Introduction to Greek Mythology
"We are all Athenians, in a sense for the ideas of ancient Greece have permeated our whole culture". - J,E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology.
Mythology is the organized body of the myths of peoples or races having a common tradition and inheritance; also the study of myths, their origin and nature. It is the language or study (logos) of myth (Greek mythos, story); the explanation of how humanity tells its own story, down through the ages. Expressed in countless narratives and sacred scriptures, folktales and tall stories.
Greek mythology is a mine of myths and legends, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the humanity, and the origins and significance of their own cult and mysteries. The oldest known Greek literary sources are the Homer's epic poems and the Theogony of Hesiod, which contain accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the human ages, the origin of Greek religion and mysteries. Myths also are preserved, in fragments of epic poems, in lyric poems, in the works of the tragedians of the fifth century BC.
Among the earliest literary sources are Homer's two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as his Hymns to the Gods. Hesiod, a possible contemporary with Homer, offers in his Theogony (Origin of the Gods) the fullest account of the earliest Greek myths, dealing with the creation of the world; the origin of the gods, Titans, and Giants; as well as elaborate genealogies. Hesiod's Works and Days, also includes the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Four Ages of the human race. Lyrical poets often took their subjects from myth, but their treatment became gradually less narrative and more allusive. Greek lyric poets including Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides and bucolic poets such as Theocritus and Bion, relate individual mythological incidents. Historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, and geographers Pausanias and Strabo, who traveled throughout the Greek world and noted the stories they heard, supplied numerous local myths and legends, often giving little-known alternative versions.
"There is a charm in the name of ancient Greece; there is glory in every page of her history; there is a fascination in the remains of her literature and a sense of unapproachable beauty in her works of art; there is a spell in her climate still, and a strange attraction in her ruin. We are familiar with the praises of her beautiful islands; our poets sing of her lovely genial sky. There is not in all the land a mountain, plain, or river, nor a fountain, grove, or wood, that in not hallowed by some legend or poetic tale". – Alexander Murray, The Manual of Mythology.
Myths of cosmogony, theogony and anthropogony
"Myths of origin" or "creation myths" represent an attempt to render the universe comprehensible in human terms and explain the origin of the world. Hesiod, in his Theogony. begins with Chaos (Χάος), a yawning nothingness. Out of the void emerged Gaia and some other primary divine beings: Abyss (Τάρταρα), and the Eros (Έρως). Out of Chaos also emerged Erebus (Έρεβος) and Night (Νύκτα) and from Night the Ether (Αιθήρ) and Day (Ημέρα). Without male assistance, Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilized her. From that union were born first the Titans—six males: Coeus (Κοίος), Crius (Κρείος), Cronus (Κρόνος), Hyperion (Υπερίων), Iapetus (Ιαπετός), and Oceanus (Ωκεανός); and six females: Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Rhea, Theia, Themis, and Tethys. After Cronus was born, Gaia and Uranus decreed no more Titans were to be born. They were followed by the one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires or Hundred-Handed Ones, who were both thrown into Tartarus by Uranus. This made Gaia furious. Cronus ("the wily, youngest and most terrible of Gaia’s children"), was convinced by Gaia to castrate his father. He did this, and became the ruler of the Titans with his sister-wife Rhea as his consort, and the other Titans became his court.
A motif of father-against-son conflict was repeated when Cronus was confronted by his son, Zeus. Because Cronus had betrayed his father, he feared that his offspring would do the same, and so each time Rhea gave birth, he snatched up the child and ate it. Rhea hated this and tricked him by hiding Zeus and wrapping a stone in a baby's blanket, which Cronus ate. When Zeus was full grown, he fed Cronus a drugged drink which caused him to vomit, throwing up Rhea's other children and the stone, which had been sitting in Cronus's stomach all along. Zeus then challenged Cronus to war for the kingship of the gods. At last, with the help of the Cyclopes (whom Zeus freed from Tartarus), Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.
