Lowell Edmunds - Approaches to Greek Myth

Approaches to Greek Myth

Second Edition

Edited by Lowell Edmunds

1990, 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2014

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Approaches to Greek myth / edited by Lowell Edmunds. Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1418-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1419-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1420-1 (electronic)

ISBN-10: 1-4214-1418-X (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4214-1419-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4214-1420-1 (electronic)

1. Mythology, Greek. I. Edmunds, Lowell.

BL790.A66 2014

292.1'3dc23 2013043623

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Lowell Edmunds

Jordi Pmias

H. S. Versnel

Carolina Lpez-Ruiz

Joseph Falaky Nagy

William Hansen

Claude Calame

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood

Robert A. Segal

The quarter-century that has passed since the first edition of this book has witnessed an enormous interest in Greek mythin scholarship, the arts, and popular culture. For students and scholars, who are addressed here, excellent companions and handbooks have put on record the main ways of thinking about this always intriguing, always contested subject. These works, which I have cited again and again in my general introduction and in my separate introductions to each of the chapters, also offer bibliographical aids that this book does not aspire to reduplicate, let alone surpass.

This second edition complements the handbooks and companions, discussing at some length and in some detail eight approaches to Greek myth. Two chapters reprinted from the first edition (Versnels and Sourvinou-Inwoods) have been reedited and provided with new contextualizations in my introductions. Three chapters have been revised (those of Nagy, Hansen, and Calame, to whom I am grateful for their willingness to participate in this project). Two chapters, those on Greek and Near Eastern mythologies and on Greek myth and psychoanalysis, have new authors (Lpez-Ruiz and Segal), and a new chapter (by Pmias) gives a history of the reception of Greek myth. To these three new authors I am also grateful. All these chapters have new introductions. A chapter from the first edition has been dropped (the one on Greek myth and history, a topic considered at the end of my general introduction). The approaches discussed in these chapters will not soon cease to be of interest. These are, in the sequence in which they appear in this book, the history of myth, myth and ritual, comparative mythology (Near Eastern, Indo-European), comparative folklore, narratology, iconography, and psychoanalysis.

If the passage of time since the first edition has made possible the gains or hoped-for gains of all the revision, it has also brought a particular loss. Those who knew Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, who died in 2007, remember her brilliant, sometimes impassioned conversation. The originality and force of her mind persist in her chapter reprinted here.

Email makes everything easier except the customary expression, at this point, of gratitude to all those who helped the author or, in this case, the editor. So many messages have gone and come that it is no longer possible for me to keep track of them. To mention some names might seem deliberately not to mention others. To all I offer warm thanks. Thanks also to Susan T. Edmunds for many useful conversations and for practical advice. Finally, I thank Linda Strange, whose lynx-eyed preparation of the manuscript for the printer improved every part, I could almost say every page, of this book.

Approaches to Greek Myth

LOWELL EDMUNDS

A Greek myth is a retold story about gods and heroes and sometimes the monsters with whom they have to contend. The setting of myths is in the past, and the past has a chronology that extends from the origin of the world and the gods down through the age of the heroes, with which the present time is continuous.

Anyone could retell a myth. In Euripides Ion, serving women, visitors at Delphi with their mistress, behold the sculpture on the west pediment of the temple of Apollo. Socrates presents a record of excellence that he thinks could inspire present-day citizens to emulate their ancestors, and this excellence is the meaning he gives, in the context, to Athenian history, including the early mythical part.

To know the myths and to be able to tell them was normal. This ability is still assumed in the period of the Roman domination of Greece, as by Strabo (1st c. B.C.E.), who somewhat disprizes it, in his Geography. Contrasting the value of his own work with history and myths (muthoi), he makes the point that myths have no practical application:

As Strabos way of introducing his example suggests (a man, which in Greek is , someone), the ability to tell such stories was not special.

About two centuries later, when the knowledge of Greek myths was beginning to fade, Greeks who wanted to know about this aspect of their heritage could turn to various kinds of support. The Bibliotheca (Library) of Apollodorus (probably 2nd c. C.E.), which is our standard handbook of Greek myth, is the best-known example. While it may have had more than one purpose and more than one intended readership in its own time, it certainly bears comparison in some respects to the mythical material found in the subliterary papyri. Monique van Rossum-Steenbeek, in a study of four categories of such papyri, calls them a kind of readers digest containing noteworthy knowledge. One category is the learned list of names, of which there are several in Apollodorus. We have no way of knowing whether Apollodorus expected that any of his readers would memorize his list of suitors, but we can at least say that his presentation of such a list is flattering. His readers might, he implies, wish to learn all these names, or some of them, and in this way to display their familiarity with their cultural heritage.

The womens reference to myth-telling in Ion was prompted by the sight of sculpture in a pediment. Visual contact with Greek myth was normal and, one can assume, a daily occurrence in antiquityindeed, the primary access to myth, along with story-telling, for most persons. of this book).

Verbal sources remain the predominant ones for most students of Greek myth. Oral myth-telling, impromptu, as by the women at Delphi, or in regularized contexts like the symposium, was normal but usually went unrecorded. Some would say (this view is discussed below) that poetic performance was the primary mode of the communication of myths.

In Greek poetry, myth shows two contrary tendencies that clearly predate our earliest sources. One is system and the other is variation.