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July 18
13 min read
Greek Mythology II: Heroes

The Underworld

Daily history and lit
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Readings
• "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus
• Book 5: 341–571 from "Metamorphoses" by Ovid

Persephone

Venus sends Cupid's sharpest arrow into the ruler of the underworld.
Ovid dedicates this next story to Ceres, goddess of grain, sister-consort of Jupiter, who "first broke the glebe with her crooked plow, giving birth to all the fruits of the earth."
Ceres is the mother of Proserpine by Zeus. You might know mother and daughter by their Greek names, Demeter and Persephone.
This is a story of the seasons. It begins with Typhoeus, serpent-giant of wind and fire, who had once challenged Zeus and lost. He now lies buried beneath Sicily.
Ovid
Typhoeus lies pinned beneath Sicilia: Pachynus grips his right hand, Lilybaeus his legs, Aetna weighs his head; spewing sand and flames, his struggles shake the lands.
Pluto, the king of silent shades, trembles lest yawning fissures might admit daylight into the underworld and terrify its ghosts.
Fearing such ruin, the dark despot rode forth in his soot-black car to survey Sicilia's foundations.
Having explored and proven no part was shattered, he laid aside his careful fears and wandered at ease through those parts, satisfied the island stood secure above Typhoeus and his restless force.
Venus Erycina beheld Pluto from her mount, resolving to extend Love's sway even into Tartarus, the third of realms allotted when the universe was portioned. She then embraced her winged son, Cupid.
Aphrodite (venus)
O Cupid, my son and strength, take up the arms by which you conquer all; aim your keenest arrow at him whom Fortune made last heir when the triple realm was cast by lot.
You master Heaven and the deep, bending Jupiter and every Sea-God; why should Tartarus escape our rule, when enlarging your mother's empire and your own is needful to our honor?
See how Pallas and javelin-hurling Diana disdain my power; so will Ceres' daughter choose virginity if we permit it. Unite this goddess, Proserpine, in marriage to her uncle.
Ovid
Cupid opened his quiver, chose—with his mother's aid—the keenest, surest shaft, braced knee against the pliant bow, and let it fly; the arrow flashed through air and struck Pluto in the breast.

The Stolen Goddess

Pluto abducts Proserpine and breaks through the nymph who bars his descent.
Ovid
Near Henna lies Lake Pergus, where swans sing sweeter than Cayster's, trees ring the waters like a wreath, noon's heat is veiled, cool breezes wander, flowers purple the humid ground, and spring reigns eternal.
There Proserpine dallied, plucking white lilies and violets, heaping basket and bosom with pretty zeal to outdo her companions; seen, loved, and snatched by Pluto, she cried for mother and friends as flowers fell from ripped garments.
The ravisher urged his chariot, calling each horse by name, shaking rusted reins; through deep lakes and the sulfurous, boiling Palici they sped, toward Syracuse.
Between Sicily's springs lies a moon-like pool with silvered horns; there the Nymph Cyane, revered above all, stood waist-deep, recognized the god, and from the middle waves prepared to bar his passage.
The nymph told Pluto that he could not win Proserpine by force; that it would be better to beseech her mother's aid than to drag away her child.
Pluto blazed with rage, lashed his team, and hurled his royal scepter into the pool; the smitten earth yawned to Tartarus, opened a vast basin, and received the plunging chariot in its midst.
Cyane wasted into tears; bones bent, nails softened, azure hair and slender limbs melted; her back, shoulders, sides, and breasts dissolved to rivulets until hollow veins ran only with water.
When Proserpine was lost, her mother roamed land and sea without rest, bearing two pines kindled from Aetna, seeking by rising sun and declining light alike, unappeased by dawn or Hesperus and unquenched by any stream.
Again through Sicily she wandered and reached Cyane, who, voiceless, showed upon the wave a well-known girdle. Convinced her daughter was forced away, Ceres raged, tore her hair, and cursed the land's ingratitude.
She broke the plows, leveled peasant and ox in equal death, and decreed the seed should rot; that fertile isle turned waste—blighted blades, ruinous heat and rain, malign winds, harmful constellations, greedy birds, and choking weeds.
Thunderstruck, Ceres stood long bewildered, then mounted her car and, with clouded face and streaming hair, confronted Jupiter in the heavens to plead for their daughter.
Zeus (jupiter)
Pluto's deed was love, not injury; no shame attends our daughter marrying him. Indeed, he is second only to me in fortune.
Yet if your fixed desire compels dissent, let Proserpine return to Heaven, provided the binding law allows it—on condition, as the Fates decreed, that her tongue has never tasted the food of the underworld.
Ovid
Ceres resolved to lead her child away, but the Fates forbade. In the Stygian fields, Proserpine had already plucked and chewed seven pomegranate grains.
At last Jupiter mediated between grieving sister and brother, dividing year equally; Proserpina reigned six months with her mother and six with her husband, her sorrow brightening to smiles like sun emerging from clouds.
This tale shares how, as a result of Cupid's arrow, Proserpine became Queen of the Underworld. And it explains the seasons: the promise of Proserpine's annual return ushers in spring as her mother rejoices; her descent in winter darkens the fields as her mother grieves.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Sisyphus cheats death until the gods answer with an endless ascent.
Sisyphus was a shrewd and audacious king of Corinth. Some say he was a violent brigand, others say he was wise and prudent. Perhaps he was both.
In one story, Zeus abducts the daughter of the river-god Asopus. Sisyphus then sells Zeus's secret to Asopus in exchange for a fresh spring in his dry city. In retaliation, Zeus orders Thanatos (Death) to chain Sisyphus to a rock.
As Death approaches, Sisyphus traps Death with his own chains. For a time, mortals cannot die and even war becomes deathless. This, naturally, annoys Mars (Ares), the god of war, who frees Death and hands Sisyphus over to him.
As Sisyphus lies (once again) dying, he orders his wife to toss his corpse, unburied, into the public square. Once in the underworld, Sisyphus feigns disbelief and requests to return to the living so that he can scold his wife for the improper burial.
Granted brief passage, he touches the world again—sunlight, sea, warm stone—and simply refuses to go back. He lived on, defiant and exuberant, until Mercury himself dragged him back to the underworld.
For his irreverence, for loving life too much, the gods condemn him to his infamous punishment. For eternity, he is to push a stone up a mountain, only for it to roll back down, again and again.
The story of his punishment endures as a metaphor for our absurd human condition. Day after day, we work on the same tasks toward some endless ascent, struggling for meaning in a world that offers us none.

