Poets and artists have drawn inspiration from Greek mythology from antiquity to the present day, discovering modern importance and relevance in Classical mythical subjects. Greek mythology has since had a significant impact on the arts and literature of Western civilization, which inherited much of Greek culture.Īlthough people from all countries, eras, and stages of civilization have created myths to explain the existence and workings of natural phenomena, recount the exploits of gods or heroes, or justify social or political institutions, the Greek myths have remained unrivaled in the Western world as sources of imaginative and appealing ideas. In general, though, the Greeks’ common piety regarded the myths as accurate facts. The most critical Greeks, such as the philosopher Plato in the 5th–4th century BCE, understood that the stories contained a significant element of fabrication. Greek mythology is the collection of tales about the gods, heroes, and rites of the ancient Greeks. Homeric and other mythical events complement the extant literary material in the subsequent Archaic (c. However, the severe formality of the style makes much of the identification impossible, and there is little inscriptional evidence to aid academics in identification and interpretation. Geometric patterns on ceramics from the eighth century BCE show events from the Trojan cycle and Heracles’ exploits. Unfortunately, because the Linear B script was primarily employed to record inventories, the evidence for myth and ritual at Mycenaean and Minoan sites is essentially enormous. Such findings provide light on features of Minoan society from around 2200 to 1450 BCE and Mycenaean civilization from approximately 1600 to 1200 BCE both eras were followed by a Dark Age that lasted until approximately 800 BCE. The discovery of the Mycenaean civilization by Heinrich Schliemann, a 19th-century German amateur archaeologist, and the discovery of the Minoan civilization in Crete by Sir Arthur Evans, a 20th-century English archaeologist, is critical to understanding the development of myth and ritual in the Greek world in the twenty-first century.
The ancient myths and tales were collected for modern audiences by writers such as the 2nd-century BC Greek mythographer Apollodorus of Athens and the 1st-century BC Roman historian Gaius Julius Hyginus. Mythological people and events, for example, exist in Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ 5th-century plays and Pindar’s lyric poetry.
Later Greek poets and painters drew on and expanded on these sources in their own work. It includes a complex family tree of elements, gods, and goddesses derived from Chaos, including Gaia (Earth), Ouranos (Sky), Pontos (Sea), and Tartaros (the Underworld). The Theogony narrates the tale of the universe’s evolution from nothingness (Chaos, a primal vacuum) to existence. The poet Hesiod’s Theogony, written around 700 BC, provided the earliest recorded cosmogony, or genesis tale, of Greek mythology.
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Many high schools, collegiate, and professional sports teams (such as the Titans, Spartans, and Trojans) draw their names from mythical origins. In contrast, the website is named after a race of mythological female warriors. Nike footwear, for example, is named after the goddess of victory. They don’t bother introducing the gods and goddesses as their major protagonists because readers and listeners are already familiar with them.ĭid you know that? Many consumer goods have names derived from Greek mythology. Homer’s epics from the eighth century BC, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, for example, portray the narrative of the (mythical) Trojan War as both a divine and a human battle. Their plots and themes emerged gradually in the archaic and classical periods’ written literature. Instead, the oldest Greek myths were part of an oral tradition that originated in the Bronze Age. There is no original source in Greek mythology that introduces all of the myths’ characters and storylines, as there is in the Christian Bible or the Hindu Vedas. They described everything from religious ceremonies to the weather, and they provided meaning to the world they observed. “The first is to respond to difficult inquiries from youngsters, such as ‘Who built the world?’ What will happen at the end? What was the name of the first man? ‘What happens to souls after death?’ … The second role of myth is to legitimize an existing social structure and explain ancient rituals and customs.” Stories about gods and goddesses, heroes, and monsters were an essential element of everyday life in ancient Greece. “Myth serves two purposes,” stated poet and scholar Robert Graves in 1955.