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The Uses of Greek Mythology
In an innovative sequence of topics, Ken Dowden explores the uses Greeks made of myth and the uses to which we can put myth in recovering the richness of their culture. Most aspects of Greek life and history - including war, religion and sexuality - which are discernable through myth, as well as most modern approaches, are given a context in a book which is designed to be useful, accessible and stimulating.
204 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 1992
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June 7, 2017I heard a little girl and her mother asking a bookseller for a book on the Greek myths for a school project the other day. I had one of those inward shudders. Murder, incest, rape, pederasty, driving into extinction rare monsters - the Greek myths have it all. What ever happened to teaching small children about nice things? When I went to school we were taken to the local cemetery, but at least we didn't run into Hades there, nor Hercules with knowing leer keen to integrate the prettiest boys into adult society .
The uses of mythology prompts the question whose uses. The uses of those who first told those stories, those who repeated them, the scholars who have debated them? There is a geology whose rocky outcrops once or twice burst out of subtext and into the sentences of this book that underlies the whole endeavour and make it clear that the uses are as unclear, muddy, and debatable as origins.
Helpfully , Dowden gives a discussion of approaches to myth. First the old approaches:
Historicism - that myth is actually history, just a little in disguise
Allegory - that myth is philosophy and/or theology, just a little in disguise
Natural Allegory & comparative mythology - that myth is an allegory of nature, just a little in disguise
Cambridge myth-ritual - for example Frazer's The Golden Bough
then the surviving approaches:
New comparative mythology - attempts to reconstruct Indo-European myths, as Indo-European words are reconstructed to amuse people who like that kind of thing
Psychoanalysis - vigorous application of Freud & Jung to myth, Dowden doesn't care for this
Structuralism - Dowden cares even less for this
followed by the modern ones:
Modern myth-ritual - Dowden's preference
'Rome school' - aims to compare, in particular, ethnographic information, with myths and to set them in their religious & historical context
'Paris school' -closes the gap between structuralism & concrete historical data
all of which is a long way away from little school girls wanting to read about Clytemnestra doing Agamemnon in with an axe as he gets out the bath , but this isn't a book about myths, rather about understanding them.
Dowden's sympathies are with the modern myth-ritual school of thought which traces its academic roots back to Jane Harrison in the Cambridge School at the beginning of the twentieth century who felt, among other things, that ritual and myth shared the same concerns.
We then get into the issue of how did we get to be here - myths about the past and the creation of the people. The Maya apparently believed that they had been made out of Maize by the gods, in contrast the Greeks generally seemed to be believe that they were new comers. The myths that Dowden mentions all feature other people who were born from the earth - autochthonous - with the Greek ancestors coming into replace them, as though in their self-conception they were always colonists even in their native land. Occasionally though they were guided to their homeland by a snake. This, says Dowden is almost as good as being autochthonous because the legless snake is always close to the ground, and so is deeply connected with place and soil.
Then we have religion, Zeus - born in caves - the birth of gods seems to involve a complicated labour with the mother goddess having to stop at lots of mountainous places to have her girdle loosened before reaching the right cave to give birth in, Demeter - wandering searching for her daughter who was abducted by her uncle in connivance with her father, Apollo - who comes into Delphi, defeats a python and takes over its oracle -Pythia. Religion is followed by initiation - of maidens and boys. The maids, and many might sympathise in seeing teenagers this way, turned into bears or deer for a year, Artemis - the virgin huntress - offended by their burgeoning sexuality (this indicated sometimes by being raped by Zeus), before they can marry . I suppose in some way the myth of being turned into a bear is a substitute for a ritual, or maybe it is simply that stories live longer than rituals, or the story sat alongside the ritual becoming a just so story for why teen-aged girls have to serve the goddess in her temple for a year.
The boys have a longer transition, nine years in a wolf pack, nine years before Troy, with the ritual of kidnapping of the best looking boys by an older man for sex surviving in Crete into the Classical period reflected in the myths of Hercules and Zeus, and debatably, apparently since ancient times, in the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. And these boys typically in gangs of fifty (p116), fifty oarsmen on the Argo, various groups of fifty sons , even fifty mythic colonists to found a new city.
In Greek myth we learn that adulterous relationships are always sterile irrespective of how many years they last, unless they involve a god - in which case they result in the birth of a Significant Ancestor. I liked also how one can talk about a complex story - like the Iliad - as constructed out of myths. The hero brothers rescuing their sister/wife (p59) combined with the nine years of initiation of boys - epitomised by Achilles dressed as a girl until fetched to take part in the activities of a man's estate . I thought of the skittishness of the colt like girls - Atalanta who ran so fast (unsurprisingly if she had four legs) that Meleager tricked her with his golden apples (a tasty snack beloved by horses) to win her in marriage.
