Children of the Gods

"It’s a beautiful book, illustrated with line drawings by Elisabeth Frink. I love the way Kenneth McLeish doesn’t sweeten the pill. A lot of these stories are quite gruesome and unpleasant, involving humans – and indeed immortals – coming to grisly ends. I remember when I was at school being asked to write a creation story in RE and, budding classicist that I was at age 11, I trotted off to my book of Greek myths and wrote up the story of how Zeus defeated his father Kronos right at the beginning of the world. He lopped off his genitals and threw them in the sea and out of the semen that leaked out of them sprang Aphrodite. This was the subject of concerned conference between my RE teacher and my Latin teacher. Of course, all that dark stuff is absolutely gripping and I loved it, as I think most children do. The rather brutal thing about so many of these Greek stories is that the power of the gods is absolute and arbitrary. A famous example is Oedipus, essentially rather a good man, but he did one bad thing in his life: he killed a man in a sort of road-rage incident. Later he became king of Thebes, a respected, loved and just ruler of the city, but then it transpired over the course of a terrible detective-story working-out that the person he killed at the crossroads was his own father and he’d married his own mother. And so he blinded himself, stabbing his eyes with his wife’s brooch pins, and was sent in exile from the city. So, actually, it’s quite a good lesson for life: life isn’t fair and the good don’t always prosper. Not at all: the really bad end up with unpleasant fates in the Underworld – like Sisyphus, who attempted to cheat the gods, and even cheat death. His punishment was to roll a boulder up a mountainside, but he is never quite able to manage it: it rolls back down and he must start again. And Tantalos, whose fate is to stand in a lovely glassy pool but he can never reach the water to drink or reach the fruit on the overhanging trees."