Myths of the Ancient Greeks

INTRODUCTION

MYTHS ARE STORIES THAT CONTINUE to engage the imagination of a society over a long period of time. The stories you are about to read were told more than two thousand years ago by Greeks who lived in communities all around the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, from what is today southern France to the eastern shore of the Black Sea, from the northern Balkans to North Africa. They reflect the thoughts of a complex civilization and at the same time allow us to enter the vibrant private spaces of an archaic culture. Long before they were written down, myths from Greek-speaking lands were passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth. Later, they were recorded in a bewildering number of epic and lyric poems, tragedies, comedies, histories, scholarly compilations, travel books, philosophical dialogues, and scientific works of all sorts, from the eighth century B.C. until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 A.D. Although some entire works made their way down to our time, painstakingly copied and recopied in manuscripts until the age of printing, many of these ancient writings are today lost. We have what survived in papyrus fragments or literary quotations. Already by the third century B.C. the Romans had discovered this rich body of stories and had begun to exploit it in creating their own art and literature. By 100 B.C., when the Roman empire had expanded to include most of the Greek-speaking world, the classic myths had become a part of basic schooling. Through Latin sources—especially the works of the poet Ovid—the tales found their way into later European culture, where they became so deeply embedded in art, literature, and thought that, to this day, no one in the West who is unfamiliar with Greek myths can seriously claim to be an educated person.

At the same time, there is the risk that the myths become too familiar to us. The Greek gods and goddesses have been taken over for less than divine objects, providing labels and images for everything from rockets to sneakers to cement. Jellyfish, software programs, moths, and Jupiter’s moons bear names from myths. Cartoons and children’s books have spread awareness of the stories, but at the cost of distorting and trivializing them. Meanwhile, self-help and assertiveness-training books appropriate myths for their own ends, urging us to follow our quests, find inner heroes and goddesses, mimic Artemis in the boardroom or Herakles in the gym. Tales that once unified a whole culture, enabling it to reflect on major public concerns, have largely turned into private icons, ripped from their social, religious, and artistic roots.

A book that presents these tales to the twenty-first century must do more than make the stories known to those encountering them for the first time. It must also defamiliarize the tales for those who already know the gist of them. Classical scholarship for the past two hundred years has increasingly uncovered the contexts for Greek myths. Thousands of books and articles have explored the intricate web of meaning that binds these narratives to their society and to one another. Thus, even people who recall the basic stories might not be aware of the latest thinking on how the stories fit within ancient Greek culture. My headnotes, the sections introducing each book, include the interpretive work of scholars, while not overwhelming the down-to-earth retelling that follows. I hope that the combined method makes myth more familiar and yet keeps it at one remove—enough to remind the reader that the ancient Greeks were never quite like us.

WHERE DID GREEK MYTHS COME FROM?

There are two types of answers to this question: practical and speculative. Both should be kept in mind.

Practically speaking, myths derive from writings in ancient Greek (or Latin writings based on Greek sources). The major surviving works include:

• The Iliad and Odyssey (roughly 700 B.C.). These two epics attributed to the poet Homer tell the story of the siege of Troy and the return home of one of the heroes. They contain some flashbacks to prior mythic events, but only allude to and do not dramatize many stories recorded elsewhere (for example, the judgment of Paris, the building of the Trojan Horse, or the death of Achilles).

• The Theogony. Attributed to the poet Hesiod, who was thought to be contemporary with Homer, this composition in dactylic hexameter is our earliest and most dramatic rendering of events from the beginning of the world up through the marriages of Zeus. Additional details on some myths (e.g., Pandora, the Five Ages) are provided by the Works and Days, a composition based on traditional wisdom and agricultural lore attributed to the same poet. The (now fragmentary) Catalogue of Women, said to be by Hesiod, tells of love affairs between mortals and gods.

