Lecture 2
Good morning. Welcome to LLT121 Classical Mythology. When last we left off, we were talking about three categories of myth. If you’ll recall, we talked about true myth, quote, unquote. True myth is a traditional story, believed as true by the community which passed it down. It happens, supposedly, in primordial time. Number one, back when the earth was young. It has supernatural characters; gods, goddesses, mountains, monsters and the like. It has an aetiological function. I’m going to write that on the board again because that is one of my favorite buzzwords in the class. “Aetiological:” It means a story that explains something. Why is the sky blue? Why is it that it only rains some of the time and not all of the time? The answers to these questions are called “aetiologies.” True myth is usually an attempt to answer these questions.
The second category I gave you last time was “legend.” A legend is usually something that occurs in real time. It has heroic characters, not quite gods or goddesses. On the other hand not every day schmucks like us. It usually has a historical function. It’s passed along so that the great deeds of old are not forgotten.
The third category of story that we haven’t yet gotten to in any great extent is “folk tale.” Folk tale, fairy tale, fable—it’s got a bunch of different names. Basically, it’s a story that can be true or maybe not true. It tends to happen in quote/unquote once-upon-a-time. No time, any time in particular. It has anti-heroic characters. I would say it has, usually, an educational function. Does anybody recall a story called, “Little Red Riding Hood?” Okay, one person in this whole class remembers Little Red Riding Hood. Okay. How many of you encountered that story for the first time in print? Uh huh. I didn’t get anybody that time. Okay, what’s the basic premise of the story of the Little Red Riding Hood? The little girl goes with a basket full of food to visit her grandmother, right? Instead of the grandmother, she runs into big bad wolf. What’s the moral of the story? You got kids? Is that a good thing to teach your kids? Is this a pretty good way of teaching it? You don’t say, “hey, don’t talk to strangers.” You tell them this story. They’ll remember, right? You get the basic premise. It’s the same thing for The Three Little Pigs or The Fox and the Grapes, or what have you. But they don’t necessarily have to have lessons for little kids.
Let me tell you one of my favorite stories in the whole wide world. It has been ever since I was young. It’s a story about a guy names Ulysses. The Greeks called him “Odysseus.” One day, as he was trying to sail back from Troy with his faithful men, he wanted to make it back to his hometown where he could get back together with his wife, Penelope, to whom he had been faithful the entire time. He was sailing past this island and he and his men were really hungry. They saw an island with a cave, so they stopped off at the island with the cave on it. They looked into the cave. Remember, they’re really starving, right? They see all sorts of good things hanging from the walls of the cave like cheese and milk, and filet mignon and Bavarian cream donuts and just everything that you could want to eat was there. So what did they do? They go in there. Ulysses and his men go into the cave and they start munching out. They are having a grand old time when, all of a sudden, they hear the sound of big footsteps. They hear a great big huge boulder rolling across the mouth of the cave. They hear this deep voice saying, “What are you doing in my cave?” It’s the owner of the cave, a Cyclops by the name of Polyphemus. He’s got a great big eye in the middle of his forehead. He’s enormous, he’s strong, and he’s not really very nice. Moreover, he’s the owner of the cave. So he’s not very happy with these people, either. He herds his sheep, goats and rams into the cave and proceeds to grab some of Odysseus’s men and bash their brains out on the floor of the cave. It’s just blood, gore, and guts, you know. Or maybe he rips a head off and tosses it into the corner. He’s mad because these people have been ripping off his food.
Odysseus, who is pretty bright, remembers he’s been traveling with some wine. He’s got some wine on him. He gets an idea. He gives it to the Cyclops. Her says, “Here have a drink, Cyclops. Have a few drinks. Drink it all. I don’t care.” By and by the Cyclops starts to get pretty happy. The Cyclops says to Ulysses, “Tell me what your name is, stranger, and I’ll do you a favor.” Odysseus is not going to say, “Hey, I’m Odysseus.” He says, “my name is ‘No Man.’” This is a pun. He tells him his name is “No Man,” but he pronounces as if it was, “Noman.” The Cyclops thinks the guy’s name is “Noman.” He says, “I’ll tell you what, Noman. I’ll do you a favor. I’ll kill you last.” Then he belches. They belch all the time in the Odyssey. By and by the Cyclops starts to get really hammered. Pretty soon he’s asleep. While the Cyclops is asleep, Odysseus and his men take a stake of olive wood—big long pole of wood—and sharpen one end of it off. Then they take the sharp end of the wooden stake and heat it in a fire. Then Odysseus and five of the other guys take a run up to the Cyclops and stick the smoldering wooden stake right in the middle of his one eye. He’s not very happy about this. He’s really mad. He can’t see.
