It’s midnight and 37C: my hell (and history) of Cerberus

It’s approaching midnight and it’s still 37 degrees celsius. Heat is radiating through the stones I’m sitting on in the ancient amphitheatre of Epidaurus. I’m here on a theatre retreat, attending the annual national theatre festival’s opening night where the audience is restive. Despite marshals offering hand fans at the entrance, the whole audience is shimmering with sweat, looking utterly drained.

While British weather has been rainy in the past week, the Mediterranean has been baking. Where I am, by the coast in the town of Nafplio, temperatures have been regularly reaching 28 degrees celsius by 8am, usually climbing to the high 30s and low 40s by midday, then staying there until long after the sun has set.

Already the heat has forced Athenian Niki Smirni, owner of retreat company Travelgems, to change the programme four times, getting us up earlier and earlier to try to avoid the worst of the midday sun. “I would never normally host visitors in Greece in July and August, if it wasn’t for the theatre festival. This heat is outrageous, even for us,” she tells me, dabbing herself with a hand towel. “It’s bad for business, I worry about the older people on this trip.”

The name being applied to this heatwave is Cerberus, the mythical three-headed hellhound whose job was to guard the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology. Owned by Hades (or Pluto, if you prefer your chthonic deities in Latin) Cerberus was charged with preventing damned souls from escaping the netherworld and stopping marauding heroes from reclaiming those who they’d lost.

In the Christian tradition, naming the heatwave after a denizen of hell might seem appropriate. When we picture the afterlife reserved for those who’ve committed mortal crimes, we see fire and lakes of lava. However in Greece, where the myth of Cerberus originates, the underworld was quite different.

The lands of Hades were more heavenly. We know from stories like that of Persephone that there were flowering gardens and fruit trees. Even when Odysseus visits on his journey back from Troy, he finds a dark, dank place where ghosts spend their time drinking blood and pining for their old lives, rather than baking on fiery spits.

It is, perhaps, important to note that the moniker for this weather is unofficial. Italian weather website iLMeteo came up with the name, as it does for a lot of heatwaves (the 2017 “Lucifer” heatwave is another one of its creations), but the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has criticised the naming of heatwaves.

On its website, the organisation acknowledges that giving weather events names makes people take them more seriously, but adds, “Caution should be exercised when comparing or applying lessons or protocols from one hazard type to another, due to the important differences in the physical nature and impacts of storms and heatwaves.” In short, one person’s heatwave is another’s pleasant sunny day.

Still, I can’t help but feel “Cerberus” is nonetheless appropriate. After all, he’s a guard dog and there’s no doubt that the heat is keeping us locked up tight. Snarling at the door whenever I attempt to leave my air-conditioned hotel, Cerberus has done his best to keep me indoors this week. He’s also kept me out of the archaeological sites I came here to visit: the Greek government has closed all outdoor spaces, from municipal parks to archaeological sites like the Acropolis from noon each day.

Interestingly, here in Greece, the heatwave has been dubbed “Cleon”, by local meteorologists. This is another name with ancient origins. The most famous Cleon of antiquity was an Athenian general who lived in the 5th century BCE.

This Cleon is most famous for using his natural charisma and military prowess to beguile voters of the nascent Athenian democracy into following his plans.

History hasn’t remembered Cleon kindly. His contemporary, the historian Thucydides described Cleon as a “sycophant” and a “demagogue”. While there’s no record of Cleon promising “sunlit uplands”, he did all but destroy any opportunity for peace with Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, by persuading voters in the Athenian assembly of the glory and triumph that would come when they eventually defeated the enemy. In fact, after a further 19 years at war, Athens was crushingly defeated, a generation of young men wiped out.

Holidaymakers heading to Greece should consider the warning: warm weather might seem grand at first, but be careful because it could become more dangerous than you realised.

One more name for the European heatwave comes from Seville, Spain. In 2021, the city adopted its own official naming convention for heatwaves. They use Spanish names in reverse alphabetical order, much like how storms in Britain are given English names going forward through the alphabet – Antoni, Betty, Cillian, Daisy, Elliot, and Fleur were some of the names announced by the Met Office for the 2022/2023 season.

Last year Seville baked under Zoe and Yago, but this year’s heatwave is called Xenia. Funnily enough, this is another name of Greek origin. The practice of xenia is the act of being a hospitable host and a good guest.

Even if they aren’t such willing hosts for the heat, with no end in sight, there is one aspect of xenia which all Europeans might hope for: a good guest knows not to outstay their welcome.