Greek Myths: Tales of Travelling Heroes

Throughout my life I've been fascinated by the Greek myths,

by the tales of those tragic heroes,

by the loves and personalities of the Gods,

and their battles with monsters, or even with one another.

Myths are stories without known authors,

and I've always wondered, where do they come from?

On their trail, I will go on a journey of discovery

East and West across the Mediterranean.

I will travel from a mountain in Turkey where a god was castrated,

to the peak in Greece where the young king of the gods was brought up to power.

I'll trace the fragile beginnings of our Western alphabet and literature.

This is huge, this is really the beginning of literate Western civilisation for us

and we are witnessing it in the palm of your hand.

I will uncover a hidden inscription which tells a remarkable story.

This really is the lifeblood of ancient history and we're finding it straight in front of us.

I will enter the underground lair of a once terrifying snaky monster...

..and look upon his final explosive resting place.

It's really steaming, hotting up,

been blazing away for about 5,000 years, it's still not exhausted.

And I will discover a place where, amazingly,

the Greek past is still mirrored in our world.

In this film, I will reveal how Greeks' myths of their battling gods

were shaped by the minds of people from a particular place,

living at a time which has been described as a Dark Age.

I teach ancient history here at New College, Oxford,

where classical Greek has been studied for so many centuries.

It really is the place to think about the ancient world.

And not only think about it, but look at it too.

Nearby, the Ashmolean Museum is built on classical Greek principles.

Recently, it's been excitingly redesigned.

The cultural links between ancient civilisations are at its heart.

Here I always reflect how Greek art, philosophy, politics

are at the roots of our Western world,

and at the heart of their legacy lie the Greek myths.

These are stories that have inspired art of great beauty...

and great horror, from the Renaissance to the modern,

and influenced philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years.

Even today, the tales of the Greek mythical heroes -

Odysseus, Adonis, Achilles - are still alive for us.

But grander still are the myths which made the Greek gods what they were.

Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo,

and ruling over them, Zeus himself, the father of gods and men.

The most fascinating of these myths

are the stories of the wars of the gods in heaven.

I believe we can understand their roots

and understand the world in which they developed.

Our knowledge of these myths comes from ancient hymns to the gods

and epic poetry.

Above all, the great poetry of Homer.

In the very first book of his Iliad,

Homer actually describes the singing of just such a hymn with myths to the god Apollo.

Homer probably composed in the mid to late 8th century BC -

after 400 years of what historians used to call the Greek Dark Ages.

They were dark in one respect. Greeks on the mainland

had lost the art of writing.

But during this pre-literate age, myths proliferated.

They were not fantasies of the human unconscious mind,

they were born through contact with real places

by a particular people whom I will trace for the first time.

Theirs is an extraordinary story of exploration and imagination

and it begins for me with a journey

to the Greek island from which they came more than 3,000 years ago.

The island of Euboea was known to the Greeks as Long Island.

It's not on many tourists' trail

but at the Euripus Strait, the island lies so close to mainland Greece

you can actually walk across using a short bridge.

Towards the end of the Greek Dark Ages, between the 10th and 8th centuries BC,

there were a number of relatively sophisticated settlements on Euboea.

I believe that their residents played the crucial role

in development of the Greek myths about the gods in heaven.

The contemporary evidence for them comes from archaeological finds.

'In Euboea, the most telling excavation has been on a hill

'near the town of Lefkandi,

'where the excavation is led by Irene Lemos,

'my colleague from the University of Oxford.'

So this is the deposit where you put everything you find on the hill, mainly pottery?

Yes, this is where we keep all our pottery.

Oh, my God, it looks as though you're clearing up after the party the night before.

There's so much you can't make any sense of it. All you've got

is a mass of undecorated pieces, none of which match, as far as I can see.

Pretty much, yes. This is a normal bag, really.

Right, and that is the contents of about half a crate out of that?

And you've got how many hundreds of crates? I dread to think.

We have 1,000 crates.

-1,000?

-Yes, in here.

You're going to be here until you're old and grey,

they're never going to let you out. You'll be locked in, it's the end of your life.

'Pottery is so important for historians

'because it leaves an indestructible human trail,

'and it's exciting when fragments can be assembled into one object.'

How many pieces are there in that one, for instance?

-Around 20.

-20? Are you sure you've got them in the right order?

-Yes, definitely.

-And that's all held together with little bits of glue,

and then I see it beautifully photographed and think in an airy way that it's a perfect piece.

Yes.

All the pottery in the world is waiting to be found, Irene.

'The most significant of Irene's finds

'are brought to the Eretria Museum, a few kilometres from Lefkandi.

'Here, there are objects which reveal the prominence

'of myths in Euboean society and hint at how they developed.'

Here, Robin, you will see some of our complete finds

and some of the best - mostly from the cemeteries

-of Lefkandi.

-What have we got here?

-This is a figurine of a centaur.

A man and a horse, wonderful.

So this really is evidence of a figure of myth,

and that must mean that the myths were known

and being told in Lefkandi in the 10th/9th century.

I don't think I recall a centaur any earlier than this.

-Is this one of the first?

-It is actually the first three-dimensional representation

-we have of the mythical centaur.

-Heavens.

This particular one has six fingers and a gash on his leg,

-so it might be a particular one.

-Ah!

-It could be Chiron, the teacher of Achilles.

-Absolutely.

What this really means is that the myths we talk about must have been

known and circulating at Lefkandi, possibly told in poetry.

So when we're thinking, "What did they talk about?"

An object like this gives you a real idea of the surrounding culture

and understanding of the people.

This looks likes some kind of a ship, I think, Irene.

Yes, it is a boat, and it is most probably galley.

Right, and what sort of date are we talking about?

Well, it is early 9th century BC.

What, 9th century BC boat on a pot? I don't believe you.

-It is the earliest one.

-Right.

-Actually, when we found it,

I excavated this part and nobody believed me

that we had the bit of a boat and then we got the rest of it.

And proved you right?

-Yes.

-It's very sophisticated.

We've got the oars, we've got one to steer by,

we've got the mast and with that they could set out onto the Aegean,

steering by the stars, we have to remember, pulling on their oars for a long journey.

