The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

Taken as a whole, the
Library
amounts to far more than an anthology of mythical tales. For it offers a full account of each of the main cycles of myth, and thence a complete history of mythical Greece, organized on a genealogical basis, family by family; all the main stories are there, each situated in its proper place in the overall structure. From this perspective it could well be argued that the author wanted to provide the general public with a summa of Greek myth in epitome form; and that in a modest way, his aim was encyclopaedic. In a recent French edition of the
Library
, J.-C. Carrière has advanced some interesting arguments in favour of this view. Although this is ultimately a matter of judgement, and a full consideration of the question would require the examination of a number of different issues, I would like to consider a single aspect of the work which seems to favour such a view.

Even a casual reader of the
Library
will be struck by the profusion of names. The narrative may often be brief and bare, but the author was immensely thorough in recording the names of all the figures associated with the heroic families and the main episodes in heroic mythology. Most of these names appear in various catalogues, or in the genealogies which punctuate the histories of the great families of heroic mythology; let us first consider the catalogues, which serve less of a practical function than the genealogies.

In such a short work, the author devotes a surprising amount of space to these catalogues, which sometimes take up more than a page. Instead of merely reporting that the fifty daughters of Danaos married the fifty sons of Aigyptos and, with one exception, murdered them on their wedding night, Apollodorus lists all the brides and their husbands, and tells us who their mothers were (pp. 61–2). Only two of the Danaids are of any significance thereafter. Similarly, the fifty sons of Lycaon, who met a premature death, are listed by name, and all the suitors of Penelope (although there is no such list in the
Odyssey
, Apollodorus’ main source at this point), and the many children of Heracles by the fifty daughters of Thespios and other women.
In certain cases such catalogues could be of practical interest even to those first approaching the study of Greek mythology, as with the catalogue of the Argonauts (pp. 49–50), or the catalogue of ships (pp. 148–9), which gives the names of the Greek leaders at Troy, and their origins and the relative strength of their contingents. But generally this is gratuitous information. Such catalogues were nevertheless valued in the Greek tradition, as in many other mythical traditions, as a matter of record, and it is understandable that our author should have wished to include the more important catalogues when summarizing the tradition. It may be doubted, however, that any author would wish to burden a digest for schoolchildren with catalogues listing over six hundred and fifty names (excluding patronymics).

The genealogies are equally comprehensive. The histories of the heroic families are interspersed with genealogies which list the full succession in each family, even if no significant stories are associated with the figures in a particular generation, and usually catalogue all the known children of each marriage, even if most are not mentioned again (and may be otherwise unknown). In this way, complete family trees are built up for each ruling line, partly as a matter of record (and here completeness can be seen as a virtue in itself, even if many of the names which appear are no more than names), and partly because these genealogies provide the main principle of organization in mythical history. In many mythical traditions, the myths tend to tell of events that happened ‘once upon a time’, in an indefinite past. This is rarely the case in Greek mythology, and heroic mythology in particular was ordered into a fairly coherent pseudo-history. This history was necessarily organized on a genealogical basis, because the succession of generations in the families ruling in each centre provided the only possible chronological measure. Only when plausible family trees had been constructed was it possible to locate each figure or mythical episode at its appropriate position in time, and thus construct a history in which these could be viewed in due relation. Considering the multiplicity of the independent centres in Greece, and the mass of mutually inconsistent myths and legends which would have been transmitted in the oral tradition within these various
centres, the economy of the pan-Hellenic genealogical system recorded in the
Library
is impressive. There are only six main families, and each family tree is sufficiently detailed to allow each figure or story to be assigned to its definite place. To gain a full understanding of this body of myth as a coherent history, it is necessary to master this system. The genealogies in the
Library
give its readers the resources to do so. In this respect, it cannot be said that the book merely records matter that a well-educated person would have known; for the genealogies are by no means simple, and would not easily be committed to memory.

To draw a tentative conclusion from these brief reflections, there are aspects of the work which suggest that the common (but by no means universal) view that the
Library
was written for use in schools is open to serious question. It could well have been written as a summary handbook for a more general audience (although schoolmasters may also have found it useful), and the author’s concern for completeness and inclusion of full genealogies ensures that it has genuine virtues both as a summary of the tradition and a reference work. The shortcomings of the work derive from its extreme brevity rather than any essential flaw in the compiler’s approach to his task.

The material in the
Library
is drawn from a wide variety of sources, whether original poetic sources, from early epic to the learned compositions of the early Hellenistic poets, or mythographical compilations which offered prose summaries of mythical tales. Since the author’s main purpose was to provide an account of the most important early myths, we might expect that he would have been interested primarily in earlier sources, in particular early epic and the works of the fifth-century chroniclers, who were amongst the earliest prose writers. If we consider which sources are cited most frequently by name, we find some confirmation of this. Of poets, Hesiod is named most often (eleven times) and then Homer (five times), and of prose writers, two less familiar figures, Pherecydes (thirteen times) and Acousilaos (ten times), who wrote on mythical history in the fifth century BC. This provides only an approximate measure because Apollodorus sometimes cites authorities for specific
traditions or variants, but rarely indicates the main source that he was following in each stage in the work. The emphasis on early historical and epic sources is nevertheless significant.

