This book contains eleven chapters on myths, tragedies, and the interrelationship between them in ancient Greece. The book's approach focuses on contexts: it is throughout concerned to situate the ...topics the book analyses within the world of ancient Greece — its landscape, its social and moral priorities, its mental structures, its horizons of expectation. The approach also concentrates on themes: the book traces a variety of topics — for example, mountains, (were)wolves, mythological names, movement/stillness, blindness, feminization — through the intricate variations and retellings which these underwent in Greek antiquity. Although each of the chapters of the book has appeared in print previously in some form, each has been completely revised, often extensively so, for the present book. Recent research is taken into account in order to update, reflect upon, and, where necessary, modify or expand earlier arguments. The book also sets out, in the Introduction, the principles and objectives which underlie the approach given here to Greek myths, and how methodology is seen in relation to those of the author's predecessors and contemporaries.
Instances of rationalistic interpretation in ancient Greek authors constitute a rare and valuable example of an indigenous mode of ancient myth criticism. They display some of the ways in which the ...Greeks grappled with, manipulated and categorized their own narrative traditions. This book describes and discusses the rationalistic attitudes and approaches of six texts: three treatises transmitted under the title Peri Apiston (by Palaephatus, Heraclitus, and a third, anonymous writer), Conon’s Diegeseis, Plutarch’s Theseus-Romulus, and Pausanias’ Periegesis. Taken as a whole, this material offers new perspectives on the Greek mythical tradition as an evolving, diverse system of stories, and on ancient attempts to distinguish categorically between mythic and historical phenomena. This book locates the rationalistic tradition in relation to other responses to myth in antiquity and charts its development in parallel with evolving cultural and literary norms in the Hellenistic period and Second Sophistic, particularly the development of historiography, mythography, and other interpretative trends in rhetorical instruction. It offers new ways of accounting for the emergence of rationalistic elements within the broader storytelling contexts of Greece, and argues for the close connections – in spite of appearances – between these innovative approaches and the more conventional roles of myth in the ancient world.
Theseus is celebrated as the greatest of Athenian heroes. This work explores what he meant to the Athenians at the height of their city-state in the fifth century B.C. Assembling material that has ...been scattered in scholarly works, Henry Walker examines the evidence for the development of the myth and cult of Theseus in the archaic age. He then looks to major works of classical literature in which Theseus figures, exploring the contradictions between the archaic, primitive side of his character and his refurbished image as the patron of democracy. His ambiguous nature as outsider, flouting accepted standards of behavior, while at the same time being a hero-king and a representative of higher ideals, is analysed through his representations in the work of Bacchylides, Euripides, and Sophocles. This is the only work of scholarship that examines the literary representation of Theseus so thoroughly. It brings to life a literary character whose virtues, flaws, and contradictions belong in no less a degree to his creators, the people of Athens.
