What do you think?
Rate this book
Classical Mythology: The Greeks
In this series of 14 lectures Professor Peter Meineck examines in detail the far-reaching influence of Greek myths on Western thought and literature. The nature of myth and its importance to ancient Greece in terms of storytelling, music, poetry, religion, cults, rituals, theatre, and literature are viewed through works ranging from Homer's Illiad and Odyssey to the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus. These lectures are an entertaining guide to Greek mythology and a fascinating look into the culture and time that produced these eternal tales.
9 pages, Audio CD
First published January 1, 2004
13 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
About the author
Peter Meineck
26 books22 followersPeter Meineck (b. 1967) is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder and humanities program director of Aquila Theatre and has held appointments at Princeton University and University of South Carolina.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 13, 2020
A really engaging and interesting set of lectures - it was also great to hear an English accent, and a relatively youthful-sounding one at that, as these series are usually recorded by older American academics. Meineck is a theatre director and actor as well as a professor, and it shows in his delivery: lively without veering into zany, as lecturers sometimes do. (That's one of the things I hear in samples of lectures I don't listen to in full.)
The only drawback I found was something that other listeners may welcome. For me, the lectures were more densely packed with new information than I'd expected. I am not as good at taking in new info via audio as via text, so I choose audiobooks on familiar topics. Here, I ended up making a lot of notes and not being able to do as many other things while listening. (Especially as I listened to this on Scribd, which doesn't provide supplementary PDFs, unlike Audible's Great Courses.)
I'm writing this up from 4-month old notes, and now can't remember the extended points many of them related to. (Whatever was "Theory re gorillas," related to or just after the bit about boundary-marking herms, and how Thucydides recorded revellers' removal of them as an omen?) So if some of this sounds disjointed, that's why.
Meineck begins with a discussion of the meaning of 'myth' - including types of myth such as etiological myth (e.g. Persephone and the seasons) and heroic myth (some of which may contain traces of historical memory, like the Iliad) - and the meaning of 'religion'. Hesiod's Works and Days, the first written record of Ancient Greek religious practice, is the first book of several books he recommends. (He recommends Stanley Lombardo's translation. When this was recorded, Alicia Stallings' translation for Penguin Classics hadn't yet been published. I obviously don't know Ancient Greek to judge the accuracy, but it seems very readable in English. Other texts recommended, and discussed in detail, include the first book of the Iliad, the Oresteia - he calls The Furies "the first courtroom drama" - parts of the Odyssey, and Euripides' Bacchae.)
Meineck explains how the Greco-Roman gods are fundamentally different from the supreme beings of axial age religion (who are often moral exemplars), and modern people often have a mistaken idea of how and why the older gods were worshipped. They are anthropomorphic, as well as divine elements to be propitiated and avoided/feared. (Like forces of nature and of the unpredictability of life.) He suggests that the gods' anthropomorphic nature developed due to the growth of hoplite warfare and individuality after the Greek Dark Age: a very violent society with frequent war between hundreds of city states. This stage also eventually led to the development of democracy, as more men of different classes were needed for sea power. (This sounds to me like a parallel with the Industrial Revolution leading to increased education and democracy.)
He may be on shakier ground in suggesting that the prior religion in the region may have been matriarchal and earth based. (This sounds too much like Marija Gimbutas' goddess theory for which it's now known there simply isn't enough evidence; he doesn't ground his argument sufficiently for someone aware of that but not of the specifics of Greece.) He mentions finds of ancient goddess statues; that male sky gods have a great fear of being overthrown, which makes them murderous; and more specifically, the perpetual tension between Zeus and Hera - that the first known story about them, in the Iliad, is about spousal abuse. Though some displacement of goddesses by gods was late enough to make it into written records. Demeter began to be thought of as "a bit boring" and was supplanted by Dionysios, a new god from further east; it is thought that Apollo replaced goddesses in oracles; and Hesiod suggested Aphrodite was an old goddess, not only the daughter of Zeus. Men and women in mythology, and the tension between them, are themes threaded through the whole lecture series, so this at least has a place in introducing the idea.
