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I have spent a good chunk of my life trying to inform the world about what Greek Mythology is truly about—its essence, core, and purpose.
Mostly I have failed. Frankly, it’s a big job, and who says I’m right?
Anyway, my manuscript The Invention of Greek Mythology is my last, best effort at revealing who the ancient Greeks were and why they told the stories they did.
Which is why, when my wife told me about a little snippet of a podcast that mentioned Greek Mythology, I knew I had to ride to the rescue.
Set them straight, Frauenfelder!
The podcast is “Hidden Brain,” hosted by Shankar Vedantam.
Linked above is a recent episode called “The Story of Your Life,” in which Vedantam explored how telling one’s own stories to oneself and reinterpreting them can help heal psychological hurts.
That’s an admirable podcast topic. But here’s how the podcast begins:
Greek Mythology is filled with stories of violence, anger, and hatred. Take the tale of the goddess Medea. To distract her father as she fled with her lover, Medea killed her brother, cut up his body, and scattered the pieces behind her. Then there’s the god Kronos, who devoured five of his children at birth, to ward off a prophecy that one of them would eventually overthrow him. For a land blessed with exceptional sunshine and good wine, Greece is home to a striking number of tales about incest, brutality, and bloodthirsty revenge.
There’s a striking number of things for a snobby Greek myths purist to take exception with here. Medea wasn’t a goddess and Kronos didn’t devour his children—he swallowed them, which is quite a bit different from devouring, which implies chewing and digesting.
Ew.
But that’s not the main issue here.
First, I just have to think that there aren’t many cultures where stories of violence, anger, and hatred abound, regardless of the climate and the quality of the alcoholic beverages available. It’s a mark of Greek Mythology’s privilege in Western education and tradition that if you’re going to talk about a culture’s stories, you’re going to start with Greek Mythology.
Despite that, I don’t think Greek Mythology is more violent and bloodthirsty than any other particular mythology you can name, including American mythology. I mean, the USA is possibly the richest country ever in the history of the world, and the stories we tell can out-crazy the Greeks by a mile. Friday the 13th, anyone?
But that’s not even really the main issue either.
No, it’s the phrase “blessed with exceptional sunshine and good wine” that leapt out at me.
There’s a sense, of course, that if you live in a sunny place and you drink good wine, then automatically your stories should be sunny, simple, and fun-loving as well.
But there is a myth—as in a lie—that has been propagated by the Greeks themselves at times that life in Greece is easy, carefree, and always has been.
In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Funnily enough, sun and good wine are not the only things you find in Greece.
Chapter 1 of the Invention of Greek Mythology tries very hard to inform the world of this truth:
Because Greece is mountainous and mostly unforested, next to a deep blue sea, and is sunny and dry most of the year, the place affords gorgeous view after gorgeous view…It’s been said that the greatest natural resource of Greece is its intrinsic beauty. No one who goes isn’t captivated.
So, it follows, wouldn’t the stories of such a wonderful land and such a wonderful people also be sunny, optimistic, kind, and always end with a happily ever after?
You’d think that. And if you go to Greece, every rack of books in every tourist gift shop will reinforce that notion. Greeks have a stake in promoting Greece as a paradise because tourism props up what has always been a nation with all sorts of challenges that has had more than its share of suffering. One of the miracles of Greece—and there are many—is that it attained such high stature in our world with so few physical resources to support it.
First, it’s not that easy to survive on what Greece alone provides. The country’s soil is poor because Greece is rocky and mountainous. There are few flat places in Greece to grow food or pasture cattle. The dryness works against the place as well…Most of Greece gets measurable rainfall from about November to April and then almost none the rest of the year. In all it’s not that much, and crops require careful irrigation. Drought years become a significant problem.
Then there’s the question of people. Being a crossroads of nations, Greece has had to defend itself against invaders for thousands of years. It lived under the domination of Rome for centuries, and then later under the Republic of Venice and Ottoman Turks for over 400 years. It regained its independence in the 1820s, fought a series of wars with its neighbors, and then was occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II…
Greece has done an ingenious job with mitigating these challenges. In ancient times and still today it uses the land for things that don’t take a lot of soil fertility. In exchange for the grain they were always short on, Greeks exported olive oil and wool. Olive trees are drought-resistant, long-lived, and thrive in rocky soil. Sheep can graze on hillsides instead of having to eat grain like cows and horses.
Greeks exported people, too. From early on in their history, they sent out colonies throughout the Mediterranean: to France, Italy, north Africa, Egypt. With the people went their ingenuity and imagination. They found a way to make beautiful pottery and painted scenes from their stories on the side.
That stuff sold, as a Greek friend of mine once said, “like cupcakes.”
And what kind of stories did those bowls and vases and pitchers have on them?
Stories that reflected the difficulty of life that the Greeks themselves lived. The stories are not sunny or simple, but incorporate a world-view that deeply understood that you can never, ever count on life to have a happy ending.
Excuse the long excerpt, but I hope you can see where this is going.
The Greeks didn’t tell stories about violence and anger despite living in a kind of paradise. They told difficult stories because it was true to their experience of life. And in fact, I would say that their experience is pretty much the same experience that all humans live.
Vedantam goes on to say that the Greek philosopher Aristotle theorized that we tell difficult stories (Aristotle called them “tragedy,” the name of an early Greek genre of play) in order to heal our psychological wounds. The healing process was called “catharsis.”
Aristotle was right, in my opinion. The process of taking in stories, living through the sadness and difficulty of them, weeping over the characters’ unjust fates, can be deeply cleansing.
To me, there’s no disconnect between Aristotle’s theory and the sunshine of Greece. He understood that despite the sunshine and good wine, living in Greece was hard and you needed to tell hard stories in order to soften the blow.
That’s the paradox of the day.
So what is the reason that Shankar Vedantham felt justified in drawing a contrast between sunny Greece and its violent stories? That’s a topic for another newsletter, but I think it has to do with the brainwashing spread of American mythology worldwide through movies with their default “happily ever after” endings.
Let me know if you want to hear more about that.