Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths

“The earth was held as a commonwealth and left to the goddesses to manage.”

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades rule over the sky, sea, and underworld respectively, which has often led them to be described as the most powerful gods. Evslin points out that goddesses also had a domain of power: the earth itself. Evslin’s description of it as a “commonwealth” suggests that the goddesses’ power is collaborative, a very different model from the competitive, combative qualities that often characterize the relationships among Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades.

“Poseidon was very fond of Demeter and pursued her hotly whenever he thought about it. He cornered her finally one hot afternoon in a mountain pass, and demanded that she love him. She didn’t know what to do—he was so huge, so implacable, so persistent.

Finally Demeter said, ‘Give me a gift. You have made creatures for the sea; now make me a land animal. But a beautiful one, the most beautiful ever seen.’” 

Violence against people perceived to be physically weaker is pervasive in ancient Greco-Roman myths, whether perpetrated by gods, monsters, or mortals. Evslin does not sanitize this element but maintains it and dramatizes how mythic stories portray physically weaker being protecting themselves. In this case, Demeter cannot physically overpower Poseidon, but she can distract him. Her ruse works, as he becomes so enchanted with his creation that he forgets about Demeter.

“When he saw Demeter, he laughed. He had never seen a grownup crying before. But when she looked up, he stopped laughing. She pointed at him, whispering, and he was immediately changed into a lizard. But he hadn’t learned to scuttle yet and just sat there looking at Demeter a moment too long, for a hawk swooped and caught him. He was a lizard for only a short while.”

Many myths portray Demeter as a nurturer who provides sustenance for humanity. While her role is benevolent, this does not mean that she is weak. Earlier, she proved herself capable of defending herself from a physically stronger opponent using her wits. Later in the story, she causes mass starvation and death by withholding crops. Here, Evslin shows her grief exploding into random violence against an innocent boy, who later has an opportunity for revenge.

“Secretly she gloated upon her power over this most fearsome monarch. Secretly she enjoyed his gifts and his efforts to please her…and marveled at the way he was obeyed. Although she never forgot how he had frightened her when he came charging out of that hole in his chariot, she admired the lofty set of his black-robed figure, the majestic shoulders, the great impatient hands, and his gloomy black eyes. But she knew that part of her power over him was disdain, and so kept flouting and abusing him, and, which made him gloomier than ever, refused to let a crumb of food pass her lips.”

This passage describes Persephone’s adjustment in the underworld. Evslin maintains a humorous tone overall, portraying Persephone as a spoiled young girl accustomed to getting her way, but the threat of violence and Persephone’s fear hang over the encounter. As Demeter did with Poseidon, Persephone assesses her situation and determines a course of action that plays to her strengths and assets in a dangerous situation.

“Apollo collected his price. He flayed Marsyas alive and nailed his skin to a tree. A stream gushed from the tree’s roots and became a river. On the banks of that river grew reeds which sang softly when the wind blew. People called the river Marsyas, and that is still its name.” 

Marsyas does not challenge Apollo, as Arachne does Athene, but his exceptional talent becomes dangerous when it brings him to the god’s attention. No matter how wise or moderate gods may seem, the potential for abuse of power persists. Apollo challenges Marsyas, sets the terms of their challenge, and—when the first set of rules does not reveal a clear winner—picks a second challenge that Marsyas cannot win. Apollo leaves Marsyas no way to escape. Yet Marsyas, powerless and tortured, does survive in one way: through the river that bears his name.

“It was to Delphi that Apollo had gone. An oracle there told him that at that very moment Coronis was entertaining young Ischys. Just then the crow flew in, wildly excited, full of scandal, telling the same tale. ‘Your fault! You did not watch her closely enough!’ cried Apollo. And he cursed the crow with a curse so furious that her feathers were scorched—and all crows have been black ever since.” 

At the end of the book, Evslin includes a dictionary of words that have mythological roots, which he also weaves explicitly into or alludes to in the stories as he tells them. In this instance, Apollo’s anger at his messengers explains why all crows are black. He sets a group of crows, all white, to watch over Coronis. When they bring Apollo the news he most fears—that Coronis is meeting with Ischys behind his back—his curse burns their feathers so severely that they retain the color into the present.

“Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty; so there are more stories told about her than anyone else, god or mortal. Being what she is, she enters other stories; and such is the power of her magic girdle that he who even speaks her name falls under her spell, and seems to glimpse her white shoulders and catch the perfume of her golden hair. And he loses his wits and begins to babble and tells the same story in many ways.” 

Evslin threads the theme of the power of love as an elemental force in the cosmos throughout his versions of the Greco-Roman myths. Here, he states explicitly how fair Aphrodite is. In some anecdotes, Aphrodite is portrayed as vain and gossipy, but this does not detract from her power, and love appears in the myths as a driving force of human life.

Zeus answered, ‘Do you not know, Prometheus, that every gift brings a penalty? This is the way the Fates weave destiny—by which gods also must abide. Man does not have fire, true, nor the crafts which fire teaches. On the other hand, he does not know disease, warfare, old age, or that inward pest called worry. He is happy, I say, happy without fire. And so he shall remain.” 

Here again Evslin portrays a central component of the ancient Greek worldview: that any one thing, whether emotion or concept or experience, is defined by its opposite. If humans know pleasure, then they have known pain. If they realize that they have knowledge (essentially what Prometheus offers them through fire), then they will realize that they were ignorant (the happy state in which Zeus wants to keep them). If they have crafts that enable them to travel, engage with others, grow old, and accumulate wealth, these too will bring their attendant problems and concerns.

“For there is this in man too: a vaunting pride that needs little sustenance to make it swell to giant size. Improve his lot, and he will forget that which makes him pleasing—his sense of worship, his humility. He will grow big and poisoned with pride and fancy himself a god, and before we know it, we shall see him storming Olympus.” 

In addition to the codependence of opposites, Prometheus’s gift also demonstrates how any gifts humans receive from gods, whether objects or talents, bring danger. Zeus here warns Prometheus that men will become infatuated with their own creations and grow arrogant. Their pride may cause them to push their limits, he declares (as indeed they do repeatedly throughout Evslin’s collected myths). Zeus does not necessarily imagine that men will become a serious threat to Olympus when they receive fire, but he knows they will not be as dependent on the gods. As men’s abilities and beliefs about themselves change, so will the balance of power, a change Zeus wishes to avoid.

“For the creature that Pandora had shut into the box was the most dangerous of all. It was Foreboding, the final spite. If it had flown free, everyone in the world would have been told exactly what misfortune was to happen every day of his life. No hope would have been possible. And so there would have been an end to man. For though he can bear endless trouble, he cannot live with no hope at all.” 

Evslin’s depiction of Pandora’s box explains how hope is preserved: not by hope itself being trapped in the box, but because foreboding is trapped there. As long as humans do not know the tragic ends they will meet, they can preserve the comfort of hope. This way of telling the story also draws attention to the danger of having too much of good thing, because good transmutes into bad. Humans should not have knowledge of what is to come, as it would be too much for them to bear.

“‘I was taunted by a son of Zeus, Epaphus. And I would have flung him over the cliff and myself after him if I had not resolved to make my lies come true.’

‘Well, you’re my son, all right. Proud, rash, accepting no affront, refusing no adventure. I know the breed.’” 

In this passage, Phaethon has been brought to Apollo’s palace and is introducing himself to his father for the first time. It demonstrates the humorous tone Evslin infuses into his retelling of the myths even when they have tragic outcomes. Apollo has many children he has never met, yet he recognizes Phaethon from his flaws: impulsive and prideful, rushing into adventure. These are the defining qualities of heroes.

“They could not stop weeping. They stood on the bank of the river where he had fallen until Apollo, unable to comfort them, changed them into poplar trees. Here they still stand on the shore of the river, weeping tears of amber sap.”

