Review : Mythology

Unlike many books, I didn't pick this one up because it was cheap but because it wasn't. It was more of a case of "I can afford this and it looks lovely".

And it is. Unbeknownst to me, it's a 75th anniversary edition of Edith Hamilton's 1942 classic "Mythology"*. Physically this is a beautiful book, hardback cover, thick pages, fully illustrated, with lightly silvered paper edges. It's an absolutely first-rate piece for the coffee table. It's also stonkingly well-written, a mixture of Hamilton both retelling the classic stories and providing insight and commentary. She's not in the least bit afraid to pronounce judgement without distracting from what the myths themselves say either. For example early in the introduction :

* Yes, I know, it's got "75th anniversary edition" printed in large letters on the front cover, but I didn't read the blurb.

Of course the Greeks too had their roots in the primeval slime. Of course they too once lived a savage life, ugly and brutal. But what the myths show is how high they had risen above the ancient filth and fierceness by the time we have any knowledge of them. Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories.

Perhaps the only flaw I could possibly find with the book is that the Norse section, though excellent, is tiny and tacked-on, like it should be the start of a whole new volume that was never finished. I have no idea if that's the case, but the great bulk of the book is about the Greek myths, so I'm going to concentrate entirely on that section here. A more minor quibble is that Hamilton doesn't really labour any of the more sordid stuff, yet to her great credit, this doesn't make it any the less compelling. I do think there's rather more of the filth and slime in the stories than she gives credit for though.

There were three major themes I found interesting, so let's start with those.

1) The Greek Miracle

This is how Hamilton describes the anthropomorphic Greek gods : surprisingly, they are in essence rational. That is, they are no longer primal, elemental forces beyond all human ken, but essentially human themselves. If the Greeks of pre-antiquity had little understanding of physics, then they had some knowledge of a theory of mind. They had no way of knowing about static electricity, but an angry man hurling thunderbolts they could readily understand. Rather than seeing this as a primitive attempt at describing the world with crude substitutions, Hamilton views it as a laudable and earnest attempt to make use of the best, most plausible explanations available. The Greek "preoccupation with the visible" led to a "humanised world, free from the paralysing fear of an omnipotent unknown".

In contrast, Celtic and other myths are full of figures beyond comprehension, beyond reason. Hamilton notes that the Roman gods, prior to their transplanting Greek ideas, were simply unpersonified powers of sheer will, useful and practical but inhuman. Celtic fairyland is not located on any map, nor does Aladdin's genie live in any real place. In these wilder myths, both time and space are malleable and causality an optional extra. In stark contrast the Greeks were explicit about naming exactly where everything took place : winged horses were given real stables at locations you could visit as a tourist; the sequence of events in the stories is perfectly logical, even if the characters might not always be sensible. Their internal motivations are loud and clear, whereas in the Celtic stories they are virtually absent.

Mankind in the Greek myths, says Hamilton, is put front and centre. They might not treat us very well, but the gods are more concerned with us than in ordering the structure of the cosmos. They are formidable to be sure, but they are not omnipotent or omniscient. The stories even make them amusing : one could laugh at the gods, though admittedly not to their faces. They were hugely complex figures : beautiful, capricious, dangerous, cruel, yet not terrifying. Their reasons and behaviour, even if those were often worse than that of ordinary mortals, could be understood. And though there were moments of true savagery, they were, she claims, exceedingly rare.

More surprisingly, Hamilton also describes magic as being extremely infrequent in the stories. Here she means human sorcery rather than the supernatural more generally, since gods and monsters are ubiquitous : in Greek myths, unlike the Celtic tales, it's gods all the way down. But indeed, there are basically two famous human witches and a smattering of lesser examples; in Celtic mythology, magic is everywhere and available to essentially everyone*. Celtic magic is bewildering in its unpredictability; Greek magic followed distinct rules. And even the Greek gods were created by the universe rather than the other way around : mind from matter, not matter from mind. Hamilton's view of the Greek myths is as a mixture of science, religion, and literature all blended into one astonishing whole.

*What's especially weird is that, as Philip Matyszak points out, the Greeks and Romans viewed magic as an essentially normal, daily occurrence in their real lives, making its dearth in their stories all the stranger. I have no idea why this should be.

