A Gap in the Greek Mythic System
Patrick Mooney
Humanities 204
21 May 2006
Throughout the texts of both The World of Myth and The Voyage of the Hero, Leeming provides a superabundance of Greek myths in every major section of each book. Indeed, in many sections the Greek stories are more numerous than those from any other culture are. This makes a great deal of pedagogical sense for the collector of myths who is writing a textbook: The Greek mythos is more likely to be familiar to the modern reader than any other mythological system except for Christianity, and its familiarity for many readers provides a useful starting point for discussions of many mythological concepts. Indeed, Western authors have often contrasted the mythic system of Christianity with that of Hellenism. Moreover, writers and artists from the late medieval period onward have often turned to Greek mythology for subject matter, sometimes (as in the case of, for instance, Byron and Nietzsche) as a way of explicitly rejecting the Christian mythic system.
This emphasis on Greek myth in Leeming’s texts and in Western culture makes it especially notable that there is only one section collecting more than three myths in either texts that does not include a Greek myth -- the end of part one, in which Leeming collects apocalyptic myths. In fact, it seems that, although some philosophers hypothesized about the end of the world, no apocalyptic myth was a standard part of the Greek religious system. I hypothesize that this lack in the Greek system had an effect on the Greek concept of time and history.
Although the Greek cosmography had a beginning (in fact, there were several competing origin myths), the mythic system without an apocalyptic myth left them without a concept of an end of time. In Western mythos, the concept of the apocalypse provides a sense of purpose in history. This can take the form of the resurrection of the dead with appropriate rewards and punishments, as in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mythic systems, or can provide a fatalistic background in which heroism is the only possible virtue, as in the mythic system of the Germanic tribes. In either case, this concept of history provides time with a terminus, a point toward which it moves, a direction. In Eastern myths, the concept of a recurring cycle also provides history with a form: What has a beginning has an end, and the end is the beginning of a new cycle.
The Greek system, however, lacks both of these temporal frameworks. Rather than taking the form of a timeline, as in Judeo-Christian history, or a circle, as in Eastern mythological systems, the Greek concept of time would seem to view history as a plane (or plain) in which actions occur without a structuring temporal movement. Moreover, the Greek temporal system seems to be weakened: There is not a strong mythological separation between temporal beginning, middle, and end time periods, as in other religions. Although there is a beginning, and there is a time before the creation of humanity, this seems not to be as sharply separated as in other mythic systems.
In particular, the Greek system lacks the sense of the radical separation from the divine that marks the separation point between beginning and middle (present) times that occurs in so many other mythic systems. Although there is a point at which the actions of an ancestor inflict woe on all of her descendants, the myth of Pandora seems to lack the centrality of the fall of Eve, for instance, or other, equivalent, stories.
Specifically, the gods continue to intervene directly in human affairs on any number of occasions. Although the myths are understood to have occurred in the historical past, the past in which the gods intervene directly is historical, and the impression left by the myths in which, for instance, the gods influence the course of the Trojan War, or in which Zeus seduces mortal women, or in which Poseidon inspires Pasiphae with an unnatural lust for a bull, is that there is no theoretical reason why such things could not occur now. The line or circle of time that other cultures see is thus compressed to a flat, ever-present now for the ancient Greeks.
This parallels certain Greek beliefs about the nature of the afterlife. Achilles’ declaration in The Odyssey that it would be better to be a living slave than king of the underworld parallels this concept of emphasizing an eternal now.
References
Leeming, David Adams. Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
Leeming, David Adams. The World of Myth: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
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