The Song of Orpheus Read online

  THE SONG OF ORPHEUS:

  THE GREATEST GREEK MYTHS YOU NEVER HEARD

  THE SONG OF ORPHEUS: THE GREATEST GREEK MYTHS YOU NEVER HEARD is a funny, adventure-filled collection of wonderfully weird “new” Greek myths. This unforgettable collection spins tales of love and loss, hilariously vain superheroes, ancient robots, untrappable giant foxes, men reborn after being torn apart by dragons, and even the world’s first monkeys. A few of these tales may seem familiar at first, but be prepared for the unexpected. Others are wonderfully strange and puzzling. All of them are entertaining. All of them deserve to be better known.

  Retold by author and scholar Tracy Barrett (THE SHERLOCK FILES, ANNA OF BYZANTIUM, THE STEPSISTER’S TALE) with accuracy, suspense, and humor, using authoritative translations into English of ancient source material, the myths in THE SONG OF ORPHEUS will make readers, especially fans of THE HEROES OF OLYMPUS series, laugh, gasp, and geek out.

  “An incredible feat of imagination and scholarship.” (Chapter 16, of Barrett’s KING OF ITHAKA)

  THE SONG OF ORPHEUS:

  THE GREATEST GREEK MYTHS YOU NEVER HEARD

  by

  TRACY BARRETT

  THE SONG OF ORPHEUS: THE GREATEST GREEK MYTHS YOU NEVER HEARD

  Copyright © 2016 by Tracy Barrett. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Prologue: The Talking Rock

  Before the Beginning: The Big Bang, Greek-Style

  I. Where Things Come From

  Don’t Mess with a Superhero

  If It Isn’t One Thing, It’s Another

  The Truth Will Out

  II. Life’s Big Moments: Birth, Love, Death

  The Best God

  But Does She Really Love You?

  Apples and Love

  All’s Fair in Love and War

  Be Careful What You Wish For

  Death Is Forever—or Is It?

  You Only Live Twice

  III. Gods and Humans

  From Mortal to Goddess

  An Oread Scorned

  IV. Creatures You Never Knew About

  The Hurricane Hound and the Teumessian Fox

  The Bronze Man of Crete

  The Crushers

  This Is the End

  Appendix A: A Note About Spelling

  Appendix B: A Note About Pronunciation

  Glossary

  I. Immortals

  Titans

  Gods and goddesses

  II. Other Mythological Figures

  III. Places

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Tracy Barrett

  INTRODUCTION

  The Minotaur. Jason and the Argonauts. The goddess Athena springing full-grown from her father’s head. King Midas and the golden touch. Arachne turning into a spider. Pandora’s box.

  Most fans of Greek mythology are familiar with some (or maybe all) of these stories. But even if you’ve heard of the one-eyed giant known as the Cyclops, you may not know about the bronze giant, Talos, who protected the island of Crete. You might recognize the three-headed dog, Cerberus, but are you familiar with the huge and uncatchable Teumessian Fox? Have you read about the mischievous Akmon and Passalos, who messed with the wrong superhero? What about the tragic tale of the sea goddess Leukothea, or the story of Tylos, who came back to life after being mauled to death by a dragon?

  These names are probably unfamiliar even to people who have read a lot of Greek myths. That’s because while the Greeks told many, many myths, worshipped many, many gods, and believed in many, many monsters and hybrid creatures and odd humans, the same dozen or so myths have been told and retold, while many others are practically unknown today.

  Why? Some of the myths contradict each other, and in most of those cases, the less popular one has dropped out of sight. Others don’t make much sense to modern people (and it seems they sometimes didn’t make much sense to the ancient Greeks, either), so people stopped telling them. Some have the same plot with different names: god falls in love with girl, girl runs away from god, girl turns into a tree/stone/river, god is sad; or there’s a prediction that a child will grow up to do something harmful, child is left outside to die, child survives with the help of an animal/shepherd/maid, child fulfills prophecy. People who publish mythology collections usually include only their favorite version of a myth.

