374 THE GREEK SAGAS: GREEK LOCAL LEGENDS
The richest of these cities, Mycenae, gave its name to the period, and it was the
king of Mycenae who led the Greeks on the greatest of their expeditions, the
war against Troy. There are three major geographical groups in the cycles of
saga: first, cities of the Péloponnèse—Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos, and Sparta and
the rural area of Arcadia; second, cities of the rest of the Greek mainland and
their surrounding areas—Athens in Attica, Thebes and Orchomenus in Boeotia,
and Iolcus in Thessaly; third, Troy in Asia Minor, whose relations with the Myce-
naean cities may have been extensive. Beyond these groups are legends con-
nected with Crete, whose Minoan civilization preceded Mycenae as the domi-
nant power in the Aegean world, before its collapse at the end of the fifteenth
century B.C. Finally, the story of Odysseus, although based in the Mycenaean
world, extends far beyond it and incorporates many folktales.
There is a historical dimension to Greek saga that archaeological discover-
ies have confirmed. It is important therefore to keep in mind our review of the
historical background given in Chapter 2 (pp. 39-50). Many Minoan and Myce-
naean sites that can be linked to the legends of the Greek and Roman heroes
and heroines have been and are being excavated: Cnossus, Troy, Mycenae,
Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens, to name some of the more important. How
to distinguish historical fact from romantic fiction affords endless and exciting
debate.
The sequence of these chapters from Greek saga is quite deliberate. We be-
gin with Thebes and Oedipus because the treatment by Sophocles is so uniquely
religious that it should follow closely upon a study of the gods. The spiritual in-
tensity of Oedipus at Colonus, for example, provides concrete and sublime evi-
dence for how the Greeks could actually use their myths for moral edification,
and Sophocles makes us understand more clearly how they might have actually
believed them, whether as reality or metaphor. Following this premise, Myce-
naean legend comes next, which leads directly into the events of the Trojan War.
We know that a different order, along legendary, chronological lines, may seem
more logical. The chapters, however, are designed so that they can be read with
profit in any order that one wishes.SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Larson, Jennifer. Greek Heroine Cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. A
counterpart to the study of male heroic cults.
Lyons, Deborah. Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult. New
York: Princeton University Press, 1997. An extensive and probing exploration of the
multifaceted nature of the heroine.
Segal, Robert A., ed. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Contains writings by Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, and Alan Dundes on the myth of
the hero.