Review : The Greek Myths

I went on a book-buying splurge the other day, and for no particular reason I decided to start with Richard Buxton's The Greek Myths That Shape The Way We Think. There's a question which has been ticking over in the back of my head for a while... what makes these bizarre, surreal tales still appealing ? How is it we keep returning to these intensely other-worldly stories which so often feature behaviour that must have seemed reprehensible even at the time ? 

Or in other words : What's the appeal of a god who turns into a swan and rapes people, as opposed to helping the sick and destitute ?

This book presents a compelling answer. My only gripe is that it's too short : I would have been happier if it had been about double the length. Each chapter is about the right length but I wanted there to be more of them.

In terms of style it's light and accessible but articulate and thoughtful. At times the author lapses into an academic style of prose that might be daunting if you happen to alight on such a passage when perusing it in a bookshop, but for the most part he's almost poetic. He's clearly distilled his conclusions with expert precision down to his key findings in a brilliantly readable way, as comfortable in discussing pornography as he is with Renaissance epic poetry. Each section begins with a description of the myths in their "original" tellings, followed by an analysis and a history of the re-tellings right through the ages to the present day. It's a carefully curated selection, thoughtfully and lively described, never lacking in interpretation and really just a delight to read.

I'm giving this one a "I immediately want to buy the other books in this series"* 9/10. Sadly the others (Norse and Celtic myths) aren't by the same author, so very possibly I'll have to buy more by him as well. Really, I would have just liked it to be longer. 

* Quite literally. I've already begin the Norse book in the same series, and only didn't buy the Celtic one yet because the bookshop didn't have it.

To summarise this one is a challenge : I took a full six pages of notes while reading it. Trying to give a blow-by-blow account of each myth examined would be a simply hopeless task. Instead I'll try and pick out what seemed to me to be the most interesting major themes that emerge.

1) Versatility

I said "originally" with the quotes because this is one of the author's more explicit points : that there are original versions plural of the myths, not one single tale you can point to and say that all the other versions are illegitimate. The Greeks themselves certainly had no problem with retelling the tales to suit their own preferences and purposes. It's a bit like Doctor Who's fixed points in time, certain core features of each myth that remain similar (but by no means identical) between authors, around which the myth is shaped and endlessly reshaped. Throughout the Protean shiftings, all the while there remains something recognisable about the whole thing, much like Trigger's Broom a.k.a. the Ship of Theseus.

Two things about this appeal to me. First, that fiction can be interpreted differently but legitimately according to the reader is something I've mentioned here many, many times. But while I do get the annoyance of making changes from the book to the screen, as long as a change has an interesting message to convey, does it really matter ? The Greek answer would have been an emphatic no. They would have completely accepted changing characters, the setting, and even the whole storyline as absolutely valid. They wouldn't have seen it as being somehow "untrue" in a way that, say, as a Christian might see a story about Jesus fighting a robot dinosaur with lasers for eyes.

Pew, pew pew....

Yes, that was a terrible and intentional pun. You can't stop me.

Which brings me to the second point : the pagan peoples of antiquity didn't have the same concept of religion itself as later thinkers did. Tom Holland analyses this in more detail in Dominion, but here I think the concept comes across more clearly. There simply are no pagan bibles, no foundational texts or dogma that believers in Zeus had to adhere to. It didn't seem to bother the Greeks a jot when foreigners claimed that Hercules had visited their country, or that locals of one part of Greece believed in different traditional stories than the others : they all believed nonetheless in the same gods, and their stories weren't supposed to be "true" in the modern sense. More important was that the stories were instead felt to contain truths.

This meant that the religious practises were tremendously adaptable and the tales were incredibly flexible. And that means that all the later versions, even the modern ones, have some claim on being "true" in this very loose sense. That's not to say they're all good, of course : plenty of them are utter crap. Taking out the nasty, naughty bits in the interests of making the tale more moral is a particularly bad idea, as we'll see later on. But they are valid. "Old gods do new jobs", as Pratchett put it.

Later authors looked back to the myths as allegory, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes these, such as Promethean fire being a symbol for wisdom and knowledge, seem at least halfway plausible that this is a message the myth conveyed to the earliest audiences. This fits particularly well given that Prometheus is also (as is less well-known these days) the creator of mankind, thus explaining the subtitle to Frankenstein and the Alien spin-off movie. It would present a nice, coherent character at least.

But most other allegorical readings seem extremely forced and often absurd, though this isn't to say they're without their own pseudo-mythic value. For example interpreting the fall of Icarus to point to too much knowledge as a dangerous thing seems fairly obviously a weird claim given his more knowledgeable father's successful flight. Or Francis Bacon's truly tortured use of the Sphinx as an analogy for science : get the findings wrong and you'll come a cropper – this isn't wrong or inappropriate, but it seems dubious in the extreme that the early audiences would have seen it this way*. Even in antiquity, the idea that Hercules was actually a deep thinker and the boar he hunted represented "the common incontinence of men" is... strange.

