Classics and the Western Canon discussion
The Library of Greek Mythology
>
Week 2: Book 1, 2. The Deucalionids
date
newest »
newest »
Oineus, Meleager, and the hunt for Calydonian boarIn which Meleager dies either because his mother completed the burning a log foretold to coincide with his death, or because he was just killed. Is this a case of blood being thicker than water? The takeaways here seems to be, never kill your cousins on your mother’s side and never to invite Ancient Greeks to a boar hunt, it just seems like asking for trouble. And there is this:
The sons of Thestios,* however, took it amiss that a woman should get the prize when men were present, saying that it belonged to them by right of birth if Meleager chose not to take it.If they didn’t want a woman to get the prize, then why invite her to the hunt in the first place? Besides, Atalante was the first to hit the boar.
The Later History of Oineus, and the birth and exile of Tydeus
More kids, and a little patricide.
Athamas, Ino, and the origin of the golden fleece
Another story of a failed human sacrifice that didn’t happen and a god given ram. Hmm… This almost sounds familiar.
Sisyphos, Salmoneus, and other sons of Aiolos
We are told of Sisyphos’ punishment forever rolling the rock up the hill, but not told why.
Pelias and Neleus
Twins who were abandoned, exposed, by their mother, kill their step-grandmother for being mean to their mother. Apparently they forgave their mother. Later the twins quarell and split, 11 of Neleus 12 sons are killed by Heracles. The critical genealogy here seems to be Pelius and his daughter Alcestis.
The earlier history of Bias and Melampous
Melampous wins a bride for his brother Bias through divination and there are more kids. I wonder if Bishop Usher could total all of these generations up?
Admetos and Alcestis
After winning Pelias’ daughter, Alcestis, Admetos forgets to sacrifice to Artemis. Hmm, it seems Artemis is a bit on the needy side when it comes to needing sacrifices made to her. If I am not mistaken, it was Artemis whom Agamemnon sacrifice Iphegenia for favorable winds to sail against Troy. As part of the bargain, Admetos could not find a volunteer to die for him, so his wife Alcestis dies in his place. Kore/Persephone sends her back out of pity for her sacrifice or alternatively, Heracles fights for her release. I am beginning to wonder who this Heracles is that we keep hearing about.
Cphe wrote: "They didn’t seem to place a lot of emphasis on animals it seems.The number 9 seems to be of significance but I'm at a loss as to why."
Besides being three time three, and of some significance in neo-Pythagorean arithmology in Roman times, the number nine shows up several times in Greek mythology, sometimes in a cosmological context. In Hesiod, nine is the number of days a falling object would take to reach Earth from Heaven, and the same for the distance between the surface of the Earth and Tartaros.*
It doesn't seem to have been as common as the Biblical preferences for seven and twelve -- which it turns out were shared with older and contemporary cultures in the Ancient Near East, especially the former.
(I recently came upon a demonstration for this regarding the number seven in the massive Kinyras: The Divine Lyre by John C. Franklin. This is not light reading, and much of it will make more sense to musicologists than it does for me, but a nice pdf of which, with the original page numbers, can be found at https://www.academia.edu/12968837/Kin... It is also available in electronic from from the Center for Hellenic Studies, but that version lacks page numbers, and is otherwise hard to use.)
There is a fairly late story of Prometheus, and his dull-witted brother Epimetheus, making animals and humans out of clay, and Epimetheus giving all the best special traits to animals, leaving mankind without fur, fangs, claws, gills, and other useful parts of the body, but it is not found in Hesiod, where it would be expected.
The early Greeks don't seem to have attributed the creation of human beings to anyone, but to have assumed that they "grew from the ground," as did, presumably, the animals, too. Apollodorus mostly follows this, allowing him to have a number of "first human beings," depending on location.
The Athenians in particular were insistent that their ancestors had not come to Attica from elsewhere, but were autochthones, "from their own soil." This notion Plato used in the "Republic" when he proposed the "philosophical myth" that members of different social classes had different mixtures of metals in their bodies.
That notion may also lie behind Hesiod's myth of the Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Races (or Ages), the last being our own, although he may be treating the idea as merely metaphorical. And he had to interpolate an Heroic Age before the Iron Age, in order to cover much of Greek mythology.
But, if the Greeks originally thought of emergence from the earth in regards to animals, it is not specified in the extant literature -- which doesn't mean that the concept didn't exist.
(By the way, C.S. Lewis has a wonderful scene of animals emerging from the soil in the world of Narnia, in The Magician's Nephew, an image I've always thought might reflect his knowledge of Greek mythology as much as it does Genesis.)
Up until comparatively recent times -- like the seventeenth century -- it was still generally believed that smalls animals, like frogs, were still generated from the earth itself, a notion that lasted in popular belief for another couple of centuries. This idea being supported by reference to the Biblical Plague of Frogs, which were said to still be produced by the Nile Flood and the soil of Egypt.
So spontaneous generation had to be refuted several times. One of the most important refutations was the demonstration that it did not apply to newly discovered microbes (as I learned in childhood from Paul de Kruif's wonderful Microbe Hunters.
Curiously, some early Rabbinic midrash (the homiletic tradition) did not accept this widespread theory of origin for the frogs of the Egyptian Plague. Faced with a Hebrew text that seemed to say that "the Frog covered Egypt" (in the singular), some proposed that they were all the offspring of a single mother, who was given credit in the words of Scripture. A more whimsical reading was that just one -- enormous -- frog covered the whole of Egypt, but this was rejected.