The question of sources concerns not only the origin of individual stories, but also the structure and organization of the various cycles of myth. The Greek mythological tradition, as summarized in a broadly representative manner in the
Library
, is in many respects a peculiar one. It is dominated to an unusual degree by heroic mythology, and the material from heroic legend is organized in such a way that it provides an unusually coherent pre-history of the regions covered. As has been remarked, stories are rarely located in an indeterminate past; each is fitted into its appropriate place, whether in relation to the history of a specific place and the successive generations of its ruling family, or to the development of a great adventure or the life history of a major hero. For the most part, this systematization was not the work of the scholarly mythographers of the Hellenistic era, but was achieved at a relatively early period by the epic poets and by prose writers who regarded themselves as historians rather than mythographers. Indeed, the beginning of the process by which the mass of often mutually inconsistent myths in the oral tradition was ordered into a coherent pseudo-historical pattern can be traced to the earliest Greek literature to be recorded in writing, the Homeric epics and Hesiod’s
Theogony
, and the process was brought to fruition in the works of the fifth-century mythographer-historians—precisely the sources most frequently cited in the
Library
. First we must consider the nature of these early sources and their contribution to this process, and then how the author of the
Library
made use of them.

Until the development of prose literature in the latter part of the sixth century, Greek literature was exclusively poetic, and the richest sources for myth and legend were the works of the epic poets. The earliest epics to survive, the two Homeric epics and Hesiod’s
Theogony
, were probably written about the same time towards the end of the eighth century. Although they belong to the same broad genre, the poems attributed to these authors are quite different in nature. Homer was a story-teller on a grand scale and each of the Homeric epics is constructed on the basis of an overall plot running through the whole poem.
But Hesiod organized his
Theogony
on a genealogical basis; and generally speaking, in a genealogical poem of such a kind the stories associated with the various figures are inserted successively as the figures are introduced in the genealogies, and the narratives are relatively brief and self-contained. These contrary approaches can be related to the two main ways in which the mythical material is organized in different parts of the
Library
, the narrative ordering in the histories of great adventures like the voyage of the Argonauts and the Trojan War (or in the life of Heracles), and the genealogical ordering in large stretches of the histories of the great families, where we find an alternation between genealogical sections and narratives recounting the stories associated with the heroes and heroines as they are successively introduced in the genealogies. We will examine first how the works of the epic poets who could be regarded as the successors of Homer contributed to the establishment of standard accounts of the greater mythical adventures, and then how the Hesiodic approach was extended in a later epic to cover heroic mythology, resulting in the development of an all-embracing genealogical system.

The main action of the
Iliad
covers only a few days in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, and the
Odyssey
describes the return voyage of only one of the Greek heroes, although both poems assume a much broader background of Trojan myth and they contain many allusions to stories not directly covered in the poems themselves. The exceptional quality of the Homeric poems seems to have impressed itself on their audience from the beginning, and it is understandable that poets in the century following their composition should have wished to compose epics covering the elements in Trojan mythology not already covered by Homer, and, in effect, fill in the gaps. And so it came about that a cycle of epics was composed which, taken together, built up a sequence narrating the entire history of the Trojan War. Although only a few fragments have survived, we know their general contents from a series of summaries attributed to a certain Proclus, and can see how they were constructed around the Homeric epics. Thus the origins of the war and all events up to the angry withdrawal of Achilles which marks the beginning of the
Iliad
were covered in a single long epic, the
Cypria;
and then three shorter epics (partly overlapping in content) continued where the
Iliad
left off, covering the final period of the war and the sack of Troy. Then the
Returns
told of the return voyages of the surviving Greek heroes, except for Odysseus, and last of all, the later history of Odysseus was recounted in the
Telegonia
, which formed an eccentric supplement to the
Odyssey
. Although there is reason to think that by Homeric standards the artistic quality of these poems was not high, they were of great importance from a mythographical viewpoint for the part that they played in the establishment of a canon of Trojan myth. By selecting and ordering material from the oral tradition and earlier lays, and ‘fixing’ it in long poems which were transmitted to future generations, the authors of such epics made a major contribution to the formation of standard histories of adventures like the Trojan War. The account of the war in the
Library
is ultimately dependent on these epics for its general structure and much of its contents. Other epics composed in the seventh century or somewhat later fulfilled a similar service with regard to other mythical episodes, such as the Theban Wars, or the voyage of the Argonauts (although, as we shall see, Apollodorus followed a Hellenistic epic for that adventure).

In his
Theogony
, Hesiod sought to organize the traditions concerning the gods into a coherent pattern by developing the comprehensive genealogical system which forms the basis of his poem. Beginning with a mythical cosmogony presented in genealogical terms, he tells of the origin and descent of the earlier gods and the establishment of Zeus as supreme ruler, and concludes with a catalogue of Zeus’ marriages and his offspring by his wives and other women. A supplement was added later which includes a catalogue of the children born to goddesses by mortal men. As a story-teller, Hesiod is short-winded and often clumsy, although his material is naturally of great interest. The approach adopted by Hesiod is largely determined by the peculiar nature of his subject matter; but later, probably in the sixth century, another poet composed a continuation to his poem extending the same approach to heroic mythology. This epic, which survives in fragments only, is known, somewhat misleadingly perhaps, as the
Catalogue of Women
, because the origin of each line is traced to the offspring of a god by a mortal woman. Its importance for
Greek mythography cannot be emphasized too strongly; for it was here that the heroic genealogies were first ordered into a coherent pan-Hellenic system. The pattern of heroic genealogy which we find in the
Library
is still similar in general outline (although, of course, it often reflects later developments). And the
Catalogue
offered far more than sequences of names; for most names suggest a story, and the relevant narratives were inserted at the appropriate points in the presentation of the genealogies. This approach was subsequently adopted by prose mythographers and, as we have observed, it is in evidence in many parts of the
Library
.