2) Changing Beliefs

All this makes the question, "did they really believe all this ?" barely meaningful. While Buxton noted the versatility of the myths, Hamilton charts the change of the stories over time. By the time the Greek playwrights and poets set forth the tales in their most fully-developed forms, centuries of re-evaluation meant that ideas of the gods had shifted dramatically. Zeus, once a whimsical rapist, shifted into the primary giver of justice (even in Plato this is loudly apparent). Olympus may once have been understood to be physically atop a mountain, but even by Homer's time this literal version had been replaced with a more spiritual interpretation : the gods existed, no doubt about that yet, but they weren't equivalent to giants living in a hall on a very visible nearby hillside.

Even by the end of the Roman Republic, genuine belief in the gods was waning. Philosophy had, perhaps, dealt them a killer blow. "If the gods do evil then they are not gods", said Euripides, decrying the notion that the gods would demand sacrifice. Plato's interpretation was a little more sophisticated, saying that it was the loss to those committing the sacrifice that the gods would respect, rather than the silly idea that they could be bought off with some burnt meat. Or as Hamilton quotes from Pindar on the story of Tantalus, brutally punished for feeding the gods his own children :

A tale decked out with glittering lies against the word of truth. Let a man not speak of cannibal deeds among the gods.

The poor demanded gods behave with some measure of decorum; the need for hope in a just and ordered reality was irresistible. The problem, of course, is that if the gods are comprehensible then they are not gods either. Making the gods conform to human expectations rather than the other way around, as Plato insisted on very forcefully in order to manipulate the masses, was fatal. The morality might be more appealing but a god you can negotiate with is largely missing the point.

Another example that comes to mind to me here is King Alfred as depicted in The Last Kingdom. The on-screen portrayal is magnificent : Alfred is indeed great, but he's hardly nice. One moment in particular took me a good long while to properly understand. When asked to show mercy to the wayward son of one of his most loyal followers, Alfred refuses. It makes him seem cold, aloof, and haughty, but that's the whole point. By setting himself apart from other men, holding himself to higher standards and not succumbing to loyalty, Alfred appears above mere mortals. Here is someone, or so perhaps he intends men will say, who has that spark of the inscrutably divine about him, someone truly kingly, even godlike.

Without this similar haughtiness, when tales could be re-written completely to suit the fancies of the day, belief in the gods was doomed. Of course it took centuries to die out fully, and Roman writers freely incorporated them into their literature without really caring much whether they were real or not. But ultimately, it's hard to believe in a god you can control. 

This puts the rise of Christianity in a new light : yes, it had the social-moral appeal of a god risen from the lowest of the low, but the notion that you could bribe it with sacrifice was done away with completely. Sure, aspects of this crept back in, because people need some aspect of control. But this never reached the same degree as with paganism. You can pray, you can pledge to make yourself better to atone for your sins, but ultimately it's god who judges. You cannot bribe*. This would give Christianity a devastating combination of attributes. The god appealed strongly to the poor and downtrodden, giving the new religion genuine and literal revolutionary appeal against the old order, but restored the aloof superiority and power of the earlier, more primal Greek ideas.

* And when bribery was introduced, such as buying the remission of sin, it split the Church. This is corruption in a human system, not part of the faith itself.

3) Interconnections

What this sizeable collection of tales makes clear that Buxton's analysis didn't was that the Greek mythological world was essentially an Expanded Universe. It was, in a way, a franchise operation. Characters might have their own main central "box set" collection of tales but they also get frequent cameos in other stories. Odysseus is hardly the main character at all in the Iliad but he was given his own successful spin-offs, not just in the Odyssey but in various other stories as well. Hercules has his own main show but crops up everywhere, especially on the early stages of the voyage of the Argo. Medea begins in one story and ends in another; Theseus and other heroes have whole series of escapades in which they may or may not, at any one time, be the central focus of the tales. Likewise with Daedalus, who does much more than make wings (some of it extremely unpleasant). 

Even apparently minor side-characters, like the monster Scylla that threatens Odysseus' ship, have backstories of how they came to be. And it's not just backstories. Polyphemus, the most famous Cyclops, goes on to become a figure of fun who can't get a girlfriend. Oedipus' tale continues long after the famous "oops-I-did-my-mother" moment. 