So with ships of that sophistication, there's every reason

why the Euboeans should be able to look outwards from Lefkandi,

and that's clear evidence that Euboeans would be great travellers

at a time when the rest of Greece is not capable of it.

It's extraordinary to think how the Euboeans would have sailed.

They had no maps, no compasses,

they didn't have our cardinal points like east or west.

Their world view was shaped by local landmarks,

especially distinctive cliffs.

Undaunted, they would set out from these shores and with them travelled

a mental cargo of the oral stories which they called muthoi.

These muthoi were not fixed but were open to new influences and insights,

and in their travels, I believe,

the Euboeans encountered landscapes and stories which inspired new myths.

Their trail takes me first

to the very eastern limit of settlement for Dark Age Greek travellers,

out on the coast of modern Turkey.

From the 10th century BC onwards,

Euboeans came east in search of metals,

especially copper and tin,

which was needed for their newly acquired skill of a bronze working.

It's here, just by this shore,

that I'm going to find the crucial Euboean link

which helps to explain the trail of myths surrounding the Greek gods and their wars in heaven.

What Euboeans learnt here was nothing less than the stories

of a violent struggle among the early gods - stories of castration

and baby eating, and of how their ruling god Zeus came to power.

My belief stems from the remarkable discoveries

made by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1936.

Woolley's excavations lay on the outskirts of the coastal town of Samandag...

..near the Syrian border with Turkey.

Today, even to rediscover Woolley's site is not easy,

it's been covered over and there'd been no more excavations for years.

So I've begun from a landmark he mentioned,

the shrine of a local Muslim saint.

We know Woolley excavated just to the northeast of the shrine.

This place is about a mile inland from the sea, but believe it or not,

in antiquity it was actually on the coast,

just beside a river which has silted it up.

That was why Woolley named it Al Mina,

Arabic word for the port or harbourage by which it's still known.

Now, I'm going to try to get in and see the site that Woolley excavated,

which is down there among what are now orange groves.

There are no traces here of Woolley's trenches.

Oranges now ripen in the fields.

Most of his finds have been shipped off abroad.

Woolley found nothing so exciting as gold and sculpture here,

but for historians he found something every bit as important.

He dug and dug down through nine layers of time,

and then on virgin soil at the very bottom,

he found a layer of predominantly Greek pottery,

most of which has turned out to be Euboean.

My natural conclusion, then,

is that Euboeans were the first settlers right out here at Al Mina.

Fascinatingly, the pottery fragments from the 8th century BC

which Woolley found were mainly from simple drinking vessels.

They were functional and they're not desirable items for foreign trade.

So I believe Euboeans brought them to these shores

for their own personal use in the settlement.

Experts still argue over Al Mina's pottery, which is scattered nowadays

all the way from the British Museum to Australia.

But if you actually come to the site,

you realise there was something much more important in the Euboeans' minds.

Every day, every night, they looked up

to the great beacon of a mountain, which rises steeply from the sea.

It affected the clouds, the rain, the sea itself,

and round it swirled some of the world's oldest myths about the gods.

Today this mountain is known as Jebel Aqra - Bald Mountain.

It had many names in the past, Mount Hazzi was one,

and for the Greeks, it became known as Mount Casius.

Mount Casius rises nearly 2,000 metres directly up from the seashore.

Often wreathed in clouds, it is a focal point for thunder and lightning.

Nowadays, we sometimes think of a landscape like this

as a mass of rock and soil,

which exists independently of an observer's eye.

But landscapes are also given character by human concepts

and in antiquity, they inspired myths.

When Euboeans arrived here,

they needed to understand the elemental power of the mountain peak,

and they found that near-Eastern cultures already could explain it.

For more than 1,000 years, long before any Euboean Greeks

settled below, this mountain peak was the centre for prayers,

hymns, and animal sacrifices.

Mount Casius was a holy mountain for the Hittites.

The Hittites old empire had fallen around 1200 BC,

four centuries before Euboeans settled here.

At its peak, it had ruled over a vast swathe of land,

from modern Turkey right into Syria,

and its cultural influence had survived the empire's fall.

When Euboeans arrived, that influence was still present in local myths and religion.

On the summit of this mountain,

the Hittites believed lived the god Teshub,

whom they later called Tarhunta the Conqueror.

He was a god of weather and of storms and thunder,

and when the rain clouds break on this mountain,

everyone for miles around is only too aware of his power.

Religious ceremonies were offered to the mountain too

and we've recently learned something very important.

From fragmentary Hittite tablets,

we know that the ceremonies included the Song of Kingship,

and the Song of the Sea.

This is crucial because they are the stories we know from other Hittite texts

about the many battles and fights of the Hittite gods

for control in heaven.

Most remarkably, these Hittite myths share many details with the Greek myths

of how their ruling gods came to power.

The myths are so similar - did the Hittite one influence the Greeks?

To answer this question,

I need first to travel northwards

to the ancient centre of Hittite power.

Down this 71-metre tunnel

lies a spectacular sight from the pre-classical world.

This is Hattusas. Its remains cover an astonishing area.

It was the capital of the Hittite kings

until their empire fell more than 3,000 years ago.

These scattered limestone foundations can only hint at the city's true grandeur.

The Hittite Empire was so mighty at its peak that down in the south

even the Egyptian pharaoh was forced to retreat before its army.

The kings of Hattusas honoured their gods at a shrine created out of a natural ravine.

Along its walls run carved reliefs which show the gods in procession

and at the centre, the Hittite weather god Tarhunta.

He's visible here in outline, though nowadays the carving is rather faint.

He's holding out his hand to Hepat,

a goddess who's come up from Syria and is standing on a panther.

He himself is standing on these two bended figures who symbolise mountains.

This is one mountain and this one is Mount Hazzi.

That is really very neat.

Mount Hazzi is exactly Mount Casius of the Greeks.

And the other one is the second peak on Mount Hazzi's ridge.

The importance of that mountain in Hittite religion could hardly be clearer.

The song of Tarhunta's rise to power performed on that very mountain

is known to us from texts found here in Hattusas.

From them we learn that Tarhunta was not the first king of the Hittite gods.

He overthrew his own father Kumarbi,

and Kumarbi himself had usurped the kingship

from the older god Anu in a myth with a gruesome climax.