* Saying that you think there's a similarity between [insert situation or character here] and [insert mythology here] is of course fine. It's the assertion that the mythology is supposed to represent something in particular which is problematic.

Though the strangeness is part of the appeal. Of course, such interpretations can be absolutely self-inconsistent, with the Amazons being variously interpreted as models of both chastity and promiscuity. Or my favourite example, in which the murderous murderess Medea flies off in a magical snake-pulled aerial chariot declaring that the gods do not exist. Since they don't aim to be true, the stories are often deceptively simple, readily lending themselves to endless reinterpretations, with no few contradictions along the way.

2) Complexity

Heroes, says Buxton, are "a special kind of mortal, whose behaviour challenges the boundaries of what humans can achieve". Many of the myths feature gods and heroes alike very prominently, but they're never much like the modern idea of heroes : they aren't archetypal personifications of virtue. The Greek stories are not morality tales, they don't set out to say "this is how you should act" or even "this is who you should imitate". It's up to the reader to decide when the hero is behaving respectfully and when they're being a massive arse : and most of the time they do both.

Take the Judgement of Paris. Paris is asked to choose which of three goddesses is the most beautiful. As a mortal he's chosen for this task because he's beautiful himself and also has a divine wife, so has experience in judging supernatural beauty. He selects Aphrodite, who in turn helps him abduct Helen, thus precipitating the calamitous Trojan War.

This is not an especially feminist tale according to many modern thinkers... but why not ? In the earliest versions, there's no way to choose between the goddesses based on their appearance, because divinity has no "real", set appearance, and consequently the early artists depicted them as all very similar. From the offset it's not the beauty contest it appears to be.

Paris needs some other criteria to make his impossible choice. So the goddesses bribe him with different options : power, skill, and sex. It's corrupt from the very beginning, explicitly unfair despite Paris being ostensibly qualified to make the judgement. The goddesses themselves receive nothing, because there's nothing Paris can give them. Paris isn't even choosing them at all; he doesn't get one of them as a reward. He's choosing instead only what matters to him. In short, it's nothing to do with the goddess' own attributes but everything to do with with what Paris wants.

He chooses sex : adulterous sex, no less. The result is war, disaster, and death.

Now this to me does not feel like a ringing endorsement of manly virtue but the exact opposite, a commentary on male weakness. Paris is a skilled warrior but his lack of ability to keep it in his pants brings about utter ruin*. His betrayal of his wife leads her to refuse him medical treatment when he needs it. No, to me this seems like a tale of natural male desire run amok, a cautionary tale that in no way promotes Paris' actions – rather the reverse ! Paris isn't one-dimensional, but he is a sexist pig, or at least a sex-crazed one, but the tale itself doesn't endorse this.

* Whether the other options on offer would have had better outcomes is an interesting counterfactual that isn't considered.

Or take Hercules. At heart he's a man with "huge biceps and a massive club", and there is a certain base appeal in a big strong manly man beating up monsters. But he's also, on occasion, capable of shrewd diplomatic negotiations and thinking his way through problems rather than just employing brute force. He's also radically reinterpreted. Sometimes his divinity is a reward for his Labours while sometimes he undertakes his quest only to atone for his accidental murder of his uncle. He's a mighty figure but at the beck and call of a weaker character who happens to have a hold on him. He can been seen as heroic but ordinary, but also even Christ-like in his divinity. He may not have the lasting metaphorical value of some of the other myths, but the ambiguity of the character definitely gives him staying power.

Finally Orpheus. Told he mustn't look back as he and Eurydice flee from Hades, his love for his wife overcomes him : sensing her distress, he can't avoid glancing back to check she's okay, confining her back to the underworld. It's a fundamental paradox of human behaviour, that the very thing we hold most dear can cause us to lose it. And of course Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. He has, he thinks, done nothing wrong, and always acted in good faith, but discovers he's committed the very worst of sins. It's a damn good bit of drama which speaks to a tragic paradox in human life. Complexity, indeed.

3) Primal metaphors

"The very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood", said Pratchett. A big part of the appeal of the Greek myths is that they resonate with us emotionally if not intellectually. All of us have faced difficult choices where we can't decide our own truest wants, even if they didn't have any divine consequences like Paris. All of us have have undertaken great labours even if they weren't of the Herculean variety. All of us have to deal with things which are, as for Tantalus, just out of reach.

And we often encounter sudden revelations that come from nowhere, much as Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus... which raises that issue of blood. An interesting detail in Hesiod's Theogony is that Athena is born from her pregnant mother who Zeus swallowed to prevent her from rearing dangerous children. This is an image as ludicrous and incomprehensible as it is viscerally terrifying. Myths have staying power because they combine this deep, physical-emotional resonance with the ordinary, everyday life we all experience.

