Online: Mythology on the Streets of London

In March, I'm giving an online talk to the Glossop Guild on 'Mythology on the Streets of London', as part of their Zooming Through the Spring series. You don't seem to be able to book individual sessions, but a Season Pass for everything is only £30, which seems to me pretty good value.

An Introduction to Greek and Roman Mythology

I have, as ever, completely forgotten to plug this until the deadline is almost upon us. An online course I'm teaching for pre-college kids. 

The Trojan War: Myth and history?

 

I have a new blog post up on the MANCENT blog, about the 'history' behind the Trojan War. This is to do with my upcoming course on The Trojan War, for which you can book tickets here.

My Spring 2024 MANCENT teaching

I'm repeating my Mancent online course on Screening Britannia from this January. Anybody who fancies joining, you can sign up through Eventbrite. Anyone who pays the full course fee will get the recordings. Alternatively, you can book for individual sessions here. 

I'm also doing a London mythology walk for MANCENT, going down Pall Mall and towards Victoria. 

And finally, another walk I'm doing for MANCENT is a visit to Roman Colchester. 

 MANCENT's full Spring 2024 prospectus can be found here.

An Introduction to Greek and Roman Mythology

A bit late to publicise this, but I'm teaching another online Notre Dame course for high school students. Applications close on Friday. https://precollege.nd.edu/courses/an-introduction-to-greek-and-roman-mythology/

A Greek and Roman Mythology Walk around London II: Embankment

 

If you're around London and at a loose end Saturday afternoon, there are still places available for my Manchester Continuing Education Network London mythology walk.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-greek-and-roman-mythology-walk-around-london-ii-embankment-tickets-678177947497

New article on Doctor Who by me

There's a new issue of Doctor Who fanzine The Terrible Zodin out, the penultimate issue. I have a piece in it, on why Doctor Who is a mythology, and how that affects the way in which we approach the show, and in particular issues of canon and continuity.

A Greek and Roman Mythology Walk around London

In June I am leading a myth tour of central London for MANCENT. It's a chance for people to experience the sort of things I teach to Notre Dame students. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-greek-and-roman-mythology-walk-around-london-tickets-602666239947

Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne

I have a post up on the MANCENT blog to promote my forthcoming course on Greek and Roman mythology, talking about Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. If it ends a bit abruptly, it's because there's a second part, which will come soon. 

https://mancent.org.uk/?p=4929

Online course introducing Greek and Roman mythology

I'll be teaching an online course on Greek and Roman mythology in the autumn, in collaboration with MANCENT, the Manchester Continuing Education Network. If you sign up, you'll get access to all the recordings. Feel free to share. https://eventbrite.co.uk/e/greek-and-roman-mythology-an-introduction-full-course-tickets-371185474747

If you just want to book for individual sessions, you can do that here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/greek-and-roman-mythology-an-introduction-individual-sessions-tickets-371208864707
 

You be my Hercules, I'll be your Athena.

So, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he wants to help Johnson with the Herculean task of getting a Brexit deal, to be Athena to Johnson's Hercules. A number of commentators have taken this as a subtle jibe against Johnson, intended as a reference to Athena's intervention after Hercules went mad and killed his wife and children (or, according to the BBC, when she prevented him killing his family).

I love this image - Athena is so casual. 'Here I am, nothing to see here, just holding up the sky ...'

I actually don't think Varadkar's reference to being Athena to Johnson's Hercules is quite the dig some people are making it out to be, or at least not in the way they're taking it. 'Herculean tasks' refers to the Twelve Labours of Hercules, and there's a strong tradition in which Hercules was aided in his Labours by Athena (it's all over metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, for instance - see the image above). That's surely what Varadkar means, rather than any reference to the less pleasant sides of Hercules' personality (e.g. his tendency to drunkenness, gluttony, public urination, and yes, going mad and killing his children).

But there is a dig is in the power dynamic implied. Ireland Athena to Britain's Hercules? Vardakar Athena to Johnson's Hercules? Ireland's goddess to the UK's demi-god? To judge from how Brexiters and government ministers have recently spoken about Ireland, they would conceive of it as being the other way round; they see Ireland as the weak neighbour, to be helped, patronised and pushed around by the UK. And that is Varadkar's subtle jibe at the UK, a reminder that, with the rest of the EU27 behind them, Ireland is in the best position its been in a thousand years to tell the other island to go fuck itself, and yes, they're going to have some fun with that.

Also, as Liz Gloyn says, if anyone ever offers to be your Athena, seriously consider running.

What is myth?

