Greek Mythology

Hidden Meanings

Incredibly detailed, psychologically insightful and boasting a cast of thousands, the Greek myths had many resonances for their audience. They could be considered as reference texts for the practice of Greek religion, or provide moral and philosophical reference points and tests. For example, which is worse, leaving your father’s murder unavenged or killing your mother? They can show how nature operates; how the universe came into being; how human relationships work. They can even liven up a travel guide – Pausanias’ is packed with springs where such-and-such was turned into a bird and olive trees were bent into their current, curious shape by some passing hero.

But if it is necessary to come up with one overarching definition of what Greek myths are for, we should perhaps view them as a process for seeing the world – a framework for thinking about how and why we are what we are. What the Greek myths were not is a belief system in any Judaeo-Christian sense. There was never a definitive version of a story; no single, absolute truth.

Flexible Feasts

Local variations; different endings; changes in emphasis – the myths were not the product of one unified Hellenic mind, nor were they set in amber. Even the most famous stories are still mobile. Stesichorus has a phantasmal Helen whisked away to Troy, while the real Helen lives in Egypt throughout the war’s long course. Rather than have Iphigenia sacrificed by her father Agamemnon on the beach at Aulis, Euripides sees her rescued by Artemis and spirited off to Tauris on the Black Sea.

Which is not to say that the Greeks, Romans and their successors have not sought to systematise and collate the myths. Hellenistic Alexandria saw a concerted scholarly attempt to intellectualise and standardise the slew of often conflicting stories, while the anthropologists of the early 20th Century attempted to interpret them as reflections of some prehistoric dying god and rebirth myth.

Open To Translation

However, the vast cast list and rampant chronological inexactitude means that it is all but impossible to pin the myths down in neat rows, like butterflies in a Victorian collection. What they are is a treasure house for storytelling – a huge resource of material for playwrights, artists and authors to retell and reinterpret. And, in this context at least, their mutability is a strength. For the tragedians of Athens, the myths provided a set of well-known plots whose details and tone can be shaped to serve the playwright’s purpose – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides each write very different plays about the same subject, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes and Electra.

Meanwhile, later writers such as Virgil and Ovid put a Roman spin on Greek mythology. Virgil’s Aeneid follows the Trojan hero Aeneas as he flees the doomed city to found a new home in Italy, where his descendants will become the Romans and – eventually – dominate the Mediterranean world. Ovid’s Metamorphoses takes the reader on a journey from the creation of the universe right up the modern day, with the final transformation being that of the murdered Julius Caesar into a god.

Modern Takes On Ancient Stories

And all of Western civilisation since has been steeped in the characters and themes of Greek mythology. Innumerable paintings, poems, sculptures, plays, novels and operas have been inspired by these ancient stories, from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, from Botticelli's Birth of Venus to the Trojan horse on the album cover of At The Drive In’s Relationship of Command.

Take, as just one example, Pygmalion – the story of a sculptor who falls in love with his statue. There’s Shaw’s famous play and its subsequent Broadway adaptation by Lerner and Loewe, of course, but also plays by Rousseau and W.S. Gilbert, operas by Rameau and Donizetti, poems by Dryden and Carol Ann Duffy, paintings by Burne-Jones and… well, you get the idea.

The sheer ubiquity of Greek myths is underlined by the fact that we reference them so often in everyday speech. Someone can be a narcissist, feel panic, have the Midas touch or possess the body of an Adonis. It’d be a Herculean task to list them all.

Image (top) of the statue of Odysseus by Hero Moorlag. Image (bottom) of Pygmalion by Todd Mecklem.

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Written by Davo.

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About The Author

David Axbey

Last three pieces by this author:

Waging War in Ancient Egypt

Davo is a London-based journalist with an MA in Classics. When not writing about ancient history, he enjoys movies, manga and baseball. Rumours that he was raised by wolves are unfounded.