What strikes me about this is that it's almost as if the world of Greek myth, for all its constant evolution and retellings, was constructed as a vast pseudo-history. Characters rarely exist in isolation but have complex family trees and endless backstories, a sort of mirror-world of endless supernatural adventures. All characters are connected but all of them are characters, larger-than-life figures who lead impossibly interesting, weird and wonderful lives, some of which are more fleshed-out than our surviving records of real people of the time. Together with their complex and detailed motivations, this network of relations between them all helps make the characters in Greek myths feel all the more like real, believable people, even when they do outrageously impossible things.

Which is not to say there was a Hellenistic equivalent of a bible, no single Authorised Book to sign up to, let alone any dogma to follow. But the intricacy of the relations, the need to at least make some effort towards self-consistency, maybe points towards an early tendency in that direction. I wonder if this made the whole thing any the more or less believable to the Greeks themselves. On the one hand, such a complex web of connections might be thought too detailed for anyone to have just "made up". On the other, everything was a story, and you'd have to assume that at least some people would have been suspicious of just how amazing all the character's lives appeared to be and wondered where all the normal people were. 

Especially so given that so many of the stories were well-developed literature. Indeed the explicit motivations of the characters, the logical (but carefully contrived) sequence of events, the general self-consistency at least within individual stories, all give Greek myth much more in common with modern literature than Celtic stories. Even some of Plato's dialogues contain more in the way of emotive description of the scenery than anything from Wales or Ireland. In Celtic stories things are constantly happening for no reason, motivations are hardly mentioned, violence is constant and cruelty rampant. In the Greek stories all of these are heavily toned down. There's less of the primal appeal to the base and the bloody and far more of the refined literary appeal to the head and the heart.

In Persians : The Age of The Great Kings, Llewellyn-Jones mentions that the Persians didn't really have a modern concept of historical truth. While the Greeks of course did have such a notion, it's tempting here to see the emergence of this as evolutionary. Greek playwrights were happy to use their gods as purely literary figures without a sense of blasphemy; Plato's outright declaration that the people must believe in moral gods took this to a whole other level. There is perhaps not a clear distinction but a spectrum between the purely whimsical fictions and the hard-headed historical truths, with the mythical tales always being accepted as lying somewhere in between the two. Truth and literature were not so easily distinguished.

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Differing perspectives

Which brings me to my final section : no author has a monopoly on what the Greek myths mean. While there is some overlap with Thames & Hudson's Myths That Shape The Way We Think series, Hamilton provides a much more comprehensive set of stories – and also a sometimes quite different analysis. Whereas Buxton was convinced that, unlike the Celtic and Norse, the Greek myths were largely recorded by those who actively believed in them, Hamilton makes it abundantly clear that this is at best a simplification. Not only the tales themselves but belief in them shifted over time. In fact the whole notion of "truth" dissolves when applied to myth and is probably best avoided.

Sometimes the analysis is more directly at odds. Matyszak made the claim that romantic love didn't exist in the ancient world, and that "love" was essentially an interchangeable term for the act and the emotion : regardless, disturbingly, of whether that was reciprocated or not. Here both authors may have good points. In Hamilton's description of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, when Cupid is sent by Venus to make Psyche ugly (she had the unfortunate distinction of being so beautiful she was distracting Venus' worshippers), he falls he love with her so he does... nothing. He doesn't pursue her himself. He literally takes no action of any kind.

Poor Psyche is therefore admired by all but in the unique situation of being pursued by no-one, since Cupid shoots no arrows. It would be a stretch too far to proclaim this is a clear example of Cupid's own romantic love (and probably too childish to say Cupid is just firing blanks...) but it's also a far cry from the serial rape that characterises most of the Greek gods infatuations. Cupid at least doesn't act from his own base and selfish physical needs, quite unlike Zeus or (especially) Apollo. There is at least a hint that romantic love is possible; personally I still find the claim that this was an invention to be extremely far-fetched.

On this subject in particular I think Hamilton underestimates the savagery of Greek myth. The story of the terrified Daphne, pursed by a lusty Apollo and turned into a laurel tree, is a deeply disturbing tale of attempted rape; similarly the story of Arethusa pursed by the river god Alephus... but this is worse, because she's turned into a spring and their waters mingle. So she doesn't even really escape, unlike Daphne. 

