Myth studies over the twentieth century turned from origins to usage, as did linguistics and philosophy. Consequently, sociology, history, and reception studies now have eclipsed depth psychology (and to a lesser extent, structuralism). This Companion perfectly captures the field’s latest state. The editor gave free rein to sixteen well-chosen international experts. Some, like Claude Calame, question the very existence of a distinct category “myth” (or “religion”) in ancient Greece, while others explore the impact of traditional tales on politics, literature, and art, from the self-presentation of Athenian tyrants in the sixth century BCE down to Ray Harryhausen’s screen epics. The result is one of the few truly indispensable books for those teaching or writing on mythology.

Other than incidentally, the book does not offer a meta-narrative about analysis. (Eric Csapo’s 2005 Theories of Mythology fills that need.) Instead, contributors engage at the level of case studies the varied purposes to which Greek myths have been put. Nor will one find overarching definitions; Woodard’s introduction (“Muthoi in Continuity and Variation”) instead sets the tone for a catholic approach throughout, embracing myth as speech-act, paradigm, or pure fabula, while allowing for radical divergences even within one author (cf. Clay on Plato).

Part 1 (Sources and Interpretations) offers a stimulating new view of the major works of Greek literature. Two chapters by Gregory Nagy (“Lyric and Greek Myth”; “Homer and Greek Myth”) contain the most concise summary thus far of his magisterial vision of early mythopoetics. His ruling principle—that performance activates myth and is thus a matter of ritual—is fleshed out, first, with illuminating explications of the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus, making specific connections to local rituals on their home island Lesbos. Evidence from the spectrum of Greek song traditions then provides an entry for Nagy into the mega-genre of epic, which is seen to amplify certain themes available as well in lyric, from eternal fame (kleos) to return, loss of identity, and the contrast between brute force (Achilles) and cunning intelligence (Odysseus). Nagy’s approach has the great advantage of recovering mythic voices that have been overshadowed by the prestige of Homer, while suggesting that the epic framing of its material owes much to the bardic ideology attested in such later composers as the praise-poet Pindar. Far from being the runner-up to Homer (as in conventional accounts), the poet of the Theogony and Works and Days, as Woodard demonstrates in “Hesiod and Greek Myth,” actually preserves in his Generations of Man a version of Indo-European origin myth. This brilliant analysis usefully counterbalances the recent trends that read Hesiod as transmitting primarily Near Eastern myth, and that want Greek myth to be generally less archaic than Roman, Celtic, or Indic. All three of these pieces have a heft and lucidity that makes them good for assigned reading, even for undergraduates.

Richard Buxton (“Tragedy and Greek Myth”) reminds us that the genre that crystallized the “classic” version of many stories (think Oedipus) in fact operates with a culturally specific, even distorting, agenda, drawing poets to play up conflicts, dwell on dysfunctional families, and explore extremes, boundaries, margins. Particularly insightful are Buxton’s observations on the gods in tragedy—epiphanic but unknowable, all-powerful but never merely an excuse for human action. “Myth in Aristophanes” by Angus Bowie perforce works with less material but does a fine job extracting from the remains of Old Comedy the evidence of its treatment of gods and myths, a topic that clearly had greater breadth than the eleven extant plays of the master-poet would hint. What we do have in the way of full comedies, as Bowie shows, handles myth at many levels, from allusion to deep structures associated with ritual (especially Acharnians and Lysistrata). The pair of chapters rounding out this section juxtaposes the most creative maker of philosophical “myth” (“Plato Philomythos” by Diskin Clay) with his total opposites in terms of method, the erudite preservationists of the period after Alexander (“Hellenistic Mythographers” by Carolyn Higbie). Clay’s analysis should be required reading for anyone interested in Greek philosophy, for its clear-headed interpretation of what a muthos was for Plato (either received accounts or his own inventions). Higbie manages to make sense of a disparate and centuries-long tradition of exegetical work on the by-then “classic” works of Greek poetry. She also sketches the growth of mythography in relation to other key practices: chronography, genealogy, and collecting “paradoxes” (bizarre and curious tales).

The title of Part 2 (Response, Integration, Representation) raises questions right off. How are vase-paintings of Herakles “responses” to a myth (which could imply a unilateral transmission and fixed versions) rather than “representations?” And does not “integration” imply a similar partitioning off of ready-made “myths” and a secondary “working into” culture? The five chapters themselves actually militate against any such mis-impressions, although the Roman poet Ovid clearly did “respond” to fixed literary treatments. Boyle’s elegant and energetic essay, tracing Ovid’s dangerous career-long game with anti-Augustan mythic masks, would fit better if switched with Zajko’s on women (which oddly ended up in “reception”). As it stands, however, Boyle’s chapter makes sense as a Roman iteration of the sort of tale-telling brinksmanship that Hall’s piece claims for the Greeks.

