Week 9 Lecture Script PDF

1 Pogorzelski Classics 2200 Week 9 Lecture: Myths of Thebes and Structuralism Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week we’re starting a series of three weeks on the myths t...

1 Pogorzelski Classics 2200 Week 9 Lecture: Myths of Thebes and Structuralism Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week we’re starting a series of three weeks on the myths that take place in Thebes. We often call these myths the Theban Cycle. Our reading for this week is the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which focuses on a few stories from the Theban Cycle. I’m also going to spend some time in this lecture talking about an approach to mythology that has been influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and that approach is structuralism. Ovid’s Metamorphoses The first thing I want to do is to introduce you to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We’re only reading a small part of that poem this week, but we’ll come back to it and read some more of it next semester. On Slide 2, the whole poem is an epic in 15 books of dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer and subsequent Greek and Roman epic. Unlike many epics that tell a single, unified story, Ovid’s epic tells the story of history from the creation of the universe up to Ovid’s own time in the Augustan period, all in a series of little stories about people and/or gods changing form. Next semester we’ll read the first book of the poem, and we’ll compare Ovid’s version of the creation of the universe with Hesiod’s version. For now, I’ve chosen book 3 for us this week because that book is set in Thebes, and the stories it tells are a part of the so-called Theban Cycle. Because epics are long, we won’t have time in this course to read an entire epic, but we’ll read selections from a few different ones. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is particularly suitable for that approach because it is so clearly divided into separate stories, and it doesn’t have much of an overarching plot. Even within the one book assigned as reading this week, there are a few stories that are really separate, even though they’re related to each other.  2 Pogorzelski Let me explain a couple of the terms I’m using now: “book” and “cycle.” A few weeks ago I spoke about how Ancient Greek and Roman books weren’t bound books with separate pages like you’re used to now, but scrolls. Books with separate pages are called “codices,” and the singular of that word is “codex.” There were codices in antiquity, and the oldest pieces of them look like they come from the late first or early second centuries CE. It wasn’t until the fourth century or so that they became common, and it wasn’t until the eighth century or so that scrolls really stopped being used. A codex can hold a lot more text than a scroll can, so we think of books as containing hundreds of pages, with chapters that are more manageably digestible chunks for us to read. A scroll could only conveniently hold something on the scale of what we think of as a chapter, so each chapter in antiquity was a separate scroll or separate book. That’s why, when we talk about epics like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we say that they’re made up of books. The Metamorphoses has fifteen books. In antiquity, that meant fifteen separate scrolls. For us, it usually means one codex with fifteen divisions that would, in a modern text, be called chapters. When classicists read and talk about classical texts, we follow the ancient practice and call the separate parts of a long text “books.” I also want to explain what I mean when I use the term “cycle” to refer to a set or series of myths. I’ve already spoken a little about the Homeric epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey—and I’ll have a lot more to say about them when we read parts of them next semester. Those two poems are the oldest surviving Ancient Greek poems, and they were hugely important in Ancient Greek culture. The Iliad tells the story of a year in the Trojan War, when the Greeks sailed across the Aegean and attacked Troy because Paris, a prince of Troy, had taken Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The Odyssey tells the story of how Odysseus, the king of Ithaca,  3 Pogorzelski got lost on his way home from the Trojan War. Those are only parts of a larger set of stories surrounding the city of Troy and the Trojan War. Other, later Greek authors wrote other, later epic poems about other parts of the Trojan War, and the Ancient Greeks called the whole collection of epic poems “the Epic Cycle,” or ὁ ἐπικὸς κύκλος (ho epikos kyklos). A “cycle” is a big wheel or round thing, and it can refer to an age or an era of time, presumably because celestial ways of measuring time are big circles. The Epic Cycle told the story of the heroic age of mythology. Unfortunately, the so-called cyclic epics, which is to say the poems in the epic cycle that weren’t the Iliad and the Odyssey, have not survived, so we have only fragments of them. The reason I bring it up now is that because the Ancient Greeks called the Epic Cycle a cycle, we now use the term “cycle” in mythology to mean any set of myths set in a particular age or a particular place. So, we talk about the Theban Cycle as the set of Ancient Greek myths that tell the story of the origin and development of the city of Thebes. We also apply this term to other mythologies, so comparative mythologists talk about things like the Mythological Cycle in Irish mythology too. For us in classical mythology, the Theban Cycle is one of the most important and ubiquitous cycles in Ancient Greek mythology. It is the only one that rivals the Trojan Cycle in importance. On Slide 3, you can see five important pieces of information about our text for this week. You can also see an image of a page from a medieval manuscript, which is to say a hand-written codex, of this week’s poem.  4 Pogorzelski Ovid. Metamorphoses, with glosses.. Manuscript. Place: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/. https://library.artstor.org/asset/BODLEIAN_10310768640. The author of this week’s reading is Publius Ovidius Naso, and we usually call him “Ovid.” Greek authors usually have just one name. Roman authors usually have two or three, more like we do in the modern world. A Roman’s first name was like our first names—it’s what their friends and family would call them. A Roman’s second name was a family name, or a surname, like our last names now. A Roman’s third name usually indicated a branch of a family, and not all Romans used a third name or had one at all. Some of the time, when we identify Ancient Roman authors in modern English, we use an anglicized form of their third name, and other times we use an anglicized form of their second name. There’s no real reason to choose one or the other, but once a convention has been established, it’s best to follow it. Every classicist will know who you mean if you talk about Ovid, but few will know who you mean if you talk about Naso. A few  5 Pogorzelski weeks ago I talked about another Roman—Cicero. His full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero, and we call him by his third name, Cicero. If you talk about Tullius or Tully, it’s not going to be very understandable. So, whatever has become the modern English convention for naming a particular Roman author, go with that. For us this week, that means Ovid. The title of Ovid’s epic poem is the Metamorphoses. As usual, we call it the Metamorphoses or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but not “Ovid’s The Metamorphoses.” The definite article “the” is only sort of part of the title, and we don’t usually capitalize it or italicize it when we write the title. The word “metamorphosis” means a change in form or shape, and the plural of that word is “metamorphoses.” Ovid’s poem is a collection of stories about people and things changing shape. It’s worth mentioning here that in English, Kafka’s short story about Gregor Samsa turning into a bug is called “The Metamorphosis,” which is singular, with an “is” at the end. The title of Ovid’s epic is plural: Metamorphoses, with an “es” at the end. It must have been a huge challenge for Ovid to tell all the stories he wanted to tell as stories of metamorphosis, and some of them really stretch the theme, but since changing form is so common in classical mythology, it was actually possible for Ovid to cover something that seems like all of mythology and all of history up to his own time through the theme of changing form. Ovid first published the Metamorphoses in 8 CE, during the reign of the emperor Augustus. Augustus was a patron of the arts, and he encouraged the writing and publication of poetry. There wasn’t, at the time, a copyright system that protected authors’ claims to intellectual property and allowed them to earn a living as a poet that way. Instead, poets were partly independently wealthy already and partly they survived by attracting wealthy and powerful patrons who would support them as they wrote. Augustus encouraged that system, and  6 Pogorzelski sometimes acted as a patron himself, although more often he delegated that job to others. Ovid’s patron was someone named Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, but Augustus knew and read his poetry. Ovid’s dad had wanted him to be a lawyer, but Ovid said that everything he tried to write came out as poetry. He quickly became one of the most famous poets of his generation, but his poetry was deeply controversial. Augustus was a social conservative who passed laws promoting traditional marriage and encouraging large families, and he even passed laws criminalizing adultery. Ovid, on the other hand, wrote love poems about having affairs and seducing married partners. He also wrote some autobiographical poetry that says that in 8 CE, Augustus exiled him for, as he put it, “a poem and a mistake.” Ovid never explained what he meant by that, but a very likely guess is that the poem was one of his poems about how to seduce a married partner and the mistake was that he either knew about or facilitated an extramarital affair that Augustus’ granddaughter Julia had. The fact that