Welcome back to part two of What Some Nerd Thinks About Greek Mythology. In part one I looked at the differences between a selection of variants of the same myth and also looked at how Greek literature often used quite different approaches to modern writing.
In this rather longer sequel, I challenge the view that paganism is inherently amoral. Price and Hutton were both explicit about this on the Celtic and Norse peoples, and I have to say that the moral lessons on many of the pagan stories has long eluded me. But as I'll set forth below, I think this is due to my modern liberal-lefty perspective. I think the difficulty in seeing the intended instructions arises from a combination of factors : the complexity of the stories, the fact that their gods don't directly symbolise moral virtues, and a fundamentally different outlook as to what moral behaviour actually was.
Get yerself a cuppa, then. It's a long one, but I promise it'll be better than watching the news.
Chaotic Neutral ?
So at last we come to the main event. I've gone on a lot lately about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic but it does give much more emphasis to the moral lessons of its stories than pagan writings. This is true, I think, but it probably needs needs a lot of caveats. Hutton and Price both claim outright that pagan thinking more a view of how the world works rather than why, bestowing little in the way of moral instruction.
Building on Hamilton, I would suggest that this is not wrong or unfounded, but definitely too simple. The stories themselves don't always offer explicit moral guidance in the way Christian stories often do. But they do give... suggestions, sometimes quite overtly. It's just that the earlier morality doesn't always align with modern notions : it can often be orthogonal and unrelated to modern concepts, or even diametrically opposed to them (as we'll see).
Nor is it anywhere near as simple as good deed => reward, bad deed => punishment, with good characters suffering and dying and bad people sometimes thriving without penalty*. The gods inflict reward and punishment according to their own ideals, but they themselves are flawed and imperfect rather than being simple personifications of morality. As with heroes, the conception of a Greek god was very different to a Christian one : they were immensely powerful beings but in no way omniscient nor omnipotent. That bad things happened to good people was in no way a problem for Greek paganism, because that was just the nature of reality (on which more later). They would simply not have understood the idea that gods had to be perfect; our conception of what constitutes "godliness" is not necessarily any more valid than theirs.
* The question of why this should be never arises very much. Things just happen, what the hell.
So it's not that the stories themselves are moral instructions in the way that Bible stories often are, but there are still moral lessons to be found within the stories. There's a much greater onerous on the reader to determine which behaviour is worthy of emulation and which isn't, and, perhaps most importantly, the emphasis is on telling a story first, providing ethical tutelage a somewhat distant second.
Okay, but what moral lessons do they contain then ? Chief among these is surely the overwhelming need to be kind to strangers. This is a sort of running motif of the Odyssey which is universally acknowledged by all civilised folk. The singular exception is the barbaric cyclops Polyphemus, and he's duly punished by Odysseus for this capital offence.
While this message is so deafeningly clear as to be practically WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS, it's worth remembering that this would not be something most of us today would choose to declare as our highest principle. Just as we saw last time with the Greeks having different ideas as to what made for good literature, so too did they have different moral beliefs. I mean... "Remember kids, be kind to strangers ! Let them invite themselves into your own home and shower them with expensive gifts ! Yes, give them the WiFi password ! Hell, give them the WiFi router !"... said no-one ever, apart form the ancient Greeks.
Other cases of explicit moral messaging include the famous and dreadful Torment of Tantalus, punished for his cannibalism with an equally brutal torture. So too was Prometheus for deceiving the gods, and also Odysseus for both blinding Poseidon's son and his pride in taunting him as his sailed off. Every so often, there are consequences for actions which go well beyond simple revenge and are clearly examples of moral lessons.
Odysseus deserves at little special attention. He can be a hard man to like, being at times absolutely insufferable. He's arrogant, boastful, and on occasion brutish and unnecessarily harsh. In particular when he returns home : judging the moral worthiness of the suitors but determined to kill them all anyway, regardless of the result; even worse, however, is his unambiguous rape of Circe – amorality and moral ambiguity giving way to outright villainy. But at his heart is a clever, wily man fighting not for glory but for survival, home and hearth and family, who weeps openly at memories of better days, and his physical and mental anguish are described in detail – he feels altogether more human and far less superhuman than many of the other heroes. He was no coward, but he alone was reluctant to fight at Troy, with all the rest being a bunch of bloodthirsty and/or suicidal maniacs.
The complexity of the character and his adventures alike surely underline the morally different nature of Greek mythology. The gods themselves, all too frequently, commit wantonly horrific acts, but I submit that this doesn't mean the Greeks thought that bestiality was anything desirable : it's just that they didn't understand gods to be personifications of virtue. Surely, they would have been much more choosy about what sort of behaviour they deemed to be worthy of imitation and which was intended as advice on what not to do.
