What is Greek Mythology?

Nearly all types of ancient Greek literature are in existence due to the usage of a mythological story as the foundation which plays an important role. However, one of the few general mythographies and mythologies which has been handed down to us from classical antiquity is The Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus. This work tries to harmonize the conflicting versions in the poems and gives a general picture of traditional Greek mythology including the legendary heroes on the other side of the conflict.  Apollodorus from the time of Athens between about 180 and 125 BC wrote other works on these topics as well. Although the complete work is the compilation of Apollodorus’s writing, at least, because the “Library” cover events from the time after the end of his life, therefore, some parts of his name contain the word “Pseudo”.

The oldest known writer sources are Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written around 800 B.C. Such important and great works definitely deserved to find their way to the future through centuries. Homer‘s works of epic poetry never pretentious but profoundly mighty, were the first souls to explore the worlds of eternity, ugly, and war. The poetic atmosphere of the “Homeric hymns” is rather a topic of controversy because of their ancient origins which have been partially erased from history. The earliest are choral hymns from the early days of the so-called Lyric age.  Homer, a contemporary of Hesiod, analyzes the creation of the universe, the identity of the gods, Titans, and Giants, and the endless stories of their families and races in his Theogony (Origin of the Gods). Hesiod’s Works and Days, a didactic poem about the life of farming, also contains the mythologies of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Five Ages. The poet teaches the reader how to have potential and the best ways of getting it in a world dangerous because of its gods.

Although lyrical poets had often referred to myths, the stories changed over a period of time from a narrative to a more allusive kind. Greek lyric poets, such as Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides, and bucolic poets like Theocritus and Bion, tell about individual myths separately . On top of that, myth formed the core of ancient Athenian drama. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the authors of tragedies, used most of their routines based on the myths of the heroic era and the Trojan War. Many of the great tragic stories (eg Agamemnon and his children, Oedipus, Jason, Medea, etc.) took on their classic form in these tragedies. The comic dramatist Aristophanes also made use of myths in The Birds and The Frogs .

Historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, and geographers Pausanias and Strabo, traveled around the Greek world and collected stories about the life of the people they talked with, these stories grew into the local myths, and that they were telling versions of the stories that were new and unknown, taking the work of Herodotus in a different direction. His inquiries have been summed up as: On one occasion, he focused on stories or those who were still being related and proposed that the outcome of the confrontation between Greece and the East is either historical or mythological. Besides providing cues on the place names in the East, Herodotus is likely to have stumbled upon origins and the formation of the clashes of different cultural ideas.

It is very important to note here that poetry in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was usually a medium of literary expression and not used for religious purposes. Still, it did not let go of the plethora of important information that covers what the other methods (for instance: cultic exercise) would not be able or would be lost. This list consists of the pieces made by:

• The Roman poets Virgil, Seneca, Ovid, Statius, and Valerius with Servius’s commentary. 

• The Greek poets of the Late Antique period: Nonnus, Antoninus Liberalis, and Quintus Smyrnaeus. 

• The Greek poets of the Hellenistic period: Apollonius of Rhodes, Callimachus, Pseudo-Eratosthenes, and Parthenius.

Similarly, Greek prose writers during the periods like Apuleius, Petronius, Lollianus, and Heliodorus referred to mythology. The other two vital known sources outside of the poetic genre are the Fabulae and Astronomica of the Roman writer who wrote as if he were Hyginus, the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder, and Philostratus the Younger, and the Descriptions by Callistratus. Finally, to list some Byzantine Greek writers who best provide mythological information and give the title of each are those who are the sources transmitting and transforming the myths to Poetry. These are Arnobius, Hesychius, the author of the Suda, John Tzetzes, and Eustathius. These writers frequently talk about mythology from a Christian moralizing perspective Archaeological sources The unearthing of the Mycenaean civilization by the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the nineteenth century and the discovery of the Minoan civilization in Crete by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in the twentieth century–humanity has gradually made sense of a few perceived enigmas within Homer’s epics and confirmed many mythological details about gods and heroes through archaeology. The overview of these myths and rituals at both Mycenaean and Minoan sites is absolutely monumental. Linear B script (ancient form of Greek found in both Crete and mainland Greece) was the material from which one could use the sacred rituals and refer to the names of gods, kings, and heroes that we are trying to link to the surviving Mycenaean and Minoan inscriptions.