(This was originally prepared in 2013 for students taking the Open University module A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. It represents my personal opinions, not those of the  OU Module Team, and is not part of the official module materials. I’ve now moved it over here because I’m leaving the OU, and want to continue using this in my teaching. I’ve made some minor amendments.)

The question I want to address briefly here is ‘what is myth?’ This is, of course, a pretty fundamental question for most courses on mythology, including the Open University module A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds, and it does get addressed in the A330 Course Introduction (Emlyn-Jones and James, 2011, pp. 8–10). But after that, students on that course, or indeed on many other courses on myth, may find that the question gets slightly forgotten. This is because, in a lot of ways, it’s really quite a hard question. And the reason for this is that myth is one of those things where everybody knows what it is—but when it comes to seeking a hard-and-fast definition, that turns out to be a lot more difficult than you might expect.

As the Open University Course Introduction says, there are lots of different meanings for the word ‘myth’ (Emlyn-Jones and James, 2011, pp. 8–9). If you own a copy of the Open University publication The Arts Good Study Guide (Chambers and Northedge, 2008; a text, incidentally, which I recommend to anyone studying an Arts or Humanities course), you will find in there a section on ‘Some myths about exams’ (pp. 285–290). Of course, the authors are not talking there about a heroic struggle of a legendary figure to pass the examination for a course in mythology. They are instead using ‘myth’ to describe something that is commonly believed about exams, but is not (in the opinion of the authors) actually true. But this is not what we mean when we speak of ‘the myth of Heracles’—because no-one actually believes that the story of Heracles is literally true.

The word ‘myth’ comes, of course, from the ancient Greek word μῡθος or muthos (sometimes transliterated as mythos). As students on the OU module Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds learn in Block 4 (Emlyn-Jones in James et al., 2011, pp. 112–113, 189–192), this originally simply meant ‘the spoken word’, and was contrasted with logos, the written word. Gradually, the meanings of both terms shifted, so that from its basic meaning, muthos came to mean a spoken story, such as, for instance, Homer’s Odyssey, recited by a rhapsode. That led to muthos having connotations of the made-up, and hence the irrational and the false, whilst logos in consequence represented the rational and the true. And as part of that, muthos came to represent, for the Greeks, what we would now describe as ‘mythology’.

But for a long time, ‘myth’ wasn’t the term that post-Classical scholars used. They preferred the Latin term fabulae, which means ‘stories’, or ‘tales’ (and later became the standard Latin term for a dramatic performance). The Greek term muthos only came into favour with the work of the German scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), who found fabulae too slight for the weight he wanted to place on mythology, and so started using the Greek term muthos (also, as Morales, 2007, p. 57, notes, he wanted to use the contrast between muthos and logos to advance his case that the Greek myths belonged to a primitive stage of humanity, as opposed to the rationality of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment). From there muthos passed into English-speaking scholarship as ‘myth’.

But still, what is a ‘myth’? Mark Morford and Robert Lenardon, in their textbook Classical Mythology, do advance a definition in their first chapter. They say:

A classical myth is a story that, through its classical form, has attained a kind of immortality because its inherent archetypal beauty, profundity, and power have inspired rewarding renewal and transformation by successive generations.

(Morford et al., 2015, p. 26)[1]

Is that definition acceptable? Well, for a start, it is, as Morford and Lenardon state, only a definition of a classical myth; it won’t do as an overall definition of ‘myth’, which has to encompass all the other mythologies, such as Norse, Chinese, Sumerian, etc. But even if we removed the specific reference to the Greek and Roman world, will what Morford and Lenardon say work as a definition of myth? I think problems remain. For one thing, this definition really only covers the famous and often retold myths. There are, however, many stories that are obscure, and rarely retold, such as Ovid’s tale of the crow in Metamorphoses, Book 2 (549–595). Are we to remove those stories from mythology, because they haven’t ‘inspired rewarding renewal and transformation’? I think not.

Another course on Greek and Roman mythology, run as an online MOOC by Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania for Coursera, adopted the following definition of myth:

a traditional tale with secondary partial reference to something of collective importance… told by someone for some reason.

(Struck, 2012a)

Struck is drawing his definition from that offered by Walter Burkert in Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual:

myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.

(Burkert, 1979, p. 23)

Burkert's definition has been very influential; but it is a pretty vague sort of definition, one which covers a lot of ground. It’s certainly better than the heavily value-weighted definition of Morford and Lenardon. But even Struck's course had to throw out this wishy-washy definition when it came to looking at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work OU students study in some depth in Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Struck replaced his original definition with this definition of mythology:

a clump of stories, probably untrue, about ancient characters that may or may not have actually existed, with some deeper truths in them, or not. But they’re surely fun to hear.