Animal sacrifice was important in Ancient Greek religion. (And, revising this paragraph after reading two translations of the Odyssey - all those cattle - this is blatantly obvious; the Rig Veda has also been showing me similarities from thousands of miles further east.) These audio lectures always have a few points I want to check "is that right?". One here was that Greeks (of which rank?) only ate meat about once a month and that there was a taboo around killing animals, expressed in sacrifice. A custom mentioned by Meineck, that entrails were sacrificed to the gods, while humans ate the meat, isn't entirely borne out by scenes in the Odyssey. (Perhaps change over time?) But I don't mean to generally criticise his take on the Odyssey. What he says about it was invaluable when I read/listened to it, and ended up in the review.
He suggests there are hints of a cultural memory of human sacrifice, or at least of the power of it as an idea, in the legend of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigeneia, and of the Trojan boys Achilles' kills by Patroclus' funeral pyre. One interpretation of the Parthenon frieze suggests the founder's daughter was sacrificed. (I think he means a paper by Joan B. Connolly, summarised here). Meineck says there is no archaeological evidence for it. Perhaps he was talking about mainland Greece and the smaller islands, as there is evidence from Crete: one example. Whilst checking references for this review, I found this report from 1991 of a discovery from Greek-Dark-Age Crete which indicates there is at least one example similar to that at Patroclus' funeral. This article from 2019 affirms the connection and demonstrates a number of Cretan influences in this part of the Iliad.
Going by the written evidence, Meineck says, there seems to have been a major shift in attitudes to mythology, and how real it was, within one generation or so. Herodotus (c. 484-25 BCE), illustrating the aforementioned basic conflict between male and female, lists mythological abductions in his Histories. Thucydides' (c. 460-400 BCE) writings have almost no mythological content. Myth seems to have moved out of history writing, and into the drama of tragedy.
Yet there is of course still a reverence and wariness of the gods inherent in Greek tragedy. Meineck explains the essence of tragedy as being in characters who overstep the bounds and who try to be too godlike. Certain actions during the Trojan war can be seen as attempts to be too godlike. Humans can wound gods - as Diomedes did - but he and other Greeks who try to become too godlike are punished, for overreaching with actions like the sack of Troy, excess violence, rape (the implication seems to be that this is only where noble or holy women are concerned), and the sacrifice of Priam's daughters. 'Nothing in excess', he explains, was an important value in Greek society and religion.
This idea, that figures who are defined as heroes also need to be punished, is out of line with the conventional modern definition of a hero: if they have done wrong, that means they aren't actually heroes. As Meineck puts it, the point of heroes was that they were larger than life, not that they were good. Having heard similar a long time ago from friends who studied Classics, it confused me a couple of years ago to run into a post from a feminist classics blog that made an impression on me (and which I can now no longer find) which appeared to apply the conventional modern idea of the hero, saying that we need to stop thinking of Greek heroes as heroes, and also assuming that gods were treated as admirable. Shifting sands in the scholarly world? A response to the same online crowds Donna Zuckerberg rants back at in Not All Dead White Men, which wasn't as clearly signposted? (But a better way to counter them would be to cite Classics scholars giving definitions about heroes not intended as heroic in our sense?) A misunderstanding of the original texts and history from a blogger who maybe needed to hear the explanation from Mary Beard?
The hero, Meineck suggests, is analogous to the ephebe, transitional between boy and man, like young Spartans in their initiation period who were exempt from certain aspects of morality. (This connects to the Indo-European koryos warrior bands, who come up in The Saga of the Volsungs and the Rig Veda, and who appear to have been a major feature of the culture, its military and its spread. See also p.135, the second page of the PDF of this paper by archaeologist David Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel and Language.) Achilles is the eternal ephebe in his behaviour. (And how often do 21st-century readers casually refer to Achilles' teenage tantrums? However, in a recently popular historical subfield, historian of emotions Rob Boddice has pointed out that the popular words "wrath" or "rage" of Achilles are mistranslations, which have contributed significantly to the reception history of the Iliad in Anglophone cultures for hundreds of years.) Apollo is the eternal ephebe and yet also the representation of the ideal Greek man [at which stages in history?], disciplined and skilled. (One could also connect this - the typically unbearded, cultured Apollo as the male ideal, to the Romans' later stereotyping of the Greeks as effeminate and less martial.) In the Trojan war, the fighting broke lots of codes: there was fighting dirty to win, total warfare. To an extent, heroes were allowed to use trickery, and to transcend norms to achieve their quest, usually backed by Athena or Hermes. But there are limits.