He stumbles around the cave looking for Odysseus and his men, but he can’t find them, right? Let’s see who’s been listening. Is Odysseus out of the woods yet? Why is he not out of the woods yet? The boulder in front of the door is so huge he and his guys can’t push it. Well, Odysseus has got that covered, too. Odysseus and his men hang on to the bottom of the livestock. Does anybody need to be told why it’s important for the Cyclops to let the livestock out in the morning? The Cyclops is not any dummy, either. He’s feeling the tops of the rams, sheep and all of that. He’s saying, “Where are these guys?” The guys are hanging out down at the bottom. That’s where they are. So they make it out of the cave. They all run like heck into the boat to get away from Cyclops Island. The Cyclops is rolling out after them. He’s yelling—and this is an example of an ancient Greek joke, circa 1200 BC. He’s yelling, “Noman has poked my eye out! Noman has poked my eye out!” Does anybody care to deliver the punch line to this joke? What do the other Cyclopes say to him? They say, “If nobody has poked your eye out, what are you complaining about?” I’m sorry. That’s what passed for a joke in 1200 BC. But Odysseus is a real piece of work. This is what he does. Instead of saying, “Yeah, I poked your eye out. Say ‘goodbye, Noman.’” He doesn’t say that. Odysseus says, “By the way, Polyphemus, it wasn’t nobody who poked your eye out. It was I, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, Royal Palace, Ithaca, Greece 65804.”
Now Homer doesn’t tell us this, but your average ancient Greek knows that the Cyclops’s dad is none other than the influential sea god, Poseidon. The first thing that Polyphemus is going to do once he knows that this guy poked his eye out is pray to his dad, Poseidon, god of the sea, that Odysseus never make it home. Just a word to the wise; if you are planning a long freeway trip do not blind the one good eye of the son of the god of freeways. Odysseus has made himself a whole bunch of trouble he could have missed. What’s the point? Jennifer, do you have a point? You have to stop playing with your hair. People who play with their hair in this class get called on. What do they call behavior like this today? Pride? I was thinking more on the terms of shoplifting. What happens if you walk into a Get-N-Go and you see all these good things like beef jerkeys and bubble gum and Pizza Hut Doritos and stuff like that? You just take some because you think you’d like some. What will happen to you? You’re busted. Odysseus has been doing the same thing. But you’re right, Farra Lynn. If you’re walking out with your stolen Doritos and you say, “by the way my name is Farra Lynn. I am a senior at SMS. Nice seeing you,” you are kind of asking for it.
This is an example of a folktale I like to tell for various reasons. Another thing you may have encountered in the study guide, another thing that you may have encountered in the first chapter of the book is there are a number of possible interpretations for these myths. There are scads of them. There are scads of theories by which myths can be profitably interpreted. For example, there is the aetiological theory, which says that—I’m not going to test you on this. Don’t worry. I’m telling you this on background. Believe me, there’s more important things you can learn than this. The aetiological theory says that all myths are intended to explain or answer a question. That’s pretty simplistic. There’s Freud. You remember Freud. He says that myths are the expression of the desires and subconscious fears. We are all subconsciously afraid that somebody’s going to get us drunk and take advantage of us. His student, Jung, held that mythology and dreams represented the expression of the collective unconsciousness. There’s a joke in there somewhere about collective unconsciousness that I’d just as soon not make. Jung deals in so-called “archetypes.” Odysseus, for example, is the archetype of the tricky guy who bounces from place to place, getting into difficult situations and sleazing his way out of them—like Bugs Bunny and Loci and Hercules, for example. There are more. There’s the Euhemerus theory, which I will put on the board just to see, as a test. I’m going to test you people to see whether you’re paying attention to me. Euhemerus was an ancient Greek guy who lived around the 3rd century BC. His theory about the ancient Greek gods and goddesses was this: They were all basically humans. They were all basically famous people, kings and queens, who first became legendary characters. Then after the stories got bigger and bigger and bigger, became regarded as gods and goddesses. This is pretty dangerous thinking for 300 BC. I think there is something to it.
