Greek Mythology, page 1
About the Author
David Stuttard taught Classics for eleven years in Edinburgh, St Andrews and York, and has written numerous books on the Classical world including A History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives, The Romans Who Shaped Britain (with Sam Moorhead), Power Games: Ritual and Rivalry at the Ancient Greek Olympics and The Parthenon: Power and Politics on the Acropolis. He is the founder of the theatre company Actors of Dionysus and a course tutor at the University of Cambridge.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
A History of Ancient Greece in Fifty Lives
Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day
Exploring the World of the Ancient Greeks
See our websites
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
To Mark Grant, Emily Jane Stuttard and Alex Zambellas, whose warm companionship has so greatly enhanced my own travels in Greece.
Contents
Map
Introduction: Greek Mythology in Context
1. Mount Olympus: Dion & the Home of the Gods
2. Sunium: Poseidon’s Cliff-Top Temple
3. Eleusis & the Mysteries of Demeter & Persephone
4. Delos: Sacred Island of Leto, Artemis & Apollo
5. Delphi: Seat of Apollo’s Oracle, Haunt of Dionysus
6. Ephesus: Artemis & the Cult of the Mother Goddess
7. Paphos: Garden of Aphrodite
8. Pylos: Where Nestor Ruled & Hermes Hid the Cattle of Apollo
9. Olympia: Pelops & the Games
10. Thebes: City of Dionysus, Oedipus & Heracles
11. Tiryns & the Labours of Heracles
12. Iolcus & Mount Pelion: Centaurs, Weddings & the Voyage for the Golden Fleece
13. Corinth & False Promises of Love
14. Argos: Land of Hera, Home of Heroes
15. Athens: Prize of Athene, Kingdom of Theseus
16. Knossos: King Minos & the Labyrinth
17. Calydon: A Boar Hunt & Golden Apples
18. Sparta & the Haunts of Helen
19. Mycenae & the Curse on Agamemnon’s Family
20. Troy: A City Contested by Gods & Men
21. Ithaca & the Wanderings of Odysseus
22. Hades: Ephyra & the Gateway to the Underworld
Acknowledgments
Recommended Reading
Index
Copyright
Introduction
Greek Mythology in Context
Greek myths have a universal quality. Populated by characters who are as recognizable today as they were in antiquity, and who frequently find themselves in dire, unenviable situations – the stuff of our own nightmares – they speak to us directly across millennia. Embraced by the Romans and never forgotten even in the Dark Ages, these myths have exercised a profound influence on literature, art and music since the Renaissance, taking root in continents undiscovered by the ancient Greeks. Today, Greek mythology is so embedded in modern culture, including film, television and computer games, that it has become part of the everyday world of many who may otherwise care relatively little for antiquity.
In ancient Greece – even after writing was introduced in the eighth century BC – most people heard the stories of mythology as children from parents, grandparents and nannies. As adults in the Iron Age they thrilled to bards who recited epic poetry at banquets. In Classical times they heard professionals declaim the Iliad and Odyssey at public festivals, while praise-singers spun legends into paeans celebrating athletes’ victories and lyre-players sang love songs rich with memories of a lost heroic world. And in theatres citizen-choruses danced to hymns which celebrated fabled deeds and tragic actors took on the role of heroes. The sheer abundance of opportunities for telling and listening to myths was breathtaking.
Already in Homeric epic (which for the first time wove Greek oral myth into literature) we can witness such situations: in the Iliad Achilles sings of the ‘famous deeds of men’ as he sulks in his tent at Troy; while in the Odyssey, the Phaeacian bard Demodocus entertains listeners with tales of not just Troy, but the Olympian gods.
Heroic Myths
Demodocus’ songs reveal two strands of mythology. The first deals with heroes – mortals or semi-mortals – who inhabit and interact with the ‘real’ world. Archaeology confirms that these myths contain more or less accurate reflections of the late Bronze Age world (c. 1500 – c. 1200 BC). Towns and cities such as Troy, Mycenae, Sparta, Pylos, Calydon and Knossos were thriving in precisely the period when they are imagined as playing an important role in mythology. Since the decipherment of Linear B tablets in the mid-twentieth century we have even discovered that Bronze Age peoples spoke an early form of Greek, and that the place-names of mythology corresponded to those of real settlements. Sadly these tablets were used only for bureaucratic record-keeping, not literature, and give no real evidence even for the names of kings. Hittite tablets from Anatolia, however, do connect names such as Priam and Alexandros with Wilusa, which can reasonably be identified with Troy.
Some myths resonate so closely with the evidence of archaeology that there are those today who passionately believe in their ‘historical’ accuracy. In antiquity, too, no one doubted that the Trojan War really happened. Historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides accepted it as fact, while from the fifth century BC it assumed even greater significance when it was seen as a precursor of the Greeks’ victory over the Persians. As a result, historical figures such as Xerxes and Alexander the Great made sacrifices at Troy – the one praying to avenge the Trojans’ defeat, the other to outvie it.
