[no dialogue]
>> Dean Lanham:
Well good morning.
Thank you for waiting just
a second as
things are put into place.
I am Allen Lanham, I am Dean of
Library services and it's a
pleasure to welcome you to the
next session of our Symposium on
Ancient Egypt, sorry Ancient
Greece, because last year
we were in Egypt, you know and
of course now we have
someone from Turkey
here so we can
talk about lots of things
old, I suppose.
And new, of course, because of
you, but welcome to you all.
You have quite a presentation
and speaker ahead of you.
She's always extremely
interesting to listen to.
We are all sort of mystified
perhaps by myth and culture and
she has been talking and
researching this for a good
period of her career.
I love that 9th graders are
here, because that was when I
was in Miss Hamilton's class in
English and we used Miss
Hamilton's book on Myths and
Greek and Roman Myths and it was
eye opening to me and I can
assure you that the more time
that you spend with the
characters and the gods and
goddesses and other persons that
your life will be enriched
because you will find signs of
these all over the place, and in
so many disciplines.
And yet, Miss Hamilton really
the teacher, rather than
the writer, didn't quite impress
that upon us as 9th graders
but I found it to be true and I
still have my book at home
and it's on the table and
I occasionally need
to look things there.
So, we are glad you are here
today and congratulations
for you to bring young
scholars here
to be with us this morning.
Dr. Wahby, Dr. Wafeek Wahby is
going to present our speaker.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
Well that is a difficult task to
present our speaker, because
fifteen years ago when I
came to Eastern, first time,
she was getting her
faculty laureat, I think, and it
was very encouraging to me to
see how Eastern honors their
faculty at the time.
Since then, she has been so
influential in many capacities,
not to mention our symposium for
technology where I have to
introduce her with that again.
And if you have been here last
year, I did that.
She is the only person that I
know of that you can give her a
pen like this and she can
capture the attention of the
speaker for forty-five minutes,
nonstop, talking about the
technology of writing.
She is fascinating, you will see
that first hand, if you know
her before, you know what I am
talking about, if not you
will enjoy the story-telling way
of bedtime story, and in the
meantime, the depths of scholar.
Here is Bonnie Irwin.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
I've heard it said that there
was a young woman and her
name was Arachne
and Arachne wasn't that
important a person.
Her father wasn't rich, he
wasn't a famous politician or
anything, but Arachne had a
skill that was unduplicated
among mortal women.
She could weave.
She could spin wool and
she could weave.
Her father would dye the yarn in
these rich colors for her,
including the royal purple
and she would weave
these amazing tapestries.
But, unfortunately, Arachne was
also a little arrogant about it.
She knew she was good.
She knew she was really good.
She knew she was probably the
best in the world
and so she was pretty vocal
about that.
She talked about it all the
time, how great she was as she
was weaving she was talking
about how wonderful she is.
And so one day the goddess
Athena who is sort of the patron
of crafts among many other
things, disguises herself and
comes down to earth in the guise
of an old woman and she says,
'you know, you probably
shouldn't boast so much about
your skills, because jealousy
is a bad thing, and you may
inspire that in others, and
there might be other people out
there that you don't know about
or even goddesses that
are better at this
than you are."
And she said, "you know,"
Arachne replies, "Well, yeah,
but I, if Athena was right here
today, I would challenge her
to a weaving competition and
I've got no concerns, I'd
wipe the floor with her.
I know I am a better weaver than
Athena is, hands down."
So Athena goes back up into the
heavens and she comes back
down as herself, and "did
you challenge me
to a weaving competition?"
And Arachne says, "Sure".
And so the two of them go at it.
Now this is weaving
traditionally, right?
Big looms, they are whipping
those shuttles back and
forth and they are making these
huge, beautiful tapestries.
And Athena makes one of all of
the gods and they are all
sitting there on their thrones
and they're noble and
they're serious and they
are dignified
and it is a beautiful tapestry.
Well, Arachne is also weaving a
tapestry of the gods, but
what she is showing is Zeus
disguising himself as a bull,
and seducing and kidnapping
Europa and all of these other
sort of pranks and foibles, and
things that the gods did that
if one of us did them, would
be highly embarrassing.
The tapestry is beautiful; it
is flawless in terms
of its craftsmanship.
And so Athena looks at it, hers
is probably just as good in
terms of the craftsmanship, but
the topic really gets her
angry, and so she continues to
weave in the corners of hers
that says things like danger,
warning, beware of the
gods, you should approach the
gods with piety, and Arachne is
just ignoring this, because she
is having way too much fun
weaving all these entertaining
stories into a tapestry.
And so finally Athena gets so
angry, that she takes the
shuttle from her loom, and
starting banging poor Arachne
on the head and she is just
clubbing the poor girl.
You know, she is just hitting
her on the head, and
Arachne starts to cry, says
stop, stop, I can't do it.
And she finally gets so upset
that she wraps the thread
that she is weaving around her
neck and tries to hang
herself from her loom, because
Athena won't stop beating her.