In the twelfth century, the great commentator Rashi dismissed all the midrashic interpretations, with the simple observation that, as in other places in Biblical Hebrew, the singular represents a totality or a great number -- so it should be read as something like "Frog-kind covered Egypt.)
*A notion picked up by Milton in "Paradise Lost" Book One, ll. 50ff, in which Satan falls for
"Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf
Confounded though immortal."
Milton, at least for poetic purposes, bought in to the theory that classical myths were a confused account of Biblical truths, and could be drawn on for specific details.
I don't recall (from commentaries) whether this application of Hesiod was his own, or was already a traditional gloss. I suspect the former, or at least that it was fairly new, because the rediscovery of Hesiod was then relatively recent. But it could have come through a Latin source, or the Church Fathers.
Is there anything showing why in ancient Greece Artemis shows up prominently in stories in which someone forgets to make a sacrifice to her? It seems to show up a lot.
Mike wrote: "Is there anything showing why in ancient Greece Artemis shows up prominently in stories in which someone forgets to make a sacrifice to her? It seems to show up a lot."It does, and I've never seen an explanation. It may have become a convenient trope for storytellers, just as Thetis sometimes shows up as the "helpful goddess" in a variety of settings, after being established by Homer as a benefactor of both Hephaestus and, more remarkably, Zeus. When you need to explain a misfortune or a monster, just invoke forgetting Artemis.
The possibility that she was a late addition to the twelve Olympians, and so not regularly found in all the older rites, would appeal to an older school that tried to find religious history in the myths. This approach has had difficulties in recent years, as it became clear that another "late addition" to the official pantheon, Dionysus, was already the subject of cult in the Mycenaean period, i.e, the epoch of any real Trojan War.
There is probably a good discussion of the issue in the only modern monograph on the subject of which I am aware, Stephanie Lynn Budin's "Artemis" in the Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World series (2015), especially Chaper 6: "Artemis as Goddess of Plague and Cruelty." https://www.amazon.com/Artemis-Gods-H...
(It may have a Goodreads link, but if so it has been well hidden by the Artemis Fowl books.)
Unfortunately, I have yet to lay my hands on a copy.
The Plague reference in the chapter title, however, reminds us (or me, anyway) that she is, like her brother, Apollo, a deity whose arrows bring deadly epidemic disease to mortals (see Book I of the Iliad for Apollo in this role). She is also a huntress, and so perhaps seen as less than fully civilized. She is presented as jealous of her prerogatives, but she has this in common with the other Olympians. She is not known as a patron of heroes (unlike her sister and fellow-Virgin, Athena): in some versions of the story she is a friend of the hunter Orion, but in the end she turns on him, for any of several reasons, including the jealous need to protect her own reputation as a mighty hunter.
As she was not a patron of poets and singers, she may not have gotten a "good press" to obscure that unpleasant image on other grounds. Even some of her cults treat her as dangerous and vengeful: and the popular cult of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus, which figures in the New Testament, has what are probably non-Greek features from the cultures of Asia Minor.
Ian wrote: "The Plague reference in the chapter title, however, reminds us (or me, anyway) that she is, like her brother, Apollo, a deity whose arrows bring deadly epidemic disease to mortals."It sounds like if we still retained these mythological gods we would be blaming Artemis and some scapegoats for failing to sacrifice to her for all the COVID-19.
Speaking of hecatombs, It seems many of these myths involve cattle and cattle rustling. This would seem to highlight the importance of cattle to the Greeks, contrary to my complete lack of any modern bovine associations with Greece.
Cphe wrote: "Why sail in a chest and not a boat? What is the significance?"Hey, that is a good question. Two things come to mind that are most likely completely off base. . .
1. It seems to emphasize that mortals are just "things" to gods. Things are usually put away in storage chests for safekeeping instead of boats.
2. Maybe a chest floating around in the flood waters was less conspicuous-looking trash to a wrathful Zeus than a boat. If Zeus spotted a boat he would know there were people on board and might sink it.
Cphe wrote: "Why sail in a chest and not a boat? What is the significance?"This may be an inherited trait. The flood narrative has features which may not have been Greek to begin with. The "Ark" (KJV) or "tevah," in Genesis is probably meant to be a "box" of gofer-wood, not a ship, as it is always shown in illustrations. The fact that it was not navigable demonstrates complete dependence on God.
In fact, Latin "arca" also means "chest," and the word was adopted into English in this special usage.
However, the more ancient (Sumerian and Akkadian) Flood narratives have ships (or very large boats), and it is impossible to tell if the Biblical version was fairly common in Western Asia, or specifically Israelite.
The Genesis version was certainly known to some pagans in Roman times, but whether or not that could have influenced Apollodorus depends on his debatable date.
There may also be carry-over from the more definitely Greek story of the infant Perseus and his mother Danaë, who were enclosed in a wooden box and thrown into the sea. (We will come to their story eventually.)
Here again, there is a partial Biblical parallel: Moses is put into the Nile in another "ark" (KJV), also a "tevah," although we would probably consider this one to be a basket, as it is woven of papyrus.
David wrote: " It seems many of these myths involve cattle and cattle rustling. This would seem to highlight the importance of cattle to the Greeks, contrary to my complete lack of any modern bovine associations with Greece...."Modern Greece is better known for "small cattle," i.e., sheep and goats (especially for goat-cheese), the former producing the all-important wool: the spinning of which, in Classical times, rather fully occupied respectable Greek women.
