Narrating Myths: Story and Belief in Ancient Greece

For more than a century in the long shadow of Sir James Frazer, the study of Greek myths typically has started from the assumption that “a myth” must be extracted from the narrative vehicles that conveyed it before a scholar can do anything with the myth, qua myth. For Frazer, this assumption grew naturally out of his zeal for comparative work: until he had set aside what he perceived as the niceties in which an Aeschylus or a Homer had draped a myth, he could not demonstrate how it was similar to other myths that he had gathered from the four corners of the globe and how they were all, as he believed, derived from a single original myth. Although many of Frazer’s other ideas have been discarded by later generations, his tendency to essentialize myths has survived—not only amongst those who, like Frazer, focus on the connections between myths and rituals, but also by those who embrace structuralist or psychoanalytical approaches to myth, mutatis mutandis. If myths are to reveal the lost rationales behind mysterious rituals, the universal concerns of the human psyche, or the basic structures of the human mind, it has seemed necessary first to pare away their surface details, however enchanting they might be (indeed, the more enchanting the details, the more they seem to threaten to obscure the “real” myth underneath).

I do not reject these approaches, each of them has enhanced our understanding of what myths can do in significant ways. But I do want to suggest that, having fallen into the habit of excising Greek myths from their narratives, scholars have long overlooked one of the most salient and significant features of mythic narratives: their ability to engage their audiences emotionally and cognitively. Not only has this habit prevented us from understanding some of the most important reasons that myths were able to help create and sustain ancient Greek beliefs in the gods, heroes, and the divine world more generally, but it has also made classicists the odd ones out in a larger contemporary dialogue on myths. Wendy Doniger, an insightfully comparative scholar of myth, once described the stories told by the Greeks as “mythological zombies”: that is, she felt that the Greeks had killed anything that was really alive in the myths in the course of polishing them into the beautiful literary and visual forms that still survive today.² This isn’t true, as I hope to show, but I can well understand how Doniger came to such a conclusion: scholars of Greek myths have done nothing along the lines of what Doniger has done so well for Hindu myths in a number of her publications: demonstrate the vibrant way in which they permeate their audiences’ daily experiences, thereby keeping the characters and their stories vigorously alive.³

In this article and another one that serves as its sequel, I’ll try to recapture some sense of those ancient Greek experiences. I’ll begin by laying down some context that will help us understand how Greek myths were different from those of many other cultures. In Section 1 of the present article, I’ll look at the historiola, a type of myth that was very common in the ancient Mediterranean. Historiolae are performative utterances in the sense that what happens in them is expected to happen in the real world as the historiola is being narrated. Section 2 will take up the fact that, in contrast to their neighbors, the Greeks do not seem to have embraced historiolae. This suggests that the idea of narrating a myth in order to cause something directly to happen in the real world did not align well with what the Greeks thought myths were. I also show that in the single, seemingly experimental historiola that they did create, the Greeks shifted away from the genre’s typical reliance on performative utterance towards what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call the conceptual metaphor—or, in other words, that the Greeks expected that the myth comprising this historiola could affect the real world through the figurative force...