And so then, Athena finally
takes pity on her, and sprinkles
her with an ointment that has
had some secret herbs in it that
only Athena and Hackety know
what they are.
And instead of dying, Arachne
starts to change.
Her ears fall off, her nose
falls off, her arms and
legs shrink into her body, and
her fingers grow longer and
longer until all there is, is
this big round belly with
long fingers sticking out.
And she continues as a spider to
weave to this day.
All right.
That's one of my favorites,
right?
That's the story of Arachne.
So the topic today is "Did the
Greeks Believe Their Myths?"
We are going to talk a lot about
what belief means, because you
can do all kinds of things with
that word, and
whether myths are true.
But, what is it, what are the
take-aways from this myth?
Why would anybody tell the story
in the first place?
And yes, this is audience
participation time.
>> Attendee: 
[Unclear dialogue] humility
towards towards the gods.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
All right.
A human being should not be
very arrogant, right?
That we should honor the
gods, we should
approach them with piety.
We should approach them with
a degree of humility.
Which Greek human beings were
in the stories at least,
defying that rule a lot.
So, that's the big underlying
lesson and perhaps there's
the truth there that as a mortal
we don't have the power that
the gods do and so we should
approach them with
caution, with respect.
And then, there's the really
basic, if you take like
the Rutgers and Kipling just so
story, this is where spiders
come from story.
All right.
Now if we approach this myth and
ask whether people believed it,
many Greek myths, particularly
this kind, were told by
mothers and nurses, and
grandmothers to children.
Did we believe these kinds of
stories when we were kids?
To an extent, you know, spiders
are kind of weird and they
are kind of creepy and we are
curious as to where they come
from, and so, somebody tells us
a story that explains where a
spider comes from.
But would an adult Greek person
still have believed this story.
Would they have believed the
part about there was once
a human being who defied the
goddess and she had to pay?
Regardless of whether she turned
into a spider because, no
that's a little tricky.
Or would they have just
dismissed it all as fiction?
Which, of course, from our
perspective, it certainly is.
I don't think anybody in this
room believes this story, but my
apologies if you do.
So that's what I want to think
about a little bit today, is how
we pull this apart.
What could people believe and
what they might not have.
The first mistake we usually
make when we talk about
Greek and Roman mythology, is
by far in the west more
popular than all the other
myth traditions.
I used to teach World Mythology,
and students would often be
disappointed if I wasn't doing
Greek or Roman mythology.
That's what they were familiar
with, those were the fun
stories, and so when I pulled
out some Native American
mythology, or some Chinese
mythology it just didn't
have the same cache'.
I think part of it is because we
have these stories told to us
when we are very young.
The story of Arachne actually
comes, and some of you know the
difference between and red book
and a green book in this series.
A red book is Roman and a
green book is Greek.
The first recorded version of
the story of Arachne comes
out of the Roman culture, not
the Greek culture.
But the word Arachne is Greek
and there was a flourishing
world tradition, I had no idea
this myth was told
among the Greeks or not.
But by the time we get to Virgil
and [unclear dialogue] in
the Roman period, it is.
All right.
First thing we tend to do is
lump those two cultures
together, and we call it
Greco-Roman mythology, because
of all the things that were
passed down from
one to the other.
Well, they changed though.
Right?
Even in an oral tradition,
people were just telling the
stories, and not writing
them down.
They are going to change.
And so whether or not Aved who
clearly, by the time you get
here, does not believe this
story, by any stretch of the
imagination, and how he differs
from a Greek person and then
we make the mistake of lumping
all the Greeks together.
We take about a thousand years
of history, and say
this is what they believed.
That's very easy to do.
It is very convenient to do.
It is not entirely accurate.
Correct?
I think we can, if we look at
our own culture, and
throw out a belief.
I read somewhere recently, and
this is a very dangerous phrase
to use, I read somewhere
recently, actually I was
working on a trivia word puzzle
and it was suggested in this
word puzzle, that twenty percent
of Americans do not believe
that the earth rotates
around the sun.
They believe the sun rotates
around the earth.
I don't know if that is true,
or not, but lets' say for
the sake of argument it is.
So, if someone a thousand years
from now says Americans believed
that the sun went around the
earth, or the earth went around
the sun, neither of those
statements are absolutely true.
Because they are both
true in part.
So you think about the
Greek culture.
You've got children, you've got
people with lots of different
levels of education, because as
you'll learn later in this
series, for those of you who
keep coming, I mean the Greeks
were incredibly sophisticated
in their learning,
in their philosophy.
And so, to put that next to, oh
yeah, but they believed in
all these gods, doesn't quite
work all the time, right?
So I guess the first thing that
I would say in response to
the question, do the Greeks
really believe their
myths, is yes and no.
And you are never going to get
a more definite answer from
me all morning, so just
prepare for that.
Because it is just a complicated
question.
Yet these stories had a life
that we still tell them today.
People still want to study them,
and so there is something
about these stories.