  Occasionally, an ancient writer drops a tantalizing hint about a myth we’ve never heard of—just enough to get a modern reader interested—but then nobody can find another trace of it. Scholars know that many myths the ancient Greeks used to share have been lost. Many myths were told aloud for centuries before anyone wrote them down, and most likely a lot of them never made it into written form. If they did get written down, the paper (or papyrus or parchment) might not have lasted long enough for modern people to be able to read what was on it.

  But luckily, a lot of the less familiar myths have survived. Writings from the ancient world turn up in all sorts of places. Some have been found accidentally, bound up in a book along with a totally different text. Ancient writings have even been discovered on pieces of linen the Egyptians used to wrap their mummies in! It’s very possible that still more writings will be discovered as more mummies are found and examined. If we’re lucky, the archaeologists will find unfamiliar myths among them.

  Where else might “new” myths be hiding? One possibility is in a bunch of what look like seriously overcooked dinner rolls. These are scrolls—rolled-up books that people in Europe used before they started making books with separate pages—that were scorched in the year 79 CE, when the volcano Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in southern Italy. The burnt scrolls found among the ruins of these cities can’t be unrolled without crumbling into pieces, but scientists are working on finding a way to read them. Who knows? If they figure that out, maybe they’ll find some new myths on those scrolls!

  While everyone waits for new myths to be uncovered, here are some that have been preserved but, for one reason or another, have been left out of most anthologies. They’re just as interesting as the ones that are told over and over again, but some may be unfamiliar to even the biggest fans of Greek mythology. In these stories are heroes to admire, clever solutions to tricky problems, sad love, happy love, new ways of looking at life, and surprise endings. A few may seem familiar at first but then take an unexpected turn. Others are wonderfully strange and puzzling. All of them deserve to be better known.

  PROLOGUE:

  THE TALKING ROCK

  You’re in the middle of a dark wood, not sure how you got there or even exactly where you are. You must have wandered off the path when you weren’t paying attention. For all you know, you could be in a thick forest that goes on and on for miles, or you could just as easily be in a corner of a small city park. Oddly, you don’t feel afraid, but you are curious. You stop and listen, but you hear nothing except birdsong and the chatter of two squirrels spiraling up a tree. Then you catch the faint tinkle of running water, and you see light glinting off a creek just a few feet away.

  Near the creek lies a rock. It’s not very big—about the size of a bowling ball—but you notice it because it’s all by itself, and also because of something strange: Twin streams of water are trickling out of two small dents in its surface. It’s mossy and weathered, as though it’s lain out here for a long, long time.

  Then out of nowhere, you hear a voice. A man’s voice.

  Thank the gods you’ve come!

  Oh, sorry to startle you. D
on’t you see me? There’s no use looking for me over there. No, not up there, either. Look down. See me now? I’m that big rock by the stream, with water dripping down me. I know the water looks like tears, but I assure you, I’m not crying. It’s just condensation from the dampness in this forest.

  Why don’t you come closer? It’s not like I’m going to hurt you, for Zeus’s sake. I can’t grab you or run at you or anything. When did you last see a rock move, except in an earthquake or when someone pushed it down a hill? Or up a hill, the way that fool Sisyphus does, but his story isn’t one I feel like telling. I can’t move, I assure you. But as you’ve noticed, I can talk.

  I suppose you’re wondering how a rock can talk. It would be better if you wondered why a rock is talking.

  Well, usually I don’t talk. I sing. Would you like to hear me sing? Don’t worry; even though I’m only a rock now, I have a lovely voice. The loveliest voice a mortal man ever possessed. My name is Orpheus. Have you ever heard of me?

  No? Let me fill you in. I’m a musician, and I’m what you people nowadays call an “ancient Greek.” My father was a king and my mother was a Muse—one of the famous nine Muses, in fact. The Muses, in case you didn’t know, are goddesses who are in charge of music and dance and poetry and things like that.