As Anu was losing the battle,

he flew up to heaven but Kumarbi caught him

and sank his teeth in Anu's sexual parts, bit them off,

and swallowed a mouthful of sperm.

In defeat, Anu warned him that he'd now become pregnant,

and sure enough Kumarbi conceived a son -

the storm god Tarhunta.

So back here in the shadow of Mount Casius,

the actual scene of those heavenly battles,

it's no wonder that Euboeans nearby were impressed

by the ancient Hittite stories of kingship and castration.

As always, myths were never fixed, they evolved and mutated.

So Euboeans adapted what they heard, and worked its bloody details

into what they already suspected of their own early gods.

The Greek myths tell

how deep darkness would fall at night

near the beginning of the world.

Father Heaven would come down and stretch himself out above the goddess Mother Earth,

thrust into her and have sex with her so tightly

that no light could come between the pair.

After a while, Mother Earth could bear it no longer, she called together her sons

and asked for a volunteer and young Kronos agreed to go and hide.

The next night came, Father Heaven approached,

lay on top of Mother Earth, thrust into her

and out from behind the bushes came young Kronos,

armed with a curved sickle with sharp teeth made of adamantine metal.

And with one sweep, a right-handed sweep we're told,

he mowed off his father's private parts.

In agony, Heaven flew up to the sky, light then dawned between them.

The private parts, they were enormous, fell,

full of blood and sperm, through the air

and the sickle, dripping with blood, was thrown away.

The parallels between the Greek and Hittite stories of castration are obvious.

In due course, Greeks even located their version of the event here on Mount Casius.

The mountain was therefore a place of such pagan power.

Indeed it was so potent that even much later Christians believed

they needed a way of counteracting it.

This 6th-century church complex is a witness to their concern.

At its centre stood literally a Christian storm trooper -

St Simeon Stylites the Younger.

St Simeon perched on a 50-foot high pillar.

Only its base survives, and during 32 years,

he never came off it.

Around him clustered pilgrims who would sit and gaze upwards in awe.

These are the really special seats for the VIPs.

Even the Roman emperor consulted the saint,

but on a few days,

ordinary questioners could sometimes send written requests up to him.

And they would bring them to the bottom of this stone staircase

and they would climb, as I am,

and give them to his attendant,

who would then take them up a wooden ladder for the saint's blessing at the top.

And I think we see why he stood particularly here at such a height.

He is facing directly across to the pagan gods

who swarmed on Mount Casius,

and he's there as a Christian challenge, fighting with them - in his view, demons.

These demons were the gods whom Euboean settlers had honoured long before

in the myths of this very mountain,

the place where the gods had established their rule.

They knew the myths orally,

especially from local women with whom they lived.

They did not read them from Hittite texts.

They took those stories fresh in their mind across the seas

to the lands of the Greeks and beyond.

When Euboeans travelled on their boats to and from Al Mina and along its coastline,

they journeyed by island hopping.

The nearest island to Al Mina is hardly 80 kilometres away.

In the 10th to 8th centuries BC,

it was a place of differing kingdoms and a varied population,

a place where many cultures came together

and myths floated across the sea - the island of Cyprus.

One of the most important ancient stopovers on the island

was the coastal settlement of Amathus near modern Limassol.

At Amathus, I believe, an important encounter occurred for the Europeans.

The result of it eventually allowed Greeks to record their myths for posterity.

In recently excavated graves here, Euboean pottery was found buried

alongside objects belonging to Phoenicians.

The Phoenicians were a Near-Eastern people

and unlike mainland Greeks at this time, they were literate.

I think it was possibly here that a really important lesson was learnt.

Somewhere, one day, an inquisitive Euboean sat with a Phoenician

and looked and listened while the Phoenician wrote out the letters of his script

and described them.

And the Greek adapted them and copied them down as letters still in use in the modern Greek alphabet,

alpha, beta, gamma - exactly the order which we know

Phoenicians used for their own letters aleph, beit, gimmel.

The Greek thought he needed signs for the vowel sounds he was hearing so he added them,

epsilon, iota, and so forth, making the fullest alphabet the one which is most easy to read.

And it's that Greek alphabet that is the ancestor of all the alphabets we still use in the modern West.

As the alphabet developed, myths could eventually become more fixed as they were written down.

But during the Greek Dark Ages, they were still told orally and open to influence.

On Cyprus, we can follow this happening

to the story of a local fertility goddess.

Like other visitors to Amathus, Euboeans encountered her shrine.

Her worship here dates as far back as the 2000s BC.

Through contact with visitors from the near East,

she then took on a wilder sexual identity,

and then when the Greeks arrived, she became Aphrodite.

Jacqueline Kariorgis

has spent her whole life studying the transformations of the goddess of love.

So the goddess of love and sex is in fact, for the Greeks,

an introduction in the early Dark Ages.

You're making this Greek Aphrodite sound as though she lived in Paris! She's sexy and all the rest of it,

but, Jacqueline, there are said to have been

prostitutes here serving the cult of the goddess,

at least by Christian sources. Do you believe that?

And they kept the money as their dowry?

But nowadays their fathers build them a house.

To the west of Amathus is another place now associated with Aphrodite.

It is known as the Rock of Aphrodite and the local story is that if you

swim all the way round this rock, you are blessed with eternal beauty.

The beach alongside is now considered the location of Aphrodite's literal emergence.

Of course, the story of Aphrodite is connected to much grander stories in heaven, Jacqueline.

When Father Heaven is castrated, of course, blood and white sperm flies everywhere

and according to the Greeks, when the sperm falls down into the sea,

somebody very significant was born from it - your goddess, Aphrodite.

The Greeks, when they later thought about it,

tried to connect that name Aphrodite with their own Greek word, aphros,

meaning foam or foaming white sperm.

Do think there was any historical truth in that?

Like a wordplay?

That was a pretty good way to be born.

But there is a local story that when she was born, she was washed to this very beach.

This is what the Cyprus Tourist Board still tells you nowadays, Jacqueline.

Do think there's any history in that?

When is the first link, do you think?

Well, it shows beautifully how what will be a myth, I am sure,

continued in modern Cyprus, begins and starts

from a beautiful landscape, and then acquires a force of its own

exactly as it did in the ancient world.

This is how myths are made.

