Exam 1 - CLAS251

What is Myth? 8-25-26

  • The word “myth” derives from the Greek Mythos -(word or story)

  • In Homer, it is used to denote a forceful or extended speech, but it never connotes lack of truth

  • In the 5th century BCE, mythos meaning began to shift

    • The historian, Herodotus, was first to use mythos to denote an implausible story

    • The historian, Thucydides, distinguished the truth of his history from “the mythical”

    • The philosopher, Plato, contrasted mythos - qua untrustworthy tale or lie

      • logos -qua rational account

  • Oral traditions are always preserved for a reason

  • Myth says something about the world

    • Society

    • Environment

    • The Gods

  • A provisional definition of Myth

    • Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance

  • No greek myth is ever told exactly the same twice

  • Characteristics of Greek Myth

    • We know Greek myths through written texts, but all of them evolved in an oral culture

    • No myth existed in a standardized version

    • The Greeks had nothing akin to sacred text

    • Greek religion had no orthodoxy(the normal thought), but stipulation of orthopaxy(normal practice)

    • Greek myths were performed and constantly re-interpreted by poets

    • Most myths exist in numerous varying (and sometimes contradictory) traditions; these variations were often the product of local factors

  • Early Literacy Sources for Greek Myth

    • Homer (8th century BCE)

    • Hesiod (8th century BCE)

    • Homeric Hymns (ca. 700-400 BCE)

  • Epic Poetry

    • Homer and Hesiod were the most important literary sources for Greek Myth

    • Homer and Hesiod composed and performed their poetry in the late 8th century BCE shortly after the invention of the Greek alphabet

    • This was performed publicly

    • Never played the same character the same way twice

    • Choral Lyric Poetry

      • Stesichorus (600-800 BCE)

      • Pindar (518-446 BCE)

    • Tragic Poetry

      • Aeschylus (525-455 BCE)

      • Sophocles (497-406 BCE)

      • Euripides (485-406 BCE)

    • Pseudo-Hesiod, Catalogue of Women (6th century BCE)

    • The Genealogists

      • Hecataeus of Miletus (500 BCE)

      • Acusilas of Argos (500 BCE)

      • Pherecydes of Athens (5th century BCE)

      • Hellanicus of Lesbos (480-395 BCE)

  • The Hellenistic Tradition

    • Scholiasts

      • These were scholars who wrote notes (scholia) to canonical literary works, usually in the form of marginal commentaries

    • Collections

      • The best known is the Bibliotheca (library) attributed to Apollodorus of Athens (180-120 BCE) but the work was probably written in the 1st century CE

  • Materials in Greek Material Culture

    • Vase Painting

    • Statues

    • Votives

      • objects dedicated to a deity at a shrine or temple

    • Frescoes and mosaics

    • Coins

    • Jewelry

Cylix of Apollo - Wikipedia

  • Athenian Kylix (5th Century BCE)

    • Depicts Apollo with a lyre and a crow

      • He is also pouring a liquid out of his bowl

      • Only male figure wearing a chiton to cover the ankles

      • Laurel leaves

  • Roman marble groups/copies

    • Half goat/Half man, Aphrodite (always depicted unclothed), and Eros (baby angel)

    • Ares (unclothed, has a helmet on, carrying spear or sword)

      • Unclothed men = Heoric

      • There is a hole in his ankle to depict his chain

        • He was only let loose during war because he was so wild when it came to war

  • Dionysus on a Leopard

    • Unclothed, has ivy in his hair, cultic septer (staff with a pinecone and ribbon)

  • Nike and Zeus on coin

    • Poseidon has a trident

    • Nike is doing something

  • Athena seal-ring

    • Ankles covered = woman (“giving demure”)

    • Armor & owl indicate


Ancient Approaches to Greek Myth 8-27-26

The Authority of the Poets

  • Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey exercised an enormous influence in antiquity

  • Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days were also generally taken to be authoritative

  • We had no access to the beliefs of everyday Greeks, but the fact that there was no distribution between mythos and logos prior to the 5th century BCE suggests that the traditional stories about their Gods were overall accepted as true

  • Things began to change with the advent of Greek rationalism in the 6th century BCE

  • “All things are easy for the gods. Often out of misfortunes they set men upright who have been laid low on the black earth’ often they trip even those who are standing firm and roll them onto their backs, and then many troubles come to them, and a man wanders in want of livelihood, unhinged in mind.”

    • Archilochus fr. 130 West

  • “The god (i.e., Heracles) appeared next to him and said, ‘Grab the wheels and whip your oxen. Pray to the gods when you are doing something or you’ll pray in vain”

    • Barbius, Fables 20

Why did the Greeks become critical of their own traditions?

