THE NATURE OF CLASSICAL MYTH Allegory A story on the surface about one thing but just beneath the surface there is a hidden Mythology composed of muthos and logos the science of storytelling Metaphor Direct comparison that has no literal connection and reveal hidden truth between MUTHOS A story narrative Just a way of talking about the world Originally no distinction between truth and falsehood Muthos eventually proposed to logos word as fiction is opposed to the verifiable truth Think of movies they re not entirely true but you have some value to it That s like a myth back in the ancient world Logos finding truth in a scientific way Fiction is not necessarily untrue Myths use metaphors allegory and symbolism to get a hidden universal or eternal truth them All the world s a stage story The Dark Night movie on the surface about Batman and the Joker but underneath it is about George Bush s war on terror Myths deal with Spiritual concerns Such concerns necessarily require a mythic imagination We as humans are interested in the nature of god the human souls the afterlife love Question of religion not science Myths are sacred stories They primarily concerned with god and humankind s relations with them How we tried to be like gods Myths are traditional stories These stories are carried down from generations and are part of a culture is inherited cultural idiom and ideology And before writing stories were oral and retold to generations Because they were oral there are many versions and spins to a particular theme god of a story There is no one s true correct version Some of the versions become more canonical popular Standards established in literacy forms in text of ancient Greece and Rome in classical text Basically there are many versions and people who wrote the tales One becomes popular and this one becomes more looked on Classics the study of Greco roman literature Classical mythology this study of sacred stories found largely in Greco roman literature THE SOURCES FOR CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY 1 Electric varied 2 The texts span many time periods 800 BC 200 A D Before Christ BC BCE before coming era AD Anno Domini In the year of the lord CE Common Era 3 The texts have many geological locations We tell the narratives differently depending on the locations 4 There are many different literacy genres 5 There are two different ancient cultures the Greeks and the Romans Homer 800 BC He was the earliest and writer of the ancient world Best known for Iliad and Odyssey heroic epic poetry Didaxis Teaching Hesiod 700 BC He is known for theogony and works and days didactic epic wisdom literatures that are long Homeric hymns 700 BC 300 BC 33 and all Not written by homer but by various anonymous authors over the centuries They are songs that are written to honor the different gods The shorter ones are possibly preludes to one the narrative poems five lines Attic Athenian Tragedy 5th Century BC Greek Tragedy 1 Aeschylus 525 456 BC Prometheus Bound Agamemnon 2 Sophocles 496 406 BC King Oedipus Antigone 3 Euripdes 485 406 BC Bacchae Medea Roman Sources 1 Vergil 70 19 BC Aeneid 2 Ovid 43 BC 17AD Metamorphoses He was often light hearted and witty with his writing He was exiled by King Augustus because he wrote a story about Apollo and how his failed love that turned into a tree Augustus worshipped Apollo and felt criticized by Ovid So he was exiled to the black sea Visual Arts 1 Vase paintings 2 Sculptures 3 Architectural buildings sculptures 4 Modern paintings work of arts MYTHS OF CREATION Hesiod 700 BC Theogony Birth of the gods Genealogy of the gods family tree from chaos to Olympians Theogony Hesiod Greek Hesiod claims that the muses spoke to him He was on Mt Helicon when all of the sudden he had an epiphany realization and arrival of someone The muses arrived out of heaven and started talking to him MUSES 9 goddess of literacy inspiration They told him about the creation of the universe The MUSES are the daughters of ZEUS and Menomsyne memory The MUSES help the memory of stories This was the introduction of Theogony CHAOS that s the very beginning there wasn t being called chaos a yawning void a nothingness Everything came from nothing This contradicts Dictum Nihilex Nihilo From nothing comes nothing What they meant was that something had to come from something that s what Hesiod is saying From chaos came GAIA earth terrafirma She is the ground beneath our feet She is a big fat disk Then came TARTARUS Underworld an ad and could that s beneath GAIA Then it came could EROS love procreative principle We needed a reason why GAIA had sex Then Evelous the gloom of tartarus and lastly night emphasis on darkness There was no light yet But their creation happens by divine fiat In theogony god s have sex to create world that unlike genesis where god just spoke 1 12 titans 6 males 6 females They are early generation of gods They are personifications of 2 3 cyclopes the orb eyed ones one eyed creatures Brontes thunder Steropes lightening Ovid s Metapmorphoses Roman His poem starts with chaos Ovid meant Primordial elements Earth Water Air Fire He tells us that the four elements were in a big jumble of mess having no order He was working that you can t have something out of nothing everything in the combination of the four Then a unnamed came and imposed order on chaos Ovid gave him the title Mundi Fabricator the maker of the world He imposed order by grabbing bits of the ball and putting them at different places in the universe He takes earth our soil creates earth He takes water and creates ocean He takes air and creates an atmosphere He then takes fire and creates the sun and the stars He also takes the elements and creates a animals Water equals fish air equals birds Fire equals goddess Ovid was influenced by philosophy He wrote this five centuries after Hesiod HESIODS THEOGONY AND THE HEIROS GAMOS After chaos comes GAIA Uranus mountains Pontus the Sea GAIA and Uranus get together This is the union of earth and sky female and male hieros gamos sacred marriage They made together and sexual union under the power of Eros This is a personification and anthropomorphism Hesiod and imagining GAIA as a female and as a human This union will be played out again way Cronus and Rhea Zeus and Hera From GAIA and Uranus came natural phenomena Ex Selene moon and Arges Brightness Hesiod is personifying them as a thunder storm They make Zeus s lightning bolts HYPERION AND HELIUS they are father and son Sometimes distinct but
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