Next we're gonna have a look at the ideas
that the ancients had on their own myths. Greeks were not just passive readers or
listeners to their own mythic stories they had ideas about them and tried to figure
out themselves what myth was all about. We started with some early ideas in this
course about myth, looking at the contemporary English word myth and the
many contradictory and inter, interestingly contradictory ideas that are
contained in it. Well, this story gets even richer when we
look back over time and have a look at what the ancients thought about their own
mythic stories. After this video we're going to move
forward and have a look at things from the Renaissance and forward.
But here we'll look at what those in antiquity thought about their own mythic
tales. We'll find that the views are not uniform,
that they're very different and lots of, we'll have lots of different voices
represented. Starting off with an anonymous ancient
manuscript commentator. Someone who scribbled in the margins of
the myth that he was reading. This one had to do with, well, somebody
that we'll spend some time talking about. A myth that had some nasty things
happening, gods having sexual relations in public.
And this anonymous manuscript commentator writes in the side of the manuscript.
Among some people these things are not permitted on account of the display of
indecency. Yes indeed, it's true censorship as an
attitude toward these mythic stories is alive and well.
Some of the ancient commentators are very scrupulous about what should be told and
what shouldn't be told. And there are some decency police that are
operative here that want to make sure the stories that get retold are cleaned up a
bit, as our commentator wants to make sure of here.
Another figure, Plato, whose dates are 429 to 337 BCE, a great philosopher in the
Western Tradition, had many complex views about ancient myth and about the poets
that retell these myths. Most of them were not so easy to take,
because Plato was not a friend of the poets.
In his Republic, he has lots of different commentaries that develop some of his
ideas, and he is not one I want to pull out for our class.
Such utterances are both impious and false.
They are furthermore harmful to those who hear them.
For every man will be lenient with his own misdeeds, if he is convinced that such
are, and were, the actions of the gods. Plato is once again making a commentary on
the same thing our anonymous an-, manuscript commentator made a comment on,
talking about gods having sexual relations in public, and he says, well goodness, we
can't go around doing this. But notice that Plato's criticism is a
little bit more trenchant than the one that's given by the manuscript
commentator. That earlier one was only about decency
and indecency and, I guess, worried about being scandalized by some nasty things
happening. Plato, instead, focuses on the deleterious
effect that hearing such stories is gonna have on people as they are building values
in their culture. So, here, myths are not just something
that you listen to and get entertained by, or even offended by.
They are powerful. They actually shape the kind of person you
are, and the kind of values you have. According to Plato, then, we've got
another idea, which is that myths have the power to construct culture.
Myths have the power to construct culture. Another figure that predates Plato is
[foreign] of [foreign], known for his many colorful views.
Some of them having to do with myth, wrote in the sixth to fifth century BCE and told
us this little piece of wisdom. Mortals consider that the gods are born
and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own.
The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub nosed and black.
The Thracians, that their have light blue eyes and red hair.
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands or were able to draw, horses would
draw the forms of their gods like horses, cattle like cattle.
Xenophanes has a pretty sophisticated view here.
So, unless we quick thought that all these ancients walked around believing their own
myths, well, goodness, no. Xenophanes has, quite, quite a skeptical
view. He's skeptical of the kinds of sheeps that
the poets give to the gods, and ha-, having the gods anthropomorphized and
walking around in shapes that seem like ours.
Furthermore, he adds, you know, what's happening here in these mythic stories is
that all we're doing as Greeks is reflecting back in our gods what we see in
ourselves. We make our mythic stories on the kinds of
cultural values that we hold. And if we had ethnic differences, such as
he observes in Ethiopians or the Thracians, we would make our mythic
stories according to a reflection of what ethnic and specific ethnic qualities are
that we have. So it's good with us.
And this would happen true, too, even across species.
So, according to Xenophanes, culture actually constructs myth.
Culture plays a powerful shaping role on the kinds of myths that people tell each
other. Were inverting an observation from Plato,
putting the two of those together, we've got a pretty powerful reciprocal
relationship and observation in, in, our, in our hands.
Having a look at another theory, a figure named Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who lived
in the fifth century BCE. Not a very well-known person, but some of
his ideas are preserved by later people that comment, that, that quote his work,
and one of his famous quotation survives here: neither Hera nor Athena nor Zeus are
the things which those who consecrate temples and walls to them consider them to
be, but they are manifestations of nature, and arrangements of the elements.
Agamemnon is air, Achilles is the sun. Helen is the Earth, and Paris the air.