There is geography of myth - the city, the arable land with its sacred plants - the olive, wheat, and the vine, to pastures wild and hostile with their own gods like Pan in which women might let their hair down & wear skins provided they did it in the socially mandated way of a Dionysus festival.
It struck me that there seemed to be limits to thinking in terms of a relationship between myth and ritual unless one assumes forgotten rituals that 'must have' stood alongside every myth, or indeed to noting that Amazons, Centaurs, Cyclopses, & co represent what being Greek isn't. There are an awful lot of non-Greeks in these Greek stories. At the same time a Greek hero or a Greek god is even expected to transcend the bounds of accepted Greek behaviour (p140 & p163).
Dowden, perhaps beaten in wrestling by Proteus, still manages to offer up some conclusions:
Myth is local heritage
Myth is national heritage
Myth offers a rich picture of the past to explain the present
Myth works like ritual, or shares common concerns with it
Greek myths do their best to avoid happy endings.
I don't know. I wondered at times about things that Dowden said - for example that the Romans had no mythology of their own but just took on the Greek one wholesale, yet what about the Sabine Women, or Romulus and Remus, or does he just mean that those stories are something other than mythology ? This is the first serious reading about myth that I have undertaken since Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (since Fraser's The Golden Bough falls into the category of outdated approaches) and this is a different beast, a Hydra, branching off in all kinds of directions, while Propp was more of a Nemean Lion, rushing forward with a direct analysis. Dowden says that there is an interesting book to be written about the history of the interpretation of myth, and that this book isn't that. If the promise of the title is resolved it is more to point out the uses of myth to the modern scholar - as one of the treats of the book is Dowden's references to Pausanias' Guide to Greece written in the Roman period which is relentlessly literal in its understanding and presentation of myth. Dowdens' handling by contrast is rich, allusive, and suggestive. Perhaps because of all those failed interpretative styles, because of extra centuries of new cultural trends Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, our uses of Greek Mythology are more complex and involved than those of the ancient Greeks themselves?
The uses of mythology prompts the question whose uses. The uses of those who first told those stories, those who repeated them, the scholars who have debated them? There is a geology whose rocky outcrops once or twice burst out of subtext and into the sentences of this book that underlies the whole endeavour and make it clear that the uses are as unclear, muddy, and debatable as origins.
Helpfully , Dowden gives a discussion of approaches to myth. First the old approaches:
Historicism - that myth is actually history, just a little in disguise
Allegory - that myth is philosophy and/or theology, just a little in disguise
Natural Allegory & comparative mythology - that myth is an allegory of nature, just a little in disguise
Cambridge myth-ritual - for example Frazer's The Golden Bough
then the surviving approaches:
New comparative mythology - attempts to reconstruct Indo-European myths, as Indo-European words are reconstructed to amuse people who like that kind of thing
Psychoanalysis - vigorous application of Freud & Jung to myth, Dowden doesn't care for this
Structuralism - Dowden cares even less for this
followed by the modern ones:
Modern myth-ritual - Dowden's preference
'Rome school' - aims to compare, in particular, ethnographic information, with myths and to set them in their religious & historical context
'Paris school' -closes the gap between structuralism & concrete historical data
all of which is a long way away from little school girls wanting to read about Clytemnestra doing Agamemnon in with an axe as he gets out the bath , but this isn't a book about myths, rather about understanding them.
Dowden's sympathies are with the modern myth-ritual school of thought which traces its academic roots back to Jane Harrison in the Cambridge School at the beginning of the twentieth century who felt, among other things, that ritual and myth shared the same concerns.
We then get into the issue of how did we get to be here - myths about the past and the creation of the people. The Maya apparently believed that they had been made out of Maize by the gods, in contrast the Greeks generally seemed to be believe that they were new comers. The myths that Dowden mentions all feature other people who were born from the earth - autochthonous - with the Greek ancestors coming into replace them, as though in their self-conception they were always colonists even in their native land. Occasionally though they were guided to their homeland by a snake. This, says Dowden is almost as good as being autochthonous because the legless snake is always close to the ground, and so is deeply connected with place and soil.
Then we have religion, Zeus - born in caves - the birth of gods seems to involve a complicated labour with the mother goddess having to stop at lots of mountainous places to have her girdle loosened before reaching the right cave to give birth in, Demeter - wandering searching for her daughter who was abducted by her uncle in connivance with her father, Apollo - who comes into Delphi, defeats a python and takes over its oracle -Pythia. Religion is followed by initiation - of maidens and boys. The maids, and many might sympathise in seeing teenagers this way, turned into bears or deer for a year, Artemis - the virgin huntress - offended by their burgeoning sexuality (this indicated sometimes by being raped by Zeus), before they can marry . I suppose in some way the myth of being turned into a bear is a substitute for a ritual, or maybe it is simply that stories live longer than rituals, or the story sat alongside the ritual becoming a just so story for why teen-aged girls have to serve the goddess in her temple for a year.