But ancient Greece needed cattle, both to supply another critical material, leather, and, above all, to serve as plow-oxen, which were absolutely essential.* (The sacrifice of one was a major event, with extra rituals to ward off any bad consequences.)
However, herds may have been larger in the Bronze Age, in which most of the myths are set, and represented semi-portable wealth into the Iron Ancient and Archaic Greece: eventually being overtaken by cash money as a standard of value.
How serious cattle-rustling was in any period is hard to tell. It is a motif shared with other Indo-European peoples, from India and Iran in the east to Ireland in the West, so it may be a common inheritance as much as in independent development based on actual local circumstances. My guess would be that both were involved.
In India and Greece, for which we have early (and non-Christian) evidence, cattle-raiding was a matter for gods, as well as heroes.
Indra, a thunder-god and king of the gods in the hymns of the Rig Veda, is celebrated there for rescuing stolen cows (which are further identified as rain-giving clouds), sometimes with the help of a faithful dog.
In the so-called Homeric Hymns (in the Homeric meter, but by a variety of poets) there is a "cattle-raid" in which the new-born god Hermes steals his adult brother Apollo's cattle: but unlike the stories of Herakles, and the reminiscences of Nestor, let alone the Veda, it is not treated seriously.
*Digression:
In modern times, well into the twentieth century, Greek farmers depended instead on more efficient mules for plowing their fields. These were mostly seized by the German occupiers during World War II, to serve as pack animals, and at the end of the war Greece faced a long-term shortage of an essential part of its agriculture.
Fortunately, this came to the attention of some US officials who were trying to figure out what to do with a mule surplus -- the government had gone into mule-breeding on a huge scale to supply pack-animals for the army (especially in rough terrain where trucks were useless) and at the end of the war they were left with a herd the military didn't need. They couldn't even be sold without undercutting the remaining commercial breeders (who had enough trouble with mechanization taking over farming, especially after, at the end of the war, factories went back to producing tractors.)
They proposed giving the surplus mules to Greek farmers, solving two problems.
The Greek farmers were happy to get them, and they were the biggest, strongest, mules that they had ever seen, but they had yet to be broken to harness, so it wasn't all smooth sailing.
I'm not sure where I read it at, but I was under the impression that Greece was ecologically much different in antiquity, and that it was eventually over-forested, which caused it to be less than ideal for agriculture. I could be wrong about all that, but it sticks in my head for some reason.Large(r) herds of cattle might have been possible in the past, and subsist in myths, but were unsustainable in later years
The Greek eco-system has certainly deteriorated since antiquity, but it was already under stress in Classical times. In fact, a serious case has been made that soil erosion was already at least a regional problem for the Mycenaeans.How much plowing slopes was responsible, and how much was due to over-grazing, are problems which I suspect are now under investigation, after decades of just blaming sheep and goats for most of the problem. (Apparently they are destructive eaters, often uprooting the plants they graze on, unlike large cattle, which on the other hand need more grazing space and water.)
Plato seems to have noticed it, although he blamed the flood that sank Atlantis for stripping Greece of its soil, instead of looking to his ancestors and contemporaries, who probably were ruthlessly sacrificing trees to, for example, smelt the silver from the Sounion mines that helped drive the Athenian economy. (Ship-building timber seems to have been mostly imported.)
Other Greeks, like Herodotus, seem to have assumed that Greece was always a harsh land, producing brave and virtuous people -- unlike Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.
(They don't seem to have taken into account the huge amount of labor it took to make and keep open the canals which prevented Mesopotamia from reverting to oases in the midst of a vast desert. And life in Egypt wasn't all that easy, with endless labor to control the Nile flood so that it fertilized the fields instead of washing them away.)
Cphe wrote: "They didn’t seem to place a lot of emphasis on animals it seems.The number 9 seems to be of significance but I'm at a loss as to why."
Some additional information on the number 9, from the third edition (August 2020) Apostolos N. Athanassakis' translation of The Homeric Hymns, in the annotations to the Hymn to Demeter:
"[mourning] and expiatory rites lasted for nine days. Three and its multiples were frequently employed then as even now. Thus the Graces were three, the Muses nine, the Olympian gods twelve, and so on. .... When Apollon attacks the Achaean camp with his pestiferous arrows, he does so for nine whole days (Iliad I.53)."
So the pattern is more consistent than I realized.
David wrote: "Speaking of hecatombs..."I intended to mention that hecatombs, supposedly a sacrifice of a hundred oxen, are frequently mentioned, usually without details. When they are given, the victims may be less numerous, and may include other animals. It may be an expression indicating any lavish offering. However, Athanssakis' note to its appearance in the Hymn to Apollo says:
"Hecatombs, originally sacrifices of a hundred oxen were especially connected with the worship of Apollon, and Ionian communities named a month, Hekatombaion, after the festival of Apollon Hekatombaios."
From other sources, I know that the cities in question did not all give the name to the same month, so its position in the year changed from place to place. Just one of the little joys of trying to make sense of ancient literature.
Cphe wrote: "I imagined it would have been an arid area and they would have had to grow feed for cattle which wouldn’t have been feasible or viable"Although it is archaeologically out of date, and antiquated in some of its approach, Alfred Zimmern's "The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens" (first edition 1911: fifth revised edition 1931: Galaxy Book reprint, 1961) has a good description of the pastoral and agricultural prospects of in Greece, going back to the Archaic period, partly by way of Homer and Hesiod. It is available from the Internet Archive: a clean copy is https://archive.org/details/greekcomm...
It contains interesting reflections on little-mentioned things, like the use of caves as shelter for flocks and herds (as hinted in the Polyphemus episode of the Odyssey).
