Like A Myth

What do we mean by Greek myth and what do these myths mean to us? A good introduction to this tangled conversation is the second edition of Lowell Edmunds’s Approaches to Greek Myth, at least for the attentive reader. The writing here brings us up to date on many matters: the history of the reception of myth; myth and ritual; comparative Indo-European myth; comparative folklore; narratology; iconographical approaches to myth; and the use of psychoanalysis. Two chapters are reprinted from the first edition, three chapters are revised, two chapters are completely rewritten, and there is a new chapter on the reception of Greek myth; a chapter on Greek myth and history has been dropped. This is an important revision over the first edition of 1990.

In a learned introduction, rich with footnotes, Edmunds leads the reader through the complex topic of approaches to Greek myth. Edmunds gives a sensible definition of myth as a story about gods and heroes set in a primordial time that extends from the creation of the cosmos up to the heroic age, with which the present age is continuous. He emphasizes that by the classical period the Greeks were steeped in myths and surrounded by their imagery, especially on pottery. Most Greek myths, however, were learned through the oral presentation of written texts, themselves often of oral origin. When knowledge of the myths faded in the Roman imperial period, handbooks appeared to support aristocratic learning and display, especially the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus in the second century a.d.—a summary of stories that still today defines what we think of as Greek myth.

Greek myth had both system and variability: the general outlines of the stories were known (system), but you could mold individual myths to suit the occasion, often in surprising ways (variability). For the Greeks, myth and history were the same thing. Myth was therefore expected to be true. Only when reading became private, and the truth value of the narrative was not alleged, did fiction become possible. Fiction as we understand it does not appear until the Greek novels of the second century a.d.

What about myth and religion? All myths certainly do not derive from religious ritual, as once widely believed. It is hard to say what Greek religion was (or Greek myth for that matter), except that religious practice in Greece was the killing of animals, and it had no creed. Myth and religion seem to inhabit different spheres, and certainly Greek myth did not support Greek belief.

Before each of the eight chapters Edmunds provides a short lucid summary of the contents, while also situating the chapter into the general context of “approaches to Greek myth.”

In “The Reception of Greek Myth,” translated from the Spanish and new to this edition, Jordi Pàmias covers the topic from its beginning through the nineteenth century. Already in Homer is the notion that a preexisting tradition is being reworked for the audience, but with the mythographers in the fifth century b.c. myth was systematized in writing and separated from its oral roots: at this time myth became an artifact. The mythographers’ principle of organization was genealogical. The handbooks of the Augustan and imperial periods heightened this development and resulted in the modern “handbook of Greek myth,” in fact a survey of the important genealogies in the Greek tradition. Two methods of understanding myth by these early commentators were Euhemerism, wherein the gods were thought once to have been real human beings; and allegorism, in which all the stories were thought to have a hidden meaning, usually morally uplifting. Ovid especially was the object of allegorical interpretation in the medieval and Renaissance periods. These twin approaches were powerful up to the modern period, but Pàmias stops at the end of the nineteenth century.

The second somewhat discursive essay by H. S. Versnel, “Myth and Ritual, Old and New,” translated from the Dutch and unchanged from the first edition, explores myth’s relationship to ritual. Versnel gives equal...