Would it surprise you to hear that the ancient Greeks, the ones who originally told the stories of Greek Mythology, didn’t have what we would call Greek myth for kids?
Suprising or not, it’s true. The Greeks did not have little cartoon Zeuses and three-headed puppy Cerberuses.
The closest we come to a kid’s story in original Greek Mythology is the tale of the Lamia, a mother who lost her children, was consumed by grief, and became a monster who roamed the earth at night, stealing bad children out of their beds.
Sweet dreams, Buffy and Jody!
It was so bad that Plato, the goat philosopher and educational consultant, recommended that Greek Mythology as it was then known be banned from kids’ ears.
Nor must mothers, believing bad stories about gods wandering by night in the shapes of strangers from foreign lands, terrify their children with them. Such stories blaspheme the gods, and, at the same time, make children more timid.
What’s more, he really just didn’t like Greek Mythology in general:
Nor will we allow it to be said that Theseus, the son of Poseidon, or Pirithous, the son of Zeus, engaged in terrible kidnappings, or that any other hero and son of a god dared to do any of the terrible and impious deeds that they are now falsely accused of doing. We'll compel the poets either to deny that the heroes did such things, or else to deny that they were children of the gods... [T]hese stories are harmful to those who hear them, because everyone will be ready to excuse himself when he's bad, if he is persuaded that similar things are being done and have been done in the past [by heroes and gods]…
Plato believed that the ancient tales he knew were a playground of vice, unfit for young and old audiences. “Everyone” who takes in the myths, he claims, will get the wrong ideas, try out the bad things heroes did, and excuse themselves because even heroes succumbed to the same temptations.
Sort of sound familiar? Even contemporary?
I’m not advocating that we open the real Greek Mythology up to six-year olds. Far from it.
Back in 1997, when Disney came out with the Hercules movie, they also licensed for very young girls the sale of purple flip-flops molded to look like the sandals that the character Megara (“Meg”) wore.
On the upper part of the flip-flops a message was written: Future Goddess.
(Take a gander at these… I couldn’t find any of those original flip-flops)
Never mind that the story that Disney sold us––a Hercules demoted from divinity (he had started out a god, the son of a happy couple, Zeus and Hera) who had to win his godhood back—is the exact opposite of the true story. Heracles was actually the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Alcmene, which meant that he started out as a human—a “demigod,” as Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan and my sixth-graders all know. Heracles only became a god through unremitting toil and suffering and through finally killing himself by being burned to death on a huge funeral pyre. For added pathos, the fire was lit by his son at his father’s request. Whoa!
And cool, sandals-wearing Meg? Well, don’t tell anyone that in the original version Heracles murdered her in a fit of madness.
Plato’s right about tender young minds. We do need to curate what they take in.
But I don’t think Plato had things quite right for his time and place.
Plato was a philosopher, which meant that he was analytical and logical and pretty sure he knew what was good for Greeks.
But for something like 300 or more years the ancient Greeks had been relying on their myths as a way of coping with their reality and most of all, reaffirming who they were.
Their stories told Greeks what it meant to be Greek.
And as far as I’m concerned, those stories did not do what Plato claimed they were doing.
See, I don’t think the story of Heracles made people want to be Heracles. I think they made people want to be the opposite of Heracles.
That’s mainly because the stories concerning outstanding human beings like Heracles (and Achilles, and Odysseus, and Jason, and so on) showed us heroes whose only desire was to get back inside the embrace of their families and cities, and who for one reason or another fail in the attempt. It was a hero's job in Greek mythology, in fact, not only to inspire by their achievements (which they did), but also to point back to family and community as the only things that really, really mattered in an ancient Greek's life. They showed how great a gift it is to have a stable home and family, and how achievement often comes at the price of this stability.
Ancient Greece, like most pre-industrial nations, was not an easy place to live if you didn’t have family backing you up. The “state,” “government,” “authorities,” were dramatically less influential in people’s lives than today. There were no police, no 911 emergency number to call, no firefighters. There really wasn’t even a stable food supply. You couldn’t necessarily go to the supermarket and get a gallon of milk for your kids’ breakfast the next day. You couldn’t “move away” from your family, “reinvent” yourself, “make a new start,” or any of the things that we in our hyper-mobile world take for granted. Everything you did was predicated on who your family was and what relationships they had with the rest of the city. Families stuck together because they had to.
There’s an episode in Homer’s Odyssey that illustrates this concept well. In this passage, Odysseus, the great hero whose whole purpose in his story (the Odyssey) is to return home to his wife and family, at one point is trapped on the island of the goddess Calypso. When Odysseus shipwrecks on her island, which is about as far away from human habitation as you can get, she takes a shine to him and makes him stay with her on the island for about five years.
At the end of that time, the goddess Athena convinces Zeus to tell Calypso to let Odysseus go.
But Calypso wants to make Odysseus stay.
So when she tells Odysseus that he is free to go, she offers him a very attractive deal. He can either travel back to his home island, Ithaca, and see his family again, or she will make him immortal and he can rule the island as a minor god with her forever.
Now, normally minor goddesses like Calypso do not have the power to make humans immortal. It is very unusual for even Zeus to grant that status to a person. But in this case the momentary exception heightens a turning point for Odysseus in the story—to use jargon from the world of fiction writing, it “raises the stakes.” Odysseus is faced with a real choice. He could be immortal and spend forever with the most attractive female he’s ever seen, or he could go home to his wife and son, both of whom, along with him, will eventually grow old and die.
Seems like a no-brainer for Greek Mythology. Who wouldn’t want to be a god? And live with a goddess?
But it’s never a question for Odysseus. Listen to what he says:
Do not be angry with me, lady goddess.
You are quite right. I know my modest wife
Penelope could never match your beauty.
She is human; you are deathless, ageless.
But even so, I want to go back home,
and every day I hope that day will come.
(5.215-220, translation Emily Wilson)
The purveyors of Greek Mythology for modern times have trained us to believe that the ancient Greeks considered immortality the highest good (“Future Goddess,” indeed). And you would think that Homer of all poets, the grandest of all the Greek poets, would have codified the value of becoming a god. But Homer—and the Greek myths that follow him—suggest that family was most important of all.
So is that surprising as well? What I am now interested in as I research the ties between the West Asian and Greek story cultures is gauging the amount of interest in family that Greece’s near neighbors showed in their myths.
If the myth makers of Egypt and Canaan and Assyria and Babylon were more interested in kings and gods and very high-level stories about immortality, maybe it was really an innovation by the Greeks, this emphasis on family.
More to come.
There is a book called "Gender and Immortality. Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult" by Deborah J. Lyons that really clarified the Greek idea of heroes for me. In today's world, we think of a hero as someone who as overcome some enormous challenges. To the ancient Greeks, it's the gods who would put such an obstacle in your path. Why would they do that? They must be mad at you. So it's only natural to have a hero like Heracles named after the god who hates him the most.
An example in Lyons' book is Iphigenia, who doesn't really match up with our modern ideas of heroism. Iphigenia is just a victim of circumstance, but she still became an object of worship through her association with Artemis, which lands her in the "heroine" category. Even then, the play "Iphigenia in Tauris" reveals how Greeks (or at least some Greeks) would have thought about her: even after the cycle of revenge that destroyed her family in the Oresteia, she's eager to return home with her brother as soon as she encounters him. Clearly, she'd rather be alive than deified.