Classics 170: Transcript Summary—Myth and Mythology

Course format and overview

• Course: Classics 170: Ancient Myths and Modern Lives
• Instructor: Avi Kapach; focus on ancient Greek and Roman mythology
• Delivery: Online asynchronous
  • No fixed log-in times required
  • Lecture videos posted twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) usually by the afternoon
  • You can watch videos at your convenience, but deadlines for assignments remain fixed
• Deadlines and time management
  • Watching a lecture late may jeopardize meeting deadlines for exams and quizzes
  • Not a self-guided course; deadlines and structure still apply
• Learning management and readings
  • ELMS site should be up and running; announcements are important
  • Syllabus on ELMS; one required text (ensure you get the correct edition for page-number readings)
  • Readings come from a source book plus additional texts accessible online (posted on ELMS or linked there)
• Assessment and grading
  • Four quizzes (roughly one per week)
  • Midterm and final exams
  • Exams include a written/essay component to encourage deep reflection
  • No participation grade due to the online asynchronous format
• Course resources and announcements
  • Monitor ELMS for announcements and updates
  • The PowerPoint and other materials will be available on ELMS

What is myth? Two basic meanings and scholarly definitions

• Two broad meanings of myth
  1) Myth as a collection of myths belonging to a specific group (e.g., Greek mythology, Roman mythology, Hindu mythology, Norse mythology)
  2) The term myth as a word or story (mythos) with evolving meaning in ancient Greek and later as a 'story' or 'fabulous tale'
• Etymology of mythos
  • Origin: ancient Greek word mythos originally meant simply word or story, not necessarily a “myth” as we understand it today
  • Over time, mythOS acquires the sense of a mythic or fabulous story
• Modern vs scholarly definitions
  • In contemporary usage, a myth is often seen as a story that is not literally true
  • Scholarly definitions are more nuanced and include: stories about gods, sacred stories, cosmologies explaining the origins of the world, etiologies, or stories connected to religious rituals or social institutions
  • Myths are often defined as traditional stories regarded as true by a particular society
  • Outsiders may view myths as false; perspective and cultural context matter (e.g., Osiris, Heracles, Ragnarok vs other religious/worldviews)
• Distinctions among related terms
  • Myth vs legend: legends are traditional stories regarded as true but set in a time when the world is more or less as it is now, often involving historically grounded figures
  • Myth vs folktale/fable/fairy tale: folktales and fables are not necessarily regarded as true and often convey symbolic truths or moral lessons; myths tend to involve divine or supernatural elements and are tied to a sacred past
  • Sagas: a term associated with Germanic/Northern European traditions; often epic-length mythic narratives
• Functions and purposes of myths
  • Connected to religious rituals or practices (narrating myths in the context of rites, sacra, etc.)
  • Theological or doctrinal: explain the nature of gods and the religious order
  • Charter myths: justify or maintain social institutions and practices
  • Etiological myths: explain origins of natural phenomena or social customs (e.g., why we die)
  • Ideological myths: reflect and shape cultural values and worldviews
  • Entertainment: myths can also serve as storytelling for amusement and cultural memory
• Transmission and medium
  • Originally oral: myths transmitted by spoken word or by trained bards/singers
  • Later written forms: epics and sagas (e.g., Homer’s works) and other literary genres
  • Visual and material culture: myths appear in art, sculpture, vase-painting, architecture, jewelry, etc.; sometimes earliest attestations of a myth come from art before literary sources
• The evolving concept of myth
  • No single universal definition; many acceptable definitions are inclusive and context-dependent
  • Categories of truth/falsehood, sacred/secular, divine/human are historical constructs; different cultures did not always share the same concepts of fact and fiction
• Scope within this course
  • Focus on myths, especially Greek and Roman mythologies
  • Distinctions between myth, legend, and folktale are important to understand for analysis
• Key takeaway
  • Myths are culturally embedded narratives that function within religious, social, and symbolic systems, and their meanings shift with perspective, time, and context

