The Greeks
It is always a mistake to think of the Greeks as superior human beings uniquely endowed with enlightened wisdom and rational benevolence. We would find much in ancient Greece alien and distasteful to us. Women could play no real part in affairs outside the home, slavery was endemic, punishments were harsh and life could be brutal. Dionysus and Ares were their gods quite as much as Apollo and Athena. Pan, Priapus and Poseidon too. What makes the Greeks so appealing to us is that they seemed to be so subtly, insightfully and animatedly aware of these different sides to their natures. ‘Know thyself’ was carved into the pronaos of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. As a people – if we read them through the myths as much as in their other writings – they did their best to attend to that ancient maxim.
So while they may have been far from perfect, the ancient Greeks seem to have developed the art of seeing life, the world and themselves with greater candour and unclouded clarity than is managed by most civilizations, including perhaps our own.
Location, Location
Greece. What and where is that? It was no kind of a nation at the time of the myths. There is a politically identifiable sovereign landmass and collection of islands we can now visit, but the Greek world of Mythos includes much of Asia Minor, incorporating Turkey, parts of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as well as areas of North Africa, Egypt, the Balkans, Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The story of ‘Arion and the Dolphin’ takes us to southern Italy and other myths deal with people who might at times have described themselves as Hellenic, Ionian, Argive, Attic, Thracian, Aeolian, Spartan, Doric, Athenian, Cypriot, Corinthian, Theban, Phrygian, Sicilian, Cretan, Trojan, Boeotian, Lydian … and much more besides. It is all, I am well aware, confusing and probably irritating to anyone but a scholar or a Greek citizen. There is the map to consult, but otherwise I really hope you don’t bust a boiler trying to work it all out. Goodness knows I bust mine often enough and I wouldn’t wish the same confusion and worry on you.
Sources Ancient
To retell Greek mythical stories is to tread in the footsteps of giants. In the Foreword to this book I shared Edith Hamilton’s observation that Greek myth is ‘the creation of great poets’. While its deepest origins lie in prehistory and unrecorded folklore, in preparing material for this book I have been able, as any one of us can, to consult the very first poets of the Western tradition, who just happened to be Greek and whose subject matter just happened to be myth.
There is a unique treasury of extant sources that chart the chronology of Greek myth from the creation of the universe and birth of the gods all the way to the end of their interaction and interference in human affairs. It begins with homer, who may or may not have been a single (blind) Ionian bard, but whose name is attached to the two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, that were put together some time, it is thought, in the eighth century bc. Their setting is the siege of Troy and its aftermath, but Homer makes countless useful references back to earlier myths. His approximate contemporary, the poet hesiod (undoubtedly an individual), did the most to create what might be called a timeline for Greek mythology. His Theogony (Birth of the Gods) narrates the creation, the rise of the Titans, the origin of the gods and the establishment of Olympus. His Erga kai Hemerai (Works and Days) tells the great human creation stories of Prometheus and Pandora as well as laying out mankind’s Five Ages – Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron.
Other Greek and subsequent Roman poets, writers and travellers filled in gaps, elaborated, embroidered, fused, confused and just plain fabricated Greek mythical stories that mostly descended from Hesiod’s genealogical plan. Of these the Bibliotheca (Library), a great dictionary of myth is perhaps the most valuable source. It was originally thought to have been the work of the scholar APOLLODORUS OF ATHENS, who worked in the second century BC, but this is now doubted; these days the work is attributed to an unknown who goes by the demeaning soubriquet of PSEUDO-APOLLODORUS and dated to the first or second century AD. Other compelling and/or reliable sources – all of them probably from the second century AD – include the Greek traveller and guide-book compiler PAUSANIAS, the ‘novelists’ LONGUS (who wrote in Greek) and APULEIUS (who wrote in Latin) and the Latin prose writer HYGINUS.
Towering above them all is the Roman poet ovid (43 bc–ad 17), whose Metamorphoses (Transformations) tells of those mortals, nymphs and others who were changed by the gods into animals, plants, rivers or even stones as a punishment or out of pity. His other works, principally the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Heroides (Heroines) also contain recastings of Greek myth, using always the Latin names for the gods – ‘Jove’ or ‘Jupiter’ for Zeus, ‘Diana’ for Artemis, ‘Cupid’ or ‘Amor’ for Eros. and so on. Ovid is prolific, profuse, irreverent, saucy and cinematic in his energy and restless switching of points of view. It is clear from the wealth of references in his plays and poems that Shakespeare, amongst many other writers and artists, was hugely influenced by him. Ovid was happy to add, subtract and invent, and this has influenced and emboldened me to be – shall we say imaginative? – in some of my retellings too.
Sources Modern
Many children on both sides of the Atlantic grew up, as I did, on classic collections of the Greek myths by four enduringly popular Americans. Two were nineteenth-century writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave us A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel, Tanglewood Tales (1853); and Thomas Bulfinch, whose The Age of Fable (1855), later incorporated into the compendious Bulfinch’s Mythology (1881), has run through dozens and dozens of editions in its 160 years of life. The twentieth century was dominated by the matchless Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942), which is still happily in print, and by Bernard Evslin’s evergreen Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (1967). British equivalents include Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and L. S. Hyde’s Favourite Greek Myths (1905), this last being a great favourite of mine when I was a boy.
Estimable as all of these were, and still are, they tend shyly to skirt round or bowdlerize the erotic and violent episodes that form such an essential part of the Greek mythic world. The poet and novelist Robert Graves had no such compunctions, but his two eccentrically structured and narrated volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), while meticulous, scholarly and inspiring, chart a more literary and mythographical course – often with a view to highlighting his obsession with cults of a ‘white goddess’. The approaches of James Frazer and those who came after, including Joseph Campbell, valuable as they are, also have other, less specifically Greek and more academic, psychological, comparative and anthropological, fish to fry. Online these days there are plenty of sites devoted to helping the young ‘find’ Greek myth – though you may feel like a lie-down after reading those that describe Cadmus as ‘a homie’, Hermes as ‘cool’ and Hades as ‘a dude with issues’.