Before television, there was Greek mythology.
It, too, was was full of heroes, villains,
betrayals, abductions, murders, and other
fun stuff that we love to see happen to other
people.
Greek mythology has been retold so many times
for so many centuries that our modern understanding
of it is sometimes a little bit off.
In fact, the modern mix of pop culture and
actual mythology has left us with a sort of
twisted idea about the Greek myths.
Let's straighten that out.
Ancient Greece
You'll often hear people talk about how things
were back in ancient Greece, but we have some
bad news.
There really wasn't ever any one "ancient
Greece."
According to Professor of Greek Culture Paul
Cartledge, the Greek empire was divided up
into city-states.
There were over 1,000 of these from Turkey
to France.
There was no globalization in those days,
so even though the city-states existed under
the umbrella of the Greek empire, they had
very different traditions.
That means the Greek myths we're all familiar
with were not consistent from one part of
the Greek empire to another, and the gods
and goddesses considered important also varied
by region.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"
The Trojan War
While we're talking history, or lack thereof,
here's another one for you.
The image of the wooden horse full of malevolent
Greek soldiers is such a part of world consciousness
that most people never question whether it
actually happened.
The Trojan War story appears in Homer's poem
The Iliad, which was written in the eighth
or ninth century B.C.
So far, historians haven't been able to find
evidence that the characters in the story
actually existed — Helen, supposedly the
whole reason for the war, is probably total
fiction.
But Homer may have based his story on a real
city.
In 1870, a German adventurer excavated a nine-layer
city in Turkey and found what he believed
to be Helen's jewels.
He was wrong — the jewels predated fictional
Helen by a thousand years — but he did reveal
a city that resembled fictional Troy.
The city appears to have perished in an earthquake,
so archaeologists came up with a rather tenuously
connected theory.
Maybe, just maybe, the Trojan horse was symbolic
of Poseidon, who was the god of horses, as
well as the sea and of earthquakes, like the
one that brought the city to rubble.
"I'm not expecting you to forgive me."
Greek Satan
In the Christian tradition, the underworld
is ruled by Satan.
He's all about tempting innocent humans to
the dark side and then throwing them into
a pit of hellfire for all eternity.
To reconcile this with Greek mythology, most
people project the fire and brimstone of Hell,
along with the evil of its overlord, onto
lords of the underworld from other traditions.
But that concept of pure evil doesn't really
exist in the Greek tradition.
Hades was indeed god of the dead, but was
not the bright red, horned, cloven-hoofed
monster we like to imagine sits on a throne
in the underworld.
Hades not only ruled the kingdom of the dead
and presided at funerals, he was also "god
of the hidden wealth of the earth," which
meant that fertile soil and mines were under
his domain as well.
Pandora's box
In what's perhaps our most shocking revelation,
the box that Pandora famously opened, which
set forth all the world's evils, was not actually
a box.
It was a jar.
Pandora was the first human created by the
gods.
They made her out of clay and then pretty
much immediately married her off to some random
god.
As a wedding present, Zeus gave her a jar.
Maybe she thought it had homemade jam in it
or something because she opened it.
Instead of delicious strawberry preserves,
though, the jar was full of evil spirits.
The spirits flew away to plague mankind forever,
and leave us marveling at what a total jerk
move it was on Zeus' part to even gift evil
spirits in the first place.
There's no going back from that.
"Pandora doesn't go back in the box."
Cupid and love
Valentine's Day is associated with Cupid,
even though Valentine was a Christian saint,
said to have performed secret marriages after
the practice was outlawed.
So how did Cupid get mixed up in all this?
He was the Roman version of Eros, the Greek
god of love.
On Valentine's Day, Eros-slash-Cupid is usually
depicted as a chubby baby with wings, but
in the Greek stories he was an adult, and
kind of sinister.
Instead of helping young lovers connect, Eros
preferred to mess with people's heads.
He had two quivers — one with golden arrows,
which made the recipient fall in love, and
the other with lead arrows, which made the
recipient roll their eyes in disgust at the
person who was on the receiving end of the
golden arrow.
Maybe his transformation from adult male giver-of-misery
to cute, chubby baby with wings makes a certain
amount of sense.
There are already plenty of things to torment
us, we don't need to be tormented by the god
of love, too.
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