Seemingly even more universal in Greek culture than militarism was the battle of the sexes. Meineck says that it's in the area of gender where much of the best recent scholarship is. (These lectures were released in 2004, and the interest in gender, feminism and classics continues unabated, as visible in many recent books, fiction and non-fiction.) The sense of Classical Greece as a patriarchal, misogynistic society goes back to some of its first written literature, the first account of religion and customs in Hesiod - and leads to the question of whether Hesiod was particularly bad in this respect himself (whilst it's the common view now, Stallings' introduction to her translation says she came to view him as generally misanthropic rather than specifically misogynistic) or if he was just reflecting Greek society. But here is a dichotomy: as Meineck says, if Greek myth is so patriarchal, where did all these powerful women come from? Feminism explains it as recognising and fearing power the power of women. This is most overtly visible in what are described as "the horrible chthonic creatures of female power": the furies, graeae, and gorgons.
As far as I know, there aren't surviving commentaries from Classical Greek women saying how they saw various myths, which is very frustrating. Pandora (the first woman) was, according to Hesiod here, created to inflict misery on men, to look like a goddess but not be one; described as "this lovely evil ... an infestation", and as a lover of wealth. Was this version universal enough that it affected how women saw themselves and behaved? Or were there some different outlooks included in the women's religious rites which we know existed but have no record of? There are stories told by men which hint at influence of women e.g. of the intellect of Aspasia, the wife of Pericles. Importantly, Meineck raises the question of whether we see Greek women through our own prism - not theirs. (Something which is too absent from a lot of very recent history, especially in informal online content by graduates, where the trend seems to be to implicitly impose the idea of false consciousness on the past rather than to try to climb into the mindset of a woman or other marginalised person in the past and focus on the perhaps, to us, uncomfortable, inconvenient and strange perspective she may have taken on something. Effort to understand the past on its own terms seem in too many quarters to have fallen by the wayside in favour of presentations focused on fighting the other side in contemporary politics, meaning we end up with two very obviously skewed and politicised versions.)
The power of goddesses and other mythological women contrasts with the restricted, prescribed roles of most real Greek women. Meineck alludes to goddesses who are not dominated by Zeus, and to Hera as more intelligent than Zeus - and the clash of animal nature, phusis, which needed to be controlled, and the civilising force of nomos; Hera created the first nomos - marriage. This clashes to an extent with the ancient idea of father (god/king) as progenitor - which can be seen in Zeus' numerous extra-marital liaisons, assaults and resulting offspring, as well as mythological examples like Priam and his fifty children, and which Meineck suggests reflects a fear held by middle-class men - and also with Zeus as war god. (Meineck here links Zeus with Norse war god Tiw. Though in the tensions between Odin and Frigga one can also see similarities with Zeus and Hera; the Greco Roman gods don't all map neatly to the Norse, though there are enough similarities that common roots are evident.) Athena appears to stand apart from this, "neither male nor female", though appropriating female power via Medusa's head on her aegis; sterile, born through parthenogenesis with only a father; the essence of reasonableness in contrast to Poseidon, a god of raging natural forces, who competes with her, a craftsman and justice god, to rule Athens; "the perfect daughter" (though not your typical real-life Greek patriarch's idea of a perfect daughter, I'd assume) - and the only other god allowed to use Zeus' thunderbolts.
Continued below in comment field
(Listened Aug-Nov 2019, review written April & Oct 2020)
The only drawback I found was something that other listeners may welcome. For me, the lectures were more densely packed with new information than I'd expected. I am not as good at taking in new info via audio as via text, so I choose audiobooks on familiar topics. Here, I ended up making a lot of notes and not being able to do as many other things while listening. (Especially as I listened to this on Scribd, which doesn't provide supplementary PDFs, unlike Audible's Great Courses.)
I'm writing this up from 4-month old notes, and now can't remember the extended points many of them related to. (Whatever was "Theory re gorillas," related to or just after the bit about boundary-marking herms, and how Thucydides recorded revellers' removal of them as an omen?) So if some of this sounds disjointed, that's why.