  I had a lot of adventures growing up, like meeting the god of music, Apollo. He gave me a lyre—a stringed instrument that isn’t very popular anymore—and everyone said I played it better than anyone else who ever lived. I’m not bragging, just telling you what everyone said. I also went on a long sea voyage on a ship called the Argo, and more than once, I saved my companions’ lives and my own with my singing.

  I saw that look. You don’t get how singing can save a life, right? Well, let me tell you, the songs and stories I sang were pretty powerful. In fact, it was my great voice that allowed me to do something that hardly anyone has ever done: I went to the land of the dead and returned alive.

  Ah, that surprises you! And it should. Like I said, hardly anyone has come back alive from the land of the dead. Only one person managed it before me—a big guy named Gilgamesh—and a few went there after me: a Trojan prince named Aeneas, then another Greek named Odysseus, though he didn’t get very far before he got scared and came back out. A long time later, a Roman poet named Virgil dropped in with a gloomy Italian friend of his named Dante. There have been a few others over the centuries, but I’m the only one who’s gone to the dark realm of the dead, while still living, for love.

  Don’t roll your eyes like that. Love is even more powerful than songs and stories—although come to think of it, most songs and stories seem to be about love, don’t they? Anyhow, the way it happened was that I married a very nice girl named Eurydice and everything looked great until she got bitten by a snake and died on our wedding day. I know—pretty tragic, right? I was so upset that I went down into the realm of the dead and begged the king and queen to let me bring her back. They were all like no, you can’t do that, dead is dead; but once I took out my lyre and sang a song about how sad I was, they cried and said all right. They said I could lead her out, but if I checked to see if she was behind me, they’d take her back again, this time for good. If I looked back, you see, that would mean I didn’t trust their word. That would be an insult, and they didn’t want to do any favors for someone who insulted them.

  So I agreed to their terms and headed out, still singing. But I kept wondering whether Eurydice really was behind me. I stopped singing and listened, but I didn’t hear any footsteps except my own. I stopped walking to make sure. Still nothing.

  I couldn’t stand it, so I thought I’d take such a quick look, barely turning my head, that nobody would notice. The king and queen hadn’t followed me, so how would they know if I just glanced over my shoulder?

  I should have known better. The king and queen of the dead are gods, after all, and they can see what’s going on in their entire kingdom, even in the places where they aren’t. When I looked back, I saw my darling bride, Eurydice, disappearing before my eyes. She was being hauled back to the realm of the dead, crying and reaching out for me.

  Well, I lost it. I called her name and tried to run after her, but I got confused in the shadows, with all the twists and turns. I wandered for a long time in the darkness before I finally came out on earth again, somewhere near here, wherever this is. I knew that the gods of the underworld wouldn’t let me back into their realm, so I just roamed around, crying, until I accidentally stumbled into a party that some nymphs were having.

  You don’t know nymphs? They’re kind of like girls, or women, but they’re not really human and they’re pretty wild. This party was supposed to be just for females, and when they saw me they were furious that a man had crashed it, and they leaped on me. I was so startled, I stopped singing, so I couldn’t charm them the way I had the king and queen of the underworld. And the nymphs were really mad—crazy, even. And what they did…. Well, it’s pretty bad. You sure you want to hear it?

  Okay. They tore me to pieces, right there, and if you think it didn’t hurt, you need to think harder. So you’d assume I would die, right, since I wasn’t attached together anymore? No. That would have meant I’d go straight to the realm of the dead and be reunited with Eurydice, and the king and queen were still too angry with me to let that happen. So instead, they kept me alive while the nymphs scattered my body around. Then they turned my head into a rock and left me here by this stream.

  There’s only one way I can turn back into a human being. Oh, I won’t be alive—nobody can live three thousand years, and when the sun sets tonight, it will be three thousand years since I was torn apart and then cursed with this rock head. But it will be a pleasure to die if I can just get out of here and finally be reunited with Eurydice.