• The Homeric Hymns (seventh-sixth centuries B.C.). A collection of narrative poems in epic style, praising the Greek gods. Five of these (to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, and Dionysus) provide the earliest continuous stories of the major episodes concerning the divinities.

• Pindar (518-438 B.C.). A composer of many types of lyric songs for choral performance, he is best known for victory odes in praise of winners at the great athletic games, men and boys whom the poet compared to traditional heroes of the distant past. These epinikia are dense with mythic allusions, and many times they provide narrative variants found in no other source.

• The tragedians. The three most celebrated Athenian writers of tragic plays, already famous by the end of their own era, were Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Sophocles (496-406 B.C.), and Euripides (485—406 B.C.). From their surviving dramatic productions, though a fraction of their total output, we have learned many valuable details about myths, especially the stories of events surrounding the Trojan War and the siege of Thebes.

• Herodotus (mid-fifth century B.C.). The father of history in his long narrative about the war between Greeks and Persians includes a number of myths and legends heard from local informants as he traveled through Greek and foreign lands. While he is skeptical about many of these stories, Herodotus does treat as plausible historical fact a number of narratives we would identify as myth.

• Callimachus (third century B.C.). A scholar-poet from Alexandria, Egypt, he composed highly polished verses filled with allusions to myth and legend. Of these, six hymns in Homeric style survive intact. They are valuable for their stories of Zeus, Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Demeter, and the sacred island Delos. Hundreds of fragments from papyrus scrolls that once contained copies of his poetry give us further scraps of information about gods and heroes.

• Apollonius of Rhodes (third century B.C.). Another Alexandrian poet, he composed the epic Argonautica in four books (5,835 hexameter lines). It tells the story of Jason and his quest for the Golden Fleece. The poem had a great influence on later writers, such as Virgil, and still survives in its entirety.

• Apollodorus. The original scholar with this name lived from about 180 to 120 B.C. and wrote historical chronicles and an account of Greek religion. The surviving Library that goes under his name is a long summary of mythic stories from other sources, many of which did not survive in their original form. The book was probably composed in the first or second century A.D. and attributed to the earlier scholar.

• Plutarch (50-120 A.D.). A Greek philosopher and antiquarian writer best known for his series of twenty-three parallel lives comparing the careers of famous Greeks and Romans. His biography of Theseus is a valuable compendium of ancient traditions about the Athenian hero.

• Pausanias (mid-second century A.D.). Greek travel writer whose Description of Greece preserves many myths connected with the shrines and sanctuaries he visited.

• Virgil (70-19 B.C.). Roman poet whose brooding and sensitive epic, the Aeneid, drew on the whole range of Greek literature in narrating the story of the Trojan hero who fled to Italy and established the beginnings of Rome.

• Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.). A prolific Roman poet, his intricate and brilliant Metamorphoses—an epic poem in fifteen books—tells those mythic stories that revolve around supernatural changes in form. This poem became the single most influential narrative about myth in Western literature. His sources included many Greek works now completely lost.

In addition to these literary sources, we have to take into account an enormously valuable artistic tradition that transmitted Greek myths: ancient vase painting. Thousands of these artistic works survive. They illustrate episodes from mythic stories that are otherwise known, and many times present other versions that have not survived in writing. (One famous example, a vase now in the Vatican Museum, shows Jason emerging from the mouth of the dragon that guarded the Fleece. In this book, see pages 130 and 176.)

All this may seem like a large amount of material. Yet if the evidence of other traditional cultures is a guide, there were most likely hundreds of other stories in circulation that have not come down to us in any form. Storytelling has always been primarily an oral art, so it is likely that many early narratives tied to the specific occasions of archaic Greek life vanished when people no longer practiced or understood the ritual events connected to the stories. Furthermore, villagers in one locale in the days before writing became generally used might have had a stock of tales completely different from those living less than fifty miles away. After the eighth century B.C., there began a trend toward privileging the particular myths and institutions that all the Greeks held in common. This process, called Panhellenization by scholars, slowly began to erase or override local variations in religious cults, song making, and other cultural forms. The myths we read today have been reshaped in this way for millennia, varied, shifted, and elaborated to serve different audiences and goals.

