86 pages • 2 hours read
Edith HamiltonMythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Gods, the Creation, and the Earliest Heroes”
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Two Great Gods of Earth”
Hamilton discusses Demeter and Dionysus, two divinities who were intimately connected with humans’ daily lives, as bread and wine would have been staples and because both shared “lasting grief” (55). The Eleusinian Mysteries was a sacred festival held every five years in Demeter’s honor. Dionysus was honored during the harvest at a festival where tragedies were performed. These performances were sacred events, the attendees engaged in an act of worship.
Hamilton notes that Demeter’s story is best known through the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, believed to have been composed during the Archaic period. The hymn recounts Hades’ abduction of Persephone and its aftermath. Unable to find her daughter, Demeter withdrew from the gods in grief. At Eleusis, she attempted to immortalize a young boy but was interrupted by the child’s mother. However, because he was cared for by Demeter, she determined that he would have honors and ordered a temple to be built. She remained there apart from the gods, ignoring Zeus’s summons and causing the earth to become barren.
After famine threatened humanity, Zeus ordered Hades to return Persephone. Hades agreed but gave Persephone a pomegranate seed to ensure she would have to spend part of the year with him. Demeter returned to Eleusis and taught her sacred rites. When Persephone was in the underworld, the crops died, and when she returned, they would flourish.
Hamilton recounts Dionysus’s story drawing especially on the fourth century Homeric Hymn to Dionysus and Euripides’ fifth century BC tragedy Bacchae. Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, a princess of Thebes. Jealous that Zeus loved Semele, Hera in disguise, she contrived Semele’s destruction. Zeus saved the child she was pregnant with, Dionysus, by placing the baby into his thigh until it was time for him to be born.
When he grew up, Dionysus traveled in the East, teaching men about the vine and how to worship him. He was accepted everywhere, until he returned to his own land. Pirates kidnapped him intending to sell him as a slave, but their bonds could not hold him. He caused wine to pour across the deck, vines to cover the sail, ivy to twist around the mast, and the ship’s captain to turn into a roaring lion. As the sailors leapt from the boat to escape him, Dionysus transformed them into dolphins. In Thebes, he punished king Pentheus for dishonoring him by having the king be torn apart by his own mother and aunts, who Dionysus had inflicted with Bacchic frenzy. Women in wine-induced frenzy were called Maenads or Bacchants; they worshiped Dionysus in the wild.
Chapter 3 Summary: “How the World and Mankind Were Created”
Love was born from darkness and death, creating Light and Day, and Earth (Gaia), who bore Heaven (Ouranos), set the stage for the creation of humans. Gaia and Ouranos bore hundred-handed, fifty-headed creatures, the Cyclops, and the Titans. Ouranos imprisoned the hundred-handed ones, enraging Gaia and provoking their son Cronus, a Titan, to wound his father. From his blood, the Giants and Erinyes were born.
Cronus and Rhea ruled heaven and earth, but a prophecy indicated that one of their children would dethrone Cronus. As a result, Cronus swallowed his first five children, but Rhea concealed their sixth, Zeus, who eventually overthrew his father and forced him to vomit up his other siblings. Cronus and the Titans subsequently fought a war against Zeus and his siblings, but the latter prevailed. The Titan Prometheus sided with Zeus, but others who did not were chained in Tartarus. Earth gave birth to one final monster, Typhon, but Zeus defeated him. The Giants later attempted to overthrow Zeus unsuccessfully, and the Olympians became “undisputed lords of all” (82).
According to Hamilton, it was now time for mankind to be created. Noting that numerous stories exist to explain their creation, she tells a version crediting Prometheus (meaning forethought) and Epimetheus (meaning afterthought) for humankind’s creation. Another version credits the gods themselves, who created five ages of man, the last correlating with the historical present of the poets. In both versions, Zeus created women to punish Prometheus for twice deceiving Zeus to favor men. The first woman was Pandora, meaning “all the gifts” because each god and goddess gave her a skill or quality. This “beautiful disaster” spawned the “race of women, meant to be ‘an evil to men’ and given ‘a nature to do evil’” (87). Another version of Pandora’s story offers her curiosity as “the source of all misfortune,” rather than “her wicked nature”: She opened a box that contained all the ills of the world but preserved hope, “mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune” (87). Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock, but he refused to submit to Zeus’s tyranny. Eventually he was released, though why is not told.