Meineck begins with a discussion of the meaning of 'myth' - including types of myth such as etiological myth (e.g. Persephone and the seasons) and heroic myth (some of which may contain traces of historical memory, like the Iliad) - and the meaning of 'religion'. Hesiod's Works and Days, the first written record of Ancient Greek religious practice, is the first book of several books he recommends. (He recommends Stanley Lombardo's translation. When this was recorded, Alicia Stallings' translation for Penguin Classics hadn't yet been published. I obviously don't know Ancient Greek to judge the accuracy, but it seems very readable in English. Other texts recommended, and discussed in detail, include the first book of the Iliad, the Oresteia - he calls The Furies "the first courtroom drama" - parts of the Odyssey, and Euripides' Bacchae.)
Meineck explains how the Greco-Roman gods are fundamentally different from the supreme beings of axial age religion (who are often moral exemplars), and modern people often have a mistaken idea of how and why the older gods were worshipped. They are anthropomorphic, as well as divine elements to be propitiated and avoided/feared. (Like forces of nature and of the unpredictability of life.) He suggests that the gods' anthropomorphic nature developed due to the growth of hoplite warfare and individuality after the Greek Dark Age: a very violent society with frequent war between hundreds of city states. This stage also eventually led to the development of democracy, as more men of different classes were needed for sea power. (This sounds to me like a parallel with the Industrial Revolution leading to increased education and democracy.)
He may be on shakier ground in suggesting that the prior religion in the region may have been matriarchal and earth based. (This sounds too much like Marija Gimbutas' goddess theory for which it's now known there simply isn't enough evidence; he doesn't ground his argument sufficiently for someone aware of that but not of the specifics of Greece.) He mentions finds of ancient goddess statues; that male sky gods have a great fear of being overthrown, which makes them murderous; and more specifically, the perpetual tension between Zeus and Hera - that the first known story about them, in the Iliad, is about spousal abuse. Though some displacement of goddesses by gods was late enough to make it into written records. Demeter began to be thought of as "a bit boring" and was supplanted by Dionysios, a new god from further east; it is thought that Apollo replaced goddesses in oracles; and Hesiod suggested Aphrodite was an old goddess, not only the daughter of Zeus. Men and women in mythology, and the tension between them, are themes threaded through the whole lecture series, so this at least has a place in introducing the idea.
Animal sacrifice was important in Ancient Greek religion. (And, revising this paragraph after reading two translations of the Odyssey - all those cattle - this is blatantly obvious; the Rig Veda has also been showing me similarities from thousands of miles further east.) These audio lectures always have a few points I want to check "is that right?". One here was that Greeks (of which rank?) only ate meat about once a month and that there was a taboo around killing animals, expressed in sacrifice. A custom mentioned by Meineck, that entrails were sacrificed to the gods, while humans ate the meat, isn't entirely borne out by scenes in the Odyssey. (Perhaps change over time?) But I don't mean to generally criticise his take on the Odyssey. What he says about it was invaluable when I read/listened to it, and ended up in the review.
He suggests there are hints of a cultural memory of human sacrifice, or at least of the power of it as an idea, in the legend of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigeneia, and of the Trojan boys Achilles' kills by Patroclus' funeral pyre. One interpretation of the Parthenon frieze suggests the founder's daughter was sacrificed. (I think he means a paper by Joan B. Connolly, summarised here). Meineck says there is no archaeological evidence for it. Perhaps he was talking about mainland Greece and the smaller islands, as there is evidence from Crete: one example. Whilst checking references for this review, I found this report from 1991 of a discovery from Greek-Dark-Age Crete which indicates there is at least one example similar to that at Patroclus' funeral. This article from 2019 affirms the connection and demonstrates a number of Cretan influences in this part of the Iliad.
Going by the written evidence, Meineck says, there seems to have been a major shift in attitudes to mythology, and how real it was, within one generation or so. Herodotus (c. 484-25 BCE), illustrating the aforementioned basic conflict between male and female, lists mythological abductions in his Histories. Thucydides' (c. 460-400 BCE) writings have almost no mythological content. Myth seems to have moved out of history writing, and into the drama of tragedy.
