Atticus the Storyteller's 100 Greek Myths

Extract

In this extract from Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths, you can learn about how much the Greek gods and goddesses loved storytelling—and meet Atticus and his family for the first time. Doesn’t he have a lot of children?

Stories from the Heavens

Long, long ago, in Ancient Greece, lived gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, together with fearful monsters and every kind of fabulous beast that ever flew,or walked or swam. But gradually, as men began to build more villages and towns and cities, the gods and monsters disappeared into the secret places of the world and the heavens, so that they could have some peace. And although there were still heroes and heroines around (and always will be), they were less famous, and less strong with every century that passed.
Before they disappeared, the gods and goddesses gave the great gift of storytelling to men, so that their tales would never be forgotten. They ordered that there should be a great storytelling festival once every seven years on the slopes of Mount Ida, near Troy, and that tellers of tales should come from all over Greece, and from lands near and far to take part. Every seven years a beautiful painted vase, filled to the brim with gold appeared as a first prize, and the winner was honoured for the rest of his life by all the people of Greece.
Now, in a little village called Cydonia, near the other Mount Ida in Crete, lived Atticus the sandal maker, with his wife, Hera, his nine children (eight girls and a boy), Io, Eos, Geryon, Delphi, Dione, Pirene, Iambe, Thallo and Trivia, Melissa his donkey, Circe, his pig, Scylla, his cow, Phaeton,his cockerel, and twenty-four hens…

If you look on Point 10 of Atticus’s interactive map of Greece, you can see an actual photograph of the stone Niobe on Mount Sipylus in Turkey! Isn’t it amazing that it’s a real place? This is Niobe’s story.

The Queen Who Cried Rivers

Queen Niobe of Thebes looked at her seven handsome twin sons and her seven beautiful twin daughters playing in the palace courtyard.

“Surely they are the most wonderful children in the world, and I am the cleverest mother in the universe to have had them all,” she boasted to her husband Amphion. “I’m better than a goddess at being a mother anyday—after all look at silly little Leto. She may have had one set of twins, but I’ve had seven! I think I should be a goddess too.” And she ordered the people of Thebes to set up statues of her in the temples and worship her.

Now gods and goddesses have a nasty way of hearing when humans boast, and sure enough, a little swallow flew up to Olympus and told Leto what Niobe had said and done.

Leto called her children Apollo and Artemis to her at once.

“Let us teach this woman a lesson,” she said. “Let her daughters be frozen to death by icy moonbeams, and let her sons be roasted by the rays of the sun.”

The next morning, when Niobe went to wake her children, all she found in their beds were seven little blocks of ice, and seven little heaps of charcoal. Niobe started to weep. She wept so loud and so long that all the people of Thebes covered their ears to shut out the sound. She wept for seven long years, until the palace was swimming with salt and sadness. Zeus himself heard her cries, and he took her away and turned her into a statue, and set her on the slopes of Mount Siphylus where her father Tantalus lived. But even as a statue Niobe still wept, and the tears of her grief have fallen down the cliffs of the mountain in a great bubbling stream from that day to this.