Chapter 1:The Nature of Myth

1
Chapter 1The Nature of Myth

1. The Western Roman Empire ended over fifteen
   hundred years ago, but the stories of classical
   gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman warriors and
   leaders, live on in the their old vigor.

2

• 2. They were bequeathed to us in the writings of
  the Greeks and Romans, but their names and their
  stories are much older than the written word .
• 3. The definition of myth is that myth is a
  traditional stories.
• 4. To say that a myth is a story is to say, first
  of all, that it has a plot, a narrative structure
  consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

3

• 5. Myths have characters as well as plots. In
  myths, the characters may be gods, goddesses, or
  other supernatural beings, but they may also be
  human beings or even animals who speak and act in
  the manner of human beings.
• 6. Another element is setting. The setting is the
  time and place in which the action of the story
  unfolds.

4

• 6. In some Greek myths, the setting is an actual
  city such as Athens or Thebes, or some other
  location familiar to the audience. In others, the
  setting is an obscure place the underworld or
  Mount Olympus.
• 7. Myth transcends our everyday notions of time
  and space.

5

• Myths are characterized by the presence of plot,
  characters, and setting. However,a myth is not
  just a story, but a certain kind of story, which
  we describe as traditional. A traditional story
  is one that has been handed over by word of
  mouth from one storyteller to another without
  the the intervention of writing.

6

• Types of Myth
• 1. Divine myths (sometimes called true myths or
  myths proper) are stories in which supernatural
  beings are the main actors such stories
  generally explain why the world, or some aspect
  of it, is the way it is.

7

• 2. Legends are stories of the great deeds of
  human heroes or heroines legends narrate the
  events of the human past.
• 3. Folktales are stories whose actors are
  ordinary people or animals folktales serve both
  to entertain the audience and to teach or justify
  customary patterns of behavior.

8

1. Divine myth The Supernatural beings who appear
   as the principal characters in divine myth are
   depicted as superior to humans in power and
   splendor. Sometimes they can take on human or
   animal shape at will.
2. Supernatural beings are gods, goddesses, or
   demons with well-developed and distinctive
   personalities of their own.

9

• 3. The events of divine myth usually take place
  in a world before or outside the present order
  where time and often space have different
  meanings from those familiar to human beings.

10

• Legend
• Although supernatural beings often play a part,
  their roles are subordinate to those of the human
  characters.
• The heroes and heroines of legend are drawn from
  the ranks of the nobility.
• Whereas divine myth is set in a different or
  previous world-order, legendary events belong to
  our own, although they took place in the distance
  past.

11

• Legends can contain an element of truth. Most
  scholars have long thought that Greek legend does
  reflect major events and power relations of a
  historical period now known to us through its
  archaeological remains.

12

• Folktale is more difficult to define than is
  divine myth or legend because of the variety of
  traditional stories grouped together under this
  heading.
• In folktales the main characters are usually
  ordinary mean, women, and children rather than
  noble family.

13

• 3. Often the main characters in folktales have
  low social status, at least at the beginning of
  the story, and are persecuted or victimized in
  some way by other characters.

14

• 4. Whereas divine myths explain why the world is
  the way it is and legends tell what happened in
  the human past, the primary function of folktales
  is to entertain, although they may also lay an
  important role in teaching and justifying
  customary patterns of behavior.

15
The Study of Myth

• The study of myth is multifaceted. There are many
  different ways in which modern scholars approach
  the study of myth, but they can be grouped into
  four general categories
• The recording and compiling of a given cultures
  myths
• In many ways, the most helpful sources for the
  study of ancient myths are works of literature.

16

• 1. The study of myths has much in common with
  the study of literature. However,the structural
  similarities between the original oral tale and
  the written work of literature in which it is
  recorded can be deceptive. The literary work is
  typically the creation of a single individual.

17

• 2. Another valuable source of information about
  the myths of ancient peoples is the
  archaeological record.

18

• 3. A second way in which scholars approach the
  study of myth is to examine the functions of
  specific myths in the context of a given society.
  
• 4. To judge a myths function, we must get beyond
  mere recording and compiling and move on to an
  interpretation of the myths in question.

19

• 5. Good interpretations require sensitivity and
  insight, as well as knowledge of the society that
  produced the myth.
• 6. A third way in which scholars study myth is to
  trace relationships between the myths of one
  culture and those of others.

