picture of a society as a whole. As an example of the preservation in myth of an archaic custom, we can
take the story of the adoption of Heracles by Hera. After his apotheosis,
Zeus persuaded Hera to adopt him as her son and henceforth for all time to cherish him with a mother's
love. The adoption is said to have taken place in the following way: Hera reclined on a bed, drew
Heracles towards her, and let him fall through her clothes to the ground, acting out what happens in real
childbirth. This is what non-Greeks do to this day, when they carry out an adoption. (Diodorus Siculus 4.
It is clear that what is described is an archaic and rather naive procedure: a child cannot be adopted
without being, symbolically, born of his adoptive mother. The Greeks observed that many things which
among them happened only in myths were regular in the society of contemporary 'barbarians'.
Myth could preserve features of archaic life and society. But it could also transform quite recent history
for spectacular exotic potentates: Cyrus the Mede and Croesus of Lydia, historic personalities of the mid
sixth century, were given in the fifth century strong mythical features. Cyrus was exposed at birth and
brought up by an animal, like Romulus or Aegisthus; Croesus was carried off from death by Apollo and
given eternal happiness among the Hyperboreans, because of his great offerings at Delphi.
That children exposed at birth might survive was a natural wish in a society in which such exposures were
not uncommon, and in myth, as in comedy and in the novels, we find many examples. That a world-
conqueror such as Cyrus, or a great figure such as Oedipus, should have risen to the zenith of prosperity
from the desperate position of an exposed infant had the added appeal of a superlative 'log-cabin to White
House' story. It is another sort of fantasy when, as in the myth of Anchises and Aphrodite, a beautiful girl
drops from the sky to seduce a young man minding his flocks on the hills. Darker fantasies found
cathartic expression in myth: every variety of incest, murder of kindred, cannibalism, sexual union with
animals. The speculative imagination combined various creatures into compound monsters: man-horse
centaurs, man-bull river gods, woman-bird harpies, the woman-lion sphinx, the winged horse Pegasus.
Here the visual arts led the way for literature. Fantastic changes of scale produced giants and pygmies.
The dog Cerberus had three heads, Geryon had three bodies; Argus had a hundred eyes, Briareus and his
brothers a hundred hands. The whole natural world could be peopled with Pan and the satyrs, with
Artemis and her retinue, and with nymphs in the trees, the streams, and the mountains.
We have seen (above, p. 81) how the myths helped to define the nature and position of women in relation
to men. They also were the framework within which men were defined not only in relation to women, but
also in relation to gods. The mythical period in Greece is not like the 'Dreamtime' of Australian
aborigines, a remote and dateless past. It consisted of two or three generations, the time of the Theban and
Trojan wars; and it could be dated and fitted in with history. Hellenistic scholars calculated that Troy fell
in 1184 BC. What happened after that period was different: tragedies, for example, were not written about
the colonizing period or about the tyrants, although some of the stories in Herodotus about Periander of
Corinth might seem suitable material for one. No doubt this is due, at least in part, to the incalculable
impact of the Homeric poems. The epic showed the heroic age as one in which gods intervened openly in
human life, in a way in which later they did not. That in turn implied two things: both that the gods took