Prominent Greek (and, later, Roman) families traced their lineage back to heroes of the Trojan War, just as some English people today boast of ancestors who came to Britain with the Normans, or Americans profess connections with the Founding Fathers. Thus Alexander claimed descent from Achilles (and Heracles), while Julius Caesar and Augustus counted Aeneas and Anchises among their forebears.
Creation Myths
Demodocus sang, too, of the gods, and an important body of Greek mythology takes place in a wider cosmic setting. Some myths describe the creation of the universe. Hesiod summarizes them in his short epic poem, Theogony (‘Birth of the Gods’) – a fusion of Greek and Near Eastern traditions. Here the world is born from the void of Chaos, generations of gods vie for supremacy, and sons castrate or otherwise weaken fathers to seize ultimate control. A bewildering array of gods and goddesses populates this early world, many the personifications of abstract concepts such as Vengeance, Lawlessness, Fate and Harmony.
Such creation myths have their roots many millennia before Hesiod in early man’s attempts to explain his environment and his place within it, and many of their themes are shared across different cultures. For example, the story of a great flood sent to punish (or annihilate) mankind, whose only survivors, a pious couple, subsequently repopulate the world, appears throughout the Near East, while common to many of the world’s great religions is the patriarchal explanation that a woman (be she Eve or Pandora) caused all human misery.
Universal Myths
Even myths that at first seem quintessentially Greek contain universal folk-tale motifs as three examples show. The first involves a baby abandoned to die, who returns to claim a throne. Central to the myth of Oedipus, this theme plays an important role too in the tale of the Trojan Paris, as well as of Pelias and Neleus, respectively king of Iolcus and founder of Pylos. A variation is the story of Perseus, set adrift in a casket with his mother Danaë. In certain circumstances throughout antiquity babies were exposed to die, and the motif of a child surviving to grow up and wreak deliberate or accidental vengeance no doubt reflects real fears.
A second example betrays another anxiety, this time about the written word, which for early Greeks must have seemed both magical and sinister. Letters written by rejected women wrongly accuse two mythological characters of rape: Hippolytus, who is killed as a result, and Bellerophon, who lives to be exonerated.
In a third motif an adventurer overcomes adversities and wins the love of a foreign princess. Sometimes (Perseus and Andromeda) the outcome is benign; sometimes (Jason and Medea; Theseus and Ariadne) it is disastrous. Occasionally it turns expectations on their head. Rather than journeying to an unknown land, Oedipus unwittingly returns home to defeat the monstrous Sphinx and claim the hand not of an exotic princess but of his own mother.
Causation, Local Myths & Variations
There are also aetiological (causation) myths. Many explain specific phenomena, either natural or man-made. One tells how, when Apollo inadvertently killed the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, he caused the letters ‘AI AI’ (representative of wailing) to appear on the petals of the hyacinth; another recounts how the same god’s anger caused crows to have black feathers.
Cities used local myths to proclaim their own status or the origins of rites. Thus Thebes boasted of its foundation by the legendary Cadmus, while Athens claimed that it was so loved by the gods that Poseidon and Athene fought one another to possess it. Elsewhere, mythology was used to bolster sanctuaries such as Delphi, Delos and Eleusis, while hymns performed there heightened ties between worshippers and mythology.
At its peak the Greek world stretched from Spain to India and from the Black Sea to the Nile. A common language and shared religious beliefs provided a sense of unity, but travel could be difficult and the world was physically fragmented. So it is not surprising that localized legends and variations of more widespread myths sprang up – made po
Equally, myths could be reshaped and revised, and new versions coexisted happily with old. Thus the sixth-century BC lyric poet Stesichorus (from Metaurus in South Italy) could write in his Palinode that the Spartan Helen never went to Troy, but instead the gods hid her in Egypt and sent a phantom in her place. A century later the Athenian Euripides used both this and the older, still more common version of the myth interchangeably in his dramas.
Mythology in Greek Literature & Art
For the Greeks mythology was all-pervasive, richly diverse and constantly developing. For us, however, our knowledge is confined to surviving literature and art (such a small fragment of what was originally produced that we can never be certain how representative it is). The Greeks had their own views about the relationship between mythology and literature. The fifth-century BC historian Herodotus (who was familiar with Egyptian, North African and Near Eastern mythology as well as Greek) wrote:
How each of the gods came into being, whether they existed for all time and what they look like – these are things about which no one knew until yesterday or the day before so to speak, since I imagine that Hesiod and Homer both lived no more than 400 years before my time. It was they who instructed Greeks about the gods’ birth, gave gods their names, assigned their honours and skills, and described their appearances.
Herodotus was wrong on several levels. Homer and Hesiod were closer to him in time, the origins of mythology much more distant. But he was correct that it was early epic poets who helped crystallize details of mythology and the gods. Homer assumes an easy familiarity with a wide range of myths, clear evidence that they were common currency. But there were many other early epic poems, only fragments of which survive. Some told of the Trojan War, others of Thebes, still others of the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts.
