The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics) (9 page)

Not long afterwards, he killed Tityos also, who was the son of Zeus and Elare, daughter of Orchomenos; for after making love with Elare, Zeus had hidden her under the earth for fear
of Hera, and had brought up to light the child that she was carrying in her womb, the enormous Tityos. Now when Leto came to Pytho,
*
she was seen by Tityos, who was overcome by desire and seized her in his arms; but she called her children to her aid, and they shot him down with their arrows. Tityos suffers punishment
*
even after his death, for vultures feed on his heart in Hades.

²
Apollo also killed Marsyas, the son of Olympos; for Marsyas had discovered the flute that Athene had thrown away because it disfigured her face,
*
and he challenged Apollo to a musical contest. They agreed that the victor should do what he wished with the loser, and when the test was under way, Apollo played his lyre upside down and told Marsyas to do the same;
*
and when he was unable to, Apollo was recognized as the victor, and killed Marsyas by suspending him from a lofty pine tree and flaying him.

³
Artemis, for her part, killed Orion on Delos. They say that he was born from the earth, with a body of gigantic pro portions; but according to Pherecydes, he was a son of Poseidon and Euryale. Poseidon had granted him the power to walk across the sea. His first wife was Side, who was thrown into Hades by Hera because she had claimed to rival the god dess in beauty; and afterwards he went to Chios, and sought the hand of Merope, daughter of Oinopion. But Oinopion made him drunk, blinded him
*
as he slept, and threw him out by the seashore. Orion made his way to the forge [of Hephaistos],
*
where he snatched up a boy, and setting him on his shoulders, told him to guide him towards the sunrise. When he arrived there, his sight was rekindled by the rays of the sun, and he was able to see again.
⁴
He returned with all haste to attack Oinopion; but Poseidon had provided him with an underground dwelling constructed by Hephaistos. Dawn fell in love with Orion and carried him off to Delos (for Aphrodite caused her to be continually in love because she had gone to bed with Ares).
*
⁵
According to some accounts, Orion was killed because he challenged Artemis to a contest in throwing the discus, while according to others, he was shot by Artemis
*
because he tried to rape Opis,
*
one of the virgins who had arrived from the Hyperboreans.

⁶
Poseidon married Amphitrite, [daughter of Oceanos,] who bore Triton to him, and Rhode,
*
who became the wife of the Sun.

¹
Pluto fell in love with Persephone and, with the help of

5

Zeus, he secretly abducted her;
*
but Demeter, bearing torches,
*
wandered by night and day all over the earth in search of her. When she learned from the people of Hermion
*
that Pluto had carried her off, she abandoned heaven in her anger at the gods, and came to Eleusis in the likeness of a woman. First she sat down on the rock which is called the Laughterless Rock because of her, and then made her way to Celeos, who was king of the Eleusinians at the time. There were some women in the house, and when they invited her to sit down amongst them, an old woman called Iambe joked with the goddess and made her smile; and that, they say, is the reason why the women make jokes at the Thesmophoria.
*

Metaneira, the wife of Celeos, had a young child, and Demeter took it over to nurse. Wanting to make it immortal, she would lay the baby in the fire at night, stripping it of its mortal flesh. But because Demophon (for that was the child’s name) was growing at such an extraordinary rate each day, Praxithea
*
kept watch over him, and when she found him buried in the fire, she screamed aloud; as a result, the baby was consumed by the fire, and the goddess revealed her identity.
*

²
For Triptolemos, the eldest of Metaneira’s children, Demeter fashioned a chariot drawn by winged dragons, and she gave him wheat,
*
which he sowed over the whole inhabited earth as he was carried through the sky. Panyasis says that Triptolemos was a son of Eleusis, for according to him, that was whom Demeter had visited. Pherecydes, for his part, says that he was a son of Oceanos and Ge.

³
When Zeus ordered Pluto to send Kore
*
back to earth, Pluto, to prevent her from remaining too long with her mother, gave her a pomegranate seed to eat;
*
and failing to foresee what the consequence would be, she ate it. When Ascalaphos, son of Acheron and Gorgyra, bore witness against her,
*
Demeter placed a heavy rock over him in Hades, but Persephone
was forced to stay with Pluto for a third of every year,
*
and the rest she spent with the gods.