There's a man, a French scholar
by the name of Paul Vane who
has written a book that is right
here in Booth Library, which I
stole my title from, which is
just entitled 'Did the
Greeks Believe Their Myths?"
It is an interesting read, and
it talks about many things,
but one thing he talks about is
what he refers to as the
impossibility of the gratuitous
lie, meaning that we can't
make anything up entirely.
There is nothing that doesn't
have some piece of truth
in it when you look a story.
I haven't really had a chance to
really think about this long
enough to tell you if I believe
it absolutely, or not,
but I think it's a really
interesting concept.
Because even in our science
fiction, ok, there are monsters,
there are spaceships, but
relationships are still what
they are, because we can't
create something that
we have no familiarity
with at all.
My husband writes science
fiction and he likes
it as far out there as
possible.
He says I like to make things
up, but we don't
make it up entirely.
So if we look at this story
of Arachne, what is
it that we know?
We know that there are spiders
and that they
came from somewhere.
Now, again, probably didn't
come from this.
We know that there are some
people who are perhaps
more arrogant than they should
be, whether it is in the
face of the gods, or in the face
of her grandmother, who did
she learn to weave from?
There are lots of people behind
her that are
responsible for her skill.
It's not all her, and so those
truths kind of emerge
up from the story.
So we might not believe the
story, but there are some
concepts and values, some social
moirés that come up from
those stories that are
important.
In the oral tradition, stories
change over time but they
are also pretty conservative.
They don't make these
great leaps.
There are not going to, this
story for example, in an
oral tradition would not change
so that all of sudden
Arachne becomes, I don't
know, a zebra.
Well that wouldn't make any
logical sense anyway,
but the oral tradition is
conservative.
It doesn't change quickly
because if you are performing a
story that your audience has
heard somebody else perform, you
can't change it completely.
You are not going to change end
dramatically because your
audience is going to stop you
and say wait a minute, no,
no, no, that is wrong.
And so the storyteller is
always responding to
the audience, so there's a
relationship there.
There is communication
going there.
And there will be some people in
the audience that believe the
story enough or believe that
this version is correct, so what
is that telling us about belief?
Homer's Iliad and you can tell
this is a teacher's copy, it
is all marked up, tells the
story of the Trojan War.
Now, scholars have argued since
this first got put down in
writing the extent to which the
Trojan war, not that it
happened or not so much as to
what kind of war it was,
who was involved, because then
we get in that dividing
line, it is not just
fiction anymore.
We are starting to talk about
what many people believe
to be historical figures.
Now in this day and age, it is
difficult to parcel out of
that out and may throw it open
to our historians a little
bit later to help me with that,
but there are certain things
again in the story that
ring true
and other things that don't.
So where is the line?
When we start writing things
down, the whole nature of belief
changes, because when we start
writing things down, we
can construct history, we
can have science.
Science is really almost
impossible without writing,
getting back to my pen, right?
So, once writing comes into the
picture, these stories not
only stop, they stop changing
in some ways, I mean once
somebody writes it down, you
know someone can translate
it into English, but the
story is the story.
It is not going to change a
whole lot unless we have
a modern author who really
purposely, obviously,
intentionally, changes the
whole thing.
And we have had some modern
poets and authors who have done
that, but the story itself isn't
going to change anymore.
The other thing about oral
tradition is that the details
are not nearly as important as
the big pieces of the
story, so details may change.
Because really, if one were to
talk about the story of
Arachne and one says, of course,
I did it from memory as well,
so my version isn't going to
sound at all like his, I
am going to use some modern
colloquial expressions
that even this translator
wouldn't have used.
How angry was Athena?
Lots of different adjectives we
could use for that, and in
some cases she's really,
really angry, some
maybe she is less so.
How arrogant is Arachne?
And it is a sliding scale there.
So then, when we say that
somebody believed the story, or
didn't believe the story,
typically we are not talking
about the details so much.
And that is certainly true
with the Trojan War.
If it happened, if it lasted as
long as the Iliad implies
that it did, and see,
exactly, right?
[laughter] There was and even in
the early 20th century, people
were still pretty much looking
at this as historical text.
Yes and no.
War happened?
Absolutely.
This war happened?
Probably?
Yeah, I don't know.
That it happened they
way it happened.
In the Iliad there are these
great big battle scenes.
And who knows the basic story
of the Trojan War?
You guys covered it yet?
Not yet.
Spoiler alert here!
We won't, if we have time later,
we'll talk about the events
that came before, but Paris,
young Trojan man, visits
Menelaus and his wife Helen
and kidnaps Helen.
Helen runs away with him, again,
truth here is kind of murky.
Takes her back to Troy and
Menelaus contacts his brother
Agamemnon and says I've got
to get my wife back.
And not so much perhaps because
it is his wife and he loves
her, but it is a matter of pride
and it's been an incredible
insult to his honor to have his
wife stolen, or for her to
run away under his nose.
So Helen a later poet said she
was so beautiful that she's
the face that launched a
thousand ships.
