II.

Origins, Sources, and Development

The focus of the present article is on mythology of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods; that is, roughly from the 8th century bc to the late 1st century bc. However, something must first be said about when and where that mythology might have originated.

A.

Origins

Linguists have concluded that some names of Greek deities, including the name “Zeus”, can be traced back to gods worshipped by speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of the Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit languages. But—quite apart from the fact that very little is known about the people who may have spoken Proto-Indo-European—it would in any case be misleading to regard this as “the origin” of Greek mythology, since many other elements contributed.

Archaeology has shown that many places where mythical events were, in the Greek imagination, located correspond to sites which were historically important during the Mycenaean period (second half of the 2nd millennium bc); so it is likely that the Mycenaeans made a major contribution to the development of the stories, even if this is hard to demonstrate in detail. The same kind of formative influence has been argued for the Minoan civilization of Crete, on the grounds that, for example, the myth of the Minotaur (half-bull, half-man) in his labyrinth might be a memory of historical bull-worship in the labyrinthine Palace of Knossos. However, there is little evidence for the survival of prehistoric Cretan religion in Classical Greece. Even Minos existed, so far as is known, only in myth: at least, nothing in surviving Linear B inscriptions (an early form of Greek) has yet confirmed that there ever was such a king.

Influence from the Near East can be demonstrated much more reliably. Especially in the realm of cosmogony and theogony, Greeks owed much to the heritage of Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures. To take one example: when the Archaic Greek poet Hesiod sang about the castration of Ouranos (“Sky”, “Heaven”—see Uranus) by his son Cronus, and the subsequent overthrow of Cronus by his son Zeus, a clear parallel exists in the earlier Hurrian myth (known through Hittite sources) of the sky god Anu castrated by Kumarbi, “father of the gods”, who was in turn displaced by the storm god. More and more such similarities continue to be brought to light by scholars.

B.

Sources and Development

The direct sources for the Greek myths are a mixture of written texts, sculpture, and decorated pottery. Information about stories that circulated orally has to be reconstructed indirectly, by inference and guesswork.

The Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems attributed to Homer (c. 8th century bc), stand at the beginning of the Greek literary achievement (see Greek Literature), even though they almost certainly depended on a lengthy previous tradition of orally composed poetry. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War (see below); it focuses on the consequences of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, two of the leading Greek warriors. The Odyssey is about the aftermath of the Trojan War, when the Greek hero Odysseus at last returns to his home on the island of Ithaca following years of wandering in wild and magical lands. The Trojan War would later provide the subject matter for many tragic dramas (originally staged in Athens, but replayed all over Greece later), and was illustrated on countless painted vases.

Contemporary with the Homeric epics were the songs of Hesiod. His Theogony gave an authoritative account of “how things began”. The coming-to-be (or creation) of the world described by Hesiod in terms of the passions and crimes of the gods, is a theme that Greek thinkers such as Empedocles and Plato would develop in new directions—a reminder that Greek mythology was not a completely separate aspect of Greek culture, but one that interacted with many other fields of experience. This is particularly true of the writing of history. For example Herodotus (5th century bc), in his historical account of the war between Greeks and Persians, employed numerous themes and story patterns found also in epic and tragedy.

Though the authority of Homer and Hesiod remained dominant, the poetic retelling of myths continued throughout antiquity. Myths were constantly remade in the light of new social and political circumstances. Thus the Hellenistic period (usually defined as 323-31 bc) saw many new trends in the treatment of myths. One of the most important was the development of “mythography”, a type of work that compiled and codified myths on the basis of particular themes (for example, myths about metamorphosis). Such codification corresponded to the wish of newly established Hellenistic rulers to lend legitimacy to their regimes by claiming to be continuing a cultural tradition reaching back into a supposedly great past.

Artists too portrayed myths. Temples contained statues of the gods, and the pediments and friezes on the outside of temples were adorned with relief sculptures of scenes from mythology (see Greek Art and Architecture). Among the best-known examples are the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis, which include depictions of combat between centaurs (half-man, half-horse) and heroes from the race known as Lapiths. There were also plenty of more modest visual representations of mythology. The best evidence comes from thousands of surviving painted ceramic vases, which were used in a variety of contexts, from cookery to funerary ritual to athletic games (vases filled with oil were awarded as prizes). Often the imagery can be securely identified as mythological, but sometimes there is no way of telling whether an allusion to mythology was envisaged; myth becomes fused with everyday life.

As well as the myths that have survived into the present in literary and artistic works, Greeks also retold myths orally. Mothers, grandmothers, and nurses transmitted to children tales of monsters, bogeymen, and also myths of gods and heroes; for their part, old men gathered to exchange tales in leschai (clubs or “conversation places”). Storytelling, whether in writing, art, or speech, was at the heart of Greek civilization.