For all of those who are a bit put off by this book's handbook style I have a question. I suggest the level of detail we are given is somewhat similar to the style of the bible, especially the old testament. We get a vague, "In the beginning", people created out of the earth, clay and stones, a great flood and restart of humanity, a ton of beggetting, and other basics of certain events, some more cohesive than others.If you were in a college course with an assignment to write an essay in the form of a sermon, what story, or aspect of a story would you pick and what would the message of that sermon be?
I'm not answering the question directly, because what I would say might be considered cheating: I've already experienced "The Gospel at Colonus," an African-American musical rendition of Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus," much of which comes across like a dramatized sermon, and the rest as a church service (Pentecostal, according to some sources). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gos...I saw the original-cast PBS "Great Performances" televised version, which in theory is available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001B1Q3EO?...), but is absurdly expensive -- it seems to be "out of print" (or whatever the phrase is for DVDs).
However, there are other versions accessible on YouTube.
I finished this section today and enjoyed it. I was thrilled to see three names which I knew about, Circe , Medea and Alcestis. I read books about them this year only.I know nothing about Greek Literature, whatever is my knowledge about it is from various works of English literature which are based on them.
Earlier this year I read Medea by Euripides.
Alcestis’s mythology appears in a thriller The Silent Patient.
But I must say, the book seems like directory of who married whom and begot whom , I would like to know about a book which provides more than this.
Nidhi wrote: "But I must say, the book seems like directory of who married whom and begot whom , I would like to know about a book which provides more than this...."Unfortunately, Apollodorus is the most complete and reliable compendium of Greek myths to survive from the ancient world. Reliable modern equivalents tend to be a bit dry themselves, like Robin Hard's "Handbook of Greek Mythology," itself a revision of the exceedingly dry work of H.J. Rose early in the twentieth century.
More popular, and accessible, but less complete or reliable, versions are the ever-popular Bulfinch's Mythology (properly "The Age of Fable") which is very Victorian, and its perpetual rival, Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," which is aimed rather directly at younger readers (or at least is often assigned as a "safe" textbook in Junior High classes).
Hamilton is short, so she had to be very selective, and the information you want may not be there. Bulfinch is more comprehensive (although he also leaves out a lot). But he uses the Roman names of the gods (so Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, instead of Zeus, Hera, and Athena), standard in English literature through the nineteenth-century, which can be disconcerting if you aren't used to them.
It is worth getting used to them, though, since the most extensive (although still selective) ancient literary version of classical mythology is "Metamorphoses" ("Transformations") by the Roman poet Ovid. This runs from the creation of the world to the Roman Empire.
It has always been popular -- the Middle Ages saw "Ovid Moralized," with allegorical interpretations of the (mis)deeds of the gods, and Golding's Elizabethan translation may have been a favorite book of Shakespeare (although some of the resemblances in his works might be his own school translations, based on the same elementary sources...).
There are a number of good translations out there (and some less appealing ones -- I haven't gone over the list for years, so I won't try to pick out any for you, with an exception below.)
As for availability, Bulfinch can be found in free and cheap Kindle editions, which is an advantage over Hamilton, whose work is still in copyright, and currently is available at a range of prices for different editions.
A very cheap complete Ovid for Kindle, with Latin texts included, is the "Delphi Complete Works of Ovid (Illustrated)," but I would avoid it: it has two undistinguished translations of the Metamorphoses, one in verse, the other, with "explanations" attached, in prose. I found it a considerable disappointment. It does have some pretty illustrations.
Thank you Ian for such detailed answer for my query, I will definitely read Ovid’ Metamorphosis.
Nidhi wrote: "But I must say, the book seems like directory of who married whom and begot whom , I would like to know about a book which provides more than this."I can recommend two that I am enjoying immensely right now supplying much dramatic filler without criminal amounts of poetic license for the work we are reading:
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry
Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry
I highly recommend the audio book editions ready by Stephen Fry himself. I happen to like the actor/narrator quite a bit and he does a great job sprinkling in a little humor, and doing a very good job explaining the very enlightening etymology of terms, many still in use today, and seems as good as anyone else identifying possible actual locations where some of these events supposedly occurred. I have not finished Heroes yet, but it looks like he will be covering most all of Greek mythology transparently drawing from many sources, but includes many footnotes for those inclined to read them. I wouldn't call it, authoritative, but I haven't noticed any egregious misrepresentations, and its about as engaging a work as you will find on the subject.
At one point Fry adds this bit of advice, which we would all benefit from taking for this work:
A lot of names will come at you now like quills shot from a porcupine; but don’t worry, the important ones will stick.
Nidhi wrote: "Thank you Ian for such detailed answer for my query, I will definitely read Ovid’ Metamorphosis."Nidhi, please feel free to read Ovid along with this group's discussion posts when we read it back in the summer of 2013. It can be found here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...
The Bibles has sections as dry as Apollodorus, but they are just for linking one set of rich stories to another--like the generations between the Flood and Abraham. Apollodorus seems like a Wikipedia article from the quill-and-papyrus era.
Roger wrote: "Apollodorus seems like a Wikipedia article from the quill-and-papyrus era...."That is a fairly good comparison (and I think a much better appreciation than the critics who think it was aimed at school-children).
In their translation, as "Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology," R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma make a good case for it being a handbook for the well-educated but busy, who can't take the time to re-read a whole Greek tragedy to find what they want -- and, of course, for teachers, who would often want a quick run-down of the facts for the same reason.