(Struck, 2012b)

The problem is, of course, that any mythology includes a whole range of different stories, created for different purposes. There are aetiological myths, myths that explain the origins of a feature of the natural world. This sort of story used to be familiar to children through Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), which explain various features of animals, such as ‘How the Leopard got its spots’, and ‘How the Elephant got its trunk’. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is full of such stories, as anyone who reads that work will find out—one example from Book 2 (401–531) is the myth of Callisto, explaining the origins of the constellation of the Little Bear, and why that constellation never sinks below the horizon (from a Mediterranean perspective).

Then there are myths that probably have their origins in actual historical events, such as those myths concerning the Kings of Rome (though too much assumption of a historical background behind a myth such as that of the Trojan War brings its own problems).

And there are myths that are just funny stories, with no particular object beyond that. An example of this might be the story of Iphis and Ianthe in Metamorphoses Book 9 (666–797), a humorous tale about a girl raised as a boy.

And this is just to cover a few types of myth.

In their first chapter, Morford and Lenardon (2015, pp. 3–39)[2] advance a possible method of rationalizing this complexity. They address the manner in which some scholars have divided mythology into ‘true myth’, which concerns the gods, ‘legends’ or ‘sagas’, which have a historical basis, and ‘folktales’, those stories intended as pure entertainment. They add a couple of subcategories of folktales: ‘fairy-tales’, those folktales with a high moral and/or magical content; and ‘fables’, for stories in which animals are the principal characters, best-known from the tales of Aesop, such as ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’. They make no distinction between ‘legends’ and ‘sagas’, though one could argue that ‘legends’ should be individual stories, and ‘sagas’ longer linked stories around a central character or event (such as the Trojan War).

There are several problems with this rationalization. One is the unnecessary importation of the term ‘saga’, a specific term from Norse literature, into the study of Greek mythology. Another is that not everyone uses terms in the same way—for example, J.R.R. Tolkien, in his 1939 essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (in Tolkien 2012), clearly includes in the category of fairy-stories the sort of high fantasy/mythology he had been writing since the 1910s, and which would soon be published in The Lord of the Rings.

But the biggest problem for this rationalization is the one that Morford and Lenardon themselves identify (2015, p. 4)[3]—that few actual myths can be fitted neatly into these categories, and most include different elements taken from different categories.

This is a natural product of the constant retelling of the stories. A story intended to explain some element of the world around the original storyteller will then be retold for a contemporary purpose by an Athenian tragedian, or as an entertainment by Ovid. A mythology is built out of ‘true’ myths, legends, folktales, fairy-tales and beast fables, so it is important to know that some people make these distinctions—a former colleague of mine amongst the Open University Associate Lecturers, for instance, distinguished between the story of Aeneas, a myth of the foundation of Rome, and the story of Romulus, a legend of the foundation of Rome. But trying to categorize all mythological stories is fraught with problems, and I will continue using the general term ‘myth’—and should I use other terms such as ‘legends’, I don’t mean anything specific by this.

I'm still no closer to a precise definition of myth. But perhaps I shouldn’t be looking for one. In fact, there are a lot of concepts that resist easy definition in this way. As part of my scholarly portfolio, I do some work as a science fiction critic. Science fiction critics get very exercised about how to define science fiction. One famous definition was offered by the critic Damon Knight in 1956, in a work called In Search of Wonder. He says:

… it will do us no harm if we remember that [science fiction] means what we point to when we say it.

(Knight, 1996, p. 11)

That sounds like an enormous cop-out—it doesn’t try to tell you what science fiction is, it just tells you that you’ll know it when you see it. But in fact it’s the only definition that makes any sense. Most of us have a fair idea of what the core of science fiction is, but we’ll always be arguing about works on the edges of the genre. And those arguments will always undermine any attempt to more precisely define what we mean by ‘science fiction’.

The same thing happens in other genres. Let’s look at western movies, for instance. Everyone knows that The Searchers (USA, John Ford, 1956) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (USA, George Roy Hill, 1969) are westerns. But if one adopts a definition that says, for example, that westerns are set on the American frontier between the American Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, one ends up excluding movies such as Red River (USA, Howard Hawks, 1948), which begins in 1851, a decade before the Civil War. Even if one stretches the chronological boundaries, to, say, from the Texas Revolution of 1835 to the start of the First World War in 1914 (or US participation in 1917), one excludes Bad Day at Black Rock (USA, John Sturges, 1955), set in the late 1940s, yet often included in lists of the best westerns ever.

