Hell on Earth: How sizzling temperatures are reviving Europeans’ knowledge of the classics

This habit of naming weather events started with everyday names, — almost comforting in their familiarity — and applied to storms of enormous destructive power. These storms tended to happen in the winter, though. This may be the first time that people have been on first-name terms with what used to sound innocuous enough, the 'heat waves' of summer.

The fact that these 'waves' have been upgraded to 'heat storms' is itself an indication of the increased severity of the phenomenon. Naming meteorological events is intended to alert people to that severity. Thus, expecting trouble this year, the Greek authorities settled on Cleon for the name of their first heat storm of 2023.

Now one of the minor joys of being a tourist in Greece, is that you might encounter individuals with names you associate with antiquity. There are living examples of men called Adonis, for example, though they don't always have much else in common with their mythical namesake.

The obvious choice for a heat storm might have been something a bit more worrying than Adonis, but equally archaic. Pluto, say, given that he was the big cheese in the underworld.

But actually, it is doubtful that the Greeks were thinking in terms of mythological figures. The only Cleon that would have sprung to mind – and even then, only to the mind of a scholar of 5th-century Athens – was a populist disliked by Aristophanes and Thucydides, both of whom are marginally more famous than Cleon himself.

I doubt the Greek meteorologists were trying to make a subtle point about the growth of populism in 21st-century Europe. They obviously just liked the name.

Classic inspiration

Given that the whole purpose of names is to bring home to people the seriousness of the situation, the Italians might have had a better idea. With similarly record-breaking temperatures, they have already been through one major heatwave so far this summer. But the Italians had a brainwave too.

Rather than use a mere name, they decided to draw on the classics and on the inhabitants of Hades, Hell, the Inferno... you get the picture.

This might be said to have brought an entirely new eschatological aspect to meteorological warnings. If the point of naming storms is to deter people from venturing out, then calling the next one Mildred is unlikely to work.

A heatwave called Cerberus, on the other hand, comes closer to the old Roman message at the threshold, warning passersby to 'cave canem' (beware the dog).

The difference is that the dog in question is not guarding your house. It's outside the door, just waiting for you to show some leg before it rips your foot off. Furthermore, this dog has three heads and an insatiable appetite. Taming it would literally be a Herculean task.

Given the prospect of encountering a beast like that, the only people with an incentive to leave their rooms are the tourists who came to see the sights, even if seeing the Colosseum nowadays is as risky as it once was for the early Christians.

That was the previous heatwave. Pretty terrifying!

Right now, there is a new heatwave in place of the old one, with the same dire effects of overheating, dehydration and a daytime curfew from mid-morning till around six in the evening.

You might think that the main danger for Italian meteorologists is the law of diminishing returns: if you start out with the most terrifying thing imaginable, how do you frighten the populace next time?

The answer is to treat the underworld as an infinite resource. It is well known that Hell is overpopulated. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, this is one of the main things that makes it hellish. Among its many denizens are a large number of pagan figures. Then there are the various devils. Beelzebub would be the perfect name for a heat dome.  

But it might not even come to this. Thanks to the superstitious ancients, the Italians have a wealth of classical talent to draw upon.

Even if they ran out of mythical beasts, there would always be various other grim inhabitants of the afterlife, such as the one whose name has been given to this week's heat storm: Caronte, otherwise known as Charon.

He's the ferryman with the official job title of psychopomp who takes dead souls over the Styx. In other words, you wouldn't want to step out of your door and straight onto his boat. As hints go, this one is probably the least subtle since Don Vito Corleone made somebody an offer he couldn't refuse.

The ferryman's services don't even come cheap.

Charon is essentially the taxi driver from hell, the one who takes you around the houses while the meter is running, though, by all accounts, he lacks a taxi driver's conversational skills.

Instead, he communicates his disapproval – and it is always disapproval, for obvious reasons – with a look that could kill if you weren't already dead, or a swift blow on the shoulders with his oar, as illustrated by Michelangelo.

If these deadly and alarming heatwaves continue, at least the Italian authorities can take comfort from the fact that there are plenty more names where those came from, an entire Who's Who of the Classical Underworld.

Whether this would work in Britain, though, is doubtful.

On Sky News, the names of Cerberus and Charon meant little to the radiantly intelligent news anchor, Sophie Ridge. "I'm not familiar with these guys!" she confessed. This goes some way to explaining how Boris Johnson manages to appear erudite.  

Whether the resort to menacing mythology has persuaded the Italian public that humanity is the cause of global warming is a whole different question. The climate crisis has received very little attention from most of the Italian media.

Nonetheless, with their knowledge of Dante from school (the three-headed dog appears in his Third Circle) and their folk memory of the classics, the naming policy must have contributed to their anxiety about the heat.

The Guardian reported that when 15,000 people braved sweltering temperatures in the Vatican on Sunday to hear Pope Francis lead the prayers, they used parasols and fans to keep cool. How many of them were pondering the line, well-reported over there, about the Infernal City?

The priests, certainly.

Dressed in black robes, they were suffering even more than their flocks. One in particular, François Mbemba, said they were "sweating like hell".

That's probably as close as theology ever gets to stating the obvious.