I suppose, supposedly the Greeks
piled into a thousand ships to
go to Troy, meanwhile this war
is going to take place for
a decade, all right?
Like any war, there are ups and
downs and you know, you might
think a decade is a long time
to fight a war, but then
you think about how long we've
in Afghanistan and one way
or another, think well maybe ten
years isn't that long, right?
But the way Homer tells it, and
I also argue there was probably
not a person, or not one
individual responsible for this
that is named Homer, or that's a
whole other story for a whole
other presentation, but things
will happen like all of a
sudden, Paris disappears from
the battlefield, he's not there.
Well, Paris has a reputation as
a coward to a certain extent,
I mean he kind of comes
and goes.
The Greeks don't have a whole
lot of respect for him,
so all of a sudden he is gone.
And the story is that Aphrodite,
the goddess of love and
beauty who has helped Paris get
Helen in the first place,
has spirited him away.
Again, does the audience
really believe that?
Does the audience believe that
this dainty goddess swept
in, invisibled everybody but
Paris, and kind of carries him
off and keeps him safe or do we
believe that Paris had a
moment of cowardice and ran
away from the front?
Similarly as the battle rages
on, occasionally, a god or
goddess will pick up the spear
or the arrow that someone
has fired at the enemy and
make it so they miss.
Really?
Or did they just miss?
[Laughter]
You think about it and you can
tell the same story
without all the divine
intervention just a story about
pride, about honor,
and about war.
And the Greeks could believe in
it as history, whether they
believed in the gods or not.
My favorite part of the Iliad is
really one of the most human
episodes, which is at the very
end of the Iliad.
After Achilles has killed Hector
and finally Hector's father
Prime goes to see Achilles to
beg to get his son's body back.
And even in modern warfare,
getting the bodies back
is always really important if we
can do it, but in this case,
the Greeks, supposedly believed
that if we didn't, if they
didn't bury the body
appropriately, they didn't
have the appropriate funeral
rites, then that spirit
would be in limbo forever,
and so it is very
important to Prime to get
his son back.
And there is a scene in there
where Prime kneels down before
the great warrior Achilles who
is still angry, you know he
thought killing Hector was going
to fix his anger, and it hasn't.
He is still just absolutely
enraged.
And Prime kneels down and takes
his hands and says, "I kissed
the hand of the man who
killed my son."
That is one of the most
heart-wrenching scenes in all of
western literature as far as I
am concerned, because what
it took for him to do that, what
it took for Prime to put away
his own anger, and his grief
long enough to have this
conversation, and if we look at
the Iliad as a work of
literature, that is also the
moment where Achilles, who has
been this enraged killing
machine for twenty three books,
you know he has been fighting,
and fighting and fighting.
He becomes human again.
He gives the body back to Prime
and we can kind of repair the
damage that has been done.
Now a lot of other things are
going to happen.
That's the other interesting
thing about the Iliad, is
the story of the Trojan War,
this book takes place over the
space of, oh, I don't remember
exactly, but I think it is
like twenty four days,
>> Attendee: 
Fifty-one
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Fifty-one.
Ok, I had half of it right.
But it is a really short
narrative span in a war that
supposedly took ten years.
So you are thinking, wow, if
all that happened in this
fifty-one days, I wonder what
else happened, you know?
So there is a lot of the Trojan
War to come afterwards, but
that moment, again, would it
have happened, would the father
of the you know the hero on the
one side had been able to get
in unharmed, see Achilles, make
his case, take his son's body
back, it's a moment
of great drama.
But whether it happened or not,
I don't know, but it tells us
about the value of family.
In a way that is true.
So we can say that the audience
believed in the father and
son relationship, regardless of
whether they believed in the
particular incident, to say
nothing of you know, arrows and
spears flying and gods
running back and
forth on the battlefield.
So it sounds like I am making a
case that the Greeks didn't
believe their myths and
certainly a lot of them probably
didn't, but a lot probably did.
Because in the absence of
anything else, these stories in
some ways ring true and they
explain things that
are hard to explain.
The stories are
anonymous, all right.
There is no one person that
makes it up and so the
story comes out of a community,
and if a story comes out of
community, we tend to believe
it more because we
all own a piece of it.
There were great poets who could
perform the story better than
others and maybe Homer was the
name of one of those poets,
but what we see here in this
book is the combination of lots
of the work of lots and
lots of people
over many, many centuries.
The other thing is, when we look
at an epic story, which is the
heroes and the battles, and even
with the gods involved, so
lets take the gods out.
Ok.
So let's say we don't believe
that these gods were really
involved, that they were just
symbolizing emotions and
other things that were going
on this battlefield.
We can take that step, and
certainly there are
some people who are there.
Other people will be looking,
like ok, that's how it went, but
this battle, by the time
anything gets actually written
down, if the war took place,
it took place hundreds
of years before.
And so that story is going to
change, it is going to
migrate and I told you that oral
traditions are conservative,
they don't change.
