Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (25 page)

 

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f your introduction to Greek history and classic mythology came from watching the opening-night ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, you may be understandably befuddled. The panoramic view of these myths and the achievements of one of history’s most remarkable civilizations unfolded in a sort of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade merged with a “toga party.” In a badly costumed pageant of gods and warriors, centuries of myth and some of the most significant moments in Western history rolled by on floats. Above it all floated the figure of Eros, god of love, suspended like an awkward Peter Pan wishing he were somewhere else.

Those opening Olympic moments may be blissfully forgotten. But set against the magnificent remains of Athens’ Golden Age, the 2004 Olympic games did provide a stunning reminder of an extraordinary moment in world history—a breathtaking glimpse of the glory that had been Greece. Those marble ruins in downtown Athens and the modern Olympic games are vestiges of that glory. The remnants of the Parthenon pulse with what was once the heart of Athens, a magnificent temple celebrating its patron goddess, Athena. And while they barely resemble their ancient predecessors, the modern Olympics are a bloated version of the competitions once dedicated to Zeus, king of the gods of Mount Olympus. The ancient world’s longest-running show, the original Olympics—which, like the modern Super Bowl, attracted thousands of spectators for several days of sports, drinking parties, and whoring—took place every four years for more than twelve hundred years. And you thought
Cats
had a long run!

Yet the pinnacle of Greek civilization that produced those exquisite ruins on that hill in Athens was but a passing moment in human history some 2,500 years ago. It was a relatively brief episode in the march of humanity, but one that changed everything. Ancient Greece had a profound, unique, and lasting impact on the Western world. Like it or not, Western civilization was born in Greece.

As Greek-born writer Nicholas Gage described it in
The Greek Miracle
, “In the fifth century before Christ, an unprecedented idea rose from a small Greek city on the dusty plains of Attica and exploded over the Western Hemisphere like the birth of a new sun. Its light has warmed and illuminated us ever since…. The vision—the classical Greekidea—was that society functions best if all citizens are equal and free to shape their lives and share in running their state: in a word, democracy…. The concept of individual freedom is now so much a part of our spiritual and intellectual heritage that it is hard to realize exactly how radical an idea it was. No society before the Greeks had thought that equality and freedom of the individual could lead to anything but disaster.”

The Greek—or more precisely, Athenian—concepts of government by the people, trial by jury, and the first real notion of human equality (limited, to be sure; women and slaves, for the most part, didn’t count) mark the true beginnings of the Western democratic tradition. What we call science and the humanities—including biology, geometry, astronomy, history, physics, philosophy, and theology—were also essentially invented by the Greeks. In the spoken and written arts, these ancient people introduced and perfected epic and lyric poetry, as well as tragic drama. In their art and architecture, the Greeks created an ideal of beauty that has dominated the Western world. And these ideals of beauty were reflected in the mythology they created.

“The world of Greek mythology was not a place of terror for the human spirit. It is true that the gods were disconcertingly incalculable. One could never tell where Zeus’s thunderbolt would strike. Nevertheless, the whole divine company…were entrancingly beautiful with a human beauty, and nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying.”

These are the words of Edith Hamilton, perhaps the greatest promoter of Greek myth in our lifetime. Largely due to generations of students having had her book
Mythology
on their school reading lists, many people instinctively think of Greek myths when they hear the word “myths.” Hamilton’s 1942 introduction to these classic stories provided the standard for a long time.

In those two words—“human beauty”—Edith Hamilton may have best summarized what we consider the Greek ideal. But Hamilton’s romanticized notion of Greek myth, as well as the traditional vision of Greek culture and history, have undergone serious revision of late. Recent scholarship has shone a light on some other aspects of the classical world. And Edith Hamilton’s worshipful tone ignores some nasty realities. The Greek gods of Olympus may have been “entrancingly beautiful,” as Hamilton wrote. But their stories were filled with as much cruelty, violence, incest, adultery, sibling rivalry, and venality as any of the earlier myths of Egypt or Mesopotamia—myths which the Greeks clearly borrowed and then revised to suit their needs.

The vision of idealized Greek marble figures, perfectly painted urns, and beautiful gods and goddesses delighting in cups of ambrosia is only part of the picture. It overshadows a more complex view of Greece, in which war and conquest, human sacrifice and slavery all played a part. This dark underbelly of the Greek past shows up in its myths, just as it does in the great Greek literature that emerged from them.

There is, however, another reality reflected in the story of Greece and its myths. More than in any other ancient culture, the mythic tradition in Greece is a grand story in which, in the words of Voltaire, “men passed from barbarism to civilization.” The Greek poets and playwrights reshaped and recast the brooding, violent ancient stories of feuding, spiteful gods and flawed heroes into the poetic epics and drama of an emerging social order that profoundly influenced Western civilization. The Greek myths permeated the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
of Homer, which form the core of the Western literary tradition. Also based largely in the Greek mythic traditions were the great Greek dramas, highlighted by the three playwrights of the Athenian Golden Age—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose works have influenced writers for more than 2,500 years and are still staged around the world.

Before the “Greek Miracle”—as this extraordinary period of cultural and social ferment is called—sculpture in such places as Egypt and Mesopotamia mostly showed stiff, unapproachable gods and kings, often on a monumental scale. But in the hands of Greek sculptors, the divine became human, for example, in the form of a discus thrower perfectly frozen in action. On pottery and vases, Greek painters depicted not only the gods and heroes, but ordinary women of delicacy and beauty serving food and drinks. (They also made an art of obscenely painted drinking cups, of a sort not usually displayed in modern museums, portraying the popular wine-and-sex parties called symposia. But that’s another story.)

Greek architects created a classical sense of scale and beauty still considered the standard for great and important buildings. These poets, playwrights, and sculptors transformed Greek arts, and in doing so, changed the basic view of humanity, elevating the human form to the nearly divine.

At the same time, their philosophers and early scientists, rooted in the same ancient ideas of gods and religion, pushed the envelope of what human reason could discern. In this Greece, humanity was no longer helplessly trapped in a world in which people existed to serve the gods. At this unique moment in human history, the gods were glorified. But the Greeks also realized that, as the philosopher Protagoras put it, “Man is the measure of all things.”

That was the glory of Greece.

Where did the Greeks get their myths?

Two of the most famous goddesses in Greek myth make their debuts on the mythical stage as fully formed and perfect adults—one usually naked, and the other in battle armor. Aphrodite—you know, the one on the half-shell—is the goddess of love, and she emerges full-blown from the sea, au naturel but with strategically placed long locks, in one of the most famous artistic depictions of her birth. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, is born in full battle regalia, emerging from the head of her father Zeus when another god hits him on the head with an ax.

People seem to have the same idea about Greek myths—that somehow, they were created full-blown, in just the form we know them today, crafted from the genius of some anonymous poet or philosopher. But ancient myths, as their history in Egypt and Mesopotamia prove, aren’t that simple. Over the course of centuries, myths are invented, told, and then start to travel. As they make the rounds, they are borrowed, reshaped, and retold—often to fit a very local agenda. Like old wine in new bottles, or reality shows that originate in England and get picked up by American networks, ancient myths sometimes resurfaced with a different name and a changed face. It was no different in Greece, where the origins of the myths—and the religion they spawned—serve as a fascinating reflection of Greek history.

Recent discoveries from the worlds of archaeology and literature make it clear that what evolved into Greek mythology was a mélange—like some fusion cuisine—of some existing local stories with bits and pieces borrowed from other Near Eastern civilizations, including the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and the Phoenicians—from whom the Greeks also appropriated a writing system, later adapted as the Greek alphabet. Forced by their geography to turn to the sea, the Greeks had early on mastered trade and travel. As they ventured out around the Mediterranean ports of call, they encountered these other ancient neighbors. Eventually they brought back not souvenirs but samples of these foreign cultures and religions to what was then Greece—the hilly, rocky, northern mainland jutting out into the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Ionian Seas; a southern peninsula called the Peloponnesus; the many islands that dotted the surrounding waters; and the west coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey).

These “foreign influences” found their way into a Greece that was already a mythological melting pot. Beginning around 2000 BCE, waves of conquering invaders had swept into Greece and merged the stories of their gods with those that were already established on the Greek mainland. These bloody invasions go back to a time long before the brief Golden Age of Greece that so many students falsely equate with Greek history. The story of Greece actually plays out over a much longer span, and its civilization and mythology can be separated into five distinct periods.

The earliest known civilization to flourish in what came to be thought of as Greece was not actually Greek but a sophisticated and rather extraordinary culture called Minoan. Based on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the Minoan Period may have begun as early as 3000 BCE—around the same time as Mesopotamia and Egypt—and then suddenly and somewhat mysteriously disappeared from history around 1400 BCE. In the early twentieth century, the long-abandoned capital of Crete’s early civilization was discovered by English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in one of the most dramatic finds in history. At Knossos (or Cnossus), Evans uncovered the remains of a huge, luxurious, and graceful palace, whose walkways were paved with cobblestones. The palace was complete with ceramic bathtubs and fully functioning, flushable indoor plumbing serviced by an elaborate system of drains. Its walls were decorated with brightly painted frescoes depicting handsome, naked young men and women somersaulting over the backs of bulls, an ancient Mediterranean “rodeo” that was clearly tied into the worship of an elaborate bull cult, a vestige of the Minoans’ origins in Asia Minor. The palace may have also provided the source of one of the most significant myths in Greece, the story of the Minotaur, a fearsome half-man, half-bull that demanded human sacrifices.

Although the Minoan written language, Linear A, has not yet been fully deciphered, we know it was most likely used—as the early cuneiform was in Mesopotamia—for keeping track of trade and commercial accounts. The Minoans were among the first seagoing traders, and their ships sailed to Egypt to do business in the land of the pharaohs. Most likely the Minoan deities included a sea god whom the Greeks later called Poseidon, and an earth goddess who later became the Greek goddess Rhea.

The Minoan Age flourished until about 1400 BCE, when it more or less disappeared from history, perhaps partially crippled by a devastating volcanic eruption nearby, or conquered by new arrivals, known as the Mycenaeans. These Aryan, or Indo-European, warlords had swept into mainland Greece about five hundred years earlier, presumably coming from the steppes of the Caucasus Mountains (between the Black and Caspian Seas). A warrior race, the Mycenaeans rolled over the existing inhabitants of the Greek mainland—whose own origins are similarly mysterious—and began to fuse their own stories and beliefs with those of the people they conquered, as well as those of the Minoans they encountered on Crete. This era is called the Mycenaean Age, after Mycenae, one of the most significant cities of the period—first excavated by the famed Troy-discoverer Heinrich Schliemann in the late nineteenth century. The Mycenaean Age lasted from 1600 to about 1110 BCE, and is generally considered to be the period in which the small Greek kingdoms and the events described by Homer in the
Iliad
may have taken place. Apparently, the “Mycenaeans” may have called themselves “Achaeans,” one of the names used by Homer to describe the men who attacked Ilium—or Troy. Most scholars place the destruction of Troy around 1230 BCE, but there is considerable disagreement on that date—others argue for a later destruction, around 1180 BCE.

More widely accepted is the idea that these war-loving, chariot-driving Mycenaeans were responsible for what the modern business world might call a “hostile takeover.” When they came crashing into the Greek mainland, they apparently brought with them a set of their own, very old gods, such as the sky father, Zeus; the Earth Mother, Demeter; and Hestia, the virgin goddess of the hearth. The local farmers they encountered and subdued on mainland Greece probably worshipped an ancient Earth Mother, who became Hera. And the very stormy marriage of Zeus, the conquerors’ sky god, and Hera, the fertility goddess of the conquered locals, may actually symbolize the merger of these two ancient mythologies. The concentration of power in such cities as Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes, all of which are featured prominently in Greek myths, is another clue that many of the Greek myths and legends may have originated in their familiar form during this Mycenaean Period.