining men she killed or enslaved. A few terrified survivors fled to nearby villages, spreading the word about the crazy woman Otrera and her band of merry murderesses.
The next town’s men tried to stop her. Her warriors slaughtered them. Rinse and repeat. Soon Otrera found herself in control of a dozen towns, with a fledgling army of vicious women ready to follow her to glory. They were highly motivated to fight, because if they ever lost their male enemies would have no mercy. The women wouldn’t be treated as prisoners of war. They’d be beaten, sold as slaves and then killed. The whole trifecta!
Otrera was still learning how to organize her troops when the menfolk of the neighbouring cities started to take her seriously. The men mustered an actual, no-nonsense army – thousands of hardened veterans with real weapons and no illusions about beer and spankings.
Otrera’s scouts warned her what was up.
‘We need more time,’ Otrera said. ‘We haven’t trained our women properly. Besides, this country is harsh and barren and it really sucks. It’s not worth defending. Let’s migrate to a richer land and carve out our own queendom!’
That sounded a lot better to her followers than an all-out war they might not win. The entire tribe of warrior women, along with their slaves and captured loot, their children and their barnyard animals and their favourite knick-knacks, migrated to the other side of the Black Sea, to the northern coast of what is now Turkey. Glory awaited them! Also, a whole lot of blood and some flesh-eating birds …
Otrera founded a new capital city called Sinope near the Thermodon River. She trained her armies and gathered recruits, gradually expanding her territory and discovering where all the best restaurants were.
She’d set up her kingdom in a good spot – northeast of the Greeks, northwest of the Persians, in what was a no-man’s-land. (Get it? No men?) Whenever she conquered a new town, she was careful to leave no male survivors. That way, word was slow getting out. By the time her neighbours figured out she was a threat, it was too late. The new nation was firmly entrenched. They raised their terrible banner – a stick-figure guy with a big X through him. They became known and
Why were they called Amazons? Nobody’s sure.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the Amazon River down in Brazil. (Man, that confused me for years before Annabeth set me straight. I had this image of women warriors hanging out in the rainforest with parrots and monkeys and piranhas.) The ancient Amazons also have nothing to do with any modern company that might have the name Amazon, nor is that company a secret front for their plans for world domination. (Cough. Yeah, right. Cough.)
Some Greeks thought the name Amazon came from the word amazos, which means without a breast. They somehow got the idea (SERIOUS GROSS-OUT ALERT) that Amazon women removed their own right breasts so they could shoot a bow and throw a spear better.
Okay, first of all, no. Just no. That’s not only gross; it’s dumb. Why would the Amazons do that? I mean, yeah, they were serious battle-hardened killers, but you can shoot a bow or throw a spear just fine without … you know.
Also, if you look at any ancient statue or picture of the Amazons, there’s no evidence that the Amazons were, um, lopsided.
Finally, I have met Amazons myself. They are not into hurting themselves unnecessarily. Other people? Sure! But not themselves.
A few Greek writers realized this was a bonehead theory. One dude, Herodotus, called Otrera’s people the androktones instead, which means man-killers. Homer called them the antianeirai, meaning those who fight like men. Both of those terms are a lot more accurate than those who did a big owie so they could shoot a bow better.
Me, I like the theory that Amazon comes from the Persian term ha-mazan, which means warriors. I like that theory because Annabeth likes that theory, and if I don’t like what she likes she gets all ha-mazan on me.
Anyway, the Amazons had arrived, loud and proud. They got stronger and more numerous as they raised their next generation of girls to think and act like warriors.