Claude Calame admits that his Greek Mythology is a “reaction to structural analyses which…have all too frequently been sensitive to the points shared in common by diverse symbolical systems that have totally disregarded their differences, contrasts and, above all, contexts of performance” (ix). Regardless of whether Calame’s critique of structuralism is accurate or merely a polemic, Greek Mythology provides an engaging examination of seven different myths found in seven very different performance contexts. In so doing, Calame demonstrates how the study of pragmatics and mythopoiesis can uncover the meaning of a particular narrative event and, therefore, justifies his privileging the differences and contrasts found in different narratives of the same story. For Calame, there is no archetypal “Bellerophon” myth, for example, of which all other Bellerophon narratives simply partake. Rather, a myth exists only in its various iterations, each one further enriching the meaning of the others.
Because Calame considers myth only to exist in and through specific artistic creations, it is important to note that despite its title Greek Mythology is not intended as a handbook of Greek mythology. A number of excellent books published recently serve this purpose, including William Hansen’s Classical Mythology, Richard Martin’s Myths of the Ancient Greeks, or any of the standard Classical mythology textbooks. Calame is quite right that this form of mythology—the study of myths—often reduces a body of stories “to a textual plot in order to discover the logic that permeates them” (7). Unlike these works of scholarship, Calame proposes to restore “not only the extraordinary semantic richness of these discursive manifestations but also the wide range of social and symbolic functions that can be assumed by stories that are always told in a particular discursive manner and are associated with particular situations of utterance” (8).
In order to restore this semantic richness, Calame does not organize this book around a central argument. Rather, Greek Mythology is a roughly chronological journey through the various Greek genres that incorporate myth. Each chapter examines a different genre and myth and demonstrates how the myth is utilized in that particular generic context. The first four chapters cover generally standard genres of myth. Chapter 1 uses the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a springboard to present both the standard survey of the modern study of myth and Calame’s own particular examination of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Chapter 2 considers the presentation of the Bellerophon myth by Glaucus within the context of his duel with Diomedes in the Iliad. Chapter 3 investigates the dual roles of praise and blame to which Pindar puts the myth of the murder of Clytemnestra. Chapter 4 examines how mythical genealogies are used to construct space within the context of Aeschylus’ two different accounts of the journey of Io in Prometheus Bound and The Libation Bearers.
Unlike the first half of Greek Mythology, the second half addresses three genres that are less commonly discussed in terms of mythology. Chapter 5 examines the fairly customary topic of Helen’s role in the Trojan War but uses this myth to discuss myth’s role within historiography. Chapter 6 discusses Hellenistic poetic creations which may imitate originally performance-centered hymns but are, in fact, literary fictions that turn all apparent extra-discursive references into intra-discursive ones. Chapter 7, finally, turns to the role of local legend in the creation of place with particular reference to Pausanias’ description of Troezen. In this chapter Calame outlines how Pausanias links the divine past with the more recent heroic past, local legend with pan-Hellenic myth, and finally time with space.
In each chapter, Calame pays close attention to the context of the narrative event. This approach allows Calame to suggest how the myth is functioning within the larger work and to demonstrate that the meaning of a myth can only be found in context. This context consists not only of external factors but also of the internal and generic factors of the literary production in which the myth is found. The strength of Calame’s analysis, therefore, lies in the rigorous attention Calame pays to how the story is told and not in the abstracted elements of the story that is being told.
These abstracted elements, however, can also become the narrative event itself, and the one work Calame frequently cites yet seldom engages in a serious way is the Library of Apollodorus. He is correct that the mythographer’s goal is to reduce the mass of stories to a coherent plot summary, and the muthoi presented are no longer “active,” but even this “mythographical exercise” (94) has a pragmatic aspect, just as Pausanias’ antiquarian approach has. Recent interest in the mythographic tradition, exemplified by the American Philological Association’s panel on mythography in 2009 and Smith and Trzaskoma’s forthcoming edited volume on Greek and Roman mythography, demonstrates the need for work in this genre of myth writing. Calame’s own use of Apollodorus in the fourth chapter hints at a particular way to read Apollodorus and the footnotes offer tantalizing clues as to how Calame might approach the Library, but the reader interested in the mythographers will have to look elsewhere for an analysis of the myths found in this genre.
Other than this omission, if it can even be called that, and the occasional minor error such as reading Proteus for Proetus during the discussion of Bellerophon (72–73) or the confusing citation of Plato’s Republic under a quote from the Laws (42), Calame has once again given us a work of scholarship that forces us to read myth with new eyes. Whether the book is taken as a whole or used only for those genres or works that are of interest to the reader, Greek Mythology would make an excellent companion for an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar on the analysis of myth not merely for its specific interpretations but as a model of the rigorous, performance-based myth analysis that Calame sets as his goal in the Preface.
WORKS CITED
Hansen, William. Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Martin, Richard. Myths of the Ancient Greeks. New York: New American Library, 2003.
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[Review length: 1020 words • Review posted on July 1, 2010]