To borrow a term from semiotics, science fiction, westerns, and mythology are all ‘analogical’ modes of communication, where meaning is articulated through proportion, expression and gradation, as opposed to ‘digital’ modes, where clear-cut definitions are employed. This means that there is general consensus about the core of such concepts, but there are grey areas at the edges, where interesting discussions can be had. As a mythological example of a grey area, one can consider the degree to which the emperor Augustus not only employs mythological imagery, but becomes himself, through the writings of Virgil and others, a mythological character. The same thing happens to Julius Caesar at the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (15.745–870). Can one therefore talk about the ‘myth of Augustus’ or the ‘myth of Caesar’? Obviously people do, but generally they mean the image that Caesar and Augustus presented of themselves, not Caesar or Augustus as mythological characters with the same status as Odysseus or Heracles.

So I can’t provide a definition of myth. But you may have noticed that one word has recurred through these discussions. That word is ‘story’, and I would certainly assert that the principal feature of myths is that they are stories.

If no single definition of myth is universally applicable, it follows, as Morford and Lenardon say (2015, p. 3),[4] that no single theory of myth explains the entirety of myth. This hasn’t, of course, stopped proponents of various theories asserting that their theory explains everything, whether that be Bronislaw Malinowski and the functionalists, who argue that myths legitimized aspects of society, or the Freudians and their idea that myth represents the collective unconscious of humanity. Many of these are ideas that can be useful for understanding individual myths—well, perhaps not Freud, but that’s an argument for another time (for a partial takedown of Freud, see Morales, 2007, pp. 74–79)—but they don’t explain everything. Familiarity with theories of myth is an important part of any course on myth. But inevitably, those theories must be used with caution.

I’ll end by saying something about what myth is not. Myth is not something that exists independently of the texts, literary or visual, in which it is recorded. This may seem obvious—of course we can’t experience myth except through reading or looking at images. But it is surprising how much the idea persists that the representations of myth are reflections of some concept that is referred to as the ‘original myth’, rather as Plato theorized that everything we experience is a manifestation of an ideal concept.

However, there is no ‘original myth’, at least not in any sense that is meaningful to us. Of course, there will have been a time back in the mists of prehistory when the story of Odysseus was first told. But we cannot recover that moment, or the form that the story took at that telling. We can talk about the earliest versions recorded, but even those are the products of countless earlier retellings that we no longer have access to.

We can also talk about ‘dominant’ versions. These are the versions that become the ones that people first think about when they consider a myth, and which later versions engage with and react against. These are not necessarily the same as the earliest surviving versions. For the story of Odysseus, Homer’s Odyssey, the earliest surviving version, is also the dominant version. But for the story of Oedipus, the dominant version is in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, and this differs significantly from the earliest surviving version, which is again that of Homer’s Odyssey. Sometimes these dominant versions are called ‘canonical’, but that implies that these versions are correct, and versions that differ are wrong. This is not, in my view, an idea that is useful.

Because there is no one ‘right’ version of a myth, it is impossible to treat sources for myths in the same way as one might treat historical sources. Many students trained on historical courses will be used to taking various sources, and fitting them together like a jigsaw, to create as true a picture as possible of the event. But in myth, that simply can’t be done. We have a collection of jigsaw pieces, yes, but each piece comes from a slightly different jigsaw. If those pieces are forced together, the picture created is inevitably a distorted one.

So this leads to a final comment: what do you mean when you talk about, for example, ‘the myth of Hippolytus’? Do you mean an embracing concept that includes all the variations on that myth? Or do you mean the version in Euripides’ play Hippolytus, which is the dominant version? Or do you mean a composite version that has been put together for the Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Grimal, 1991, p. 204), or some other reference work? You’ll have effectively grasped hold of the essential concepts of courses on myth when you are able to mean the first, rather than the other two.

Reference list

Burkert, W. (1979) Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Oakland, CA, University of California Press.

Chambers, E. and Northedge, A. (2008) The Arts Good Study Guide, 2nd edn, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Emlyn-Jones, C. and James, P. (2011) A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds: Course Introduction, 2nd edn, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Grimal, P. (1991) The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (trans. A. Maxwell-Hyslop; ed. S. Kershaw), London, Penguin Books.

James, P., Hughes, J. and Emlyn-Jones, C. (2011) A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Block 3: Ovid and the Reception of Myth; Block 4: Myth and Reason in Classical Greece, 2nd edn, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Kipling, R. (1902) Just So Stories, London, Macmillan & Co.

Knight, D. (1996), In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction, 3rd edn, Chicago, Advent.

