Greek Mythology: Pretty Depressing, Most of It

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, committed violent and senseless acts. The king of the gods, Zeus, went around raping women, and his jealous wife Hera went around afflicting the women. Apollo, the god of Truth, was a liar. In addition to this, he loved a human woman, Coronis, but she didn’t like him, so he had her killed. And it goes downhill from there.

The human heroes, as well as the demigods, were also far from being models of behavior. Hercules, for example, was a total jerk except when he was depressed. One time he went crazy and killed his family. Then he felt such intense remorse that he forced his famous Labors upon himself. The Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Even after reading about it, I could not understand why Medea killed her children.

Punishments, meted by the gods upon demigods or humans, seemed random. Some, like Tantalus, deserved the eternal torture that they received in Hades. (In his case, he was eternally hungry, and fruit hung right before his mouth but moved away whenever he reached for it, forever, and he was eternally thirsty, and water came right up to his mouth, but flowed away when he tried to drink it, forever.) I think Tantalus was one of the guys who killed his children. There were a lot of those. But Sisyphus was condemned to roll the stone uphill forever from a minor infraction. The Danaïds had to carry water, forever and forever and forever, in jars with holes in them, then refill them, for reasons that were not clear to me even when I read about them. And poor Oedipus. It was apparently the whim of the gods that condemned him to kill his father and marry his mother, and not realize he was doing it. The mother of Tithonis asked that he receive eternal life. The gods granted it. But she forgot to ask for him to remain young. So, he lived forever, just getting older and older and older. He must be a pile of flesh somewhere even today; if you step in a pile of goo, it might be him. Helen was immortal unless someone killed her.

The logical Greek view of the universe, as written by philosophers, came after a long history in which people thought of themselves as part of a universe that made no sense, and could never make sense. I can imagine living in a world of Aristotle, where effects follow causes, but I cannot imagine living in the world of Homer. The gods were just like humans, some good, some bad, most of them alternately and unpredictably both. The only difference is that they were powerful and immortal. How can you even get up in the morning if you believe the world is unpredictable?

The Romans were so unimaginative that they took the whole load of Greek mythology and adopted it as their own, just changing some names, like Zeus into Jupiter, Chronos into Saturn, Hephaestus into Vulcan, etc.

There were some bright spots. You will find them in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there was one brief moment of humanity, in which Achilles returned the body of Hector to Hector’s grieving father, Priam the king of Troy. And the Odyssey is stirring because, despite the stupidity of fate, Odysseus (Ulysses) never gave up his quest to return home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, now two decades older. Some consider the Odyssey the first, and possibly the greatest, novel ever written.

Another bright spot is that the Greeks did not yet have our modern sense of racism. Andromeda, one of the beautiful princesses rescued from sea monsters, was Ethiopian.

Against the background of randomness, the priests of the gods (especially at the oracles) could pretty much make up whatever they wanted and claim that it was the will of their particular god. The priests of Zeus would listen to the susurrus of the wind in the oak leaves to discern the god’s will. However much I love the wind in the trees, I think these priests were just making shit up.

The only thing worse than Greek mythology was Norse mythology, which was just as grim, but the gods, rather than being immortal, had to eventually die in the Götterdämmerung.

So, dear students, if you have to study Greek mythology, be prepared for some grim and tiresome stuff, except for an occasional beam of light that will enter your mind the way Zeus entered through a tiny slit into the dome where the human woman Danae dwelt.