Ovid doesn’t explain what happened in any detail has made Ovid’s exile a kind of mystery that attracts some wild theories. One of my favourite theories about Ovid’s exile is that it never really happened, and that Ovid’s autobiographical poetry made the whole thing up as a fiction, but that’s not very likely. The simplest and best explanation is the obvious one here. Anyway, Ovid does tell us that Augustus sent him to the town of Tomis or Tomi on the Black Sea, where the local language was Getic instead of Latin. Ovid tells us that he did try to write some poetry in Getic, but mostly he kept writing in Latin. All of his poetry that survives now is in Latin. He desperately wanted to get back to Rome, but he never did. Early in his reign, the emperor Augustus was very tolerant of dissenting speech, and it seems like he even encouraged people to write poetry that questioned his authority. That was in a  7 Pogorzelski time when he had just come to power, and he was very secure in the military foundation of that power and in his own popularity. As time went on, he got less and less secure in that sense, and so he relied more and more on the cultural power of things like poetry, entertainment, and speech to maintain his authority. That meant that he focused more on passing cultural laws that would do things like encourage traditional family values, and he would talk about how Rome needed to get back to the old ways or its decadence would cause its decline and destruction. He began to see challenges to his conservative family values as really threatening to his power, and so he started having popular figures like Ovid who could be seen as a threat to his values, arrested, tried, and exiled or even executed. We’ll see in some passages later in this lecture and also when we come back to this poem next semester, that Ovid was already in this poem writing about the theme of restricting the freedom of speech. He did not, however, write this poem in his exile. Instead, he was writing the poem before he was exiled, and he could see Augustus already arresting other poets and dissenters. So, Ovid was just finishing the Metamorphoses in 8 CE when he was arrested and exiled. This was the last poem he wrote in Rome. One last thing I want to say before moving on from this introduction to Ovid and his Metamorphoses is that our Loeb edition and translation by Frank Justus Miller is from 1916, and it really shows its age. Miller leans into the archaic language that nineteenth and early twentieth century translators often used for classical texts, and that means it’s not the easiest to read. Ovid’s Latin is actually really smooth and not too difficult, and we often use it for teaching beginners how to read Latin poetry. Of all the texts I’ve assigned in this course, this is the one for which I most considered requiring you to buy a more up-to-date translation, but I really didn’t want to make you all buy a book, so I’m sticking with the Loeb. I just want to point out that if  8 Pogorzelski you find this text a bit more archaic and difficult than some of the other things you read in this course, it’s not Ovid’s fault. The translation is just old. A Summary of the Theban Cycle With that introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses done, what I’m going to do for the next part of the lecture is to summarize the main plot thread of the Theban Cycle, starting on Slide 4. On this slide, you can see an image of a vase showing Cadmus, who was the founder of the city of Thebes. c. 560-550 BCE. Amphora; face A: Cadmus fighting the dragon (Amphore à figures noires; Cadmos et le dragon ?). ceramics; vase painting. Place: Musée du Louvre. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_30946896. The myths of Thebes begin in the Phoenician city of Tyre, where Agenor was king and had a daughter named Europa and a son named Cadmus (sometimes transliterated as Kadmos). When  9 Pogorzelski Jupiter, disguised as a white bull, ran away with Europa, Agenor sent Cadmus to find her, and said that Cadmus could not return to Tyre unless he brought Europa back with him. Metamorphoses 3 (that’s a common short way of saying “book 3 of the Metamorphoses”) opens with Cadmus, having failed to find Europa, going to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi and learning that he must found a city, which will be Thebes. Phoenicia was the Greek and Roman name for a region on the eastern side of the Mediterranean. It included land in what’s now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine. Carthage began as a Phoenician colony from the city of Tyre, and Cadmus and Europa were a prince and princess in Tyre. It’s a very common event in classical mythology that Jupiter either seduces or rapes a mortal woman, and he often does so in the shape of a particularly attractive animal. In this story, he disguised himself as a white bull, and it was so magnificent that Europa couldn’t resist trying to ride it. When Europa got on, the bull just took off across the sea. That put Cadmus in a tough spot. Jupiter gets what he wants, so Cadmus has no hope of rescuing his sister from Jupiter, and he can’t go home to Tyre without her because his father, Agenor, told him he’s not welcome at home anymore unless he finds her. So the Oracle of Apollo comes up with a solution that he’s just going to have to establish a new city in Greece. Cadmus was not alone on his journey, which began as a mission to find Europa and ended as a mission to found Thebes. He had some companions with him, but actually the nobility of Thebes didn’t come from those companions. On Slide 5, Cadmus and his companions stumbled upon a serpent’s lair, and Cadmus killed the serpent and sowed its teeth in the ground. From the teeth arose a group of “autochthonous” warriors, who immediately fought each other. The survivors of that battle would become the origin of the noble houses of Thebes, and the city would be ruled by Cadmus and his descendants. You may have noticed that the caption of the  10 Pogorzelski picture on the slide says that Cadmus is fighting a dragon. We get the English word “dragon” from the Ancient Greek word δράκων (drakon), which means a large serpent or snake. Mythological stories give us lots of cool descriptions of terrible dragons, but in Greek mythology at least they do not have legs or wings or fiery breath. They’re just big snakes, sometimes with some cool powers but mostly not really. Anyway, Cadmus’ men stumble on the lair of this dragon and Cadmus has an epic fight with it and kills it. I really like that fight scene as Ovid narrates it. And the dragon was sort of magic in that its teeth were seeds that grew men. Cadmus planted the dragon’s teeth in the ground like a farmer sowing seeds, and warriors grew from those teeth/seeds. They immediately fought each other, but stopped before they were all killed. The survivors became Thebans. Sometimes they’re called the “spartoi” or the sown men because Cadmus sowed the teeth like a farmer sows seeds. More technically, we call them autochthonous. You may remember the term “chthonic” for the gods that live beneath the earth. Chthon just means earth or ground, and so autochthonous people are people that spontaneously grow from the ground. That means that even though Cadmus and his Tyrian companions were Phoenician immigrants, the noble houses of Thebes were not immigrants at all. They didn’t come from anywhere else, because they grew out of the land itself. Thebes was their only home. That’s another interesting and recurrent theme in classical mythology. It’s often full of origin stories of cities or communities, and sometimes those stories are stories of immigration and colonization. Those kinds of colonization stories help to establish bonds between different communities and regions. Other times, they’re stories of autochthony, and those stories help to establish a connection between people and the land they inhabit. We’ll see later in this lecture that the structuralist approach to myth makes a big deal of autochthony in the Theban Cycle.  11 Pogorzelski Moving on, once Cadmus had founded Thebes, it became the setting for a lot of myths. In our reading for this week, and on Slide 6, Ovid tells the story of Cadmus’ grandson Actaeon, who stumbled on the bathing site of Diana and was changed into a deer. So, Actaeon was out hunting one day, and it was a hot day and he decided to take a lunch break. He found a nice little spring of cool water and a little pond in the shade, and was all set to relax for a little while. But he didn’t know that this pool was a favorite bathing site for Diana, the goddess of the hunt. Diana was very much not into men. She is never going to get married or have children. Instead, she goes out hunting with a party of beautiful nymphs, and when they decide to take a break, they get naked and bathe in a nice, cool pond. So Actaeon goes to this pond, and Diana and her nymphs are there. Diana is naked, and she is not happy about being interrupted by a man, but she’s also put her weapons down. So, she grabs a handful of water and throws it at Actaeon, transforming him into a deer. He can still think like a human, but he can’t speak anymore, and he runs away. His hunting dogs see him as a deer, and even though he tries to shout at them that he’s Actaeon, he can’t speak and so they don’t understand him. Instead, they chase him down and kill him. The next story in Metamorphoses 3 is the story of Semele, who asked her lover Jupiter to come to her as he comes to Juno. Semele was killed by Jupiter’s ferocity, but Jupiter sewed her unborn baby into his thigh and then gave birth to Bacchus, who is therefore sometimes called “twice born.” Semele was a princess in Thebes—a daughter of Cadmus and an aunt of Actaeon. She was beautiful, and Jupiter was her lover. The affair was going along fine, but Semele’s friends doubted that her lover was really Jupiter. This happens all the time in classical mythology. A woman is having an affair, and that would be bad in normal circumstances, but if it’s with a god, that’s kind of cool. So the woman’s friends don’t believe her when she says she’s  12 Pogorzelski having sex with a god. They think she’s just lying to make it seem okay that she’s having