Anyway, a flawed and imperfect human he may be, but Odysseus has much to admire about him : his lies are generally beneficial and just. Not so his counterpart in the earlier Iliad. Achilles has exactly nothing worthy of emulation because there's nothing about him possible to imitate : his strength and fighting prowess are divinely bestowed but his attitude is petulant bitching from beginning to end*. He is, in short, an absolute cunt. Yet the ancient Greeks seemed to view him as sex on legs, another reminder that their standards were not our standards. At all. They would have agreed that violence in a certain context is wrong, but would not at all have understood the concept of trying to reduce violence for its own sake. They might have viewed Achille's wrath as misplaced, but they would never have accepted that violence was innately undesirable. In this respect the tales only seem amoral to us because the Greeks had such radically different standards to modern Western audiences, not because their religious beliefs had no standards at all.
* First he won't fight at all and whines about it. Then he gets angry because his boyfriend gets killed and blames it all on Hector, who is, however, only defending his home. Achilles is a total Karen with sword and stupid sandals and I just don't like him.
Fortunately, Achilles gets his comeuppance just like most of the heroes, with few happily-ever-afters in Greek mythology more generally. Odysseus does get one but has to wait twenty years for it, Hercules dies horribly despite being the favourite of Zeus, many others achieve some fleeting moment of glory only to die badly : being heroic by itself doesn't automatically win you divine awards (and most heroes don't maintain a high ethical standard for very long, but quickly sink into corruption and vice*). Perseus is an exception**, who after many adventures slaying Gorgons and whatnot, retires to a happy kingship and is rewarded with an afterlife with the gods.
* Whether this is supposed to have any moral implication is unclear. Generally it feels like this is just a reflection of human nature, though it could be a warning that all glory is fleeting. Either way, it means that there are attributes of the heroes worthy of imitation, but one shouldn't go the whole Agamemnon. Aggy was great for assembling an army, but one hell of a shitty military commander.
** He too can be a right little prick, insufferably full of arrogant pride. In one of the weirdest lines in this collection he declares to Andromeda, "I will win you and I will wear you." Misogyny too, sadly, would not have struck the Greeks as offensive.
All this complexity makes the stories altogether more engaging than the pure morality-tales of the Bible – with Greek mythology you can't predict anything based on the moral actions of the characters. But this doesn't mean that what the heroes did was of no virtue. Rather the reverse : in Tolkienian fashion, the true heroes act correctly in spite of the lack of reward, be it divine or worldly.
Sometimes rewards and punishments are indeed forthcoming, however, but not always in a straightforward way. When Hercules – a character who constantly atones for his misdeeds – accidentally shots his immortal mentor Chiron the centaur with poisoned arrows, the pain is unbearable. The gods can't cure him so instead they grant him the gift of death... and if that's not a topical moral lesson then I don't know what is. This is in marked contrast to Tithonus, who was granted immortality but not agelessness, eventually decaying into a grasshopper ("whose monotonous chirpings may not inaptly be compared to the meaningless babble of extreme old age", says our questionable translator), or Echo, who fades to nothing more than a voice.
Immortality in Greek myth can be a reward for exceptional heroes like Perseus and Hercules, but it can also be a terrible punishment. Much more common, of course, is that mortals simply die, but the afterlife they receive takes moral ambiguity to the extreme. The plethora of different views make this one difficult to summarise, but it seems that the afterlife could be extremely difficult to enter – you'd have a long and difficult descent, a ferryman to pay, a giant multi-headed dog to get past, rivers of fire and giant snakes and whatnot... except even this wasn't clear. In the Aeneid :
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.
So getting in could be either trivial or enormously difficult (what happened if you failed isn't stated, nor is it clear why getting in should be a challenge anyway since there's not necessarily much there). For Odysseus neither posed that much difficulty, essentially he just sails in and sails right back out again. But whether you'd be rewarded or not was anyone's guess. In some versions the shades in Hades really are phantoms, with a shadow of Hercules being present despite his true soul being in Olympus – yet their wits could be temporarily restored by an offering of blood. In some versions Elysian (and Olympus itself) comes close to a vision of heaven, but the entry conditions are unclear to say the last, and even those who don't make it in are described as "blessed". Sometimes a blissful afterlife is allowed for heroes but what happens to everyone else isn't said.
Whether good behaviour would result in a reward is, then, often totally opaque... but if good characters aren't always rewarded, then bad ones are almost invariably and savagely punished; the heroes might not win for long, but they always defeat their enemies. None of this means that many events in the stories aren't described in positive terms, clearly meant as moral guides despite the lack of reward or even suffering that would subsequently befall the characters.
Rather than the mythology being amoral, I think this shows that it simply doesn't fit with modern conceptions of how religion and morality were supposed to relate. Our understanding is much simpler and more straightforward : reward the good and punish the wicked; lots of carrot and lots of stick alike. The ancient Greeks appear not to have shared this view, and wouldn't have accepted it because that's clearly not how the world works. All the same, this doesn't mean their mythology doesn't share some aspects of how they think the world should work.
