Chapter 1:The Nature of Myth 1. The Western Roman Empire

ended over fifteen hundred years ago, but the stories of classical gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman warriors and leaders, live on in the their old vigor.

2. They were bequeathed to us in the writings of the Greeks and Romans, but their names and their stories are much older than the written word .

3. The definition of myth is that myth is a traditional stories.

4. To say that a myth is a story is to say, first of all, that it has a plot, a narrative structure consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

5. Myths have characters as well as plots. In myths, the characters may be gods, goddesses, or other supernatural beings, but they may also be human beings or even animals who speak and act in the manner of human beings.

6. Another element is setting. The setting is the time and place in which the action of the story unfolds.

6. In some Greek myths, the setting is an actual city such as Athens or Thebes, or some other location familiar to the audience. In others, the setting is an obscure place: the underworld or Mount Olympus.

7. Myth transcends our everyday notions of time and space.

Myths are characterized by the presence of plot, characters, and setting. However,a myth is not just a story, but a certain kind of story, which we describe as traditional. A traditional story is one that has been “handed over” by word of mouth from one storyteller to another without the the intervention of writing.

Types of Myth

1. Divine myths (sometimes called true myths or myths proper) are stories in which supernatural beings are the main actors; such stories generally explain why the world, or some aspect of it, is the way it is.

2. Legends are stories of the great deeds of human heroes or heroines; legends narrate the events of the human past.

3. Folktales are stories whose actors are ordinary people or animals; folktales serve both to entertain the audience and to teach or justify customary patterns of behavior.

1. Divine myth: The Supernatural beings who appear as the principal characters in divine myth are depicted as superior to humans in power and splendor. Sometimes they can take on human or animal shape at will.

2. Supernatural beings are gods, goddesses, or demons with well-developed and distinctive personalities of their own.

3. The events of divine myth usually take place in a world before or outside the present order where time and often space have different meanings from those familiar to human beings.

Legend

(1) Although supernatural beings often play a part, their roles are subordinate to those of the human characters.

(2) The heroes and heroines of legend are drawn from the ranks of the nobility.

(3) Whereas divine myth is set in a different or previous world-order, legendary events belong to our own, although they took place in the distance past.

Legends can contain an element of truth. Most scholars have long thought that Greek legend does reflect major events and power relations of a historical period now known to us through its archaeological remains.

1. Folktale is more difficult to define than is divine myth or legend because of the variety of traditional stories grouped together under this heading.

2. In folktales the main characters are usually ordinary mean, women, and children rather than noble family.

3. Often the main characters in folktales have low social status, at least at the beginning of the story, and are persecuted or victimized in some way by other characters.

4. Whereas divine myths explain why the world is the way it is and legends tell what happened in the human past, the primary function of folktales is to entertain, although they may also lay an important role in teaching and justifying customary patterns of behavior.

The Study of MythThe study of myth is multifaceted. There

are many different ways in which modern scholars approach the study of myth, but they can be grouped into four general categories:

(1) The recording and compiling of a given culture’s myths

(2) In many ways, the most helpful sources for the study of ancient myths are works of literature.

1. The study of myths has much in common with the study of literature. However,the structural similarities between the original oral tale and the written work of literature in which it is recorded can be deceptive. The literary work is typically the creation of a single individual.

2. Another valuable source of information about the myths of ancient peoples is the archaeological record.

3. A second way in which scholars approach the study of myth is to examine the functions of specific myths in the context of a given society.

4. To judge a myth’s function, we must get beyond mere recording and compiling and move on to an interpretation of the myths in question.

5. Good interpretations require sensitivity and insight, as well as knowledge of the society that produced the myth.

6. A third way in which scholars study myth is to trace relationships between the myths of one culture and those of others.

Finally,some scholars involved in the study of myth are concerned with the assessment of myths. What is the deeper human significance of these old tales?

Questions of the deeper meaning and truth of myth have played an important role in the study of classical myth for many centuries.

Chapter 2: The Cultural Context of Classical Myth 1.The Early/Middle Bronze Age: Indo-European society may have been divided into three groups whose membership was determined by birth: kings and priests, warriors, and food producers.

The Mycenaean Age In the Mycenaean Age the Greeks were ruled by powerful kings.

The Dark AgeWhen Troy was destroyed by human hands about 1250 B.C., the people were raising horses and using pottery similar to that were found in Greece; the Trojans of this period may themselves have been Greeks.

Most scholars associate the destruction of 1250 B.C. with the legend of the Trojan War.

The Archaic Period(1) The Archaic Period witnessed the

emergence of the Greek polis, the politically independent city-state.

(2) Another important development during the Archaic Period was the rebirth of commerce throughout the Dark Age.

The Classical Period

1. During the latter part of the Archaic Period, Greece was threaten by a powerful rival from the East. In 508 B.C., in Athens, a remarkable development took place: the emergence of the world’s first democracy.

2. Democracy made the ordinary citizen feel that he has responsibility for his own destiny.

3. During the Classical Period the polis reached its greatest effectiveness, but also showed its worst faults.

4. Aristotle described the polis as the perfect and natural fruit of a long social evolution.

5. The Classical Period saw the development of Greek philosophy and history as powerful intellectual rivals to traditional myth.

6.The stories of gods and heroes were the common birthright of all Greece and were celebrated in painting, sculpture, song, and drama. However, they were given new meanings in the intellectual ferment of the age.

The Hellenistic Period

1. The social and political system based on the polis was crippled in 338 B.C. when Philip II of Macedon, a region to the north of Greece ove-ran the Greek city-states and imposed his will on them.

2. After his death, his son Alexander inherited the throne. Moved by the legends of the Trojan War and seeing himself as a latter-day Achilles, Alexander attacked the enormous Persian Empire.

Greek Society1. The Greeks’ dependence on the sea for commerce, transportation, and food was important in the formation of their character and had a direct influence on their social structure. The sea is an equalizer.

2. Greek cultural values can be best be understood as those emerging from team competition.

Every Greek citizen could expect at some time in his life to face the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.

The FamilyThe Greeks were monogamous; that is, offspring from one wife at a time were the man’s only legitimate heirs. The Greek word for “family” included not only the female and the young unmarried male members of the household, but also the slaves, the domestic animals, the physical house and the property.

The family had a political aspect, because even the Athenian polis

was governed by its leading families. Marriage was not based on mutual affection, but arranged between families on political and economic grounds.

Greek literature is our principal source of information about the lives of Greek women, and yet the literary works were composed exclusively by males, most of them Athenian.

BeliefThe belief that the world is pervaded by ghosts and spirits. One example is blood sacrifice, the shedding of animal or human blood in honor of a god or spirit. Such an offering was thought to be more potent than a bloodless sacrifice of fruits or material objects.

We divide the human world sharply from the natural, but to the ancient Greeks such distinctions need not be made. Animals may have human intellectual qualities, including the power of speech.

Transformation of humans into animal or natural forms is common. In Greek myth, there are only a few examples of mixtures of man and animal: the Minotaur, half bull and half man, and the Centaurs, who had human torsos but a horse’s body.

Similarly, the supernatural world easily mixes with the human. A human being may be born of a god or spirit: Achilles’ mother was Thetis, a sea nymph.

ReligionThe Greeks had many gods, who did not make the world, but dwelled within it. Zeus is their leader. The Greek gods have personalities like those of humans and struggle among each other for position and power.

Greece and Rome Classical myth comprises not just the stories of the Greeks, but also the Roman versions of those stories, and some stories native to Rome. The Romans remade Greek culture in their own image, and it was they who passed the classical tradition on to modern Europe.