sex with a human. Semele’s friends are like this. They think her lover might not actually be Jupiter. And, of course, Juno was jealous and hated Semele. Juno decided to trick Semele by playing on her insecurity about the true identity of her lover. Juno disguises herself and tells Semele that maybe her friends are right and her lover really isn’t Jupiter. Maybe her lover is lying to her about who he is. Juno suggests that Semele get Jupiter to prove he’s really Jupiter by getting him to have sex with her like he has sex with his wife, Juno. Then he’ll reveal his true self in an unmistakable way. So, some time passes and Semele gets pregnant. Jupiter is really happy about that, and he tells Semele that she can ask him a favor, and he promises that he’ll do whatever she asks. Semele asks him to have sex with her like he has sex with his wife, Juno. Jupiter is horrified, and he begs Semele to change her mind and ask for anything else, but Semele is adamant, and Jupiter has to keep his promise. He becomes a thunderstorm and strikes Semele with lightning, and she’s a mortal woman instead of a goddess, so she burns up. Jupiter is, however, able to save the baby. He does an emergency c-section and then cuts open his thigh and sews the baby in there. Then, when the baby is born from Jupiter’s thigh, he’s okay, and that’s Bacchus, or Dionysus, the twice born. Next up, on Slide 7, is the story of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes. Tiresias wasn’t always blind, though. He was just a regular guy from Thebes and one day he took a walk in the woods outside of town. He happened to see two snakes mating, and for some reason he took his walking stick, and he used it to separate the snakes from each other. In that instant, he was magically transformed into a woman. She was fine with that, so she just went back to town and lived as a woman for years. Then, one day she took a walk in the woods outside of town. She  13 Pogorzelski happened to see two snakes mating, and for some reason she took her walking stick, and she used it to separate the snakes from each other. In that instant, she was magically transformed into a man. So, he went back to town and continued his life as a man. Everything was going along fine until Juno and Jupiter got into an argument about whether men or women get more pleasure from sex. Juno said that men get more pleasure from sex, and Jupiter said that women get more pleasure from sex. To settle the argument, they decided to ask Tiresias, who had lived as both a man and as a woman. Tiresias has no trouble answering that question based on personal experience, and he says that women get way more pleasure from sex than men do. Juno was furious at that answer, so she struck Tiresias blind. Jupiter was happy with that answer, and so he gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy. Next up, on Slide 8, is the story of Echo and Narcissus. This one starts, as often, with Jupiter having an affair. This time Jupiter was having sex with a nymph in the area around Thebes, and Juno came around looking for him. Echo was a young woman from Thebes, and she covered for her nymph friend by chatting away with Juno and keeping her busy while the nymph was having sex with Jupiter. Juno, of course, found out exactly what was going on and was really angry at Echo for distracting her with conversation, so she cursed Echo by taking away her power of speech. She made it so that Echo could only repeat the last words she heard. She could no longer say anything original. That became a problem for Echo later on when she fell in love with a young man from Thebes named Narcissus. Echo was not unusual in loving Narcissus. He was the most beautiful young man ever, and everyone was totally in love with him. Tiresias, who was blind but could see the future, said that Narcissus would have a long and happy life as long as he didn’t come to know himself. That’s weird, because the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi is  14 Pogorzelski famous for having an inscription that says “Know yourself.” Anyway, Narcissus was not into girls, so when Echo tried to ask him out, he told her to get lost, and there’s a very cool scene in the reading for this week where Narcissus keeps telling Echo things like “Never will I give you power over me,” and Echo replies with things like “I give you power over me.” She repeats what he says, because that’s all she can do, but she does it in a clever way that actually expresses her feelings. But Narcissus isn’t having any of it, and he swears he won’t ever fall in love, and then he sees his reflection in a pool of water, and he goes, “Wow, that dude is hot.” And so he just stares at the hot guy in the reflection forever until he fades away, and Echo hangs around until she fades away into nothing but a voice. We say that a person who is too obsessed with themselves is a narcissist, like Narcissus. And an echo is the voice of the cursed Theban woman. The last story in Metamorphoses 3 is on Slide 9. It’s the story of Pentheus, who was the king of Thebes and a grandson of Cadmus. You will recall from a few minutes ago that Bacchus was a son of Semele, so even though he was a god, he was also Theban. He was raised elsewhere, and he spent a bunch of time in the east and having other adventures, but eventually he decided to go back home to Thebes. He has heard that people in Thebes are denying that he’s a god, denying that his father and Semele’s lover was Jupiter, and saying that he doesn’t really have any power. They say that Semele was just having an affair with a mortal man and covered that up by saying she was sleeping with Jupiter. So Bacchus, who is also called Liber, comes back to Thebes and starts establishing this cult where people worship him by heading out of town to the slopes of the mountain and getting drunk and having a big party. Pentheus, the king of Thebes, is a tough guy and thinks this whole party culture is bad news, so he tries to stop it. He remembers that the Theban noble houses are descended from the warriors who grew from the  15 Pogorzelski dragon’s teeth, and he thinks that they should be tough and manly work hard and not drink too much. He captures a prisoner from Bacchus’ entourage, a guy named Acoetes, and Acoetes tells Pentheus a story about how he was a sailor on a ship and Bacchus turned a bunch of sailors into dolphins, but didn’t do that to Acoetes because he respected Bacchus’ power. Bacchus disguises himself as a priest of Bacchus and he and Pentheus decide that Pentheus should dress up as one of the women who worship Bacchus so he can spy on their drunken rituals and find out what’s really going on. So Pentheus does that, but he gets found out. The Bacchic worshippers somehow mistake him for a boar, and his own mother, Agave, in the throes of her Bacchic madness and drunken strength, tears off his head. And that’s why you should never try too hard to stop people from having drunken parties. If you do, your own drunk mother will literally rip your head off with her bare hands. That’s where book 3 ends, so I’m mostly going to end my summary there for today. There’s a lot more to the Theban Cycle, and we’ll keep going with it over the next couple of weeks. On Slide 10, another grandson of Cadmus was named Labdacus, and his son Laius became king of Thebes. When Laius’ son Oedipus killed him, Oedipus became the king, and he had two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, with Jocasta, who was Laius’ wife, Oedipus’ mother, and also a granddaughter of Pentheus, making her Laius’ cousin as well. One last significant character is Creon, Jocasta’s brother and Pentheus’ grandson, who will become the king of Thebes after Oedipus’ sons kill each other. We saw him in this role in the story of Hercules. These are, I think, even more famous stories than the ones in Metamorphoses 3. The story of Oedipus is that the Oracle of Apollo told Laius that his son would kill him, so he made sure that when his son was born, the infant was exposed and left to  16 Pogorzelski die on the slopes of the mountain outside of Thebes. But the infant was rescued by a shepherd and raised by the king and queen of Corinth. When the Oracle of Apollo told that child, Oedipus, that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he ran away from Corinth to prevent that from happening. He didn’t know that the people who raised him in Corinth weren’t his biological parents. On the road heading out of Corinth, he got into a fight and killed a guy who turned out to be his biological father, Laius, and then he showed up in Thebes and saved the city from the Sphinx. He was a hero for saving the city and he married the queen, Jocasta, not knowing that she was his biological mother. When they found out, Jocasta died by suicide and Oedipus blinded himself and went into exile in Athens. When Oedipus left, his twin sons Eteocles and Polynices fought over who would be the next king. Polynices went to Argos and brought back an army, led by himself and six other champions. There were seven gates of Thebes, and the war was decided by seven single combats at the seven gates, the final one being between the two brothers. This war is known as the Seven Against Thebes. Eteocles and Polynices ended up killing each other in the final duel, and so Jocasta’s brother Creon became king. He said that Polynices was an enemy of Thebes and that he couldn’t be buried in Thebes, but Antigone, who was Polynices’ sister, buried her brother anyway in defiance of Creon. When Creon sentenced her to be buried alive, she and her fiancé, who was also Creon’s son, died by suicide. Creon remained the king in Thebes and welcomed Hercules to the city. But all of that is beyond the scope of Metamorphoses 3. I’m just mentioning the stuff that happens after this week’s reading so you have a sense of just how many of the famous myths are connected with the Theban Cycle. Structuralist Linguistics What I want to do with the next part of this lecture is to introduce you to an approach to  17 Pogorzelski mythology that has been very important for the past century or so, but that is also notoriously difficult to explain and understand. It’s one of the more scholarly and esoteric approaches to myth, and it doesn’t always connect with people immediately. It takes some effort to see how it works. Ultimately, I think it’s still worth going over, even in an introductory course, because it has been really influential in professional scholarship on classical mythology. Even for people who aren’t professional scholars or professors, it can be eye-opening. Some of you may find it really compelling as a way to understand culture. It starts not directly with mythology, but with linguistics. On Slide 11, I’ve already mentioned Eric Csapo’s (2005) Theories of Mythology. One of the most important 20th century theories of mythology, covered in chapter 5 of that book, is “structuralism.” Structuralist approaches to myth take their cues from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was based on his lectures between 1906 and 1911 and was published posthumously in 1916. It will all come back to myth and Thebes later, but for now it’s worth spending a little time with language. You can see on the slide a photo of Saussure.  