Greeks and Romans in myth: scope and relationships

• Course focus clarified
  • We will cover myths of the Greeks and the Romans
  • The title might suggest broader coverage, but the scope is Greek and Roman mythologies; comparisons to Mesopotamian or Indian subcontinent myths may be drawn
• Greek vs Roman myth and religion
  • Greeks and Romans are distinct civilizations with different languages, social norms, and religious practices
  • Greek and Roman gods are not identical; Rome borrowed many Greek myths and often equated Greek gods with Roman counterparts (e.g., Poseidon ⇄ Neptune)
  • Despite borrowing, the gods’ worship and religious roles remained distinct across cultures
• Special relationship and influence
  • Early Roman culture was greatly influenced by Greece (7th–6th centuries BCE), including the Greek alphabet, literature, art, architecture, and mythic narratives
  • Romans reinterpreted and sometimes rebranded Greek stories; many Roman myths are heavily Greek in content but with Roman names
• Purely Roman myths and legends
  • Romans maintained their own legendary/heroic narratives that are distinctly Roman and less dependent on Greek models
  • Example: Horatius (Roman legend illustrating the supremacy of the state over family ties)
• Greek myth as the source for later Roman adaptations
  • Virgil’s Aeneid blends Greek myth with Roman foundational history by presenting Aeneas as the progenitor of Romulus, linking Greek myth to Rome’s origins
• Important takeaway on the relationship
  • The Greek and Roman mythologies are deeply interwoven, with Rome adopting and transforming much of Greek myth while preserving some independent, uniquely Roman legends

The Greeks: origins, periods, and geography

• Ethnic and linguistic background
  • Greeks are an Indo-European people who settled in the Southern Balkan Peninsula and Aegean region beginning in the Bronze Age
• Key historical periods and milestones
  • Mycenaean period (early Greek civilization; roughly 1700 BCE to 1100 BCE):
  • Evidence of early Greek language and society
  • Written records in Linear B (a syllabic script) that encode Greek language but not the later alphabet
  • Dark Age (approx. 1100 BCE to 800 BCE):
  • Period of relative decline and limited historical records
  • Archaic period (beginning around 800s BCE):
  • Foundation of many Greek poleis (city-states) and the revival of writing with the Greek alphabet (derived from Phoenician)
  • Establishment of the Olympic Games around 776 BCE as a symbol of Greek identity
  • Emergence of the polis as the basic political unit; thousands of poleis with diverse forms of government
  • Greek colonization expands outward to Eastern Aegean coast, Asia Minor (Western Anatolia), Southern Italy, Sicily, and other Mediterranean regions (Magna Graecia in Southern Italy and Sicily; Marseille as a Greek colony)
  • Classical period (often framed as Greece’s golden age):
  • Flourishing art, philosophy, drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), architecture (e.g., Parthenon), and philosophy
  • Persian Wars and intensified rivalries, particularly Athens vs. Sparta
  • Hellenistic period (post-Alexander the Great):
  • Alexander’s conquests export Greek culture eastward (to Egypt, India, etc.) and create Hellenistic kingdoms
  • Major centers like Alexandria become hubs of science, learning, and culture
  • Interaction between Greek and Near Eastern cultures expands; science and mathematics advance
  • Late classical transition to Roman dominance: end of Hellenistic polities and incorporation into Roman Empire by 30 BCE with conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt (Cleopatra’s realm)
• The Greek world: geography and regions
  • Thessaly: mountainous, horse country
  • Epirus: western-northern region; perceived as wilder or more peripheral
  • Boeotia: central Greece; Thebes as a cultural center
  • Delphi: sacred site of Apollo’s oracle; focus of religious life
  • Attica: central region; Athens as the preeminent political and cultural center
  • Peloponnese: major southern peninsula; includes:
  • Laconia (Sparta and environs)
  • Arcadia (wild landscape with divine associations to Hermes and Zeus)
  • Elis (western Peloponnese; Olympia)
  • Aegean Islands and coastlines: Delos (sacred to Apollo), Cyclades, Sporades; Rhodes, Crete; Cyprus (often depicted separately from the core Greek mainland in maps)
  • Asia Minor (Asia Minor / Anatolia): Aeolis (Aeolic region) and Ionia (Ionian region, including many coastal cities and Attica’s dialect influence)
  • Magna Graecia: Greek colonization in Southern Italy and Sicily; culturally Greek-speaking regions far from the mainland
• Major dialects and linguistic variety
  • Doric: associated with southern Greece, correlates with Sparta (Laconia)
  • Ionian: associated with Ionia and heavily represented in Attica; basis of most surviving literary Greek (e.g., Athens)
  • Aeolic: associated with western Greece and parts of Asia Minor
• Mythical vs historical Greece
  • Myths describe both cosmological or primordial worlds and Greek-placed heroes (Theseus, Achilles, Heracles) connected to real places (Athens, Thessaly, Thebes, Argos)
  • For historical Greeks, myths were often seen as true accounts of early Greek memory (Mycenaean period)
  • Trojan War myth potentially derives from a historical conflict in Northwestern Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age; later embellished into myth
• Origins and sources of Greek myth
  • Early myth origins involve Indo-European elements (societal roles like male initiation rites in Achilles’ myth; marriage rituals in Helen’s myth)
  • Parallels with other Indo-European myths (e.g., Helen vs. Sati and the Ramayana) suggest shared cultural motifs rather than direct influence
  • Late Near Eastern influences appear in creation myths and divine succession (Cronus and Ouranos; castration motif); Hurrian parallels to Zeus/Typhon myths
  • Greek myth is a product of early memory and exchange with neighboring cultures; themes may crystallize in the Mycenaean period and become codified later
• The role of writing in Greek myth
  • The earliest surviving Greek myths are preserved in writing after 900 BCE, but oral composition predates this
  • Two major types of sources: literary and artistic

