Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate the evolution
of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions,
is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as
found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, is inherently political, as
Gilbert Cuthbertson has urged.
The earlier inhabitants of the Balkan
Peninsula were an agricultural people who, using Animism,
assigned a spirit to every aspect of nature. Eventually, these vague spirits
assumed human forms and entered the local mythology as gods.
When tribes from the north of the Balkan Peninsula invaded, they brought with
them a new pantheon of gods, based on conquest, force,
prowess in battle, and violent heroism. Other older gods of the agricultural
world fused with those of the more powerful invaders or else faded into
insignificance.
After the middle of the Archaic period, myths about relationships
between male gods and male heroes became more and more frequent, indicating the
parallel development of pedagogic pederasty (eros paidikos,
παιδικὸς ἔρως), thought to
have been introduced around 630 BC. By the end of the fifth century BC, poets
had assigned at least one eromenos, an adolescent boy who was their sexual companion, to
every important god except Ares and to many legendary figures.
Previously existing myths, such as those of Achilles
and Patroclus,
also then were cast in a pederastic light.Alexandrian poets at first, then more generally literary mythographers in the
early Roman Empire, often readapted stories of Greek mythological characters in
this fashion.
The achievement of epic poetry was to create story-cycles and, as a
result, to develop a new sense of mythological chronology. Thus Greek mythology
unfolds as a phase in the development of the world and of humans.
While self-contradictions in these stories make an absolute timeline
impossible, an approximate chronology may be discerned. The resulting
mythological "history of the world" may be divided into three or four
broader periods:
1.
The myths of origin or age of
gods (Theogonies, "births of gods"): myths about the origins of
the world, the gods, and the human race.
2.
The age when gods and mortals mingled freely: stories of
the early interactions between gods, demigods,
and mortals.
3.
The age of heroes (heroic age), where
divine activity was more limited. The last and greatest of the heroic legends
is the story of the Trojan War and after (which is regarded by some
researchers as a separate fourth period).
While the age of gods often has been of more interest to
contemporary students of myth, the Greek authors of the archaic and classical
eras had a clear preference for the age of heroes, establishing a chronology
and record of human accomplishments after the questions of how the world came
into being were explained. For example, the heroic Iliad and Odyssey
dwarfed the divine-focused Theogony and Homeric Hymns in both size and
popularity. Under the influence of Homer the "hero cult" leads to a
restructuring in spiritual life, expressed in the separation of the realm of
the gods from the realm of the dead (heroes), of the Chthonic
from the Olympian.
In the Works and Days, Hesiod makes use of a scheme of Four Ages of Man
(or Races): Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. These races or ages are separate
creations of the gods, the Golden Age belonging to the reign of Cronos, the
subsequent races the creation of Zeus. The poet regards it as the worst; the
presence of evil was explained by the myth of Pandora,
when all of the best of human capabilities, save hope, had been spilled out of
her overturned jar.
In Metamorphoses,
Ovid follows Hesiod's concept of the four ages.
Credit : wikipedia
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น