- Greek Myth And Hesiod
(By Jasper Griffin)Myth
Everyone is familiar with some Greek myths: that Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and married his
mother, that the Argonauts sailed away in search of the Golden Fleece. Many people know that there is a
large modern literature about mythology, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough and Robert Graves's
Greek Myths to the dense and complex accounts given by Claude Levi-Strauss and the Structuralists.
Myth is a very attractive subject, but the immense disagreements of the experts show that it is also a very
difficult one. It was a brilliant stroke of George Eliot to show the learned Mr. Casaubon, in Middlemarch,
struggling to write a Key to all Mythologies, swamped and overwhelmed by masses of material on which
he could not impose any intelligible order.
Even to define myth is extraordinarily difficult, if it is to be marked off from legend, folk-tale, and other
relatives. It will perhaps be best to settle provisionally for something like the modest definition of G. S.
Kirk, 'A special sort of traditional tale', to suspend the search for a single source, and to offer, instead, a
couple of examples of the typically mythical mode of thought, in contrast with something recognizably
different.
In the fifth century, Greeks were struck by the fact that whereas their own rivers tended to flood in winter
and dry up in summer, the Nile flooded in the summer and not in winter. Pindar, in a lost poem, told of a
'guardian daemon' a hundred fathoms tall, who caused the flood by the movement of his feet. Herodotus,
by contrast, considers three theories (including the correct one of melted snow in the distant mountains),
but settles for a theory of his own about the movement of the sun, which 'behaves as it normally does in
summer', but is subject to deflection by storms at a certain time of year. He is anxious, that is, to give an
explanation in terms of familiar natural laws, not fantastic personalities. Again, the old story explained
why the Greek chiefs followed Agamemnon to Troy by saying that Helen's father made all her suitors
swear in advance to come to the aid of her chosen husband, if her beauty should lead to her abduction.
Thucydides rejects this story, replacing it with an explanation in terms of economic power: Agamemnon
was the most powerful man in Greece as the heir of the wealthy immigrant Pelops, and he had 'courted the
favour of the populace'; the chiefs followed him 'from fear rather than goodwill'. In these examples we see
an older sort of explanation in terms of the free acts of striking individuals, succeeded by one in terms of
rationalistic physical speculation, or of reflection on the real nature of political power. It is no accident
that Thucydides' Agamemnon, wealthy, democratic, and master of a fleet, is so reminiscent of the Athens
of the Peloponnesian War.
Until this century 'myth' virtually meant 'Greek myth', but now anthropologists and others have collected
immense stores of myths from all over the world. It soon becomes clear that those of the Greeks are
unusual in important ways. The great majority of Greek myths are concerned with heroes and heroines:
that is, with men and women of a definite period in the past, -who had greater powers and were more