This brings us to the second type of answer to the question of myth origins. This involves speculation based on comparisons with the small-scale cultures that we can still explore in remote parts of the world today. Myths may come down to us in art and literature, but they seem to have developed in more general social performances. In other words, myth functions as a sort of communication system, a way of making meaningful statements and assertions within a group that knows the stories. In this connection, it is important to realize that the Greek word muthos (the basis of our English word) originally referred to an act of speaking. Translators of early Greek texts usually employ the English terms word or story when muthos occurs. Within our earliest complete texts, however—the Homeric epics—muthos has a quite specific range of meaning: it refers to the sorts of speech-acts that demand action or command respect. When Agamemnon gives orders to the troops, or old Nestor recalls his youth (to teach younger heroes how to act), the poet describes the speech as a muthos. Usually, men make such speeches. Among Homeric women characters, only the laments they make are regularly so named.

We can imagine that such acts had to rely both on a depiction of the past and on references to glorious ancestors or origins. Gradually, such assertions came to be recognized as a different kind of speech unlike everyday stories. One could never prove or disprove a muthos, precisely because a tale of this type referred to the distant past. Until the use of writing became widespread in Greek lands, well after 800 B.C., it was impossible for anyone to check facts. Historical reality was simply what was remembered and talked about. Not by accident, the ancient Greek word for truth (alêtheia) is a compound word meaning, literally, not-forgotten-ness. (Compare the name for the River of Forgetfulness, Lêthê).

Nor is it by chance that the older meaning of muthos as authoritative speech began to change, even within Greek culture, to mean something closer to lie or fiction exactly at the period when the Greeks started using alphabetic writing, which they borrowed from the Phoenicians. Once such stories began to be written down, anyone could compare multiple versions of what used to pass for the single truth. By the sixth century B.C., it was being discovered that the versions never matched up. As happens in an oral culture, the old stories varied widely from region to region, even from one family to another. Thus, Greek thinkers and writers in the more modern, literate culture that evolved began to criticize the myths. It was possible to interpret the stories within Homeric poetry as allegories. We know that at least one man, Theagenes of Rhegium (a Greek city in southern Italy), used this method in teaching that the clash between Hephaestus and the river Scamander in the Iliad was really just a way of describing a cosmic war of physical elements: fire versus water. By the next century, enlightened intellectuals were dismantling all the myths. Their use of the term and their way of talking about the old tales hardly differs from the attitude of scholars all the way through the nineteenth century. Prodicus of Ceos, a contemporary of Socrates in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., went so far as to say that Demeter and Dionysus arose from the thinking of primitive people who worshiped as gods the substances that were most beneficial in their lives: bread and wine.

To try to push back beyond the centuries in which Greek myths were recorded, elaborated, and analyzed involves asking much larger questions, to which there are no satisfactory answers. Why these particular heroes and tales? What was the influence of stories from other cultures, either from contemporary Near Eastern neighbors or from ancient pre-Greek peoples, on Greek myth? How did myths fit into religion, and where did Greek rituals come from? What deeper meanings do these myths have?

STUDYING GREEK MYTHS

As scholars attempted to solve these mysteries, a number of methods were developed, starting in the eighteenth century. As we have seen, the roots of myth analysis extend much earlier, back to the Greeks themselves. More modern critics of myth had the advantage of using comparative material from other cultures to try to unlock the secrets of ancient tales. At the same time, they had the disadvantage of distance. More often than not, the scholars of the last few centuries unwittingly imposed their own views of religion and society on archaic Greece. Nevertheless, much valuable work has been done to clarify the meanings of myth. Here are some of the leading ways of understanding the material, in their historical contexts.

