Reinventing The Invention of Greek Mythology
News on the manuscript and a new Introduction
As we come to the end of 2022 and the end of the querying season, I am rethinking my focus on THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY.
Originally I was thinking it would be one book, but now it’s looking like two.
Really, it could be a bunch of books. The topic is that large.
But my work on the early centuries of the Greek myths—from Indo-European roots put down millennia ago, to the Bronze and Iron Ages, and on to Hesiod and Homer, those poets who “gave the Greeks their gods,” according to the historian Herodotus—all this has convinced me finally that THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY (Volume One) needs to have a more limited scope: it must tell of the first invention of the Greek myths rather than the whole history of invention and re-invention up to the present day, as I had been planning.
You could call what I’m telling a superhero origin story, with the superpower being the creativity that comes from diverse and multicultural influences.
Below is my first go at a revised introduction. It’s a lot shorter than the other one, and hopefully more focused and engaging.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think.
Introduction: Greek Mythology, the Origin Story
This book tells the origin story of a superhero.
The superhero? Greek Mythology, that famous set of tales featuring the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus who watch over the exploits of heroes such as Achilles, Perseus, Medea, Penelope, and Odysseus. I’ve taught the subject for more than three decades and it is reliably the star of the academic show.
Greek Mythology’s superpower? Unlimited creativity. Enough creativity to power thousands of stories through thousands of years. Greek Mythology is still generating compelling stories (Hello, Disney’s Percy Jackson TV series!) and helping sell Amazon Prime, with Medusa vibing to Nicki Menaj while rocking Amazon-sourced shades that block her stony gaze.
(Not to mention Arnold Schwarzenegger as Zeus and Salma Hayek as Hera hawking BMW’s latest all-electric vehicle in an ultra-pricey 2022 Super Bowl spot.)
It’s a phenomenon, and has been for millennia.
Let’s extend this superhero metaphor a bit further: what about the villain? For me, that goes hand in hand with the origin story. Greek Mythology has labored for centuries under a popular misapprehension: that its hypercreativity comes from the inherent superiority of Western (European, Anglo-American) culture.
But in fact, as we’ll soon discover, Greek Mythology was not invented by a few (mostly white, male) Western geniuses, but was the result of centuries of diverse, multicultural exchange and mixing, all set in a cozy little area known as the eastern Mediterranean, the home not only of Greeks, but of several other advanced, myth-loving civilizations, including, among others, the Egyptians, Hebrews, Phoenicians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Mesopotamians.
Telling Greek Mythology’s origin story–how it was invented–will not only set the record straight (in the process defeating the villain, ignorance), but underline the crucial, indisputable fact that creativity pops when it’s diverse.
Hey Greek Mythology, What are your influences?
You might think it’d be non-controversial that diverse influences power the creative storytelling of Greek Mythology, but you’d be wrong.
The idea has always made sense for music. Groups are constantly being asked what their influences are, and music lovers don’t bat an eye at hybrid genres such as rockabilly (rock n’ roll and country) and the appropriately-named jazz fusion (jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues). In fact, rock n’ roll itself is a fusion of several genres: gospel, jazz, R&B, and country.
Food, too. New Orleans Creole cooking, for example, delectably combines African, European (mainly French), and Native American techniques and ingredients. Some years ago, the TV show Messy Delicious featured Nikki Tran, a Vietnamese chef from Houston, Texas, who pioneered a Viet-Cajun cuisine and featured it at a restaurant she opened in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).*
All the scientists reading this could point to an even more elementary reality: alloys of metals (such as bronze, which combines tin and copper) are very often stronger than the metals by themselves.
Neuroscience further reinforces this creativity conclusion. The Runaway Species, a book collaboration by neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman and composer and professor Anthony Brandt, emphasizes that creativity never happens in a vacuum–it is “an inherently social act.”
For example, the authors point to Steve Jobs’ invention of the iPhone. Jobs was widely acclaimed as a genius for his groundbreaking achievement that seemed “to have come from nowhere.” But previous engineers had come up with various inventions–wristwatches, mobile phones, digital assistants–that 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.
Similarly, Henry Ford, who was lionized for his innovation with the auto assembly line in the early twentieth century, said this about his achievement:
I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.
Yet Greek Mythology is somehow the lone exception to the rule.
You’ll have to look closely on the internet for sites that catalog the diverse influences that helped the Greeks invent their tales. And it’s only in the last twenty years or so that scholars have begun seriously to study (and accept) those influences. Quite the contrary: as late as 1987, in his book Black Athena, Professor Martin Bernal attempted to show that Greek Mythology owed a huge debt to the religion and myths of Egypt and West Asia. He may have overplayed his hand–even I’m not one hundred percent sympathetic with everything he proposes–but the backlash against his theories was swift and brutal on the part of western classicists.Yet only a few years later, scholars such as the eminent Martin West, following Bernal’s lead, had begun mining what would be a rich vein of new knowledge and understanding.**
What are the reasons for this reluctance? They are many, and we’ll review them as we go (see especially Chapter One). For now, however, it’s time to get cracking on that origin story I’ve been talking about–how Greek Mythology came together in the ancient world to become an endless source of creative inspiration.