Zeus was plagued by the same concern and, after a prophecy that the offspring of his first wife, Metis, would give birth to a god "greater than he"—Zeus swallowed her. She was already pregnant with Athena, however, and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war.
The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical mythos—and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's Theogony is not only the fullest surviving account of the gods, but also the fullest surviving account of the archaic poet's function, with its long preliminary invocation to the Muses. Theogony also was the subject of many lost poems, including those attributed to Orpheus, Musaeus, Epimenides, Abaris, and other legendary seers, which were used in private ritual purifications and Mystery-rites. There are indications that Plato was familiar with some version of the Orphic theogony.
"Erebus and Black Night were born of Chaos. Night in its turn gave birth to Air and Light. Gaea, first of all gave birth to a being equal to herself, capable of covering her completely. This was Uranus (Heaven), whose duty was to offer the gods a perpetually firm foundation". – Hesiod, Theogony.
The Greek Pantheon
According to Classical-era mythology, after the overthrow of the Titans, the new pantheon of gods and goddesses was confirmed. Among the principal Greek gods were the Olympians, residing atop Mount Olympus under the eye of Zeus. Besides the Olympians, the Greeks worshipped various gods of the countryside, the satyr-god Pan, Nymphs (spirits of rivers), Naiads (who dwelled in springs), Dryads (who were spirits of the trees), Nereids (who inhabited the sea), river gods, Satyrs, and others. In addition, there were the dark powers of the underworld, such as the Erinyes (or Furies), said to pursue those guilty of crimes against blood-relatives.
The Greeks considered immortality as the distinctive characteristic of their gods; this immortality, as well as unfading youth, was insured by the constant use of nectar and ambrosia, by which the divine blood was renewed in their veins. Each god descends from his or her own genealogy, pursues differing interests, has a certain area of expertise, and is governed by a unique personality; however, these descriptions arise from a multiplicity of archaic local variants, which do not always agree with one another. When these gods are called upon in poetry, prayer or cult, they are referred to by a combination of their name and epithets, that identify them by these distinctions from other manifestations of themselves (e.g., Apollo Musagetes is "Apollo, [as] leader of the Muses").
Most gods were associated with specific aspects of life. For example, Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, Ares was the god of war, Hades the god of the dead, and Athena the goddess of wisdom and courage. Many cities also honored the more well-known gods with unusual local rites and associated strange myths with them that were unknown elsewhere. During the heroic age, the cult of heroes (or demi-gods) supplemented that of the gods.
Age of gods and heroes
Bridging the age when gods lived alone and the age when divine interference in human affairs was limited was a transitional age in which gods and mortals moved together. These were the early days of the world when the groups mingled more freely than they did later. Most of these tales were later told by Ovid's metamorphoses and they are often divided into two thematic groups: tales of love, and tales of punishment.
The age in which the heroes lived is known as the heroic age. The epic and genealogical poetry created cycles of stories clustered around particular heroes or events and established the family relationships between the heroes of different stories; they thus arranged the stories in sequence. According to Ken Dowden, "there is even a saga effect: we can follow the fates of some families in successive generations".
After the rise of the hero cult, gods and heroes constitute the sacral sphere and are invoked together in oaths and prayers which are addressed to them. In contrast to the age of gods, during the heroic age the roster of heroes is never given fixed and final form; great gods are no longer born, but new heroes can always be raised up from the army of the dead. Another important difference between the hero cult and the cult of gods is that the hero becomes the centre of local group identity.
The monumental events of Heracles are regarded as the dawn of the age of heroes. To the Heroic Age are also ascribed three great events: the Argonautica expedition, the Theban Cycle and the Trojan War.
Some scholars believe that behind Heracles' complicated mythology there was probably a real man, perhaps a chieftain-vassal of the kingdom of Argos. Some scholars suggest the story of Heracles is an allegory for the sun's yearly passage through the twelve constellations of the zodiac. Traditionally, Heracles was the son of Zeus and Alcmene, granddaughter of Perseus.
