First ten!

"The Invention of Greek Mythology" as it is currently introduced

My manuscript, THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, is in progress and mostly resembles an empty lot at the front of which a sign has been posted: Future Home of Grand and Significant Thoughts.

As I continue to marshal those thoughts, the beginnings of the foundation of the infrastructure of them is taking shape. But before I lose myself in multiple mixed metaphors, let me just say that the introduction to the book is currently titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Greek Mythology,” and it has been copied and pasted below for your reading pleasure.

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Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Greek Mythology

I didn’t grow up with Greek Mythology.

I attended public schools in Berkeley, California, back in a pre-internet era known as the seventies, and Greek Mythology was not in the curriculum.

I went to a school named after the 1960s civil rights leader Malcolm X. My classmates and I sang and danced to the Hawaiian song “We’re Going to the Huki-Lau” and the Japanese coal miners’ song. We learned about the Spanish missions of colonial California and how to make a California Native American raft out of tule reeds, the papyrus of the San Joaquin River delta.

Black History had a robust place in the curriculum. I did a report on the 18th century African-American inventor and surveyor Benjamin Banneker who helped lay out the plan of the new city of Washington, D.C. We were thrilled by the heroic deeds of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Black teachers played recordings of Ray Charles’s “Look What They Done to My Song” and recited the early rap poem “Stagger Lee” to my class and we discussed what they meant.

It was not your typical American education of that era.

And between and amongst all that, no teacher ever gave me the skinny on Greek Mythology.

Even my education in the Latin language, which began in the eighth grade, didn’t include a Greek Mythology component. My teachers were dedicated mostly to grammar and vocabulary. For me, the greatest mythological monster of my high school education was an accusative singular neuter future passive participle.

So, true confessions here: I learned about Greek Mythology in graduate school at the University of North Carolina from the 150 students to whom I was teaching the course. 

When we—most of us in casual daily life—say “Greek Mythology,” we’re not talking about the original Greek myths that we absorb when reading the plays of Greek tragedy or Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. We often mean the modern versions of the stories, many concocted especially for children, that in many ways only faintly resemble the primary texts we have from ancient Greece. 

 My teachers in Berkeley, conscious as they were of multiculturalism, strove to give me and my classmates a sense of authentic Greek myths.

In the ninth grade, read the Odyssey, using the Harper Torchbook edition of Professor Richmond Lattimore’s magisterial translation. The cover shows the great hero holding a long spear and adorned with a crested helmet and wrapped in a long cloak flapping in the breeze. My best friend redrew that picture as an upright horse with a rooster-like comb over its head; it could shoot lightning from its finger.

He called the new species a Khaan Kobe.

I made my friend’s creation into a character in my Dungeons & Dragons game. 

That’s what 9th graders in Berkeley did back then.

My teachers turned us then to Hesiod who wrote the Theogony, a poem about the generations of the gods, and the Works and Days, a poem on farming and mythology. 

In the 10th grade I read the plays Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles and argued with my teacher about whether or not Oedipus was responsible for the terrible acts of killing his father and marrying his mother.

In college I was assigned and read the Iliad for the first time. I acted in Aeschylus’ great play Agamemnon as a member of the chorus. And eventually I read a fair amount of Latin and Greek and got more than one degree in it.

 I just wasn’t acquainted with Greek Mythology.

What I am talking about when I talk about Greek Mythology—and I bet you’re talking about, too—is a phenomenon that my students in North Carolina knew only too well. That’s why they signed up for the class.

The following is what my students thought they were signing up for when they took Greek Mythology. 

Long ago there was a bunch of stories called myths. These stories were lies, which is why they were called myths. However, even though they weren’t true stories, they were still important and interesting, and after a few thousand years people decided to call them Greek Mythology. Greek Mythology was invented by the ancient Greeks, a sunny, simple group of white Europeans who didn’t know what science was. To explain natural phenomena such as the sun, moon, and the seasons, the Greeks made up gods and goddesses and chiseled statues of them in white marble. These deities were powerful and sometimes mean, but they kept the Greeks in line. These stories are a bit strange and childish, which makes them good for children to learn, and in the end, we have to preserve them because there are many references to Greek Mythology in the art and literature of the world. This tells us that European culture is the best there is.

This picture of Greek Mythology is a composite—a kind of collage developed from the ideas and attitudes with which my students provided me over several semesters, and which I supplemented after a time with books such as Bulfinch’s Mythology, Mythology by Edith Hamilton, and Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths.

“I love Greek Mythology!” a student taking my course would gush. “I learned it in fifth grade. My project was on Apollo, the god of the sun.”