A Face Almost Stone

Camus makes an eternal punishment visible in one straining body.
In his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the philosopher Albert Camus explains how the absurd hero can rise above.
Albert Camus
By now it is understood that Sisyphus is the absurd hero, as much through his passions as through his torment and the stubborn excess of his life.
His scorn for the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life earned him this unspeakable punishment in which a whole being strains endlessly to accomplish nothing.
This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth, for the invincible attachment to what is fleeting and mortal.
Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld; myths are made for the imagination to set them in motion and fill their silences.
For this myth, one sees only the effort of a straining body lifting the enormous stone, rolling it, helping it climb a slope begun again a hundred times.
One sees the face contracted, the cheek pressed against the rock, the shoulder accepting the mass smeared with clay, the foot that wedges it and keeps it from slipping.
One sees the arms taking up the weight again, the wholly human sureness of two hands full of earth gripping their burden in the darkness.
At the very end of this long effort, measured by a space without sky and a time without depth, the goal is reached for a moment.
Then Sisyphus watches the stone hurtle in a few instants back down toward that lower world from which he must once more haul it toward the heights.
It is during this return to the plain, this brief pause between two efforts, that Sisyphus interests me most in his solitude, his breathing space of awareness.
A face straining so close to the stones is already almost stone itself, hardened by effort, sculpted by the slope and its eternal resistance.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Lucid revolt makes Sisyphus stronger than his rock and happy without escape.
Albert Camus
I see this man descending with a heavy step. This hour, like a breathing-space, that returns as surely as his misfortune, is the hour of consciousness in which he measures his situation fully.
At each of these moments, when he leaves the summits and sinks little by little toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate; he is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, it is because its hero is conscious; for where would his misery be if at every step the hope of success sustained him?
I imagine again Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and at the beginning his heart was full of pain and homesickness for the world he has lost.
When the images of the earth cling too tightly to memory and the call of happiness becomes too insistent, sadness can rise in a man's heart; that is the victory of the rock, the rock itself.
The immense distress is too heavy to bear; these are our nights of Gethsemane, when even the strongest spirit feels abandoned beneath the weight of suffering.
Yet crushing truths perish from being recognized; once they are faced clearly, their power to crush us begins to die within our minds.
The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences every idol, refusing any consoling voice that explains or justifies his suffering.
As soon as he has restored the universe to silence, a thousand tiny, marveling voices of the earth rise up, unconscious and secret calls, invitations issuing from every face.
The absurd man says yes, and from then on his effort never ceases; if there is a personal destiny, any so-called higher destiny or consolation becomes something fatal and contemptible.
Sisyphus, returning to his rock, contemplates that sequence of disconnected actions which became his destiny, created by him, unified under the gaze of his memory and sealed by his death.
Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that denies the gods and lifts the rocks; [like Oedipus,] he judges that everything is well in his heart.
This universe, henceforth without a master, seems to him neither sterile nor futile; each grain of this stone, each mineral fragment of this mountain full of night, forms a world in itself.
The struggle itself toward the summits is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
Daily history and lit
Nerd out on the subjects you love
Try a free lesson from The Underworld