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1. Why do we study the mythology of Greece and Rome in English Department? "From Chaucer to [Eliot's] Sweeney among the Nightingales much of English poetry has relied on a code of instantaneous recognition. Where the code lapses...a good deal of the poetry may lapse too." (George Steiner, p.3)
For educated readers from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, a reference to Hercules, or Venus, or Helen, or the sack of Troy, could be relied on to produce 'instantaneous recognition' - not an anxious search of school memories for a vaguely familiar name, but the involuntary and subliminal flash of images and associations that a modern reader would have on encountering the name of Superman, or Sherlock Holmes, or Marilyn Monroe(pp. 3-4).
2. The origins of myths
Scholars have propounded many views of the origins of myths: that they were pre-scientific attempts to explain the world and its phenomena; that they were aetiological stories, explaining the origins of things; that they acted as ‘charters’, explaining and justifying social institutions; that they were records of religious rituals, garbled over time into narratives of real events; that they were political propaganda; that they taught moral lessons;that they were historical facts distorted and fantasticated over time into legends of gods and superheroes(p. 5). 3. Literary Uses of Myth in Classic Literature 1) Homer: Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: Homeric poems became the basis of Greek literature and education, carrying the combined cultural prestige of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Bible for English readers. Both poems deal with the stories of the Trojan War; the Illiad focuses on the destructive anger of the Greek warrior Achilles, his quarrel with his commander Agamemnon, and his eventual duel to the death with the Trojan Hector; the Odyssey follows a different kind of hero, the patient and resourceful Odysseus, on his journey home after the war. Homer created the classic picture of the Greek heroic age, and also of the very human, quarrelsome and meddling Olympian gods(p. 6). 2) Hesiod: His Theogony ('Origin of the Gods’') gives the fullest account of the earliest Greek myths, dealing with the creation of the world and the early battles of gods, Titans, and Giants leading up to the establishment of Zeus as ruler of the universe. His Works and Days, a didactic poem about farming life, also includes the myths of Prometheus and Pandora and the Four Ages. 3) Homeric Hymns: the dominant literary form of 'lyric age'(mid-seventh to mid-fifth centuries) was song: poems to be publicly sung, either by and individual or by a choir. Choral hymns to various deities such as Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, and Dionysus. Pindar of early fifth century was most distinctive with his odes in honour of victors at the athletic games. 4) Classical Athenian playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides(big three of tragedy writers) and the comic playwrights Aristophanes. 5) Plato: the philosopher attacked the traditional tales of the gods'tricks and thefts and adulteries as immoral, objected to their central role in literature and education, and proposed to ban them from his idea state(pp. 6-7). 6) Virgil: the poet began by writing pastoral poems, the Eclogues, and a didactic poem about farming life, the Georgics; both include mythological elements, notably the story of Orpheus and Eurydice at the end of the Georgics. But his masterpiece was the Aeneid, and epic poem about the escape of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy, and his long wanderings and wars before he founded a settlement in Italy that was to be the origin of Rome. 7) Ovid: He, a generation younger than Virgil, is a very different poet. Ovid’s masterpiece is the Metamophoses: a collection of mythological tales from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar, woven together in 'one continuous song' by the unifying theme of metamorphosis or change of shape. The poem itself is metamorphic, slipping from story to story on what seems like a continuous stream of free association, while continually changing moods - ironic humour, romance, pathos, moral earnestness, violence and horror, and then back to comedy again...The Metamorphoses was for many centuries one of the most popular books in Europe, and it is by far the most important text in transmitting the myths to later writers(p. 9).
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