The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box.
The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech.
Curiously, Florence Nightingale – who was named after the Italian city of that name – had a sister named Parthenope, after another Italian city, Naples. Parthenope, whose tomb was said to be in Naples, has a name meaning ‘maiden-voiced’ in reference to her singing, and when she died it was said she became the city of Naples (which began as a colony named Parthenope). And one of the names of the Sirens has become well-known. Much as Scylla and Charybdis are thought to be mythical explanations for real, natural geographical features (sharp rocks and a vortex or whirlpool off the coast of Sicily), so the island of the Sirens was believed to have a surprisingly specific location: namely, off the southern coast, near the Sorrento peninsula. According to his Metamorphoses, they were once ordinary maidens who accompanied Persephone, but when she was abducted by Pluto (Hades in the original Greek myth), they requested some wings from the gods, so they could go in search of Persephone.Īnd the Sirens are bound up, curiously, with Italy. Ovid adds some ‘backstory’ for the Sirens.
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