Here Phaethon’s story accounts for another natural phenomenon: poplar trees. Their sap is imagined to be tears shed by Phaethon’s heartbroken sisters after his disastrous ride on Apollo’s sun chariot. By including such explanations of the natural world, Evslin shows how mythic stories become embedded in a cultural consciousness, inhabiting the material world around us in ways that come to feel indelible.

“And Charon, listening, felt himself carried back to his own youth—to the time before he had been taken by Hades and put to work on the black river. And he was so lost in memory that the great sweep oar fell from his hand, and he stood there, dazed, tears streaming down his face—and Orpheus took up the oar and rowed across.” 

To survive his journey through the underworld and make it to Hades’s court, Orpheus enchants his listeners with his beautiful musical storytelling. Each being he encounters is so moved that they allow Orpheus to pass by unharmed. Here, Charon remembers the life he had before his service to Hades, just as Cerberus recalls being a frisky puppy. This anecdote highlights the power of poetic song to transport those who hear it to other times and places as well as deep into their own memories. In a more immediate sense, it draws attention to how even a figure like Charon, whose eternity is spent in the thankless task of ferrying souls across the Styx, has a life, with aspirations and connections, that those who encounter him daily know nothing about.

“This one stroke of unique mercy will illumine like a lightening flash the caverns of your dread decree. Nature exists by proportion, and perceptions work by contrast, and the gods themselves are part of nature. This brilliant act of kindness, I say, will make cruelty seem like justice for all the rest of time. Pray give me back my wife again, great monarch.” 

This passage is Orpheus’s impassioned plea to Hades to allow Eurydice to leave the underworld with him. Hades is not known for his mercy, but Orpheus (as Evslin depicts repeatedly) draws on the power of contrasts to convince him. An instance of mercy, Orpheus claims, will draw attention to Hades’s fearsome nature because it will remind those who hear of it how rare it is. Hades will also show that he is capable of kindness, thus suggesting that when he does not show it, his kindness has not been earned.

“How did he know she was there? How did he know that this was not all a trick of Hades? Who calls the gods to judgment? Who can accuse them if they lie? Would Hades, implacable Hades, who had had the great Asclepius murdered for pulling a patient back from death, would that powerful thwarting mind that had imagined the terrain of Tartarus and the bolts of those gates and dreamed a three-headed dog—could such a mind be turned to mercy by a few notes of music, a few tears?” 

Hades has warned Orpheus that if he turns back to make sure Eurydice is behind him, he will not be able to take her back to the living world. Hades’s conditions require Orpheus to trust blindly both in the power of his own talent and in the god’s word. The more Orpheus thinks about his situation, the more he begins to doubt both. The more he doubts, the harder it is for him to align his actions with Hades’s conditions.

“Without love, work died. Farmers did not plough their fields. Ships crawled listlessly on the seas. Fishermen scarcely cast their nets. Indeed, there were not many fish to catch, for they had sunk sullenly to the very bottom of the sea. And Aphrodite herself, goddess of love and beauty, found herself wasting in the great parching despair that came off the earth like a desert wind.”

Here, Eros, angry that his mother will not allow him to marry Psyche, refuses to do her bidding. People stop falling in love, and then everything that love inspires also stops. The passage draws attention to two important concepts. It highlights love as a generative force, not only of human life but of human creation, energy, and achievement. In addition, the passage draws attention to the notion of connectivity in the ancient Greek worldview: Aphrodite’s power only exists when there are people on whom that power can be exercised. Thus, her power—and by extension all the gods’ powers—is great but not absolute, because it does not exist outside the context of its relationship to mortals.

“And then jealousy, more terrible than fear, began to gnaw at her. She was not really afraid that he was a monster. Nor was she at all afraid of being devoured. If he did not love her she wanted to die anyway, but the idea that he might have other brides, other castles, clawed at her and sent her almost mad. She felt that if she could only see him her doubts would be resolved.” 

When Eros first brings Psyche to his palace, he does not allow her to see him. He visits only at night, under the cover of darkness. Though her parents blindly accept the oracle that results in Psyche marrying Eros, Psyche herself struggles, and ultimately fails, to trust Eros blindly. She wants verification, as Orpheus does. She wants to see with her literal eyes, but Eros asks her to trust with her inner eye, which she is not able to do. Jealousy is portrayed as a destructive attendant of love because it blinds that inner eye.

