Approaches to Greek Myth

By Lowell Edmunds

“A handy introduction to some of the more useful methodological approaches to and the previous scholarship on the subject of Greek myths.” —Phoenix

Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of “myth” in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today?

Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important contemporary approaches to the subject. Whether exploring myth from a historical, comparative, or theoretical perspective, each contributor lucidly describes a particular approach, applies it to one or more myths, and reflects on what the approach yields that others do not. Edmunds’s new general and chapter-level introductions recontextualize these essays and also touch on recent developments in scholarship in the interpretation of Greek myth.

Contributors are Jordi Pàmias, on the reception of Greek myth through history; H. S. Versnel, on the intersections of myth and ritual; Carolina López-Ruiz, on the near Eastern contexts; Joseph Falaky Nagy, on Indo-European structure in Greek myth; William Hansen, on myth and folklore; Claude Calame, on the application of semiotic theory of narrative; Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, on reading visual sources such as vase paintings; and Robert A. Segal, on psychoanalytic interpretations.

“A valuable collection of eight essays . . . Edmunds’s book provides a convenient opportunity to grapple with the current methodologies used in the analysis of literature and myth.” —New England Classical Newsletter and Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781421414201

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION Reception means, in aesthetic experience, a reader’s, a viewer’s, or a listener’s (perhaps also a participant’s) understanding of or take on a work of the relevant kind. If this person happens to make creative reuse of his experience, as in James Joyce’s reworking of Homer’s Odyssey in Ulysses, then reception calls for further reception. In the field of Classics, the word reception most often refers to a particular writer’s or other artist’s take on a work from antiquity, as in the example just given. Classicists also talk about reception in larger senses—that of Homer by Flavian epic poets (Valerius Flaccus, Statius, Silius Italicus, 1st c. C.E.), for example, or even that of something as large as Greek myth in times posterior to classical Greece, as in the Hellenistic period (conventionally dated 331–323 B.C.E.). Jordi Pàmias works on this large time scale, offering a history of the reception of Greek myth from the beginning up to the nineteenth century, often, however, zooming in on particular writers.

Pàmias starts, in fact, with the earliest Greek literature and shows how internal evidence in Homer points to already ongoing reception. There was, in short, Greek myth before the Greek myth that we know, and it was being reworked from the beginning. Further, as in the Catalogue of Ships in Homer or as in Hesiod’s Theogony and in the Catalogue of Women attributed to Hesiod, Greek myth is already taking systematic forms, mainly of genealogy. Already, then, there is an incipient mythology in the sense of an organized body of myth. A new stage of mythology comes in the fifth century with Hecataeus of Miletus, Pherecydes of Athens, and Hellanicus of Lesbos: mythography, the writing down of myths. (The term is accurate even if it is anachronistic for the fifth century.) From the fragments of their works, it is clear that each has his own agenda. In each case, however, writing not only enables a new compilation and a new organization of the traditional myths, even when a genealogical framework is preserved, but it also means a distancing of the writer, and of his readers, from the tradition. The traditional myths are becoming an artifact.

In the Hellenistic period the forms of mythography proliferate, as Pàmias explains. The handbook arrives. The two culminating expressions of this form, in antiquity, come in the Roman period: the Fabulae of Hyginus (in the time of Augustus, 33 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) and the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus (probably 1st–2nd c. C.E.). Over the centuries, countless others followed, and probably someone somewhere is now writing a new handbook of Greek myth. It is not a waste of time. Those who want to study Greek myth, especially beginners, do not go through all of Greek and Roman literature and abstract a Greek mythology; they rely on an already established corpus, in the form of a handbook or textbook, or, if they are given a set of readings from ancient poets and writers, they rely on commentary, oral or written or both.a In any case, the commentary comes from the same mythographical tradition that began in antiquity. Specialists, too, use handbooks, lexica, and encyclopedias, but ones with titles like Lexikon Iconographicum Mythologiae Graecae or Thesaurus Cultum et Rituum Antiquorum.

The Hellenistic period is also a turning point in the history of Greek mythology in the sense of the scholarly study of myths. Once it has happened, as in the Catasterisms of Eratosthenes (3rd c. B.C.E.), that the patrimony of Greek myths is something simply of the past, so that it can be exploited for literary purposes, the question arises: what do the Greek myths mean? A severely reductive answer came from Euhemerus of Sicily (3rd c. B.C.E.). He held that the gods of Greek myth were in origin human persons and that mythical events were at bottom historical. His approach had tremendous success in antipagan literature that he could not have foreseen, that is, in Christian apologetics and on into the Middle Ages. But the uptake began earlier, as fragments tell us, in the (now lost) sixth book of Diodorus’s Bibliotheca (1st c. B.C.E.) and in a translation (also lost) of Euhemerus by the Roman poet Ennius (3rd–2nd c. B.C.E.).

