The Greeks and Their Mythology
Fragments from Jacob Burckhardt's "The Greeks and Greek Civilization"
Sections
Introduction
Goal: Discover the Vital Forces Active in Greek Life
The task, as I conceive it, is to treat the history of Greek habits of thought and mental attitudes, and to seek to establish the vital forces, both constructive and destructive, that were active in Greek life. It is not the narrative mode, though indeed primarily through history (since they are part of universal history), that the Greeks must be studied in their essential peculiarities, those in which they differ from the ancient Orient and from the nations that came after them, and yet represent the great transition between the two. It is the history of the Greek mind or spirit that must bet the aim of the whole study. The details, and even what are called the events, can appear only as supporting testimony to the general, not for their own sake; for the factual knowledge we want relates to the habits of thought, which are of course themselves also facts. The sources, when examined in this sense, will speak to us in quite another way then they do to the more researcher into antiquarian material. [^]
Each Generation Must Take Possession of the Classics
It would certainly be an advantage not to be addicted to present day literature, which appeals so much more directly to the nerves; and above all not to the reading of newspapers. Whatever belongs to the present easily combines with our material self-interest; what belongs to the past is at least more likely to become associated with our spiritual nature, and to fuse with higher interests. Then our eyes may gradually quicken, and we may even learn to succeed in eliciting the secrets of the past. The fact that thousands have done this work before us cannot save us the effort. This kind of work is never 'finished with', never done once and for all. In any case each age has a new and different way of looking at the more remote periods of the past; for instance there might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now. [^]
The Greeks and Us
We do not set out to glorify, and will not allow enthusiasm to color our judgement. As Boeckh says 'The Greeks were less happy than most people suppose.' But the role of Greek intellectual life in world history, its position between East and West, must be made clear.
What they did and suffered, they appear to have done and suffered freely, and thus differently from all earlier races. They seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity.
This is why in their creativeness and their potentialities they seem the representatives of genius on earth, with all the failings and sufferings that this entails. In the life of the mind they reached frontiers which the rest of mankind cannot permit themselves to fall short of, at least in their attempts to acknowledge and to profit, even where they are inferior to the Greeks in the capacity for achievement. It is for this reason that posterity needs to study the Greeks; if we ignore them we are simply accepting our own decline.
Their knowledge and their faculty of observation were extraordinary. By their study of the world the Greeks illuminate not only their own nature but that of all other ancient peoples; without them, and the philhellenic Romans, there would be no knowledge of past times, for all other nations attended to nothing but themselves, their own citadels, temples and gods. All subsequent objective perception of the world is only elaboration on the framework the Greeks began. We see with the eyes of the Greeks and use their phrases when we speak.
It is self-evidently the special duty of the educated to perfect and complete, as well as they can, the picture of the continuity of the world and mankind from the beginning. This marks off conscious beings from the unconscious barbarian. The vision of both past and future is what distinguishes human beings form the animals; and for us the past may have its reproaches, and the future its anxieties, of which the animals know nothing.
So we shall always be in debt to thee Greeks in the perception of the world, where they are close to us; and their admirers in the realm of creative ability, in which they are great, alien and remote from us. And it is because cultural history brings out this relation some more clearly than the history of events that it must claim our preference. [^]
The Greeks and Their Mythology
Historical Greeks Not Aware of Their Origins
Here we must take account of a general assumption which coloured the whole Greek viewpoint. It is extremely probable that the Greeks came to their country from somewhere else, whether we suppose their previous habitation to have been in the Caucasus, in Asia Minor or in Europe; but it is certain that as a nation they had lost all awareness of this. The migrations which were still part of common knowledge were not thought to have originated outside the country but to have been movements within the Greek lands; the few recognized exceptions (Cadmus, Pelops, Danaus etc.) had to do only with royal houses, not whole peoples.'
