Lowell Edmunds’s Greek Myth is an entry in DeGruyter’s Trends in Classics series, which “aims to provide state-of-the art guides to research in Classical Studies.” The present volume is written at a level that makes it most useful to those who are already familiar with the vocabulary and conventions of Classical scholarship. Edmunds assumes, for example, that his reader has a working knowledge of the Greek alphabet and knows such terms as Atthidography, catasterism, elenchos, and zero grade. Therefore, the question is whether this book provides something of value for its specialized target audience. I answer in the affirmative, for it is beneficial to have this bracing and succinct account of the current state of studies in Greek myth from a scholar of Edmunds’s stature.
In the introduction, Edmunds tackles the contested question of definition, settling upon Robert Fowler’s description of “the” myth as the hypostasis of all the versions known to an individual, with the proviso that a given telling “responds to a social nexus.” This understanding of myth he enhances with an analogy to Saussure’s langue and parole: a given myth exists both as a potentiality in the shared knowledge of a group, and in the particular cases of its oral, written, or visual instantiations.
Chapter 1 plunges directly into the minutiae of the Theseus myth and argues against the “truism” that Greek vase paintings are illustrations of poetry. This view can arguably be described as the current consensus. Its main value here is to call attention to the existence of non-poetic oral traditions, which served as source material for artists representing Theseus. This point lays the groundwork for chapter 2, which deals with myths in everyday storytelling and in oratory. Edmunds is in his element discussing how myths differ according to the social context in which they are presented. Unlike poetic versions, everyday storytelling is concise and relatively simple, as in the retellings of the early mythographers or transmission from mother to child.
Edmunds establishes inconsistency as a normal feature of storytelling in chapter 3. Mythic composition happened piecemeal, with plot taking precedence over both name and character. Thus, Theseus was in some stories a disreputable kidnapper, and in others a noble crimefighter. Edmunds usefully contrasts this form of storytelling with the modern novel, in which character drives action, and psychological interiority is regularly depicted.
Chapter 4 offers an overview of the neglected topic of mythography, hailing Robert Fowler’s Early Greek Mythography as the standard corpus, adducing examples of mythography in the works of the fifth-century historians and tragedians, and tracing the shift in the fourth century away from genealogy and toward new organizational principles (collections of tragic plots, star-myths, metamorphoses, and the like). These tendencies culminated in the Hellenistic and Roman compilation of “libraries” of myths.
In chapter 5, Edmunds tackles the question of whether the Greeks believed their myths by applying H. H. Price’s distinction between “belief-in” (involving trust and reliance) and “belief-that” (involving assent to a proposition). He makes the point that the actions of the gods in epic, “however unseemly,” are responsive to narrative needs, citing Plato (Euthyphro, 6b3) for the view that a variety of opinions were held on the veracity of cosmogonic myths. Belief-that was therefore a matter of individual opinion, yet as Edmunds makes clear elsewhere in the book, even the hard-headed historian Thucydides did not doubt that the Trojan War happened. Regarding the debate over beliefs concerning gods, Edmunds describes (73) Henk Versnel’s position as “the view that belief-in, in some form, could be found in the Greeks.” In the work which Edmunds cites, however, Versnel argues that the Greeks thought their gods existed, which is a form of belief-that, and is mainly concerned to refute the notion that belief is irrelevant to Greek religion. Therefore, his position is not so far from that of Edmunds. Based on a reading of the Erythraean paean to Apollo, Edmunds further concludes that even the gods of cult did not command belief-in. But this does not hold for the Hellenistic period, when (as detailed in Versnel’s work on aretalogies and henotheism) deities such as Isis were hailed as saviors from the power of death and fate, and began to make the kind of “I am” statements of power familiar from Judeo-Christian texts.
Chapter 6 on “Myth and Religion, Myth and Cult, Myth and Ritual” is the least satisfying in the book. While it laudably makes use of concrete examples (the myth of Prometheus’s sacrifice at Mecone, and several accounts of cult statues), the discussion meanders and leads only to the unsurprising conclusion that myths often explain the origins of cults. In fact, his examples show how myths about cult statues have religious meanings more various than the bare etiological function: the myth of the Palladion deals with the concept of the civic talisman, while myths of statues that miraculously move (or refuse to be moved) are assertions of divine power, making the case for belief-that.
Edmunds’s expertise in the interpretation of myth comes to the fore in chapter 7, as he authoritatively discusses the myth-ritual theory, psychoanalytic interpretations (with emphasis on Freud), and various forms of structuralism. His description of the interrelations between the work of Harrison, Freud, Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Burkert, and Vernant is an instructive vignette of intellectual history, and in chapter 8 he similarly addresses the comparative approaches focused on Indo-European, Near Eastern, and folklore materials.
Chapter 9, in my opinion, is the reason to buy the book. It addresses the problem of “segmentation” (how do we define the beginning and ending of a myth, and what are its constituent parts?) and explains the allied concepts of typology and morphology, all of which are terms arising from the work of folklorists in the classification of tales. As Edmunds notes, scholars working with Greek materials have only rarely recognized the problem of segmentation, preferring instead to proceed without a theoretical framework or shared terminology.
While Edmunds is skeptical (xxv, 147) about the potential contribution of the cognitive sciences, these fields have much to offer students of myth, from the interface between narratology and cognition in theories about segmentation (David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, 2009), to Dan Sperber’s model of the “epidemiology of representations,” which elucidates processes of oral transmission (Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, 1996), to the role of “minimally counterintuitive” concepts such as magical objects and hybrid creatures in making narratives memorable (Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained, 2001).
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[Review length: 1069 words • Review posted on February 18, 2022]