Greek Myth

Lowell Edmunds

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110696240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

This volume provides a guide to research in the field of Greek Myth, introducing the main questions, theories and methods related to the study of Greek Myth today. The author points out, with critical reappraisal, the key themes and ideas in recent scholarship and makes suggestions for future lines of study. Aimed at students and scholars in Classics, it will also be of interest to larger audiences in the Humanities.

1 Myth in Visual Media: The Example of Theseus

Against the wide-spread notion that the performances of Homer, Hesiod and choral lyric were the primary medium in which myths were communicated must be set the fact of day-to-day contact with myths as represented in visual media. As Robert Fowler has said: “In everyday life in Greece reminders of the mythical heritage were ubiquitous in the visual and built environment: in the decoration on domestic furnishings, the images on your coins, the herm at your door, hundreds of landmarks in village, town and country, the shrines, the great temples, the national and panhellenic sanctuaries.”¹ Of these media, painted vases literally brought home mythical scenes. The different kinds of vases, including the non-utilitarian kinds, could be “read” by their owners and presumably by others who saw them.² This chapter considers the use of vase painting and sculpture in the Athenian appropriation of Theseus as their national hero and compares the evidence for the visual media just mentioned with the evidence for Theseus in verse. The purpose of this comparison is to test the truism that “[p]oetry tends to inspire artistic representation, rather than the other way around.”³

Two large questions can be safely left in the background. One concerns the older, pre-Trojan War Theseus, a hero in some ways like and in other ways unlike Heracles, without a pronounced Athenian identity.⁴ The other concerns the period in which he took on that identity. Of the four periods that have been proposed the earliest is the years of Solon’s leadership of Athens (archon 594/3 B.C.E.). The earliest artistic evidence for the Athenian Theseus, the François Vase (see below) comes from these years. For the next period, ca. 540–510, vase paintings, some of them cited below, provide the main evidence. The story that Theseus and the Athenians whom he rescued from the Minotaur stopped on the island of Delos and performed the “Crane Dance” may have been invented to serve as an aition for Peisistratus’ “purification” of Delos (Hdt. 1.64.2; Thuc. 3.204.1).⁵

The cults of Theseus in Athens develop along with the myths.⁶ In the third period, 510–490 B.C.E., Theseus becomes conspicuous in Athenian art and sculpture. Finally, Cimon’s bringing of the bones of Theseus from Skyros (470 B.C.E.) also has an obvious reflex in vase painting.⁷ A detailed survey of these periods has concluded that Theseus was already the polis-hero in the first, Solonian period and “each subsequent age, including the Tyranny of Peisistratus, the democracy of Kleisthenes, the oligarchy of Kimon, and the radical democracy of Perikles, could adopt the hero as its own and promote those aspects of his career which best suited its own purposes.”⁸

To begin with verse in the seventh and sixth centuries, Theseus does not appear often. In the Iliad, mention of his mother, Aethra as the handmaid of Helen is usually taken to be an Athenian interpolation (3.144).⁹ (The care-taker of Helen, Aethra, was taken captive by the Dioscouroi when they sacked Aphidna and recovered their sister, whom Theseus had abducted.¹⁰ Having returned to Sparta with them, Aethra then accompanied Helen to Troy.) Another reference to Theseus in the Iliad, the line in which Nestor recalls the superior heroes of the preceding generation, is omitted in most manuscripts (Il. 1.265 = Hes. Scut. 182). Theseus does not fare much better in the Odyssey. In the underworld, Odysseus pauses, after the disappearance of Heracles, in the hope of seeing more heroes of the past (11.630–33). He names Theseus and Peirithous (631). The line has been suspected since antiquity.¹¹ The solidest evidence in Homer for an early association of Theseus with Athens is Odysseus’ sight, again in the underworld, of Ariadne “whom Theseus tried to bring to the hill of holy Athens” (Od. 11.321–25). (I return below to the question of a Homeric Theseus.) The Homeric references to Theseus, especially if they reflect an Athenian redaction of the Iliad, are, as Claude Calame has said, an indication of the secondary character of the Athenian focalization of the Theseus myth.¹²

If there was a Theseus epic (attested in two scholia to Pindar and in Plutarch’s Theseus), or if even if there was more than one Theseus epic, as Aristotle implies (Poet. 1451^a19–21), the absence of any reference to this epic or to these epics in Athenian literature is surprising.¹³ In hexameter verse known to us, Theseus appears as the Athenian polis-hero for the first time in a fragment doubtfully attributed by Bernabé to the Minyas (Θησεῦ Ἀθην]α̣ ί̣ων βουληφόρε θωρηκ̣τ̣άων, fr. 7.26) and to a Hesiodic Peirithou Catabasis by Merkelbach and West (fr. 280.26 M-W).¹⁴ This presumably mature Theseus, the one known from fifth-century tragedy, appears only in this poem and in a fragment of Exekias (ca. 540).¹⁵ The surviving fragments of the poem, for which Bernabé suggests an early fifth-century date, have to do with the encounter of Theseus with Meleager in the underworld. Theseus as wise Athenian king, even if this conception of his character was early, seems to have been prominent in neither verse nor visual media before Athenian tragedies in the second half of the fifth century, the Heracles and Suppliants of Euripides and the Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles.¹⁶ The Theseus who organized the synoecism of Attica, presumably as king, is likely a mythical precedent for Cleisthenes’ reforms at the end of the sixth century (see below).