So while the whole nation considered itself an original autochthonous population, a few Greek communities also took a very special pride in the claim that they were still living on the very spot where long ago the human race itself had come into being with them. True, the words autochthon, gegenes (aboriginal, sprung from the soil) sometimes have only the negative sense that beyond a certain person nothing earlier is known, and may elsewhere be applied merely to the non-refugees who in mythical times were almost in the minority, since migrations, expulsions and flights from persecution were so much the rule. But there are many unquestioned sources to prove that in the main these epithets were taken literally and bestowed as a title of honour. [^]
Note in What the Greeks Claimed Originality
Several inventions too were Greek in origin. The Argo was the first ship to sail the seas; in Alesiai, near Sparta, Myles (the miller), son of the first ruler, Lelex, had the first mill (Pausanias 3.20.2), and the Athenians even boasted that it was they who had taught men to make fire (Plutarch, Kimon 10). In general, though, the Greeks easily accepted the idea that things redolent of human toil and of the banausic were borrowed from abroad — in strong contrast to the modern world, in which industrial inventions are thought to be the greatest achievement of the nations that lay claim to them, so that priorities of this kind lead to serious disputes.
Thus the Greeks conceded that Tyrsenus the Lydian had invented the trumpet, that the shield and helmet,' the war chariot and geometry had come to them from Egypt, the drapery of the statues of Pallas Athena from Libya, the alphabet from Phoenicia, the sundial and the division of the day into hours from Babylon." They were quite content to be the centre of the world and to be able to show the 'navel of the Earth' on their own sacred soil in the temple at Delphi. [^]
An Unhistorical People
This is why we remarked earlier that even the account of the relationship between Hellen and his sons is not to be taken seriously. In modern times genealogy is a laborious critical undertaking, while for the Greeks it was a diversion, and even mythical animals were not left out: there was a general conviction that the sow of Crommyon, slain by Theseus, was the mother of a Calydonian boar.
…Again and again we must overcome the temptation to assume that a people as clever as the Greeks must have had something resembling a critical approach to the past. It is true that they were passionately attached to the particular and the local in their ideas of primeval times, but their antiquarian sense did not extend much beyond the mythical sphere.
…However questionable their actual knowledge of ancient times may have been, myth was a powerful force dominating Greek life and hovering over it all like a wonderful vision, close at hand. It illuminated the whole of the present for the Greeks, everywhere and until a very late date, as though it belonged to a quite recent past; and essentially it presented a sublime reflection of the perceptions and the life of the nation itself. [^]
A Culture and Civilization Primed to Succeed
Other nations, too, have possessed a similar representation of themselves in the shape of their stories about gods and heroes. Whether the relation of the Indians, Persians and Germanic races to their myth was ever comparably intense is a question for experts in these fields. Possibly the great dominating orthodoxies of the Orient and of Egypt, all resulting from later developments, effectively sucked the lifeblood from more ancient legends and gods and heroes, and reduced popular fantasy to the level of fairy stories.
In any case the Greeks enjoyed enormous advantages. They were still in the first phase of their history; as yet they had no experience of a great catastrophe overtaking an already developed culture — neither migration, for the migrations we know of took place within the Greek nation itself; nor invasion by another people, which might have led to a break in the old way of life and obscured the memory of it; nor religious crisis leading to a rigidifying of belief, an orthodoxy; nor, finally, any secular enslavement.
