Greek Myths
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Abstract
Hard on the heels of the English version of Fritz Grafs excellent Griechische Mythologie, here is another and rather different introduction to the general issues surrounding the stories told by the Greeks. Like Grafs book, B.'s is of value both as a true introduction to the subject and as a summing-up of its author's thoughts, a series of perspectives on the functions of myth among the Greeks and on the views of modern students of the subject. But whereas Graf aims to give a panoramic picture of the main issues and a representative sample of relevant material, B. is much more selective and idiosyncratic. Stimulating and open-ended, explicitly adopting a pluralist approach, the book can give no illusion of completeness. The 'contexts' of the subtitle give a clue to B.'s way in to mythology, and the four chapters of the book's first part are concerned with the place which story-telling occupied in Greek society and the different ways in which the Greeks encountered myths. Adopting a fairly pragmatic and—dare I say?—commonsense definition of myth (p. 15), and rejecting a rigid distinction between traditional and innovative (or 'literary') versions of narrative, B. locates myth in the different facets and stages of a male Athenian's life, both in areas partially recoverable to us (literature, art) and those where we can only guess what was told (nurses' stories, old men's chatter). These sections are full of interesting sidelines (what is a Aea îy? how did the Greeks view the old?), but more importantly they emphasize and expound the point that the setting in which you encounter a myth may be at least as important as the myth itself. Throughout the book, indeed, there is a welcome stress on the transformations undergone by myths and their concomitant plurality (though not infinity) of meanings. This is perhaps the book's major theme; some other angles of myth receive relatively little attention, including not only the relationship with ritual, a lacuna signalled and to some extent justified by B. himself, but also the analysis of narrative directions.