Rupert (they're not laughing now) Grint
The Newsflash from the BBC was most alarming:
4/07/09 BBC
Harry Potter star ‘had swine flu’
Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint is recovering from a “mild bout” of swine flu, his publicist has said.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8134632.stm)
Well, we’re truly stuffed now! Obviously, we can’t even go to the movies any more and, unless we wear a burka, we certainly can’t go and see our most beloved film. Not now that its beloved star has succumbed to the ravages of this insidious malady! The Atomou household is most distressed at the moment and lives in tremulous trepidation. Lest we, too, get snatched by this ever-spreading contagion, we won’t even borrow videos until this cataclysm of sneezing and splattering ends and we won’t know when that happens until the white dove we’ve sent out of our ark returns alive, free of sneezes and with an olive branch in its beak.
We will play scrabble for a while longer.
But the world’s health authorities have it all wrong. The origin of the flu, I mean. And the appropriate medication. Sure, they’re right about it bouncing off pigs but they’re not right about Mexico. Nor the medication. Mexico wasn’t the birthplace of this pulmonary curse.
No, its birthplace was a place called Aeaea. Two letters put in sequence two and a half times. The first two vowels of the alphabet. If you say it out loud enough it’ll sound like you’re in unbearable pain; and that’s why it’s called that. Aeaea was an island. Might well still be an island but Roman writers reckoned it’s the modern Mount Circeo, or Cape Circaeum, in Italy, on the west coast. “Circeo,” they thought, “from Circe, the witch goddess who lived there.” They were probably right.
It was a sad island, inhabited by a sad goddess.
And the medication is a little root. Moly, the gods call it. It’s a black thing that has a milk-white flower emerge from bits of it.
Aeaea was the fifth place that Odysseus and his men visited on their way home from Troy. In the end, out of all of them only Odysseus will make it home. The rest will be either slaughtered, or eaten by Cyclops, or by beasts of the sea or drowned in the vast, salty, wine-red waters of Poseidon. That god, brother of Zeus, was furious with that lot of Greeks and with Odysseus in particular, who had, not only blinded one of Poseidon’s sons, his handsome giant, the one-eyed, the wheel-eyed, the Cyclops Polyphemus, but he had also boasted about it and taunted Polyphemus with unbearable insults. That was hubris! Unforgivable stuff for a mortal! So what if Polyphemus had killed and eaten six of Odysseus’ men? Divine creatures can do as they please.
So, Poseidon’s anger was implacable and it would take all of Athena’s charm and ten years of wandering by Odysseus to convince the other gods –while Poseidon was away feasting in Ethiopia- to grant Odysseus his home-return. Nothing is more valuable to a mortal than his home-return. The gaze at his homeland as he approaches it, after a long absence arouses the greatest delight in all mortals.
Athena loved the resourceful scallywag.
“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after sacking the holy citadel of Troy. Many the men whose cities he saw, whose ways he learned. Many the sorrows he suffered at sea, while trying to bring himself and his friends back alive. Yet despite his wishes he failed to save them, because of their own un-wisdom, foolishly eating the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.”[1]
So begins Homer’s “Odyssey.” Odysseus’ men, though brave and brutal on the battle field with hearts full of raging blood, away from the blood-soaked ground were simply stupid. Heads full of straw. So they were deprived of their home-return.
Odysseus and his men had already endured much hardship and adventure before they got to Aeaea. They had just left the island of the god of the Winds. What a billowing stuff up! Before that, they were on the island of the Cyclopes. Six of the men were grabbed by the giant, hurled against the wall of his cave like unwanted pups, and eaten. Some thrown onto the fire of his hearth, others boiled and yet others eaten raw.
Before that they were on the land of the lotus eaters. Odysseus nearly lost all his men and himself there because that fruit made the eaters happy and care free. Useless, in other words. Unwilling to move from under the tree.
And before that, the first port of call after Troy, they had a war with the Cicones. There, his men showed just how stupid they were and how the ten-year war in Troy had completely replaced the compassion in their hearts, with bellicose brutality.