The road ahead
We’ll start in Chapter One with the original Greeks, where they came from, when they got to Greece, and what myths they might have had with them when they arrived. It’s a journey back in time–five thousand years ago and more–to a group of people that scholars have dubbed Indo-Europeans. It’s also a controversial subject, one that Nazi theorists abused and distorted to claim the Greeks were originally German. The truth involves a combination of historical linguistics, South Asian epic poetry, cutting-edge DNA research, and evidence for the taming of horses and the spread of chariot warfare.
Chapter Two introduces the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks and their first near neighbors, the Minoans. The Mycenaeans were the first Greeks we know who wrote in Greek. They established a civilization on the Greek mainland based on the strongholds of warrior-kings, and worshiped gods and goddesses with names we recognize today. The Minoans were islanders–their greatest palaces lay on Crete–who already had a flourishing culture and mythos; the story of Theseus and the Minotaur is just one example of their early influence on Greek tales.
Chapter Three opens with a bang: the cataclysmic event that ended the Bronze Age and changed Greek myths and religion forever. The Mycenaeans, along with all their neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean, underwent a sudden collapse shortly after the time we know as the period of the Trojan War. The remnants of the Mycenaean kings moved east to Cyprus, where they continued an oral tradition of epic poetry that preserved the memory of the great war in Troy and the great Greek heroes who fought in it. But their eastward migration also brought the Greeks into intimate contact with advanced civilizations with millennia-old mythological traditions, and these would shape Greek stories for hundreds of years to come.
The poet Hesiod, one of the so-called fathers of Greek myth, makes his first appearance in Chapter Four. He claimed to be a lowly shepherd who had been visited (and crowned mythmaker extraordinaire) by the Muses, goddesses of inspiration, but we’ll find that his real inspiration for the enduring stories he told came from places like Anatolia (modern Turkey), Syria, and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).
We move on in Chapters Five and Six to that other father of myths, the poet Homer, author of the foundational epic poems of Greece, the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Chapter Five, we’ll hail the Olympian divinities well known from Greek Mythology and discover that fully half of them have roots in non-Greek mythologies. Homer himself remakes the divinities in delightfully creative ways, like a chef in a fusion restaurant.
Chapter Six will go more deeply into the plot and characters of the Iliad, especially the core story of the hero Achilles and his companion Patroclus. There are many compelling parallels between their story and the much older epic friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a story told over and over again starting in Mesopotamia and moving on to points west. The evidence strongly suggests that Homer dropped in this tale on top of a story template preserved by memories of Bronze Age Greek warriors at Troy. The result? A poem with disparate strands (fusion Olympians, Gilgamesh, Bronze Age heroes) that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Chapter Seven highlights further Greek myths with roots in other cultures, including Homer’s Odyssey and the wildly popular myths of Adonis and Orpheus. Both of these latter stories played a pivotal part in everyday Greek religion, where they received their particular Greek stamp.
Chapter Eight brings to a close the first phase of the invention of Greek Mythology, when the mythmakers of Athens, in reaction against their eastern enemies, the Persians, attempted to erase the non-Greek roots of their myths.
Chapter Nine summarizes what came next: as Greek myths traveled west to Italy, they were retold and reinvented first by Etruscans, then by Romans (especially the influential Roman poet Ovid). Christians reinterpreted the myths as allegories, and in the nineteenth century, we’ll witness the birth of Greek Mythology for general consumption and for children.
The king wren
Back in my graduate school days, I was fortunate enough to study under the late Professor Edwin Brown, a good and generous human being as well as a meticulous scholar of the Greeks’ debts to their Anatolian neighbors. In my early years as a student, however, I had little idea what he was talking about, because his learning was so extensive that he often layered allusion upon allusion.
In one of the first seminars I took with my mentor, I produced a term paper that I knew did not really offer any innovative ideas about the subject I was studying.
“I feel like I’m just quoting what others have already said,” I confessed.
He nodded, and with characteristic opacity, gently informed me that “Sometimes, David, like the little king wren, we must fly on the wings of eagles.”
Huh?
Professor Brown was referring to the European folktale that appears in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. It seems that the birds decided they must have a king, so they held a contest. The bird that would fly the highest would be declared the ruler of all other birds. Everyone thought the eagle would win, as it is the strongest and the highest flyer, but the clever wren hid itself on the shoulders of the eagle and so laid claim to the title when the supposed strongest bird soared to the heights.
This was one way I learned humility around my scholarly ideas. In many areas of life, we are all wrens flying on the wings of those eagles who have gone before. This book is an attempt to honor that truth.
Endnotes
* Food is the premise for this story, but its real depth lies in the stories and experiences of the people behind the food. It is an inspiring story of ethnic diversity in the United Stages that results, not coincidentally, in creative new cuisine.
** My 1991 Ph.D. dissertation concerned the non-Greek influences on the divine twins Castor and Pollux, considered at the time to be quintessentially Greek mythological figures. When I told prospective employers about my work, their reaction was mostly blank stares. Professor West’s The East Face of Helicon is now a seminal work on the Greek debt to their eastern neighbors.