More positively, there was the remarkable good fortune that Hellenic myth, having come into being in a wholly unsophisticated period, yet survived in its full richness into a literate, indeed a highly literary age, and was consequently recorded in astonishing completeness. [^]
My Skepticism Towards Greek Tragedy
Above all it was the rhetoricians of the schools who refused to give upon this substratum of material. Comparisons would be drawn between the fame of Odysseus and that of Nestor; eulogies or condemnations of them would be delivered, speeches composed for and against mythical figures in the court proceedings; pathetic declamations on crucial occasions were put into their mouths; we hear what Cassandra would have said when the wooden horse entered Troy, or Agamemnon at the moment of being murdered, Heracles as he prepared to ascend the funeral pyre, Menelaus at the news of his brother's death, and many similar things. [^]
The Surprising Continuity of Greek Myth
Indeed the surprising thing is not so much that myth was capable of standing up to history, as that it could stand up to itself, that is that mythological tales were not constantly supplanted by other myths - in other words that a consensus was arrived at, with the bards joining on their narratives where a predecessor had started, or where he had left off. [^]
Myth: The Underlying Given Factor in Greek Existence
Myth is the underlying given factor in Greek existence. The whole culture, in everything that was done, remained what it had always been, developing only slowly. The mythological or sacred origin of many outer forms of life was known, and was felt to be very near. The whole Greek nations believed themselves the rightful heirs and successors of the heroic age; wrongs suffered in prehistoric times were still being avenged much later. Herodotus begins his account of the great battle between East and West with the rape of Io, and the Persian War becomes a continuation of the Trojan War. Later, indeed, (in 396 B.C.) when Agesilaus once more took up arms against the Persians, he went to Aulsus on purpose to offer up a solemn sacrifice in imitation of Agamemnon, though his intention was severely frustrated by a surprise attack of Theban cavalry. Ancestral exploits in remote antiquity were employed as gambits in official negotiations. Thus, before the battle of Plataea, the Athenians argued very seriously that they had a better right than the Tegeans to wage the preliminary engagement on the grounds that they had formerly protected the Heraclids vanquished the Amazons, given burial to the seven heroes who went out against Thebes, fought bravely in the Trojan War and, only as an afterthought, that they also won the battle of Marathon. Athenian funeral orations for the fallen made use of such themes over and over again as a matter of course; only Pericles, in his funeral oration, dared to leave out these mythical exploits and confined himself to the real powers of Athens then existing.
When the people of Megara voted honorary citizenship to Alexander the Great he laughed; but they said they had never before bestowed it on anyone except Heracles. The Spartans too called upon Heracles as their ancestral hero and upon his sons, the Heraclids, both in war and in official decrees. Traditional consumes and customs enjoyed effective protection through the emphasis on their mythical origins. [^]
Vigorous Defense of Myth As the Ideal Basis of Existence
Given the fixed intention of linking the present with the remotest past, it would be foolish to expect that any precise and detailed knowledge of that past could flourish. No criticism is capable of analyzing into its component parts this whole, brought together by the youthful nation's powerful vision; and in fact this need cause us no anxiety. Not only mythical events, but some that were historical too, were transformed by long retelling until they took on a typical and characteristic resonance. Our recognition of this has its own value for our understanding of the Greeks.
Here, then, was a nation which vigorously defended its myth as the ideal basis of its existence, and tried at all costs to make connections between that myth and practical life. It was not only this that made history difficult; this people tolerated no historical drama on its stage and paid little attention to the historical epic, that is, the literary treatment of the relatively recent past. [^]
The Incalculable Enrichment of the Greeks
This, then, was the spiritual disposition of the Greek people; and on them the greatest destiny in the history of the world was to devolve. Caught in the toils of their mythical past, only slowly becoming capable of history in any true sense, attaining their full stature in imaginative poetry, they were destined in the course of time to be the pioneers in the understanding of all nations, and in communicating this understanding to others; to conquer vast territories and peoples of the East, to make their culture that of a whole world, in which Rome and Asia came together, and to become, through Hellenism, the great leavening force of ancient times.
At the same time they were to secure for us, through the survival of this culture, continuity in the development of the world; for it is only through the Greeks that different epochs, and our interest in them, are linked and strung together. Without them we would have no knowledge of earlier times, and what we might know without them, we would feel no desire to know. Besides this incalculable enrichment of thought processes, we have also inherited as an extra gift what remains of their creative achievement - art and poetry.
We see with their eyes and use their phrases when we speak.
Yet, of all civilized peoples, it was the Greeks who inflicted the bitterest and most deeply felt suffering upon themselves. [^]
Thanks for these excerpts. Oswald Spengler made some of these points as well in "Untergang des Abendlands". That the Greeks were so uninterested in industrial achievements is fascinating - I recently read that they had a proto-steam engine, but considered it merely as a party trick. To the modern mind it's inconceivable that it didn't occur to them to develop it further - but they just looked very differently at the world.
I do wonder though if we aren't missing a few things, especially concerning the "Greek Dark Age" (1200-800 BCE). There seems to have been a lot of mayhem, and perhaps over the centuries people simply forgot much about their history. Perhaps there was also a deliberate framing for political reasons that helped the process along. This might also be why some of the great works survived, while others didn't, which might warp our perception.