Greek Mythology is as popular today as it’s ever been.
Young readers have a profusion of choices: Percy Jackson to start with, but plenty more. Remarkably, one author who’s a young reader herself has published a book with the goddess Aphrodite as a character.
Then there’s stuff for adults. Circe by Madeline Miller was a big recent book that jumps off from the Odyssey.
A lot of this stuff isn’t your great great great grandfather’s Greek myths. What the Greeks told is a world away from that which most people like when they say they like Greek Mythology.
And so there’s a lively side debate going on about the respectful use of Greek Mythology. Is it okay to change the stories? How much?
With all the important discussion of cultural appropriation today, this is a worthwhile issue.
I am a purist on the one hand. I love the ancient stories for the truth that they bring out about what it was like to live in the ancient world, and what it is to be human generally. I don’t like Disney’s Hercules and I couldn’t stand Troy with Brad Pitt as Achilles.
On a visit to Greece some time ago I asked a Greek what they had thought of the Disney movie. “It was a flop,” she said. “People got angry.”
Here’s an interesting article from a Greek who’s irritated about how Americans use and misuse Greek culture.
We know it’s cultural appropriation for someone to dress up for a party or on Halloween in blackface or a sombrero and big mustache. What about dressing up as Medusa?
I don’t know that I have a definitive answer for that last question.
But I do know a couple of things about Greek Mythology.
The reason why anyone even thinks about dressing up as Medusa nowadays is because Greek Mythology started out as an unusually resilient and flexible set of stories.
Is that because the Greeks just had a special genius for storytelling?
Investigation says yes and no.
The ancient Greeks were remarkable in many ways and I take nothing from them for their original invention of their own tales.
But the Greek myths originally started out in a context that was intensely multicultural and diverse. Maybe more than today. When the first stories were being formulated, the Greeks were in contact with peoples, gods, and tales from—among many other places—Anatolia (area of modern Turkey), Western Syria, Mesopotamia, Cyprus, and Egypt.
And research tells us that the Greeks used gods and tales from these cultures (which had been telling myths already for hundreds and hundreds of years) and re-invented them for their own purposes.
It’s a little bit like what Vietnamese people in Louisiana and Texas did when they encountered traditional Cajun crawfish boil: created a new dish that was partly Cajun, partly Vietnamese, totally delicious, and more than the sum of its parts.
That is a wonderful story (and TV show called Ugly Delicious) you can read about here.
So, to use one metaphor, Greek myths started out as fusion food. And because of the flexibility of that origin, peoples in later times were able to reinvent and further fuse other cultural elements into the original mixture.
And that’s a good thing.
Is all fusion food tasty? Did I enjoy the dish of Brad Pitt faking a British accent while ruining the Iliad?
Ugh.
But I will tell you, I appreciate it when a kid publishes a book with Aphrodite as a character.
It is indeed, about respect, which can be a slippery concept.
Cultural appropriation is about disrespect and dehumanization. Fusion is about gratitude for the differences in all of us.
Not easy all the time to tease out the subtleties of that. But worth it.