CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND ART 693The Apollo of Bellac, in which the god appears as a nondescript inventor. Better
known is his play La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (The Trojan War Will Not Take
Place, 1935), translated by Christopher Fry with the title Tiger at the Gates. In this
play, Hector and Ulysses agree that Helen will be returned to Menelaus and so
the war will be avoided. But a drunken incident nevertheless precipitates the
fated hostilities, and at the end Cassandra prophesies the inevitable action of
Homer's Iliad—"and now the Grecian poet will have his word." The renowned
Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) has two plays inspired by Greek mythology:
Electre ou la chute des masques (Electra or the Fall of the Masks, 1954), concentrat-
ing on Orestes' return before the murders, and Qui n'a pas son minotaure? (To
Each His Minotaur, 1943), about the legend of Theseus.
In literature in Spanish, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was
especially provocative in his use of classical mythology, whose importance to
him is indicated by the title of his best-known collection of short stories,
Labyrinths (1953; translated into English, 1962). "The Immortal" begins with the
antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna offering the Princess of Lucinge a
six-volume set of Pope's Iliad. A little later he dies during a voyage to Smyrna
on the ship Zeus, but he leaves in one of the volumes a manuscript relating his
experiences in many ages as a kind of Odysseus. His account ends:
¥
"I have been Homer; shortly I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly I shall be
all men; I shall be dead."
On quite a different scale, the enormous Odyssey, A Modern Sequel of the
Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis (1938; translated into English, 1958) also takes
Odysseus beyond the limitations of place. He travels through the world until
his search for a perfect society is transformed into a search for himself, ending
with his isolation in the Antarctic, where death comes gently to him, as Tiresias
had foretold in the Odyssey.
It is not surprising that our survey ends with Homer, the first and greatest
creator of the literature of classical mythology. The myths and sagas, like the
great mythical figures of the gods and heroes, have proved indestructible be-
cause of their universal quality, expressed in the words of Borges and interpreted
in countless works of poets, dramatists, and other writers for the greater part of
three thousand years.
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN ART
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN THE ART OF LATE ANTIQUITY
Despite the decline of the influence of the gods in the life of the cities and in-
dividuals, they continued to be a source of allegory, especially in funerary art.
With the spread of inhumation (from about A.D. 140), wealthy patrons com-
missioned reliefs on sarcophagi (i.e., marble or stone coffins), whose mytho-