The reason I’m really tossing out these ideas, these theories of the interpretation of myth is, they’re nice. We should know about them, but I would much rather talk about the myths first before we supposedly study the theories we’re going to need to interpret them. I want to learn to drive the car first before I learn how to fix it. It’s more important to me. I know that these theories of interpretation are listed in your study guide. I’m not going to stress them that much, right now or probably ever. At this point I pause for your questions. Did I leave anybody in the dust? Any great observations anybody cares to make? Or do you want more classical mythology? I think I can handle that.
Before we get into the myths themselves, I am going to have to give you a little bit of a nutshell history of ancient Greece. Right here we have a map of Spain. That’s not going to help us very much, but perhaps we can work around that. I should warn you that I am not a historian by anything else than instinct. I do have a history minor, but that was many, many, many years ago. Just about everything I’m going to tell you about the history of the ancient Greeks could be argued with and is argued with from here to kingdom come. They didn’t leave any written records. Most of their physical records are also gone. There’s a whole lot of guesswork. However, I would like you to keep your eyes and ears and minds peeled for the terms that I have here on the board.
Right around 2000 BC, we might as well say January 1st, 2000 BC—I’m positive it didn’t happen then—two cultures came into clash. Let’s draw here the Rorschach map of ancient Greece. Ancient Greece and modern Greece basically looked like this. The people who were already here, we will call the indigenous Greeks, that is to say the Greeks who were already there, not unlike the American Indians, the indigenous Americans, the people who were already here. Right around 2000 BC—we might as well say January 1, 2000 BC—a people known as the Achaeans came into ancient Greece.
I would suggest there is a valid analogy. I would suggest that it is much like the Europeans coming into North and South America. We know for a fact it took many, many years for the Europeans to get a grip on the Americas. Just so the Achaeans didn’t take over all of ancient Greece. They didn’t overcome the indigenous Greeks all in one day, one year, or even one century. What we do know is this, the Achaeans, the invaders, the people from the north, the people who spoke an Indo-European language, did get the upper hand over the indigenous Greeks—culturally, politically and the rest.
I’d like to tell you a little bit about each of the two, because it’s like it’s easier to explain a human being, why a human being does what a human being does, when you know that person’s mother and father. You can explain a lot more about me—if you cared to—if you knew the way my mother and father are. The same works for any of us. The Achaeans and the indigenous Greeks are the cultural ancestors—the cultural mommy and daddy if you will—of the ancient Greeks.
To start with the people who were already there, the indigenous Greeks, we believe that they were matriarchal. Does anybody want to explain what matriarchal means? Ray? The women run the show. That’s right. The boss of the family is mom. She passes her property onto her daughters. When a woman and a man marry, the man becomes a part of the woman’s extended family. That’s matriarchy. Guess what? In a matriarchal society, anybody want to guess who the supreme deity is? The great goddess. Not God, the Goddess. A fertility goddess. This is point number two. Point number one is, we believe they were matriarchal. We believe that they had basically one deity, the mother earth goddess, who is always very generously proportioned, who is always got long flowing hair and wide hips, because you can’t very well have an earth goddess who looks like one of these skinny little super models. The third thing I can tell you about the indigenous ancient Greeks is they seem not to have been very warlike. They would rather be peaceful and get in touch with each other's feelings than they would fight. Well, of course the Achaeans coming in through the trap door, the great Indo-European trap door are patriarchal. Dad is the boss. Dad passes his property down to his sons. A woman joins her husband’s extended family when she marries. The Achaeans are very war-like. They like to fight. It’s good. Thirdly, the Achaeans bring with them a whole group, a whole pantheon, a whole group, a whole bus load, of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. Remember the indigenous Greeks seemed to have one goddess. She always has long hair, always very generously proportioned. Whereas the Achaeans, the invaders, come in with their war-like society, their patriarchal society, with all sorts of gods and goddesses who are anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphic—I’m going to tap dance on this concept in a couple minutes, maybe five minutes—but anthropomorphic is just a big buzzword for gods and goddesses who have human form, human shape, human faces, human personalities, human just about everything except for they are more powerful than we are and they’re immortal. Okay?