18 Pogorzelski "F. Jullien Genève", maybe Frank-Henri Jullien (1882–1938), CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons The caption refers to “F. Jullien, Genève” because the photographer was Frank-Henri Jullien and the photo was taken in Geneva. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant approach to linguistics was not all that different from the way people in Ancient Greece and Rome thought about language. The academic discipline of linguistics was dominated by etymology, or the study of the origin of words. It seemed self-evident that language works something like this: If I’m talking with someone who wants to know what the word “apple” means, I can just show them an apple. On Slide 12, there’s a way of thinking about language that goes all the way back to antiquity, but still makes sense now. If I’m talking with someone who wants to know what the word “apple” means, I can just show them an apple. In this way of thinking, there is a sign (the word “apple”) and a referent to which the sign refers (the actual apple). The world provides the material of language, and language works because it is made up of signs that point to things in the real  19 Pogorzelski world. This is sometimes called an “ostensive” approach to language because it relies on ostentation, or pointing to things. Language, in this view, describes the world, and the world is the substance behind language. On Slide 13, the Ancient Greek word for “apple” is µῆλον (melon). That word, however, also means “peach” or “apricot” or any other apple-shaped fruit. Ancient Greeks could tell the difference between apricots and apples, but that difference didn’t have a lot of meaning for them. Similarly, I can tell the difference between apple-shaped fruits and other fruits, but that difference doesn’t hold a lot of meaning for me. For me, an apple is as different from an apricot as it is from an orange, but for an Ancient Greek person, the apple and the apricot are very similar and the orange is very different. The point here is that in addition to the world shaping language, language also shapes the world, or at least the way we perceive it and the categories that have meaning for us. Another famous example of this is how we perceive colors. Sometimes, people who speak languages that categorize colors differently and draw different boundaries between colors see shades as belonging to different color categories. The language they use encourages them to see physical phenomena in different ways. I think what I’m getting at is even more obvious when language isn’t describing physical reality, but social categories. So, for example, ancient Athenians categorized sexuality differently from the way we do. We categorize sexuality by object choice. The gender of the people you want to have sex with is really important to our identities. That wasn’t so much the case for the ancient Athenians. They categorized sexuality by the kinds of things you wanted to do with people instead of by who you wanted to do them with. If you were an ancient Athenian man and you wanted to sexually penetrate other people, whether they were men or women, that was for them normative sexuality.  20 Pogorzelski But if you were a man and you enjoyed being sexually penetrated by other people, that was non- normative and they had derogatory words for that. They knew that some people want to have sex with men and not women, and other people want to have sex with women and not men, and other people want to have sex with both women and men, and other people don’t want to have sex with either women or men, but they just didn’t care about those things enough to name them. For us, sexual object choice is a defining feature of our identity, and our sexual vocabulary is organized on that principle. You could see that as language reflecting our social reality, but you can also see that the language we use shapes the categories we can perceive and how we divide the world up in different ways. Ultimately, what I’m getting at here is that language isn’t as simple as just saying the word “apple” means an apple. On Slide 14, Saussure thought that, if we want to understand language, we can’t just understand the relationship between signs and referents. We have to instead try to understand the system or structure of how signs relate to each other. Saussure argued that we can understand language better if, instead of thinking of a sign (the word “apple”) and a referent (an apple in the real world), we instead think of a third layer. For him, a sign is made up of a signifier, which is a word, like “apple,” and a signified, which is the concept of the apple. It’s not really the referent, which is the apple in the real world. The signified is the concept of the apple in your mind. Words don’t directly point to referents, but instead they are signifiers that point to signifieds, and that allows us to take into account that different languages have different categories. The signified concepts in our minds don’t correspond precisely or simply to referents in the real world. But the really big leap Saussure made was not in dividing the sign into the signifier and the signified, it was in his insistence that rather than trying to understand how signs mean  21 Pogorzelski referents, what’s important is how signifiers relate to each other. If you look up the word “apple” in a dictionary, its meaning will be there in other words. Signifiers don’t get their meaning from signifieds or referents, but from the way they relate to other signifiers. When I’m talking with someone who wants to know what the word “apple” means, it’s not great to show them an apple. Maybe they’re like speakers of Ancient Greek, and if I show them an apple, and say the word apple, they’ll also think an apricot is an apple. Really, if I want to teach someone what the word “apple” means, I should explain it to them in words. Words get their meaning not from things in the real world, but from other words. What matters is not the relationship between signs and referents, but the relationships between words. On Slide 15, one important way that a lot of signifiers relate to each other is in opposition. “Good” is the opposite of “bad.” “Good” is similar to “delightful” and “beautiful” and different from “awkward” or “foul.” We can understand what those signifiers mean not so much by giving real-world examples as by saying that they’re opposites. Saussure argued that a language is made up of a network of signifiers that all relate to each other in a complex system of similarity and difference, and that understanding a language means not so much knowing what the words mean, but having a grasp of the whole system. When you’re trying to learn a language, you can memorize a lot of vocabulary and phrases, but that won’t mean you know the language. When you’ve spent enough time hearing or reading enough material in the language you’re trying to learn, you’ll end up with a kind of mental model of the whole system, and that will allow you to fit new words you’re learning into that whole system. When you know a language, it's not really about knowing what the words mean. There’s something much deeper involved in grasping the system of the language.  22 Pogorzelski On Slide 16, language also works by putting words in relation to each other in sentences. We can think of surface structures, which are the actual sentences that people say, and deep structures, which are the grammatical rules that govern how words can fit together. The sentence “Colorless green dreams sleep furiously” follows the grammatical rules that speakers of a language know unconsciously (deep structure), but it’s meaningless because the words chosen for the sentence (surface structure) don’t produce meaning together. Saussure was interested in the deep structure of grammar rules, and he called this aspect of language “syntagmatic” (like “syntax”), while the rules of meaning that govern word choice are “paradigmatic” (like “paradigm,” which means “model” or “example”). We might think of syntagmatic rules as rules of combination and paradigmatic rules as rules of selection. This is what we mean when we describe Saussure’s linguistics as “structuralist.” He wasn’t interested so much in etymology, or how words come to mean what they mean. He was interested in the structures in which words combine with each other. He was interested in grammar and syntax. If you take a linguistics course now, you will learn very little about etymology and a whole lot about grammar. Grammar is how words fit together, and it’s a name for the structure of rules that fit words into meaningful sentences. The actual sentences people say are the surface of language, but deep underneath that surface as a set of unconscious rules that govern how words fit together. If you have that unconscious grasp of the rules of English, then the sentence, “Colorless dreams sleep furiously” fits to you. It sounds like it makes sense, even though it doesn’t mean anything. Its surface structure—the choice of the words—doesn’t work, but the deep structure—the way the words fit together—does work. That deep structure is the subject of structuralist linguistics. On Slide 17, when we learn our native languages as children, we take examples of  23 Pogorzelski utterances (surface structure) and intuitively grasp without really thinking about it how to make new utterances that follow the same grammar rules (deep structure). When we learn a foreign language as adults, we can sort of learn it by memorizing explicit grammar rules and vocabulary, but we don’t really know the language until we unconsciously grasp the whole system, so that we sense how words fit together without thinking about it. Structuralist linguistics is about making explicit those unconscious rules about how words can fit together. It’s like we all know how to play a board game, but nobody has ever actually said the rules of the game out loud. Language is that board game, and Saussure wanted to write the rulebook for the game. Structuralist Anthropology Okay, so that’s a quick introduction to structuralist linguistics. I’m guessing some of you found that interesting and others don’t really care. It’s not immediately apparent how any of that matters for mythology. We’ll get closer to that in the next part of the lecture, which I’ll start on Slide 18. The next step in our structuralist journey is to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss. You can see a photograph of him on the slide—he’s the guy on the left—again with a caption crediting the photographer.  