Envoi The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors – earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilisation. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs and mutant beasts infested the air, earth and seas we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity. In time, even the benevolent minor deities would find themselves elbowed out by the burgeoning and newly confident human race. The nymphs, dryads, fauns, satyrs and sprites of the mountains, streams, meadows and oceans could not compete with our need and greed for land to quarry, farm and build upon. The rise of a spirit of rational enquiry and scientific understanding pushed the immortals further from us. The world was being reshaped as a home fit for mortal beings only. Today, of course, some of the rarer and more vulnerable mortal creatures that have shared the world with us are undergoing the same threats to their natural territories that caused the end of the nymphs and woodland spirits. Habitat loss and species extinction have all happened before. The days of the gods themselves were numbered too. Prometheus’s gift of fire, as Zeus had feared, would one day allow us to do even without the Olympians. But not yet. Heracles, without knowing it, had started the clock on a countdown to a cataclysmic event in our history. The installation of Tyndareus in Sparta and Atreus in Mycenae and the sparing of the life of Priam after the destruction of old Troyfn1 – these would prove to be sticks of kindling that would one day burst into the greatest conflagration the world had yet seen. Not yet. Zeus and the Olympians were not finished with us yet.
The Offspring of Echidna and Typhon The giant serpent TYPHON, child of Gaia and Tartarus, was the primal and most deadly chthonic monster of them all. He mated with the sea creature, ECHIDNA. Their brood includes many, if not most, of the monsters that our heroes were sent out to defeat. THE NEMEAN LION, slain by Heracles. THE LERNAEAN HYDRA (serpentine guardian of the gates of hell), slain by Heracles. ORTHRUS (canine guardian of the cattle of Geryon), slain by Heracles. LADON (dragon guardian of the Apples of the Hesperides), slain by Heracles. CERBERUS (canine guardian of the gates of hell), borrowed by Heracles. THE CHIMERA, slain by Bellerophon. THE SPHINX, defeated by Oedipus. THE CAUCASIAN EAGLE (sent by Zeus to tear out Prometheus’ liver), slain by Heracles. THE CROMMYONIAN SOW, slain by Theseus. THE COLCHIAN DRAGON (guardian of the Golden Fleece), hypnotised by Medea. SCYLLA, avoided by Jason.fn1
The Rages of Heracles I was reading not long ago about the strange and sad case of Chris Benoit, a World Wrestling Entertainment star who strangled his wife and son in 2007. An inexplicable and terrible crime that has been put down variously to ‘roid-rage’ (the psychotic effects of synthetic and natural testosterone, nandrolone, anastrozole and other hormones and steroids used by wrestlersfn1) or the effects of traumatic brain injury similar to those experienced by some NFL players, as highlighted in the Peter Landesman/Will Smith film, Concussion. It seems Benoit specialised in a move called the ‘diving headbutt’ which may have caused serious trauma to his brain. The similarity between Heracles’ murder of Megara and his children and the Benoit case struck me at once. Two musclebound men, boiling over with an excess of testosterone, have a moment of rage or delusion and spend the rest of their lives regretting it. In Benoit’s case not a long rest of life: he hanged himself two days after the murders. I don’t believe all myths must be founded in some historical truth, but I do think it interesting that when the collective unconscious of the Greeks imagined and gave life, character and narrative to a mythical strong man, they included in him a terrible and inexplicable tendency to explode in destructive psychotic ragesfn2 – I’m thinking not only of the savage murder of his family, but the massacre of the centaurs in the cave of Pholus and the killing of Iphitus too. Of course plenty of musclemen are gentle, kind and sweet-natured (André the Giant springs to mind) but I do not think it is outside the realms of possibility that the Greeks had heard of a real strongman who had a tendency to be overcome by savage fits of violence followed by periods of agonised remorse.