The Ultimate Reality
The Iliad is surely the supreme example of moral ambiguity. Full of both the glories and brutalities of combat, it also presents each side very even-handedly and presents direct contrasts between good and bad characters on both sides. More than most of the other tales this is straightforward literature rather than mythology proper, with little in the way of explanatory metaphors, full of titanic armies instead of individual duels. Yet there are opposing cases in Greek myth, situations where one side is clearly evil and the other clearly good. I refer, of course, to monsters.
Like the later Norse myths, monsters spring from a different lineage than the gods. The gods themselves are hardly emblematic of virtue, but just as heroes are not always rewarded but villains always punished, so the monsters are almost entirely straightforwardly evil. Killing the monsters is never questioned : they are dangerous and deserve to die, end-of*. Although some of them are the result of misadventures by the gods – the Cyclops are, according to some at least**, the offspring of Poseidon, and thus fully part of the natural order – many are not. The Furies are born of the blood of Uranus; Hydra*** is the offspring of the mighty Typhon (itself the son of Gaia); Perseus encounters a "monster bred of slime who devours all living things".
* A History Hit documentary provides a fascinating caveat, describing how Medusa was originally a protector-goddess rather than a Crazy Snake Lady. But this doesn't negate that in later depictions as Crazy Snake Lady, everyone thought that she needed to be killed.
** As usual there is no one accepted account. Wikipedia has a very nice overview.
*** Who is assisted by a giant crab, and I feel this needs to be more widely known.
Why does this matter ? Well, Tolkien, I think heavily overstated the case that the Greek monsters were all entirely in keeping with the natural order. They might not cause any sort of "corruption of the soul", but their narrative function is be defeated by the heroes : their only innate desires are destruction and malevolence, and many of them are literally another order of being to the gods and mortals alike. Even those which are god-begotten, like Polyphemus, are wholly villainous, and a good Greek hero has no doubt that his duty is to slay them if he can. True, the gods do not wage war against all monsters, but they certainly do fight some of them. Greek cosmology is partly dependent on the existence of malevolent beings, even if the underlying sense of doom in Norse myth is nowhere present. The future, for the Greeks, was always uncertain, and again this comes through as heroes are sometimes laid low unjustly and villains sometimes achieve – albeit usually temporarily – great success.
If the future was unwritten then the past was... confused. There's little or nothing to indicate a cyclic view of the future, no hint that things will repeat or reset – if they even ever mention the future at all. Of course, here and there is a vague hint of heroic destiny and short-term prophecy, but nothing much at all beyond that of individual lives. But myths of the past, though they vary substantially, do contain repetitive aspects. There's a cycle of overthrow and especially patricide : Gaia (Earth) is overthrown by her offspring Uranus (heaven) who is in turn overthrown by Cronos. Cronos, famously, devours his children, fearing a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him. Of course this turns out to be Zeus, but Zeus himself eats Metis who births Athena inside him, eventually springing forth fully formed from his head. Humans are even more cyclic, being created first from races of successively lower-quality metals, then all being wiped out in a great deluge only to finally repopulate the Earth from a few survivors,
What exactly is the point of all this repetition* ? Christian teachings are an awful lot simpler and easier to follow; Greek ideas (emphasis on the plural) are muddled, complex, with a sense of deep time about them that a literal interpretation of the Bible famously lacks. It's almost, dare I say it, to the sense of evolutionary change... the gods are superior to their predecessors the Titans; gods have at least a capacity for good whereas giants and Titans and monsters tend overwhelmingly to be just, well, monstrous. Conversely humans are are degenerate from their forbears rather than being improvements on the earlier models.
* And this is just a selection of the formation myths. Other aspects repeat as well : as Demeter spends half the year in Hades, so does Adonis. As Echo fades to just a voice, so does Tithonus. More general themes, such as a hero being separated from their parents at birth, or falling victim to their own hubris, are also abundantly re-used.
Perhaps the lesson is itself uncertainty and change even on the cosmic scale. The universe itself is certainly not underpinned by moral agency, but even so, nothing is ever truly destroyed – gods and monsters are much more replaced than they are destroyed utterly. The more things change, the more they stay the same; things alter, but they don't always progress. And perhaps this is a larger reflection of that vast, interlinked pseudo-history, without any clear endings even on the longest of scales.
If anything I suppose "lack of clarity" might be the defining feature of the whole edifice. Lack of clear endings and the uncertain prospect of repetition doesn't render the whole thing amoral so much as it does morally ambiguous.