Well they change, but the change
is really slowly, but if you
are telling a story without
writing it down for hundreds of
years, it's going to change.
And then there are some familiar
names, and names of families,
and the people in the audience,
ok they know
their families, right?
And so they think well, what
does it do for me to
believe this story then?
If my you know, great, great,
great, add a few more
greats grandfather is mentioned
in here, and they did
traditional cultures to keep
very careful genealogies,
you tell the story, you know
there's a passage in the Bible
of so and so begat so and so
begat so and so, and it
seems to go on and on, all
traditional cultures
do that sort of thing.
And so if your ancestor's name
is mentioned here, you are going
to want to believe if it's a
good portrayal that this
happened, because it give
honor to your family.
But from the poet's perspective,
I am looking out at my
audience, and I know who is
there and I know who is going
to you know buy my wine, or pay
me at the end of the night,
so as I am reciting the story,
I may change the order of
the names, I may slip some names
in there that weren't in my
teacher's version, but hey, that
guy is in the audience, and we
were all involved in that war
somehow, so I'm just going
to throw them in there.
So the audience then has a stake
in a story and that's going to
maybe cause them to believe it a
little bit more strongly, a
little more seriously.
So and these myths take place in
a time that doesn't bear any
relationship to our time.
But if I go around the room, I
can ask you what you did
yesterday, and most of you will
remember with some degree
of accuracy most of what
you did yesterday.
Depending on the day of the
week, sometimes I
remember a lot, and sometimes
not so much.
We were talking about that just
in the office, when were we
having that conversation?
Was it Thursday or was it
Friday, I don't remember, but
we know we had the
conversation,
and we can report it and
it's in real time.
We know what happened last
week, or you know what
you were doing right before
you came here.
But Myths takes place in this
time period, in the time
where time functions
very differently.
First of all, it's this and I
hesitate to use the term 'golden
age', because in myth studies,
that means something else,
but it takes place in this age
where supposedly
gods walked among men.
And I am using the word men
purposely here.
I mean, there are some women in
this book, but it's a war
story, it's mostly about men.
And this idea that there was
this time a long time ago where
gods were down here on earth or
people could see them, now
that's not true anymore, so,
was there really?
We like to imagine there was a
time when god was intimately
involved in what we do and not
this distant presence so
that piece has an effect
on what we believe.
And then where does belief
come from?
So if you pick any random fact
that you believe, and when
I taught myth and culture, I
would do the same thing
every semester, before my
students even got a syllabus, I
would make them right
down five things
they believed to be true.
I would do the same, I would
give them to a student
worker because they were all
anonymous, typed it into a
miscellaneous list, we'd bring
that list back to class, and
through the semester, we'd talk
about some of the things,
every once in a while, we'd pull
up that sheet and say, ok,
someone believes that the
grass is green.
You know, it's a very different
belief than I believe in
God, which was also there.
But how do we believe anything?
How do we come to believe
what we believe?
Again, not a rhetorical
question.
Shall I throw belief
out there for us?
Ok.
I believe it is Monday.
How do I know this?
Yes.
>> Attendee: 
[Unclear dialogue]
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Ok, Observation and we all have
to use a word that is probably
not appropriate here, faith,
in this thing called
a calendar that
Monday always follows
Sunday, right?
And we all agree that that is
what the calendar is, so we all
agree that is is Monday and
that one is easy.
All right.
I believe that and I am going to
go totally outrageous here
because I don't want to
offend anybody.
Ron Paul is going to win the
Presidential election.
Where would I get a belief
like that from?
Hmm?
>>Attendee:
[Unclear dialogue] watching tv?
>>Dr. irwin:
All right.
Television.
>> Attendee: 
Because Ron Paul said
he was going to.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
All right.
And if I trust him, then maybe
I will believe that.
Maybe I looked at that debate
last week, which I didn't by the
way, but maybe I did and
thought, don't really either of
those, and everybody in this
country kind of agrees
with me there, for somebody else
is going to come in and we've
heard of him, so maybe
he'll be it.
Television, newspapers, the
media generally, has a certain
amount of authority, whether it
is well deserved or not is
really valid question.
But we believe things that
we hear from
authority figures, all right?
You young women when your
teacher tells you that a myth is
from Greece, absent any proof
otherwise, you are going
to believe her right?
Because she is the teacher and
she knows these things.
She's agreeing with me,
ok this works.
We learn a lot of what we
believe from our parents, and
talk about authority figures.
We've got parents, we've got
teachers, ministers,
priests, pastors, we have the
media, we've got books, another
weird thing that happens when
we put something in writing
is all of a sudden it tends to
have more authority somehow
in our culture, because we are
a highly literate culture.
When more people spoke than
wrote, it was
actually the other way around.
Signing a document meant
nothing, but if you told me
something and you shook my hand
in front of witnesses that
was the binding contract.
Today that doesn't work.
All right.
We have experience, and we
have observation.
Now, our experience might be
limited, so we might
believe something based
on experience.
This happens a lot on
a college campus.