  This is what I have to do: I have to tell three hundred stories within three thousand years. The catch is that they have to be stories that the other person has never heard before.

  You’d think it would be easy, telling just three hundred stories in three thousand years, and at first, I figured I’d be out of here in a few months. But not many people come around this deep in the forest, and most of the ones who do get a little nervous when I start talking and they don’t see anyone, so they don’t stick around. And some of the ones who do stay have already heard a lot of my tales.

  So I’ve only managed to tell 2,983 stories. Actually, 2,984, if you count me telling you how I got here, but I think it would be cheating to count that one. This time I’m going to be extra careful to play by the rules. So seventeen more to go.

  What do you say? Want to hear a story? How about seventeen stories? If I tell them to you before the sun goes down, I’ll be free. If not—well, I hate to think about it, but I imagine the gods will leave me here forever, and I just couldn’t stand that. I’m tired of freezing in the winter and baking in the summer, and the bird poop alone is enough to make me sick of all this. Plus, I miss my wife, and I at least want the chance to apologize to her for being such a bonehead.

  You will? You’ll stay until I tell you seventeen stories you’ve never heard? Great! Let’s start at the beginning—or rather, before the beginning.

  BEFORE THE BEGINNING:

  THE BIG BANG, GREEK-STYLE

  I hear that nowadays Greece is a single country, but in my time, what is now the Greek nation was a bunch of small city-states. The people in the different city-states had different customs and they told different stories about the world, including how the world itself and the stars and planets came to be.

  According to one of the stories, before humans walked the earth—before there even was an earth to walk on—before the gods ruled from Mount Olympos, or the stars shone in the sky, or there was light or air or even time, all that existed was Chaos (or Χάος, in Greek).

  Now, I know that chaos is a familiar word in English, one that people use all the time. It means confusion, a lot of things happening at once, people bumping into each other, hurry, noise, activity.
<
br />   But that’s not what Chaos meant to the Greeks. The word χάος comes from the same root as the word chasm, which means “a big hole in the ground.” Far from being a scene of bustling confusion, χάος is nothingness—it’s a gap, an abyss. It’s related to the Greek word for “yawn.”

  So if a gap or a hole was all that existed before the world (and everything else) came into being, the question is: a gap between what and what? A hole in what?

  Just as the ancient Greeks didn’t agree among themselves about what existed before the world, they also didn’t agree about what the gap was in. Some of them said that Chaos was surrounded by a circle of flowing water called Okeanos. Others kind of ignored the question.

  Still others said that far from being the only thing in existence, Chaos was ruled by a goddess named Eurynome, the daughter of Okeanos and his wife Tethys (but where did they come from?). The name Eurynome means “wide-roaming,” so she might have been a moon-goddess, since the moon roams across the entire sky. Eurynome wasn’t an only child, though. Her mother, Tethys, had more than three thousand children. Among them were the three Graces, goddesses who presided over gracefulness, celebration, singing, dance, merriment, and everything else that brings joy to humanity.

  Other Greeks rejected the whole Chaos theory. They said that the first beings were Kronos (Time) and Ananke (Necessity), who must have been something like snakes. They twined themselves around an enormous egg, squeezing it tighter and tighter until it burst, sending the lightest atoms inside it upward to make the sky, and the heavier ones downward to become the earth.

  Like Tethys, Ananke was the mother of three daughters, but her girls were gloomier than Tethys’s Graces. Ananke’s daughters were the three Fates: Lakhesis, who sings about the past; Klotho, who sings about the present; and Atropos, who sings about the future. Klotho spins a thread that represents a human life, Lakhesis measures how long that thread and the life that goes with it will be, and Atropos cuts it where Lakhesis tells her to. Atropos means “unturnable,” and once this grim Fate has made up her mind about when someone must die, there’s nothing, the Greeks said, that anyone can do about it.