Wikipedia fills those roles (among a great many others): especially if the reader is willing to follow up the links to other articles, in the text and at the end.
Nidhi wrote: "Thank you Ian for such detailed answer for my query, I will definitely read Ovid’ Metamorphosis."Delighted to have helped. If you check the previous discussion of it, you will find some comments on various translations, which will be more helpful than mine would be (at least at the moment).
Cphe wrote: "The number 9 seems to be of significance but I'm at a loss as to why."Returning to this topic: Andrew Ford, in Homer: The Poetry of the Past (the Kindle edition of which is currently free), notes an instance I had not seen as particularly relevant, and another that I had probably never noticed, but which look more significant together:
"We may note too that as Homer [in the "Iliad"] took up his tale in the ninth year of the war, Calchas intervenes in the plague after nine days." (Chapter 1, note 91.)
For those not currently up on the "Iliad," Calchas is the Greek prophet who, in Book One, insists that he be promised protection by the army before revealing that King Agamemnon is personally responsible for provoking Apollo into sending the plague that is slaughtering the Greeks.
As with his counterpart Teiresias in "Oedipus Rex" (in Greek "Oidipous Tyrannos," Oedipus the Dictator), this Greek "prophet" hesitates to say something that will impugn or offend the powerful. They are soothsayers, and are not, like a Biblical prophet, commissioned to deliver Divine Truth, whether anyone wants to hear it or not. Sometimes things get muddled in translation.
(If we had more examples of Greek prophets at work, as in the multitude of lost tragedies, or the early epics, a really systematic comparison to the Biblical literature might be interesting.)
Ian wrote: "Cphe wrote: "The number 9 seems to be of significance but I'm at a loss as to why."Returning to this topic: Andrew Ford, in Homer: The Poetry of the Past (the Kindle edition of wh..."
Demeter searches for her daughter for nine days until Hekate takes her to Helios to learn of her daughter's fate.
Nine is also the number associated with birth/rebirth.
Thanks. I'd missed that on Demeter (and I'd just re-read the Homeric Hymn on the subject.)The relationship of nine to birth in Greek literature would be expected by us, but I would like a citation: the Greeks, who used an inclusive count, which we find confusing, seem to have thought of ten months of pregnancy. (This practice is sometimes normalized in translation, but sometimes not, which is doubly confusing).
I am lurking as I absorb all this wonderful discussion on a topic - mythology - I am determined to study at length... but right now I am a wide-eyed amateur in awe of the knowledge I encounter here. I have read Joseph Campbell's 4 volume set of Masks of God (I am currently working my way slowly through The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology. And I am also, like David, enjoying Stephen Fry's Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, which seems to be a wonderful accompaniment to this discussion.. I have ordered Apollodorus' encyclopedia, but I find this discussion very dynamic in the meantime.
And I would also like to add that I too look forward to some shared ideas of what sort of symbolism and metaphor, and meaning, these myths contain. It occurred to me that Jung might be a good source for that sort of information. Also, thank you Tamara for your discussions of Persephone and Hestia. Fry mentions that Hestia was important when a family and community gathered around the only single source of heat, giving her the lovely association of "heart" of a matter, as well as "hearth"...
Janice (JG) wrote: "I am lurking as I absorb all this wonderful discussion on a topic - mythology - I am determined to study at length... but right now I am a wide-eyed amateur in awe of the knowledge I encounter here..."Thank you for the thoughtful post, Janice. I think much of the symbolism will come by way of psychology. You mentioned Jung. I think we may soon be mentioning Freud's Oedipus complex as well. I suppose psychology also has something to say about Cronos the son castrating father Ouranos.
There is also and abundance of supplementary reading out there on the internet. I found this article which had this among many other things to say:
Zeus married “Metis, whose name means idea. From this union Athena was born, growing in Zeus’s head, from where she jumped into the world” (Hamann, 2004, p.296). This is the way ancient Greeks connected instinctively the process of thinking with the head and, implicitly, the brain. Humorists, in exchange, view it as the capacity of the cognitive labor, the genesis of an idea (Athena), to generate head-aches (for Zeus, her father, or, in other words, the “author”). In conclusion, Athena “symbolizes, most of all, psychological creation, the synthesis, the socialized intelligence” (Virel, 1965, p.104). Therefore, the words of Horatius, the poet, remained famous: “Tu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva” – “Nothing will you be able to say or do without the help of Minerva (Athena)” (Mitru, 1996).
https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/e...
The Hamaan quotation is debatable. To begin with, "Metis" did not mean "idea," but "wisdom," "skill," or "craft ." I think that this would still work, but how commonly the ancient Greeks associated the head, let alone the brain, with thought is disputable(Also, "idea" in our sense is derived from Plato, for whom it meant a form or image, especially as received by the mind from a higher reality, so phrased this way the position wouldn't have made much sense even for many educated people in antiquity.)
Those early philosophers who had any (surviving) opinion on the matter do seem to have located thought in the head (where the main sense organs are conveniently located, although this may not have influenced them).
But Aristotle, probably with some popular opinion behind him, associated thinking and emotion with the heart.
(For one thing, it was the only internal organ that could be felt to respond to mental conditions, like fear and excitement.)
This was corrected, in the short term, by his immediate successors, and by Alexandrian physicians who experimented with animals, and concluded that both sensory response and volitional actions resided in the brain. But Aristotle's opinion was widespread, and ultimately dominated Arabic and European thought on the matter in Middle Ages.
For example, for a long time physiological views treated the brain as similar to the lungs, as spongy devices critical for "cooling the blood," but with no activity of their own.