The vision of Aphrodite emerging from the sea is so compelling

that it has inspired great artists through the centuries.

The most famous image is by the Renaissance master, Botticelli,

Aphrodite being blown ashore in a shower of roses.

She seems far removed from Heaven's castration.

Without that act, though, she would never have been born,

adult, erotic, and dangerously desirable.

Here in Cyprus, the myths were being re-imagined

under the constant influence of new ideas.

The goddess had been worshipped for millennia beforehand

but her waterborne origin became a new, then an accepted, detail.

This same adaptability is at work when our myths of kingship in heaven

reach another nearby island, Crete.

The myth I've come to find continues the story of the god Kronos

after he'd castrated his father, Heaven.

In the story, Kronos would in turn be overthrown by his own son, Zeus,

and Crete is where Zeus was raised to his destiny.

Every year on the 12th of September,

on the summit of the highest mountain in Crete,

Mount Ida, local shepherds gather for a religious ceremony.

It's a difficult ascent for the pilgrims, as the mountain rises 3,500 metres.

The winds on its upper slopes, as I found out, are fearsome and freezing.

At the summit, villagers maintain a simple windowless church.

Like Mount Casius in Turkey, this Cretan mountain peak

has seen a long continuity of worship, from pagan to Christian.

HE CHANTS IN HIS LANGUAGE

Nowadays, the priest reads a written liturgy and passages of scripture.

He reminds worshippers that Christ died for their sins on a cross

whose very fragments are said to be sheltered in this church.

He calls on God to show mercy.

The pagan Greeks had no scriptures. They had many gods who never died.

They never expected mercy from them.

They prayed to them as if they were great aristocrats in heaven,

unpredictable in their favours to mortals and unpredictable in their quarrels.

It's so moving that the mountain is still a sacred place for Cretan pilgrims.

Long before Christ, Mount Ida was a sort of pagan Bethlehem

because of its role in the myth of the Greeks' supreme god, Zeus.

That myth begins with Zeus' father, Kronos,

who had castrated his own father, Heaven.

But it was prophesied that Kronos himself would be

overthrown by a son, so he swallowed his babies at birth.

It is this nightmare image

which the 19th century Spanish master, Goya,

shows in this painting.

But when Kronos' wife, Rhea, bore yet another son,

she handed Kronos a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes.

He was tricked and swallowed it instead of the baby...

..and the baby Zeus was flown away to Crete

to Mount Ida.

The Greek story is remarkably like that old Hittite story

of the struggles of their gods and the succession in heaven.

Kumarbi, the surviving god, had taken a huge bite

out of Heaven's private parts, swallowed it, sperm, DNA, and all,

and wondrously, inside his stomach it mixes together, we are told,

like the metals that make bronze, and he finds he's pregnant.

In due course, he expels or excretes in some way his firstborn son.

And then we can follow tattered texts that amazingly say,

"I will eat my son, I will crush him, Tarhunta."

Instead, he's given a very sharp rock on which he bites and in agony,

throws the rock away where it is to become an item of cult forever.

Like his Hittite counterpart, Tarhunta, the young Zeus, too, would eventually defeat his father.

But first he had to be raised secretly to maturity.

The myth tells how the baby Zeus was hidden in a cave, this one,

I believe, about 1,000 metres below the summit of Mount Ida.

During the Greek Dark Ages, Euboeans were among many pilgrims who came here.

The cave had had a long sacred history.

People of Crete had been worshipping here for at least 1,000 years

before it became associated with stories of Zeus.

Nobody yet knows how deep this cave is, the nursery of Zeus, or how far back it runs.

It's been excavated and the covers have concealed

what was recently found, but it's still never been fully excavated.

Before Zeus, this cave was sacred to a young Cretan fertility god,

invoked as Kouros.

His worshippers, the Kourites,

would honour him by dancing and clashing shields in the cave.

By the 8th century BC, this Kouros had had been merged with Zeus,

so the noisy ritual worship had to be brought into the myth of the baby Zeus, too.

The dancing is explained as the Kourites attempt to make the baby inaudible

so that Kronos wouldn't realise his abusive father.

Well, of course you can see there is a slight inconsistency.

They're trying to hide the baby deep in this cave

and at the same time, they're making a noise that

you would think would alert anyone to his presence,

but that is the way the story grew and developed.

Like the goddess Aphrodite of Cyprus, the early god of the Cretans, Kouros-Zeus,

was evolving and adapting to the multicultural exchanges of the time.

The myths go on to tell how, when Zeus had reached manhood,

he emerged from his cave and defeated his father.

But first, father Kronos had been forced to vomit up all his children

and the very stone that had replaced Zeus.

This myth was to become central

at the most famous sanctuary in antiquity,

one in which a sea voyage was also to play a major role.

To understand how, we have to turn to a hymn

in honour of one of Zeus' many children -

Apollo, god of the light and the sun, poetry and prophecy.

In fine hexameter verses, the poet describes how Apollo chose his first priests.

On the wine dark sea, he tells us, the god spied a swift, dark ship

with a crew of travelling Cretans who were going on business to sandy Pylos.

Miraculously, the god jumped in

in the shape of a large and fearsome dolphin, and redirected the ship.

He prevented it from landing at Pylos, and guided it

along the Gulf of Corinth to Krisa, near modern Itea.

Apollo then revealed himself to the terrified Cretans and told them

to follow him up Mount Parnassus to a site on its flank,

where he would found a rich temple.

Today, their route takes us through the finest olive grove in Greece,

up a winding mountain road.

When the Cretans arrived at their destination, their hearts,

the hymn tells us, were stirred within them.

In the early morning light,

Delphi remains one of the most magical places in the world.

Apollo's first shrine here dates from the Greek Dark Ages,

probably from around 825 BC.

At Delphi, a prophetess would predict the future as an Oracle.

Her prophecies were made here at the Temple of Apollo itself.

In response to petitioner's questions, she would enter a trance

and her garbled words were later translated

into elegant hexameter verse.

But the ambiguity of her predictions

sometimes lead to unexpected outcomes.

The most famous example? It has to be Croesus,

the richest man in the world,

the King of Lydia who was planning in Asia to invade eastwards.

So famous was Delphi that he already sent messengers

to ask the Greek god Apollo whether he would succeed.

