86 pages • 2 hours read
Edith HamiltonMythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Defining Western Civilization
A driving influence on Hamilton’s interpretation of myths across Mythology is a particular vision of Western civilization. It is progressive, moving beyond irrational, “primitive” beliefs. It is secular and human centered. It focuses attention and power squarely in the hands of real-life human beings rather than looking skyward for divine motives and intentions. The ancient Greeks “began” this forward motion with a bang with the “Greek miracle,” and this progress continued, gradually transforming the sacred myths of Homer and Hesiod’s time to entertaining stories that could be spun into beautiful literary works like Virgil’s. Hamilton’s vision of Western civilization reflects beliefs of her time; today, its defining characteristics continue to be debated. Those debates aside, as an interpretive framework for approaching myths, Hamilton’s formulation presents numerous challenges, some that she seems aware of and others that she does not.
First is that she fails to account for considerable socio-political shifts from Archaic and Classical Greece to the Hellenistic Empires to the Roman Empire. Despite acknowledging that they come from different times, she does not account for their discrete contexts. Socio-political shifts transformed the way society was organized; for example, the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandra sought to craft an identity for the city that incorporated both immigrant Greek speakers’ various cultures and those of the indigenous population. In step with shifting socio-political systems, notions of what constituted the divine were debated and transformed over time, and the rituals around these beliefs with them. However, across pagan antiquity, rituals around gods and heroes remained important parts of daily life, and the myths remained connected to these rituals.
Hamilton’s limitation is that she tends to interpret the stories literally: Either they were “believed” at face value, or they were not. For the ancients, it was perhaps not so much a case of believing or not believing the myths but of using them to explore, approach, and seek to connect with the divine. Ancients did not need to believe, for example, that Zeus literally turned Io into a cow for the story to represent a deeper truth that people subscribed to in different ways at different times: that divine power was great and terrible, and mere humans could not expect to resist it. This could remain “true” whether the divine power was represented in forces of nature or the might of emperors.
As a result of ignoring context, she does not address that the notion of progressive forward motion conflicts fundamentally with the ancient Greek view of reality. For them, cyclicality defined reality. Their observation of the natural world revealed the pervasiveness of cycles in human life, whether in the rise and fall of city states or the flowering and dying of the natural world. In either case, death was inevitable and unavoidable, but it was not permanent. Humans could regroup and rebuild, as winter was followed by spring and summer, the rebirth and flowering of nature. The Greeks seem to have concluded that what remained for humans was to create meaning out of these cycles, and they built their sacred rituals around them. While aspects of Athenian culture became influential in Rome as well as across artistic and intellectual movements, these were plucked selectively and cannot be said to represent the ancient Greek world generally.
A larger problem with Hamilton’s framing of Western civilization could be, then, that it is somewhat idealized and dependent on interpreting the past retroactively, through the lens of her own beliefs, rather than taking the ancient world piece by piece in its own contexts. The latter reveals that commonalities and differences lived side-by-side across ancient myth retellings. Zeus and Jupiter are not interchangeable, as Minerva and Athena are not interchangeable, etc. Rather, each version emerges in its own time from a variety of factors that cannot be easily distilled into a tidy and consistent definition of what “Western civilization” is and is not.
Claiming Ancient Greece and Rome as the Foundation of Western Culture
While Norse mythology presumably provides, for Hamilton, insight into her perceived racial group’s way of approaching and understanding reality, Greece and Rome provide the West’s “spiritual and intellectual inheritance” (448). This view of the ancient world continues to be deployed in contemporary times, perhaps ironically for opposing ends. One side views the ancient past as a glorified ideal and the other as the root of modern problems. Both extremes fall into the same trap of effectively colonizing the past—extracting from it elements that can be shaped to support the argument of the moment—with the justification that it is their modern “inheritance.” Both sides similarly fail to approach the ancient past in its own contexts.
This is not entirely different from what ancient Athenians and Ptolemaic Alexandrians and Romans living through the emergence of empire did: They interacted with the ideas available to them and adapted them to their own needs. Ovid does not seem to have been concerned with whether he may have misrepresented a Greek myth because the myth offered him a useful way of exploring power and its abuses as related to his experiences in Augustan Rome. At the same time, one cannot expect to gain insight into classical Athens by reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To approach classical Athens, one must approach their own texts and contexts. Augustan Roman poets may have found inspiration from the poetry of Alexandria, Athens, and Archaic Greece, but this does not render them the “foundation” of Roman culture. They were ideas that engaged their poets and that were also transformed by them.
These transformed versions remained influential through the adoption in Rome, and parts of Western Europe, of Christianity and into the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Modern periods. These were not the only influences, and significant intellectual shifts occurred that transformed how mythological stories were interpreted and represented. Hamilton’s suggestion that ancient Greece and Rome are the inheritance of Western Europe obscures that the way the Renaissance, for example, viewed the ancient past may have very little to do with how the ancients understood their own culture. Further, it obscures the movement of ideas across East and West, and it obscures the limited scope of what has survived from antiquity and the danger of attempting to construct a coherent narrative from such fragmentary evidence. For example, some 30 tragedies have survived relatively complete from ancient Athens, yet more than 300 are known to have been staged. Still others may lie beyond the view of historians and scholars. The work of scores of poets exists in fragments or passing references. Yet Hamilton treats what has survived as if it is definitive of its time.
Crafting a Coherent Narrative of Ancient Mythology
In her Preface, Hamilton claims that a “unified” narrative cannot be constructed from across Greek and Roman myth variants, but her project inevitably requires that she do so. She attempts to smooth over the problem by citing her sources and using Roman names with Roman myth versions and Greek names with Greek myth versions, but because different versions across antiquity provided different details, she inevitably is compelled to blend, for example, some details from Pindar with others from Ovid, or to cobble together the Trojan war narrative from both Homer’s Archaic epics and Augustan Virgil’s Aeneid. Further, while Hamilton cites the sources that she deems most important, it seems clear that she has been influenced by more than just the sources she cites, whether she is aware of it. For example, the myth of Achilles’s invulnerable heel does not appear in ancient sources until Statius’s first century Achilleid, yet Hamilton makes no mention of this source at all. Whether this is because she was not aware of it and drew the variant of the invulnerable heel from some other source is not clear.
These issues reflect Hamilton’s overall approach toward ancient sources: universally as works of literature (meaning products of literacy), albeit supported by varying levels of belief in the narratives themselves. Hamilton repeatedly comments on the literary quality of the ancient myth narratives, emphasizing which are “well-told” and which are “dull.” She assesses from modern values about storytelling that she seems to view as self-evident since she does not elaborate on what makes a poem “well-told” or “dull.” Her gold standard seems to be Virgil, and she at turns criticizes and praises Ovid, sometimes finding him delightful, other times disturbing, other times unnecessarily wordy. Apollodorus is criticized for being dull in some places and lauded in others for providing “simple” and “clear” narratives.
This approach renders her decision to use a Greek or Roman name seem not only arbitrary based on what percent of Roman-to-Greek source she uses to craft a narrative but also confusing for the non-specialist who is not in a position to differentiate among sources. The thought patterns of Archaic oral poetry that lingered into the Classical period and permeated every segment of society are evaluated in the same way as those of literary Roman that existed primarily for the privileged classes. The former to retain traces of “primitive” culture that gradually fall away as society becomes, as she believes, increasingly skeptical and sophisticated. The differences that Hamilton notes become little more than footnotes, providing occasions to opine about their absolute literary value.
Despite her claims in her Preface, Hamilton seems to treat the ancient sources as a single body of literature. This body of literature may contain writing of varying quality and discrete concerns, but, ultimately, it can be treated as a singular body of work, as her book is titled Mythology, in the singular tense. Consistent with her view of Western culture as a single thing, Hamilton approaches the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology as they are relevant to her understanding of “Western civilization.” These are portrayed as progressing from the big bang of ancient Greece, that retains traces of “primitivism,” to the sophistication of Roman poetry, to the stalwart and serious heroism of Norse mythology.
