Edmunds, 'Greek Mythology: An Introduction', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9409-edmunds-greek
@@@@94.9.10, Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction
Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction, trans.
Thomas Marier. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993. Pp. xi, 240. $22.95. ISBN 0-8018-4657-9.
Reviewed by Lowell Edmunds -- Rutgers University
The past two years have seen a spate of publication of books
about Greek mythology. In the United States, there are, or soon
will be, four new textbooks (by Barry Powell; by Carl Ruck and
Danny Staples; the fifth edition of "Morford and Lenardon";
HyperMyth 4.1). In addition, there are in English new
reference works (Gantz; Ahlberg-Cornell) and an important new
work of interpretation (Buxton). These books support the
teaching of those perennially attractive college courses on Greek
myth whose large enrollments do much to support the profession of
Classics in the United States. Those who teach Greek myth, if
they want to go beyond lists of names and outlines of stories,
face the questions: what is Greek myth? how to discuss it as
such, in its specificity, and not as the poetic texts in which it
first appears? The book under review faces these questions
directly, and will thus be useful to the instructor as well as to
the student.
On the question of what is Greek myth, Graf occupies a middle
ground between two emerging extremes.
One of these extremes, which can be called post-structuralist,
dates to the publication of Marcel Detienne's L'Invention de
la mythologie (1981) and of Paul Veyne's Les Grecs ont-ils
cru a leurs mythes? (1983). The first of these books showed
the formation of the concept of myth in the modern period,
beginning in the eighteenth century, and the retrojection of this
concept onto Greek antiquity. The Greeks themselves, according
to Detienne, had only the incipient concept found in Plato. What
we thought was Greek myth was only "un poisson soluble dans les
eaux de la mythologie." Veyne showed the irrelevance of modern
theory of myth to the "program of truth" which guided the Greeks'
understanding of the stories that we call "myths." Detienne's
argument has recently been carried forward in articles by Claude
Calame, which will soon take the form of a book. Like Detienne,
Calame puts emphasis on the non-existence of any ancient Greek
terminology for "myth," "legend," etc. The lack of terminology
is one of the arguments for the non-existence of any ancient
Greek "native category" of what we call "myth."
The other extreme, which can be called oralist, lacks both
foundational tracts and a self-conscious school of exponents. It
is emerging more slowly, but no less certainly, than the first.
An early formulation appears in 1983 in a paper published by
William Hansen in Journal of Folklore Research. Hansen,
starting from more or less the same observation that Calame makes
concerning the absence of a general concept of myth in Greek
antiquity, concludes that it is time for "Hellenists . . . to
operate with one inclusive category of the oral story, whether we
wish to call it mythology or something else, and however we may
wish to divide it up into genres." Support for this notion of
"oral story" appeared in Richard Martin's The Language of
Heroes (1989), even though this book was principally a study
of oral poetics. Of the speeches called muthoi, Martin
chose a large subset consisting of commands, boast-and-insult
contests ("flyting"), and recitation of remembered events, and,
on the basis of speech-act theory and comparative ethnological
evidence, described these muthoi as "performances of
self"; further, he argued that they must be imitations of styles
of speaking actually practiced by those who listened to the
poems. As the narratives of remembered events are sometimes what
we would call "myths," we can say, on the basis of Martin's
findings, that for Homer and his audience, myths are oral
performances. (It is not surprising, if performance is the
important thing, that, for a long time, muthos and
logos could be used interchangably and that we find
various genres of narrative, Aesop's fables, for example,
referred to as muthoi. At a certain point, however, the
word muthos came to refer to the contents of the
narrative, not to the narration itself, and to particular
contents, i.e., stories of gods and heroes.)
Graf's moderate position is stated in his "Introduction: A
Provisional Definition" (1-8). A myth is a "traditional tale."
"Traditional" means author-less: no one knows who created a myth.
Further, myth is a "peculiar kind of story" that "does not
coincide with a particular text or literary genre" (2-3). Myths
continue to be reused because they have "cultural relevance,"
making "a valid statement about the origins of the world, of
society and its institutions, about the gods and their
relationship with mortals, in short, about everything on which
human existence depends" (3). Myths are adaptable and change as
historical conditions change. This process continued in ancient
Greece down to the time when the claims of truth had to satisfy
new requirements of rationalism, though in Plato myth still
retains expressive power for areas that are inaccessible to
dialectical reasoning (4-5). (A more elaborate form of this same
moderate position, directed to specialists, will be found in
Walter Burkert's contribution to Mythos in mythenloser
Gesellschaft.)