Well, let’s get through the history part of it first. We don’t know how many years it took. We do know, however, that the Achaeans did get the upper hand over the indigenous ancient Greeks. The two cultures, Achaeans and indigenous Greeks, formed a civilization known as the Mycenaean Greek civilization. The Mycenaean Greek civilization lasted from about 2000 BC to about 1100 BC. Why it passed away, we may get to later. The Mycenaean Greeks were the ancestors of the ancient Greeks as we know them. Meanwhile, on the island of Crete, just to the south of ancient Greece, we already have a really neat civilization going on. Far advanced from what the Mycenaean Greeks had, these people, the natives of the island of Crete know how to write. They know how to build multi-story palaces with indoor plumbing. My parents are of a generation that didn’t grow up with indoor plumbing. We take for granted. The Minoans (Cretans) were a technologically advanced civilization that lived on the island of Crete from 2000 BC to about 1400 BC. The Minoans were placed in a location—I wish I had a map, I will have a map next time—that puts them at the hub of the eastern Mediterranean world. That is to say, people who are traveling from Egypt, people who are traveling from Phoenicia, people who are traveling from Asia Minor, or people who are traveling from Greece can all get to the island of Crete very easily.
Crete is kind of like a cultural clearinghouse for ancient near eastern and Mediterranean civilizations. The Cretans live on their island making beautiful statuary and telling really weird myths to each other. Meanwhile, on the mainland of ancient Greece the Mycenaeans are being patriarchal and fighting each other and stuff. Right around the year 1200–1100 BC, the Mycenaean civilization doesn’t exactly vanish from the face of the earth, but it does cease to exist. We know that this civilization has ceased to exist because archeologists have excavated in Greece and in Asia Minor the ruins of cities, hamlets, little villages that were all destroyed at some time between 1200 BC and 1100 BC. They use carbon-14 data. They use a number of things. It’s no coincidence, but between the years of 1200 BC and 1100 BC, cities are being sacked. Around the Mediterranean world the same thing is going on. In ancient Egypt, during the rein of Rameses III, people known as the quote, unquote, sea people are storming into Egypt and sacking cities and stealing things and wrecking things. Of course, since these raiders, since these people who did all this sacking and pillaging, don’t leave any written records for us, we don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they came from. We don’t know where they went. The ancient Greeks had their own theories. The ancient Greeks said, “Yes, it was the sons of Hercules who came and did this to us.” Or they said it was a mysterious people known as the Dorians. There were lots of theories about why Mycenaean civilization came to an end as we know it between the years of 1200 BC and 1100 BC, but nobody knows for sure. Nobody will ever know for sure.
The one event that is usually tied with the fall of Mycenaean civilization is the fall of the city of Troy. I’m sure we’ve all heard some of the details about the fall of Troy, that great big city that the Greeks rolled the Trojan horse up to. When the goofy Trojans brought the Trojan horse into the town and started partying like it was 1999, the Greeks all hopped out and killed the Trojans, took the city, end of war. For very many years, until a little more than a 100 years ago, people believed that the Trojan War was myth in the worst possible sense. Just a bunch of goofy, bogus stories made up by ancient Greeks sitting around a campfire, until this fellow by the name of Heinrich Schliemann, a fellow who was a self-made millionaire. He retired at age forty and decided he was going to devote his career and the rest of his life and considerable fortune to proving that the Trojan War actually happened. The world is full of self-made millionaires who quit their job at age 40 to accomplish some great thing like the perpetual motion machine or something. Heinrich Schliemann dug into the ground at what he believed was the city of Troy and found ruins of, not one, but several cities that were on that site and destroyed in various interesting ways. Digging down, seven layers of cities, he found... Schliemann was not much of an archeologist. His idea of archeology was to basically dig like all heck and throw away whatever he wasn’t particularly interested in. That’s not good technique, but you’ve got to hand it to him. He found a level of Troy, 7B I believe, in which there were the unmistakable traces of large city that was destroyed by fire. Later on, as archeologists became more sophisticated, the fall of this city can be dated to right around 1200 BC. Guess what? The date at which the Greeks always said Troy had been sacked. It wasn’t a quote, unquote, myth after all. It actually happened, just not exactly the way that Homer tells us it happened.
