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Greek myth comes to us through many different channels. Our best
source for the ways that local communities told and used these
stories is a travel guide from the second century AD, the
Periegesis of Pausanias. Pausanias gives us the clearest glimpse of
ancient Greek myth as a living, local tradition. He shows us that
the physical landscape was nothing without the stories of heroes
and gods that made sense of it, and reveals what was at stake in
claims to possess the past. He also demonstrates how myths guided
curious travellers to particular places, the kinds of responses
they provoked, and the ways they could be tested or disputed. The
Periegesis attests to a form of cultural tourism we would still
recognise: it is animated by the desire to see for oneself distant
places previously only read about. It shows us how travellers might
map the literary landscapes that they imagined on to the reality,
and how locals might package their cities to meet the demands of
travellers' expectations. In Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth,
Greta Hawes uses Pausanias's text to illuminate the spatial
dynamics of myth. She reveals the significance of local stories in
an Empire connected by a shared literary repertoire, and the
unifying power of a tradition made up paradoxically of narratives
that took diverse, conflicting forms on the ground. We learn how
storytelling and the physical infrastructures of the Greek mainland
were intricately interwoven such that the decline or flourishing of
the latter affected the archive of myth that Pausanias transmits.
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 (first to second 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.
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.
Polybius boldly declared that 'now that all places have become
accessible by land or sea, it is no longer appropriate to use poets
and writers of myth as witnesses of the unknown' (4.40.2). And yet,
in reality, the significance of myth did not diminish as the
borders of the known world expanded. Storytelling was always an
inextricable part of how the ancient Greeks understood their
environment; mythic maps existed alongside new, more concrete,
methods of charting the contours of the earth. Specific landscape
features acted as repositories of myth and spurred their retelling;
myths, in turn, shaped and gave sense to natural and built
environments, and were crucial to the conceptual resonances of
places both unknown and known. This volume brings together
contributions from leading scholars of Greek myth, literature,
history, and archaeology to examine the myriad intricate ways in
which ancient Greek myth interacted with the physical and
conceptual landscapes of antiquity. The diverse range of approaches
and topics highlights in particular the plurality and pervasiveness
of such interactions. The collection as a whole sheds new light on
the central importance of storytelling in Greek conceptions of
space.
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