The Mythology in my Surroundings – Plain Greek People who Evoke Mythical Ones
Parikia, Paros Island, Greece, March 2nd, 2020
Salaroche

Talking to people while living in different countries can sometimes evoke a number of images or stories in our minds. Talking to Greek people is no exception.

Walking around the streets of Paros island or sitting at the restaurants and bars in my vicinity I often engage in short conversation with other pedestrians or patrons. Usually, I first ask them if they speak English, then I ask them about whatever may be on my mind at the moment. Finally, after talking to them for a short while, I ask them for their name and I give them mine.

Meeting a Greek waitress at a restaurant this afternoon made me do a little research on her name, as it sounded clearly mythological to me. After finding out about it, I waited for the waitress to come around again and told her about my findings, to which she replied that she had learnt about most of it at school, but she had not known about all the details I gave her.

The afternoon was warm and sunny so, while I was sitting at a small sidewalk table outside the restaurant, enjoying a nice cold beer with some hors d’oeuvre, I thought I should put together a list of some of the mythological names I have encountered so far here in Parikia.

Greek mythology is fairly well known to most of us westerners. Who among us has never heard of Zeus, or Pallas Athena, or Poseidon, or Hercules, or Oedipus? Or what about Aphrodite, or Helen of Troy, or Achilles? Who has not heard at least a couple of stories about them?

Those names belong to some of the major characters in the epic writings of Aeneas and Homer, or in the tragedy plays of Sophocles and Euripides, all of them ancient literary people who, to this day, keep retelling us their fascinating classic mythological tales.

Love, hatred, ambition, intrigue, jealousy, vengeance, seduction, madness, devotion, trickery, cowardice, selflessness, perversity, malice, heroism, and every other possible human passion can be found embodied in the characters that come to life in the writings of those authors.

By now, some of the names given to those mythological characters have acquired a significance directly related to the distinctive passions or features those characters displayed within the stories and plays where they appear. This also applies to the characters that appear in Roman mythological tales as well.

Thus, today the name Adonis is evocative of an extraordinary male beauty because of the mythological character with the same name that appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where his beauty made him the favorite of the Goddess Aphrodite.  

Dionysius is the name of a god found in Greek mythology who embodies the cult to wine, fertility and religious ecstasy​ and​ has its equivalent in Roman mythology in the god Bacchus. Who has not heard the word “Bacchanal” in reference to any drinking orgy?

Other mythological characters play more dramatic roles than the previous two. Orestes, for example, the son of King Agamemnon, winner of the Trojan Wars, killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the killing of his father by her lover Aegisthus. Talk about a dramatic reaction.

Female protagonists, of course, are never absent in ancient mythological tales, and thus we have princes Phaedra, daughter of king Minos of Crete, spouse of king Theseus of Athens and half sister to the Minotaur.

Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, son of Theseus, and when Hippolytus turned down her amorous advances, in revenge she wrote a letter to king Theseus claiming Hippolytus had raped her, causing Theseus’ anger.

In a couple of versions of Phaedra’s story, Hippolytus dies, either directly at the hands of his father Theseus, or from a curse Theseus casts on him. The god Poseidon had previously granted Theseus three curses he could cast on anyone he wished, so he used one on his son. In a third version, Phaedra commits suicide after learning of Hippolytus death, as she never intended for Hippolytus to die.

As you may have imagined, the name of the waitress I met this afternoon was Phaedra and she had never heard the version of the story where the mythological Phaedra killed herself.

The mythological name Adonis is also used by real people here in Greece. Just a few days ago I met a guy standing behind the kitchen counter at a nice buffet-like take-away-food restaurant whose name was Adonis. I just marveled at that and exclaimed “are you joking? Is your name really Adonis?” Everyone behind the kitchen counter smiled as he replied “yes, that is my name”.

Thus far I have also encountered one Orestes and two Dionysius. I met Orestes while walking down one of those narrow streets typical of Parikia. He was walking home with his older sister and her sister’s girl-friends, who must have been around 12 years old. Orestes must have been around 4 or 5.

I stopped them first, to inquire whether they spoke English and second, to know whether they learnt it at school and how many hours a week did they studied it. Just some reflex questions from a language teacher. Then I exchanged names with them and when it came to Orestes turn, I again played the same game of admiration for his mythological name.

The same happened with the two Dionysus guys. Meeting them happened in two different occasions, but I was equally reminded of the mythological origin of their names.

By the way, in Greek, my name George Laroche would be something like this Giórgos Ovráchos, which, using the Greek alphabet, would look something like this: Γιώργος Οβράχος.

Unfortunately, regardless of the way I may write it, my name is in no way evocative of any mythological characters, which is only quite befitting to this regular mortal guy.

Meanwhile… the beat goes on…

Salaroche​