Another would say, “Wait a minute, doesn’t the myth of Persephone explain the origin of the seasons?”

And still another: “When are we going to learn about Arachne, the first spider?”

I was glad to encounter this wellspring of interest, which wasn’t present in my Latin students, who usually considered study of the language a breadth requirement purgatory before the bliss of their major coursework. I soon learned to value my mythology students' knowledge, and they were proud to share it.

“What do you think of when you think of Greek Mythology?” I would ask at the start of the term.

“Zeus!” would echo from the rafters of the lecture hall.

The “white Europeans” part of the picture was never explicit, except for the marble statues. To tell the truth, the thought came up only fleetingly in my mind at the beginning. As a young enthusiast, all I knew was that Classics was an underdog discipline with fewer majors than its grand past suggested it should have.

My students knew enough about cultural hegemony, however, to explain they were taking the course because (as they would sometimes tell me), “I’m an English major and I know I need this to understand literature.”

These types of observations would have stunned the original tellers of the tales. Why?

Apollo was never the god of the sun.

Persephone’s myth didn’t explain the seasons.

Arachne was not the first spider.

And perhaps most astonishing to the Greeks of old would have been the idea that their stories—the ones they told in order to make sense of their particular lives, cement their identity as a particular people, and apply to the circumstances of their particular time and place—would be adopted and modified so extensively and so consistently throughout time, much less used as the hallmark of a supposed pure, European heritage.

Together we’ll explore the astonishing difference—and the near-interplanetary distance—between the original Greek myths and Greek Mythology, the cultural behemoth that grew out of them that we know today. We are going to discover how, thousands of years ago, a ragtag band of local divinities and traveling myths, aided and abetted by an equal and opposite band of traveling divinities and local myths, transformed themselves into a self-generating content machine that has, ever since, mirrored and mediated the predispositions, values, and anxieties of every culture with which it has come into contact.

In other words, we are going to find out how Greek Mythology—the idea about the myths and the new stories that sprouted from that idea, not the original myths themselves—was invented.

It’s a grand journey, full of labyrinthine twists and turns, an odyssey of words and pictures. It would be an epic story told completely on its own.

But I don’t want to stop there.

Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t white Europeans or European culture that’s responsible for the spectacular longevity and continual re-invention of Greek Mythology. Rather, it is the original myths’ very multiculturalism and diversity that gave them the strength, resilience, and potential to be so popular for so long. 

The ancient Greeks, we will find, had their own particular character (the “local” aspect I note above) and their own religious sensibilities and story culture. But they also borrowed liberally from other cultures in their neighborhood (the “traveling” part), starting from Anatolia (ancient Turkey) and extending to the coastlands of Syria and Lebanon, Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq), Egypt, and all parts in between. Some of this influence is very clear, and some, we need to tease out the subtleties, but there is no doubt of its reality.

As eminent a person as J.R.R. Tolkien, writing in the early twentieth century and anticipating the Nazi regime that shamefully claimed ancient Greek and Roman achievements as stemming from invented, non-existent German roots, understood that culture is never as pure as some fancy it to be:

Nothing in this world can be finally defined, or marked out with rigid lines. So it is with Europe. It has south-eastern frontiers over which have perpetually poured the influences, half-Asiatic, half close kindred to ourselves, of the Semitic languages and cultures to be assimilated swiftly and often beyond easy recognition in Europe.

In his time, Tolkien had to speak about influences that were “often beyond easy recognition,” but scholarship has advanced to a point where we can now see much more clearly what the Greeks started with, what they took on, and how they shaped that composite material.

You could say, for instance, that the Greek myths are like an alloy of metals stronger when combined than any of them by themselves.

You could say that they are open-source software worked on by generations of coders for maximum user-friendliness.

You could say that they are fusion cuisine, the wildly innovative pop-up kitchen experiment where ingredients, techniques, and flavors are combined, re-seasoned, and served to a hungry, ravenous public. 

Choose your own metaphor. The conclusion is the same. 

Some of this discussion connects to the nature of human creativity—how we invent what we invent. The Runaway Species, a collaboration by neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman and composer and professor Anthony Brandt, offers a theory of the three types of creativity: bending, blending, and breaking. This understanding will be crucial as we move through the ages, from before the Bronze Age all the way to the present day. Eagleman and Brandt emphasize that creativity never happens in a vacuum: rather, they affirm that more cooks make better broth.