20

• Finally,some scholars involved in the study of
  myth are concerned with the assessment of myths.
  What is the deeper human significance of these
  old tales?
• Questions of the deeper meaning and truth of myth
  have played an important role in the study of
  classical myth for many centuries.

21
Chapter 2 The Cultural Context of Classical Myth

• 1.The Early/Middle Bronze Age Indo-European
  society may have been divided into three groups
  whose membership was determined by birth kings
  and priests, warriors, and food producers.

22
The Mycenaean Age

• In the Mycenaean Age the Greeks were ruled by
  powerful kings.

23
The Dark Age

• When Troy was destroyed by human hands about 1250
  B.C., the people were raising horses and using
  pottery similar to that were found in Greece the
  Trojans of this period may themselves have been
  Greeks.
• Most scholars associate the destruction of 1250
  B.C. with the legend of the Trojan War.

24
The Archaic Period

1. The Archaic Period witnessed the emergence of the
   Greek polis, the politically independent
   city-state.
2. Another important development during the Archaic
   Period was the rebirth of commerce throughout the
   Dark Age.

25
The Classical Period

1. During the latter part of the Archaic Period,
   Greece was threaten by a powerful rival from the
   East. In 508 B.C., in Athens, a remarkable
   development took place the emergence of the
   worlds first democracy.
2. Democracy made the ordinary citizen feel that he
   has responsibility for his own destiny.

26

• 3. During the Classical Period the polis reached
  its greatest effectiveness, but also showed its
  worst faults.
• 4. Aristotle described the polis as the perfect
  and natural fruit of a long social evolution.

27

• 5. The Classical Period saw the development of
  Greek philosophy and history as powerful
  intellectual rivals to traditional myth.
• 6.The stories of gods and heroes were the common
  birthright of all Greece and were celebrated in
  painting, sculpture, song, and drama. However,
  they were given new meanings in the intellectual
  ferment of the age.

28
The Hellenistic Period

• 1. The social and political system based on the
  polis was crippled in 338 B.C. when Philip II of
  Macedon, a region to the north of Greece ove-ran
  the Greek city-states and imposed his will on
  them.
• 2. After his death, his son Alexander inherited
  the throne. Moved by the legends of the Trojan
  War and seeing himself as a latter-day Achilles,
  Alexander attacked the enormous Persian Empire.

29
Greek Society

• 1. The Greeks dependence on the sea for
  commerce, transportation, and food was important
  in the formation of their character and had a
  direct influence on their social structure. The
  sea is an equalizer.

30

• 2. Greek cultural values can be best be
  understood as those emerging from team
  competition.
• Every Greek citizen could expect at some time in
  his life to face the enemy in hand-to-hand
  combat.

31
The Family

• The Greeks were monogamous that is, offspring
  from one wife at a time were the mans only
  legitimate heirs. The Greek word for family
  included not only the female and the young
  unmarried male members of the household, but also
  the slaves, the domestic animals, the physical
  house and the property.

32

• The family had a political aspect, because even
  the Athenian polis
• was governed by its leading families. Marriage
  was not based on mutual affection, but arranged
  between families on political and economic
  grounds.

33

• Greek literature is our principal source of
  information about the lives of Greek women, and
  yet the literary works were composed exclusively
  by males, most of them Athenian.

34
Belief

• The belief that the world is pervaded by ghosts
  and spirits. One example is blood sacrifice, the
  shedding of animal or human blood in honor of a
  god or spirit. Such an offering was thought to
  be more potent than a bloodless sacrifice of
  fruits or material objects.

35

• We divide the human world sharply from the
  natural, but to the ancient Greeks such
  distinctions need not be made. Animals may have
  human intellectual qualities, including the power
  of speech.

36

• Transformation of humans into animal or natural
  forms is common. In Greek myth, there are only a
  few examples of mixtures of man and animal the
  Minotaur, half bull and half man, and the
  Centaurs, who had human torsos but a horses body.

37

• Similarly, the supernatural world easily mixes
  with the human. A human being may be born of a
  god or spirit Achilles mother was Thetis, a sea
  nymph.

38
Religion

• The Greeks had many gods, who did not make the
  world, but dwelled within it. Zeus is their
  leader. The Greek gods have personalities like
  those of humans and struggle among each other for
  position and power.

39
Greece and Rome

• Classical myth comprises not just the stories of
  the Greeks, but also the Roman versions of those
  stories, and some stories native to Rome. The
  Romans remade Greek culture in their own image,
  and it was they who passed the classical
  tradition on to modern Europe.