And the prophetess gave the answer,

"If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire."

So Croesus did invade, crossed the river, and yes,

he destroyed a great empire.

But the empire was his own.

Today, Delphi is still a place of great pilgrimage.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors every year

wind up the sacred way, past the remains of the great Treasuries, once full of gifts to the temple.

INAUDIBLE

For me, all the treasures they contained

pale beside one ordinary looking object now lost to us.

It's an object that had been set up at Delphi as a sign and wonder to the future...

..the very stone that Kronos had swallowed believing it to be his son, Zeus.

And it would've been seen by our 8th century Euboeans, for they'd come

then seeking the Oracle's advice on their settlements abroad.

That wondrous stone at Delphi is the West's first holy relic.

It fitted beautifully with the Euboeans' insights

into the origins and battles of the gods,

gathered in their travels around Al Mina, Cyprus, and Crete.

And among the other pilgrims who'd marvelled at it

in the late 8th century was the poet, Hesiod.

It's Hesiod's poem, the Theogony, or the Generation of the Gods,

which is our fullest early Greek source

for the stories of the struggles in heaven,

the struggles of heaven and earth, Kronos and the emergence of Zeus.

He knew them, surely, after confirming them and elaborating them with the priests here.

He was not a widely travelled man.

Apart from travelling here, he made one other journey further afield.

He took his poem off to perform it at a competition.

To reach his competition, Hesiod risked this very sea crossing.

He went to compete at the funeral games of the fallen warrior, Amphidamas.

Better still, he even won the prize for poetry.

Now, it's a fair guess that the poem with which he won

was nothing less than his Theogony, the Generation of the Gods.

The site of the competition may help us understand why he won.

Amphidamas' funerary games were held in Euboea,

so Hesiod sang before Euboean judges the very stories which featured

in the Euboeans' own discoveries about the battles of the gods.

No wonder he met an appreciative audience here and won the prize.

When Hesiod came to Euboea in the late 8th century,

Lefkandi had been eclipsed by the nearby settlement of Eretria.

Here in the storerooms of the Eretria Museum,

the shelves are crammed with boxes full of objects excavated here by the Swiss School of Archaeology.

They have given us a clearer picture of the lives of our Euboean travellers,

and the Greek culture into which the myths we've traced were born.

OK, Robin, I wanted to show you here two shards with the graffiti.

-Early writing.

-Writing, early writing.

They were found in the sanctuary of Apollo.

The first one is dated from the end of the 9th century,

early 8th century.

We can see four letters.

Well, they're not Greek.

-I can't understand them. What are they?

-They are Semitic.

Good heavens. So this is at the turning point

when some near Easterner has either

taught a Euboean to write,

or the Euboean is copying what he's learned perhaps in the near East?

Absolutely, but it was carved on an Euboean pot.

This is a typical Euboean drinking cup.

We are right at the start of the origin of writing.

How extraordinary. Yes.

And at the end of the series, we have again a graffito carved on

a local pot, Euboean, with another four letters.

-I think I can read it. It's Hera...

-Hera.

-Yes. Four Greek letters.

So what we have is a real moment of transition.

We have somebody trying to write Greek in a non-Greek alphabet,

and then we have Greek written in the real Greek alphabet.

This is an enormously important change. This is really at the root of all Western civilisation.

The Greek alphabet and we have the Roman alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet, our alphabets.

If they couldn't write, we wouldn't know anything about them.

If they couldn't write down Homer,

we wouldn't be able to read his poems.

We wouldn't know anything about Hesiod.

This is a real change for people and we're witnessing it

in the palm of your hand. Incredible.

-Now, I want to show you the neck of an amphora.

-Euboean women, wonderful.

-Look, they're dancing.

-Yes, or it's a procession.

And they are holding garlands, it looks like, and these very trendy skirts.

They've had to breathe in for the painter anyway.

Tight waists, long skirts, 8th century BC fashion, wonderful.

Now, this was found in the west quarter near Eretria.

It's a very important find and it's a monumental amphora.

-Which stood then buy a grave, would that be right?

-Exactly.

And I can see a chariot.

It's a sort of chariot race or on this bit, there's somebody...

Oh, they're trying to jump off and on the back of the chariot.

-The apobates.

-Yes, this is a sort of Greek game they play where the skill

is to jump onto a chariot when it's moving and jump off the back of it.

-Probably during funerary games.

-Fantastic.

In the Greek Dark Ages, Euboeans were not only renowned

for their horsemanship. Their soil was fertile, especially for the cultivation of grapes.

During the grape harvest nowadays, families traditionally gather

at the end of work to eat and of course to drink.

And to swap stories as their Euboean predecessors also did.

We can imagine Euboean travellers, perhaps fresh from a journey out to Al Mina,

full of stories of those castrated gods and waterborne goddesses.

And the wine made here was an important item in the trade that had sent them sailing eastwards.

The ground, the soil, is the best here in Euboea for wine?

Yes, it's very good ground

-because here...

-It's rich.

-It's rich, yes, very rich.

You live the year of the poet Hesiodos.

Hesiod tells us we pick the grapes in mid-September, like you, and in mid July

we cut the corn.

When the goats are very fat, the wine is very good

and the women are very sexy,

but the poor men are exhausted, not by the women but by the heat.

THEY LAUGH

Hesiod's great poetic legacy is not only his account of the tribulations of the farming life.

He was, above all, a poet of battles in heaven.

His Theogony doesn't end with Zeus' victory over his father.

Hesiod tells us that Zeus' rule in turn is challenged.

Mother Earth, to avenge her son Kronos, raises up a vast snaky monster, Typhon.

When Hesiod performed his prize poem, its first verses, about Typhon, I believe,

will particularly have caught his Euboean audience's attention.

They may even have given him more details after the performance,

for there were Euboeans there who knew so much more than Hesiod about Typhon.

They had tracked him, they believed, from one end of the Mediterranean right across to the other.

I even believe that the Euboeans bigger picture of Typhon

may have been incorporated later by Hesiod into his Theogony,

so I've returned to Mount Casius in modern Turkey on those Euboeans' trail

to discover the roots of their great knowledge about the monster.