Yet there is of course still a reverence and wariness of the gods inherent in Greek tragedy. Meineck explains the essence of tragedy as being in characters who overstep the bounds and who try to be too godlike. Certain actions during the Trojan war can be seen as attempts to be too godlike. Humans can wound gods - as Diomedes did - but he and other Greeks who try to become too godlike are punished, for overreaching with actions like the sack of Troy, excess violence, rape (the implication seems to be that this is only where noble or holy women are concerned), and the sacrifice of Priam's daughters. 'Nothing in excess', he explains, was an important value in Greek society and religion.
This idea, that figures who are defined as heroes also need to be punished, is out of line with the conventional modern definition of a hero: if they have done wrong, that means they aren't actually heroes. As Meineck puts it, the point of heroes was that they were larger than life, not that they were good. Having heard similar a long time ago from friends who studied Classics, it confused me a couple of years ago to run into a post from a feminist classics blog that made an impression on me (and which I can now no longer find) which appeared to apply the conventional modern idea of the hero, saying that we need to stop thinking of Greek heroes as heroes, and also assuming that gods were treated as admirable. Shifting sands in the scholarly world? A response to the same online crowds Donna Zuckerberg rants back at in Not All Dead White Men, which wasn't as clearly signposted? (But a better way to counter them would be to cite Classics scholars giving definitions about heroes not intended as heroic in our sense?) A misunderstanding of the original texts and history from a blogger who maybe needed to hear the explanation from Mary Beard?
The hero, Meineck suggests, is analogous to the ephebe, transitional between boy and man, like young Spartans in their initiation period who were exempt from certain aspects of morality. (This connects to the Indo-European koryos warrior bands, who come up in The Saga of the Volsungs and the Rig Veda, and who appear to have been a major feature of the culture, its military and its spread. See also p.135, the second page of the PDF of this paper by archaeologist David Anthony, author of The Horse, the Wheel and Language.) Achilles is the eternal ephebe in his behaviour. (And how often do 21st-century readers casually refer to Achilles' teenage tantrums? However, in a recently popular historical subfield, historian of emotions Rob Boddice has pointed out that the popular words "wrath" or "rage" of Achilles are mistranslations, which have contributed significantly to the reception history of the Iliad in Anglophone cultures for hundreds of years.) Apollo is the eternal ephebe and yet also the representation of the ideal Greek man [at which stages in history?], disciplined and skilled. (One could also connect this - the typically unbearded, cultured Apollo as the male ideal, to the Romans' later stereotyping of the Greeks as effeminate and less martial.) In the Trojan war, the fighting broke lots of codes: there was fighting dirty to win, total warfare. To an extent, heroes were allowed to use trickery, and to transcend norms to achieve their quest, usually backed by Athena or Hermes. But there are limits.
Seemingly even more universal in Greek culture than militarism was the battle of the sexes. Meineck says that it's in the area of gender where much of the best recent scholarship is. (These lectures were released in 2004, and the interest in gender, feminism and classics continues unabated, as visible in many recent books, fiction and non-fiction.) The sense of Classical Greece as a patriarchal, misogynistic society goes back to some of its first written literature, the first account of religion and customs in Hesiod - and leads to the question of whether Hesiod was particularly bad in this respect himself (whilst it's the common view now, Stallings' introduction to her translation says she came to view him as generally misanthropic rather than specifically misogynistic) or if he was just reflecting Greek society. But here is a dichotomy: as Meineck says, if Greek myth is so patriarchal, where did all these powerful women come from? Feminism explains it as recognising and fearing power the power of women. This is most overtly visible in what are described as "the horrible chthonic creatures of female power": the furies, graeae, and gorgons.
As far as I know, there aren't surviving commentaries from Classical Greek women saying how they saw various myths, which is very frustrating. Pandora (the first woman) was, according to Hesiod here, created to inflict misery on men, to look like a goddess but not be one; described as "this lovely evil ... an infestation", and as a lover of wealth. Was this version universal enough that it affected how women saw themselves and behaved? Or were there some different outlooks included in the women's religious rites which we know existed but have no record of? There are stories told by men which hint at influence of women e.g. of the intellect of Aspasia, the wife of Pericles. Importantly, Meineck raises the question of whether we see Greek women through our own prism - not theirs. (Something which is too absent from a lot of very recent history, especially in informal online content by graduates, where the trend seems to be to implicitly impose the idea of false consciousness on the past rather than to try to climb into the mindset of a woman or other marginalised person in the past and focus on the perhaps, to us, uncomfortable, inconvenient and strange perspective she may have taken on something. Effort to understand the past on its own terms seem in too many quarters to have fallen by the wayside in favour of presentations focused on fighting the other side in contemporary politics, meaning we end up with two very obviously skewed and politicised versions.)