Morales, H. (2007) Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Morford, M.P.O. and Lenardon, R.J. (2007) Classical Mythology, 8th edn, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press.

Morford, M.P.O., Lenardon, R.J. and Sham, M. (2011) Classical Mythology, international 9th edn, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press.

Morford, M.P.O., Lenardon, R.J. and Sham, M. (2015) Classical Mythology, international 10th edn, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press.

Struck, P. (2012a) ‘Week 1 Lecture 4: Ideas on myth from the modern era’, Greek and Roman Mythology [Online]. Available at https://class.coursera.org/mythology-2012-001/lecture/8 (Accessed 15 September 2014).

Struck, P. (2012b) ‘Week 10 Lecture 4: Ovid—Background and themes’, Greek and Roman Mythology [Online]. Available at https://class.coursera.org/mythology-2012-001/lecture/94 (Accessed 15 September 2014).

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2012) The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays [ebook reader], London, HarperCollins.

---

[1]      In the 9th edn (Morford et al., 2011) this text can be found at p. 25, and in the 8th edn (Morford and Lenardon, 2007) at p. 29.

[2]       8th edn (2007), pp. 3–39; 9th edn (2011), pp. 3–36.

[3]       8th edn (2007), p. 4; 9th edn (2011), p. 4.

[4]       8th edn (2007), p. 3; 9th edn (2011), p. 3.

A National Gallery tour

[This is a post I originally put on my OU blog on 25 August 2010. I'm reposting it here so non-OU students and colleagues of mine can see it (back then I didn't have such things). Obviously, some of the paintings not on display then now are, and vice versa. And these days my route would be slightly different, including Bronzino's An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, and Lastmann's Juno discovering Jupiter with Io.]

At the beginning of this month I took my last group of students round the National Gallery in London as a post-exam treat. I've been doing this for a long time, and I hope that students appreciate it. The intention was to have a look at some paintings related to the Classical world, with one eye on A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds. [These were students who had done the module on Exploring the Classical World, and might be tempted to the follow-on module.]

Anyway, the tour went as follows:

I began chronologically at the end, with Room 34: Great Britain 1750-1850. I began here simply because it seemed to make most sense in terms of the Gallery's layout, from the main entrance. I had come here for J.M.W. Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey. Turner didn't do a lot of Classical landscapes, but this one always appeals to me. I'm never quite sure if the Cyclops can be seen in this painting (is he the dark shape above the ship? or are those just rocks?), but there's lots of details you can point out, such as the almost-invisible horses of the sun, or the Trojan War depicted on the ship's flag (I nearly got in trouble from the attendants for getting too close when pointing that out). It's nicely placed next to The Fighting Temeraire.

We passed swiftly through Room 33: France 1700-1800, pausing only briefly for Psyche showing her Sisters her Gifts from Cupid. We paused only slightly longer in Room 32: Italy. There we looked at Dido receiving Aeneas and Cupid disguised as Ascanius and, on the opposite wall, Perseus turning Phineas and his Followers to Stone. With regard to the latter, I talked about how many of the mythological scenes depicted in post-Renaissance painting are derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In that context, I should really have discussed The Fall of Phaeton, but I didn't.

In Room 30: Spain, we stopped at The Toilet of Venus. Here we talked about how, in this commission for the Marqués del Carpio, Diego Velázquez was able to use the cloak of making the painting mythological essentially to allow him to depict a real naked woman, in a manner that would otherwise be unacceptable - if not for the addition of wings to the boy, this would have been considered wholly immoral. Even then, it was probably not displayed publicly. And it has remained controversial, as shown when a suffragette slashed it in 1914. I also find it interesting that when Manet, to all intents and purposes, showed us the other side of this image in Olympia, whilst he stripped away much of the mythological associations, he left her with a Classical name.

Room 29: Peter Paul Rubens, has paintings that we could have looked at, including two versions of The Judgement of Paris. Instead, we headed for Room 12: Titian and Venice 1500-1530 [this has now moved to Room 2]. The key piece here is Bacchus and Ariadne. I really liked talking about this painting, because there is so much one can get out of it. It crystallizes the moment that Ariadne ceases to care about Theseus, who has abandoned her (Theseus was, frankly, a bit of a [four letter word], at least in this instance). This is symbolized by making his ship very small, and placing it on the opposite side of Ariadne from where she is looking. But there is so much more: Ariadne's crown set in the sky as stars, the chariot of Bacchus in the form of a sarcophagus, thus symbolizing resurrection, the sly nod to the Sistine chapel in Bacchus' arm. (I'm grateful to Chris Wilson for pointing that out in a previous National Gallery trip that he led, and which he is repeating for the London Region Arts Club on Sunday October 17.)