Sources for ancient myth: literary and artistic

• Literary sources
  • Homeric epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey (composition likely oral tradition before writing; dated to the eighth century BCE in written form)
  • Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days
  • Tragedians of the Classical period: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; many myths are the plots of their plays (e.g., Agamemnon in the Oresteia; Oedipus in Sophocles’ plays)
  • Hellenistic literature: Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (Jason and the Argonauts)
  • Philosophers: Plato uses myths for moral and pedagogical purposes; historians like Herodotus and Thucydides incorporate myths with attempts to present historical context or skeptical interpretation
  • Mythographers: handbooks summarizing myths; many have been lost, but one major surviving example is the Library of Apollodorus (also called Pseudo-Apollodorus)
• The Library of Apollodorus (Pseudo-Apollodorus)
  • A comprehensive handbook that summarizes cosmogonies, genealogies, heroic myths, and the end of the Age of Heroes
  • Widely used in classical studies; contains useful summaries despite flaws
• Roman adaptations and sources for Greek myth
  • Virgil’s Aeneid: Roman retelling that links Greek myth to Roman founding myth
  • Ovid’s Metamorphoses: retellings of Greek myths with Latin names and transformations
  • These works remain essential sources for Greek myth in the Roman period
• The visual arts as myth sources
  • Vase painting, sculpture, wall paintings, mosaics, armor, and jewelry frequently depict mythic scenes (e.g., Heracles, Theseus, the Trojan War)
  • Art can preserve myths not preserved in surviving literature
  • Some myths are attested in art earlier than in literature (e.g., the 12 Labors of Heracles depicted in metopes on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia; earliest attestations from sculpture and reliefs at Olympia)
• The role of art in dating and understanding myth
  • Visual sources can reveal canonical myth details before they appear in literary texts
  • Art helps reconstruct myth cycles and iconography in early periods

The Greeks’ origins of myth and early cross-cultural influences

• Early sources of myth and cross-cultural contact
  • Indo-European roots provide a shared set of motifs across various cultures
  • Near Eastern influences contribute elements to creation and succession myths (e.g., Cronus and Ouranos parallels with Hurrian myths; Typhon as a monster appears in multiple traditions)
• Notable cross-cultural parallels
  • Heracles, Gilgamesh, Samson, Ninurta: lion-slaying and heroic feats show shared narrative motifs
  • The Hurrian myth of the castration of the sky-father has thematic parallels with Greek myth development
• The oral tradition and the transition to writing
  • Early Greek myths likely crystallized during the Mycenaean period and continued to develop during the Dark Age and Archaic period
  • The written form (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod) dates from the 8th century BCE but reflects much older oral traditions
• The significance of this cross-cultural development
  • Greek myth emerges as a confluence of indigenous Greek beliefs and external influences, then becomes a cornerstone of Western literary and artistic tradition

The end of antiquity and the transition to Roman dominance in myth study

• Rome’s adoption and adaptation of Greek myth
  • Greek myth was widely adopted by Romans; gods acquired Roman equivalents and names, but the mythic narratives often persisted with local adaptations
  • Romans also produced their own myths and legends that emphasize Roman values (e.g., duty to the state, family vs. civic loyalty)
• The Aeneid as a bridge
  • Virgil’s Aeneid integrates Greek myth with Roman founding myth to legitimize Roman imperial identity
• The study of myth across cultures
  • We examine both Greek and Roman myths, noting how Roman culture reshaped and reinterpreted Greek narratives
  • We acknowledge the ongoing influence of Greek myth on later Western literature and art

