The Greek gods were not local in their interests or powers: they held sway over the whole world. Ancient Greeks had access to a huge reserve of fabulous tales about these gods’ about a very different universe, one full of not only these powerful and fierce gods, but also great but flawed mortal heroes, mighty warriors, and incredible monsters. Even their earth mated with the sky, giving them a world where both gods and humans lived side by side and sometimes even interbred, producing semi-divine offspring.
Some of these tales were spun from observing the natural world, others from strange tales from the near-east and a few from the imagination of Greek poets and sages whose names are long forgotten. These tales, spun out over time became almost a part of the fabric of everyday life, going beyond tradition, heritage, even religion, in turn becoming myth. The Greeks understood their past to have contained both myth and history; myths occured in their ancient past, on a continuous timeline with more recent historical events.
The Greek word muthos, the root of the word ‘myth’, simply meant ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ without any distinction of true or false. In many cultures, as we have seen myth was considered to be set in the ‘ancient past’, and it was easy for a society to develop its self-image by identifying closely with figures from myth. The city, or polis of Athens was a good example as it took its name from the goddess Athena, who planted an olive tree on the Acropolis to mark the land as hers when she discovered Poseidon, the god of the sea also wanted to claim it.
Foundation myths are narratives that explain the origins of places, people and institutions. They usually blended historical and mythological elements, often explaining the origins of things that still existed when the myth was told, thereby creating a sense of continuity from the mythological origin to the present day. The eighth century BC Greek poet Hesiod talked about the Five Ages of Man, seeing his age, the Iron Age, as the successor to previous ages when gods and heroes walked the earth freely.
A famous foundation myth is that of Rome itself; in mythology, Aeneas was the son of the goddess Venus (and a mortal man, Anchises). His escape from the Trojan War and voyage to Italy, and his settlement there, is the story told in Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. This was written during the Augustan period. It was from Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, whose Latin name was Iulus, that the Julian family traced its descent. The most famous member of this family was Julius Caesar. But it is with the Greeks that we are primarily interested in here, myth as we know it started with them.
The ancient Greeks wanted a sense of continuity, and they may not have actually believed their myths were true, but found it comforting if and when they chose to believe in them. Myths were also often open to reinterpretation and changed over time to suit the changes in ancient societies.
Some myths are aetiological (meaning they show the reason for something, from aition, cause), Persephone’s abduction by Hades, god of the Underworld, from her mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture gave rise to the seasons. When Persephone was with her husband in the Underworld, Demeter was so sad nothing would grow on the earth (Winter), but when her daughter returned to earth to visit her (Spring), the land became fruitful again.
Other myths are etymological (meaning they relate to the origin and historical development of words and their meanings). When Zeus decided to destroy mankind by flooding the earth, Themis instructed the two survivors, a man called Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha to repopulate earth by throwing the bones of their mother over their shoulders, whereupon they picked up stones – laas – from ”mother earth” and carried out their instructions. These stones sprouted into human beings. One of the Greek words for people is ‘‘laos”.
Greek heroes were not necessarily kind or altruistic, rather they could be self-centered, jealous and even murderous to their own, never mind the enemy. Their Gods were equally cruel, vain, capricious, and often petty, and their individual stories can be strange, delightful and horrifying. As John Carey in his Sunday Times review of Ted Hughes’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses says ” He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror.”
The goddess Athena actually picked up an entire island, Sicily, and crushed a giant to death by hurling it at him. This happened during the Gigantomachy, the mythical war between the Olympian gods and the Giants, the offspring of Gaia and Uranus, the earth and the sky. The giant in question was Enceladus, one of the most powerful of all the Giants. Enceladus fled during battle, and Athena pursued and crushed him by throwing Sicily on top of him. Enceladus is still believed to be trapped beneath the island, his angry, fiery breath is said to be the cause of the volcanic eruptions of Mount Etna, and his struggles beneath the earth are what cause the region’s earthquakes.
Sometimes the gods would intervene to help or hinder human efforts. The god Apollo, to please the priest Chryses, marched down from Mount Olympus with his bow and quiver over his shoulder and showered the Greek army camped at the walls of Troy with poisonous arrows, causing a plague that threatened to wipe out the entire Greek force. He also guided the arrow shot by Paris that struck Achilles in his vulnerable heel, leading to the great warriors death.
Other divinities caused outright havoc with their petty jealousies and spitefulness, simply mirroring the squabbles that blight human relationships. Eris, the goddess of discord, was not invited to the wedding of the mortal Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis (their child was Achilles; held upside down by his mother in the river Styx because it’s waters granted invulnerability, he received his weak spot as his heel didn’t touch the water). Determined to seek revenge, she brought a golden apple, inscribed, “To the fairest one”, which she threw into the middle of the wedding guests, of whom three of them, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, after some arguing, agreed to have Paris of Troy choose the fairest of them. Paris chose Aphrodite, she having bribed him with the most beautiful mortal woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus. So Paris carried Helen off to Troy, and the outraged Greeks sailed a thousand ships across the sea to give rise to a legend.