A third narrative around humanity’s creation begins with a flood Zeus and Poseidon unleashed to punish wicked men. Prometheus had forewarned his son Deucalion and Epimethius’s daughter with Pandora, Pyrrha. The two survived the flood in a chest stashed with provisions. Their piety endeared them to Zeus, and he allowed the waters to recede. They were instructed to cast stones behind them, which became human when they fell. These “Stone People” were “a hard, enduring race” (92).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Earliest Heroes”
“Prometheus and Io”
Io, in the form of a cow, visited Prometheus in the early days of his punishment, and they exchanged stories. Zeus fell in love with Io. To prevent Hera from finding him with her, Zeus transformed her into a cow and gave her as a gift to his suspicious wife. Hera then placed Io under the guard of Argus, the watchman with a hundred eyes. Zeus sent his clever son Hermes to kill Argus by lulling him to sleep with music and the story of Pan and his love for a nymph called Syrinx. To help Syrinx flee Pan’s advances, her sisters turned her “into a tufts of reeds,” but Pan made her his forever by turning her into reed pipes (98). Hera sent a gadfly to pursue Io into madness, as she told Prometheus. He prophesied that after much wandering “she would reach the Nile,” be made human again, bear a son, and be “happy and honored” forever (98). Hercules, “the greatest of heroes,” would be her descendant and eventually free Prometheus (98).
“Europa”
Like Io’s story, Europa’s has “geographical fame,” but according to Hamilton, Europa “was exceedingly fortunate” and “did not suffer at all” (99). One day, she awakened from a dream in which two continents, Asia and an as-yet-unnamed one, “tried to possess her” (99). She and her companions went out to collect flowers, Europa, the “fairest among the fair,” carrying a basket that depicted the story of Io crafted and was by Hephaestus (100). Aphrodite and her “mischievous boy Cupid” inflicted Zeus with an arrow of love. Turning himself into a beautiful, fragrant bull, Zeus approached the maidens, lowing musically, and laid down at Europa’s feet. She climbed onto his back, and he leapt up and raced across the sea, bringing her to Crete, an island special to him because his mother hid him from Cronus there. The Seasons, Olympus’s gatekeepers, greeted her when they landed. Two of her sons, Minos and Rhadamanthus, would be rewarded for just acts “by being made the judges of the dead” (103).
“The Cyclops Polyphemus”
Among the early “monstrous forms of life” that Zeus had conquered, only the Cyclops were not banished from the earth. He favored them because they “forged his thunderbolts” (103). He gave them fertile land to live on, but they remained fierce and savage, without law or justice, doing as they pleased. Trojan war hero Odysseus passed through the land of the Cyclops on his journey home. In search of food and hoping for hospitality, Odysseus and 12 of his men entered the cave of Cyclops Polyphemus, “bigger than any god and fear[ing] none of them” (104). Finding the men there when he returned, Polyphemus spurned their request for hospitality and consumed two of Odysseus’s men. Odysseus determined to get Polyphemus drunk on potent wine Odysseus had brought to offer as a gift then blind the Cyclops with a hot poker. When Polyphemus moved the boulder to let his rams out to graze, Odysseus and his men escaped by tying themselves under the rams. As Odysseus and his men were rowing away, he shouted out his identity so Polyphemus would know who punished him. According to Hamilton, this story of Polyphemus alone circulated about him until many years later when he was portrayed with his eye intact, as ridiculous and repulsive rather than terrifying, and hopelessly in love with Galatea.
“Flower Myths: Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis”
Greece’s rugged, rocky landscape plays counterpoint to its wildflowers, Hamilton notes, and the juxtaposition “arrests the attention sharply” (110). Creation myths existed around flowers, marking them as divine creations. In one version of the narcissus, for example, Zeus created it to attract and distract Persephone so Hades could seize her. In another version, a nymph called Echo distracted Hera from discovering Zeus’s affairs by endlessly chattering. To punish her, Hera condemned her only to be able to echo what others say. Echo falls in love with handsome Narcissus, the love object of many maidens, all of whom he rejected, including Echo. She wasted away from longing, leaving only her voice behind. Acting on the prayer of a vengeful maiden, the goddess Nemesis caused Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool. Trapped in his pining, he died there and was transformed into the flower called by his name.
The hyacinth also had a tragic story behind it, one that was commemorated annually in a ritual festival. Hyacinthus and Apollo were competing in a discus throw, and Apollo’s accidentally struck and killed his friend, who was transformed into a flower at the moment of death. In another version, Zephyr killed Hyacinth in a jealous rage because the youth preferred Apollo. Hamilton suggests that these myths may have had distant ancient origins in human sacrifice, human blood being poured over the earth as a ritual offering. As people left the practice behind, the stories too became transformed.
Aphrodite fell in love with Adonis when he was born and brought him to Persephone to care for him, but she too loved him and refused to return him, even when Aphrodite traveled to the underworld to retrieve him. Zeus decreed that Adonis would spend half the year with Persephone and half with Aphrodite. Out boar hunting one day, Adonis was gored and groaned in pain. Aphrodite rushed to his side, arriving in time to kiss him as he died. Crimson flowers bloomed where his blood fell, which was commemorated in an annual festival.