MYTH AND RITUAL

When the modern science of anthropology was developing in the second half of the nineteenth century, British explorers and soldiers were expanding the empire and reporting on the customs and beliefs of distant lands. One scholar especially made use of this flood of new data to approach Greek myth in a fresh way. James George Frazer (1854-1941), the first person in the world to hold a university chair in social anthropology, was the son of a well-off Glasgow merchant family. He studied classical literature at Glasgow University and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, and edited Pausanias, Apollodorus, and the Fasti of Ovid. Interested especially in the obscure rites and customs described by these ancient writers, in 1890 Frazer published in two volumes The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. In it he set out to answer two questions about a custom described in ancient sources: why was the priest at Nemi in Italy obliged to kill his predecessor and why, before doing so, did he have to pluck a branch of the sacred grove there (which Frazer speculated was the golden bough mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid)? Frazer’s answer, which he expanded and elaborated over the next twenty-five years, was that the priest represented an original sacred king, who had to be killed and revived (in the form of a new priest) each year to make sure that the crops would grow. By 1915, Frazer had moved from this problem in ancient Roman religion to shaping a general theory about how human thought developed. For him, myths and rituals attached to them were what gave birth to religion and even science. By assuming that all humans underwent the same stages of development, he tried to use the new data about distant exotic tribes to reconstruct stages in Greek and Roman intellectual evolution.

Despite many criticisms by later anthropologists, Frazer’s work on myth and ritual had a vast influence. Even beyond technical scholarship, it inspired creative writers such as T. S. Eliot (who cites Frazer as a source for his poem The Waste Land), Yeats and Joyce, Lawrence and Conrad. Ironically, the scholars whose work made Frazer popular among students of Greek myth relied primarily on the bolder, earlier views that Frazer himself later gave up. Between 1900 and 1915, a close-knit group of Classicists at Cambridge University began to use Frazer’s method to reconsider the main monuments of Greek culture, the classical art and literature that was widely held to be the ideal of taste and civilized culture.

The informal Cambridge school of interpreters centered around a remarkable woman from Yorkshire, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928)—known to some as Bloody Jane, since she sometimes carried to an extreme Frazer’s view that Greek myth arose from misunderstood rituals of the most primitive type. (She seems to have been convinced, for instance, that the ecstatic female followers of Dionysus really did tear apart animals with their bare hands. When the philosopher Bertrand Russell promised to buy Harrison a bull if she and her devotees would demonstrate how this could be done, Harrison declined.) In Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912), Harrison focused on the importance of darker chthonic rites within Greek religion and also argued that myth and ritual coexisted in Greece, as mutually dependent ways of expressing religious feeling. Some of her major insights have lasted the test of time. In recent years, increasingly sophisticated applications of the method, controlled by better anthropology, have been able to suggest intriguing connections. At the same time, scholars have come to see that myth can often represent, in a dramatic, thrilling way, and project into the past, what are actually very ordinary everyday customs. It does not take real madness and the killing of cows to produce the tale of the Bacchae.

PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) began the study of myths from the standpoint of psychology. Both had European classical educations and could quote passages in Greek and Latin from memory. Naturally, in their studies on the human mind, both men turned first to the world of Greek mythology for analogies and examples. Freud, the son of a Jewish wool merchant, spent most of his life in Vienna, where he began work as a neurologist and later practiced and wrote about the revolutionary treatment method he termed psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud argued that what we see in our sleeping hours are psychologically necessary means of wish fulfillment. It was in this connection that Freud made his first public statement of what he came to call the Oedipus complex (see Book 8: The Saga of Thebes).