Graf's notion that myth is a "peculiar kind of story" is
diametrically opposed to the post-structuralist denial of myth as
a native category of ancient Greek mentality. (Graf glances at
Detienne's book [55] but does not enter into controversy.) But
this notion makes sense to oralists, as does the kernel of Graf's
definition, "traditional tale," and also his sharp distinction
between myth and poetry. The oralist would regret that, having
made this distinction, Graf proceeds to privilege the poetic
forms of myth; cautiously stating, "It is just possible that
myths were passed along in nonpoetic forms--in prosaic, quotidian
narratives not bound to set institutions . . . . " (5). The
oralist would maintain that the nonpoetic forms were the normal
ones and would invoke Homer as a witness to nonpoetic
story-telling. Homer fairly often represents a hero narrating a
story about the past (one of Martin's three types of
muthos). When he does so, as for example in Achilles'
recounting of the Niobe story to Priam, Homer does not represent
the hero as a bard; on the contrary, Homer represents the hero as
a story-teller (24.601-619). Further, contrary to Graf's stress
on large-scale diachronic variation in myth, the oralist would
call attention to small-scale synchronic variation, as in
Achilles' version of the Niobe story, which is tailored to
Achilles' immediate purpose, i.e., to persuade Priam to take
food. While Graf is undoubtedly correct that historical change
and the persistent cultural relevance of myth produce diachronic
variation (3), there is another, more immediate "motor of the
tradition" and that is the story-teller's desire to make a point.
All of Martin's three types of muthoi, including the
narration of remembered events, are assertions of the self
against someone else.
The last few pages of Graf's Introduction are concerned with
problems of terminology. The greatest one of all is the word
"myth" itself. The poststructuralists make much of the fact that
muthos never in the archaic and classical periods refers
to a category of narrative corresponding to "myth" as in our
expression "Greek myth." We have to use "myth," then, with
self-conscious anachronism, as we use "historian," "gnomology,"
"fable," etc. in referring to these periods, and with a clear
statement, such as Graf has given, of what we mean by "myth." I
agree with Graf's general view (which accords with that of Hansen
quoted above) that we need fewer terms, not more, but I believe
that it is helpful to have a pair of terms to distinguish between
myth and its particular instantiation in a poetic or dramatic or
choral or visual medium. These terms are "story" and
"narrative," which come from Gerard Genette (and are used
systematically in my Myth in Homer). The term that Graf
especially wants to banish, "folktale" (7), is one that I want to
keep. Without it, we would have great difficulty in discussing
Odyssey 9-12 and the dozens of other cases in which Greek
myth has adapted international folktale story-patterns or motifs.
("Dozens" is an understatement, as Hansen's forthcoming
Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Folk Narratives in
Classical Literature [provisional title] will show. Hansen
discusses 150 examples from a list twice as long.) Graf himself
discusses such an adaptation in the case of the Meleager folktale
(65-66). We have to reckon with the existence of folktales in
antiquity (cf. the prudent statement of P. E. Easterling in
The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, Vol. I
[Greek Literature], pp. 699-703), even if we have no records of
them, and therefore also with their function in the ancient
audience's reception of myth. While scholars like Sir Denys Page
who have written on the adaptation of folktales have usually
assumed that, once adapted, they disappeared or that their
continued existence had no further relevance, it seems more
likely that the audience would have been aware of the
transmutation of the simpler form of the story into the mythical
narrative.
Graf's first ("The Rise of the Scientific Study of Myth") and
second ("New Approaches to the Interpretation of Myth in the
Twentieth Century") chapters form a unit. Graf gives a history
of the concept of myth in modern times up to the present. This
history, which begins with Christian Gottloeb Heyne (1729-1812)
and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), is implicitly polemical:
neither Heyne nor Herder is mentioned by Detienne in a similar
history in L'Invention. The stakes are high. Depending
on how the history is written, one can conclude that myth is
nothing but a construct bearing no relation to Greek antiquity
(the poststructuralists) or that current, feasible approaches to
Greek myth are traceable to the eighteenth century. Graf has
written a separate essay on Heyne (in Mythos in mythenloser
Gesellschaft) and he recently gave a paper (Mar. 2, 1994 at
the V Coloquio Internacional de Filologia Griega, Madrid;
forthcoming in the Actas of the conference) on Bernard de
Fontenelle (1657-1757) in which he criticized some aspects of
Detienne's interpretation of this founding father of mythology.