Likewise, so too is the nature of the gods uncertain. They are clearly of a different order altogether than humans, but they still require sustenance to survive (and presumably, for reasons that are never explained, the worship of mortals and sacrificial offerings). They personify natural forces to the nth degree. It's not that Poseidon is some big burly water-man with a changeable moods, it's that there are even separate gods and goddesses that personify the sea in different and highly specific states*; similarly it's not that there's a god just for the Sun, but also those for the twilight and the dawn.
* The god of Mildly Choppy Waters wasn't a thing, but easily could have been.
Exactly how this works I've not got a clue. Even the simpler cases of personification aren't clear. How exactly does Poseidon or Zeus deal with multiple prayers simultaneously ? How do they manage different parts of the world all at once ? The answer seems to be that they simply don't, that they're just singular figures who somehow muddle through, but this is deeply unsatisfactory. I have to wonder if this points to a different conception of reality – if there was some obvious solution to those who actually believed in the Olympians* – or if it's just romanticism run amok with no attempt ever made to fathom an answer. Emotions were allowed to drive the stories and beliefs far more than rational thought.
* Perhaps the point I'm missing is the transactional nature of the relationship between humans and gods. They presented a way whereby mortals could hope to overcome otherwise hopeless situations, and that sometimes things would or wouldn't work out when bargaining with sapient deities was something easily understood. Maybe the gods don't so much represent nature itself as man's relationship to it.
Hamilton made the excellent point that human-like minds were something that humans could understand, and thus crafting the gods in their own image was a measure of progress in rationality compared to believing in incomprehensible forces. For all that, it's worth remembering that this progress was extremely limited, with no attempt or interest in understanding the nature of the gods or even imposing any degree of self-consistency over the stories. And as Hamilton herself pointed out, when this started to happen, the ancient beliefs were doomed. Varying the stories through happy accident was one thing, but actively remaking the gods according to an independent moral code was quite another.
Conclusions
Greek myths are distinctly different from Celtic, Norse, and Christian teachings, even if all share plenty of common themes. The Greek world view is one all of its own, without the underlying moral guidance of Christianity and without the overarching doom of Norse. They aren't morally fixated but they are not all amoral either. They are ambiguous about practically everything, endlessly versatile, but this can make them infinitely frustrating in trying to understand their purpose. They are somewhere between pure literature and a genuine world view, neither entirely an attempt to understand reality, nor only to provide ethical guidance, nor to simply tell a good story. They were, of course, all of these, though some stories were far more profound than others.
What's also hard to factor in is the humour. Occasionally this is obvious, such as Odysseus' famous "Nobody" ploy against the Cyclops. But what about when Athena, in human guise, prays to Poseidon – would the Greeks have found this amusing or serious ? How are we to view Athena disguising herself as a man, or Hercules cross-dressing and lounging (however briefly) in an apathetic depression ? Sometimes that which can be played for laughs can also be deeply serious.
The ambiguity and flexibility of the myths could also be a tremendous weakness. It was possible to journey to the very edge of reality; journeys into Hell could be undertaken in a numerous different ways. There was no clear cosmology and thus mingled into ordinary geography. The ideas were supposed to explain reality, but ultimately, having multiple conflicting accounts of this – many of which were testable – was unsustainable. Not only, perhaps, was it the human need for a a robust moral belief that undermined the gods (insisting they behaved with ever-greater levels of nobility), but so too it may have been that there was a need to impose order on the whole system : not just morally, but physically also. And when you learn there's actually a single and specific truth to something, a flexible and indeterminate belief cannot be maintained.
Eeep, this has been a long one, right enough. The Greeks may have hated endings to the same level as Monty Python, but I still have to finish somewhere. I guess I'll go for this : the Greek myths are, ultimately, fascinating because of their combination of similarity and differences to modern standards. We can appreciate Hercules' defence of the weak, but not his murderous rage (though we might sympathises with his madness). We can appreciate Achilles' martial prowess but not his Karen-like bitchiness; we can embrace Odysseus' cunning and empathise as he fails to persuade his crew as they court their own disaster, but we shun his ruthlessness and pride. And we can endorse the attempt, however flawed, in seeking a comprehensible explanation for how the world worked, even as we reject the contradictory solutions.
A look at Greek myth is, then, to stare into a hall of broken mirrors at our alien ancestors. We see ourselves twisted and broken and warped but nevertheless recognisable. We continue to draw lessons from their stories, but as with all good stories, those lessons can and should change over time; that some of their behaviours are now understood to be outright wrong does not negate the value of their stories but simply changes it; we now learn what not to do rather than feeling inspired to sack cities and molest swans. We will never understand the full moral symbolism of all of their stories as the original audience perceived it, but that doesn't make our own attempts any the less valuable, and certainly doesn't devalue them simply because our own ethical teachings are not the same. On the contrary : to try and understand the shifting moral sands is intrinsically valuable, an avenue to critical thinking that is, surely, essential in reaffirming our own ideals.
