A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology

Vanda Zajko, Helena Hoyle, Vanda Zajko, Helena Hoyle

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119072119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di miti e folklore

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day.

• Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day
• Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance
• Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance
• Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples

Part I
Mythography

1
Greek Mythography

Robert L. Fowler

Writing in the first century BCE, Parthenius of Nicaea, himself a poet, put together a collection of love‐stories that he dedicated to Cornelius Gallus, commonly called the creator of the Latin love elegy. Although not all the stories in his collection are set in the so‐called mythical period of Greek or Roman history, most of them are, and many of the others happen in faraway, effectively timeless places: the book is without difficulty included in any catalogue of ancient mythography. In his preface, Parthenius describes his gift in modest terms, calling it a “little note‐book” that might provide Gallus with matter for his own compositions. In doing so he sets up a relationship familiar in the genre: the mythographical handbook is a work of reference, providing the raw material – the myths – for others to adorn, rework, and interpret. The author of the handbook himself has no such pretensions; he is a humble compiler, a passive recorder of myths just as he finds them.

Of course Parthenius is being disingenuous. His collection offers much to entertain the reader, who he hopes will read the book for its own sake. The tales, when not amazingly recherché (as most of them are), offer novel versions of familiar tales. One smiles at the ingenuity with which the author bolts his oddities on to the framework of mainstream mythology: the amorous mishaps occur in the interstices of Odysseus’ wanderings, as it might be, or Hercules’ labors. Parthenius prodigally deploys every trick of the romantic trade. He offers us callow youths and tender maids, predatory males and lustful wives. There is treachery, deceit, suicide, murder, and incest. There are gods, nymphs, pirates, shepherds, and kings. Baffling oracles are improbably fulfilled, unwise oaths go badly wrong, clever stratagems backfire. Antiquarian thirst is slaked with details of commemorative cults and festivals, and even cities may be founded as a result of these erotic disasters. The style is simple, as is traditional in mythography, but the narration is nevertheless masterful – full of suspense and surprise.

Yet Parthenius’ stated purpose in writing is not totally misleading. Collections like his were useful for consultation. All kinds of readers, and great writers too like Virgil or Ovid, had recourse to them. The difficulty of finding information in ancient books and libraries is hard to overstate, and précis like these would have saved a lot of time and trouble. Even before the advent of a bookish culture, mythography served as a guide for readers to the Greek mythological archive from the genre’s beginnings in the late sixth century BCE. When one realizes just how much mythography there was on offer in antiquity – and one simple purpose of this chapter is to convey a sense of that amount – one appreciates that the demand being met by this supply must have been correspondingly great.

Throughout the history of mythography, however, in all its changing contexts, one motif constantly recurs, either implicitly or explicitly, and that is the stance exemplified by Parthenius’ preface: that myth is something “out there” in the record awaiting the attentions of the mythographer, who is but a neutral cataloguer of the archive. In studying the reception of Greek mythology, as this volume does, one might for that reason exclude mythography, as not being sufficiently, or to any degree at all, interpretative. There are at least two responses to such a view. One is that this attitude to myth is already a kind of reception, even an interpretation, whose implications can be explored (and will be explored later in this chapter). Another is that – of course – interpretation sneaks in willy‐nilly, with varying degrees of complicity on the part of the mythographer. For instance, a compiler of Amazing Tales taken from traditional mythology (a “paradoxographer” in ancient terminology, though that genre also encompassed wonders from the contemporary world) is already making a statement about what he thinks mythology is for, and, like modern tabloid writers, challenging readers to think about the boundaries of truth and fiction, and the nature of reality. When and why such books of marvels were put together becomes a question of social as well as literary history. One can also observe the ways different paradoxographers raise the pitch of astonishment by choosing ever weirder details, or how, by combining the unbelievable with the mundane, they encourage the fantasy that you might encounter the miraculous right outside your front door.

Like all ancient historians from Herodotus on, mythographers relied on their imaginations, with varying degrees of sincerity, to flesh out the skeleton of a received narrative. An interpretative stance will often be embedded in such acts. The amount of free invention is sometimes so great as to spring the boundaries of the genre and make the book look more like an ancient novel, which was avowedly fictional from start to finish (as in all generic definitions, boundaries are fuzzy at the edges). In the first century CE, for instance, someone calling himself “Dictys of Crete” wrote a “true history” of the Trojan War, writing as an eye‐witness; a sensational treatment, as we can tell from the fragments (Dowden 2012). And some mythographers do overtly peddle interpretations anyway. Rationalizers such as Palaephatus (Hawes 2011; Nünlist 2012) or Euhemerus (Winiarczyk 2002) and allegorists such as Cornutus (Nesselrath 2009) start by telling the myth, in the manner of ordinary mythography, but go on to offer their view of what the myth really means. Already Hecataeus offers rationalized versions of some myths: for instance, according to him Hercules did not descend to the Underworld to fetch Cerberus, the hound of Hades; he killed a large and pestilential serpent that dwelled in a cave thought to be the entrance to hell. Allegorical readings also originated in the classical era, for instance as a way of explaining the immoral behavior of gods in poetry: they were, properly read, symbols of emotions, ideas, or natural phenomena, and poets like Homer were actually encoding moral lessons and technical knowledge in their stories (Brisson 2004; Ford 2002, 67–89).

Thus it does not take long to discover ways in which mythography is not a neutral act. To get a better sense of the possibilities, let us survey some more examples. The selection will necessarily be severely limited, but the interested reader can find detailed accounts of the history of Greek mythography in the Further Reading at the end of this chapter.

Beginnings and Classical Mythography

Most of the issues emerge with the first mythographer, Hecataeus of Miletus, writing at the end of the sixth century BCE; so we will dwell a while on him. His work, like almost all ancient mythography, survives only in fragmentary quotations in other writers, but even from those meager remains we gain a clear sense of his colorful and pugnacious personality. He wrote two works: one containing a redaction of the genealogies of heroic Greece (the Genealogies), the other a work of geography‐cum‐ethnography, the Periodos or Circuit of the World, describing major cities and peoples in a clockwise direction around the Mediterranean, with brief information about local traditions and customs (and perhaps a map).

The first issue is one of nomenclature. If “mythography” means “writing up myths” then it is a problem to know what to do with Hecataeus and his immediate successors, who were working before myth was distinguished from history, and (therefore) mythography from historiography. For them, people like Hercules and events like the Trojan War were historical. It is only because their subject‐matter was, in later terms, myth, that we call them mythographers. One may question the legitimacy of the label, and it is actually very instructive to think of these early writers as historians like Herodotus, comparing methods and aims: the “father of history” owed them a great deal (Fowler 1996). Moreover, in their day the very act of extracting the bare narratives from the poetry in which they were embedded had massive cultural implications. Although casual contexts for story‐telling existed, poetry was the main purveyor of myth, and poetry involved much more than the story: song or recitative, a richly traditional style; music and dance, resplendent costumes – above all a performance, with an audience. To strip all of these elements out and expose the naked story, to do it in prose rather verse, and in a book to be read rather than performed, more probably by an individual than by a group, was an act of great intellectual imagination and daring. The wider background is the birth of critical inquiry in sixth‐century Ionia, which engendered philosophy and science as well as this scrutiny of the past. The first myth/historiographers became conscious of the enormous power of the past to shape our understanding of the present, and realized that, to study the process critically, one needs first to establish the record. Doing so in itself invited critical examination of that record.

One obvious problem was the multiplicity of versions on offer. Every poet had a different take on every point of a story, whether it was the genealogies of the characters, their motives, the settings, the sequence of events, or links to cults. Every detail, mor...