In many stories the rape is successful and not viewed as anything especially heinous. In others, especially perhaps later stories, things turn out quite differently. Apollo rapes Creusa, but is later shamed by the Oracle of Delphi into essentially paying child support. Mind you, Apollo is a particularly nasty piece of work who burns a girl alive for cheating on him. Interestingly he's supposedly the god of truth who can never himself be deceived. Having the god of truth being a serial rapist would seem to rather undermine Frank Herbert's claim that respect for truth is the basis for all morality. You can't be a moral rapist, even if you're honest about it.

As might be obvious by this point, compared to the Celtic stories the focus on love and sexuality is much more predominant. Even bestiality is common, sometimes as a result of madness. Strangely, homosexuality is rare, though asexuality is relatively common. Plenty of huntresses just wish men would bloody well sod off.

But it isn't just love and sex in which the darker aspects of Greek myth are visible. Perhaps I'm just looking for it too hard, but there's plenty of savagery here despite Hamilton's claim to the contrary. Dionysius' followers, the Maenads, run through the forests tearing animals apart, with Dionysius himself being "the god who dies", being ripped apart every year on Hera's orders. Tantalus and others murder their children and eat them, as does Cronos himself, and even Zeus swallowed Athena's pregnant mother. And Hercules is on occasion an actual murderer, sometimes due to madness but sometimes not.

To Hamilton's credit, though, she sees the value in these early authors despite their many obvious faults. Whereas "Homer never wondered about anything", Hamilton notes that Hesiod was determined to address the larger, cosmological questions despite his flagrant misogyny. And Pandora, that "beautiful disaster" (a.k.a. a hot mess) can be interpreted variously as being actually the cause of men's evil, or merely providing a focal point rather than being the actual source. Interpreting the myths in any single way would be to misunderstand and underappreciate just how incredibly versatile they can be.

The very last difference I want to end on is Theseus and Hercules. If Hamilton understates the brutal nature of some of the myths, her claim that this aspect was played down certainly has merit nonetheless.

Hercules, says Hamilton, was by far the most popular hero in classical Greece. He was a bit of a hot mess too : not really stupid exactly, but hardly the brightest penny in the fountain. Big, burly, and willing (possibly even able) to fight the gods themselves, he had the usual complex flaws of most Greek heroes. He would mostly fight for a sense of justice we today would recognise, defending the weak and overthrowing tyrants and so on. But he would make many mistakes, sometimes causing the deaths of innocents. Yet he would also punish himself incredibly harshly for his transgressions. If he sometimes should have known better, he would at least do anything anyone could ever possibly do to atone for his sins. This level of subtlety in the character work is not absent from Celtic stories but it's certainly rare, whereas in the Greek myths it's all too common.

And Athens had an even more sophisticated hero, who they uniquely preferred to the simpler charm of Hercules. Theseus was more compassionate and more intelligent by far than Hercules, able to understand concepts the big guy with the club couldn't make sense of. Theseus' great skill is, in prelude to Christianity, forgiveness. He doesn't inflict petty revenge on those who oppose him. When Oedipus, later in life, was cast out from his city, Theseus alone received him. When Hercules went mad and killed his wife and children, Theseus alone forgave him, saying the deed was not his own, and fearing not that he himself would be morally tainted by association. The heroism of Theseus is not only in fighting men and monsters (though he does plenty of that) but in making moral choices. Here indeed Greek myth appears to have risen well above the primeval muck and slime.

Lest we get carried away, like Hercules, Theseus too was far from perfect. At one point he tries to help his friend abduct Persephone from Hades because his friend wants to – ahem – "marry" her. Yet having any moments of moral sophistication at all is a powerful development all the same. And these imperfections are part of what gives the myths their enduring appeal : their blend of sophisticated moral reasoning together with the base and most primal human instincts, the terror of monsters with the light of reason, the strength of "naked will and courage" embedded in intricate and sophisticated plots, the familiarity of modern values shining through against the dark savagery of the distant past. They can be appalling violent, but also deeply thoughtful. There's usually more to them than meets the eye.