Part 1, Chapters 2-4 Analysis
This section exemplifies the ways Hamilton’s thematic concerns—namely to situate Greece and Rome within a particular understanding of Western civilization—seemingly overshadow some of her insights into the ancient texts. A case in point is her observation that while Olympus was a physical place in the ancient Greek world (a mountain in Thessaly), the Olympus of the gods was characterized as a mythical place beyond human perception and understanding. This duality is characteristic of Archaic and Classical Greek conceptions of the gods. On the one hand, they were personified in the figures of Zeus, Hera, Athena, etc. and explored through narrative. On the other hand, debates were ongoing as to who the gods were, what they expected of humans, and how they should be understood and honored.
The centrality of duality in Greek thought is also represented in the stories told about Pandora: “Good” and “bad” are so tightly interconnected that one cannot remove one without losing the other. Thus, Pandora can be understood not only as a story about women but also as a foundation for the double-sided nature of reality that is central to Greek thought and manifest in their stories about gods and heroes. Hamilton, however, is concerned with where the Pandora myth fits into the chronological narrative of the creation of the cosmos.
Duality can also be applied to understanding Euripides’ enigmatic plays. They frequently end with a character observing that the ways of the gods are mysterious and beyond human understanding, including Bacchae, which Hamilton cites in this section as a source for Dionysus’s story. Bacchae was first staged in 405, after the playwright’s death and the year before Athens was officially defeated by Sparta. Assuming Euripides composed the play at the end of his life and the end of Athens as a political power in the Greek world, perhaps he was lamenting the limits of human foresight and perception. If only Athens had known that their war with Sparta would lead to their own destruction, they might not have undertaken it. Hamilton is primarily concerned with the plot of the story as she can fit it into a characterization of Dionysus. She refers to him as a “later” addition to the pantheon. If looked at as a story, this is accurate, but the figure of Dionysus is now believed to be quite ancient and to have precedents in Near Eastern cosmology.
Hamilton’s struggle to reconcile story with context and meaning also play out in her discussion of Demeter. As she does with Dionysus, Hamilton notes the festival that is associated with Demeter in antiquity: the Eleusinian Mysteries. This cult is believed to have been the most important one in ancient Greece and perhaps also the longest, potentially stretching back into the Bronze Age and continuing into the late fourth century AD. Eventually, initiation into the cult was open to anyone who could understand Greek, whether enslaved or free, Hellene or not. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is believed to be one of the older of the largely undated Homeric hymns, has been said to provide an origin story for the Mysteries. It has also been noted that the plot of the Hymn corresponds with a thematic concern in Greek epic, which is the destructive potential of divine wrath, as well as its characteristic yoking of creation and destruction, good and ill. Demeter is described as a benevolent goddess, but the Homeric Hymn highlights her destructive potential. The famine that results from her rage forces Zeus to negotiate with her. Hamilton focuses on the narrative as it pertains to her concern with “Western” progress rather than with the Hymn’s thematic concern with cyclicality: death and rebirth, which was also a theme of the Mysteries.
To situate the creation of humanity within the larger mythological narrative, Hamilton revisits the origin of the cosmos and the succession myths that end with the ascension of Zeus and the Olympians: Cronus violently unseats his father before being violently unseated himself. This theme of violent overthrow plays a central role in the Homeric epics. References to attempted overthrows of Zeus are woven into the texts, and various interactions between Zeus and his sons suggest that they could overthrow him but choose peace as the better option for all. In addition, Achilles’s mother Thetis is portrayed as having been forced to marry a mortal, Peleus, to ensure that her son would not become a threat: A prophecy had revealed a son born to Thetis would become more powerful than his father, which prompted Zeus to order her marriage to a mortal. Again, Hamilton’s primary concern is to construct a chronological narrative and to fit each myth into that narrative. To do this, much of the meaning of the stories in their original context is stripped away.
This continues with Hamilton’s analysis, such as it is, of the flower myths. She sees them in “progressive” terms: moving away from irrational human sacrifice (practiced in the East) toward a more enlightened Western civilization. Hamilton’s primary source for these myths is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A text composed during the reign of Roman emperor Augustus and deeply engaged with the violence of power. Echo and Narcissus both fall afoul of divine power and are punished in gruesome ways, with no recourse. The beauty of Ovid’s language plays disturbing counterpoint to the shocking content. The juxtaposition can invite readers to reflect on the ways “horrors” and “terrors” that Hamilton accuses the East of practicing can be disguised in pretty dress.