The other great technique of interpretation was allegory, the decoding of a myth to reveal an underlying moral or other kind of truth.b It is said to have begun with Theagenes of Rhegium (6th c. B.C.E.), who interpreted the strife of the gods in Homer (Il. 20) as the strife of the natural elements (D-K 8.2). As Pàmias shows, it had great staying power, lasting down to the time of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) and his new doctrine of myth as symbol.c But the symbol was to have a shorter life. Change in mythology in the second sense begins to accelerate in the nineteenth century. Pàmias brings the story up to the beginning of the twentieth, when it is clear that no one approach will ever hold the field again, as euhemerism and allegory did for many centuries. It became, and it still is, necessary to use the plural and to speak of approaches to Greek myth.

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The Reception of Greek Myth

JORDI PÀMIAS

Reception and Myth

The first edition of this book did not include a chapter on the reception of Greek myth. In the decades following its publication, the theory revolution—which had a strong impact on all fields of the humanities, including Classics—introduced reception as one of the most successful of the new approaches. Unlike the terms tradition, inheritance, or influence (implying a projection from past to present) and survival or Nachleben (implying historical continuity), reception implies the active participation of readers . . . in a two-way process, backward as well as forward, in which the present and past are in dialogue with each other.¹ This kind of participation will entail serious consequences for the understanding of ancient texts. If the reader participates in the construction of meaning, interpretation will emanate not solely from the original meaning but also from new readers in new contexts. None of the various readings of a classical text, over time, will be fundamentally wrong.

But the reception of myth assumes that the reader is in possession of a substantive notion of the object myth—that is, a kind of traditional story defined by characteristics peculiar to it. The research of some specialists in Greek myth, however, precisely during the final decades of the past century, raised the suspicion that this notion is unfounded. According to these critics, the modern concept of myth has no equivalent in ancient Greece. Myth would thus be nothing but a modern construction, projected onto Greek antiquity only after the fact. In other words, the forms of appropriation and study of ancient myths, as first practiced in the eighteenth century, would have led to the concept of myth itself: it is only reception that creates myth.

Indeed, Claude Calame, who takes as a starting point that ancient Greek does not have a term for myth, comes to the flat conclusion that myth is not an indigenous category in Greece. Only from an ethnocentric perspective did Western historiography endeavor to establish such operational concepts as myth and logos in Greco-Roman culture, confident that the categories so designated find their origin there or, further, that they correspond to an institutional reality there.² Calame follows in the footsteps of Marcel Detienne, according to whom we have to trace the origins of myth to the Enlightenment, that is, to the scientific study of myth, beginning with Bernard de Fontenelle’s De l’origine des fables (1724). For Fontenelle, fables reflect the history of the errors of the human mind from its primitive beginnings. In its origins, then, mythology, emerging against the background of a progressive concept of history and in the rationalist context of the Enlightenment, is the science created to explain the scandalous—everything that is the other of religion, civilization, and reason. In short, mythology, understood in the etymological sense of science of myth, would have given rise to the modern concept of myth, and not vice versa, and myth would be a fish soluble in the waters of mythology.³

The term mythology can also have, however, from a strictly etymological point of view, a second meaning: collection or organized corpus of myths.⁴ Given the absence of myth in ancient Greece, there would not have been a mythology in this second sense, either. Again according to Detienne, mythology as a system would also be a byproduct of the science of myth and its taxonomic zeal. For him and those who followed him, myth is, in short, an illusion, existing only in the controversy about it.⁵

Antiquity

The contemporary scientific study of myth, however, has achieved a victory that, in my view, ought to be reckoned an accepted truth: the twentieth century was able to recognize in myth an autonomous form of thought, with a meaning that goes beyond the textual support by which a particular myth has survived. Myth, according to the famous proposal of Claude Lévi-Strauss, is not so much an object as an instrument of reflection. What I think is essential, in any case, is the distinction between myth and its particular expression in poetic, choral, dramatic, and visual form. This contrast is the basis of the definition of myth proposed by Fritz Graf:

A myth is a peculiar kind of story. It does not coincide with a particular text or literary genre. For example, in all three major genres of Greek poetry the story of Agamemnon’s murder and of Orestes’ subsequent revenge is told: in epic (at the beginning of the Odyssey), in choral lyric (e.g., in Stesichorus’ Oresteia), and in the works of all three tragedians. A myth is not a specific poetic text. It transcends the text: it is the subject-matter, a plot fixed in broad outline and with characters no less fixed, which the individual poet is free to alter only within