Calame, too, has done much research in this area, which is,
somewhat oddly, where much controversy over Greek myth will take
place in the next few years.
After the first two chapters, Graf turns to the main sources
of Greek myth in the archaic and classical periods and the main
problems (myth and ritual; myth and history). He begins with
"Myth and Epic Poetry" (ch. 3). He discusses the relation of the
Iliad and the Odyssey to the larger Trojan War
myth, to myths about individual gods and heroes, and to
non-Trojan War myth. As an example of this last category, he
takes the Meleager myth. He concludes, correctly, that "Homer's
use of myths that were not about the Trojan War was
idiosyncratic" (66), but the reason for the idiosyncrasy, to
return to a point made earlier in this review, is that Homer, who
never narrates such myths at any length in his own voice,
represents the heroes as adapting them for their own purposes.
In this chapter, Graf is more open to the possibility, which
arises in a valuable passage on local epic (apropos of the
Meropis), of non-poetic mythic tradition (67). Turning to
the question of the origin of the myths found in Homeric epic,
Graf considers Nilsson's thesis and the related problem of the
historicity of the Trojan War. Graf's discussion is
characteristically sane and refreshing. He does not deny the
possibility of historical reverberations in Homer but is far from
lapsing into the Schliemann-inspired reductionist explanations
that undergraduates and some archaeologists seem to love.
(Consider an article in the The New York Times, Feb. 23,
1993, p. C1 on a geomagnetic survey of Schliemann's site. The
headline was "A New Clue to the Splendor That Was Troy," and the
sub-head, "Find may be wall around which Achilles ran"!) He
prefers to see the Mycenaean elements in Homer as the
localization of an Indo-European poetic tradition. His cautious
suggestions concerning Achilles as the reflex of the young
Indo-European hero point to a new way of understanding the story
of the Iliad. (It is discouraging that the field of
Classics has had nothing better than the vaguely myth-ritualist
pattern of withdrawal, devastation, and return as an account of
the story-pattern or underlying myth of the Iliad.)
Ch. 4 ("The Origin of the World and the Gods") is mainly on
Hesiod. Graf makes a nice suggestion concerning the notorious
lack of a story about the origin of humans: what Hesiod offers at
the center of the Theogony is a definition of mankind in
religious and cultural terms; physical creation is implied to be
of secondary importance (86). Much of this chapter is
necessarily taken up with the Near Eastern background of the
succession myth in the Theogony. On the question of how
Near Eastern myths reached the Greeks, Graf is confident that the
transmission was oral. The Near Eastern myths that we have are
the textual crystallizations of traditions that the Greeks
encountered probably in Cilicia and in the ninth century, not at
the end of the Bronze Age (94-96). The final section of this
chapter, on theogony and cosmogony after Hesiod, opens with the
statement that "Hesiod's account of the origin of the world and
the gods . . . never became canonical" (96), and proceeds to
discuss Orphism and the preSocratics. The point is worth taking.
Too often, the passage in Herodotus on Homer and Hesiod (2.53),
which suggests an orthodoxy, is taken as definitive. (Graf
quotes some of the passage at the beginning of the next chapter
but for a limited purpose.) The pan-Hellenic success of Hesiod's
poem does not preclude a high degree of theogonic pluralism in
local myth and cult.
The title of Ch. 5, "Myth, Sanctuary, and Festival," already
suggests how Graf will refocus the old question of myth and
ritual. Graf takes the myths concerning Apollo and Delos as his
main example and shows the complexity of their relation to the
island's buildings and history. Graf sees myth and ritual as
autonomous phenomena, each of them governed by its own structural
laws (116). The etiological relation of the former to the latter
is thus, even when it is fairly constant, as in the case of
Delian myth, anything but rigid.
Ch. 6 ("Myth as History") takes up another old problem of
mythology, the relation of myth to history in the Greek mind.
Graf describes very well the lack of any clear distinction down
through the classical period. Greek myth is itself therefore a
counter-example to the standard account of Greek intellectual
history as the triumph of logos over mythos (cf. 140). As Graf
shows, the progress of rationalism, at least as far as historical
thought was concerned, took place inside of myth (e.g. in
systematic genealogies), it did not supervene upon it. (Graf and
twenty or so other speakers will address this issue at a
conference organized by Richard Buxton, "Myth into Logos?", to be
held on July 24-28, 1996 at the University of Bristol.) The
oralist notices the lack of any mention of the logioi in
this chapter.
