When is Greek myth?

A complex and fun question

I am a big history fan, though I am not as interested in events and dates as I am in languages, stories, and cultures. The big question I wrestle with every day is when did the Greek myths we know begin to be told? When did the first audiences hear the story of the Trojan War, or Medea and Jason, or Persephone and Hades?

In other words, what is the history of creativity in ancient Greece?

It’s a huge question and not one that can be easily encapsulated in one newsletter. But if you’re interested enough to read, I’m interested enough to give you a quick intro.

First, we have to admit that this is a question that has been answered before in unproductive ways. In the early 20th century, for example, some scholars in Nazi Germany decided that Greek myths and culture were so wonderful and amazing that they decided all of it had to have originated in Germany, and they excluded any possibility that Semitic peoples (which includes Jews and peoples of the Near East) had anything to do with the making of Greek stories, religion, and so forth.

This separation has somewhat of a historic basis, because it is true that the Greek language comes from the Indo-European language family, not from the Semitic language family, which have separate origins. So these scholars figured if the languages were not related, then the cultures couldn’t be, either.

That’s a big leap.

In fact, as my colleague Greg Fishbone pointed out recently, the eastern Mediterranean area where Greece is situated is ideal for cultural exchange:

Greek mythology shares Proto-Indo-European roots with Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Persian, and Vedic cultures, and borrowed heavily from the cultures of Northern Africa, Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia. Analogues of Greek gods, heroes, and stories can be found in all of these cultures.

The so-called Greek myths were actually a mixing bowl of cultures, which spread outward into the multi-ethnic, multi-racial empire of Alexander the Great, and even further into the multi-ethnic, multi-racial empire of Rome.

So the idea that Greek stories originated with one pinpointed culture and remained pure up to the present day is inaccurate to say the least.

So where does that leave us? Can we tease out the strands of cultures that have been knotted into that very strong rope that is the Greek myths?

Not very easily. But we can try.

We can start in the Mycenaean Bronze Age, about 3,500 years ago, and about 800 years before the first written Greek myths appear.

This is the time when we know there were Greek speakers in Greece, because they wrote a kind of Greek on clay tablets that survive to the present day.

There are no actual myths written down on these tablets, but there are some names of some gods and goddesses: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, among others.

Do those names ensure that all the stories we know must have been told at that time? Was Zeus having affairs and was Hera jealous? Did they watch over the heroes who assailed the walls of Troy?

These stories do not have to be written down, after all. Scholars have confirmed that before the Greek myths were recorded, they were told orally for hundreds of years.

My own impression, however, is that we'd be very surprised to find out the content of the stories that these early Greeks told. I think there’s a whole treasury of myths from this time that we may never discover.

First, much of the content that we know from historical times actually hearkens back to the Mycenaean Bronze Age itself. Some of our most familiar myths may have originated as distant memories of historical events (such as the Trojan War) and the splendor of foreign kings. A long time ago I speculated in a doctoral thesis that the name Tyndareus, who in Greek myths was the king of Sparta, the father of the twins Castor and Pollux, and the stepfather of Helen, preserves an ancient memory of an Bronze Age line of Hittite (area of modern Turkey) kings named Tudhaliya.

So the Mycenaean Greeks would not have been telling these stories as myths or legends of previous times. They would have been contemporary news.

Second, as we know from Greg’s words quoted above, the Greeks borrowed a lot of beliefs, stories, and even poetic forms and devices from the peoples of Western Asia and Egypt, and it’s quite possible much of this was borrowed only a couple of hundred years before the myths started being written down.

Here’s why: the Greek civilization of the Mycenaean Bronze Age collapsed around 1177 BCE after only a few centuries at its highest level of wealth. No one knows exactly why, but conditions in Greece went back to a very basic standard of living. For hundreds of years there were fewer people, houses were much smaller, trade was much less.

This is enough time for the story culture that was supported by the kings and princes of Mycenae and other cities to be lost or changed and for a legendary past to spring up and be imperfectly remembered—somewhat like the stories of King Arthur in England, which have some historical elements to them, but which were embellished and mythologized by later tellings.

Some Greeks, as well, migrated out of Greece and went east to the island of Cyprus, where they set up the remnants of their Mycenaean past. In Cyprus, the nearby civilizations that were older and had more continuity in their culture influenced the Greeks. There is evidence, for example, that the goddess Aphrodite got her start among the Greeks in Cyprus.

Later, in the most famous instance of borrowing from the eastern Mediterranean area, the poet Hesiod took a traditional story called the Succession Myth that was known throughout the region and gave it a Greek spin, changing the names of the gods and goddesses involved and some of the details, but leaving the basic structure intact.

So that’s just a very rough, brief summary of what to me is an enormous and enormously fun question.

In fact, it was so interesting to me that I wrote a whole novel once that was set in Greece in 2000 B.C.E., five hundred years before the rise of the Mycenaean Greeks. If you’ve read this far and you’d like to read a chapter of that novel—it’s still unpublished, and may be forever, who knows—I’d be happy to email it to you.

Leave a comment telling me that you’re already on the email list or DM me your email on Twitter @dwfrauenfelder.

Hopefully someday you’ll be able to read the whole story when The Invention of Greek Mythology is published.

Image was taken in Limassol, Cyprus, on a beautiful night some time ago.