24 Pogorzelski Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Lévi-Strauss thought that just like there are unconscious, automatic, deep structures that govern how words fit together, there are similarly deep structures that govern culture, or how people fit together. He took structuralism, which was a theory in linguistics, and adapted it, making structuralist anthropology. When you’re a child and you’re learning language, you observe surface structures, and you unconsciously build mental models that build an understanding of deep structures. You’re absorbing grammar rules that tell you what kinds of sentences work and what ones don’t work. But, when you do that, you’re not just learning language. You’re also learning about people and social relations. You’re learning about family structures. What are fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, and how do they all relate to each other. Who is in charge and tells other people what to do and who obeys other people, and how does that sometimes switch around and how do those power dynamics get negotiated? What are the possible roles people can play, and how do those roles combine? What subject positions and  25 Pogorzelski identities are possible, and how do they relate to each other? Just like different languages encourage people to see the world in different ways, different cultural rules and deep structures about things like kinship and social identities also encourage people to see the world in different ways. So, just like Saussure wanted to write the rulebook for language, Lévi-Strauss wanted to write the rulebook for societies—for things like kinship and families and eating. Anthropology is the study of humans, and cultural anthropology is the study of human culture. For a long time, anthropology was really only interested in so-called “primitive societies.” The idea is that modern society is advanced, and we can learn about humanity by studying earlier phases of physical and cultural human development, represented by more primitive people who have not advanced as far as modern, industrial societies have. Now, these days anthropologists will tell you that there’s not really a defined development path for human societies. It’s not like all societies grow up into industrial societies in the same way as children grow into adults. It’s just that people in industrial societies spread that culture to other cultures in a way that makes it seem like all human societies are on the same track toward industrialization. That means that there’s not really much meaning in the term “primitive.” Now, anthropologists study all human societies, including modern, industrial ones. But the reason I bring this up is because back when anthropologists really focused on so-called primitive societies, they also were very frequently interested in mythology. The idea was that primitive societies are characterized by a reliance on myth, and that modern, industrial societies have replaced that reliance on myth with a new reliance on science. I think that’s not really the case. Modern, industrial societies still rely on myth all the time. The place of religion in society has not disappeared, and even beyond religious myths, there are all kinds of culturally significant stories  26 Pogorzelski we tell ourselves and each other. Myth is not a marker of a primitive or underdeveloped society. But anthropologists were right to be interested in myth, because myth really does tell us a lot about a culture, including our own, modern, industrial cultures. If we, like Lévi-Strauss, are interested in the ways people can take on roles and identities, and the rules by which those roles and identities can be combined to form families and societies, myths can tell us about how those things work. When we’re children and we’re learning about how people and social roles work together, we learn that not just by observing people in the real world, but through stories, including especially fictional and mythological stories. So, on Slide 19, Lévi-Strauss was also interested in myth, but he really wanted to understand the deep structure of myth. He argued that there are “mythemes,” which are basic story elements that can be put together according to the rules of a deep structure, just like linguistic elements (like “phonemes” and “morphemes”) fit together according to unconscious rules of language. Think about memes. You know that memes are simple structures that work to produce meaning, and you can replace parts of them. The deep structure of a meme, its syntagmatic part, stays the same, but you can replace the surface structure, the paradigmatic part, to make it mean something different and apply to a new context. The pattern stays the same, but the parts change to produce new meaning. Anything with that “eme” suffix works like that. Phonemes are linguistic sound memes. Mythemes are the patterns that work like memes in mythology. When you, like the Ancient Greeks and Romans, are surrounded by myth and it permeates every aspect of your life, you understand unconsciously the rules by which elements of myths can fit together into stories that make meaning. You know without knowing how you know it which myths work, and which ones don’t work. Saussure argued that if you want to  27 Pogorzelski understand language, you shouldn’t care much about the stuff that changes all the time, the surface structure, the paradigmatic stuff. You should care about the patterns that stay the same, the deep structure, the syntagmatic stuff. You should care about the picture of Squidward putting out his lounge chair and taking it away, and not so much about the specific things Squidward is there for and what he rejects. Just know the pattern that stays the same. You should care about Drake refusing a thing and then approving a thing, and not so much about the things he refuses and approves. Lévi-Strauss said the same thing about mythology. If you want to understand mythology, you should care less about the particular stories, and care more about the repeated patterns or structures underlying them. If you’re interested in reading about that in his own words, one of the places where he first makes his argument is in a 1955 article called “The Structural Study of Myth” in The Journal of American Folklore. On Slide 20, mythemes help to explain why so many elements of myth are the same in different stories, even when they’re combined in different ways. So, for example, we might think of story elements like “the hero is approached with a request” or “a difficult task is proposed to the hero” as mythemes that can be combined with other mythemes. The fact that myth is governed by deep structure is one of the reasons why it’s so hard for us to define exactly what “myth” is. We know how to recognize it because we have internalized the deep structure unconsciously, but it is very difficult to articulate the reasons for that recognition consciously, just like you can know a language without being able to articulate the rules of grammar that govern the language. It is possible to know a mythology without being able to articulate the deep structure or grammar of that mythology. You can understand a mythology without an explicit rulebook. It’s like understanding a language without knowing the grammar rules. But, Lévi-  28 Pogorzelski Strauss argued, it’s better to be able to articulate the deep structure explicitly—to make mythology like linguistics. He wanted to write a grammar of mythology—to articulate the deep structure explicitly. We’ll spend a little time in a few minutes on an example of how exactly Lévi-Strauss does that with the Theban Cycle, but before that I just want to emphasize that this is only one way of understanding mythology. None of the approaches or theories I’m talking about in this course are definitive—none offer the one key that will unlock your understanding of mythology. We could spend this entire year developing a grammar of mythemes that would give you a ton of rules about the deep structure of myth. We’re not doing that. Instead, we’re spending this one week on a small sample of mythemes. I think spending a whole year on it would be kind of boring, but it would also leave out so much that we gain from the variety of approaches to myth. Still, it can be hard to resist, when you’re trying to understand the structuralist approach to mythology, it can be hard to resist the idea that if you could just get the right grammar, you could really understand mythology and it would all become simple. It will never be simple. A lot of mythology textbooks will start with a definition of myth that looks pretty straightforward, but one of the things that we can learn from the variety of approaches to mythology, and also from the structuralist approach in particular, is that myth is very hard to define, and all definitions of it are flawed. It’s better just