Ch. 7 ("Myth, Choral Song, and Tragedy") begins with the uses
of myth in archaic choral lyric and in Pindar and Bacchylides and
proceeds to the fundamentally new dramatized form that myth
assumed in tragedy. Graf holds that "the mythical narration of
fifth-century tragedy, unlike that of archaic choral lyric
poetry, was not marked by the use of tales continually modified
within a purely oral tradition; instead, the tragedians tended to
borrow specific poetic versions from the archaic period. They
probably became acquainted with most of these versions in the
form of written texts, not by attending performances of choral
lyric poetry" (152). While the fifth-century tragedians might
not have seen performances of archaic choral lyric, there is no
reason that the stories common to this genre and to tragedy could
not have come to the tragedians orally, independently of texts.
There is also the matter of epic as a source for tragedy. Graf
cites Aeschylus' acknowledgement of his debt to Homer (142) but
does not pursue the matter. My opinion is that the
textualization of myth is a result of tragedy, not a cause. As
is well known, the poetic engagement with myth ceases to flourish
after the fifth century; in Alexandrian poetry, myth becomes a
learned, dilettantish affair. While the narrative of myth in the
forms that become what we know as Greek literature thus ends, the
stories retained their explanatory and probative value for many
people in many places for many centuries, as the reports of
Pausanias show (and see the post-fifth-century examples given by
Graf on 177-78).
The main discussions in ch. 7, of Pindar, Ol. 1, of the
Oresteia, and of "Euripides, Myth, and the Gods," are
excellent. The climactic position of Euripides emerges
forcefully. The capacity of myth to express a radically new,
pessimistic worldview paradoxically meant the end of myth as a
form of a poetic reflection. In his concluding chapter
("Philosophers, Allegorists, and Mythologists"), Graf turns to
the ultimately more powerful kind of thought that had already
started with the sophists in the fifth century and that in Plato
and Aristotle would lead to more or less systematic critiques of
myth. Graf begins with the sophists, who fundamentally challenge
the validity of myth and who therefore free themselves to invent
myths for expository purposes, as Plato was to do. Graf
discusses Plato after the Sophists, and then, with only a glance
at Aristotle (191), pursues myth in the directions it took after
Plato, euhemerism, mythography, and allegoresis.
The criticisms of Graf's book that I have made are obviously
in the area of specialist research. This book is to my mind the
best general introduction to Greek mythology in English. It will
be of great use to teachers of Greek mythology. As it provides
excellent synopses of the myths that are discussed in detail and
assumes little prior knowledge, it will also be of use to many
students. The only note of caution I want to sound concerns the
first chapter, which is the only difficult one. Those who
persevere beyond this chapter will be rewarded. In brief
compass, Graf has set out the major issues surrounding, and the
major sources for, Greek myth, and, at the same time, preserves a
clear sense of historical context and of the particular literary
or poetic character of the sources. He has managed to be both
brief and nuanced. He has been well served by his translator,
Thomas Marier, who, unlike many translators of books in the field
of Classics, both understood the book he was translating and was
able to write readable English.
Finally, a prognostication on the successor to Graf's book.
Whatever it may be, one can predict that it will make much
greater use of visual sources than Graf has done. It happens
that Graf's final words, under "Abbreviations and Sources"
(200-201 with a long note on 220-21), are on visual sources,
where he comments on the vase painting seen on the dust cover (a
cup by Douris), which shows Jason exiting or entering the mouth
of a serpent. As Graf indicates, on-going research is providing
the means of understanding iconography as an authentic narrative
mode, contrary to the traditional approach, which regards vase
painting as illustration of verbal myth. The new approach, along
with the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Graecae and
other new resources, will surely lead to revisions of our
understanding of Greek myth.
Bibliographical Appendix
New Textbooks
"Morford and Lenardon," fifth edition forthcoming.
Barry Powell, Classical Myth (New York 1994).
Carl Ruck and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth: Gods
and Goddesses, Heroines and Heroes (Durham NC 1994).
Randy Stewart, HyperMyth 4.1 (Salt Lake City 1994,
forthcoming), with a link to Perseus.
The Post-Structuralist Extreme
Claude Calame, "Mythique (discours, niveau)," in A. J. Greimas and
J. Courtes, Semiotique: un dictionnaire raisone de la theorie
du langage, II (Paris, 1986) 148-49.