From the seventh century BC, lyric poets such as Sappho from Lesbos, Tyrtaeus and Alcman from Sparta, and the Theban Pindar peppered their verses with mythological allusions, sometimes so obscure that modern readers find them almost incomprehensible. From the sixth century BC, mythology provided material for hundreds of tragedies, written and performed in Athens and throughout the Greek world. In the Hellenistic period (following Alexander the Great’s death), mythology was studied, developed and transformed at the Library of Alexandria by scholars and poets including Callimachus, whose Aetia catalogued causation myths, and Apollonius of Rhodes, whose Argonautica was self-consciously modern in its learned references. Prose authors, too, such as the second-century BC Apollodorus, collated and streamlined myths, often tying themselves in knots, while Latin poets such as Vergil and Ovid adopted and adapted Greek mythology to suit their Roman ends.
In the second century AD mythology fascinated the traveller Pausanias. His Description of Greece provides useful evidence for local variations, as well as for many now lost artworks that played an important role in the understanding and dissemination of Greek myths. One was the Throne of Apollo at Amyclae near Sparta, whose sculptures represented myths as diverse as the Calydonian boar hunt and the Judgment of Paris. Another was the Chest of Cypselus in the Temple of Hera at Olympia: perhaps dating to the seventh century BC, its richly carved sides and lid showed scenes from the Trojan War, the Voyage of the Argo, the Labours of Heracles, the voyage of Odysseus, the Seven Against Thebes and the adventures of Theseus and Perseus.
Myths in a Landscape
Sometimes sculptures helped link location with mythology. The east pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia showed preparations for Pelops’ chariot race, which was supposed to have begun close by, while the subjects of the west pediment and west metopes (self-contained sculptural blocks) of the Parthenon at Athens were myths set on the Athenian Acropolis. Natural phenomena provided another link. Also on the Athenian Acropolis an olive tree and three grooves in the rock, apparently made by a trident, reinforced the reality of Athene and Poseidon’s contest. In Magnesia in Asia Minor a cliff shaped like a weeping woman was identified with Niobe, turned to stone, still mourning her children slain by Artemis and Apollo. At Delphi another rock, positioned at what for the Greeks was the centre of the earth, was venerated as the stone Cronus swallowed in mistake for his son, Zeus.
For many, the very landscape was alive with myths and mythical creatures. Dryads lived in oak trees, oreads in mountain caves and nereids in ocean waves. Breezes, pasturelands and meadows, fountains, springs and rivers, all had their resident spirits. In many places, too, mythology and landscape were inextricably linked – the boar hunt to the wooded glens of Calydon, the birth of Aphrodite to the sparkling sea at Cyprus or the slaying of the Minotaur to the palace at Knossos.
A Traveler’s Guide
Greek landscapes shaped Greek myth, which in turn influenced Greek history. So, to try to link myth and history with their associated sites, this book takes readers on a journey through the Greek mainland, as well as to some of the Aegean islands and sites in Turkey which once were Greek. All the locations are accessible today, and visitors may use this book as a companion. For armchair travellers, the brief evocations that begin each chapter are intended to capture something of their modern atmosphere.
Travel is instructive, but not essential, for Greek mythology still thrives wherever there are receptive minds, as a poem first published by the present author’s Humanity professor, Robert Ogilvie, makes clear:
When I was one, in Shillingstone,
June afternoon you spent
In reading Homer. Twenty now
Homer I read in Ghent.
From Ghent to Shillingstone is far.
It’s twenty years away.
But clear-seen Ithaca is near.
I’ll meet you there today.
1
Mount Olympus: Dion & the Home of the Gods
They say that Mount Olympus is the everlasting home, immutable, of the immortal gods. Gales cannot shake it, nor rainstorms drench it, and no snow clouds come near; but, rather, the high air opens out, serene and cloudless, bathed in the purest light. Here every day for all eternity the blessed gods lead lives of happiness.
Homer, Odyssey, 6.41f.
On the fertile plain between the sea and Mount Olympus, Dion thrums with life. Tall clumps of trees – oak, ash and poplar, cypress, plane and agnus castus – chitter with the busyness of birds that flit between the branches with a sudden chirr of wings before alighting on a cluster of bamboo. Doves murmur in the tree-tops. Distant crows abrade the air. Iridescent dragonflies hover over the flat surface of the lake or dance around the pillars of a sunken temple, where water flows clear over weathered stones and tortoises loll, lazy in the sun. Straight paved streets stride off with an initial confidence, only to be overcome by lush vegetation, distracted by wild roses and entangled in a sea of asphodel. Elsewhere, anemones and poppies stud the rippling meadows as they flow towards the theatre. And rising up behind the ranks of benches – so close and yet remote, at once forbidding and apparently benign, its high peaks crowned with clouds, its slopes already burgeoning with grapes – is Mount Olympus, the legendary dwelling place of Greece’s gods.
In the Beginning
For the Greeks, Mount Olympus was the ultimate seat of power. The gods whose home it was controlled the earth and skies, and all that lived there. Theirs was an extended ruling family, often beset by arguments and egos, sometimes capricious, sometimes fiercely loyal, but always jealous of their own authority and merciless against any who opposed it.
But the Olympians did not always rule the cosmos. Nor was there always a cosmos to rule. At first there was only Chaos, a yawning void, infinite and empty, a lifeless place of endless darkness. Hesiod described the process of creation:
