Review of: B. Goff and M. Simpson (eds), Thinking the Olympics. The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011 (original) (raw)
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1. Greek Mythographic Tradition (10,000 words) Jordi Pàmias (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) The opening chapter of Part Two will address mythographic (and paradoxographic) tradition in ancient Greece, the origins of the genre of mythography, and its evolution. Among individual mythographers discussed will be Hesiod (to whom the Catalogue of Women is ascribed), Acusilaus, Pseudo- Apollodorus (author of the Bibliotheca), Eratosthenes, Parthenius, Antoninus Liberalis, Greek scholiasts. 1. Introduction The first section of this ‘Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography’ (Part One: Myth) opened with four chapters dealing with Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, and Semitic mythologies before turning to Greek myth. This second section (Part Two: Mythography), instead, starts with ‘Greek Mythographic tradition’. Although those ‘high civilizations’ were well acquainted with written sources, Greeks seem to deserve the honour of primacy in the task of recording myths (by writing). A Greek word, mythography appears to be a ‘Greek’ creation. Under which conditions should it be so? To start with, the word ‘mythographer’, unattested before the fourth century BCE, is rarely used in Greek (‘mythography’ is first used by Strabo in the first century CE). In fact, as a genre, delimiting its borders with other literary genres poses a major problem (Calame 2016: 403). In late archaic and classical Greece, those works that we are accustomed to call local history, universal history, ethnography, genealogy, and mythography, overlap at the base. And the Greek themselves did not make a distinction: for them such activities are named with generic terms such as historiē ‘inquiry’ or, simply, logoi ‘accounts’ (Fowler 2001: 96–97). We can thus say that mythography seems to be an ‘exogenous’ category in Greece. However, research conducted in the last decades (and especially the major contributions by Fowler 2000 and 2013) has made it clear that prose writers collected accounts dealing with the past ever since the sixth century BCE. From before the time of Herodotus (fifth century BCE), the ‘father of history’, a burgeoning writing activity was going on in the Greek cities...
2017
This paper concerns two popular myth collections that date from the mid-twentieth century: Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, first published in 1940, and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, first published in 1955. The dates of these collections mean that they are close enough to us that they are still considered current: both are still widely read, and are both are still in print, in an interesting variety of editions. But they are also far enough away from us that we can identify with some precision the ways in which they are shaped by the preoccupations of their period. In particular, both now reveal themselves as over-reactions, although in opposite directions, to the early twentieth century rediscovery of classical culture, especially Greek culture, as primitive, as comparable to the traditional cultures studied by anthropologists. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics\_papers/155 MYTHS OF THE...
Jordi Pàmias works on [a] large time scale, offering a history of the reception of Greek myth from the beginning up to the nineteenth century, often, however, "zooming in" on particular writers. Pàmias starts, in fact, with the earliest Greek literature and shows how internal evidence in Homer points to already ongoing reception. There was, in short, Greek myth before the Greek myth that we know, and it was being reworked from the beginning [...] (from Lowell Edmunds' Introduction).
Mythical History and Historical Myth: Blurred Boundaries in Antiquity (2019)
Department of Philology, University of Patras (Conference & Cultural Center, Room I 10), 28th June - 1st July, 2019
The complementary and overlapping spheres of Myth and History are part and parcel of the entire ancient Greek and Roman world. Yet, on many occasions it is hard to disentangle one from the other; instead, they are often projected as one, concrete entity. This Conference aspires to delve deep into the intricate notions of Myth and History in both the ancient Greek and the Roman world. In particular, the Conference welcomes papers asking opportune questions, and – hopefully – reaching enlightened answers, leading to a better understanding of intentional or incidental amalgamation of the mythical and the historical parameters, as well as the perception of History at an early stage of its appearance as a science.