The power of goddesses and other mythological women contrasts with the restricted, prescribed roles of most real Greek women. Meineck alludes to goddesses who are not dominated by Zeus, and to Hera as more intelligent than Zeus - and the clash of animal nature, phusis, which needed to be controlled, and the civilising force of nomos; Hera created the first nomos - marriage. This clashes to an extent with the ancient idea of father (god/king) as progenitor - which can be seen in Zeus' numerous extra-marital liaisons, assaults and resulting offspring, as well as mythological examples like Priam and his fifty children, and which Meineck suggests reflects a fear held by middle-class men - and also with Zeus as war god. (Meineck here links Zeus with Norse war god Tiw. Though in the tensions between Odin and Frigga one can also see similarities with Zeus and Hera; the Greco Roman gods don't all map neatly to the Norse, though there are enough similarities that common roots are evident.) Athena appears to stand apart from this, "neither male nor female", though appropriating female power via Medusa's head on her aegis; sterile, born through parthenogenesis with only a father; the essence of reasonableness in contrast to Poseidon, a god of raging natural forces, who competes with her, a craftsman and justice god, to rule Athens; "the perfect daughter" (though not your typical real-life Greek patriarch's idea of a perfect daughter, I'd assume) - and the only other god allowed to use Zeus' thunderbolts.
Continued below in comment field
(Listened Aug-Nov 2019, review written April & Oct 2020)
September 10, 2025
Excellent. Learned a lot, even though I've taught this subject before.
December 24, 2012
This book was listened to for research purposes. Pros: Quality information in layman's terms and it expanded my course of thinking regarding Greek mythology. Also included tidbits of relative information, such as my Athens considers itself descendent of Athena who was a virgin. I also appreciated the chapter format; each chapter/lecture had a theme that was concluded by a question from the college class that listened to the lecture-this also expanded the lectures past the given material.
Cons: Wish I'd gotten this in print; since it is being used as a reference tool, it's going to be cumbersome to go back and look up particular ideas/names/terms since I didn't use the bookmark tool. Next time I will. Also, since it is only an 8 hour audiobook, I can very well go back and relisten to this in the future, or at least refresh myself on the 30-minute long lectures.
Cons: Wish I'd gotten this in print; since it is being used as a reference tool, it's going to be cumbersome to go back and look up particular ideas/names/terms since I didn't use the bookmark tool. Next time I will. Also, since it is only an 8 hour audiobook, I can very well go back and relisten to this in the future, or at least refresh myself on the 30-minute long lectures.
October 6, 2019
Peter is Zeus blessed: wonderful insights, incredibly entertaining and truly recreates a world larger than life. My go to scholar to have everything I know about mythology reinforced and reenacted.
October 3, 2019
Informative and more engaging than others I've listened to on Greek history.
September 22, 2011
Informative and elucidating are the words that come to my mind for description.
As a literary enthusiast and appreciator of classic mythology, I've often found it difficult to keep straight the heroes and tales of ancient European myths. Prof. Meineck does a great job of telling these stories in both a succinct and fascinating way.
I particularly liked the way he explained a theme in the Odyssey, by Homer, about how Agammenon's death contrasts starkly with Odysseus' humble, yet calamitous, return. Agammenon returns home from the Trojan war in great pomp. During the war, however, he has cheated on his wife, and now his wife has concocted a malicious plan to take revenge. Because Agammenon is so prideful, his wife finds it easy to execute her plan and kill Agammenon. Odysseus, on the other hand, returns to his home (after years and years of hard trials through which he has learned to be humble and intelligent, rather than dominant and arrogant) in the disguise of a beggar. By this disguise he is able to infiltrate his own home, which has been usurped by wicked men seeking to assume Odysseus' wealth and power, without being recognized and thus be able to win back his house by surprise. At that time in history it was a novel concept that a noble man like Odysseus could return to his home in such a demeaning disguise, regardless of the peril. This theme marks an increase of self-awareness and wisdom in humanity.
