Myths of the Greeks and Romans (Meridian)
Language: English
Pages: 496
ISBN: 0452011620
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this insightful and absorbing book, distinguished historian and classical scholar Michael Grant demonstrates the dynamic effect that ancient mythology has had on the creative efforts of succeding centuries. He summarizes all the myths as well as the legends of the lesser gods and heroes, and traces their origins in historical fact or religious myth. He then shows how myths have continued to evolve throughout the ages. The author's brilliant investigations lead from Pericles to Picasso, Homer to Freud, Apuleius to Grimm - and prove that mythological themes have been continuously restated in art, science, and folklore, up to the present day.
Lively and fascinating, this in-depth study is complemented by maps, genealogical tables, and 64 pages of photographs. Included, too, are an appendix on additional myths, chapter notes, and an updated bibliography and index.
The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5)
The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer's Odyssey
MYTHS OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS Nietzschean explorer. There was also the nervous and ageing liar of Jean Giono's Naissance de l'Odyssée (1938); the lucidly rounded figure of Giraudoux (page 53); Eyvind Johnson's lust-shattered ruin of a warrior. The fishermen of Ithaca say that Odysseus still turns up from time to time. 3 EVER-REPEATED TALES The Odyssey is a collection of folk-tales and fairy-tales: fictitious stories, less sophisticated half-sisters of myth— "backyard mythology," because they
the Minotaur on a red-figured hydria; British Museum (Photo: British Museum) 82 Theseus and centaur on a Roman relief; British Museum D595 (Photo: Mansell) 83 Labyrinth on silver coin of Cnossus; Sale Catalogue 84 Ariadne abandoned, engraving from Ovid's Heroldes; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Photo: Giraudon 36825) 85 Pasiphae, an illustration by Matisse for Montherlant's Pasiphae; M. Fabiani 1958, copyright to S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris 86 Death of a Minotaur, engraved by Picasso, 1937; Collection of
unself-conscious western life today is the comic strip of the daily newspapers, in which the "return of the repressed" 74 MYTHS OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS makes itself manifest in characters close to the ancient archetypes. The folk-tale world is one of astuteness, violence and cruelty. Such components, and the strange and irrational actions which accompany them, have been held by some to point to an origin from remote, primitive societies, of whose thoughts and customs these folk-tales are
earth19 and not vice versa, but at all events the identification of motherhood with the ploughed soil is very ancient and widespread. "Creep back to the earth thy mother," says the Rig Veda,20 and the identification is repeated in many Greek writings.21 "It is a sin," said the AmericanIndian prophet Smohalla of the tribe of Umatilla, "to wound or cut, or tear or scratch our common mother by working at agriculture"; but this was an extreme view. Palaeolithic, Grauettian deposits over a vast area,
with the rational Apolline patriarchal principle by which, in his view, the myths were later contaminated. 5 MYTH AND RITUAL Although the Homeric Hymns themselves are literary rather than ritual (page 120), much of the material which they contain was related to cult-acts. This is pre-eminently true of the Hymn to Demeter, of which the story was so integrally connected with the subject-matter of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Parallels are not hard to discover; the Spartan lyric poet Alcman's Maiden