We also went across the intersection to Room 10: Venice 1530–1600 [now Room 6], for Titian's unfinished The Death of Actaeon. Here, once again, one can see the influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Though the transformation into a stag is in the earliest versions of the myth, there are other versions (in vase painting, etc.) in which the transformation appears not to take place, and it is Ovid's terrifying description in Metamorphoses 3.138-255 of Actaeon being torn apart by his own hounds, unable to communicate with them, has become the dominant version. Unfortunately, Titian's companion piece to this painting, Diana and Actaeon, is not currently on display - it's jointly owned with the National Galleries of Scotland, and spends five years at each institution, so at the moment it's in Edinburgh. [It is now, of course, in London.] (Charles Martindale has an interesting discussion of Titian and Ovid, including these paintings, in Redeeming the Text, pp. 60-64.)

From there it was off to Room 19: Nicholas Poussin, principally for two treatments of essentially the same subject, A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of 1632-1633, and The Triumph of Pan, from 1636. We compared the two paintings, and also compared them with the same artist's The Adoration of the Golden Calf, and Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. I feel that the revel in the earlier painting looks like mostly harmless fun, whilst that in the later one has the air of an event about to get out of control.

From there, it was into the Sainsbury Wing for the mediaeval paintings. Actually, there was only one room we were interested in, Room 58: Paintings for Florentine Palaces. When we arrived, another tour group was already there, so we listened to their guide talk about A Satyr Mourning Over A Nymph. When they departed, we went to look at Antonio del Pollaiuolo's Apollo and Daphne [the National Gallery now attributes this to his brother, Piero], which depicts the climax of the Daphne myth (scroll down), the point where the nymph Daphne is being transformed into a laurel bush to save her from the god Apollo's amorous intentions. The Penguin translation of the Metamorphoses, which is a set book for A330, has on its cover Bernini's sculpture of the same moment, in which Daphne is being transformed from arms downwards, as in this painting, but also from her legs upwards. The Bernini is probably a better encapsulation of frustrated desire, but it's interesting to compare this to the earlier (by about 150 years) painting (which, incidentally, is used - though for some reason reversed - as the cover for the Penguin edition of Arthur Golding's Elizabethan translation, which Penguin has in print as a classic of English literature).

Unfortunately, the painting that I would have like to conclude with, Botticelli's Venus and Mars, is not currently on display in this room, being shown in the exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries, next to a painting that was bought together with Venus and Mars in 1874, and considered at the time to be another Botticelli, though it patently isn't. What I like about Venus and Mars is the contrast between Mars and Venus. The former is asleep, clearly exhausted after a bout of lovemaking. Venus, on the other hand, is wide awake, with a rather inscrutable look on her face. I wonder if she is going through the experience of women through the ages, the post-coital thought, "was that it?"

This, of course, doesn't get close to covering all the paintings in the National Gallery's collection that have mythological subjects, or even all the ones on display (I tried and failed to spot Claude's Landscape with Aeneas at Delos as we passed). The Gallery used to publish a useful Pocket Guide on Myths and Legends. This covers some of the most significant mythological paintings in the collection, including some, though not all, of the ones I mention above. It no longer appears available through their online ship, but you can get it at Amazon, though their stock is almost exhausted. [Now it's via Amazon Marketplace.]

Classics and fanfic

One of the things I've often heard said is that most texts of ancient  mythology are pretty much fan fiction, since they reuse and repurpose characters that already exist. "Virgil was writing Homer fanfic" is the way it's often phrased. I'm not too sure that the equivalence is as strong as it's sometimes claimed to be. For a start, the concept of fan fiction is predicated on the idea that there are 'official' and 'unofficial' stories set in a particular megatext, and that the official stories hold an essential position of privilege over the unofficial ones. That's not really true in ancient literature - not even Homer is quite treated in that fashion. Still, what the comparison does show is that fanfiction, telling new stories about characters in stories that we've heard, is a manifestation of an urge in human storytelling that has very deep roots indeed, and that making the creation of original characters a sign of a superior writer, a stick that is often used to beat fanficcers, is a fairly recent idea.

Anyway, Juliette Harrison has written an interesting blog post on this subject. And Ika Willis will be editing an issue of  the Journal of Transformative Works that addresses Classics and fanfic, If you want to contribute you have until 1 March.

A couple of posts on my OU blog

I've put a couple of posts up on my OU blog (which I don't use much, but occasionally I post something closely related to my teaching interests).

One is a medium-length exposition on 'What is myth'.

The other, much shorter piece, applies a theoretical framework to a particular myth.