(The thermodynamic problems of cooling anything in an enclosed space like the skull were of course beyond their apprehension. The difference between cooling and oxygenation likewise would take a couple of thousand years to be ironed out.)
The issue is much more complicated than I have indicated, and one could probably argue that association of the head and thought was a commonplace in some Greek opinions, and could have influenced the early mythology, as seen in Hesiod.
For a comprehensive review of this, and a great many other questions, see The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, by R.B. Onians. Unfortunately (or maybe not) I no longer have a copy from which to cite the evidence (much of which is given in the original Greek, anyway, and has to be looked up in translations by most of us).
Some possible interpretations for Metis and Athena:Metis represents wisdom. By swallowing her, Zeus is appropriating the wisdom associated with the female. I think it can be argued that in swallowing her, he subordinated/suppressed the wisdom she represents.
Athena, like Eve, has the distinction of not being born of woman. She emerges fully grown from Zeus head, garbed in battle armor and shouting her battle cry. She is born of the male, is associated with the male, and always sides with the patriarchy. She is very much her father’s daughter. She denied the role of the mother, ranking patriarchal principles above maternal bonds, as in the trial of Orestes where she cast the deciding vote to free Orestes.
Tamara wrote: "Some possible interpretations for Metis and Athena:Metis represents wisdom. By swallowing her, Zeus is appropriating the wisdom associated with the female. I think it can be argued that in swallo..."
This response has turned into an essay, as I kept seeing more that was cryptic, and had to be explained. I apologize for the length. But my point about Athena otherwise would have been left as a bare assertion, explaining little.
I haven't brought this up before, because it is largely tangential to Greek mythology, but Athena's combination of characteristics -- association with royal power and thought, with war, and with production (especially, but not exclusively, the weaving of cloth, regarded as especially "women's work") -- fits in rather neatly to the comparative mythology of the French scholar Georges Dumézil, on whom see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges... for a reasonably good rundown of his life, and his very complex theories.
According to Dumézil's reconstructions, early (even Proto-) Indo-European culture divided activities, and the natures of the gods, into three parts: Sovereignty, which included both orderly law and magical powers: Force, primarily but not exclusively war: and "fecundity," i.e. all forms "production," both natural -- notably including sex -- and artificial, such as metal-working.
Athena's diverse roles fit the pattern very neatly (it is sometimes forgotten that she is a weaver and patron of weaving), and she would correspond to the occasional trivalent goddesses and heroines in other mythologies.
Sometimes each function had its own characteristic symbols, such as colors, usually white for sovereignty, red for force, and a dark color for fecundity. E.g., this was the case with early India, where he argued that society was divided into three and then into four Varnas, literally colors, ancestral to, but not identical with, the later developments of the Caste System. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(...)
This division, he theorized, from Indian and Iranian evidence for the most part, originally involved the social system.
Dumézil was insistent that it was carried over into heroic mythology, with mortal characters embodying one or another aspect of the Functions, just as the gods did: the subject of his final major work, "Mythe et epopee" (1968-1973: Myth and Epic Poetry).
His early work with Greek mythology lead him to conclude that, with a couple of clear exceptions, it was too heavily mixed with non-Indo-European material to be consistently interpreted in these terms. His major sources were Roman, Norse, and Indo-Iranian (Persian and Indian, especially Avestan and Sanskrit), with extensions into Armenian and the Celtic languages, among many others.
(He noted several peculiarities in their transmission, such as that the early Germanic peoples seem to have downshifted the associations of the typically functional gods, so that Odin, besides being the King and Magician, is closely associated with war, while the thunder-god Thor, an ideal representation of force, acquired agricultural functions, e.g., a belief that thunder ripened the crops. I'm not attempting to persuade anyone of this notion in particular: he dedicated two books, and a number of articles, to the subject.)
A number of his followers have pointed out other outcroppings of I-E-type functional divisions in early Greek literature, as in the fragments attributed to Hesiod, and to much later extended passages which seem to suggest it in the background, such the social classes in Plato's Republic.
Dumézil himself interpreted the career of Heracles (Hercules) from a tripartite perspective, according to which he committed in the course of his life three "sins," or violations of the values of the three functions, for which he had to atone, thus motivating many of his characteristic activities. Dumézil drew much of his material from the account of Diodorus Siculus, the only other comprehensive treatment of the hero, but he naturally used Apollodorus as well.
A lot of Dumézil's writings were translated in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of these can be found in the Internet Archive, although a couple are 'borrow' only. His first extended treatment of Heracles was in "The Destiny of the Warrior," but it was revised, with different Indian material used as one of the points of comparison, in "The Stakes of the Warrior." For Internet Archive holdings, see https://archive.org/details/texts?and...
A number of his books were bundled together as Georges Dumezil Books, which can be found on the same page.
There have been a number of attacks on Dumézil, some technical, from specialists in the many languages he surveyed, but also personal, some charging him with Fascist and even Nazi leaning. A main piece of evidence against him was an anonymous article in the 1930s, arguing that no reliance could be placed on Stalin, and that France should cultivate good relations with Mussolini's Italy in order to form a "Latin Front" against the German menace.
He was right on the first count: of course, Mussolini turned out to be equally open to German enticements. So Dumézil turned out to be about as acute overall as the French Left when it came to choosing which murderous dictator was the lesser evil. In any case, this had more to do with international politics than comparative mythology -- and at the time his main arguments had yet to crystallize.