In the 8th century BC, when Euboeans journeyed across the sea to settle in Al Mina

in the shadow of Mount Casius,

they settled where near Eastern myths swirled around them.

Just as they'd adapted the story of Father Heaven's castration by Kronos,

so they adopted another Hittite story heard on this very mountain,

the story that gave them details of the myth of Zeus

and his battles against Typhon.

Here they learned how the power struggles of the Hittite gods

had not ended with the defeat of Kumarbi by his son, Tarhunta.

In revenge, Kumarbi raised up a series of monsters,

including the serpent monster, Hedammu.

The story of Hedammu has recently been pieced together from fragmentary Hittite tablets.

But we also now know that it was part of the ancient song of kingship

sung by choirs on the very slopes of this mountain.

And here is the king of Hittite gods himself, Tarhunta,

the storm god who fought a snake monster just like his Greek counterpart, Zeus.

Around the bay from Mount Casius in this ruined fortress of Karatepe,

his statue still stands.

As the worn inscription on it reveals,

in the 9th and 8th century BC, the end of the Greek Dark Ages,

the House of Muksas ruled this region, what we know as Cilicia.

The kingdom was one of several which had succeeded the Hittite Empire.

We know that these neo-Hittites maintained some of the older empire's gods and traditions.

And it was through them that Euboeans heard the story of the Hittite snake monster.

We are even able to locate the creature's mythical lair,

a place that became the home of their Typhon, too.

The coastal kingdom of the House of Muksas

included ravines to the southwest of Karatepe.

Turks now call them the Caves of Heaven and Hell.

This fearsome abyss has been hollowed out over thousands of years

by the rivers, and it drops straight down for hundreds of feet.

It still known in Turkish as jehenem,

that's gehenna or hell in Muslim and Christian tradition.

And it really would be hell now to try to get to the bottom.

Fortunately, Heaven doesn't require a climbing rope.

It's a few hundred metres from Hell,

where stairs lead down into the ravine.

In ancient times, saffron crocuses grew here,

objects of cult for the ancient Hittites.

Modern Turks named this place cennet, Heaven.

But beyond Heaven is the underground lair of a monster.

One of the stories we have of the Hittite snake monster is that

at first, it defeated the storm god Tarhunta,

then stole his eyes and heart, which it hid in a cave.

In later Greek myth, Zeus, too, is defeated at first

by the snaky monster - in Greek, Typhon -

on Mount Casius itself, we are told.

And Typhon cuts away the god's sinews using an adamantine sickle,

wraps them up in a basket, and conceals them in his lair of the Corycian Cave.

If we consider the story in its real context, we can understand for the

first time how and when the story passed to the Greeks and then grew.

Visible beyond the remains of this Christian church

is the Corycian Cave of the Greek myth.

At its mouth, there's actually an inscription

which identifies it, although it dates from some 600 years after the Greek Dark Ages.

To protect it from damage, it has been concealed

and its location is known only to the cave's Turkish guardian.

He's agreed to uncover it for me.

I am the first scholar to see it in years.

In 1896, an inscription was reported here.

It's absolutely thrilling. We've managed to find it again.

As far as I can see, beautifully cut Greek lettering.

This really is the lifeblood of ancient history.

This is what we rely on and we are finding it straight in front of us.

And it looks as though it's lines of verse by one Eupaphis,

who is in the dells of... and the cave...

We'll have to wait till the lines are clearer.

After a couple of hours of digging,

all four lines of verse are revealed.

Wary of going into the depths, Eupaphis wrote his verses

and had them inscribed on this beautifully dressed stone.

What he tells us is so important for fixing its context.

He tells us, how I honoured and propitiated the gods Pan and Hermes.

Now, that's immensely important because in the story, precisely Pan

and Hermes are the gods who rescue the stolen sinews of Zeus.

So this is the cave, certainly, where it happened.

And he calls it, "En arimois",

in Arima, a name which is going to be so important for our Greek travellers

but which also ties up with the Hittite place name here -

Erima on the map - and he describes how he entered the depths

which are echoing with the sounds of the streams of a river.

So when he was in the bottom, he heard the echoing noise of a river.

The Arima cave is a quarter of a kilometre deep.

As I descend, I well understand the dark demonic nature of this cave

in the ancients' imagination.

Arima was a continuing place of pilgrimage for Greeks

and then Romans, a continuity, I believe,

which goes right back to the age of the neo-Hittites and even earlier.

And like those ancient pilgrims, at the bottom I find my way is blocked

and beyond, the river does indeed echo.

DISTANT GURGLING

When I hear this sound of the river behind the rocks as it snakes its way down into the next world,

I realise we have elements of immense religious significance for the ancient Hittites.

Every year, the Hittite king would hold rites and a festival at the watery abysses

throughout his kingdom to assure his control over the waters of the land.

And here, the neo-Hittite king, centuries later, the sons of Muksas, had exactly the site

at which to maintain those same rites and festivals that were part of the tradition.

And it is through knowledge

of the hymns and the stories told round the cave,

that Euboean Greeks became aware of the snaky monster here

whom they turned into Typhon.

And at the mouth of the cave, visible proof of the continuing power of the myth.

This church was built in the 5th century AD

using the stones of an earlier pagan Greek temple dedicated to Zeus,

and marking his battle against Typhon.

By building a church in ancient Arima,

the early Christians had a clear purpose.

It is a fine tribute to the power of the pagan gods and monsters

we've met in the cave behind.

It sets straight across the opening of the Corycian Cave to cancel them out.

A deliberate counterweight dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

We should think of Christian pilgrims coming once a year

all the way down to this very inaccessible place to celebrate the Christian liturgy,

knowing that they were now safe from the demons, from Typhon,

the terrible Typhon, in the cave behind.

In the Greek myths, with his stolen body parts restored,

Zeus hurled thunderbolts and lightning against the monster.

It was believed that traces of his mythical fight

could be found elsewhere in Cilicia.

Just to the northeast of the caves, there's another huge ravine

known nowadays as Kanlidivane, meaning, "The crazy place of blood."

In the 3rd century AD,

the Greek poet Opian served as a priest of the gods at the nearby Corycian Cave.

And Opian tells us how Zeus took the monster Typhon and battered him all

the length of the seashore, hitting his hundred heads against the rocks.

