Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

Beginning in the late Archaic period, the name “Homer” begins to appear in ancient sources associated with epic poetry, including two poems that survive complete to the current day, the Iliad and Odyssey. However, Homer is not, in these ancient sources, associated with texts of these poems. That is, Homer is not described as an author but as a bard, and what we refer to now as “texts” of these poems are, in ancient sources, referred to as songs. By the end of the fifth century BC, the name of Homer becomes associated with what were considered to be the two “best” of the then-extant epic poems, what we know as the Iliad and Odyssey.

Study of the texts, in one way or another, was part of a “Greek” education throughout antiquity (and beyond). Poets who followed Homer would have known their Iliad and Odyssey and were in some way in conversation with them. The Alexandrian poet Apollonius of Rhodes, composer of Jason and the Golden Fleece (also known as Jason and the Argonauts, or Argonautica) and Roman Empire poet Virgil both consciously engage with Homer’s themes and style while pursuing their own literary and socio-political agendas. 

Hamilton too draws on Homer for her Trojan war narratives. In accordance with scholarship of her time, she dates “Homer” to approximately 1000 BC. Today, it is less common to attempt to determine whether or when Homer existed. Instead, attention has shifted to dating the texts themselves, based on their language and references to material culture within them. From this research, the poems now tend to be dated to the latter half of the eighth century BC, the Iliad earlier than the Odyssey (though this continues to be debated).

An important development in scholars’ perception of Homer occurred in the 1920s and onwards through the work of American classicists Millman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord. By studying living Serbo-Croatian bards, Parry determined that the texts of Homer bore traces of oral-composition-in-performance. An implication of this is that the poems may predate, in some form, written language. When they were written down, their fundamental structure was not altered to conform to “literature” but preserved as they were performed, which may explain why they contain repetition of formulaic phrases and thematic patterns. These formulae and themes seem to have been the oral performer’s language toolbox. If Hamilton was aware of this research, she does not incorporate it in her analysis and judgments of the poems. She treats them in the same way she treats literary texts.

With Homer, Hesiod is the oldest written source for Greek mythology. The two names have been linked in a variety of ways over time. One school of thought argues that Hesiod provides a macro view of Greek cosmology and Homer, via the stories of Achilles and Odysseus, a micro view. The two relatively-complete poems attributed to Hesiod are Theogony, which treats the origin of the cosmos up through the ascension of Zeus, and Works and Days, a didactic poem that provides a cosmological explanation for why humans have to work and suffer as well as advice for farming, sailing, and more.

Hesiod’s poems suggest a strong Near Eastern influence that Hamilton does not acknowledge and/or may not have known. The relationship between early Greek texts and Near Eastern ones had been overlooked by scholars who tended to look back from Rome rather than forward from the Near East, and to regard Greece and Rome as one unit that comprises the beginning of “Western civilization.” Both Homer and Hesiod can be seen as poised between the end of the oral age and the beginning of the literate one, as well as between East and West. Similarly, it can be noted that Hamilton tends to overlook the ways Greek speakers characterize their culture as interwoven with their neighbors’ in the Mediterranean basin, most notably through the myths of Perseus (who marries Ethiopian princess Andromeda) and Europa (whose abduction brought Cadmus from the Phoenician city of Tyre to Thebes).

Pindar (518-sometime after 446 BC) was a lyric poet from Thebes, active during the Classical period and known for his victory odes. The odes of Pindar that have survived were composed to honor the victors of athletic games at Panhellenic festivals (meaning festivals that were open to all Hellenes, as the “Greeks” called themselves). The festivals at which competitions were held were fundamentally religious rituals held to honor gods and heroes. Hence, the victory odes could be said simultaneously to celebrate present day victors and to celebrate gods and heroes. A feature of these odes was connecting the victor to figures from epic (and/or oral traditions local to the victor), which is where mythological narratives fit in. This context shaped the types of stories Pindar told and the way he told them, as context inevitably contributes to shaping all the versions of mythical stories recounted in ancient sources.

Generally, poetry that has survived to the modern day was so highly esteemed in antiquity that it was incorporated into educational curricula such that it was frequently reproduced. This does not mean that all highly-esteemed poetry survived (for example, little of Sappho’s poetry survives intact, though she was highly regarded in antiquity), and there have been instances of random finds. In the case of Pindar, however, his poetry was held in high regard in antiquity. When Alexander the Great razed the city of Thebes, he ordered the putative home of Pindar to be spared.

Aeschylus (525/4-456/5 BC) was a tragedian in Classical Athens, meaning he composed tragic dramas performed at religious festivals. Seven tragedies that have survived mostly complete have been attributed to Aeschylus since antiquity. The authenticity of one, Prometheus Bound, which Hamilton cites, has been challenged on the grounds of stylistic differences. All but one of these tragedies (Persians) takes its plot from mythology.

At the festivals, tragedies were performed in competitions. Three playwrights were selected to stage three tragedies followed by a satyr tragicomedy, and a jury selected the winner. Only one such tragic trilogy, which Hamilton also draws on, survives complete, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which was comprised of Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. The satyr play performed with the trilogy has not survived. The trilogy is believed to have been staged in 458, 22 years after the Athens-Sparta coalition defeated Persia in a critical sea battle in the straits of Salamis. At this time, Athens was an ascending power in the Greek-speaking world. The Oresteia reflects this pride in Athenian ingenuity, courage, and democracy. The trilogy ends with Athena establishing trial by jury in Athens and transforming the Furies into Eumenides, meaning “kindly ones.” In this sense, the trilogy can be read as a kind of foundation myth for Athens’ participatory democracy, which had transformed society in a way that, in the moment, seemed to them to enable their rise in power and prestige.