Dumézil's works have been embraced by some on the extreme right, which does seem to lend support tot he accusations. However, rightists have failed to take into account that Dumézil was talking about culture transmitted through language, rather than race: i.e., an Indo-European is in effect anyone whose mother-tongue is a traditional Indo-European language, regardless of genetics.
I say traditional, because he felt less secure about analyzing modern Western languages for these patterns, as all of them have been subjected to complex influences, including other Indo-European ones, making it risky to try to identify genuine survivals, which was the main point of his work.
Some of his followers have been less cautious: e.g., in associating the European (and US) vogue for tricolor flags as tacitly referring to the unity of the Three Functions in society. Most of these have different historical explanations for the choice of colors, although stopping at three, instead of two, or going on to four, is an interesting "coincidence."
Ian wrote: "The Hamaan quotation is debatable. To begin with, "Metis" did not mean "idea," but "wisdom," "skill," or "craft ." I think that this would still work, but how commonly the ancient Greeks associated..."OK, I guess you cannot believe everything you read on the internet, even it when it is linked to from Honest Abe Lincoln's website. :)
Ian wrote: "Athena's diverse roles fit the pattern very neatly (it is sometimes forgotten that she is a weaver and patron of weaving),"I just read of this in Stephen Fry's, "Mythos" in the story of Arachne being turned into a spider for besting Athene at weaving. Weaving seems a strange attribute out of place with Athene's other skills and inclinations. However a note in Graves adds some clarity as to possibly why:
Her vengeance on Arachne may be more than just a pretty fable, if it records an early commercial rivalry between the Athenians and the Lydio-Carian thalassocrats, or sea-rulers, who were of Cretan origin. Numerous seals with a spider emblem which have been found at Cretan Miletus—the mother city of Carian Miletus and the largest exporter of dyed woollens in the ancient world—suggest a public textile industry operated there at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. For a while the Milesians controlled the profitable Black Sea trade, and had an entrepôt at Naucratis in Egypt. Athene had good reason to be jealous of the spider.Curiously the story of Arachne does not seem to appear in The Library but does appear in works by the Roman poets, Ovid and Virgil.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (p. 78). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Graves' speculation about Lydians and Carians, and Cretan rulers, is just that: speculation. But offered as received facts, which is one reason I do not recommend Graves to novices (or pretty much anyone else). I went into this at length on the Backgrounds and Translations thread, including why his summaries themselves are sometime unreliable in detail.The fact that no one before Ovid seems to have known the story may suggest that it was of very late, perhaps even of Alexandrian, origin: especially since there seems to have been a vogue for transformation stories in that milieu, as evidenced by a collection by Antoninus Liberalis. which amounts to a concise Greek forerunner of Ovid.
As observed in the Anthology Of Classical Myth: "Antoninus Liberalis’ Collection of Metamorphoses (Metamorphoseon Synagoge) presents short prose summaries of transformation myths found in earlier writers, particularly the poets of the Hellenistic era." (The Anthology contains a representative collection.)
If it was Hellenistic in origin, the story of course would not necessarily reflect Athenian adoration of their patron goddess, or anything in particular about Athenian history.
Athena's response is not out of character, however. For one example, in some versions of the story, Medusa was the only mortal Gorgon (out of three), because she had been a virgin priestess of Athena, but, when she was raped by Poseidon, Athena decided to punish the victim by turning her into a monster. (Punishing Poseidon was plainly out of the question....)
In full accounts, when Perseus beheaded her, the flying horse Pegasus emerged from Medusa's body -- presumably the offspring of Poseidon, who was closely associated with horses (in Athens he was a patron god of the cavalry). Along with the human-shaped Chrysaor, "golden swordsman," about whom nothing else seems to be known.
Ian wrote: "Graves' speculation about Lydians and Carians, and Cretan rulers, is just that: speculation."The remarks regarding Graves were indeed made. However, being the novice in question, I unable to tell what is more or less speculative in his work and I know it cannot all be speculation. I reasoned anything I threw out there in error would be quickly corrected. Thanks for that.
I still wonder though if there is some less speculative reasoning or explanation for why Athene is given the role of goddess of weaving. It seems out of place with her warrior-like appearance, being the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, and her duties as patron to Athens, other cities and heroes. It seems like trying to imagine General Patton as an master quilter.
I am tempted to suggest that the association was also Hellenistic, but I don't think that would survive scrutiny. It may seem strange to us, but if Dumezil is right, something like weaving should belong to the trivalent goddess, to go with Wisdom (First Function), War (Second Function), and Fecundity (Third Function).
She was also associated with potters and smiths, by way of Prometheus and Hephaistos (the latter a purely Third-Function character, the former probably more of a tutelary daimon, than Hesiod's tortured Titan).
As a virgin goddess, Athena would not have fit in well as a guarantor of human fertility, let alone that of animals* -- although another virgin godess, Artemis, was called on for help by women in childbirth. Her most obvious connection to fertility was her patronage of the olive tree, which provided a main Athenian export (olive oil), but this was probably hard to ritualize in the city proper, instead of the Attic countryside.
However, in Athenian ritual in particular she was closely associated with weaving, an important part of production in an area that made most of its own cloth. Two major festivals involved the ceremonial delivery of a new robe (peplos) for her cult images, each woven by aristocratic maidens specifically as an offering.
To quote Wikipedia:
"Every four years, the Athenians had a festival called the Great Panathenaea that rivaled the Olympic Games in popularity. During the festival, a procession (believed to be depicted on the Parthenon frieze) traveled through the city via the Panathenaic Way and culminated on the Acropolis. There, a new robe of woven wool (peplos) was placed on either the statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheum (during the annual Lesser Panathenaea) or on the statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon (during the Great Panathenaea, held every four years)."