to spend some time with it and get a sense of what it is than to try to define it exclusively and in advance. Structuralism and the Theban Cycle Anyway, the reason I’ve chosen to bring up the structuralist approach to mythology in the week in which we’re starting the Theban Cycle is that in that 1955 article on “The Structural  29 Pogorzelski Study of Myth,” Lévi-Strauss used the Theban Cycle as his main example to illustrate the idea. On Slide 21, which is from page 433 of the article, there is a chart with four columns, and each column represents a single mytheme, with examples of that mytheme given. The first column, on the left side of the chart, represents the mytheme that Lévi-Strauss calls “overrate blood relations.” The examples of that happening in the myths are “Kadmos seeks his sister Europa ravished by Zeus,” “Oedipus marries his mother Jocasta,” and “Antigone buries her brother Polynices despite prohibition.” In the second column, Lévi-Strauss gives examples of the mytheme he calls “underrate blood relations.” Those examples are “The Spartoi kill each other,” [the Spartoi, remember, are the sown men who grew from the dragon’s teeth], “Oedipus kills his father Laios,” and “Eteocles kills his brother Polynices.” The third column gives examples of  30 Pogorzelski what he calls “denial of autochthony,” and the examples are “Kadmos kills the dragon” and “Oedipus kills the Sphinx.” The fourth and final column gives examples of what Lévi-Strauss calls “assertion of autochthony” and the examples are “Labdacos (Laios’ father) = lame (?),” “Laios (Oedipus’ father) = left-sided (?),” and “Oedipus = swollen-foot (?).” These examples in the fourth column are etymologies. Lévi-Strauss puts question marks there because he’s not sure the etymologies are right, but at the very least he’s right about the name Oedipus meaning “swollen foot.” But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. On Slide 22, in the first column, Lévi-Strauss says the events all represent a mytheme something like “overrate blood relations.” Cadmus seeking Europa, Oedipus marrying his mother Jocasta, and Antigone burying her brother Polynices even though the king Creon has forbidden it all place too much value on family members. The meme or mytheme here is that something happens in the story that shows us a character making a mistake by getting too close to a family member or putting too much value on their relationship with a family member. That mytheme repeats as a deep structural element using different surface structure examples. Agenor told Cadmus to seek out Europa, and Cadmus did that—so far so good—but he was so committed to seeking his missing sister that he gave up his home for it. He never went back. He put too much commitment into his relationship with his sister, and Agenor and Cadmus both put too much value into their relationships with Europa. Similarly, Oedipus got way too close to his mother, and instead of growing apart from her into an independent man, he married her. Finally, when Creon declared that Polynices was an enemy of Thebes and his body could not be buried but must be left for the scavengers and carrion eaters, Antigone broke the law of Thebes because she felt too much commitment to her brother. In each of these examples, a character does  31 Pogorzelski something wrong because they’re too attached to a family member. In the second column, the mytheme is just the opposite. The spartoi brothers killing each other, Oedipus killing his father, and Eteocles killing his brother Polynices all “underrate blood relations.” The spartoi—the sown men who grew from the dragon’s teeth—were brothers. Brothers sometimes fight, but they shouldn’t kill each other. And that mytheme repeats, as other characters in subsequent generations also kill their family members. Oedipus kills his father Laius, and Eteocles and Polynices, the twin sons of Oedipus, kill each other. They, like the spartoi, don’t put enough value on their relationships with their family members. The deep structure or mytheme is that some character kills a member of his immediate family, and the surface structure is the spartoi, Oedipus, and Eteocles and Polynices being put into that meme. The first two columns show a relationship of opposition, and that’s important in structuralism. Remember that Saussure talked about how words get their meaning from a system of similarity and difference. One of the key structures of that system is opposition—antonyms— words that mean the opposite of each other, like good and bad. If you want to know what “bad” means, it’s the opposite of “good.” This kind of structure is especially good at producing meaning when there are two terms that are exactly opposite, and we call that a binary opposition. And, on Slide 23, the second two columns of Lévi-Strauss’ chart also form a binary opposition, this time between the denial of autochthony and the assertion of autochthony. The two items in the third column are examples of the mytheme “denial of autochthony.” Cadmus kills the dragon whose teeth grow humans and Oedipus kills the chthonic sphinx. The dragon is a chthonic monster that is associated directly with autochthony. Its teeth grow the spartoi, so it is the origin of Theban autochthony. When Cadmus kills it, Lévi-Strauss argues that this is a kind of denial of  32 Pogorzelski autochthony. He identifies the same kind of thing, though I think less obviously in the Sphinx, which is the monster that is killing Thebans when Oedipus arrives. Here is another monster killed by a member of the Theban royal family. Now, I’ll admit that I think it’s a bit of a stretch to associate the Sphinx with autochthony and say that killing it is a denial of autochthony, but I don’t think Lévi-Strauss is really wrong here. I would just label the mytheme in a slightly different way. I would call it, “an immigrant proves his right to rule by killing a monster.” Cadmus was from Tyre, and he made the area of Thebes safe for human habitation by killing the dragon. Oedipus was an immigrant from Corinth, and he saved Thebes from the monstrous Sphinx that was killing the people. In each case, the hero proves his right to live in a place and rule over the people there as king not because he was born there or because he was born into a noble family, but by performing the heroic deed of slaying a monster. Autochthony means people have a right to live in and rule over a place because the land itself gave birth to them, so they have a right to that land. The stories of Cadmus and Oedipus killing monsters denies that being born in a place or from the land is what gives you the right to rule it. Instead, it’s your actions, even as an immigrant, that give you the right to the land. This, I think, is how both killing the dragon and killing the sphinx are examples of denying autochthony. It’s really about denying that the circumstances of your birth are what determine your rights. Finally, according to Lévi-Strauss, the fourth column is again the opposite, which is the “assertion of autochthony.” He argues that Labdacus, Laius, and Oedipus all have names that indicate foot injuries, and that in other mythologies, autochthonous people have difficulty walking right. Again, I don’t think this is quite right, but I also don’t think it’s 100% wrong, either. What I don’t like about it is Lévi-Strauss’ appeal to comparative mythology, looking at  33 Pogorzelski things like native American myths and using them to associate problems walking with autochthony. I don’t think that’s even necessary here. What I would call this mytheme is something like “a physical characteristic proves a right to rule by birth.” The most obvious example is Oedipus. When he was abandoned on the mountain to die, his feet were bound together in a way that caused him a permanent injury. He never could get rid of his limp. When he and the Thebans are discovering his identity as the son of the old king Laius, that limp is one of the characteristics that proves he is the son of king Laius. So, even though he came to Thebes from elsewhere and proved his right to rule by killing a monster, he actually was always the legitimate heir to the throne anyway. He’s the king in Thebes not by merit, by killing the monster, but by birth, because he’s the son of the king. And the physical characteristics that Lévi- Strauss finds in the etymologies of the names of the kings of Thebes proves that they are kings not by their actions, but by birth. The right to a piece of land or territory, in this way of thinking, is inherited rather than earned. Myths of autochthony claim the right to a territory by birth from the land, and they support the inheritance of that land through generations related genetically. Myths of meritocracy claim the right to a territory by actions that conquer that territory instead of by inheritance. So what Lévi-Strauss calls the denial of autochthony, I might call the denial of inheritance, or the assertion of meritocracy. And what he calls the assertion of autochthony, I might call the assertion of inheritance, or the denial of meritocracy. So far so good. We’ve got a set of four mythemes and a few examples of each. We can even see a larger structure in which the mythemes fit into binary oppositions that give meaning to each other. Lévi-Strauss goes even further than that, though. On Slide 24, to understand how the chart shows us how the myth works, I want to turn to the question of what Lévi-Strauss  34 Pogorzelski thinks the purpose of myth is. In 1977, he gave a series of lectures on the CBC Radio show Ideas, and they were published in 1978 as a book called Myth and Meaning. By the way, you can still listen to those radio shows—they’re recorded and findable on the internet. Anyway, on page 17 of the book, he says, “We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature —I don’t need to elaborate that point, it is obvious enough—while, of course, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion.” Humans are curious, and we want to know how the world works. That’s very practical, because knowing how the world works allows us to predict how things will go and to make good decisions about what we’re going to do, but it doesn’t really feel practical. We don’t try to