Publisher's Synopsis
We speak of an Achilles' heel, and veterans read of Achilles's adventures to help them deal with their own traumatic experiences in combat. The days of the week and months of the year derive from mythological figures. We call our products Ajax, Hermes, Trojan, Mars, Taurus, and Nike. Movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou? place ancient stories in modern settings. Classical mythology is a vital cultural narrative, and the ancient myths continue to inspire our music, movies, advertising, and literature and to inform the questions we still ask about our cultural values and choices. Proceeding topically, this book compares myths across time and cultures.
People tell myths of themselves in order to communicate key ideas about their own culture. By means of myths, people explore and explain creation and composition of the natural world and the divine world, their own origins as an identifiable group, and the features of their everyday lives and social interactions, especially the occasions of conflict (within the family, in the city, between nations) and of uncertainty (death and the afterlife). Greco-Roman mythology forms the core narrative of this book, because these stories have an unparalleled legacy in the Western tradition, owing to twenty-five hundred years of constant retelling and reinterpretation. The meaning of some mythological characters changes over time and geography: e.g., Odysseus was a hero in one time but a villain in others. Hercules could be a stupid oaf or a philosophical sage. Similarly, the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas created myths that parallel those of Greece and Rome: e.g., stories of creation, the story of the flood. Each chapter includes boxes, illustrations, and a list of further readings. This volume is a thorough overview of ancient Western mythology, an overview that both reveals myth-making and myth-telling as fundamental modes of communication and illuminates for modern readers what the ancients actually believed about themselves.