The article follows the long-favorite interpretation of the Parthenon frieze as a depiction of the peplos procession, but, judging from Wikipedia on the Parthenon Frieze, this has apparently gone out of favor, or at least been severely challenged: hence "believed to be depicted."
*There is a also a myth in which Athena is almost a mother of the first king of Athens, although his actual parents are Hephaistos and Gaia (the fertile earth, as a sort of surrogate) -- but I'll save that for another occasion.
Weaving seems to me to fit Athena perfectly. It requires skill, intelligence, and artistry, and it's necessary for civilized society.
Apparently Athene is the goddess of craftspeople and artisans. I was just having trouble reconciling that with her martial persona.
David wrote: "Apparently Athene is the goddess of craftspeople and artisans. I was just having trouble reconciling that with her martial persona."Don't know that an answer is provided, but for fun, you might google "why link war and weaving" and scan what results. I have no idea how authentic/valid the info is, but I was fascinated by the Egyptian goddess of war and weaving, including the "word"/symbol linkages. Creation and death/funerary contrasts/linkages. The discussions also broach the differences between defensive wars and offensive wars. Weaving worthy of protection, even while target for acquisition. But this ventures into the morphs of icons/god-figures across cultures. Yet also gateways to the wars of commerce versus those of arms?
Hi friends, I want suggestion regarding translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Allen Mandelbaum how is he? I have unread copies of Inferno and Aeneid translated by him, seems good to me but i don't know any other translator, if you have read him please tell me.
It has been more than a decade since I paid close attention to the Metamorphoses, and I'm only familair with Mandelbaum's version by reputation, but back in 2004 I reviewed, with reference to others, a then-recent translation by Michael Simpson The Metamorphoses of Ovid.It has more than one Amazon page: for an active one, see
https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-...
For my review only, see
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1558493999
I mention there a review by a classicist: since Goodreads allows URLs, see https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004.0...
The important thing about the Simpson translation is that it has a commentary, which is very useful. Ovid throws a lot at the reader, and assumes considerable knowledge of basic Greco-Roman mythology, and ancient culture in general. An intelligent guide is useful.
Another translation with (a shorter) commentary (which I mention in the review), which is less expensive, is by A.D. Melville for Oxford World's Classics. I don't particularly like it, though. The only reviews I have been able to find are on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-...
Thanks Ian. I read your review. And I will remember to follow threads of this book ( read by this group in 2013). I like the detailed discussions of this group.
While looking around on Amazon, I discovered that the old (1955) verse translation by Rolfe Humphries, which I read years ago, has been reissued (2018) with annotations by J.D. Reed. I am seriously considering buying it, although I've been doing too much of that recently.It is available on Kindle, so if you try the first book, and find you can't stand Rolfe Humphries' verse, and don't find the annotations useful, you can probably return it painlessly.
https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-...
A Goodreads friend, who once studied "Metamorphoses" in a class, remarks (slightly paraphrased) that: '... having notes is very important when it comes to Ovid. There are so many witticisms, and puns, and jokes, and rhetorical tricks, it would be a shame to merely read it for “plots” or contents.'
She adds: 'The Raeburn translation (Penguin Classics) that is designed for non-academic general readers, and is in verse (in hexameter!). Raeburn did made an effort to make it accessible, and there’s a prose “explainer” or overview at the beginning of each of the 24 Books.
'If I didn’t have supplementary materials and an instructor, this is probably the version I would recommend.'
She adds that Raeburn admittedly altered the material to make allusions, etc., clearer to the modern reader, and edited out repetitions, wish somewhat clouds over Ovid's rhetoric.
The class text she used was the Martin translation, with an introduction by Bernard Know which she really liked. She also compared it at the time to Humphries' translation.
She finally notes that: '... when I was studying it, I found a pre-print “proof” PDF of Genevieve Liveley‘s Ovid's 'Metamorphoses': A Reader's Guide just by googling it, and it’s pretty great — it walks you through a lot of the implicit details that would not be clear to readers not familiar with Roman poetic conventions, Latin puns, etc etc. So that’s another thing I would highly recommend if someone is reading it without a tutor.'
Unfortunately, I can't find the book in print, but PDF Drive offers a free download: https://www.pdfdrive.com/ovids-metamo...
Hope this helps.
Classics and the Western Canon
Books mentioned in this topic
The Metamorphoses of Ovid (other topics)Anthology Of Classical Myth (other topics)
The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (other topics)
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (other topics)
The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology (other topics)
More...
We get a decidedly undramatic one paragraph summary of our recent read of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, spoiler included.
Deucalion, Pyrrha, and the great flood
The Greek version of the flood story. Instead of Noah and his family, we get Prometheus’ son, Deucalion and Deucalion’s wife, who is also his niece, repopulating the earth. Nothing is mentioned about the animals, which if you ask me, would have only introduced a lot more technical problems to the story that it doesn’t need. Is there anything significant to the 9 days and nights of the flood?
The immediate descendants of Deucalion
More begats.
Ceux and Alycone; the Aloads; Endymion
More begats including Endymion, who chose to sleep forever, never aging or dying. What a strange wish.
Early Aetolian genealogies; Evenos and Marpessa
More offspring, including Marpessa, who chose the mortal Idas over Apollo because she feared Apollo would leave her when she grew old. Do you agree with her choice?