Heracles attained the highest social prestige through his appointment as official ancestor of the Dorian kings. This probably served as a legitimation for the Dorian migrations into the Peloponnese. Hyllus, the eponymous hero of one Dorian phyle, became the son of Heracles and one of the Heracleidae or Heraclids. These Heraclids conquered the Peloponnesian kingdoms of Mycenae, Sparta and Argos, claiming, according to legend, a right to rule them through their ancestor. Their rise to dominance is frequently called the "Dorian invasion. The Lydian and later the Macedonian kings, as rulers of the same rank, also became Heracleidae.
Other members of this earliest generation of heroes, such as Perseus, Deucalion, Theseus and Bellerephon, have many traits in common with Heracles. Like him, their exploits are solitary, fantastic and border on fairy tale, as they slay monsters such as the Chimera and Medusa. Bellerophon's adventures are commonplace types, similar to the adventures of Heracles and Theseus. Sending a hero to his presumed death is also a recurrent theme of this early heroic tradition, used in the cases of Perseus and Bellerophon.
Argonauts
The only surviving Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica tells the myth of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis. In the Argonautica, Jason is impelled on his quest by king Pelias, who receives a prophecy that a man with one sandal would be his nenesis. Jason loses a sandal in a river, arrives at the court of Pelias, and the epic is set in motion. Nearly every member of the next generation of heroes, as well as Heracles, went with Jason in the ship Argo to fetch the Golden Fleece. In ancient times the expedition was regarded as a historical fact, an incident in the opening up of the Black Sea to Greek commerce and colonization. It was also extremely popular, forming a cycle to which a number of local legends became attached. The story of Medea, in particular, caught the imagination of the tragic poets.
The Theban Cycle
In between the Argo and the Trojan War, there was a generation known chiefly for its horrific crimes. This includes the doings of Atreus and Thyestes at Argos. Behind the myth of the house of Atreus (one of the two principal heroic dynasties with the house of labdacus) lies the problem of the devolution of power and of the mode of accession to sovereignty. The twins Atreus and Thyestes with their descendants played the leading role in the tragedy of the devolution of power in Mycenae.
The Theban Cycle deals with events associated especially with Cadmus, the city's founder, and later with the doings of Laius and Oedipus at Thebes; a series of stories that lead to the eventual pillage of that city at the hands of the Seven Against Thebes and Epigoni. (It is not known whether the Seven Against Thebes figured in early epic.) As far as Oedipus is concerned, early epic accounts seem to have him continuing to rule at Thebes after the revelation that Iokaste was his mother, and subsequently marrying a second wife who becomes the mother of his children — markedly different from the tale known to us through tragedy (e.g. Sophocles' Oedipus the King) and later mythological accounts.
Trojan War
Greek mythology culminates in the Trojan War, fought between the Greeks and Troy, and its aftermath. In Homer's works, such as the Iliad, the chief stories have already taken shape and substance, and individual themes were elaborated later, especially in Greek drama. The Trojan War also elicited great interest in the Roman culture because of the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero whose journey from Troy led to the founding of the city that would one day become Rome, as recounted in Virgil's Aeneid (Book II of Virgil's Aeneid contains the best-known account of the sack of Troy).
