Myths in which women reject their ordinary feminine role are numerous. Their natural role, their telos,
was marriage. Those who reject marriage become, in the myths, hunters and outdoor girls-the outdoors
belonging, in the normal way, to men. Girls such as Atalanta and Callisto chose that life, only to be
overcome in the end and brought back to marriage. Others behave in an irregular manner within marriage.
Fears about a wife naturally focused on sexual misconduct and disloyalty, and we find bad wives like
Phaedra making advances to young men. The seer Amphiaraus knew that if he joined the doomed
expedition of the Seven against Thebes, he would not return: his wife was bribed to make him go to his
death. Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra took a lover in his absence and murdered her husband on his
return. Evil deeds or rejection of their role on the part of mythical women are a way of defining and
endorsing that role. We shall find that the potential of men, too, is limited and clarified in myth in a
similar -way, when we turn to the aspirations of the hero.
A myth can have a political function ('charter myth'). In Cyrene a historian told the story that once the
local Africans were plagued by a monstrous lion. In desperation their king proclaimed that whoever
destroyed it should be his heir. The nymph Cyrene killed the lion, and her descendants, the Cyreneans,
inherited after her. This tale legitimizes the Greek colony: not just invaders, the settlers inherited the land
from a heroine who earned it as reward for a memorable action. Again, the Athenians got control of the
island of Salamis in the sixth century. Not only did they make Ajax, the great Salaminian hero, the
eponym and theoretically the ancestor of one of the ten tribes of Attica: they also, so other Greeks alleged,
introduced a spurious line into the text of the Iliad to support the assertion that Salamis and Attica went
together in the heroic period (Iliad 2. 558). The Dorians, too, had an elaborate myth which presented their
invasion of the Peloponnese, in which they were the last Greeks to arrive, as being in reality a return, to
claim an inheritance which was their due: the children of Heracles, their ancestor, having been driven out
and coming back several generations later. In the modern world we think of the many myths of
nationalism, or of the importance to modern Israel of the possession of its land by distant ancestors.
The myths were all that later Greeks knew about their own early history, apart from a few striking
remains such as the 'Cyclopean' walls of Tiryns and the citadel of Mycenae. Systematic excavation was
neither a practical possibility nor an ideal. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was a fashion for
saying that apparently historical myths contained no truth at all, being in reality disguised or allegorical
statements about natural phenomena such as the sunrise or the coming of winter. Schliemann's discoveries
at Troy and Mycenae, and those of Evans in Crete, showed that such radical scepticism was mistaken:
Mycenae had been 'rich in gold', as Homer said, and at Cnossus there had been a great and complex
building and some strange sport involving bulls-the originals of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. Already
in the fifth century the two possible ways of treating myth for the purposes of history were both
understood. Thucydides, in the opening chapters of the first book of his History, gives a brilliant sketch of
early Greece, reinterpreting the myths in the light of modern rationalism, with a heavy emphasis on
economic factors. We have seen how he dealt with Agamemnon (above, pp. 78 f). For Thucydides, King
Minos of Crete was 'the first man we hear of to have a fleet'; ruler of much of the Aegean, he 'put down
piracy, it is reasonable to suppose, so that his revenues would come in' (1. 4). No mention, needless to
say, of the Minotaur. Herodotus, on the other hand, at one moment at least envisages rejecting the myths
completely, as being just different from history. He says of the sixth-century tyrant Polycrates that 'He is
the first man we know of who set himself to rule the sea, except indeed for Minos and anyone there may