A faculty member might say
students just
aren't very well prepared.
That faculty member maybe
they've been teaching for thirty
years and they've seen this for
a number of generations, and
they've seen a change, but it is
still based on their own
experience and what is going on
in their own classroom.
Or, I didn't actually write
examples down for this but you
can all think about things that
you have done, that is your
experience, representative of
everybody else's.
Maybe so, maybe not.
And in any case, we are all
individuals who all bring
a different set of baggage to
any story we hear, and so
that is going to change the
extent to which we believe it.
Ok.
Experimentation.
Some things we believe because
it has been proven
scientifically over a
period of time.
Scientific method we test, and
we verify and then we test
again, and then someone else
tests to make sure and so that
leads us to believe
things perhaps.
We also believe things out
of faith, out of fear,
sometimes out of superstition.
And so when a grandmother might
be telling the story of
Arachne to her grandchildren,
is it important that it is
a story about where spider
comes from?
Maybe, maybe not.
It would depend on the
relationship that those kids had
had with the spider.
Maybe one of the saw a spider
and got scared and so she
told this story to make the
spider less threatening
But maybe she's telling the
story more for that first thing
we talked about which is the
importance of honoring the gods
and having a fair amount of
humility before the gods.
She may not believe the story,
but she believes in
the concept of a higher power.
She might not even believe in
Athena, as the particular
goddess but she believes that
there might be something
out there and I want to teach my
children to be humble because
you never know or she might
believe very directly in Athena
and want her children or
grandchildren to know more about
why this goddess is important.
Because Athena, of course, is
not only the goddess of crafts,
she's the goddess of warfare,
not war, but warfare,
and most importantly, wisdom.
She, another of the famous
stories about the Greek gods she
supposedly sprang fully formed
out of Zeus's head,
can we believe that?
Hmm, maybe not.
Ok.
We also tend to believe things
based on cause and effect
and there are lots of logical
fallacies out there that
just because something happened
first, doesn't necessarily
mean that it caused the
second thing.
Right?
If I break a mirror and then I
trip and sprain my ankle,
it is because breaking a mirror
is going to give me bad
luck or is it just coincidence.
Again different people believe
different things.
One of the things I find most
fascinating about these stories
in the end is not so much
whether we literally believe
them, but what is it about
these stories that
make them so popular?
I brought some of my many
visual aids.
Greek Mythology is one of those
things that we have produced
more things more toys, about
than certainly any other
myth system in the west.
Here is my little card deck.
Here we have pictures of all of
the Greek gods and goddesses,
and a little information about
them, so it is a convenient
wonderful thing to bring to
class and pass around.
And trying to be a scholarly
tool, on the back we get
the continuation of the myth or
one of the stories about them.
And also, and you have a little
bit of this on the front, but
I've got even more on the back,
pieces of artwork that were
inspired by these stories,
because that is the other thing
that is perpetuated
these stories.
When I think of the story of the
birth of Venus, that Venus was
supposedly sprung out of the
ocean, I don't remember
the story any more, but what I
remember is a painting of
this gorgeous beautiful mostly
naked woman on a scallop
shell, kind of coming
out of the ocean.
So, whether to the extent to
which I believe that is
the official version of the
birth of Aphrodite has
been guided more by that visual
image by Botticelli, correct?
Yeah, ok.
I'm pretty sure I had
that right.
Than anybody else.
The other thing that writing
allows us to do is to make
things way more complex than
perhaps they were originally.
I told you that most traditional
cultures you know, they would
recite their genealogy so they
would remember who was
related to whom and how far
generations go back.
But those genealogies tended not
to include cousins and your
siblings' children and things
like that, and so when we
got writing and we in the west
particularly like charts and
we like to organize things and
so we started putting
together a family tree, and
that is what this thing is.
I can't show it to everybody,
but I think I am going to
ask you to sort of pass
this one down, and
I'll continue unfolding.
So the family tree of the Greek
gods and goddesses, runs from
where Dr. Barharlou is there all
the way to here.
Did the Greeks themselves
assemble all this in this order?
No, we've got people like Edith
Hamilton who we heard about
earlier who put together these
stories and took it from
lots and lots of different
sources, right?
We have sources all over the
place that they
would pick and choose.
They would go ok, Athena is
mentioned here and she is also
mentioned here, and she is
mentioned here, and
she's mentioned here in relation
to this character, and
mentioned here in relation to
this character, oh and by
the way, she's the sister of
Apollo, and she's the daughter
of Zeus, so let's put them in
and by the time you've finished
this is what you have, part of
me wants to ask, why?
But part of me is also just
really fascinated and the reason
though that these stories are
so compelling is that at
some level they are very human.
I'll pass this on down
along here.
That the stories in the end
tend to be about family
and emotions and passions, and
things we do well, more
often things we do poorly, you
know when somebody gets
in trouble about something.
And that's what I think the
Greeks, we can say that
the Greeks believed, and I think
we can say that's what we
believe to a certain
extent, too.