________, "Evanescence du myth et realite des formes narratives,"
in C. Calame, ed. Metamorphoses du mythe en Grece antique
(Geneva 1988) 7-14.
________, "Illusions de la mythologie," Nouveaux Actes
Semiotiques (Universite de Limoges 1991).
________, "'Mythe' et 'rite' en Grece: Des categories indigenes?"
Kernos (1991)179-204.
Marcel Detienne, L'Invention de la mythologie (Paris 1981).
The Creation of Greek Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook
(Chicago and London 1986).
Paul Veyne Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? Essai
sur l'imagination constituante (Paris 1983). Did the
Greeks Believe in their Myths? Essay on the Constitutive
Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago 1988).
The Oralist Extreme
Lowell Edmunds, "Oral Story-telling and Hexameter Poetry in Archaic
Greece," forthcoming in the Actas of the V Coloquio
Internacional de Filologia Griega. I have cannibalized a couple
of paragraphs of this essay for the present review.
William Hansen, "Greek Mythology and the Study of the Ancient Greek
Oral Story," Journal of Folklore Research 20 (1983)
101-12.
Richard Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance
in the Iliad (Ithaca 1989).
Ada B. Neschke-Hentschke, "Mythe et traitement litteraire du mythe
en grece ancienne," Studi Classici e Orientali 37 (1987)
29-60, esp. 43-44. But, unlike others in this list, she takes
the pre-exisiting myth as only a personage (hero or god) and an
act (or two) and not a story (which we define as a type) that
was always a potentiality for reuse or reference.
Ernst Risch, "Homerisch 'ennepo', Lakonisch
'epheneponti' und die alte Erzaehlprosa," ZPE 60
(1985) 1-9.
Alex Scobie, "Storytellers, Storytelling, and the Novel in
Graeco-Roman Antiquity," RhM 122 (1979) 229-59. Because
of the author's interest in the novel, the focus is Roman and
Hellenistic.
Sophie Trenker, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period
(Cambridge 1958). Ch. 2 ("Story-telling in Attica in the
Classical Period") covers evidence not in Scobie's article.
New Reference Works and Handbooks
Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and
Artistic Sources (Baltimore and London 1993). Rev. by
Jennifer Neils in BMCR 94.5.10.
Gudrun Ahlberg-Cornell, Myth and Epos in Early Greek Art:
Representation and Interpretation (Jonsered 1992).
Suzanne Said, Approches de la mythologie grecque (Paris
1993). A very handy 128-page outline. Worth using in tandem
with Graf.
Logioi
W. Robert Connor, "Commentary on the Conference," Arethusa
20 (1987) 259-60. Cf. Nagy below.
J. A. S. Evans, the third essay, "Oral Tradition in Herodotus," in
Herodotus, Explorer of the Past (Princeton 1991) 88-146.
Kurt von Fritz, the appendix, "Die Sogenannten logographen,
logopoioi und logioi," in Die griechiche
Geschichtsschreibung, vol. 1 (Anmerkungen) (Berlin 1967)
343-47.
Oswyn Murray, "Herodotus and Oral History," Achaemenid
History 2 (The Greek Sources), ed. Heleen
Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amelie Kuhrt (Leiden 1987) 93-115.
Gregory Nagy, "Herodotus the Logios," Arethusa 20
(1987) 181-82.
_______, Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic
Past (Baltimore and London, 1990) 221-25.
_______, "Response to Mabel L. Lang and Robert Connor,"
Arethusa 20 (1987) 209.
Other
Walter Burkert, Mythos--Begriff, Struktur, Funktionen," in Fritz
Graf, ed. Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma
Roms (Stuttgart and Leipzig 1993) 9-24.
Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology
(Cambridge 1994).
Paul A. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others
(Oxford 1993). Ch. 2 ("Inventing the Past: History v. Myth")
complements Ch. 6 of G.
Lowell Edmunds, Myth in Homer: A Handbook, 2nd ed. (Highland
Park NJ 1993).
Fritz Graf, "Die Entstehung des Mythosbegriffs bei Christian
Gottlob Heyne," in Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft,
pp. 284-94.
Steven Lowenstam, "The Use of Vase-depictions in Homeric Studies,"
TAPA 122 (1992) 165-98.
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek Culture: Texts and
Images, Rituals and Myths (Oxford 1991). Part IV ("Myth and
History") complements Ch. 6 of G.
H. A. Shapiro, Myth Into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical
Greece (London and New York 1994).