Overall I can definitely recommend this to anyone who likes mythology, mythopoeia, ancient cultures, and simple, great stories.
As a literary enthusiast and appreciator of classic mythology, I've often found it difficult to keep straight the heroes and tales of ancient European myths. Prof. Meineck does a great job of telling these stories in both a succinct and fascinating way.
I particularly liked the way he explained a theme in the Odyssey, by Homer, about how Agammenon's death contrasts starkly with Odysseus' humble, yet calamitous, return. Agammenon returns home from the Trojan war in great pomp. During the war, however, he has cheated on his wife, and now his wife has concocted a malicious plan to take revenge. Because Agammenon is so prideful, his wife finds it easy to execute her plan and kill Agammenon. Odysseus, on the other hand, returns to his home (after years and years of hard trials through which he has learned to be humble and intelligent, rather than dominant and arrogant) in the disguise of a beggar. By this disguise he is able to infiltrate his own home, which has been usurped by wicked men seeking to assume Odysseus' wealth and power, without being recognized and thus be able to win back his house by surprise. At that time in history it was a novel concept that a noble man like Odysseus could return to his home in such a demeaning disguise, regardless of the peril. This theme marks an increase of self-awareness and wisdom in humanity.
Overall I can definitely recommend this to anyone who likes mythology, mythopoeia, ancient cultures, and simple, great stories.
December 31, 2020
very very interesting but I dont think I have quite enough knowledge to completely understand these lectures. I'm going to read the illiad, the odyssey and oedipus rex and then come back and read this again.
July 28, 2009
Dry. But well informed. Just make sure your iPod is not on shuffle :P
August 23, 2023
In 2004 Modern Scholar released Professor Peter Meineck’s 8 hour audio course “Classical Mythology: The Greeks,”. This 14 lecture audio course comes with a 68 page course guide. At the time of the course release, Professor Meineck was employed at New York University where he taught courses on ancient drama, Greek literature, and classical mythology. His Modern Scholar course begins with three lectures about myth fables, Greek 5th century BC religious rituals, and the concepts of chaos that were foundational to Greek beliefs. The next three lectures discuss the Trojan War, myths as history, and the divinity features of gods, goddesses, and their impact on Greek human values. He then discusses the Odessey, afterlife myths, and myths that underpin politics, stories about the god Agamemnon, and the role of gender in Greek culture and social relations. The course ends with lectures about Greek heroes, Oedipus, and Athenian folklore. His discussion about Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy, his presentations about how Greek myth influenced Freud, and presentations about the role myths play in literature are very insightful. Professor Meineck is an excellent presenter. (P)
January 10, 2019
I loved this! The professor was not only intelligent, he made the lectures interesting. I was never boring through any of the 14 lectures. And by the way, Peter Meineck's voice was amazing! Great narrator. 10 out of 10!
April 9, 2022
// audio //
i love peter meineck
i love peter meineck
September 28, 2024
Good overview.
November 10, 2012
Very Very good and refreshing insight into origins and content of mythology ,much deeper than the usual retelling
The analysis of the Odyssey as a PTSD recovery roadtrip was especially striking for me
Very much recommended
The analysis of the Odyssey as a PTSD recovery roadtrip was especially striking for me
Very much recommended
November 12, 2014
I have this as an audiobook and it's a wonderful source of information. A must for anyone wanting to gain a greater insight into Ancient Greek Mythology and the inspiring culture that blossomed such wonderful tales our culture still has the honour of enjoying today.
August 16, 2021
Very interesting and informative.
October 10, 2012
Good as a primer. But it's straight-up Greek mythology, no fuss. I prefer comparative mythology, and the Myth in Human History course does a good job on that front.
Read
May 28, 2012A bit dry. I liked the narrator. Sometimes they make listening difficult, but he was pretty clear
October 31, 2012
A really engaging read, and a great place to start your journey back to the minds of the ancient Greeks.
December 1, 2012
Really simple to understand and the information was presented in such a way as to make it easy to remember. Great introduction to greek mythology.
March 15, 2013
A well-done, informative, and entertaining introduction to Greek mythology. A good course to learn the basics, refresh your memory, and--at least for me--learn some new aspects and angles as well.
April 20, 2013
Good intro to Greek mythology.
May 8, 2015
Very interesting and informative.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews