Classical Mythology
Lecture one. Introduction.
What is meant by Classical mythology?
- “Classical” in this context refers to the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.
- Ancient Greek culture’s highpoint occurred in Athens in the fifth century BC.
- Roman culture reached its zenith in the first centuries BC and AD.
- These two cultures shared the bulk of their mythology, because Rome simply adapted Greek mythology wholesale
- “Mythology” is an ambiguous term.
- Strictly speeking, the “-ology” ending means “the study of”; thus, “mythology” means “the study of myths”.
- However, the word “mythology” is frequently used to mean “a culture’s body of myths.”
- Myth as “traditional stories a society tells itself that encode or represent the world-view, beliefs, principles, and often fears of that society.”
Many scholars subdivide traditional tales into 3 categories: Myth, legend, and folktale.
- Myth refers only to stories that concern the gods and their rites. It is closely connected with religious ritual.
- Legend refers to traditional stores rooted in historical fact, describing the (greatly exaggerated) adventures of people who actually lived, such as Robin Hood or George Washington.
- Folktale refers to stories that are primarily entertaining and that often involve animals or ordinary but clever humans, such as Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks.
- These subdivisions are useful, but in fact the categories overlap so much that the distinctions seem artificial.
Which societies use myth, why?
- All societies have myths; however, myth is most important in preliterate cultures.
- Modern, literate cultures have many different forms of explanation available to them, including theology (神学), psychology, philosophy, ethics（伦理学）, and history and so on.
- All these depend on a sophisticated (诡辩的) and long-lived literate tradition.
- In a preliterate culture, myth is the only means available to explain and discuss a whole range of phenomena （现象） and concepts.
- Modern Western culture makes a distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, actual and imaginary.
- When myth is the only available form of explanation, these distinctions cannot be so clear cut.
- In Greek myth, Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (sky) are good examples of this. As anthropomorphized (人格化) deities, they are also physical “realities” our usual distinction between metaphorical and literal doesn’t apply.
Many modern scholars of myth work with living cultures.
- This anthropological approach means that scholars of living cultures can observe myth in its “native habitat.”
- In studying classical mythology, we are trying to do anthropology backward in time, on a culture without living representatives.
- Our sources for this are literature and archaeological artifacts. Both present formidable problems.
- Written versions of myths are frozen, as in case of Oedipus, whose final fate was described differently by Sophocles and Homer.
- Because myths were the given of the society, literary works frequently refer to myths without giving a full synopsis of them.
- Only a fraction of ancient Greek literature has survived, and it often does not tell us what we would most like to know about people’s religious beliefs and practices, daily lives, and so on.
- The archaeological record and the literature can sometimes shed light on one another.
- Archaeological remains, such as buildings and artwork, are even more difficult to interpret than literature is.
What are the implications for the study of classical mythology?
- We are studying only particular variants of the myths
- Sometimes we can reconstruct a fairly full version of the myth as it underlies the written variants and as it must have existed in the living culture of ancient Greece.
- Many times we cannot; references remain tantalizingly obscure.
- Occasionally a work of art will preserve what is clearly a very different version from the ones preserved in literature, which remains us that living myth is not fixed.
- We cannot recover all the nuances of myths’ functions in their original society, any more than we can recover all their variants.
- Within these limitations, however, we can use what we know about the society to shed light on the myths and what we know about the myths to shed light on the society.