And he goes on, "Even now the tawny banks and rocks run red with the blood from Typhon's heads."

Standing here, I can see exactly what the local poet meant.

The rock seems stained with conspicuous streaks of red,

especially now as the light fades.

From the 5th century AD onwards, the Christians

built no less than four Basilica churches by the rim of this ravine.

No text survives to explain this surge of new Christian building

but pagan buildings had existed on this site.

At this ravine, just as at the cave in Arima,

the churches were built as a counterweight,

designed to cancel the traces of Typhon's demonic blood,

an old cult of Zeus at the ravine itself.

Kanlidivane is stained with blood

but it cannot be Typhon's last resting place. He was far too big.

His head brushed the stars, his arms spread out across east and west,

he had those hundred hissing heads. He needed somewhere far bigger.

So where was he, then, Euboeans would have wondered.

He had to have a resting place commensurate with his size, one which measured up

to the great cosmic war with the great majesty of Zeus himself.

On their travels, Euboeans were to find just such a place,

away at the furthest edge of the Greek world.

In the mid 8th century BC, the Euboeans founded settlements

on the island of Sicily's eastern shore.

And every day, dominating the view, was the great volcano, Mount Etna.

This is an eerie, dangerous place.

Climbers like me have to be accompanied by a guide.

These fumes can choke unwary travellers and up here,

the wind can change in an instant.

How did early Greeks explain this extraordinary burnt landscape?

By myth - the very myth Euboeans had met in the east.

Euboeans reasoned that the victorious Zeus had scorched Typhon

on these very slopes, and below us,

the monster is imprisoned and being lashed in punishment.

And when he tosses and turns, his fiery anger erupts.

300 years after the first Euboeans settled in this mountain's shadow,

the great Greek poet Pindar witnessed an eruption

and described it here belching out streams of unapproachable fire,

the writhings of the monster.

Well, this is Typhon's latest hole, blasted in 1968, quite amazing.

-I think you have to remember that poet Pindar...

-HE SPEAKS IN GREEK

During the day, he sends out rivers of blazing smoke.

Now I think that Pindar the poet in the 470s BC stood pretty near here,

and then the whole thing exploded into the sea

and the rocks came down with a crash, it's wonderful.

He's really steaming this morning, he's hotting up.

Under there he's been blazing away for about 5,000 years,

still not exhausted.

There's a great argument as to whether myth is contrary to reason.

If you stand here, nonsense, myth makes perfect sense.

There's no application, no opposition between the two.

In the Greek imagination, the myth of Typhon did not end on Etna.

Euboeans had found signs of his presence north of Sicily.

In their journey westwards, our travelling heroes had sailed

through the Straits of Messina and along Italy's coast.

Even before they founded their Sicilian colonies,

Euboeans had travelled as far north as the Bay of Naples.

Etruscans were present in the area, so at first Euboeans avoided

settling on the mainland.

Instead they headed out to an island beyond the bay.

This is the island which the Euboeans chose to settle,

known nowadays as Ischiam, but they called as Pithecusa,

which in Greek means "Monkey Island".

Zoologists claim that in early times there were no monkeys here,

and nowadays it's crawling with tourists.

The ferry journey from Naples takes less than an hour.

Hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers

visit the little island for its health spas and beaches.

We can follow Euboeans in the west with the help of ancient texts,

supported by archaeological evidence, which suggests

they arrived on Ischia about 770 BC, and if correct, that's very soon

after they had settled at Al Mina in the East.

They found Ischia thinly inhabited so they settled beside this cove.

And a local name for the island would have caught their attention,

in Etruscan it meant "monkey", and the word no less was Arima.

Out east in Cilicia and Turkey, they had come from one Arima,

the cave in which Typhon had hidden the body parts of Zeus,

and now they'd travelled to their furthest point west and had landed on yet another Arima.

Was Typhon to be seen here, too?

Yes, if they looked carefully even at the beach because on the ground

the sand here is dark and volcanic

as if Typhon himself has been active.

It must have seemed heaven sent, an omen from the gods.

Overlooking the cove is the hill of Monte Vico,

just the place for a Greek Acropolis.

On it, hot springs serve as a bathing spa.

For the Greeks too, they steamed up from the ground.

As on Etna, the cause seemed obvious.

Why, the Euboeans reasoned, it was Typhon imprisoned below.

The monster, they imagined, was so large that he lay stretched

all the way from Ischia to volcanic Sicily,

far across the sea.

In his Iliad, Homer compares the sound of the Greek army's

first advance on Troy to the crushing sound when Zeus lashes Typhon.

"In Arima," Homer says, "where they say is Typhon's bed."

Homer was composing, I believe, around 750 BC.

By Arima, he meant exactly Ischia.

Word of it had derived ultimately from Euboeans.

The archaeological finds made on the island are now housed in the Pithecusae Museum.

Among the objects here are small seal stones

whose style and type of stone has been traced exactly to Cilicia

in modern Turkey, the very place of Typhon's lair.

The seals were buried in the graves of young children.

This is a near-Eastern practice and the mothers, I think, may often

have come with Euboean partners from the near East.

The director of the museum is Professori Giovanni Castagna,

and his most important treasure is this drinking cup.

It too was made in the eastern Mediterranean,

brought out here and later buried

in a small boy's grave around 725 BC.

This Greek inscription for me, Professori, is so suggestive

because it is written in the characteristic script of the Euboeans,

and there are the three lines in verse, and at least I think

that this is the world's first literary allusion

-because the inscription says...

-HE SPEAKS IN GREEK

"I am the cup of Nestor, good to drink with,

"and whoever drinks from this cup will be seized

"by the love desire of Aphrodite the goddess of love."

Now in Homer's poems we know of the old hero Nestor, whenever he picks up his big cup

as an old man, he talks for line after line giving advice,

he's rather boring, and this is a witty allusion

on a person's cup saying, "I am Nestor's cup,

"but unlike the one in Homer,

"if you drink from me, you will fall in love."

Amazing, it makes us realise that the Homeric poems

about the nobles and the heroes were not confined only to the aristocratic classes.

This is not a very grand grave and yet the owner of the cup

believes that everyone has Homer on the brain, like you and me.

-It's wonderful.

-HE SPEAKS IN GREEK

-Don't mention it.

