It Was Him

"He set fire to my temple!"

Sometimes situations force even the most powerful to hang their minds in helplessness and desperately search their suddenly empty heads for a single thought.

Apollo patted his divine twin comfortingly on the shoulder.

"You don't like cities anyway."

"I don't. He set fire to my temple," Artemis repeated mechanically.

As the god of poetry, her brother might otherwise have found a certain dramatic interest in the repeated verse, but now it was getting on his nerves. He sympathized with his sister, which surprised him. Artemis' temple in Ephesus was larger than any of his. Larger than the shrines of their father, Zeus. The largest. Also, he had to admit, it was beautiful. Architecturally pure.

"A fairly ordinary man. For no reason. Why?" sobbed the goddess of the hunt.

Apollo sighed resignedly and disappeared. Not only because the unexpected whining of his otherwise decisive sister was getting on his nerves.

"He has a reason," he revealed to Artemis after a brief but successful search. "He wants to be famous. He can't do anything, he hasn't tried particularly hard, he just wants the whole world to know and remember his name."

His sister looked at him helplessly. The gods have plenty of time for everything, which is why even temporary mental states can linger unexpectedly long and persistently.

"It won't work out for him, will it? Humans won't allow it."

"Of course not."

He looked away. He knew them much better than Artemis, who was enchanted by nature and the purity of relationships and therefore naive in some respects. What they should forget, they spread around. What should remain in human memory forever, they soon forget.

Even an annoying sister sometimes needs a brother to stand up for her. Sometimes, that brother realizes it. Apollo had reached that point. He rejected the destruction of the city and its surroundings (even though it would certainly have enhanced his reputation). But how else to prevent gossip? You can't stop human desire to listen to unpleasant things that have happened to someone else, not even the gods can do that.

Apollo suddenly lit up. As the sun god, he took that feeling literally.

He already knew.

❖

"My name is known throughout the world. No one will ever forget it! I was the one who set fire to the Temple of Artemis."

The underworld is, with a few exceptions, a boring place. Its inhabitants find entertainment wherever they can. They usually talk and show off, without anyone paying attention to them.

"That's true," agreed the hooded specter, who, surprisingly, not only listened but even responded. "It's already been made public."

The arsonist puffed himself up.

"I knew I would succeed."

"But you're not Herostratus," wondered one of the Erinyes, enjoying a free afternoon in the asphodel fields.

"Herostratus? No, that was the name of my dim-witted neighbor."

"Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis. It says so here," said the demoness, pointing at the book she had been reading while comfortably seated in a beach chair on the banks of the Styx.

"Yeah, it was him," added another ghost. "With Rome — where I lived— it's not certain, we're still arguing about who was to blame, but even little children know about that old business in Ephesus. Herostratus."

"That's wrong!"

The arsonist's ghost almost melted away in a fit of helpless rage. "You must be mistaken. I set fire to that temple! And my name is Dio..."

He didn't finish. He looked around. Looked up, where he sensed the world of the living. Desperate tears welled up in his eyes.

The hooded apparition winked slyly at the arsonist. He could have sent Hermes, but Apollo wanted to enjoy this himself. A solution that required no skill or extra effort on his part.

When you can't stop the gossip, just go first.

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