Whether or not the fall of the city of Troy was right around 1200 BC can be tied indirectly with the fall of Mycenaean civilization, again, that’s lost in the deeps of time. What we do know is that the Mycenaean civilization more or less vanished by around 1100 BC. How bad was it? The ancient Greeks forgot how to write. That’s how bad it was. Prior to 1100 BC, ancient Greeks could write. Not using letters or anything like that like we do. But the ancient Greeks used a pictographic language known as Linear B. If I want to say, “I love you,” I, today, will write out a number of letters which stand for sounds. A pictographic language will draw a picture of an eye. That means the organ of sight. It also means “me”, if you see what I’m getting at. The Chinese, for example, have evolved the pictographic system into something really wonderful and expressive. But back around 1200 BC, this is still pretty basic. The cultural upheavals that resulted in the fall of the Mycenaean Greek civilization were so terrible, they flat out forgot to write. The ancient Greek people flat out forgot to write. Molly, you’re making a face. Do you have a question. Anybody who has a question, please feel free to ask because it is kind of stupefying to forget how to write. I’ll point out that not everybody knew how to write to start out with. Literacy was not really wide spread back in 1400 BC, let’s say. The people who are most likely to know how to write, the wealthier people, were also, likely, the first people to get killed when the culture was overthrown.
All of these stories had to be passed around by word of mouth. They were myths in the strictest sense. Almost 100 percent of the stories we’re going to be talking about this semester dates to a time before the Mycenaean Age ended. Some of these stories are so old, you can’t help but believe they were brought in, imported in to ancient Greece along with the Achaeans themselves. We must not forget the stories that the indigenous Greeks had before the Achaeans came in. One of the things we’re going to learn in the class is—we’re going to learn a lot of things in the class this semester— but one of the most important things is, you can’t keep a good earth mother goddess down. Just because the Achaeans got the cultural upper hand on the indigenous ancient Greeks does not mean that, as of today, the mother earth goddess is fired. It doesn’t mean that we’re just going to ignore her, she doesn’t exist. Believe me, she’s there. The point I want to harp on here is, looking at this very rough time line, the stories date back well before 2000 BC. They are passed along, probably, completely by word of mouth up through 1100 BC. We don’t have any records of these stories being written down before 1100 BC. Around 1100 BC to around 750 BC, you’ve got the Dark Ages of ancient Greece, which were dark, primarily, because the ancient Greeks didn’t know how to write. Before we go, “illiterate ancient Greeks,” keep in mind, the stories they preserve for us through this time period. The whole body of Greek mythology, which was passed on to the Romans and passed on to us, remained intact during the Dark Ages, this so called period of illiteracy and stuff. Any questions on the nutshell history portion? I think that I have put you into a coma. I’ll try to think of something interesting. Your name is Regina, right? Got any questions or comments? Not right now, but when you have some... I mean these people need to have something besides just me talking.
Try to envision yourselves as ancient Greek men and women, living around the dawn of time. Let’s, just arbitrarily, say 2500 BC. We don’t really know much about the world into which we were born, but we’d like to. We’ve got so many questions. How did we get here? What are we doing here? How are we to get a grip on this concept called life? Pretty soon human beings will isolate certain forces in their lives that have power over their lives. For example, table is not really a power packed concept in my life. They’re nice and have their uses. Coffee. Coffee is important. The sun. Important. When the sun comes out, my skin turns red. Crops grow. The earth, that brown stuff below our feet, produces just about everything we eat. How do the animals get here? Yadada, yadada, yadada. The ancient Greeks are just about like every other ancient civilization we know anything about. They try to conceptualize these forces. They try to understand the sun, moon, stars, earth, rivers, mountains, the what have you, by saying, “they’re gods.” They are gods and goddesses.