The Trojan War cycle, a collection of epic poems, starts with the events leading up to the war: Eris and the the golden apple of Kallisti, the Judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. To recover Helen, the Greeks launched a great expedition under the overall command of Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon, king of Argos or Mycenae, but the Trojans refused to return Helen. The Iliad, which is set in the tenth year of the war, tells of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, who was the finest Greek warrior, and the consequent deaths in battle of Achilles' beloved comrade Patroclus and Priam's eldest son, Hector. After Hector's death the Trojans were joined by two exotic allies, Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and Memnon, king of the Ethiopians and son of the dawn-goddess Eos. Achilles killed both of these, but Paris then managed to kill Achilles with an arrow in the heel. Achilles' heel was the only part of his body which was not invulnerable to damage by human weaponry. Before they could take Troy, the Greeks had to steal from the citadel the wooden image of Pallas Athena (the Palladium). Finally, with Athena's help, they built the Trojan Horse. Despite the warnings of Priam's daughter Cassandras, the Trojans were persuaded by Simon, a Greek who feigned desertion, to take the horse inside the walls of Troy as an offering to Athena; the priest Laocoon, who tried to have the horse destroyed, was killed by sea-serpents. At night the Greek fleet returned, and the Greeks from the horse opened the gates of Troy. In the total sack that followed, Priam and his remaining sons were slaughtered; the Trojan women passed into slavery in various cities of Greece. The adventurous homeward voyages of the Greek leaders (including the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas (the Aeneid), and the murder of Agamemnon) were told in two epics, the Returns (the lost Nostoi) and Homer's Odyssey. The Trojan cycle also includes the adventures of the children of the Trojan generation (e.g., Orestes and Telemachus).
In Europe, Greek mythology never took the same hold of the visual arts, but its effect was very obvious on literature. The English imagination was fired by Greek mythology starting with Chaucer and John Milton and continuing through Shakespeare to Robert Bridges in the 20th century. Racine in France and Goethe in Germany revived Greek drama, reworking the ancient myths. Although during the Enlightenment of the 18th century reaction against Greek myth spread throughout Europe, the myths continued to provide an important source of raw material for dramatists, including those who wrote the libretti for many of Handel’s and Mozart's operas. By the end of the 18th century, Romanticism initiated a surge of enthusiasm for all things Greek, including Greek mythology.
The Nine Muses.
The Importance of Greek Mythology
Not only has Greek and Roman mythology furnished inspiration, exerted influence and provided subject matter for many masterpieces of poetry, prose, sculpture and painting, but its stories are interesting and entertaining in themselves, to say nothing of having provided the source of classical allusions which appear continually in editorials, addresses, lectures, advertisements, and conversations.
Scientists have found mythology a treasure chest in providing names for animals, plants, constellations, planets, and – more recently in our space age – for missiles and space vehicles like Gemini, Apollo, Mercury, and Zeus. The old myths have also been a source of inspiration for designers, engravers and other craftsmen.
A knowledge of classical mythology is indispensable in understanding and appreciating much of the great literature, sculpture and painting of both the ancients and the moderns. Unless we know the marvelous stories of the deities and heroes of the ancients, their great literature and art as well as much later work down to the present day will remain unintelligible. Through the centuries from Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare and Milton on, not only the major writers but also hundreds of lesser writers have retold the old tales or used them as a point of departure for new interpretations in terms of contemporary problems and psychology. Often modern writers use the old myths as symbols, though they may change the original story so much that it is not recognizable except to the really perceptive reader. An intelligent reader of much English, American and continental poetry and prose, or an attentive observer of Renaissance or modern sculpture and painting needs to be acquainted almost as much with mythology as with the world of nature and of human nature.
The Greeks based their literature, as well as their sculpture and painting, more on mythology than on any other one source, and the Romans, having little mythology of their own, used the material from Greece and changed the names to a Roman form, such as Zeus to Jupiter, Hera to Juno, Athena to Minerva, Aphrodite to Venus etc.
An English scholar H. A. Guerber has written: “The importance of classical mythology from an educational standpoint has never been more generally recognized than it is today”. Whitman said, “Great are the myths”. John Keats knew mythology almost by heart and after reading Chapman’s translation of Homer, wrote: “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen”.
For the twentieth-century reader, there is still a great deal of gold in these stories. Like Odysseus and his dramatic encounters with gods and men as he sailed home from Troy to Ithaca, we too can learn much from the stories of the ancient gods and the Greek and Roman heroes, much that is applicable to our life today.