I want to mention a couple of other myth-metaphors (mythtaphors ?) of particular resonance. The first is the story of Daedalus and Icarus. What's often forgotten here is that Daedalus murdered his own student/rival and had to flee to escape persecution (or rather prosecution), and then helped create the Minotaur by constructing a magnificent sex costume... to wit, a giant cow for Pasiphae to hide in while being impregnated by a bull. This extremely disturbing image is then countered as he creates not only lifelike statues (robots by some interpretation) but also the gift of flight, itself a mythical accomplishment. Buxton notes a common theme of linking of opposites : human with animal, statues with life, flying between earth and sky. Add to this the hubris of his son, who he genuinely loved, and the especial poignancy of the grief because Icarus was in competition but no-one but himself, and the story becomes wonderful precisely because of its complexity, tragedy, and violence.

But if the brutality in the Daedalus story is somewhat incidental, the same cannot be said for Medea. The villainy of the wronged mother who murders her children may have a moral complexity to it, but the heart of the appeal is that Medea commits horrifying actions. Her humanity, shown by her chronic indecisiveness, heightens the sense of monstrosity by making her more believable without taking away from the shocking nature of the crime. 

And yet Pratchett continued :

Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it’s being shed by the deserving), and then wondered where the stories went.

Which perhaps points to when revisionism simply doesn't work. While it's absolutely understandable that later interpretations have focused on her status as a woman and an outsider wronged and scorned, sometimes this would seem to miss the point. In one later retelling Medea basically does nothing at all, becoming friends with a woman she originally murdered. This would seem to be ludicrously bland and dull, sacrificing the whole point of the story for the sake of making a feminist statement. The point, surely, is that some things in a good story should be bad. And that women too can be evil, for that matter.

By contrast, History Hit's Medusa documentary presents a far more compelling case for a myth retold in ever-more unjustified misogynist tones, with Medusa originally being a giant, protective guardian figure and only later made into the evil demon-woman of modern popular depictions. Nevertheless, the appeal of the villains, that they are villains, should not be overlooked, especially given their complexity and depth. There's nothing wrong with stories that feature villains, and though there absolutely are misogynist aspects to some of the Greco-Roman myths, there are far better and less insulting ways of dealing with this than simply making all the women wonderful models of virtue.

Conclusions

One version of the myth of Prometheus has him cheating the gods not once but twice : stealing fire, and deceiving them into accepting the worse cut of the meat for sacrifices. But not everyone accepted this. Plato in particular didn't think that such things were even possible : of course the gods were good and of course they couldn't be deceived, or, as he went on at some length, placated with actual physical offerings of something as trivial as a side of beef. He also used the stories of the Amazons as proof of the viability of a more feminist society, whereas others used them more for misogynistic titillation (notably, while they were often said to cut off a breast, they were never depicted as having done so in paintings or sculpture).

This enormous versatility of the myths, that nobody would much care if you rewrote them, is part of their longevity. Not all changes are always to the good. Much of the political symbolism of this and that leader wanting to associate themselves with Hercules or Achilles is superficial and vain, and many artists have gone for unfathomable surrealism in trying to depict the indescribable. 

At their core, though, the myths couple primal themes with everyday reality. They make the normal world seem that little bit extraordinary. They join the predictable blandness of everyday life with the brutal and often bloody realm of fantasy. And they succeed in part with ambiguity : I'm particularly gratified to learn that the myth of Pandora's Jar, where she closes it to keep hope inside, isn't something with an obvious message that I've just missed but confusing to historians as well. Which is probably why we're still talking about it.

I've suggested at some considerable length that part of the appeal of Tolkien is in linking the worlds he describes with the cosmic, the very grandest of themes embodied in the otherwise basically-normal figures. This is true in part for the Greek myths too, but Buxton chooses here not to concentrate on the cosmology but the ordinary : the forces driving the characters, their flawed and complex personalities, and the similarities we infer with them. I've not given Buxton many direct quotes, but I'll let him summarise the nature and the appeal of myths :

One serviceable definition of myth is 'a socially powerful traditional story'... Myths are first and foremost thought experiments. What myths do [is] exaggerate, sharpen, and heighten issues taken from everyday life. About Oedipus' fate each one of us might say : there but for the twists of fortune go I.

A crucial difference between the world of mythology and the world of the everyday is that myths crystallise and dramatize and highlight and sharpen the concerns of everyday life, making the tensions more extreme, the disasters more catastrophic, and the achievements more glorious – and everything more memorable.

Another strategy, called 'rationalization', consisted in asking the question, 'What ordinary truths underlie these myths ?' ... The Hysperides were two ordinary women who owned sheep; Hydra was the name of a fort. This perspective can display a good deal of ingenuity and remains incredibly popular today (a centaur is just a confused memory of a man on a horse). But such an approach involves one fatal drawback : to regard myths as stories that simply reflect the ordinary world is to bleach out the very quality of imaginative daring – the departure from the everyday – that makes a myth a myth.

Do any myths reflect literal truths ? Quite probably. Does this matter ? Surely the most appropriate answer can only be, given the ambiguous versatility of a good myth : yes... and no.