But what is myth?
Written by Greta Hawes and Scott Smith
Anyone teaching a course on Greek myth — or writing a book on it — will inevitably find themselves having to define what myth is. And they will (almost as inevitably) conclude that myth is pretty much undefinable.
We have no such out.
As a “born digital” initiative, MANTO is built on a data model. And that data model requires that we specify the object of our analysis in advance. In short, we need to say (if not know) what myth is in order to collect and analyse its data.
Over time, we have developed a basic, pragmatic model of Greek myth. This ‘ontology’ is a formal expression of what myth is within the bounds of this project. Inevitably, it simplifies and homogenizes a very complex cultural tradition. It’s not supposed to align perfectly with the myriad ancient conceptions of myth, but it does at least provide a working framework for them to sit within.
A useful starting point was Tolkien’s idea of the ‘secondary world’ — a fictional universe with its own spatial and temporal dimensions, and biological and cultural norms. Most crucially, a secondary world is coherent and consistent: in principle, you could draw a map of it, or write its history, or conduct anthropological (or botanical, or biological, or sociological) studies of its inhabits. So, although it is separate from the ‘primary world’ of our reality, we nonetheless experience it as similarly full and rich.
Of course, what makes Greek myth so difficult to work with is that it departs from the purely fictional model of (e.g.) Middle Earth in significant ways. Firstly, it was never entirely separate from the here-and-now of the “primary world”. Myth was the deep past of the Mediterranean, and in historical times traces of it could still be discerned: cites had tombs of mythic heroes; genealogical relationships between these heroes were the basis for diplomatic relationships; and mythic events explained why rituals were conducted as they were.
The second major point of difference is that Greek myth was not created by a single author. What we think of as a single tradition is the product of thousands of disparate communities and thousands storytellers and artists. The same myth could be told in radically different ways depending on the perspective of the teller and the interests of the audience. It is an inherently messy target for analysis.
The defining feature of myths for us is the fact that they narrate events that took place in the distant past. We have found chronological markers much easier to work with than (e.g.) the story’s function, context, or perceived plausibility. Our model of Greek myth looks something like this:
The MANTO ontology. Graphic: Glen Goodwin.
Essentially, we posit that the mythic period and the historical period are two distinct worlds, each describable in its own way. So, while we can date events in the historical world very accurately, even to the day, events in the mythical world can only be dated relative to each other (e.g. the Seven against Thebes took place roughly a generation before the Trojan War). Equally, the things possible in these worlds are different: for example, people in the mythical period could be born directly from the earth (i.e. by autochthony), whereas people in the historical period cannot; people in the mythical period might encounter flying horses, but people in the historical period do not.
Nonetheless, these periods exist on the same timeline, and (largely) in the same geographical space. This means that the events of the mythical period can impact the historical present: weapons used by heroes might be preserved in temples, springs created by gods might still provide water, and cities founded by Heracles might still flourish.
(All this of course begs the question of when the mythical period ended, and when the historical one began. Ancient writers were seldom clear on this: their notions of events in what we would call the early archaic period were pretty vague, hence our “floating gap”. For the purposes of MANTO, we make the end of the mythical period 5 generations after the return of the descendants of Heracles to the Peloponnese. In some ways, this is an arbitrary point (why not four generations, or six?). In others, it seems about right: Pausanias’ account suggests that even those communities like the Spartans and the Messenians who could give long lists of Heraclid kings do not seem to have stories to attach to the names after about five generations.)
All this is beginning to look very tidy — too tidy to be correct! This entire project presumes that Greek myths can be collected together into a single network, and yet one of the aims of MANTO is to make clear that this network was full of messy divergences. In short, inconsistencies and disputes are not bugs of myth - they are features of the system. Our database must be flexible enough to tolerate this: the next blog post will describe our solution.