“The gods, being all-powerful, needed a more subtle praise than obedience. They preferred their intention to become man’s aspiration, their caprice, his law. Athene, in particular, liked to be served this way. The gray-eyed goddess of wisdom, whose sign was the owl, taught men the arts they needed to know, not through gross decree, but through firing the brightest spirits to a white heat wherein they perceived the secret laws of nature and made discoveries and inventions.”

Evslin expresses a paradox inherent in the ancient Greeks’ characterization of the god-mortal relationship: the alignment of wills. Gods gift humans inventions they need to achieve certain ends, as Hermes gifts Perseus the winged sandals that he needs to get past the gorgons. More often, though, gods create conditions that push mortals toward the gods’ desired ends: The winged sandals are only useful to Perseus because he has already committed himself to killing Medusa. In the case of Daedalus, his inventions result from conditions that fire his creativity: Being locked in the labyrinth forces him to invent wings to escape.

“‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘You are not to look upon yourselves as victims, or victims you will surely be. The time of tribute has ended. You are to regard this voyage not as a submission but as a military expedition. Everything will change, but first you must change your way of looking at things.”

Theseus verbalizes another version of the alignment of wills paradox. In this case, if the Athenians continue to believe themselves to be victims, they will continue to be victimized. To escape their condition as tributes, they must stop thinking like tributes. In other words, in order to achieve their desired outcome—to escape and to live—they must align their wills with that outcome, even though they have no proof that they can achieve it.

“Yes, I trust them to act like themselves. These neighbors of ours didn’t become so rich in land and cattle by right of purchase, my dear. They are men who have always taken when they wanted; this is how they have gained their property and their reputation. Frankly, I fear them more than I do the board.” 

In his introduction to the collection, Evslin describes the battles between heroes and monsters as “family quarrels” (10). This description can be said to characterize relations more generally within the ancient Greek world. Quarrels and full-scale wars between neighbors and family members are the basis of many conflicts in Greek myth, including the Theban and Trojan wars. This source of violence reflects the idea that conflict does not necessarily arise between good and evil but also occurs between competing interests and as a result of jealousy, greed, and other forces of nature. Here the king of Calydon, Meleager’s father, describes his neighbors to his wife, emphasizing that to act violently is their innate quality and habit.

“The best then whirled and charged Peleus, who might have died on the spot, leaving no son named Achilles (and Hector might have gone unslain, and Troy, perhaps, might have stood unburned), but Atalanta drew her bow and sent a shaft into the vulnerable spot behind the boar’s ear.”

Evslin builds into his narratives references to heroes and events that exist in other myths that he does not tell in this collection. In this case, readers are introduced to Achilles and Hector via Peleus, Achilles’s father. References like this one draw attention to the interconnection of mythical stories, the ways their narratives spill into each other, embodying the connectivity that characterizes the ancient Greek worldview.

“He did not look much like anyone’s idea of a hero, and no one believed he had a chance. […] “But for all his gentleness, he could not be moved. […] He thought to himself, ‘The others want to coerce her. I want her to want me.’ …So he prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.” 

“He” is Hippomenes, who falls in love with Atalanta during the Calydonian boar hunt and follows her back to Arcadia (197). Unlike the typical hero, Hippomenes does not draw attention to himself, being neither egotistical nor prone to feats of excessive strength. The heroic qualities he possesses are dedication and determination to pursue his cause: marrying Atalanta. Hippomenes diverges from the standard mythic mold but is no less a hero.

“You pretended to forgive me, but you punished me with a gift!”

Midas’s reproach to Apollo perfectly encapsulates the contradictory way gods often work and highlights the limits of human knowledge. Unlike divine knowledge, mortal knowledge is limited—by mortal senses that limit perspective as well as by heroes’ personal limitations that cause them to see only what they want to see. Midas receives what he wants and thinks it a gift, but Apollo knows Midas’s greed will lead to disaster.