Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

As a companion to the above, Hamilton uses the term “civilization” to refer to having progressed beyond “primitive” beliefs. By Hamilton’s definition, civilization has poetry and beauty, and science and rationality. Civilization is progress and improvement. Her views are characteristic of the time in which she lived, and her interpretation of the myths is dependent on this definition, though the myths at times expose the limits of it. Hamilton sometimes resolves the incongruity by leaving out contradictory details. In other instances, as when discussing Apollo, she attributes the god’s so-called “crude” aspects to remnants carried forward from “primitive” times.

In her introduction, Hamilton refers to “the Greek miracle,” meaning “the new birth of the world with the awakening of Greece,” which she cites as the beginning of the progressive modern West (5). The idea of “the Greek miracle” has elsewhere been described as a kind of “big bang” theory for intellectual developments, a moment when humans first began to move from attributing causes to the whims of gods to characterizing causes as natural processes divorced from divine intentions. A conclusion that has been drawn from this shift is that ancients stopped “believing” in the gods and heroes of myths. This is the approach that Hamilton takes toward Greek and Roman myths. As these cultures “progressed,” belief in the myths fades away, and they become amusing, entertaining stories.

Historians cannot know what people believed in privately, but as far as Classical Greek city-states are concerned, they were not secular entities. They were organized around gods and heroes, and annual rituals established to honor their gods and heroes were taken very seriously. To corrupt the rituals was potentially a capital offense. In the administratively centralized empires of the Hellenistic and Roman empires, the line between emperors and gods/heroes became blurred, and cults to honor emperors were established. Ancient philosophers, including Plato in Classical Athens and the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome used reason to understand their divine purposes. In short, rather than study of the natural world replacing belief in the gods, study of the natural world in antiquity can be understood as a study of the divine, since virtually everything in the natural world (and potentially in human nature) carried a sacred manifestation.

In recent years, the term “the Greek miracle” has been critiqued on several grounds: first that thought patterns evolve gradually, second that evolution occurs within a particular historical context, and third that these evolutionary processes are not miracles but natural processes themselves. That the Greeks initiated new ways of thinking can be reasonably argued from their surviving texts. That their way of thinking has had tremendous influence in world developments, including in the West, can also be attested by their continuing influence. However, the Greeks did not initiate these new ways of thinking in a vacuum. They arose from, in part, cultural interactions that enabled new technologies, one of the most significant being the adaptation of the Greek alphabet from the pre-existing Phoenician that led to rethinking of established traditions.

Hamilton frequently refers to Greek poetry as “literature” and analyzes it as such. This has been challenged as an anachronistic perspective. Though the Greek alphabet was adapted during (it is generally believed) the eighth century BC, enabling Greek verse to be written down and to survive to the modern day, the texts of Homer are now generally accepted to contain remnants of oral composition in performance. This means that, though they have come down to the modern day as texts, they were not composed as texts but as performances. The main unit of composition was not individual words, as is the case for written poetry, but metric units, which readers (but not necessarily listeners) would recognize as phrases. Poetry of the Classical period was composed in the context of an existing literate segment of society, but texts seem to have functioned largely as memorization aids. It was possible that a verse text would travel beyond its context, but that text was generally created for a particular purpose and performance.

The implications of this are considerable. For the purposes of Hamilton’s attempt to compile a compendium of myths and to analyze them as a literary critic, poetry composed in or for performance is interacting intentionally with both the poetic tradition and the historical moment. For example, Euripides’ Trojan Women was staged in 415 BC, a year after Athens had sacked the island of Melos (which had refused to submit to Athenian control), killed its male population, and enslaved its women and children. It could be argued that Euripides’ shaping of Trojan war mythology is as much a commentary on his own time and city as it is on the myth itself. Hamilton generally overlooks performance and historical contexts in her analysis.