This book strives to counteract the Frazerian heritage typified by Jane Ellen Harrison, who was “so eager to penetrate beneath the surface that she almost grew to dislike the surface itself and to love what lay below" (from Gilbert Murray’s obituary for F. M. Cornford, PBA 29 [1943] 424-5.) An engaging re-evaluation of how Greek myths worked, by a specialist in Greek religion, it makes the case for surfaces, investigating narrative phenomena that apparently convinced ancient audiences of the reality of gods and heroes. Although, for a general audience, the book is nevertheless richly annotated (42 pages) with a robust bibliography (16 pages) and ideal for advanced undergraduates and grad students in Classics or religious studies. Folklorists, comparatists, and anthropologists might find it less informative. The same goes for those concerned with the uses of myth in politics or social formations, both of which (along with history) recede in Sarah Iles Johnston’s rendition.
The opening pages of chapter 1 offer an uncontroversial heuristic definition of the subject: stories concerned with a network of Greek gods and heroes, set in the past, using specific names and real geographical locations that imply or enable continuity with the present. Stories is the crucial word. To develop her larger argument regarding the dynamics of narration and story-consumption, she borrows binaries from Dorothy Noyes (sought/unsought experience; focused/flexible attention), and suggestively applies them to a range of ancient myth materials, from jokes and allusions to performances of epic and drama. The acknowledged emotional impact of the latter leads Johnston to the fraught problem of belief. Some hearers of the Odyssey might have been left unmoved, but Johnston prefers to think most would be convinced of the divine and heroic reality behind the epic representation. (Known dissenters—Xenophanes and Heraclitus—are not mentioned.) Not totally eliding it with myth, she nevertheless appeals to the Greeks’ investment in ritual (as at the healing site, Epidaurus) to propose that stories drove the ancient religious imagination into action, beyond any mere “playful pretense.”
Chapter 2 surveys the “Cambridge School” evolutionary notion that myth is ritual misunderstood, locating this Frazerian project within the fin de siècle fascination with the “savage within” (cf. Stevensons’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stoker’s Dracula). But Johnston argues that the myth and ritual mode actually overshadowed most twentieth-century analysts, from Malinowski to Walter Burkert. Their stubborn assumption that myths must explain something is contradicted, in her view, by numerous stories (e.g., Bacchylides’s dithyrambic version of how Heracles discovered Deianeira). Nor did Greeks, it seems, perform aetiologies to activate rituals, unlike the Enuma Elish recital essential to the Babylonian Akitu festival. After dismissing as overly reductive most approaches up to and including Lévi-Strauss, Johnston resorts in chapter 3 to contemporaries: Joshua Landy’s work on “formative fictions” and Tanya Luhrmann’s on “parasocial interaction,” where she discovers models for tale-triggered belief. These cognitive approaches are introduced by way of the historiola, a category based on persuasive analogy, whereby what is narrated causes the desired action, like healing. Myths, however, unlike one-off spells, gradually build confidence in the supernatural. Their complex narratives, therefore, rather resemble TV series (e.g., Mad Men), while stories of supernatural encounters that often frame myth-telling can be compared via the category of memorate) to modern ghost stories. Close readings of Pindar and Euripides, among others, solidify Johnston’s point. Yet one wonders: effective narrative devices surely move audiences today, whether in Homer or on HBO; it is plausible that they conditioned ancients to believe in gods. But does Greek religion really boil down to “ripping good yarns about extraordinary events” (203)?
Chapter 4 starts to explore the unique physiognomy of the Greek story-world, finding it characterized by a minimum of weirdness (even the monsters have sensible genealogies); attention to staging myths in usually accessible locales; complex networking of relationships, among gods and mortals; and figures from one mythic lineage cropping up in another of fairly marginal relevance. Serial novels (e.g., Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga) and TV spinoffs provide parallels here for dense layering and “crossover character” effects. Yet, were some tie-ins (e.g., the slain dragon’s teeth from Thebes linked to those weaponized by Medea’s father in Colchis) really a feature of early Greek myth, or instead clever elaborations by Hellenistic poets, Ovid, and the mythographers? Did the latter simply take to an extreme an inherent traditional trait?
After this gross-anatomical overview, resembling Geoffrey Kirk’s The Nature of Greek Myths (1974), the following three chapters dissect Characters (5), Metamorphoses (6), and Heroes (7) in satisfyingly rich detail, with some original touches. Still wrestling with “belief,” Johnston places divinities along a spectrum of fictionalized or legendary beings, adducing, among many analogies, Helen Mirren acting Elizabeth II, Thucydides’ method, and Sherlock Holmes. That the gods are “plurimedial” and “accretive” creations undergirds sustained conviction about them. What might distinguish Theseus from Holmes is the expectation that even post mortem the hero can aid the worshiper; then again, the unending stream of mail to 221B Baker Street signals a kindred trust in efficacious contact.
A fancy for hybrids generates stories of transformation, while the specifics of what-becomes-what can be better understood, in Johnston’s eyes, through J.J. Gibson’s notion of “affordances.” With it, she shows how Arachne’s spider metamorphosis plugs into Greek ideas about parricide, incest, and textiles—a tour de force analysis reminiscent of the late Marcel Detienne’s work, though Johnston slights his Paris-school structuralism. After precise observations on Near Eastern features lacking in Greek myth, Johnston segues into the most telling difference: heroes. Her larger thesis about the power of story is amplified by the distorting effects of patchy source survival (impressive Athenian tragedies, few local narratives), letting Johnston downplay hero-cult with its fascinating diversity in favor of flatter typologies (heroes are close to gods, kill monsters, travel to otherworlds, etc).
Narrativity, surely, is vital, but one does not have to be “Bloody Jane” Harrison to value in Greek myth its deeper embeddedness in social, visual, and (yes) ritual landscapes, held here at a distance.
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[Review length: 991 words • Review posted on January 23, 2020]