Two of four other early appearances of Theseus in verse refer to episodes following the slaying of the Minotaur, a mission that begins in Athens. Theseus abandons Ariadne (Hes. fr. 298 M-W from Plut. Thes. 20). He does so, according to Athenaeus, out of love for Aegle (13.557a–b). In Sappho, according to a report by Servius, Theseus rescues seven youths and seven maidens, surely the Athenians known from many other sources, from the Minotaur (fr. 206 V from Serv. Aen. 6.21, which does not specify the place in Sappho).¹⁷ I discuss the other two references, in Alcman and in Theognis, after continuing with the Minotaur in vase painting, in which it was the earliest, and for centuries the favorite, episode concerning this hero.¹⁸

The first certain appearance of the Minotaur on a vase is on a relief amphora of about 670–60 B.C.E. (LIMC “Mi.” 33* = “Ar.” 36). There are also a stamnos from the same period (LIMC “Mi.” 6) and gold plaques and a shield band (LIMC “Th.” 246*–247).¹⁹ Theseus appears in the uppermost band of the chef d’oeuvre of black-figure pottery, the François Vase (ca. 570–565 B.C.E.; LIMC “Th.” 264). Lyre in hand, he leads youths and maidens in a dance. They are next to a ship. Ariadne is present.²⁰ (This vase also provides the earliest datable evidence for Theseus’ fighting against the Centaurs. For Il. 1.265 see above.)²¹ In the same period or perhaps earlier, Theseus with a lyre and Ariadne holding a crown (στέφανος) appear on the Chest of Cypselus, which has been dated to ca. 600 B.C.E. (Paus. 5.19.1). These accoutrements imply dancing.

A passage in the Iliad may bear a relation to the dance seen on the François Vase. On the Shield of Achilles, Hephaestus cunningly wrought youths and maidens dancing on a dancing-floor like the one that Daedalus built for Ariadne in Cnossus (Il. 18.590–92).²² This dancing floor appears neither in the story of Theseus and Ariadne as told in Pherecydes (EGM 1, fr. 148) nor in what I would call the major mythographical tradition (Diod. Sic. 4.61.4; Apollod. epit. 1.8–9; Hyg. Fab. 42) nor in a puzzling variant in the Odyssey (11.321–25).²³ Nor is Theseus mentioned apropos of the dancing floor wrought by Hephaestus. A dance, however, was said to have been taught by Theseus to the youths and maidens whom he had rescued from the Minotaur. It imitated their path through the labyrinth (Plut. Thes. 21; schol. D Il.18.590). On their return to Athens they stopped at Delos and performed the dance, referred to at the beginning of this chapter apropos of Peisistratus, which the Delians called “The Crane” (Call. Hymn 4.307–15; Lucian De salt. 34). This minor mythographical tradition shows the nexus: Theseus-dance-youths and maidens-Delos. Comparison with the other sources is clearest in tabular form:

Tab. 1:Comparison of sources for Theseus, Ariadne and dancing or dancing floor.

Source	Theseus	Ariadne	Dance or dancing floor	Youths and Maidens	Place
François Vase	√	√	√	Ø	Cnossos? ^24
Chest of Cypselus	√ (with lyre)	√ (with στέφανος)	(√)	Ø	Ø
Shield of Achilles	Ø	√	√	Ø	Cnossos
Major mythological tradition	√	√	Ø	Ø	Ø
Minor mythological tradition	√	Ø	√	√	Delos

The reason for Ariadne’s omission in the minor mythographical tradition is probably that, in returning to Athens from Cnossos, Theseus would have reached Naxos before Delos and Naxos was where Ariadne was left. Theseus is conspicuous by his absence on the Shield, the reason for which might be the implicit Homeric rule of his exclusion, the rule often assumed by scholars in discussion of the few places in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which mention of him is found to be intrusive. In any case, if the puzzling lines in the Odyssey referred to above were alluding to a version of the myth established in epic hexameter, re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Myth in Visual Media: The Example of Theseus
• 2 Greek Myth as Story-Telling and in Oratory
• 3 Characters and Names in Myth, Epic and Fiction
• 4 Mythography
• 5 The Question of Belief in Myth
• 6 Myth and Religion, Myth and Cult, Myth and Ritual
• 7 Three Great Theories of Myth
• 8 Three Comparative Approaches
• 9 Typology, Morphology and Segmentation
• 10 Conclusion
• 11 Appendix: Muthos and Myth. From Homer to Plato and Aristotle
• Index Nominum et Rerum
• Index Locorum