The similarity between myths and dreams has often been noticed. Australian aboriginal peoples make the connection directly when they talk of the Dreamtime as the distant foundation period when their sacred ancestors lived and their sacred stories took shape. The major gain that Freudian psychology offers for the study of myth lies in the detailed analogy drawn between myth and dream as processes. It seems that myths and dreams have several common characteristics. In both, various elements can be unconsciously welded into a single symbolic expression. Just as one might dream about an animal that has human traits, myths contain strange combinations of creatures, such as the Sirens, often depicted as women with the bodies of birds. In myths as well as dreams, a symbolic element can be substituted for a different object or abstraction. A golden fleece means kingship, or an apple signifies immortality. Finally, feelings can be transmuted into visual images. The winged horse, Pegasus, seems to embody the ambition and exultation of his rider, Bellerophon, much as dreams of flying express the feelings of discovery and joy. Psychoanalytic criticism has been best in interpreting the ugly and bizarre elements in such stories as the birth and succession of the gods, which feature chaos, castration, and swallowing of children.

C. G. Jung, the second major figure whose theories touch on myth, was a Swiss psychologist, and friend and collaborator with Freud from 1907 until 1913, when their differences over the role of sexuality in neurosis drove them apart. After the break, Jung developed the influential notions of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The archetypes for Jung represented an archaic level of human consciousness that gave rise to specific, regularly recurring types of motifs and images in both myths and dreams. Whereas Freud had seen in dream imagery an unsystematic, uniquely personal expression of one person’s psyche, Jung saw signs of a shared, collective psychic structure. Some of the many instinctual archetypal images Jung identified include those of the mother and father, the trickster, the wise old man, the hero, and the animus or anima. This last pair is a unique contribution by Jung, referring to the unconscious images that women form of men (animus) and men of women (anima). In another formulation, Jung describes the anima as the feminine side of a man, and even attributed problems of violence and war to the underdevelopment of this facet in the modern world.

Whether or not Jungian theory explains the origin of any given myth does not alter the success that his theories had in psychotherapy. Patients can be taught to handle relationships through recognizing how their unconscious reliance on or resistance to archetypes blocks psychological wholeness. Jung’s influence was overwhelming in the work of a recent American popularizer, Joseph Campbell (1904-87). In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and many subsequent books, Campbell rummaged through worldwide mythology to construct a monomyth of the hero, knowledge of which, he claimed, can help each person discover his or her individuality. A spate of Campbell-inspired self-help books and workshops has now turned the individual’s quest for inner heroes and heroines into a profitable segment of popular psychology. To some, this is simply an updated form of the ancient method of turning myths into coded narratives, stories that systematically conceal their real meanings under the guise of heroic or supernatural events.

SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES

The most recent mode of interpreting myths relates them to society. This work is an outgrowth of two traditions. One in France dates its modern beginnings from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and his collaborators on the journal Année sociologique. The other is a functionalist position most famously developed by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), the Polish anthropologist who influenced a generation of scholars through his renowned seminars at the London School of Economics. Durkheim’s central ideas—that religion is a symbolic expression, or collective representation, of underlying social structures, and that all the cultural expressions of primitive societies are tightly knit together—had a great influence on several generations of French classical scholars. Malinowski, a social anthropologist who felt the powerful influence of J. G. Frazer when young, did intensive field-work in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesian New Guinea during the later years of World War I. This experience led to his formulation of a distinctive approach to the role of myth within culture. For him, myth codified the beliefs and morals of a given culture, and was an active force in holding together the social fabric. Myth, wrote Malinowski, was a charter for social beliefs.

In the study of actual myths, ancient or modern, the notion of charter opens up new perspectives. In the cosmogonic stories of Hesiod’s Theogony, we can now see that the tales do nothing less than authorize a society’s gender roles, agricultural practices, family structures, economic exchanges, and legal procedures. What the functional approach does not do is explain the variety and change within myth systems. Why should there be multiple versions of a story within one society if in fact the myths continually prop up social roles that all people acknowledge? Here, more attention has to be paid to the innovations made by a person telling the myth aloud. Because stories work with a limited number of symbols and narrative paths, not unlike a language with its finite resources of grammar, any speaker can become adept enough to manipulate the system. By making a story the tribe controls itself, true enough; but a subgroup, or even an individual within the society, can gain power in the same way, through myth. Herodotus reports that Peisistratus took charge as a tyrant in sixth-century B.C. Athens by claiming that Athena (as she did in myths) was accompanying his heroic return, riding in a chariot before him. Because of his propaganda parade, the Athenians welcomed the tyrant, a fact that dismayed Herodotus. The rationalistic critics in the fifth century were already having trouble understanding the way myth worked in their own culture just a century before.

COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY

Another method differs from the broader use of comparisons made by anthropologists and sociologists studying major institutions—sacrifice, taboo, matrilinear descent, and so forth—in various cultures. The idea of comparative mythology is a descendant of the modern discovery that languages, like flora and fauna, occur in historically related families descended from common parent languages. This idea gave birth in the early nineteenth century to comparative historical linguistics. As did anthropology and sociology, comparative linguistics grew in connection with European colonial expansion. A British judge in Calcutta, Sir William Jones (1746—94), is credited with first bringing to the world’s attention the resemblances among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. The insight that these languages have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists, heralded a century of intensive work by linguists. It is now known that the Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, and Anatolian language families, along with Greek and Latin, are descended from a single parent language, probably spoken in the area of southern Russia around 3000 B.C. Just as we would have to assume, on the basis of similarities among French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, that something like Latin once existed, even if no texts of that language survived, so we presume the existence of an Indo-European language. No texts survive from the language, and we can only guess what concepts it expressed from an analysis of shared vocabulary in the daughter tongues.

Early comparatists often cast wide nets with their reconstructions. Max Müller (1823-1900), a German Sanskritist who spent most of his scholarly life at Oxford, was the first scholar to extend systematically this sort of linguistic detective work into the realms of comparative mythology and religion. Nowadays, he is remembered chiefly for the idea that mythical gods were originally natural phenomena—the sun, moon, dawn, rivers, and so forth—which had been described by primitive Aryans in metaphorical terms that later were misinterpreted and taken to refer to persons. (The linguistic misreading thus implied led Müller to call myth a disease of language.) Müller gives the example of the story of Daphne, a nymph changed into the laurel tree in order to escape Apollo, who once pursued her. Her name, he claims, originally signified shining. Apollo, he says, was worshiped as a sun god; thus Apollo’s pursuit originally signified the driving away of dawn by the sun. In case after case of this type, Muller’s use of the philological method not only knit together the myths of Vedic India, Greece, Rome, and other cultures, but neatly overcame the apparent scandals in many ancient stories. Through this reading, Apollo changes from a lecherous nymph chaser into a more properly Victorian meteorological explanation.

In this century, the French scholar Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) almost single-handedly revived the study of comparative mythology. He conducted numerous studies of older literature in Indo-European languages, as well as work on myths from the Caucasus region. Dumézil was a student of Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet, two associates of Émile Durkheim. He thus brought to the study of myths a much more sophisticated theoretical outlook than had been available to Müller. Dumézil’s new comparative mythology makes brilliant and detailed equations among mythic motifs in Irish, Greek, Roman, Indic, Iranian, and Norse traditions. The parallels that he draws between the Greek hero Herakles, for example, and the Scandinavian warrior Starkadr—both of whom are known for violating the rules of their respective cultures—place these figures in an entirely new light, as characters that define the structure of society. Dumézil’s abiding concern has been to show how these Indo-European myths embody a specific social ideology. For Dumézil, as for Malinowski and the followers of Durkheim, myth represents one strand in a tightly knit web of social institutions. Unlike his predecessors, however, Dumézil dealt with cultures that an anthropologist could no longer observe, and ultimately with a culture—Indo-European—without an identified physical location or artifacts, one deduced solely from the reconstruction of linguistic forms.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN GREEK MYTH

The study of ancient stories is often a barometer of modern concerns. Thus it happens that two politically charged and controversial approaches to the origin of Greek culture and its myths have recently gained attention. Both approaches have drawn support from broader research on groups that had been widely neglected in academic circles until the mid-twentieth century: women and African Americans.

Feminist criticism, which has changed the face of Classical studies, especially in the areas of Greek and Roman social history, gives prominence to the experiences of actual ancient women, their roles, contributions, and creative expressions. In the analysis of myth, the impact of feminist scholarship can be seen in the many innovative studies produced in the last quarter century on certain collective categories (goddesses, heroines, nymphs) and on such individual figures as Helen, Medea, Penelope, Circe, and Calypso. While most of this research has found ready acceptance, one question remains fiercely debated—whether Greek myths as we know them show traces of a suppressed, pre-Greek matriarchal culture in which women were dominant.

The late Marija Gimbutas of UCLA, an archaeologist of prehistoric Europe, attempted to prove that successive waves of invasions across Europe in the period from 4000 to 2000 B.C., by speakers of Indo-European (the parent language of Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic and other dialect groups), led to a clash of ideologies and mythologies. In such studies as The Language of the Goddess (1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), she claimed that the original inhabitants, with a sexually egalitarian society and worshiping one primary goddess associated with earth, were eventually subjected to a male-dominated hierarchical social structure devoted to a masculine sky god. The goddess in her various forms was absorbed into the invading religion; her powers were split and reconfigured under the names of different wives, daughters, or consorts of the new male pantheon. Traces of an Old European goddess cult survive in folklore and customs, especially in the Baltic region, according to Gimbutas.

It is not difficult to see how this vision, which has roots in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Bachofen and other scholars, might be fitted to progressive social views in the present: women’s equality would count as a return to a forgotten golden age. Archaeologists, however, have given the work of Gimbutas a skeptical reception. The major objection is that such work is speculative, claiming to reconstruct a world of thought from the mute remains of carved symbols and figurines. To deduce that Old Europeans strongly believed in regeneration, from the evidence of some graves that she interprets as egg-shaped or uterus-shaped, or that are decorated with concentric circles, begs a number of questions. In the absence of documents, such equations can remain only a vague possibility. Even the alleged worship of Mother Earth in prehistoric Europe is moot.

Another controversial figure whose work touches on the study of Greek myth is Martin Bernal, professor of Chinese studies and of government at Cornell. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), the first book of a multivolume study, gained attention far beyond the field of Greek studies with its claims that deep-seated racism and anti-Semitism among Classical scholars had for more than a century suppressed the truth about the origins of Hellenic civilization. According to Bernal, those origins were to be sought in the older civilizations of Egypt and Phoenicia. He has made many claims based on supposed linguistic borrowings from Egyptian and Semitic languages into Greek—by his estimate, more than a third of the vocabulary of Greek would stem from such sources. Myth, as well, is called on to support his arguments. For instance, the stories that Kadmos from Phoenicia colonized Thebes in Greece, or that Danaos came to Argos from Egypt, are seen by Bernal to contain a core of fact. Decrying what he calls the European or Aryan model, according to which non-Hellenic sources played no role in the birth of Greek culture, Bernal advocates a return to an ancient model of Greek cultural development. Bernal notes in defense of this model that prominent Greek thinkers themselves, especially Herodotus and Plato, credited Egyptian culture with many of the distinctive traits of their own civilization.

In 1996 a group of twenty experts sought to rebut Bernal’s theses in a collective volume, Black Athena Revisited (edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers). Among their many counterarguments were demonstrations that Bernal’s linguistic equations lacked plausibility or precision, and that ancient art and artifacts did not bear out his claims. At the same time, no one now denies that some central myths of early Greece—such as the Kingship of Heaven cycle in Hesiod—owe much to earlier stories from civilizations of Asia Minor, especially that of the Hittites (on which see Martin West, The East Face of Helicon, 1997). But the idea of massive influence of Phoenicia or Egypt cannot be sustained.