During the 8th-century BC, humans started painting their pottery in a way that came to represent different scenes of the Trojan Cycle and the labors of Heracles. These myths in their visual documentation are very important in two ways. First of all, many Greek myths were depicted on vases before they appeared in literary sources. The legend of Heracles performed by Heracles himself is the only one from the Heracles’ cycle that appears in the art of his own day. Secondly, the visual sources sometimes depict myths and mythical events that are not represented in any available literary source. Sometimes the first known representation of a myth in geometric art tradition is older than the first known representation of the myth in poetry, by several centuries. During the Geometric (c. 750 – c. 500 BC), Classical (c. 480–323 BC), and Hellenistic (323–146 BC) periods, Homeric and some other mythological stories were recorded on pottery and metal, which supplements the literary evidence then characterized. So, who really were the gods of earth?

Greek mythology was in the course of a long history that had to cope with the dialing of a people’s culture of which mythology, whether expressed as stories or contained within the culture’s beliefs, was the form of the change. Greek mythology’s literary expressions, beginning primarily at the end of the sequence of changes, were intrinsically political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) discovered when he asserted. As far back as the Balkan Peninsula the inhabitants were mainly farmers and followers of the animism religion which honored gods in every aspect of the natural world. By and by the ambiguous spirits morphed into the human form and were integrated into the native mythology as divinities. When the tribes from the north of the Balkan Peninsula invaded, they took with them a new pantheon of gods related to war, aggression, battle success, and violent heroism. Some local gods own spirit fused with the more powerful invaders while the rest of the local agriculturally-based gods became very unimportant or shrank into obscurity.

From the fourth centuries till the end of the middle archaic period (around 630-500 BC), myths about romantic relationships between the gods and heroes had made the semi-divine pedagogic eros, eros pais, pederasty, the development of the most important  in the Greek environment from the 7th ω . In the fifth-century BC, the poets, who all Emmanuel Papadimitrakopoulos of Dimitris/was to find, had thought of their eromenoi, the young males who were their sexual partners, in every major god’s case, except Ares’, as well as in the case of any number of legendary figures. Previously told Orpheus and Eurydice, Persephone and Demeter, and other myths had on the other hand been renamed into a new pederastic style. From then on, poets or else mythographers in the Roman/ Early Roman imperial times often re-adapted new versions of Greek mythological characters in the form of a love story. The epic poem was the outcome of the creation of story-cycles and, consequently, lead to the emergence of a new vision of a mythological time-table. Hence, Greek mythology is only a part in the process of the ongoing world and humansŕ development. Even though there are obvious inconsistencies in these stories, which make a definite timeline unattainable, a rough chronology can still be surmised. The general mythological “history of the world” can be classed into four – three or four periods:

• The beginning of gods and the world was explained through them with the help of stories of gods’ birth origin or age (Theogonies, “births of gods”): stories containing information about the emergence of the universe, gods, and the human race.

• The age of relationships when gods and mortals mingled freely: the narrations of the early intercourses between gods, demigods and mortals.

• The time of the great ancient times (the heroic times), which were those eras that had less divine activities. The last of the heroic myths and the greatest of them all is the legend of the Trojan War and its significant after-effects (which is seen by some scholars as a separate, fourth period).

Much of the time, it is only the latter group of people that are thus treated as the gods, being the objects of great interest to the contemporary students of mythology, while the earlier authors of Greece, both Archaic and Classical, especially the heroes who fixed the sequence of human personal achievements following the understanding of how the world came into existence with the solutions to cosmogony, the later generation of gods came mostly as an add-on which Hesiod linked to his concept As, for instance, the heroic Iliad and Odyssey were much greater in both their scope and popularity than the divine-focused Theogony and Homeric Hymns. The “hero cult” because of Homer is the restructuring of spiritual life, it is represented in the separation of the gods from the realm of the dead (heroes), of the Chthonic from the Olympian. 

Hesiod, in his Works and Days, utilizes a pattern of Four Ages of Man (or Races) which are: Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. Those races or ages are unrelated to each other in a sense because the Golden Age is really a legacy of the time of race of Chronos, not the rest which Zeus is the creator. The existence of misery was originated in the myth of Pandora. Once hope was the only one to be left inside a jam jar that had been tipped over and having all good parts of humans spread over the ground. In Ovid Metamorphoses, Ovid continues with Hesiod’s concept of the four ages.