Hector is the Moon. But among the gods Demeter is the liver,
Dionysus is the spleen, and Apollo the bile.
So, Metrodorus looks at these stories and says, you know, what's happening on the
surface as one god talks to a human, or a human talks to a god, or a god talks to a
god, it's not as though we've got some divinities floating around engaging in
conversations with others or engaged in actual physical actions.
Instead what we have is representations of deep truths, symbolically carrying forward
deep hidden wisdom. And look at the kind of mapping that
Metrodorus makes when he talks about the code that's underlying this hidden wisdom.
All the human beings, in the stories that he's interested in, this drawing from
Homer's Iliad, we've got Agenendon who's related to the air, Achilles the sun,
Helen the earth, Paris the air, Hector the moon, so all of these humans are related
to specific pieces of the natural, physical cosmos.
Furthermore, the pieces, the relationships between humans and pieces of the cosmos
doesn't have to be one to one. Agamemnon is there, and Paris, also at the
same time, is air. So, the relationships can be multiple,
from figures to features of the cosmos. And then when we look at the gods, well
look at what the gods are mapped onto. Their deep hidden meanings, their symbolic
representa-, their symbolic representations of, is body parts.
Demeter is the liver, Dionysus the spleen, and Apollo the bile.
So, maybe, was he suggesting that when we tell stories about human beings, what
we're really doing is reflecting deep truths about some features of the physical
cosmos around us and when we tell stories about gods, what we're really doing is
reflecting deep ideas we have about our human nature.
A fascinating idea. We don't have Metrodorus around to ask
him. I wish we had more we could read of him
instead of, you know, just these little snippets.
So, looking at Metrodorus's view of the world, this is a very famous school of
ancient ideas about myth called allegory. Metrodorus and many others were convinced
of the idea that myths carried deep, hidden truths.
Those who did were, can be fit under the school of ancient allegory, and when they
ran into mythic stories they said to themselves okay, the surface level must be
a code for some hidden deeper truths. And all kinds of stories get, or all kinds
of meanings get discovered and found in these, in these mythic stories.
Stories about the physical cosmos and its shape, about the weather, about morality.
All kinds of hidden wisdom were thought to be contained in these rich powerful texts
especially of Homer. Ancient readers loved to read Homer
allegorically and find deep hidden truths in them.
Now, all this hunting around for hidden meanings can sometimes get to be annoying.
Right? Because a person can say, oh look, this is
a hidden meaning here, and this is a hidden meaning here.
You don't usually bring the author back to say, did you intend this or didn't you?
And at a certain point, there are some people that developed a kind of
anti-allegorical strategy. Aristarchus of Samothrace is one of those
figures. His dates are 216 to 144 BCE.
He's a very sober commentator. A more scholarly type of person,
interested in a literary approach to the mythic tales.
And he told us a view that was captured by a, a later commentator that summarized his
views this way. Aristarchus thought that readers of the
myths ought not to take things told by the poet, I'm sorry, ought to take the things
told by the poet as more like legends according to poetic license, and not
bother themselves about what is outside the things told by the poet.
So Aristarchus is saying, just take a step back from trying to find all these deep
hidden truths in there. Instead, what you're gonna see is a story
that. Because of poetic license, poets like to
tell exaggerated representations of things, but don't go around looking for
bunches of hidden wisdom in there. So Aristarchus gives us a view that we
would characterize as something that is literary and pretty strongly
anti-allegorical. Finally among our ancient views, I wanna
take a look at a figure named Euhemerus. His dates are the fourth to the third
century BCE, and here's another example of a summary of ideas in, in a later author.
Nothing survives except small quotations of Euhemerus, and this summary helps us
get a grip on him. The gods, we are told, were terrestrial
beings who gained immortal honor and fame because of their gifts to humanity.
Regarding these gods, many and varied accounts have been handed down by the
writers of history and mythology. So Euhemerus had the view that the stories
that we hear are actually based on real historical characters.
These stores of historical characters get told and retold over time until they're
literally deified. They become gods in the retelling and this
is where the myths come from. Real and historic personages are the
background behind any of the mythic characters we have.
As time advances euhemerism and allegory are the two most prominent theories that
survive. We'll see through the Middle Ages, and
then in our next segment, we'll look at what happens in the Renaissance and beyond
as people try to grip, get a grip on these strange, wonderful stories.
But through the Middle Ages, allegory and euhemerism are the ideas that really have
the most weight.