¹
. Such is the story of Demeter.

6

Ge, angered by the fate of the Titans, brought to birth the Giants, whom she had conceived by Ouranos.
*
These were unsurpassable in size, unassailable in their strength, and fearful to behold because of the thick hair hanging down from their head and cheeks; and their feet were formed from dragons’ scales. According to some accounts, they were born at Phlegrai, or according to others, at Pallene. And they hurled rocks and flaming oak trees at the heavens. Mightiest of all were Porphyrion and Alcyoneus, who was even immortal as long as he fought on the land of his birth. It was he, moreover, who drove the cattle of the Sun from Erytheia. Now the gods had an oracle saying that none of the Giants could be killed by the gods [acting on their own], but if the gods had a mortal fighting as their ally, the Giants would meet their end. When Ge heard of this, she searched for a herb to prevent the Giants from being destroyed even by a mortal; but Zeus forestalled her, for he ordered Dawn, and the Moon and Sun, not to shine and plucked the herb himself. And he sent Athene to summon Heracles as an ally.

And first Heracles shot Alcyoneus with his arrows, but when he fell to the earth, he recovered some of his strength. On the advice of Athene, Heracles dragged him beyond the boundaries of Pallene, and so it came about that the Giant met his death.
²
In the course of the fighting, Porphyrion launched an attack against Heracles and Hera. But Zeus inspired him with a lust for Hera, and when he tore her clothing and tried to rape her, she cried for help; and Zeus struck the Giant with his thunderbolt, and Heracles killed him with a shot from his bow. As for the others, Apollo shot Ephialtes in the left eye with one of his arrows, while Heracles shot him in the right. Eurytos was killed by Dionysos with a blow from his thyrsos,
*
Clytios by Hecate with her torches, and Mimas by Hephaistos with missiles of red-hot iron. Athene hurled the island of
Sicily on Encelados as he fled; and she flayed Pallas and used his skin to protect her own body during the fight. Polybotes was pursued through the sea by Poseidon and made his way to Cos, where Poseidon broke off the part of the island called Nisyron
*
and threw it down on him. Hermes, who was wearing the cap of Hades, killed Hippolytos in the battle, and Artemis killed Gration;
*
and the Fates, fighting with bronze cudgels, killed Agrios and Thoon. The others were destroyed by Zeus, who struck them with thunderbolts; and all of them, in their death throes, were shot with arrows by Heracles.

³
When the gods had defeated the Giants, Ge, whose anger was all the greater, had intercourse with Tartaros and gave birth to Typhon
*
in Cilicia. He was part man and part beast, and in both size and strength he surpassed all the other children of Ge. Down to his thighs he was human in form, but of such immense size that he rose higher than all the mountains and often even scraped the stars with his head. With arms outstretched, he could reach the west on one side and the east on the other; and from his arms there sprang a hundred dragons’ heads.
*
Below his thighs, he had massive coils of vipers, which, when they were fully extended, reached right up to his head and emitted violent hisses. He had wings all over his body, and filthy hair springing from his head and cheeks floated around him in the wind, and fire flashed from his eyes. Such was Typhon’s appearance and such his size when he launched an attack against heaven itself, hurling flaming rocks at it, hissing and screaming all at once, and gushing mighty streams of fire from his mouth. Seeing him rush against heaven, the gods took flight to Egypt,
*
and when they were pursued by him, transformed themselves into animals. While Typhon was still at a distance, Zeus pelted him with thunderbolts, but as the monster drew close, Zeus struck at him with an adamantine sickle, and then chased after him when he fled, until they arrived at Mount Casion, which rises over Syria. And there, seeing that Typhon was severely wounded, he engaged him in hand-to-hand combat. But Typhon enveloped him in his coils and
held him fast; and wresting the sickle from him, he cut the tendons from his hands and feet. And raising him on his shoulders, he carried him through the sea to Cilicia, and put him down again when he arrived at the Corycian cave. He placed the tendons there also, hiding them in a bear’s skin and appointing as their guard the she-dragon Delphyne, who was half beast and half maiden. But Hermes and Aigipan
*
made away with the tendons and fitted them back into Zeus without being observed. When Zeus had recovered his strength, he made a sudden descent from heaven on a chariot drawn by winged horses, and hurling thunderbolts, he pursued Typhon to the mountain called Nysa, where the fugitive was tricked by the Fates; for persuaded that he would become stronger as a result, he tasted the ephemeral fruits.
*
Coming under pursuit once again, he arrived in Thrace, and joining battle near Mount Haimos, he began to hurl entire mountains. But when they were thrust back at him by the thunderbolts, a stream of
blood
*
gushed from him onto the mountain (which is said to be the reason why it was called
Haimos)
. When he set out to flee across the Sicilian sea, Zeus hurled Mount Etna at him, which lies in Sicily. This is a mountain of enormous size, and there rise up from it, even to this day, eruptions of fire
*
that are said to issue from the thunderbolts hurled by Zeus. But that is quite enough on this matter.

2. The Deucalionids

¹
After he had fashioned men
*
from water and earth, Prometheus

7

also gave them fire, which he had hidden in a fennel
*
stalk in secret from Zeus. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaistos to nail his body to Mount Caucasos (a mountain that lies in Scythia). So Prometheus was nailed to it and held fast there for a good many years; and each day, an eagle swooped down to feed on the lobes of his liver, which grew again by night. Such was the punishment suffered by Prometheus for having stolen the fire, until Heracles later released him, as we will show
*
in our account of Heracles.

²
Prometheus had a son, Deucalion, who ruled the area around Phthia, and married Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and of Pandora, whom the gods had fashioned as the first woman.
*
When Zeus wanted to eliminate the race of bronze,
*
Deucalion, on the advice of Prometheus, built a chest, and after storing it with provisions, climbed into it with Pyrrha. Zeus poured an abundance of rain from heaven to flood the greater part of Greece, causing all human beings to be destroyed, apart from those few who took refuge in the lofty mountains nearby. It was then that the mountains of Thessaly drew apart and all the lands outside the Isthmus and the Peloponnese were submerged. But Deucalion was carried across the sea in his chest for nine days and as many nights until he was washed ashore at Parnassos; and there, when the rain stopped, he disembarked, and offered a sacrifice to Zeus, God of Escape. Zeus sent Hermes to him and allowed him the choice of whatever he wished; and Deucalion chose to have people. On the orders of Zeus, he picked up stones and threw them over his head; and the stones that Deucalion threw became men, and those that Pyrrha threw became women. That was how people came to be called
laoi
, by metaphor from the word
laas
, a stone.
*

Deucalion had two sons by Pyrrha, first Hellen (though some describe him as a son of Zeus), and secondly Amphictyon, who became king of Attica after Cranaos; he also had a daughter, Protogeneia, who later bore Aethlios to Zeus.

³
Hellen had three sons, Doros, Xouthos, and Aiolos, by a nymph, Orseis; and those who were called the Graicoi he named Hellenes
*
after himself. And he divided the land amongst his sons. Xouthos received the Peloponnese, and by Creousa, daughter of Erechtheus, he had two sons, Achaios and Ion, after whom the Achaeans and the Ionians were named. Doros received the country opposite the Peloponnese
*
and named its inhabitants the Dorians after himself. Aiolos became king of the lands around Thessaly and named their inhabitants the
Aeolians. He married Enarete, daughter of Deimachos, and became the father of seven sons, Cretheus, Sisyphos, Athamas, Salmoneus, Deion, Magnes, and Perieres, and five daughters, Canace, Alcyone, Peisidice, Calyce, and Perimede.

Perimede bore Hippodamas and Orestes to Acheloos; and Peisidice bore Antiphos and Actor to Myrmidon.
⁴
Alcyone became the wife of Ceux, son of Heosphoros. Both of them died because of their arrogance: for Ceux said that his wife was Hera, and Alcyone that her husband was Zeus, and Zeus changed them into birds, making her a
halcyon
*
and him a
sea-swallow
*