The reason these stories have
so much staying power is
that they are a reflection of
values and beliefs in
things even if not
in the story.
I think I am going to stop
there, because according to my
watch, we are getting close
to the hour.
This is the topic that I could
have brought stacks of
books talked about for many
hours and gotten really deeply
into it, or I could do the
more entertaining
version, which is what you got.
So I will take questions,
or comments.
>> Dr. Barharlou:
That was a very
eloquent presentation.
Three or four hundred years from
now when they [unclear dialogue]
of our time, say it was a time
people believe in God,
[unclear dialogue] sent his son,
[unclear dialogue] and not
see him, how does these myths
and how many people believe
in these myths now?
What does Roman Mythology
[unclear dialogue] and [unclear
dialogue] Have you seen the God?
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Well, and the scholarly
definition of myth that I use in
the classroom is that myth is
a sacred story that people
believe to be true.
All right?
Because that direct observation
is not there, but there are
many people of faith who
believe that we see
the product all around us.
And I am not going to get into
one side or the other of
that debate, but the stories do
tell us what is important
and the idea of having something
outside ourselves to believe
in is the driving force behind
so many of these, because we
always want to know what is our
place in the world.
Why are we important?
Who cares about us as
individuals?
And that is one of the things
that myths answers.
It ties us to something larger,
something more important and
so that is why we believe.
Now, again, different people
believe in different
degrees, but it's sort of has
always been thus that we
need that connection as people,
and that's what's
the important thing.
>> Dr. Barharlou: 
Talk about the consequence
of believing these myths.
For example, believing the God
created man in his image.
And the woman out of
man's stomach.
Creation [unclear dialogue]
the most advanced
country in the world.
We haven't talked about the
movie this makes in the mind of
the people to make them more
civilized, more humane,
more tolerant, more
compassionate.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
It's not really my topic, I
understand the question, but I
am not going to, it is too
big a topic for me to
cover in three
minutes, Allen, you know that.
[Laughter]
>> Attendee: 
Talking about Paul Bain, and
this might be more on the
technical side than you decided
to forego, just a quick
observation, Paul Bain made a
big deal about how intellectual
writers, how they differ from
the vast majority of the Greeks,
and people like historians,
geographers, philosophers,
and so on,
and the key word I think
is tradition.
Tradition is what grabs on to
people, and it is given
authority, which you mentioned,
and so it's an interesting
thing how tradition has momentum
even in the most rational
heart and intellectual writer
and analytical writer
cannot completely resist.
So for example, how Satanists
comparing he's sort of a
geographer and Aristotle talked
about [unclear dialogue] they
are not so sure about the parts
of this story that are
fantastical, another phrase by
Paul Bain is the doctrine of
present things, referring to
understanding things in terms of
what you can observe around you
and you know Aristotle, I'll
say this, has never laid eyes on
a bull headed man, as far as
[unclear dialogue] is concerned,
but there is a traditional
belief that [unclear dialogue]
had a hand in the foundation
of Athens, and Aristotle in his
[unclear dialogue] talks
about the role that [unclear
dialogue] played in the
development of Athens'
constitution.
When he complains about belief
in myth, it is not belief in
myth as myth; it is belief in
the wrong details.
He complains that people get
details that [unclear dialogue]
wrong, he was a political enemy.
And that is what we need to take
away from this story.
That is what [unclear dialogue].
There is an interesting way
these intellectuals framed this
issue of credibility and I think
it is true that, this has been
my own research, that the vast
majority of Greeks did not apply
that analytical apparatus in
their discussions and myths.
I think it more or less on the
lines of what you are
talking about but even among
intellectuals there are
different gradations of [unclear
dialogue] and they struggle
with these issues because
it occurs
to them to struggle with it.
I don't think it occurs to most
people to struggle with it.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Right.
And I think that is one thing
that carries over, you see that
in lots of cultures that your
average everyday person.
You are right, even an educated
person isn't really worried
about whether they believe it
or not, at some level,
because it's not a compelling
question.
Mythology in Greek culture was
not really closely tied to
religion and belief, yes, I mean
the idea of gods, yes, but the
details not so much, and people
wouldn't sit back like we are
thinking hmm I wonder if this
really happened.
That wasn't it.
But you are right, that even the
intellectuals who had been the
philosophers and the historians
who were trying to turn that
analytical eye couldn't
entirely, you can't just break
away from that much tradition
if you know that there
was once a man names Theseus.
And if you apply that to our
American culture today, we look
at somebody like George
Washington.
What was that man really like?
Books and books have been
written about him, but in the
popular imagination, even among
educated people, there's a
vision of that flesh and blood
man that is dominate
regardless of you know
what anyone
else is going to write down.
It's just is, you know, and I
think with the Greek mythology,
the interesting things about
that is you have these
people that are supposedly
existed, these great heroes of
the past who were human beings,
and then you've got the
gods mixed in, and so they want
to take something away
and believe pieces of the
human being part.
They want to believe something
about this war, even though,
again the historians and the
philosophers wouldn't have
believed that it necessarily
took place like this, verbatim.
