A Thing That Has Been Invented

Why I capitalize Greek Mythology

I’ll confess. I don’t like English grammar.

I don’t think it should be taught as part of a Language Arts curriculum.

In my heart of hearts, I would rather everybody take Latin or Greek and learn about English grammar that way.

Oh, no! Even worse, right?

But here’s one thing that Latin and Greek cannot teach a student, at least not directly:

Punctuation.

Neither Latin nor Greek originally had any punctuation or distinction between minuscule and majuscule letters. Anything written down was pretty much WRITTENLIKETHISWITHOUTEVENANYSPACESYEAHTHATSRIGHTNOSPACES

Ancient Greeks even wrote “boustrophedon” sometimes. No punctuation, and you also meander from left to right and then right to left, like an ox plowing a field.

Boustrophedon text: image courtesy Wikipedia

So, despite my opposition to teaching English grammar in an English class, I am eternally grateful to the English language for its ability to make fine distinctions in tone and meaning using non-letter signs and letters of different size.

All of which is a too-lengthy introduction to the revelation of the day, which is that in my manuscript The Invention of Greek Mythology, I talk about a concept called Greek Mythology in which the G and the M are always capitalized.

“Greek” is a proper noun and adjective so that makes perfect sense for English grammar.

But mythology is not a proper noun and in general nowadays is not capitalized unless it’s in a school or university’s course catalog. Even then it’s not a lock to be capitalized by people writing about it.

But for the purposes of my manuscript, I capitalize Greek Mythology because I consider it a Thing That Has Been Invented And Is Important.

And I differentiate it from Greek myths, which are simply a group of tales that a particular culture used for its own purposes—just one of many similarly-utilized groups of tales from around the globe.

Greek Mythology is a particular phenomenon. How did a rag-tag band of traveling myths and local gods, aided and abetted by a corresponding band of local myths and traveling gods, transform themselves into a constantly metamorphosing, nearly indestructible literary mirror that addresses the fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, and ambitions of every culture it touches?

Preliminary answer: it was in origin multicultural and diverse.

Greek myths have their own Greek stamp for sure, but they were originally a product of much exchange and cross-pollination. That was the way of the ancient world in general with mythology and religion: people went with what worked or seemed to work. That’s not to say that cultures didn’t get intensely tribal at times, the Greeks included. But in practice, there was a lot of mixing and matching.

In fact, writing itself is a great example of multicultural influence and exchange. The alphabet we now use came from a set of symbols invented on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea among Semitic peoples in the Iron Age, which the Greeks (and later the Romans) adapted for their own purposes.

In fact, the writer Herodotus claims that a character from Greek myths, Cadmus, brought writing to Greece from Tyre, a Phoenician city in the heart of alphabet-using country.

And we all know how powerful the alphabet has been through the ages.

In the olden days, we used to capitalize the Internet, because it was A Thing That Was Invented That Had A Great Impact On Our Lives. Now we don’t, because it is just a thing that is part of our lives. I want to call attention to Greek Mythology as a thing that has had and still has a great impact on our lives.

Dare I say it?

It is a capital idea.