  • Greeks were one of the first groups to realize that their traditions were weird

  • The Pre-socratic Philosopher

    • Greek thinkers of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE

    • None of their works survive intact; we depend upon later writers who excerpt from or quote them

    • The presocratics rejected the theological explanations of natural phenomena offered by Homer and Hesiod

    • They instead understood the world was a rationally ordered place (kosmos) that is intelligible to human understanding

  • The Milesians

    • Aristotle (Metaphysics) says that the Thales of Miletus was the first to inquire into the causes and principles of the natural world and natural phenomena

    • Thales (6th century BCE) claimed that water was the first principle of all things

    • Anaximander in his treatise On the Nature of Things, held that the infinite (aperion) was capable of transformation into multiple elements

      • solid, liquid, gas, hot, cold

    • Anaximenes posited air as the first principle of nature

  • Xenophanes

    • Poet, theologian, and philosopher

      • One of the first that wrote in verse rather than prose

    • Criticized anthromorphism in religion

    • Criticized the immoral portrayal of the gods in Homer and Hesiod

    • Tended towards monotheism

    • “Man made his gods, and furnished them with his own body, voice, and garments.”

    • “If a horse or lion or slow ox had agile hands for paint and sculpture, the horse would make his god a horse, the ox would sculpt an ox.”

    • “Our gods have flat noses and black skins say the Ethiopians. The Thracians say our gods have red hair and hazel eyes.”

    • “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men; theft, adultery, and mutual deception.”

    • “One god, greatest among gods and men, not at all like the mortals in body or thought.”

  • The Sophists

    • Itinerant scholars who taught for money, beginning in 5th century BCE

    • They claimed to teach the skills necessary for political success, most notably rhetoric

    • The first was Protagoras of Adbera

      • Others included Gorgias of Leontini, Hippias of Elis, and Prodicus of Ceos

    • Plato later used “sophist” as a term of abuse

    • The sophists devalued the importance of mythos and elevated the importance of logos

    • Plato hated them

      • thought they were pretty stupid and violent and children shouldn’t be taught what they believed

Allegory

  • saying something in a different way/saying something different from what appears to be said

  • the allegorical method of interpretation presumes that a deeper meaning is hidden beneath the surface level of the text

  • Homer and Hesiod were both subject to allegorical interpretation

  • Daphne and Apollo

    • How women should avoid the advances of men

    • Apollo wanted to crack so Daphne asked her dad for protection and dad turns her into a tree

  • Theagenes of Rhegium

    • A grammarian active at 525 BCE

    • He sought to defend Homer from attacks by rationalist critics, including Xenophanes

    • Odyssey

    • iad are physical allegories

    • First greek thinker we know to employ the allegorical method to interpret myth

  • Physical Allegory and the Stoics

    • Stoicism was a philisophical school founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium

    • It remained one of the msot important schools of philosophy throughout the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire

    • The Stoics wielded physical allegory and etymology as tools that could be employed to explain myth

    • They found in Homer and Hesiod complex allegories that corresponded to their own view of the universe

    • The goddess Hera was equated with the Greek word aerI (“air”) and her union with Zeus was interpreted metaphorically as the meeting of air and aether

    • Cronus the Titan was identified with the Greek khronos (“time”) etc

  • Historical Allegory I

    • Historical allegory maintained the myth was a distortion of real historical events

    • Palaephatus explains myths as the result of misunderstandings of really explainable events

      • The sphinx was really a woman with a dog

      • Actaeon was a nobleman who wasted all his money on dogs

    • Historical Allegory II

      • In his work titled The Sacred History, Euhemerus of Messene wrote of visiting the island of Panchaea, where he learned that Uranos, Cronos, and Zeus had been great kings

      • The term: euphemism refers to the thesis that the gods were originally human beings

    • Moral Allegory

      • This was the most developed kind of allegorical interpretation in antiquity

      • Moral allegory interprets myth as an enigmative mode of expressing ethical doctrines

      • In the Homeric Problems, Heraclitus the Grammarian interpreted the Iliad and Odyssey through moral allergory to rescue Homer from charges of impiety

      • It was a favorite technique of the Neoplatonists

      • It remained very popular in the Middle Ages

Neoplatonism

  • Revival or Plato’s teaching during 3rd century BCE

  • Major representatives

    • Plotinus and his student, Porphyry

  • made heavy use of allegory as a vehicle for discovering profound moral truths about the world beyond

  • these philosophers tended to downplay historicizing approaches in favor of

  • allegory


Conclusions

  • Homer and Hesiod were authoritative throughout antiquity

  • Homeric epics were foundational for the Greek cultural identity

  • development of Greek rationalism, however, challenged literal interpretations of the great poems of the epic tradition

  • different philosophical schools impunged both the truth and the morality of the poems of Homer and Hesiod

  • Allegory developed in part as a response to these criticisms and the changing intellectual environment in Ancient Greece