Odysseus and his ship entered the Aeaea’s harbour slowly, carefully, anxiously. Their past adventures had sharpened their wariness. Who lived there? What sort of mortals, what sort of gods? All they could see from their ship was a thick forest. Odysseus decided to send down Eurylochus with a scouting party. These men walked up and into the dense forest and, after a while, found in the centre of a clearing, an enormous palace made out of cut stone. Lions and wolves roamed about around it but they seemed to be tame. As they say in the classics, little did they know! The animals were, of course, drugged with a powerful and sinister potion concocted by the owner of the palace.
Eurylochus pricked his ears and peeled his eyes.
Still panting from the run back to the ship and trembling with fear, he tells Odysseus later.
“Someone inside, a woman or a goddess, was singing in a clear voice as she walked to and fro, in front of a huge tapestry. The men shouted and called to her, and she came to open the shining doors, and invited them to enter: and so they innocently followed her inside. But I, suspecting it was a trap, stayed behind. Then they all disappeared, and no one emerged again, though I sat a long time watching.”[2]
Odysseus flung his bow and a quiver full of arrows over one shoulder, strapped his great bronze, silver-embossed sword over the other and stepped ashore. He had almost reached the palace when he was stopped by Hermes, the messenger of the gods.
“Wretched man, where are you off to?” He asks Odysseus. “Wandering the hills of an unknown island all alone? Your friends are penned in Circe’s house, pigs in close-set sties… You must take a powerful herb with you, and go to Circe’s house, and it will ward off the day of evil. I will tell you all Circe’s fatal wiles…”
Then Hermes tore out a herb from the ground and handed it to Odysseus.
Odysseus obeyed the god. As well as the goddess with the lovely tresses, who was quite taken aback by this new phenomenon. She has never come across such obstinate recalcitrance. No other mortal had withstood the potency of her potion. But then she remembered. Hermes had warned her that Odysseus would arrive and that she had to look after him before she let him go. She calms down and tells him to, “Come, sheathe your sword, and let us two go to my bed, so we may learn to trust one another by twining in love.”
And so (cutting a long story short) after Circe gave back his men their human features, she and Odysseus went to her fine bed.
The Moly root worked.
Odysseus and his men were looked after for a whole year. The softest beds, the sweetest wine, the tastiest of morsels, the most beautiful minister’s of Aphrodite’s rites. When the year was up, when all the seasons rolled the one after the other, the men approached Odysseus and told him to remember Ithaca.
Odysseus remembers,
“My proud heart yielded to their words… but I went to Circe’s lovely bed, and clasped her knees, and the goddess listened as I spoke winged words: ‘Circe, keep the promise you gave and send me on my way, since my spirit is eager for home, and so too are my friends’, who weary me with their grief whenever you happen to be absent.”
To this the lovely goddess replied swiftly:
“Odysseus, man of many resources, scion of Zeus, son of Laertes, don’t stay here a moment longer against your will, but before you head for home you must make another journey.”
That journey, of course, was to Hades. Circe guided him through its portals and there Odysseus saw his mother, whom he tried to embrace three times but failed, where he saw Achilles who said he’d rather be a slave among the living than a king among the dead, where he saw the great general Agamemnon, who, the moment he arrived home, was slaughtered by his wife, Klytaimestra and her lover, Aigisthus and where he saw –the shock nearly killed him also- one of his mates, Elpenor, the youngest of them, who was alive only minutes earlier!
“…not one of the cleverest or bravest in battle. Heavy with wine he had climbed to the roof of Circe’s sacred house, seeking the cool night air, and had slept apart from his friends. Hearing the stir and noise of their departure, he leapt up suddenly, and forgetting the way down by the long ladder, he fell headlong from the roof. His neck was shattered where it joins the spine: his ghost descended, to the House of Hades.”
But that journey is another loooong story.
Not Mexico, then and not Tamiflu but Aeaea and Moly, taken with a shot of ouzo at the Pig’s Arms with all of the mortal mates one can get.
….. another fabulous piece from ……. Atomou
[1] Translation by Tony Kline http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Greek/Odyssey1.htm
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 