Key themes, terms, and examples to remember

• Core terms and distinctions
  • Myth: traditional story believed true by a community; often set in a sacred or remote past
  • Legend: traditional story believed true, set in a time when the world resembles the present; often includes historical figures
  • Folktale/Fable/Fairy tale: stories with symbolic truths or moral lessons, not typically claimed as true historical events
  • Saga: epic tradition in Germanic/Northern European contexts
• Major Greek periods and landmarks
  • Mycenaean period; Linear B tablets; early Greek language
  • Dark Age; archaeology guides understanding, limited texts
  • Archaic period; alphabet adoption; foundation of Greece’s city-states and colonies
  • Classical period; Parthenon; Athenian tragedians; Persian Wars; rise of Macedon
  • Hellenistic period; Alexander the Great; Alexandria as a hub of culture and learning
• Key textual and artistic sources to study myths
  • Literary: Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Hesiod (Theogony, Works and Days), Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; Apollodorus Library; Virgil, Ovid; Plato; Herodotus and Thucydides
  • Artistic: temple reliefs (e.g., Temple of Zeus at Olympia), vase-painting, sculpture, mosaics, jewelry
• Notable myths and figures to know
  • Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Cronus, Ouranos, Typhon, Hermes, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Aeneas, Romulus, Remus, Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles, Theseus, Helen, Trojan War narratives, 12 Labors of Heracles
• Foundational geographical and cultural context
  • The Greek world encompassed a wide geographic area: mainland Greece, Aegean islands, Asia Minor, Magna Graecia, and colonies in the western Mediterranean
  • The Greek dialects (Doric, Ionian, Aeolic) shape literary and regional variations in myths
• Practical implications and relevance
  • Understanding myth’s role in religion, politics, and social norms in ancient societies
  • Recognizing how myths explain natural phenomena, social order, and collective identities
  • Appreciating how myths are transmitted and transformed across media (oral tradition, text, and visual arts)
• Mythography and modern resources
  • Apollodorus’s Library as a key compendium of myths
  • Virgil, Ovid as Roman retellings that preserve and adapt Greek myth
  • Mythopedia (recommended online resource by the instructor) for further study
  • Course materials and slides will be available on ELMS; PowerPoint decks are shareable for study

Visual and practical takeaways

• The interplay of myth and ritual
  • Myths often inform or accompany religious rites and ceremonies (e.g., creation myths and ritual purity practices)
• Myth as a tool for cultural memory
  • Myths help founders like Romulus and Aeneas articulate identity and legitimacy for political communities
• The importance of context when interpreting myth
  • Different cultures interpret myth through different truth-claims; what is considered true can vary by culture and era
• How to approach myth academically
  • Distinguish between histoire (historical memory) and mythic narrative
  • Analyze how myths change with media (oral to written; literature to sculpture)
  • Be mindful of cross-cultural influences (Indo-European parallels, Near Eastern motifs, and later Roman reinterpretations)

Quick references and suggested starting points

• Core texts to read or skim for a solid foundation
  • Homer, Iliad; Homer, Odyssey; Hesiod, Theogony; Hesiod, Works and Days
  • Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (selected plays using mythic plots)
  • Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses
  • Apollodorus, Library (scriber: Pseudo-Apollodorus)
• Key art and artifacts to explore
  • Temple of Zeus at Olympia reliefs depicting the 12 Labors of Heracles
  • Vase paintings and sculpture illustrating mythic scenes (Heracles, Theseus, Trojan War)
• Online and print resources mentioned in class
  • Mythopedia (Joris Truly; recommended for Greek and Roman myth information)
  • PowerPoints and slides available on ELMS
  • Include readings from your required primary source text and supplementary online materials as directed

Summary and study tips

• Build a structured outline from the major sections above when reviewing lectures
• Use the relational ideas (myth vs legend vs folktale) to categorize different narratives you encounter
• Note the Greek-Roman relationship and the influence of cross-cultural contacts on myth development
• Pay attention to how myths are used to express religious, political, and social ideologies in both Greek and Roman contexts
• When studying myths, annotate where art first attests a detail before literature, as this helps understand the transmission and evolution of myth cycles
• Leverage Mythopedia and ELMS resources to deepen understanding and to find illustrative examples for essay prompts