Although I find it really
interesting what this particular
publisher put on the cover, this
is the D-day invasion and you
know we think even going back as
far as WWII how many stories
come out that again, true,
I love Stephen
Colbert's word "truthiness".
Because I think that is what we
pull out of these myths, are
certain broader concepts and
values, the truthiness of then
rather than specific facts,
so I think that is
really interesting things.
>>Attendee:
[Unclear dialogue] I think the
interesting way about classical
studies is the way it always
seem current and one of the
things that happened that maybe
makes the myths believable
longer is that already in the
late 19th and 20th century,
people were thinking ok,
[unclear dialogue]religion and
then I started digging the
excavations [unclear dialogue]
time is [unclear dialogue]
and they found things like Troy
and the citadels and things
that although that [unclear
dialogue] that is not true, he
still found a place where he
put the shovel, and
evidence found, well, between
Troy and and Greece, and
Crete and all, Things that had
been buried for so long had
came up, then all of sudden
everything is called into
question again, because, ok,
maybe I [unclear dialogue]
he became a hero [unclear
dialogue] model that a lot of
things hung on, but there's a
place that he lived that we
can actually find walls from
that period, so it
makes it, it brings it alive
[unclear dialogue].
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Exaxtly
And it sort of keeps coming
back and in iterations
too, different pieces of the
stories come back to us.
Absolutely.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
[Unclear dialogue] I am going to
ask you a couple of questions
very quickly.
You don't have to answer
them all.
First the one thousand knights
and [unclear dialogue] is
considered myths, [unclear
dialogue]
>> Dr. Irwin: 
No the Thousand and One Knights
are tales, they are considered
to be fiction rather than myth.
If traditional again, I am
probably over-simplifying, but
traditional narrative falls
into three categories.
There's myth, there's legend,
and then there are tales.
So the Arabian Nights are tales,
legends are stories that are
kind of fanciful but they are
about real people, like Daniel
Boone, Washington cutting down
the cherry tree, so Washington
is true, the story maybe not, so
that's what legend is, stories
of heroes and famous
people, and myth.
For a story to be a myth, it
generally has to have some kind
of divine presence.
So in the Arabian nights, it
really skews more towards
the tale, although there are
some stories in there
about [unclear dialogue] who was
a person, so that's again,
a talk for another day.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
The Bible says Paul when he went
to Athens and 2000 years ago, he
broke the statues for gods and
that Athenians or Greeks usually
are, or typically are religious
quote, unquote, because they
worshipped many gods.
So my question at this point,
is there any historic
evidence that they worship these
gods in the myths or were
there temples for them, or?
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Yeah, absolutely.
So there were significant
numbers of the Greeks
who believed the stories, even
if they didn't believe the
actual details, but believed
these gods existed and the art
sort of underlines those beliefs
as well, as one of the ways in
which you pay homage to a deity
as to erect a statue or to
build a temple to worship
that person.
Now, or that figure.
Later on, when we get to Roman
history, when you get out to
[unclear dialogue] of the Roman
empire and people are
building statues of Augustus,
then some people start
to believe the emperor Augustus
is a god because they've
never seen him, here is a
statue, just next to this other
statue of somebody who had
been told is a god,
so, it gets a little muddied.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
Yeah.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
So the outside observer is
always going to be outside.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
So can we comfortably say that
some Athenians or a certain
percentage really believed that
the question of the title of the
presentation, "did they really
believe" we can comfortably say,
or scientifically say, "yes,
some of them really believed
to the extent
that they worshipped them?
>> Dr. Irwin: 
Um hmm
>> Dr. Wahby: 
Now last question from my side.
Again, Apostle Paul say that
Greeks search for wisdom, they
have a quest for wisdom.
And they want to talk about
things and discuss it
and find the truth.
Is this something thats natural
for them, at that time they
would discuss, or search for
truth or something like that
that you find in the readings
or writings of somebody?
>> Dr. Irwin: 
That is really not my,
not my area.
I think I'd wait until we hear
more from our historians
on those or our philosophers
on those issues.
Because when I look at
mythology, I am looking at sort
of story patterns, and the way a
story works, not so much a
search for, I mean certain
truths yes, wisdom, maybe not.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
Define wisdom in ten seconds.
What is wisdom?
>>Dr. Irwin: 
The ability to
apply knowledge well.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
So, it is not something that you
have in your mind, but something
you apply, do, wisdom is
not something, I am wise now,
but I am wise when I do?
>> Dr. Irwin: 
I think so.
I think knowledge is what you
have up here, but wisdom is what
you demonstrate by the way you
apply that knowledge.
Again, that is Bonnie's
definition, that's
not anything technological.
>> Dr. Wahby: 
Would you please clap your
hands for Bonnie Irwin.
Now you know why she
is Bonnie Irwin.
Thank you very much.
>> Dr. Irwin: 
There's a myth behind that.
Thank you very much for coming.
[no dialogue]