Euripides gave Greek Tragedy the greatest scorned woman there has ever been in a tale that still shocks. His Medea, first staged in 431 BC in Athens, sees the mortal, ambiguous and at times murderous Jason, who with the help of the ‘barbarian’ and semi-divine Medea, retrieve the Golden Fleece and settle in Corinth with her and their two boys. He then embarks on a romance with the daughter of King Creon. Medea’s revenge on Jason is harsh, she uses her skills with magic to kill the princess, the king and then murders her own two boys, sneering at Jason ” I’ve penetrated to your heart as you deserve!…The boys are dead. That will gnaw away at you”, before fleeing to Athens in a serpent-drawn chariot given to her by her grandfather, the sun-god Helios. A bereft Jason himself dies when the prow of his ship the Argo falls on his head, killing him instantly. It is a hellish end to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts.
Athena, the goddess of wisdom, war, and handicrafts was born from Zeus’ head. She famously sprang fully grown and in armour from his forehead after Zeus swallowed her mother, the Titaness Metis, whole. Aphrodite was born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus and tossed his severed genitals into the ocean. A god was rescued when still a foetus from Semele’s womb a split second before she was incinerated by a thunderbolt from Zeus. The king of the gods then sewed the foetus into his thigh where it gestated until it burst out into the world to become Dionysus, the greek god of wine and fertility.
Rape featured heavily in myth, Zeus was a prolific philanderer and turned himself into a swan to rape Leda, Queen of Sparta. He raped Antiope, the daughter of King Asopus of Boeotia because he was enchanted by her beauty, transforming himself into a satyr before attacking her. The centaur Nessus was killed by Heracles (Hercules to the Romans) when he tried to rape his wife Deianeira, yet Heracles sired a son, Telephos, when he overpowered a priestess of Athena, and Eos the goddess of dawn, abducted and raped Celaphus, the son of Hermes.
Ares’ son Tereus raped his sister in law Philomela and cut her tongue out to silence her. On discovering what her husband had done, Procne killed their son Itys and served him up as dinner to her unsuspecting husband. When the enraged Tereus chased the two women with an axe, they were turned into birds to escape him, Procne becoming a nightingale, Philomela a swallow.
It is evident that in mythology there is little sympathy for the victims of sexual assault. Instead, these victims are expected to “lay aside their wrath” and go on with their lives. The Greeks thought little of non-consensual sex if it was committed by a god, male or female.
As well as sex, myth was full of death, murder, conflict and struggle, and the violence that ran through them was a way which young men could display their masculinity. Mortals like Jason, Theseus and Peleus encountered monsters like the Scylla and hybrids like the Minotuar (the result of the Cretan queen Pasiphae’s night of passion with a bull), and even married and had children with goddesses and nymphs, producing semi-divine offspring like Achilles. Others like Ajax, Hercules, Odysseus, Cygnus and Hector, were mighty warriors but flawed. Athena humiliates Ajax because in his arrogance he thought he didn’t need the help of the gods. Reason enough as far as she was concerned. The poor girl Medusa who simply fell in love and slept with Poseidon in Athena’s temple was punished by the goddess by being turned into a Gorgon, a creature with snakes for hair, whose fearful gaze turned those who looked upon her to stone. She was decapitated by Perseus, who used her head as a weapon against his enemies, before giving it to Athena who fixed it to her shield when she went into battle.
Cruelty abounds throughout myth, Heracles struck and killed his music teacher in a fit of anger, and was driven insane by the goddess Hera so he would kill his wife and children. As penance he was ordered to carry out his twelve labours by King Eurystheus. Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and allowed an eagle to eat his liver every day for eternity as punishment for giving mankind fire, and he blinded the sage Phineus because the old man could read the mind’s of the gods, then sent the Snatchers, black-winged monsters with faces like evil hags, to steal and befoul his food, so he would starve to death. The celebrated inventor Daedalus who designed the Minotaur’s labyrinth was exiled to Greece for killing his nephew, and in Homer’s Illiad, Patroclus was exiled for the murder of his childhood friend Clysonymus over a game of dice.
Probably the most famous death is that of Acteon after he caught sight of the goddess Diana bathing in a pool. She turned him into a stag and he was torn apart by his own hounds.
Many have said that myth is nothing but history misremebered; tales that aquired certain elements of the fantastic as they grew in retelling, fire side stories embellished over the centuries. The gods were nothing but long dead kings whose achievements were magnified after their deaths to the point they were believed to be divine. That may be so, but what we do know is that these fanatstic tales, full of horror and incredible acts, brave people and monsterous creatures, have been with us for eternity giving us an escape from the mundane world and all its drudgery, to a place of imagination that is brilliantly alive with colour and vibrancy.
Sources:
Tragedy and Greek Myth, Richard Buxton
Out Of One, Many, Jennifer T. Roberts
Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Jenny March
Foundation myths and early Athens, Christine Plastow, Open University
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