Orpheus Down Under

So much for my resolution to post to this more regularly ...

Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orphée aux enfers, the source of the most famous music for the Can-Can, has always lent itself to adaptation. I remember seeing some sequences from the 1977 television Orpheus in the Underground, though I don't think I've ever seen it all the way through.

In Unexpected Opera's version, Orpheus Down Under, the action for the second half is relocated to Australia (as the new title rather implies). This had its premiere last night in the Tunbridge Wells Opera House. This building has passed through being a cinema and a bingo hall, and is now, most of the time, a pub. But the interior has been preserved, and it is still capable of putting on shows.

The production itself is rather good. It takes a bit to get going, and the first half is only patchily amusing (though there is a good joke about Venus' husband training for the Paralympics). It's not helped by the fact that the first Act is a bit on the overlong side (which is Offenbach's fault).

But the second half makes up for any problems with the first - funny all the way through, and well-performed. Go and see it - it's on in various venues across the south-east of England until June.

As for the portrayal of the gods and classical mythology - sometimes, there doesn't have to be a deep significance to the way in which a reception is presented. Sometimes it's just fun, and silly, and done for its own sake. And, you know, that's all right.

Afternoon Play

A quick mention of BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Play from Monday, an adaptation by Salley Vickers of her own novel, Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus story from the Canongate Myth series. It wasn't publicized much, but it's worth catching. You have until next Monday afternoon to listen to it.

Camelot! Camelot! (It's only a CGI effect.)

Yes, I watched the BBC's new fantasy series, Merlin.

Good things about Merlin:

Unlike the last two screen examples of Arthuriana, I've seen, King Arthur and The Last Legion, there is no attempt here to do a 'historical Arthur'. Instead, it's all set in a timeless quasi-mediaeval fantasy world (seemingly using leftover sets and costumes from Robin Hood). In general, I approve. When Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes wrote down these stories, the main fonts from which all subsequent versions come, they set them in a timeless mediaeval fantasy world. Doing a historical Arthur strikes me as slightly missing the point.

Gwen from Torchwood! Actually showing more acting skills than she's ever displayed in that role.

Bad things:

Richard Wilson's frightwig is rather unsettling.

The music, overly dependent on Howard Shore, and over-emphasizing the emotional content of each scene, which seems to be the fashion these days.

And there's not much of a sense of otherness about Camelot. Everyone talks, behaves, even to a degree dresses as if this is 2008 London. Roll that up with a bunch of cliches (the bullying prince, the servant who saves everyone but can't tell), and, though this is not bad, it doesn't climb much above most other semi-competent Arthur versions.

Judea AD 33. Saturday afternoon. About tea time.

When I see a headline stating 'Doubt over date for Brit invasion' (original press release, and another report), I expect to find a dramatic change, redating it to 56 BC, or AD 54. Instead, it turns out that the date is being shifted by a mere four days, from August 26/27 to August 22/23.

So it's not really that significant. In any case, what do either of these dates mean? I can tell you what they definitely don't mean - they don't mean the 22nd/23rd or 26th/27th days of the month Sextilis (not renamed August until 8 BC) in the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus (yes that Pompey and that Crassus). The Roman civic calendar was in a mess by the first century BC. A failure to apply intercalary months properly meant that the Roman civic year was about three months ahead of the solar year, something that Caesar had to rectify in 46 BC. So the last week of 'August' would have the conditions that would now be expected in May. This is certainly not when Caesar invaded Britain. He clearly states in De Bello Gallico 4.20, that the invasion was launched when there was little of the summer left (exigua parte aestatis reliqua). So 'August 22/23' actually means 'the equivalent of August 22/23 if the Roman civic calendar and the solar year were properly aligned' (i.e. on the Julian calendar). At which point the dates become, for me, rather meaningless.

I'm not even sure that the event can be dated to where August would have been. Apart from the reference to the summer, the only other dating evidence is that the landing took place four days before a full moon. I'm not sure why September is ruled out - in 1940 the Germans were certainly contemplating invasion in late September. Perhaps the astrological work and the studying of the tides demonstrates that the invasion cannot have been four days before a full moon, but eight or nine days (a textual correction proposed by R.G. Collingwood in 1937). But even this may be open to possible objections (as raised by others) that changes to the coastline over two thousand years have altered the currents. In any case, neither the 'traditional' date nor the new one seem to me to be terribly helpful.

At least these dates are less meaningless than the recent attempt to date the return of Odysseus (full article) to April 16, 1178 BC, on the basis of astronomical evidence from the text. Now, I'm happy with the notion that genuine astronomical phenomena are described in the Odyssey. It may be that the reference to the obliteration of the sun at Odyssey 20.356 is meant to be an eclipse. What I find far less plausible is the notion that Homer is able to insert consistent astronomical data into his imaginative account, that point to an eclipse five centuries before he wrote. Even the authors concede that their theory only works if one assumes that Zeus sending Hermes to Ogygia represents movement of the planet Mercury. Given that there are perfectly good dramatic reasons in the framework of the Odyssey for this trip (he's been sent by Zeus to tell Calypso to release Odysseus, and who else would Zeus send than the messenger god?), I don't see the need for an allegorical interpretation.

What both these items share, it seems to me, is a positivist outlook on the ancient world. Caesar invaded Britain on a particular day. Odysseus returned on a particular day. Since these are facts (an arguable proposition for Odysseus' return), then, the idea seems to be, it must be possible, with enough investigation, to discover those facts. With my own little post-modernist toolkit, I conclude that some facts simply aren't recoverable.

The title of this post, by the way, is a quotation from Monty Python's Life of Brian a series of captions that satirizes exactly this sort of attempt to advance precise dates.

The Greek Myths

Last month left-of-centre broadsheet The Guardian issued a series of booklets retelling the Greek myths. These were written by James Davidson, author of the much-fêted The Greeks and Greek Love. I don’t get the paper regularly (for economic, rather than ideological reasons). But friends do, and I collected a full set a couple of weekends ago, and read them all on the train. You don’t need to do this, as they are online here.

It’s a slightly curious collection. For a start, Davidson has an individual prose style, often ready to abandon the tones of academe. Sometimes this works and is funny: ‘Deianeira wondered what it was about her that monstrous creatures found so attractive’ (No. 3: Thebes, p. 18). On other occasions, such as when Helen, reunited with Menelaus, says ‘Tell me, how are the children?’ (No. 5: The Trojan War, p. 22), it’s just a bit banal.

But it’s his choice of myths to retell that most had me raising my eyebrows. True, Davidson only has ninety pages for a topic that could easily fill out a book-length study (and often has), so some selectivity is inevitable. I’m not surprised that Bellerophon is gone completely, the only exploit of Theseus is that with the Minotaur, Achilles’ concealment amongst the women of Scyrus is overlooked, and there’s no place for more than a brief allusion to any homecoming from Troy other than that of Odysseus.

But it does seem odd that all reference to Jason’s father Aeson, and the usurpation of his kingdom by his brother Pelias, is gone. Removing this requires Davidson to devote space to another motivation for Pelias’ murder, one different from that most commonly known (and one I have as yet not tracked down in my mythology text books, though I’m sure Davidson has an authentic source). Why not keep the version familiar through the likes of the 1963 film?

When it comes to No. 5: The Trojan War, ‘odd’ no longer seems adequate. In Davidson’s version, the Iliad is missing. There is not a word about the wrath of Achilles, his dispute with Agamemnon, or about Patroclus. Hector’s death is there, but not the immediate lead up to it or the ransoming of his body. In the Iliad’s place is a tale of Achilles’ lust for Troilus, drawn from late Latin sources. It’s almost as if Davidson is deliberately choosing little-known variants. That may help him set his own stamp on the stories, but may not have been in the mind of whoever in The Guardian commissioned the booklets.

The danger in such a work as this, as Mary Beard noted when reviewing Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, is that it creates the impression that the way the stories are presented in the work concerned is in some way canonical, and the ‘true’ version, something which, in Beard’s words, ‘amounts to reconstructing a narrative which never really existed, directly against the grain of the mythic culture of Greece’. A common question students in myth courses ask, when presented with variant accounts, is ‘which one is right?’ It takes a long time to get to grips with the idea that, as Beard notes in her introduction to No. 6: The Odyssey, these are constantly evolving stories, and no one version should take precedence over the others.

So it’s particularly odd that what is ostensibly an introduction to Greek mythology (though some of it us possibly actually Roman - for instance, there’s a strong case for saying that the legends of Echo and Narcissus were first linked by Ovid) should choose in some places such outré versions. There are plenty of forewords by luminaries such as Michael Wood or Neil MacGregor, but what is missing is an afterword where Davidson explains his rationale. Some of it is obvious - Eros is a driving force throughout the stories Davidson chooses, and no doubt the chapter on Achilles from The Greeks and Greek Love will shine light on his motivation for selecting Troilus - but some of it remains obscure.

I don’t want to come across as being too negative about this. Anything that gets people reading Greek mythology is good, and it’s an interesting idea for the Guardian to do this. I just find it curious in its selection.