Perhaps most ordinary persons in ancient Greece accepted their mythological inheritance as being essentially truthful accounts of the past, but many intellectuals did not, finding the fabulous elements of the old narratives hard to believe and consequently rejecting the stories as childish nonsense.
But there was also a middle way. A different approach, now called rationalism, was to assume that mythological narratives were mistaken accounts of actual historical events. This strategy had the advantage of preserving mythological narratives as cultural property while acknowledging that they violated empirical norms of reality. Rationalists tried to show how impossible narrative elements might plausibly arise from misunderstandings of ordinary events.
In some ways the rationalists resembled the allegorists, who created another kind of middle way. For both rationalists and allegorists the task was to decode the fabulous narratives and elicit their hidden truths. The rationalists sought truth in the historical events that supposedly lay behind the stories, while the allegorists sought it in the messages they thought lurked in the texts. One looked for historical events, the other for philosophic truths.
Despite the widespread popularity of the rationalist approach to mythology among ancient authors, rationalism as an interpretive strategy has been less studied than allegorism, for which reason the present full-length treatment by Greta Hawes is a welcome contribution to the understanding of mythology in Greek antiquity.
The book’s initial three chapters are devoted to three minor Greek mythographers, each of whom composed a short treatise entitled On Incredible Matters (Peri Apiston). The first and most important of them is Palaephatus, who probably wrote in the fourth century B.C. His name, which could be rendered as “ancient-speech,” is possibly a pseudonym, since it seems too good to be a mythographer’s given name. His book offers a theoretical preface followed by forty-five entries, each rationalizing a particular fabulous story.
Palaephatus’s preface is unique in providing a rationale for mythological rationalism. There are persons, he says, who believe all the incredible events of the past and there are persons who believe none of them. He himself declares that in the case of each event, something did in fact happen that gave rise to the story. Moreover, so far as strange creatures are concerned, Palaephatus says that if they existed in the past, they would exist now, but since they do not exist now, they did not exist then either. In other words, (1) every fabulous narrative arose from an actual event, and so by implication contains a kernel of historical truth, and (2) there is no biological discontinuity between the past and the present. If there were centaurs then, we would still see them now, but we do not. Palaephatus’s second point anticipates the principle of uniformitarianism that geologists formulated in the eighteenth century: the physical laws and processes that operated in the past are identical with those of today (cf. Alan Dundes, The Flood Myth, page 408).
Palaephatus’s forty-five rationalized stories, mostly legends set in the Greek heroic age, come next. Each entry displays the same pattern: the author briefly recounts the inherited story, rejects it as impossible, and then declares, without argument or evidence, what really happened. Often he supposes that misunderstandings arose from metaphors taken literally. Thus, according to his sixth entry, people say that the hunter Aktaion was torn apart by his own hunting dogs. But the truth is that Aktaion was a spendthrift hunter who wasted his livelihood, and so people said that he was “devoured” by his dogs. The metaphor, later taken literally (by a disease of language, as it were), produced the story. Similarly, proper names gave rise to misunderstandings when they too were taken literally. According to the fifteenth entry, people say that Europa was carried across the sea by a bull (tauros). But no bull could swim that far, nor would any girl climb onto the back of a wild bull. The truth is that a man named Tauros carried off a number of girls from that area.
Hawes compares with Palaephatus’s treatise the two other works on mythological rationalism, one by a certain Herakleitos (not the philosopher of that name) that was composed around the first or second century A.D., and the other an anonymous work compiled some centuries later. Like Palaephatus’s book, they are structured as a series of short entries, each devoted to a single story or other topic. A comment in the manuscript of Herakleitos’s work interestingly describes it as “a refutation or cure for traditional stories that conflict with nature” (99). Since, as Hawes points out, refutation was a standard rhetorical exercise in schools, Herakleitos’s treatise may have served as a schoolbook illustrating how to refute the historicity of fabulous myths and legends. Herakleitos and his anonymous successor are eclectic in their methods, opportunistically drawing upon rationalism, allegorism, and euhemerism as it suits them.
In the final three chapters Hawes treats an additional three Greek rationalists. First comes the mythographer Konon, an author of the first century A.D. or so, whose Narrations is a compilation of some fifty Greek legends. Hawes discusses his three instances of rationalized narratives.
Next comes the biographer Plutarch and his rationalized life of the Athenian hero Theseus. Since most of Plutarch’s subjects are men of the historic era, the ancient author acknowledges that he is on uncertain ground when he attempts a biography of a figure of the heroic age, and asks his readers’ indulgence, saying that he is like a geographer at the edge of the known world. As Hawes explains, the figure of Theseus had a double life in ancient literature. Tragedians and poets focused upon the Minotaur and other fabulous elements of the legend, whereas historians, including biographers, sought credible history.
Hawes’s final subject is the traveler Pausanias, who in the second century A.D. journeyed throughout the Greek mainland describing notable sites and recounting stories the locals told him. Although Pausanias was not primarily a mythographer, his work contains an immense number of myths and legends connected with different places, and he usually relates them in full. Mostly he rationalizes, but sometimes he opts for an allegorical interpretation, and at other times he accepts a tradition as historically true. Most likely to be rationalized are stories of mixed creatures such as the Sphinx and stories featuring metamorphoses such as Aktaion’s transformation into a stag, since rationalists regarded both phenomena as impossible.
Hawes’s book offers folklorists a rich glimpse into the reception of mythology in ancient Greece, in particular an examination of an early kind of interpretive strategy, and for this reason can be recommended. Readers of Greek will be surprised to see errors in the Greek here and there, which is unusual in books published by Oxford University Press. Classicists may find the ancient authors focused upon—the three minor compilers of treatises on rationalist interpretation, in addition to Konon, Plutarch, and Pausanias—a bit strange, but they will also likely agree that the obvious choices are few. Overall, Hawes’s study is a carefully researched and clearly written treatment of an understudied mythological phenomenon.
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[Review length: 1168 words • Review posted on November 10, 2015]