Bernal has recently defended his ideas anew in Black Athena Writes Back (2001). Meanwhile, his views have been welcomed by Afrocentrist scholars, who make even wider claims that Greeks stole nearly all their major cultural institutions—democracy and philosophy included—from Egyptians (claimed to be black Africans, as were, they assert, Socrates and Cleopatra). Despite overwhelming scholarly evidence against these ideas (marshaled in the 1996 volume by the Wellesley classicist Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: Hou, Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History), the issue still sparks heated debate. At any event, discussions like these remind us that one of the abiding gifts of Greek culture has been the tools with which we can sift through the residue of muthos, or traditional utterance, by means of historia, or research. The Greeks themselves were the first to appreciate the essential differences between these two ways of looking at the world.

INNOVATING, ENTERTAINING, AND THIS RETELLING

As we have said, myths are stories. Put simply, they tell the enthralling narratives that people in any culture want. For the nineteenth century, the closest art form to myth was the novel. Readers modeled themselves on fictional characters, and the society depicted in stories became an ideal (or distorted but alluring) reflection of life. People could communicate with one another through reference to Werther or Heathcliff. For the past few generations, movies have taken on a similar role in shaping society’s imagination. But in the days before either of these forms of mass entertainment, storytelling sessions and public performances about supernatural beings and great men and women of the past were an important part of community life, as they still are in many parts of the world. Myth familiarized the world, but also made it strange, unpredictable, and exciting.

Where myths come from, precisely how they work, and why they use such fantastic and oddly compelling images and narratives will never be completely explained, even though scholars and artists have thought and written about these powerful stories for two thousand years. On one point we can be certain, however. The teller of a myth is always both a reteller and an innovator. Paradoxically, the more closely involved in the remote past and its stories the teller becomes, the more liberated he or she is to tell them afresh. The story material is there; the rest is up to the narrator. Even the earliest authors known to us from Greece—Homer and Hesiod—are clearly taking advantage of their authorial freedom, as we can tell from the cases in which multiple versions survive for a given story. In their cases, the resources of a richly developed, age-old Greek poetic language (one that can be traced in part back to the third millennium B.C.) gave performers a vast choice of phrases and motifs whereby they could elaborate their mythic performances.

Retelling through innovation marks the treatment of Greek myths throughout antiquity. A later Greek poet, Callimachus, said of his mythological poems, I sing nothing unattested. At home in the extensive royal Library and Museum (shrine of the Muses) at the great cosmopolitan city of Alexandria in Egypt, he had hundreds of papyrus scrolls preserving previous writings to consult when he retold the mythic stories from his Hellenic heritage. Most likely, he could draw as well on a strong, living oral tradition. These stories would have been still circulating in the Greek communities of North Africa, or were being brought to the new metropolis by traders and visiting scholars, soldiers, and slaves. Given this material, Callimachus clearly felt free to embellish.

My own retelling, though nowhere near as elegant, is equally hybrid. On the one hand, I do not invent versions. Each tale in this book is attested, and my narrative follows the leads given by one or several ancient sources. Most often, the source is from the archaic or Classical period of Greece (800—300 B.C.), although I sometimes include later ancient variations that appeal to me. In every case, I have gone back and reread the evidence we have in Greek or Latin. I have cited my main authorities in the headnotes. Those who wish to find more detailed accounts of the available mythic versions can consult one of the handbooks listed in the bibliography.

On the other hand, I have felt free to invent dialogue and novelistic touches where I thought this helped the telling. When the narration turns into a straightforward translation from the ancient sources, it never occupies more than a paragraph or two. Usually, my retelling is a combination of summarizing and more cinematic reimagining. Those familiar with the original texts will notice that I splice together various sections of such standard narratives as the Theogony and Apollodorus with more dramatic renditions from Homer, Pindar, the lyric poets, and Athenian tragedy. I have added transitions