Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Virtually all ancient Greek tragedy was based on myths about the doings of gods and heroes in ages long past. We know of three tragedies in the fifth century BCE (Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus and Phoenician Women , and Aeschylus’ surviving Persians ) that dealt with contemporary events, and of a few in Hellenistic times that drew their plots from Herodotus; we also know of one play ( Anthem , by Agathon) whose plot and characters were freely invented (Aristotle Poetics 1451b21–2). But myth was the basis of well over 99 percent of all the tragedies that were written|—and often the same stories were returned to, over and over again: for example, our meagre sources mention eleven tragedies entitled Thyestes (three of them by Sophocles alone). In discussing what we call “Greek myth” or “Greek mythology” it is important to remember two things in particular. One is that the distinction between “myth” and “history” was, for an ancient Greek, far from clear-cut. Learned commentators of the Hellenistic period and later can complain that a poet's version of a story is “contrary to history,” or report that “X says [so-and-so], but the true history is [something different]” the often skeptical historian Thucydides (1.4–12), while making much allowance for “poetic exaggeration” and discounting the supernatural element, takes it for granted that the major events of the heroic age (such ... log in or subscribe to read full text