The boys have a longer transition, nine years in a wolf pack, nine years before Troy, with the ritual of kidnapping of the best looking boys by an older man for sex surviving in Crete into the Classical period reflected in the myths of Hercules and Zeus, and debatably, apparently since ancient times, in the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. And these boys typically in gangs of fifty (p116), fifty oarsmen on the Argo, various groups of fifty sons , even fifty mythic colonists to found a new city.
In Greek myth we learn that adulterous relationships are always sterile irrespective of how many years they last, unless they involve a god - in which case they result in the birth of a Significant Ancestor. I liked also how one can talk about a complex story - like the Iliad - as constructed out of myths. The hero brothers rescuing their sister/wife (p59) combined with the nine years of initiation of boys - epitomised by Achilles dressed as a girl until fetched to take part in the activities of a man's estate . I thought of the skittishness of the colt like girls - Atalanta who ran so fast (unsurprisingly if she had four legs) that Meleager tricked her with his golden apples (a tasty snack beloved by horses) to win her in marriage.
There is geography of myth - the city, the arable land with its sacred plants - the olive, wheat, and the vine, to pastures wild and hostile with their own gods like Pan in which women might let their hair down & wear skins provided they did it in the socially mandated way of a Dionysus festival.
It struck me that there seemed to be limits to thinking in terms of a relationship between myth and ritual unless one assumes forgotten rituals that 'must have' stood alongside every myth, or indeed to noting that Amazons, Centaurs, Cyclopses, & co represent what being Greek isn't. There are an awful lot of non-Greeks in these Greek stories. At the same time a Greek hero or a Greek god is even expected to transcend the bounds of accepted Greek behaviour (p140 & p163).
Dowden, perhaps beaten in wrestling by Proteus, still manages to offer up some conclusions:
Myth is local heritage
Myth is national heritage
Myth offers a rich picture of the past to explain the present
Myth works like ritual, or shares common concerns with it
Greek myths do their best to avoid happy endings.
I don't know. I wondered at times about things that Dowden said - for example that the Romans had no mythology of their own but just took on the Greek one wholesale, yet what about the Sabine Women, or Romulus and Remus, or does he just mean that those stories are something other than mythology ? This is the first serious reading about myth that I have undertaken since Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (since Fraser's The Golden Bough falls into the category of outdated approaches) and this is a different beast, a Hydra, branching off in all kinds of directions, while Propp was more of a Nemean Lion, rushing forward with a direct analysis. Dowden says that there is an interesting book to be written about the history of the interpretation of myth, and that this book isn't that. If the promise of the title is resolved it is more to point out the uses of myth to the modern scholar - as one of the treats of the book is Dowden's references to Pausanias' Guide to Greece written in the Roman period which is relentlessly literal in its understanding and presentation of myth. Dowdens' handling by contrast is rich, allusive, and suggestive. Perhaps because of all those failed interpretative styles, because of extra centuries of new cultural trends Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, our uses of Greek Mythology are more complex and involved than those of the ancient Greeks themselves?
May 29, 2022
After reading this a second time, I am still convinced this is one of the best overviews of Greek Mythology. It surveys leading theories of the 19th-20th c. It delves into good topics like aetiology and eponym and attitudes toward sex. Overall it restates Greek Myth is the domain of males. It helps to understand Homer and the later poets and even mentions why Ovid is maybe not the best source.
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June 26, 2024Luin tän teoksen yliopistoa varten, ja ymmärrän miks tätä arvostetaan perusteoksena kreikkalaiseen mytologiaan! Aina välillä tuntui että kirjoittaja poikkesi tieteellisestä kirjoitustyylistä hieman, mutta se ei juuri häirinnyt. Tykkäsin erityisesti uskontoon, seksuaalisuuteen ja naisten asemaan liittyvistä osista, ne olisi voinut olla pidempiäkin. Teos on vuodelta 1992, joten kiinnostaa mitä nykypäivänä voisi löytyä näistä aiheista liittyen myyttiin ja mytologiaan.
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May 15, 2022I got this book for my The Myths of Greece and Rome class at uni. I found this really useful for my research essay. I found it to be really accessible for my understanding of mythology and some of the ideas were really interesting.
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February 23, 2015An oddly dry, unsatisfactory book, not helped by the author's rather distanced tone from his subject matter.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews