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May 2007 |
Greek
Mythology |
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A new student's view of the Symposium What are students learning? Lynn Bootes (TS-472C)
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Two literature courses were offered this term, TS-472B Literature of the
Greco-Roman Period and TS-472C Literature of Classical India.
The following assignment is from TS-472B, which concentrates on some of the enduring works of Greek Dramatists, including Sophocles trilogy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, the Aenid and Ovid's Metamorphosus. The course overview notes that it is important for the student to gain a comprehensive knowledge of Greek Literature, and to a lesser extent Roman Literature, since all subsequent authors in the Western Tradition assumed that their readers were quite familiar with the classical stories of gods, heroes and family sagas. Indeed, many of the themes of modern Western Literature hearken back to Greek Myths and the Classics of Literature as metaphors for modern life. To get a better understanding of the Gods as presented in these works, students in the first week of class answered questions based on Richard Buxton's book, "The Complete World of Greek Mythology." Inga Duncan Thornell Study Questions on Greek Mythology a. Discuss the importance of Egypt being integrated into the Roman Empire and the culture of Byzantium in the preservation and transmission of Greek Literature. Alexander the great’s armies carried Greek culture as far as Egypt, Libya and Afghanistan.[1] In Egypt, he founded a city that was actually built by his general and close friend, Ptolemy, after Alexander’s death. That city was Alexandria and it became the melting pot for the blending of Eastern and Western ideas. MacLeod expands on the religious implications of this syncretism, "Alexandria the city was a place at the centre of trade in goods and peoples, as well as ideas. It was a religious site, and a site of religions, a place where all the gods were worshipped, where Jews, pagans and Christians debated theologies influenced by the Zoroastrianism of Persia, and the Buddhism and Hinduism of India. Neo-Platonism, some say, was actually invented in Alexandria."[2] Because of Alexandria’s importance, Koine became the lingua Franca of trade and learning.[3] At the library, important literary works were copied onto Papyrus in the Greek language and were preserved by Egypt’s bone-dry sand long after the Greek civilization was gone.[4] The Romans conquered Greece and adopted the Greek gods and epics as their own. Eventually Christianity gained ascendancy in Rome and soon after the empire split into East and West. The Eastern portion became Byzantium. Latin became the lingua Franca of the West and Greek was forgotten except in Byzantium. Buxton says, "That any writing at all has survived from Greek antiquity is due in large part to the civilization of Byzantium, where texts continued to be copied and recopied, enabling study of selected works from the great Hellenic past to form part of the Byzantine educational programme. When Byzantium at last fell to the Turks in 1453, many of these texts were brought westwards, to attain at last a less fragile existence thanks to printing."[5] b. Discuss the importance of the Symposium and the Temple in Greek life and its relevance to Greek myth. Greek Temples and other sites of ritual observance provided contexts for myths. Greek dramas were performed "in the Theatre Dionysos, on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis. Each year, in spring, around 15,000 people assembled for several days at the City Dionysia, a festival in honour of the god Dionysos."[6] In addition, prestigious drama festivals were held each year in Athens. Attendance at the theater was more than entertainment; it was a civic and religious obligation. Businesses were closed and all were encouraged to participate in the festivals and plays. The altar to Dionysus was integrated into Greek theater and was actually used as a prop in the performances. Temples and other sites of ritual observance often provided contests in which the mythic stories were performed.[7] Another context for the performance of myth was the symposion. Buxton describes this as a "kind of formalized drinking party for (principally) aristocratic, adult males - the participants sometimes exchanged songs and stories faith a mythological slant just as the vessels used by the drinkers often bore imagery with mythological resonance."[8] c. Discuss the importance of Epic Poetry and Drama to early Greek life. Works and Days, Theogony, The Iliad and the Odyssey are, according to Vandiver, The primary cultural texts for classical Greek civilization and are the earliest literary works in the European tradition. They represent the culmination of a centuries-long tradition of orally transmitted poetry and served as educational tools and moral frameworks providing examples of proper and improper behavior. They codified information about the value system of ancient Greek culture.[9] In their own time, these poems were performance pieces. Bards traveled to cities, sang their epics and even competed for titles like athletes. These stories and performances promulgated cultural norms and the myths, such as the story of the Trojan War, which "everyone knew," provided a "stock of common reference points against which the Greeks could map their everyday experiences, frame moral questions, and so on."[10] d. Discuss the views of the early Greek Philosophers on mythology and the gods. The common view of philosophy is represented by this statement from The Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Our western philosophical tradition began in ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE (…) [the philosophers] scientific interests included mathematics, astronomy, and biology. As the first philosophers, though, they emphasized the rational unity of things, and rejected mythological explanations of the world."[11] However, Buxton notes, "This story is a misleading simplification. It is certainly the case that a series of brilliant thinkers (…) did define central aspects of their intellectual positions in opposition to the traditional myths. However first, these innovative intellectual strategies had little discernible impact on more stories of gods and heroes – these speculations were, that is to say, by and large unrepresentative. Secondly these very thinkers were, to varying degrees, themselves intellectually implicated in the assumptions underlying the traditional tales."[12] Plato wrote his own myth of the afterlife, The Myth of Er and Socrates alludes to mythic motifs in Plato’s Dialogues. Socrates Plato and Eratosthenes were all accused of "impiety" but these charges were mostly politically motivated rather than real heresy charges since the Greeks had no specified canon or dogma. e. Discuss the importance and influence of Hesiod and Homer in propagating Greek myth. Homer was a Greek bard who may or may not have existed sometime during 8th to 5th centuries.[13] The lack of any evidence of his existence or any way of dating his works leads scholars to believe that the works were performed orally for up to two centuries before being written down. The Iliad and Odyssey were both attributed to Homer by Herodotus who says, Homer lived "about 400 years before my time."[14] Hesiod was another bard, who lived at the same time or shortly after Homer. He refers to himself as a farmer from Boeotia, a region of central Greece. Hesiod codified the chronology and genealogy of the Greek gods in his Works and Days and Theogony. The Iliad and the Odyssey were written in the form we would recognize in the Library of Alexandria. The library was responsible for the collection and retention of many works of antiquity. Furthermore, since the policy of the Ptolemaic kings was to buy, borrow, or copy any and all books that arrived in Alexandria, the library ended up with many different copies of the same works. This plethora of copies enabled the library’s scholars to synthesize definitive editions from many different traditions. This is evidently what happened with the works of Homer where the library came to own "multitudinous copies with multitudinous differences in the texts they presented."[15] Aristarchus of Samothrace is credited with compiling a definitive rendering of The Iliad and the Odyssey using a complex system of notations to describe suspected errors and interpolations. These works, as noted in a previous answer, became "primary cultural texts for classical Greek civilization and are the earliest literary works in the European tradition."[16] f. Teiresias appears as a character or by allusion in countless works from early Greek to Modern Literature. Briefly recount his story and speculate why he is regarded such an authority on human relationship and sexuality. In the Oedipus story, Teiresias is "the great Theban diviner who revealed that, if the city were to survive, the anger of the god Ares must first be appeased by the sacrifice of Menoikeus, the son of Jocasta’s brother Kreon."[17] The fall of Thebes coincided with the death of the seer Teiresias, who had himself embodied the city’s fortunes for several generations.[18] Teiresias is blind and there are divergent explanations for his blindness. The story put forth by the poet Kallimachos, said, "That he accidentally saw Athene bathing at a mountain spring."[19] The goddess blinded him but due to his mother’s intercession "granted him the compensating gift of prophecy especially the capacity to understand the language of birdsong."[20] Another explanation for his blindness also includes the reason why he is regarded as an authority on human relationship and sexuality. According to Buxton, Teiresias was once in the kind of landscape where mortals typically encountered Trinities: a mountain (Arcadian Kyllene). He saw two snakes copulating, and struck them with his staff. This must have counted as a crime (perhaps because the act they were engaged in ‘belonged’ to Aphrodite, or because the snakes were themselves sacred); at any rate, Teiresias suffered what, in the Greek terms, counted as a diminution: he was transformed into a woman. Some time later he saw the same pair of copulating snakes, and regained his masculinity. These two acts of boundary-crossing made Teiresias uniquely qualified to judge a tricky dispute between Zeus and Hera, about whether males or females enjoyed the act of sex more. Teiresias, who had experienced both possibilities, said women enjoyed it nine times more than men. This answer won the argument for Zeus, so Hera blinded the hapless Teiresias.[21] g. Discuss the common denominator that connects Perseus, Meleager, Jason, Herakles and Theseus and what is their function for Greek myth and culture. The connection is that each of these characters qualifies as a Greek hero. A Greek hero or heroine is a member of "of a class of exceptional mortals who were believed to have lived in the time of myth, and whose deeds and sufferings marked them out as especially memorable."[22] The cult of a hero was generally centered on where the hero was supposed to have been buried and many city-states claimed their own. E.B Tylor, a 19th century scholar, noted similarities and common motifs in hero myths. According to Tylor, these are myths in which "the hero is exposed at birth, is saved by other humans or animals, and grows up to become a national hero."[23] Tylor’s work was expanded by Rank, Raglan, and Frazer who are known as the most important delineators of the "hero" plot. Their delineation of the hero motifs generally begins with unusual circumstances of conception or birth, oppression or exile, recognition by the hero’s father, a quest and finally the return to the home country and installment as king. The local hero’s story was part of the education of Greek boys. And although Plato "strenuously objected to the (as he saw it) anti- social results of letting children hear about violent dissension between Gods and Giants, and about bitter disputes among the Olympians themselves,"[24] most educators saw tales of heroes as the embodiment of cultural values including a restoration of order[25] or justice[26] h. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, laid the literary groundwork for the flowering of Greek Literature of the Classical Period. Generally relate the subject matter of each work and discuss their importance in the transmission of Greek culture. Very briefly, the Iliad is a poem that comprises 15,693 lines of verse and chronicles a great war between a Greek expeditionary force and the people of Troy. It is one of two works, along with the Odyssey, that comprise the Homeric epics. The Odyssey contains 12,110 lines and is, in part, a sequel to Homer's Iliad. It centers on the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten year long journey home to Ithaca, following the fall of Troy. The Iliad describes the events of a brief period at the end of the Trojan War. The 10-year long siege provided narrative material not only for the Iliad and Odyssey but also for many Greek tragedies, for Virgil’s Aeneid, and for countless later works.[27] Many of these other works have disappeared and are only known to us through catalogues and summaries. ___________ Footnotes 1. Buxton, Richard, The Complete World of Greek Mythology, Thames & Hudson,
2004, page 20
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