For example, the authors point to Steve Jobs’ invention of the so-called “Jesus phone,” the iPhone. Jobs was widely acclaimed as a genius for his groundbreaking achievement that seemed “to have come from nowhere.” But previous inventors had come up with the idea of an iPhone, and many of those prototypes helped Jobs and his company produce their final product. Jobs admitted as much: 

“Creativity is not just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Since Greeks were never isolated, always at the crossroads of Mediterranean cultures, it follows that their stories would draw from others. Zeus and his fellow immortals weren’t way up there, alone and pure and unchanging on Mount Olympus since time immemorial. They became who they were with help from epic tales sung by Mesopotamian poets, mythic representations made by West Syrian artists and sculptors, religious rituals performed by Egyptian and Anatolian priests and priestesses, and sea shanties from Phoenician traders and sailors.

Let’s also forestall the near-irresistible urge of many to attribute the myths’ popularity to the vague concept of “our shared humanity.” Of course, Greek myths couldn’t have endured unless they had a strong sense of what it means to be human. But if we’re not careful, there’s also this insidious, underlying message: that the ultra-human Greeks understood humans better than other cultures. As if, you could say, the Greeks were the Steve Jobs of excellent stories.

On the contrary: circumstances conspired in such a way that the Greeks of old, together with their neighbors, came up with a particular set of stories in a particular time that, because they had been created in a nexus of rich cultural interaction, encouraged further collaboration, extension, and invention throughout the centuries.

In other words, these Greeks, who did happen to be extraordinary people, were also in the right place at the right time.

In Chapter One, you’ll see our itinerary and road map. We will discuss the evidence that shows how far Greek Mythology and the original Greek myths diverge, both in story details and world view. Whether you’re a big fan of myths or just getting started with them, in the end we’ll all land on the same starting point and see the same destination.

Chapters Two and Three will kick off our journey with some important milestones: we’ll explore the multicultural nature of the original Greek tales, ranging back thousands of years before they crystallized. We’ll learn about the first form of “globalization” occurring 3,500 years ago, generating the cultural electricity that supercharged ancient authors such as Hesiod and Homer to bring the gods and heroes to Greek ears. We’ll also see how certain Greeks (mainly Athenians) decided to begin the process of separating their myths from their debts to other cultures.

Chapter Four will land us at the locale where Greek Mythology was first invented, ingeniously devised by a strange and fascinating group of people called the Etruscans. Chapter Five moves us on to the Roman reinvention of Greek Mythology, which takes its cue from the Etruscans, and which will have a huge influence on future metamorphoses of the tales.

Chapter Six leads us into the early Christian era, when Greek Mythology initially lost influence in the European imagination because of the rise of the new religion, but then rallied through the Middle Ages and Renaissance because of its inherited multicultural qualities that continued to intrigue and attract the attention of scholars and common people alike.

In Chapter Seven, we emerge into the nineteenth century, discussing how Greek Mythology is reinvented again as a propaganda tool for the Greek War of Independence and as a set of tales appropriate for the education of children. Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of the classic novel The Scarlet Letter, did more to popularize Greek Mythology for children than anyone before or since. But even he did not create in isolation; he also took inspiration from another culture, that of his own children.

In Chapter Eight we arrive at the transformation of Greek Mythology into a subject worthy of general adult knowledge. Examining the work of ultra-popular authors Thomas Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton, we’ll see how readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to think of Greek Mythology as indispensable to those who wanted to style themselves as broadly educated. This newly-elevated status of Greek Mythology will feed into the contemporary German preoccupation with folktales and ancient culture, culminating in the odious presumption that Germans must have been ultimately responsible for Greek Mythology and the “superior” Greek and Latin civilizations that prove, through association, German “Aryan race” superiority.

Chapter Nine sets us down in the late twentieth-century views of Greek Mythology, exploring in particular the Rick Riordan empire of fiction and cinema. Riordan’s canny use of Greek Mythology helps us understand the tales’ potential to keep inspiring, while showing us the latest reinventions.

We conclude in the realm of speculation, where we consider what the future of Greek Mythology will be in an increasingly diverse world. I hope and believe Greek Mythology will continue to be told, taught, and reinvented with the understanding that difference and diversity always makes us stronger. Now more than ever, I am convinced that we must go forward together—or literally all fall apart.

The Khaan Kobe, that strange and wonderful creature inspired by my friend’s experience with a cover of a book about a Greek myth, is not really that unfamiliar. Like it (and like Greek Mythology), we humans are a product of differing origins inspired by the past. And like the Khaan Kobe that could shoot lightning from its finger, we are powerful, too.

This book is about using that power for good.