Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

296 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Euripides, Hippolytos: Aphrodite’s vengeance upon Hippolytos for
his refusal to worship her.
Euripides, Bacchai: The dismemberment of Pentheus, king of Thebes,
as a result of his opposition to the cult of Dionysos.
Aristophanes, Frogs: Dionysos as anti-hero—cowardly, licentious,
untrustworthy, and incontinent—and his descent to Hades in search
of a poet to save Athens.
Apollonios of Rhodes, Argonautika: Jason’s search for the golden
fleece in the company of the Argonauts.
Ovid, Metamorphoses: A highly individualistic treatment of Greek
and Roman myth loosely bound together by the theme of shape
shifting.
Apollodoros, Library: The most comprehensive collection of mythology
to survive from antiquity.
Myths of Origin
Where does the world come from? Why is there so much evil?
Why do we give the least edible parts of an animal to the gods when
we sacrifice? Why is the year divided into different seasons? Why
are women so seductive? Why in the face of all the terrible things
that happen in the world do we still continue to hope that things
will improve? These and other perennial questions are just a few of
the issues that myths of origin (or charter myths, as anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski called them) seek to address.
The primary source for the mythic account of the origin of the
universe is Hesiod’s Theogony. According to Hesiod, the primordial
being was Chaos, a word that roughly translates as gaping void.
Next Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the lowest region of the underworld),
and Eros (desire) came into existence. Chaos then engendered Erebos
(darkness) and Night, and Night, by coupling with Erebos, gave
birth to Aither (upper air) and Day. Whereas the book of Genesis
ascribes the creative act to a divine being who exists outside his own
creation, Hesiod proposed a model whereby the means of propagation
emerged out of nothingness. In other words, it was the instinct
for mating rather than a series of disconnected acts on the part of a
divine will that caused the world to assume its present form.
The Trojan War
The Trojan War represented the supreme military enterprise of
all time. It was undertaken to avenge the honor of Agamemnon’s
brother Menelaos, king of Sparta. His wife Helen had been abducted