-Oh, thank you so much!

Emboldened by their settlement on Ischia, a group of Euboeans

then set out to settle across the Bay of Naples.

Here with Ischia visible on the horizon, they founded the first

Greek settlement on the mainland of modern Italy, Cumae.

Cumae has a magnificent stretch of farmland

and was to remain a centre of Greek influence for more than 1,000 years,

but the better farming and the greater space were not,

I think, their only reasons for settling here.

On rocky islands, as Homer remarks in the Odyssey, there is no scope for using fine horses.

Unlike Ischia,

Cumae had a flat beach, which was a horse lover's dream,

and it still is.

This beach is near the Agnano Hippodrome,

a racecourse for Italian trotting horses.

Every morning their trainers exercised them here, much as Euboeans did in the past.

Horse harness and chariot fittings have been found in Euboean graves at Cumae.

The top trainer here is Vincenzo Palumbo, he's agreed to let me have a go.

Horses and riding are my lifelong loves back in Britain.

The Euboean Greeks I am sure came here and they would have practised

on the sand with their horses in chariots exactly as we do.

The sand gives more strength to the horses' exercise, like Olympic runners, and then we could imagine

them all lining the beach cheering on as the horses come either at the gallop or in the chariot, and of

course they do that trick of jumping on and off that we saw with the Apobates on the pottery in Eretria.

Horses were not just bred for the Apobates race so vividly painted

on pottery I saw at Eretria's museum.

For aristocrats, they were both a status symbol and a devastating weapon in war.

In the 8th century BC, Euboeans were the finest of all Greek riders and horse breeders.

They even named their children after horses.

One of the two founders of Cumae was a Euboean named Hipocles,

and "hippos" is Greek for horse.

Once settled in Cumae, the Euboeans found yet

more evidence of battles in heaven, which established the power of Zeus.

The myths tell how after the defeat of Typhon there was a new challenge

against the gods, a tribe of insolent, enormous giants.

Just inland from Cumae, Euboeans actually located the field of the giants' battle.

They call this place Flegra, which means flaming.

We can still see what the ancients described, the wounds

of the thunderbolted giants which pour out streams of fire and water.

These sulphurous fumaroles are not the only peculiar element.

The surface here at Flegra feels to me remarkably thin.

In the late 18th century, the scholar and diplomat Sir William Hamilton

came to much the same conclusion and he decided to test it by an experiment.

He thought he'd try dropping a stone and listening to the sound it made.

So I'm going to try dropping this one and if I don't

drop it on my feet, we'll see what kind of a sound we get.

THUD ECHOES

Exactly what Hamilton heard, an echo which he thought was

the echo of a subterranean vault,

which was seething with fire and boiling with water.

But what I think is what the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Euboeans who visited here believed,

it's the subterranean vault of a vast underground prison in which

the Giants are lying scalded and wounded, fuming and furious at their final defeat by the Olympian gods.

The Ancients also believed that the base camp of the battling giants could be found.

They located it too in Flegra, but curiously the Flegra to which

they refer is hundreds of miles from this unearthly landscape.

North of their home island, the Euboeans found the three prongs

of the Calcydic Peninsula,

the westernmost prong they called the second Flegra.

Beside this fine beach, the Euboeans founded the settlement of Mendi

around 730 BC.

The first settlers were aware of the Flegra near Cumae.

The transfer of the name Flegra here is most odd,

the peninsula is not at all volcanic.

Greek authors are clear that it was the base camp for the Giants before their final battle in the West.

In recent years, we have begun to understand why.

This is the most unlikely site, how did you ever come to discover there were things to excavate here?

It was an accidental finding of this site when a worker found

a very interesting specimen of a hipparion.

-That is an ancient horse, isn't it?

-It is an ancient three-toed horse.

'Evangelia Tsoukala is a palaeontologist.

'With her team she's been excavating this hillside near Mendi...

'..and has made some remarkable discoveries.'

I can show you here a very extraordinary bone.

It's the biggest thing I've ever seen!

-It is a femur of a mastodon.

-Oh, my goodness, what is it?

-It is an ancestor of the mammoth.

-Ah, right.

And if I look at it knowing nothing, I might think this was the bone of some enormously heavyweight human.

The imagination of the lay men is incredible

and I have an example from my excavation in Grevena, with

the huge mastodons there, and the people there

thought that they come from an elephant from a circus.

From a circus? They'd escaped, but you persuaded them.

After 20 years, yes!

'This hillside has already produced many other giant prehistoric bones.'

They must have been a race of gigantic people, what I'm thinking is that the Greeks,

the Euboeans who had been out in Naples and had seen the shattered

remains of the battlefield where the gods had zapped the Giants with thunderbolts, I can now understand

why they come up here and they think "This is the camp, this is where the Giants bred, where they lived."

Once you see it, you can see what the Euboeans concluded.

Those things are far bigger than me, they are proof the poets knew these are giants.

And this is why the whole story is partly located here

and partly located on the smouldering volcanoes in Italy.

From one Flegra to the other, across a vast expanse of sea,

Euboeans linked the evidence they saw

and made sense of it through myth.

In this same pattern of Euboean travel and enquiry,

we can discern the origin of central Greek myths about the gods.

In the near East below Mount Casius, Euboeans had heard the amazing tales

of the battle for the kingship of heaven, of a castrating sickle,

and the shower of a god's sperm.

They heard stories of stone swallowed in error,

and the ruling god of storms and weather...

..and they traced that ruling god's great battle with the snaky monster across the world.

In the near East, these stories were linked to religious rituals.

Euboeans adopted them as stories, simply "muthoi".

And as true travelling heroes, they found yet more evidence of these myths across the wine-dark sea.

They found a goddess born from Heaven's sperm in Cyprus...

..the mountain which was their ruling god's nursery,

a swallowed stone in holy Delphi...

..and the snaky monster steaming under volcanic Ischia and Etna...

..and the defeated giants sweating under their western battlefields...

..and leaving bones on their northern base camp.

These myths were not the random fantasies of unconscious minds,

they were rooted in Euboeans' experience of real places and real people.

What they learned in the East, they found far away in the West,

and through them these great myths about the gods

became central to Greek religion, literature, and art,

from where they live on still vivid in our world.

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