It might make sense to read Claude Calame’s “Greek Myth and Greek Religion” first (and frequently thereafter). In typically rich and dense fashion, he draws attention to the tentative nature of both terms. Only in the act of enunciation does the performance mediate between “religious” phenomena (heroes, gods, set actions) and the specific occasion; we must shed modern ideas that a set of beliefs or a corpus of tales was at work in Greece: all is contingent. Calame’s five case studies contribute fresh explications of networked myths, cults, places, and poems, from Demeter and the Eleusinian mysteries to the story of Ion and Athenian political fashioning. As with almost all the pieces here, he goes far beyond mere summary of earlier work and breaks new ground.

Two essays focus on art. Jenifer Neils (“Myth and Greek Art: Creating a Visual Language”) shows that artistic representation (like dramatic) plays by its own stylistic rules regarding the selection of elements, inclusion of figures, and focus on certain moments. A late sixth-century amphora painted by Exekias, for example, zeroes in on the tense moment just before the suicide of Ajax—starkly alone, with a lone palm for background—rather than the string of deeds that led to this end. Other painters cram myth scenes with named personages. Neils is particularly good on the mimesis of myth by historical figures (pre- or post-democratic) in Athens. Less focused is Ada Cohen’s chapter on “Mythic Landscapes of Greece” because it juggles three tasks: arguing that landscape was a prime element of Greek art; that tales involved landscapes (caves, mountains, water); and that some mythic beings (Pan, nymphs) are closely equated with topographic features. Each point is worthwhile but the totality is somewhat askew. By contrast, “Politics and Greek Myth” by Jonathan M. Hall shows incisively how highly charged myths (e.g., the story of the house of Atreus) were manipulated by Sparta, Athens, and Argos and Thebes. The sixth century BCE saw something like a vast 3-D chess game with each polis pushing its mythic pieces onto enemy spaces. Even the traditional-enemy Trojans became “good to think with” for internal politics at Athens (as a stand-in for eastward-leaning elites).

“Reception” is always messy, so we can excuse the presence in the so-named Part 3 of Vanda Zajko’s “Women and Greek Myth” by taking its focus as primarily the modern re-visioning of myth in writers like Hélène Cixous and Adrienne Rich. On the other hand, Zajko also addresses the context of stories surrounding Pandora, Artemis, and the heroines of Hesiod’s Catalogue. What unites modern with ancient women is, it appears, the agency obtained and exhibited through access to mythic material. An erudite if more conventionally literary survey is H. David Brumble’s “Let Us Make Gods in Our Image: Greek Myth in Medieval and Renaissance Literature,” which features a bibliographic feast of largely forgotten allegorical and moralizing treatments of myth (e.g., Stephen Batman’s sixteenth century Golden Booke of the Leaden Gods). Each of the Companion’s chapters mentions further reading, but Brumble’s occupies five meaty pages.

No one volume could be expected to keep pace with the rapid acceleration of myth-based literary and artistic production after the Renaissance, so it is not surprising Woodard commissioned only two representative chapters: “‘Hail, Muse! et cetera’: Greek Myth in English and American Literature” by Sarah Annes Brown, and “Greek Myth on the Screen” by Martin M. Winkler. Brown wittily frames her discussion through analogy to Protestant “direct” and Catholic “mediated” encounters with canonical texts—a split characterizing Shelley using Greek myth as opposed to Keats (who could not read the languages) or the Victorian generally in contrast to the Augustans. Contemporaries, too (Norman Loftis and Carol Ann Duffy) are accorded interesting placement in this tradition. Winkler’s thoughtful meditation about our leading contemporary mythic medium touches on the possibilities and limitations of film, with obligatory reference to the great (Cocteau’s Orphée, Pasolini’s Edipo Re), the fantastic (Clash of the Titans) and the extreme (Cottafavi’s Hercules Conquers Atlantis). Italian muscleman “peplum epics” get their fair due; one misses only a word for that schlock gem, Hercules in New York (featuring “Arnold Strong,” aka Schwarzenegger).

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[Review length: 1544 words • Review posted on June 30, 2011]