What was the Greek attitude to myths? Thread! https://twitter.com/bodhidave3/status/1277632645170692096

Short answer: there wasn't one. "The Greeks" is not a coherent group. Neither, really, is "myth".

Long answer: in the archaic period - when the Iliad and Theogony and Sappho's poems were written - "myth" was not a category people thought in. Mythos means narrative, and these

early "Greeks" did not have a framework for differentiating mythical narratives from non-mythical ones. In other words, their narratives were neither myths nor not myths - they did not know this binary.

However, speaking of early "Greeks" here is already problematic.

The stories "Greeks" told each other - and to be clear, stories do not bubble forth from the heart of the people but are produced and reproduced by specific groups of people, so it was certain "Greeks" telling stories to other "Greeks", not the Greeks as a monolith telling them

to themselves - the stories, as I say, were wildly different across space, and they were as often shared across language boundaries as across the (in this period, quite strong) dialect boundaries within "Greek".

However, the archaic period also saw a number of attempts to bring large amounts of narrative material into large systems. These are most strongly connected with the name of Hesiod (Theogony, Catalogue of Women) but Homeric poetry sort of does the same thing.

In retrospect we call these mythology, "Pan-Hellenic" mythology. However, (1) all the counter-terms to mythology did not exist at the time. There weren't genres of philosophy or history, so "myth" was neither those things nor not those things. (2) we don't have literary

productions that are really comparable from non-"Greeks" to know how "Pan-Hellenic" this really was.

However: we can tell that, in retrospect, this kind of poetry became understood as something all Greeks shared, along with their language and certain institutions.

But this pan-Greek imaginary can't be projected onto the early "Greeks", very many of whom would have been bilingual, who did not yet have a unified term for themselves as a larger unit. The English word Greek is evidence for this, as it descends from a term South Italian

Greeks used for themselves: Graikoi, rather than Hellenes. (In "myth", Graikos was the brother of Hellen.)

Okay, back to "myth": the late archaic and early classical period saw the emergence of new literary forms and discourses. Oversimplifying drastically, I will call them history and natural philosophy. We will pick out one feature of each and see how they led to the formation of

myth as a concept. If you've read Hesiod, you probably know that his Muses tell him they can tell truths and falsehoods that sound like truths, if they want. In archaic poetry, knowledge of the past is not exclusively a matter of learning tradition but also of divine inspiration,

as is knowledge of the future. In other words, the poet does not primarily concern themselves with the issue of truth. Archaic poets can certainly modify stories to make them closer to what they think of as truth, but it's not a stand-out criterion by which they are evaluated.

Early historiography latches onto this latent idea of true and false, and also takes on the archaic projects to bring vast amounts of material together, by applying a criterion of consistency or plausibility to that material (altho those criteria are not very strongly theorized),

perhaps in part because writing in prose, unlike singing in verse, cannot appeal to the Muses and has to produce its own tokens of authority. (why they felt they couldn't or shouldn't invoke Muses in prose, I have no idea.)

This doesn't undermine poetry as much you might think it does. As poets continue to invoke Muses, they don't have to live up to the same standards of doubt and critical interrogation that apply in history. Not only do they plausibly have divine guidance, they also didn't make the

same kind of claims to truth as the historians. However, over time the historians' perspective comes to be hegemonic, and it becomes a popular idea that myth is inherently false and implausible. The generic boundaries and the kind of subject matter poetry can treat harden: myth

is born.

Similarly, what natural philosophy does is to forego overtly anthropomorphic language and analogies and transfer different kinds of logics to some of the same (but also many different) issues as poets used to, perhaps most importantly cosmogony.

We tend to overstress the distinctions here. It's not as if Hesiod, when he talks about Gaia as a female goddess, doesn't know that soil is different from human skin, after all. Nor do the philosophers actually get rid of anthropomorphic language and logics.

Nevertheless, that schematic contrast becomes commonly accepted and we get a similar contrast as with history. Poetry freezes, becomes myth, and the anthropomorphic conventions harden. Early "philosophy" was often in verse and combined anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic

discourses in experimental ways. By the time of Aristotle, this could be seen as a (potentially I appropriate) mixing of what ought to be distinct discourses. However Plato still seemed to think mythology could be "reformed", did not, in other words, see it as a monolith.

In later centuries, this possibility is almost entirely closed off. Mythical poetry MUST be anthropomorphic, MUST describe the earth as flat, MUST talk about an underworld below the earth's surface; it can depart from this for a moment as a genre-mixing exercise,

or perhaps in a handful of isolated works (Lucretius is a notable example), but if you did that in your attempt to write a poem about Hercules, say, you would simply be doing it wrong.

However: the genres of mythology - history - philosophy operate at an elite and specialised level. Only poets and grammarians completely master mythology and its conventions, only historians and philosophers fully understand the rules of their crafts. In other words,

"common" people and non-specialized elites do not have to observe or even understand these generic boundaries. In some fields, like rhetoric, historical and mythical data is treated virtually identically. This means that a delegation from Athens will ask the emperor

to respect them because they are the oldest people in the world and were taught agriculture by Demeter even while the professors of philosophy in Athens and the emperor's courts are using the word myth as a pejorative. It doesn't weaken the Athenians' argument.

In summary: the distinctions between myth and other forms of discourse crystallized at certain periods and were pertinent to certain contexts. They cannot be very meaningfully applied before the fifth century BCE and they never consolidated into a hegemonic singular regime of

truth in the same way that Christianity has often aspired to be (whether it actually was this at any point in time, I don't know). Philosophers and historians sometimes pretend to be able to speak sort of from above all other discourses, but you can easily see

that often when they cite myths they unconsciously adopt some of their logics or leave them unreconciled with their own frameworks. They didn't have mythology figured out nearly as much as they thought they did. /END

PS: the orator Libanius, contemporary to the famous last pagan emperor Julian (who supposedly "reinvented" paganism in the image of Platonism) is the epitome of rhetoricians' studied ignorance. He read tons of authors who make use of the generic distinctions

btwn myth, history, and philosophy, but studiously ignores that kind of thinking in his thousands of extant letters and dozens of speeches, etc. To read him, you would think Homer was understood literally in the 4th century CE. However, he is not a literalist: he is someone who

consciously avoids acknowledging that this kind of problematic had ever arisen in the first place. I have a half-written thing about how four prominent pagans of the time (Julian, Libanius, Himerius, Themistius) all have drastically different and complex attitudes to this...

Sometimes I might finish that, I think it's really important for upending certain dichotomies that make sense in relation to the Bible but not wrt to ancient pagan discourses.