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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 *** 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 *** 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.