Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the ‘ages of man’, for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories ‘wrong’ I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions. In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive.

Myth v. Legend v. Religion

Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure.fn1 The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning ‘to be read’.fn2

Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round.

Symbolical rather than historical in origin as myths and mythical figures might be, they underwent the same fictional remodelling and embellishments as more factually rooted legends. They too were written down, and the Greek myths especially, thanks to Homer, Hesiod and those that followed, were chronicled and detailed in ways that have granted us the timelines, genealogies and character histories that allow for story-telling of the kind I have attempted with this book.

Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can’t be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. Most of those who told and retold the myths would have been aware, I think, at some level of their consciousness, that they were telling fictional tales. They might have thought the world was once peopled with nymphs and monsters, but they could be fairly certain that such beings no longer existed.

Prayer, ritual and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things. At some point myth becomes cult becomes religion. It moves from stories told around the fire to a systematized set of beliefs to which obedience is owed. Priestly castes arose who ordained how people should behave. How myths become codified into scriptures, liturgies and theologies is a subject for another book and quite beyond my scope. We can, however, say that the ancient Greeks had no written revealed texts akin to the Bible or the Qur’an. There were ‘mysteries’ and initiations of various kinds that involved ecstatic states, perhaps not unlike the shamanic ones seen today in other parts of the world, and there were plenty of temples and shrines. It is true, as well, that even in the great Athenian age of reason and philosophy a man like Socrates could be executed for religious reasons.fn3

The Greeks