Also a tragedian in Classical Athens, Euripides (480-406) was active at a time when the city was embroiled in a war with Sparta that it eventually lost in disastrous fashion. Euripides’s tragedies have been seen as notoriously enigmatic and have led scholars to draw contradictory views. A continuous subject of debate is his views on the gods. Given the festival context of ancient tragedies and the fact that he would have had to be selected to present them, it seems highly unlikely that Euripides’s plays expressed outright censure of or disbelief in the gods in the way some modern critics, including Hamilton, have suggested. That he presented unconventional and at times shocking views, however, is attested in ancient sources.

Some have suggested that Medea murdering her and Jason’s children, which Hamilton cites in her retelling of “The Quest of the Golden Fleece,” was Euripides’s invention and would have appalled the audience. The play was staged in 431 BC, at the onset of overt hostilities between Athens and Sparta. In this sense, the variant of Medea killing her children with Jason could have been a commentary on political conditions at the time: When the “adults” (i.e., the dominant powers, Athens and Sparta) come into conflict, it is the “children” (i.e., the youth of Athens and Sparta) who pay the price. Hamilton’s treatment of myths as decontextualized stories, handpicking details from across hundreds of years, renders it difficult to reckon with the meaning of myth variants such as this one (among others).

Apollonius of Rhodes was active in third century BC Alexandria. The only text of his to survive complete into the present is his epic Jason and the Argonauts (also published as Jason and the Golden Fleece, The Voyage of the Argo, and Argonautica in various English translations). In addition to writing poetry, Apollonius is believed to have composed scholarly commentaries on Homer and Hesiod, among others, and to have served as head librarian at the Library of Alexandria. 

Apollonius’s broad knowledge of existing Greek texts and poetic traditions is evident across his surviving epic, which draws on Homeric and tragic material intricately and intentionally to fashion poetry for a new city. Unlike city states of the Classical period, Alexandria was founded in historical time and had no mythic past around which to build its identity. It needed to invent one, while simultaneously drawing on Greek traditions that signified prestige and incorporating local traditions. Apollonius reached deep into the heroic past, into the generation before the Trojan war heroes, reshaping mythic material to justify the appropriateness of Greek presence in Egypt.

At the heart of his epic is the relationship between Jason (West) and Medea (East), which begins intensely and ends (as he and his audiences would likely have been familiar with from Euripides’s Medea) tragically. From this perspective, his decision to narrate the early love story of Jason and Medea could potentially be read as a cautionary tale about the ideals of reckless youth and the challenges of cultural exchange that must be navigated with care. 

Like Apollonius, Virgil (70-19 BC) wrote within an empire that was shaping a new identity for itself in the context of existing traditions. Virgil had lived through a violent transitional time when Rome had been torn apart by civil war and transitioned from a republic to an empire. This new empire and emperor (Augustus Caesar) had a need for literature that celebrated and justified its (his) power. Much ink has been spilled debating the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid, which became the national epic of the Roman Empire. Central to the debate are questions about how much of a hand Augustus had in the shaping of the epic (as well as its editing after Virgil’s premature death) and to what extent Virgil may have been subverting the epic’s propagandistic potential in his characterization of its central hero, Aeneas.

The figure of Aeneas would have been familiar as a Trojan prince and hero, who Homer’s epic describes as fated to survive the fall of Troy. In this sense, Aeneas is a useful figure simultaneously to supply an ancient foundation myth for the Roman Empire and to frame the conquest of the Greek-speaking world as payback for its sack of Troy. Aeneas is at once characterized as an ancestor of Julius Caesar and a potential parallel for Augustus. However, the figure of Aeneas also carries some potentially negative associations, as earlier myth variants had framed him as a traitor to Troy. A question that has been asked is whether Virgil was drawing on Aeneas’s complex history as a way to subtly subvert Augustus.

Virgil died before the poem was completed and asked that it be burned after his death. Augustus did not comply, and the poem quickly achieved acclaim. It continues to be praised for the beauty of its language, Hamilton’s chief interest. Debates about its meaning, however, continue.

The poems of another Augustan poet, Ovid (43 BC-17 AD), also figure prominently in Hamilton’s work. She cites his Metamorphoses as one of her sources and also may have drawn if not material at least interpretations from his Heroides. Metamorphoses presents itself as a compendium of Greek mythology, seeming studiously to avoid Homeric material while employing its meter (dactylic hexameter) and some of its thematic concerns. The poem begins with the origins of the cosmos and ends with the ascension of Augustus. Heroides is an epistolary poem composed of jilted mythical women to their lovers. In many cases, as Hamilton notes, certain myths that are believed to have had Greek origins are only known through Ovid, making it impossible to know how he may have altered the narrative for his own literary agenda.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be read as quite subversive. He draws parallels between Augustus and various gods while portraying those gods as serial abusers of the vulnerable, jealous of others’ talents (especially artists), and, in the case of Jupiter, frightened of his wife. Ovid concludes the poem saying, effectively, that his name will last outlast even Rome itself. It is not difficult to imagine why Augustus might have exiled Ovid to the extremity of the empire, never permitting him to return to Rome. One of Hamilton’s major critiques of Ovid is his propensity for luridly descriptive violence, what scholars have described as “aestheticizing” of violence. This again could have a historical context as violence seems, in Rome, to have been seen as a form of entertainment, most notably through gladiatorial sport. Retreat into aesthetics may also have been a way to desensitize oneself to the omnipresent threat of violence and lack of agency that people may have experienced in the empire.