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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Pre-Christian European & Mediterranean religions > Ancient Greek religion
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Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Hardcover)
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Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Hardcover)
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The Greek myths are characteristically fabulous; they are full of
monsters, metamorphoses, and the supernatural. However, they could
be told in other ways as well. This volume charts ancient
dissatisfaction with the excesses of myth, and the various attempts
to cut these stories down to size by explaining them as
misunderstood accounts of actual events. In the hands of ancient
rationalizers, the hybrid forms of the Centaurs become early
horse-riders, seen from a distance; the Minotaur the result of an
illicit liaison, not an inter-species love affair; and Cerberus,
nothing more than a notorious snake with a lethal bite. Such
approaches form an indigenous mode of ancient myth criticism, and
show Greeks grappling with the value and utility of their own
narrative traditions. Rationalizing interpretations offer an
insight into the practical difficulties inherent in distinguishing
myth from history in ancient Greece, and indeed the fragmented
nature of myth itself as a conceptual entity. By focusing on six
Greek authors (Palaephatus, Heraclitus, Excerpta Vaticana, Conon,
Plutarch, and Pausanias) and tracing the development of
rationalistic interpretation from the fourth century BC to the
Second Sophistic (1st-2nd centuries AD) and beyond, Rationalizing
Myth in Antiquity shows that, far from being marginalized as it has
been in the past, rationalization should be understood as a
fundamental component of the pluralistic and shifting network of
Greek myth as it was experienced in antiquity.
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