Greek mythology

• 1. Introduction

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  Greek mythology began as whispered stories passed between Minoan and Mycenaean singers as early as the 18th century BC. These tales told of gods who ate their own children, of heroes who slew monsters, and of wars that lasted a decade. Long before anyone wrote them down, the myths explained why the world worked the way it did and why the people of ancient Greece behaved as they did. They placed Olympus at the center of a cosmos still taking shape, and they gave names to the fears and desires that made human life so difficult to navigate.

  What survives today comes through an extraordinary chain of sources: epic poems, vase paintings, tragedy scripts, scholarly handbooks, and fragments of papyrus pulled from Egyptian sand. The myths were never fixed in a single version. They changed as Greek culture changed, absorbed foreign influences, survived the rise of philosophy and then Christianity, and eventually traveled so deep into Western art and language that they are still with us. How all of that happened is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. How the Myths Survived

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  The only general mythographical handbook to survive from Greek antiquity is the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus. Apollodorus of Athens lived from around 180 BC to around 125 BC and wrote on mythological topics; his work may have formed the basis for this collection. Yet the Library discusses events that occurred long after his death, which is why it carries the prefix Pseudo.

  Before that handbook, the myths lived in poetry. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the earliest surviving literary sources. Hesiod, a possible contemporary of Homer, provided in his Theogony the fullest account of the earliest Greek myths, covering the creation of the world, the origin of the gods, the Titans, and the Giants. His Works and Days, a didactic poem about farming life, added the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Five Ages.

  The fifth century BC brought the great Athenian tragedians. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides drew most of their plots from the myths of the heroic age and the Trojan War. Many of the great tragic stories, including those of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Jason, and Medea, took on their classic form in these plays. The comic playwright Aristophanes also used myths in The Birds and The Frogs.

  Visual evidence filled gaps that texts left open. Geometric designs on pottery from the eighth century BC depict scenes from the Trojan cycle as well as the adventures of Heracles. Of the twelve labors of Heracles, only the Cerberus adventure appears in a contemporary literary text; the others are known from vases. In some cases, the first known representation of a myth in geometric art predates its first known representation in late archaic poetry by several centuries.

• 3. Origins of World and Gods

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  Hesiod began his Theogony with Chaos, a yawning nothingness. Next came Gaia, described as "the ever-sure foundation of all", then Tartarus, "in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth", and then Eros, "fairest among the deathless gods". Without male assistance, Gaia gave birth to Uranus, the Sky, who then fertilized her. Their union produced the twelve Titans: six males, Coeus, Crius, Cronus, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Oceanus; and six females, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Rhea, Theia, Themis, and Tethys.

  After Cronus was born, Gaia and Uranus decreed no more Titans would follow. They were succeeded by the one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handed Ones, both thrown into Tartarus by Uranus. Cronus, described as "the wily, youngest and most terrible of Gaia's children", was persuaded by Gaia to castrate his father. He did so and became ruler of the Titans with his sister-wife Rhea as consort.

  The motif of father-against-son conflict repeated when Cronus, fearing his own children would betray him as he had betrayed Uranus, swallowed each newborn. Rhea tricked him by hiding Zeus and wrapping a stone in a baby's blanket for Cronus to swallow instead. When Zeus was full-grown, he fed Cronus a drugged drink that caused him to vomit up Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, and the stone. Zeus then challenged Cronus to war. With the help of the Cyclopes freed from Tartarus, Zeus and his siblings won. Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.

  Zeus faced his own version of the same fear. After a prophecy warned that the offspring of his first wife Metis would be greater than he, Zeus swallowed her. She was already pregnant with Athena, who burst forth from his head fully grown and dressed for war. Hesiod's Theogony is not only the fullest surviving account of the gods but also the fullest surviving account of the archaic poet's function, opening with a long invocation to the Muses.

• 4. Heroes and Their Age

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  Walter Burkert noted that "the roster of heroes, again in contrast to the gods, is never given fixed and final form. Great gods are no longer born, but new heroes can always be raised up from the army of the dead." The monumental events of Heracles mark the dawn of the heroic age.

  Some scholars believe a real man, perhaps a chieftain-vassal of the kingdom of Argos, stands behind Heracles' complicated mythology. Traditionally, Heracles was the son of Zeus and Alcmene, granddaughter of Perseus. In art and literature he was represented as an enormously strong man of moderate height whose characteristic weapon was the bow, though the club appears frequently as well. Vase paintings demonstrate his unparalleled popularity; his fight with the lion was depicted many hundreds of times. He entered Etruscan and Roman mythology and cult, and in Italy was worshipped as a god of merchants and traders. Heracles also attained the highest social prestige through his appointment as official ancestor of the Dorian kings, a role that served as legitimation for the Dorian migrations into the Peloponnese.

  To the heroic age are also ascribed three great events: the Argonautic expedition, the Theban Cycle, and the Trojan War. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the only surviving Hellenistic epic, tells the myth of Jason's voyage to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis. Jason was impelled on his quest by king Pelias, who received a prophecy that a man with one sandal would be his nemesis. Jason loses a sandal in a river, arrives at the court of Pelias, and the epic is set in motion.

  The Theban Cycle deals with events surrounding Cadmus, the city's founder, and later with Laius and Oedipus at Thebes. Early epic accounts seem to have Oedipus continuing to rule at Thebes after the revelation that Iokaste was his mother, and subsequently marrying a second wife, markedly different from the tale known through Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. The generation between the Argo and the Trojan War was known chiefly for its horrific crimes, including the doings of Atreus and Thyestes at Argos.

• 5. The Trojan War's Reach

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  Greek mythology culminates in the Trojan War, fought between Greece and Troy, and its aftermath. The Trojan War cycle starts with the events leading to the war: Eris and the golden apple of Kallisti, the Judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. To recover Helen, the Greeks launched an expedition under the command of Agamemnon, king of Argos.

  The Iliad, set in the tenth year of the war, tells of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, the finest Greek warrior, and the deaths of Achilles' beloved comrade Patroclus and Priam's eldest son Hector. After Hector's death, the Trojans gained two exotic allies: Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and Memnon, king of the Ethiopians and son of the dawn-goddess Eos. Achilles killed both. Paris then killed Achilles with an arrow in the heel, the only part of his body vulnerable to human weaponry.

  Before they could take Troy, the Greeks had to steal the wooden image of Pallas Athena from the citadel. Finally, with Athena's help, they built the Trojan Horse. Despite the warnings of Priam's daughter Cassandra, the Trojans were persuaded by Sinon, a Greek who feigned desertion, to take the horse inside as an offering to Athena. The priest Laocoon, who tried to have the horse destroyed, was killed by sea-serpents. At night the Greek fleet returned, the horse opened its gates, and in the sack that followed Priam and his remaining sons were slaughtered.

  The war's reach extended far beyond Homer. The Trojan War cycle inspired metopes on the Parthenon depicting the sack of Troy. Twelfth-century European authors such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure, whose Roman de Troie dates from 1154-1160, and Joseph of Exeter, whose De Bello Troiano dates from 1183, retold the legend and fitted it with courtly and chivalric ideals drawn from Dictys and Dares rather than Homer.

• 6. Myth Challenged and Defended

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  By the sixth century BC, a few radical philosophers were already labeling the poets' tales as blasphemous lies. Xenophanes of Colophon complained that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods "all that is shameful and disgraceful among men; they steal, commit adultery, and deceive one another."

  Plato mounted the most sweeping challenge. He attacked the traditional tales of the gods' tricks, thefts, and adulteries as immoral, created his own allegorical myths such as the vision of Er in the Republic, and objected to mythology's central role in literature. He referred to the myths as "old wives' chatter". Aristotle criticized the pre-Socratic quasi-mythical philosophical approach and argued that writers who proceed in the mythical style are not worth taking seriously.

  Yet even Plato did not free himself from myth's grip. His own characterization of Socrates drew on traditional Homeric and tragic patterns. Hanson and Heath estimate that Plato's rejection of the Homeric tradition was not favorably received by the grassroots of Greek civilization. The old myths were kept alive in local cults and continued to influence poetry and provide subjects for painting and sculpture.

  During the Hellenistic period, the Greek mythographer Euhemerus established the tradition of seeking an actual historical basis for mythical beings and events. Under the Roman Empire, Stoics presented explanations of the gods and heroes as physical phenomena while Euhemerists rationalized them as historical figures. The Roman antiquarian Varro argued that there have been three accounts of deities in Roman society: the mythical account created by poets for theatre and entertainment, the civil account used by people for veneration, and the natural account created by philosophers. Cicero's De Natura Deorum remains the most comprehensive summary of this line of thought.

• 7. Western Art and Later Life

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  Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael portrayed the pagan subjects of Greek mythology alongside conventional Christian themes. Through the medium of Latin and the works of Ovid, Greek myth influenced medieval and Renaissance poets such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante in Italy.

  The English imagination was fired by Greek mythology starting with Chaucer and John Milton and continuing through Shakespeare to Robert Bridges in the twentieth century. Racine in France and Goethe in Germany revived Greek drama, reworking the ancient myths. In Britain, new translations of Greek tragedies and Homer inspired poets including Alfred Tennyson, Keats, Byron, and Shelley, and painters such as Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Christoph Gluck, Richard Strauss, and Jacques Offenbach set Greek mythological themes to music.

  American authors of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Bulfinch and Nathaniel Hawthorne held that the study of the classical myths was essential to understanding English and American literature. In more recent times, classical themes were reinterpreted by dramatists Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Giraudoux in France, Eugene O'Neill in America, and T. S. Eliot in Britain, as well as by novelists James Joyce and André Gide.

  Modern scholarly interest in Greek mythology is traced by some scholars to a double reaction at the end of the eighteenth century, when Johann Matthias Gesner began to revive Greek studies at Göttingen. His successor Christian Gottlob Heyne worked with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and laid the foundations for mythological research in Germany and beyond. About a hundred years later, Hermann Steuding published his book Griechische und römische Götter- und Heldensage in 1897, evidence that the scholarly interest had not dimmed.