The Greek Mythic Story World

In the last article of Arethusa, I took up the question of how the highly polished nature of Greek mythic narratives—the vivacity and expressive power that earned so many of them an enduring place in the pleroma of world literature and art—contributed to the creation and sustenance of belief in the gods, heroes, and a divine world more generally. In that article, I focused particularly on how the characters in Greek myths evoked emotional and cognitive responses from their audience members that were virtually indistinguishable from those evoked by people in the real world, and on how the ancient modes of narrating myths (which typically treated them episodically and through a variety of different media), helped to keep the stories and their characters alive in an audience member’s mind and heart long after a narration was over, thus further sustaining the beliefs that the stories had encouraged.

One issue that I temporarily set aside in that article was why the narration of a wide variety of myths focusing on a wide variety of characters was appropriate for recitation at a wide variety of festivals dedicated to a wide variety of gods. In many cases, of course, there is an obvious link between the myth and the festival: the story of Apollo’s foundation of the Delphic Oracle makes intrinsic sense for performance at a Delphic festival in honor of Apollo (as in Aristinous’s paean to Apollo and, probably, the second part of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo). In other cases, thematic or contextual considerations provide a key: performing a story about Theseus’s youthful exploits in honor of Delian Apollo (as in the case of Bacchylides’ seventeenth dithyramb) would appropriately draw attention to the god’s role in protecting young men. In still other cases, we feel tempted to guess that the tastes of the poet or the patron led to the choice of myth (as in, perhaps, Pindar’s second Olympian ode). Yet there is a stubborn remainder of myths that resist all such scholarly gymnastics: how did Bacchylides’ story of Heracles’ accidental murder at Deianeira’s hands, performed in honor of Dionysus at Delphi (B. 16), help to sustain belief in anyone other than Heracles? Why perform it to celebrate Dionysus? What was “the point” of narrating that particular myth at that particular place at that particular time?

Our general answer must be that the Greeks cared less about always making tightly logical connections between festivals and myths than we have imagined—or to put it otherwise, that the contributions that mythic narratives made to creating and sustaining belief in the gods and heroes could be more broadly based than we have previously acknowledged. More specifically, I suggest that an essential element that enabled this breadth of applicability was the tightly woven story world that was cumulatively being created on a continuous basis by the myths that were narrated. The closely intertwined nature of this story world validated not only each individual myth that comprised it but all the stories about what had happened in the mythic past, the characters who inhabited them, and the entire worldview upon which they rested. Because it was embedded in this story world, a skillfully narrated myth about Heracles, for example, had the power to sustain and enhance belief not only in Heracles himself but in the entire cadre of the divine world of which he was a member, including those divinities to whom the festival at which the myth was performed was dedicated.

I will begin with a discussion of what makes story worlds in general coherent and credible and will then move on to ask whether the story world created by Greek myths fulfilled those criteria or, rather, drew its coherence and credibility from other characteristics it possessed. Along the way, I will discuss some characteristics that Greek mythic narratives share with narratives familiar from more recent centuries, which will further heighten our appreciation of the way in which the Greek mythic story world created and sustained belief. Of course, an important backdrop to my project as a whole, as I present it in...