This belief that the forces of nature like the wind, sun and moon are gods and goddesses is known as animism. Animism can simply be defined as attributing god or goddess hood to inanimate objects or forces of nature. It’s pretty easy to do. If I could offer you a little example on your left—your left, not mine. It’s my right—there is a circular object up on the wall. It's an object of great veneration. I know this because I have seen many of you looking at it. There must be some very powerful force going on there. I’ve been told that, when the two hands come together at the mysterious symbol, 1-0, you will all get to leave. I’ve been told this by previous classes. This thing up on the wall is obviously a very powerful force in your life, isn’t it? Your name is? Erika, it is pretty powerful, right? Have you been looking at it? Yeah, right. Okay, it’s not a big jump from, “wow, this big circular thing, which has a powerful effect on my life,” to, “It’s a god.” Do you see the jump I made? This is the first tenant of animism. This thing is a god. It’s more powerful than I am. It’s stronger then me. It’s great. For a long time the ancient Greek civilization didn’t progress past that. The sun, that big ball of fire in the sky, that’s a god. Okay? The brown stuff that we walk on, that will sometimes pop up things we can eat? That’s a goddess. Okay, the water, that river that runs through it is a god.
If you have ever seen, for example, a tidal wave, well, I haven’t but I’ve seen some pretty big waves in my time. It’s kind of easy to be impressed by the forces of nature, the thunder in the sky. If you can remember a particularly good electrical storm. It’s really not hard to say, “Whoa, suddenly, deity is angry.”
Yes? “I’m not trying to open up a politically incorrect can of worms, but is there any sort of method by which they attributed some things as gods and some things as goddesses?” No, that is not politically incorrect, or if it is, you meant it to be. The earth is usually a goddess because the process... What’s your name? Good question, Mark. Oh God, you have opened a can of worms, but it needed to be. I’ll cover it more fully in our next exciting class, but, yes, the earth is usually a goddess because the development of plants, for example, is considered to be analogous to the pregnancy and birth process. For you people in the audience who are female, the thunder and lightning and bluster is normally associated with men. Oh, I still have you for four minutes. But let me get back to my point, Mark, and if I don’t touch on this topic in our next exciting class, raise your hand and make me do it, please, because it’s a great question. I wanted to bring out the second, the flip side of animism. I know what was going on in Molly’s mind. She was shutting her book. I saw people putting things in their backpacks. You are trying to persuade this mysterious deity to move faster, aren’t you? That’s all right. I’ve done it, too. Not while I’m with you, of course, but, if the force in that clock is nothing more than that just as vaguely defined animistic force, I mean you can slam your book for the next three hours; that’s not going to do you any good. But, if we jump from animism to the concept of anthropomorphism, you just might get somewhere. Instead of a black circle with a white disk in the middle and two black things that go around, only not fast enough and a red thing that goes around faster, but not fast enough, let’s say, well, Molly you’re in for it today. There’s a goddess in that clock. Let’s give her the name, Molly. Now you might get somewhere, because you can say, “Well, obviously the goddess, Molly, does not live in that clock. She is a goddess, who is the goddess of all clocks. She may have a clock on her head as a signal of her status as a clock goddess.” But, if you start conceiving of gods and goddesses as anthropomorphic deities, you can start bribing the clock goddess. “My humble offering to you, oh clock goddess.” You can BS a god or goddess. You can promise outlandish things. “I will build a temple to you if you will just move a little faster, okay?” You can sing a little song that you will think will make the clock god or goddess happy. What you’re doing, what this anthropomorphic concept is doing, partially, is recasting gods and goddesses in the humans’ own image in the hope that humans can influence the gods and goddesses in the way that they influence other human beings. We’re going to pick up with that topic in our next…the clock goddess has not given you leave to depart yet. We’re going to pick up with that topic in our next meeting of anthropomorphism, animism, and we may even have time to start creating the universe. That’ll be fun. We’re going to find out—this is the teaser for the next lecture—that ancient societies try to explain science and the world about them in terms they can really understand. Back in the mists of time, back before there was even a clock goddess, the humans thought they could understand one process of creation exceedingly well: sex. They knew how they got here. They are going to apply this theory or model to the creation of the universe. It’s going to be fun. Okay, thank you very much. You’ve been a very good class. We’ll see you next time.
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