Chapter Three, Lecture Two

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Chapter Three, Lecture Two
The Development of Classical Myth
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Last Lecture

• Some of the pre-historic antecedents of Greek
  myth
• Palaeolithic Fertility Worship
• Cycladic and Minoan Idols
• Mycenaean Age
• Mesopotamian/Semitic Myths
• Hittites

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This Lecture

• Specific Greek cultural sources and contexts
• Different periods
• Archaic 800490
• Classical 490323
• Hellenistic 32331
• Roman 31

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Invention of writing makes Archaic Period
  critical for understanding earliest Greek myths.
• Painted pottery plentiful

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Homer (800 BC) himself knows nothing of writing
• Homers epics first Greek literature written down
• But his poetry could have been written only in
  alphabetic script, which notes vowels as well as
  consonants.

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period
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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• The IIiad and the Odyssey
• Events associated with the Trojan War
• Too long and complex ever to have been presented
  this way
• Their final form the result of writing

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Does Homers poetry depict the age of the heroes
  (the Mycenaean Period 16001200 BC) or his own
  age (the Dark Age 1200 800 BC)?
• His poetry often conflicts with what is otherwise
  known about the Bronze Age.

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period
Homer Archaeology
Heroes are cremated and buried in urns. Heroes are buried in shaft graves or beehive tombs, such as those at Mycenae.
Rulers are petty chieftains or war lords. Rulers are powerful kings with complex palace bureaucracies.
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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Homer does know of the boars tooth helmet, but
  such a precious item might have been kept into
  his age as an heirloom.
• His poetry mixes both his and the Mycenaean age
  into an imaginative landscape.

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Hesiod (b. 700?)
• Tells us about himself and his age, unlike Homer.
• Came from Asia Minor to Mount Helicon near
  Thebes.
• Was a singer of stories (aiodos)
• The first European author

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Theogony 1-33
• An account of the origins of the cosmos to its
  present form
• Has many Near Eastern motifs
• The Works and Days
• Issues of right and wrong
• Gnomic wisdom literature

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• The Cyclic Poems
• A circle around the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Include events not in the two great epics
• Known only in later epitomes
• The Homeric Hymns
• Songs to a deity in a public setting a sacrifice
  to a god, for example
• Sets out the story of the deity e.g. Demeter

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Greek Myth in the Archaic Period

• Archaic Lyric Poetry
• Personal reflections on private themes
• Occasionally touches on mythic themes
• Composed in writing and memorized, not improvised
  and oral like earlier songs
• E.g., Archilochus

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• 490323 B.C.

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Greek moral thought originates in the fact that
  the Greeks had no authoritative source of divine
  truth.
• Greek Humanism
• The world is knowable to human reason unaided by
  divine guidance or revelation.

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Rhapsodes
• Memorized written poems
• Leaning on a rhabdos
• With the advent of writing, the aiodoi gradually
  disappear
• Choral Song and Odes
• Use myth for their own purposes
• Pindar (518438) Bacchylides

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Most important source the tragedies of the fifth
  century
• Goat Song
• Associated with Dionysus
• Public performances
• Actors always male three-actor rule
• Masks and gestures

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Directed toward the concerns of Athenian male
  citizens, but always couched in myth
• Dionysus (the god of the dêmos)
• Pisistratus
• Aristotles Poetics
• cleansing through pity and fear
• peripeteia gt katastrophê
• hamartia hubris

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Aeschylus (525456)
• Seven of his eighty of his plays extant
• Grand moral issues
• Sophocles (496406)
• Seven of his 123 plays extant
• Dignity and loneliness of the hero caught in
  conflict of wills
• Influenced by folklore

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Euripides (485406)
• Nineteen of his ninety plays extant
• Irrationalist, deflated heroes, ridicule of myth,
  strong, passionate women, the most modern of the
  tragedians
• Showed men as they are, not as they ought to be
  Aristotle

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Greek Myth in the Classical Period

• Tragedies
• Emphasis always on human beings from the
  legendary past
• Lusty, violent, perverse
• Greek science, developing at the time, viewed
  myth critically.

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Greek Myth in the Hellenistic Period

• 323-31 B.C.

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Greek Myth in the Hellenistic Period

• Alexandrias Mouseion collected Greek literature
• Literature now read aloud with a written text in
  hand
• Not necessarily performed in front of an
  audience as before
• More learned and difficult to understand than
  previous performance literature
• This style called Alexandrian

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Greek Myth in the Hellenistic Period

• Callimachus (305240 BC)
• Author of first scientific history of literature
• Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC)
• His Jason and the Argonauts is in the Alexandrian
  style
• Allegorical method of discovering the hidden
  truths in the ancient myths

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Greek Myth in the Hellenistic Period

• Increased effort to preserve Greek myth
• The Library of Apollodorus (AD 120)
• Compendium of Greek myths, not itself a work of
  literature
• The tour book of Greece by Pausanias (AD 150)
  also collects many local myths
• Hyginus (second century AD) wrote a Latin handbook

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A Harsh Estimation

• This . . . is the time when mythology developed
  into a form of literary and artistic rabies, when
  pretty or scandalous stories of divine amours and
  surprising metamorphoses were told in elegant
  verse by poets who, poor men, found neither the
  inspiration nor the audience for anything more
  important. This is the age which intervenes
  between us and the classical Greeks, and gives
  the impression that the Greeks were incurable
  triflers . . . . The mythologizing of these poets
  is at first charming, but it soon becomes an
  intolerable bore. It is dead. Kitto, The
  Greeks 2034

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• 31 BC

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• The Romans eventually adopted Greek myths as
  their own and used them in their own literature
• The major Greek gods were given names of Roman
  gods that were similar to them

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• Vergil (7019 BC)
• The Aeneid is the story of a Trojan hero who
  escapes and eventually founds a new nation in
  Italy.
• Transmits material that would have been lost to
  us
• A full description of the underworld, the legend
  of Dido, and one of adventures of Heracles

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• Ovid (43 BCAD 17)
• The Metamorphoses
• Witty and urbane retelling of myths that contain
  transformations of shapes
• Most influential book on the way the West thinks
  of Greek myth

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• Livy (59 BCAD 17)
• His early history of Rome is more like legend
  than history
• Seneca (AD 5468)
• Tutor to Nero
• Wrote tragedies on mythic themes
• Great influence on Shakespeare

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• As they increasingly came to be written down,
  myths became identified with the particular work
  in which they were contained.
• Sophocless Oedipus Rex is not the Oedipus myth
  it is only one variant of the tale. It also
  doesnt tell the complete story.

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• This book, while about myth per se, also
  discusses myths as they are best known to us in
  literary treatments.
• It also pieces together the complete myth from a
  variety of sources.
• No one ancient text tells the entire story of
  Heracles from his birth to death, for example.

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Roman Appropriation of Greek Myth

• The ancients would not have experienced their
  myths this way.
• The book is similar in approach to that of the
  Hellenistic mythographers.

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Summary
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Summary

• Greek myth was used and presented in different
  ways and for different purposes as time went on
• Many of these differences are tied the increasing
  use of writing, as opposed to oral transmission.