find out about the world because we know rationally that it’s going to help us in life. We try to find out about how the world works because we feel curious. Sometimes, we can answer our questions about how the world works rationally, accurately, and scientifically, and that gives us both satisfaction of our curiosity and practical benefit. Other times, we can’t do that, and instead we answer our questions about how the world works through myths. Those don’t give us the same practical benefits as the rational, scientific answers, but they still satisfy our feeling of curiosity. And that satisfaction is what Lévi-Strauss says is the purpose of myth. It’s interesting to note here that, while what Lévi-Strauss says makes sense, we also have some other contenders for the purpose of myth. Jane Harrison’s ritualist approach argued that the purpose of myths is to narrate and provide explanations for ritual behavior, and that rituals act out myths. Bronislaw Malinowski’s functionalist approach argued that the purpose of myths is to  35 Pogorzelski provide charters that authorize present power relations by locating their origins in the distant past. Walter Burkert’s sociobiological approach argued that the purpose of myth is to form communities and to draw boundaries between the inside and the outside of those communities. Eric Csapo’s ideological approach argued that the purpose of myth is to reconcile subordinate classes to the worldview and interests of the ruling class while at the same time giving the illusion that it represents and combines the interests of all classes. Last week’s feminist approach didn’t argue for any particular purpose of myth in general, and instead demonstrated that one particular myth offered a voice of anger against patriarchal violence. We’ll see later in this course other approaches that argue for other purposes. In a couple of weeks, psychoanalysis, for example, will argue that the purpose of myth is to bring to consciousness and express unconscious ideas that would otherwise remain repressed. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s a good idea to say that myth has one purpose. One problem with that is that it leads people to make pretty exclusive definitions of myth. Once you think you know the purpose of myth in general, then any myth that doesn’t fulfill that particular purpose just doesn’t count as myth anymore. More importantly, though, I think that myth is a very adaptable thing, and humans are very adaptable creatures. We make myth do many different things and serve many different purposes. So, I think that Lévi-Strauss is right that at least sometimes, some myths take the place of science in satisfying human curiosity about how the world works, but I also think he’s wrong to make it seem like that’s the ultimate or only purpose of myth. On Slide 25, the question Lévi-Strauss says the myths of Thebes are trying to answer is about where humanity came from. On the one hand, Thebans (like many Ancient Greeks) believed that their ancestors were autochthonous, meaning that they grew up from the earth, like  36 Pogorzelski the “spartoi” or “sown-people.” On the other hand, they could see that new people were born not from the earth but through sexual reproduction. How did the original humans come to be? Today most of us would answer the question scientifically by saying that the original humans came about through an evolutionary process of natural selection, but Ancient Greeks would instead try to grapple with the question through myth. Some parts of the Theban Cycle suggest that the original inhabitants of Thebes came to Thebes from elsewhere, like Cadmus, and that they made the area around Thebes safe by killing monsters. They were born from sexual reproduction, and they earned the right to rule over the territory of Thebes by their actions. Other parts of the Theban Cycle suggest that the original inhabitants of Thebes were born from the land itself, and that they gained the right to rule over the territory of Thebes by inheriting it. The cycle includes both mythemes that assert autochthony and mythemes that deny it because Ancient Greeks thought both things even though they were contradictory. How, then, does the grammar or structure of mythemes attempt to resolve the question and satisfy curiosity about it? On Slide 26, the structure Lévi-Strauss proposes is of two oppositions. “Overrating blood relations” and “underrating blood relations,” and “denial of autochthony” and “assertion of autochthony.” There is a logical difference between these. The first opposition can be mediated by a middle term: “proper valuation of blood relations,” while the second is a contradictory relation that can’t be mediated in that same way. Either people are autochthonous or they’re not—there’s no halfway there. But there is a halfway for the opposition between overrating and underrating family relationships. It is possible to love your mother and not marry her, and it is possible to disagree with or fight with your brothers and not kill them. The Theban Cycle shows us extreme versions of problematic relationships between family  37 Pogorzelski members, both relationships where family members are too close and ones where they’re not close enough, and it does this to show us how the proper path is the middle way. It encourages us to imagine a middle path that they myths don’t show us, in which there are happy and healthy families. And once we get used to the idea that we should read myth that way, we can then imagine that there could be a middle path for all the oppositions. Even something as contradictory as the assertion or denial of autochthony can kind of be mediated in this way. We can imagine an unreal or impossible middle pathway between the two extremes, and that helps us to cope with the problem of a contradiction. On Slide 27, what structuralist interpretation argues is that the question, “Were the original humans autochthonous?” can only be answered one way or the other, but the myth assimilates that question to the opposition between “overrating” and “underrating” blood relations. In the deep structure of mythology, some oppositions between mythemes can be mediated and some are contradictory. The myths of Thebes assimilate a contradictory opposition to one that can be mediated, and that allows people not so much to answer the question of where the original humans came from, but to be okay with the fact that they don’t know the answer by suggesting that the real answer could be somewhere in the middle. It’s a kind of pseudo-logic that feels satisfying without providing real answers. Science provides us with real answers that confer practical benefits, and science satisfies human curiosity about how the world works. But science also sometimes fails, and when it can’t answer a question, it doesn’t pretend like it can. We don’t know all the answers. Ancient Greek people had, while not exactly science in the modern sense of an investigative procedure that uses the formal scientific method, a kind of natural philosophy that used observations and logic to answer questions in a real way that  38 Pogorzelski conferred practical benefits. But even more than we do, they had the problem of an incomplete understanding of the world. Myth’s pseudo-logic or illusion of logic performs a kind of psychological trick that helps us be okay with not knowing. Sometimes, myths like etiological myths just say, here’s the answer. This is why the world is the way it is. But it’s not that simple. The Theban Cycle doesn’t just say that the inhabitants of Thebes were originally autochthonous and leave it at that. Instead, it combines mythemes in a structure that doesn’t provide a definite answer at all, but gets our minds used to the idea that not providing an answer is okay. On Slide 28, Csapo (on page 226 of Theories of Mythology) summarizes Lévi-Strauss’ approach like this, “The function of myth, according to Lévi-Strauss, is to provide a solution to a cultural contradiction. The solution is never logical, strictly speaking, but it imitates logic. If the problem were capable of a purely logical solution, there would be no need to have recourse to myth. But myth can do what logic cannot, and so it serves as a kind of cultural trouble-shooter. Rather than thinking of it as a kind of placebo which creates the mere impression of a solution to a problem, it may be regarded as a mechanism for relieving anxiety.” What I think Csapo is getting at when he talks about a placebo is this: etiological myths can answer scientific questions. Why is there winter every year? Science tells us now that it’s winter because the northern hemisphere of the globe is tilted away from the sun. In the Early Archaic Period, the Greeks didn’t have access to that kind of scientific explanation, and so they made up the mythical explanation of Demeter’s anger. That is a kind of mythical placebo that satisfies curiosity. That’s not what Csapo says Lévi-Strauss is arguing for. Instead, Lévi-Strauss shows us how the logical structure of myth helps us to feel okay about holding contradictory ideas in suspension. It allows us to believe two contradictory ideas at once. It doesn’t answer questions in a satisfying way like  39 Pogorzelski science does, but it relieves our anxiety about not having the answers. In Lévi-Strauss’ 1955 argument about the Theban Cycle, the question he thinks is most important is, “Where did the original humans come from?” The myths help us be okay not knowing the answer to that. But I think we can modify that slightly in a way that makes more sense to me. Csapo calls myths a kind of cultural trouble-shooter, and one of the big troubles in Ancient Greek society was about inheritance. That includes both inheritance of property and also inheritance of excellence—of character traits like skill and talent. I’ve already mentioned that in the Early Archaic Period in Greece, owning property was becoming more common. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, grazing land was common to all, but crop land was privately owned. We still see that in North America today, where ranchers secure grazing rights on land owned by the government, but farmers grow crops on land they own privately. As populations increased in Greece in the Late Iron Age and Early Archaic Period, and because growing crops produces more sustenance per acre than grazing animals does, more and more land was being converted from communally owned land into privately owned land, and the private landowners were more and more concerned to protect their rights to property and to have their children inherit that property. Inheritance was arguably the single most important issue in early Greek law, and it continued to have a central place in law codes and procedures throughout antiquity. At the same time as property inheritance was becoming centrally important in Greek culture, political systems were changing, and new systems were being invented for determining who was in charge in the Greek poleis. A key question in that is whether people get the right to rule or be in charge because they earn it with their own skill and talent or because they inherit it. Do the sons of kings inherit their excellence? Do the sons of kings inherit their right to rule?  40 Pogorzelski What about the sons of democratically elected leaders? Do we elect the sons of previous leaders to office because they have inherited the excellent qualities of their fathers that made them suitable for being in charge, or do we elect people who make their own way and earn the right to be in charge on their own? Tyrannical or monarchical systems say that the sons of kings are the rightful rulers. Oligarchic systems limit that to certain families. Democratic systems say that individuals earn the right to rule by their character and their actions, and not by their inheritance. The Greeks struggled with this kind of question all the time, and it comes down to this: how much are rights and excellence inherited, and how much do rights and excellence depend on the individual regardless of the circumstances of their birth? For me, this is what the question of autochthony in the Theban Cycle is all about. Do we Thebans live here, own this property, and rule this territory because we have inherited it from our ancestors who literally grew out of the land, or do we Thebans live here, own this property, and rule this territory because we are the best people to do it and we earn it ourselves in the present? Was Oedipus the king of Thebes because he inherited that right from his biological father, King Laius, or was he the king because he earned it by defeating the Sphinx and saving Thebes from the monster? Do the noble families of Thebes own most of the property because they are smart and strong and make the best use of it, or do they own most of the property because they are descended from the spartoi? And it’s not the case that there are no answers to those questions. The problem is that there are too many answers to those questions, that people believe very strongly that their answers are the right ones, and communities are divided by the different ways to answer the questions. Myths make us feel okay about that, and that helps to preserve the stability of the status quo. Myths paper over our anxieties about societal divisions. In that way, I  41 Pogorzelski think that Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist idea about the purpose of myths can be interpreted as not that different from a sociobiological or ideological idea about the purpose of myth. In all cases, myths help to bind communities together. What’s interesting and unique about the structuralist approach is its focus on the logic of how to get there. It’s less interesting for what is says about what myths do, and more interesting for what it says about how they do it. On Slide 29, whether or not you buy into Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist interpretation of the myths of Thebes, it illustrates a type of interpretation that helps to explain how stories work. There are elements of stories that recur again and again, and there are unconscious rules about how those elements can fit together in ways that feel right, just like there are unconscious linguistic rules about how words can fit together in sentences that feel right. We’ll revisit this kind of approach in a way that may be more intuitive and accessible next semester when I talk about “the hero’s journey.” Lévi-Strauss’ idea of mythemes can also be a way of looking at the repeated elements of the so-called hero’s journey. We can identify certain story elements and see how they can be altered and reordered for different stories but still retain an underlying structure. One of the versions of that kind of analysis is especially associated with Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which proposes what Campbell calls the “monomyth.” He argues that there are universal mythemes that all cultures use, and that these reflect deep psychological structures that all humans share. So he has a different purpose or approach from the one Lévi-Strauss uses, but he still wants to identify mythemes and the rules for how they can be combined. That idea has had a lot of influence among writers, and one of the best-known examples is that George Lucas used Campbell’s ideas when he was writing Star Wars. From that perspective, Star Wars is a compelling story less because of innovative and cool science fiction  42 Pogorzelski elements and more because it combines traditional mythemes in a very traditional way. Its surface structure and paradigmatic elements are new, but its deep structure and syntagmatic characteristics are very old. It feels right because it has the right structure. On Slide 30, as for Lévi-Strauss’ interpretation of the Theban cycle, I’ll admit I’m not 100% convinced about the arguments about autochthony, but I do think that overvaluing or undervaluing family relationships is a recurrent theme in the stories, and the idea that myth is about setting up and resolving oppositions is persuasive. Our earlier ideological interpretation of the Heracles myth, although it focused on socio-economic class, also showed that myth offering opposing perspectives and trying to resolve the contradictions. I find this kind of structuralist analysis more compelling than the “hero’s journey” or “monomyth” version of it. Rather than just identifying common mythemes, Lévi-Strauss shows us how that structuralist network of similarities and differences, including especially binary oppositions, works as a cultural trouble shooter. He’s not just saying that traditional story patterns are satisfying to us—he’s also trying to figure out why traditional story patterns are satisfying. The seeming resolution of oppositions is a powerful explanation for that. Some Passages from the Metamorphoses Okay, that was my introduction to the structuralist approach to mythology. What I want to do with the rest of this lecture is to look at some passages from this week’s reading assignment. Normally, I like to spend a lot of lecture time on passages, but this week I felt like it was worth spending more time than usual on structuralist theory because it can be complicated and difficult to understand. So, I spent a lot of time on that and there’s not a huge amount of time left for the week’s reading. Still, we do have a little time and I think it’s worth spending that time doing  43 Pogorzelski some close reading. Our first passage is on Slide 31 (page 125). On this slide, I’ve included not only the English translation, but the original Latin too. I did that because I want to talk about a particular Latin word, but it also gives me an opportunity to read to you a little bit of Latin dactylic hexameter. You may recall that dactylic hexameter was the meter that Hesiod used, and Ovid uses it too. So here’s the opening of Metamorphoses 3 in Latin: Iamqve deus posita fallacis imagine tauri se confessus erat Dictaeaque rura tenebat, cum pater ignarus Cadmo perquirere raptam imperat et poenam, si non invenerit, addit exilium, facto pius et sceleratus eodem. Hopefully I was able to convey to you a sense of the rhythm of the poetry in that passage. Poetry, as they say, is what is lost in translation. Anyway, here’s the same passage in English: And now the god, having put off disguise of the bull, owned himself for what he was, and reached the fields of Crete. But the maiden’s father, ignorant of what had happened, bids his son, Cadmus, go and search for the lost girl, and threatens exile as a punishment if he does not find her—pious and guilty by the same act. So this passage drops us into an early part of the Theban Cycle, in which Jupiter disguised as a bull has run off with Europa and Agenor orders Cadmus to find her and not to come home without her. Because it’s impossible for Cadmus to find Europa, he’s effectively exiled. That’s super interesting, because Ovid is not yet exiled, but he will be soon. He sees an absolute monarch, Augustus, exiling people for unjust reasons, not aware that he himself will soon suffer that fate, and he writes about another absolute monarch, Agenor, exiling his son Cadmus for  44 Pogorzelski unjust reasons. Ovid tells us that Agenor is both pious and guilty by the same act. I want to focus for a moment on the word “pious,” which I’ve bolded in the Latin on the slide. The Latin word is pius, which is the etymological origin of the English word, “pious,” so it’s easy to translate it that way. But the Latin word is not quite the same as the English one. In English, “pious” means “religious.” Someone who is devoted to their religion and follows all the proper rituals and behaviors is pious. They have a good relationship with their god or gods. There’s some of that in the Latin word too, but the strongest connotation of the Latin word is less about religion and more about family. Someone who is pius in Latin doesn’t just obey the rules of religion, but also has a good relationship with their family and obeys the rules of the head of the family. The word gets used especially about the relationships between fathers and sons. When they’re pius, they respect each other and act appropriately toward each other. Here, Agenor is pius because he cares about his family. He instructs his son to find his daughter. He is worried about her and he wants her back. But he is also wicked, criminal, guilty, in Latin sceleratus, because he is effectively exiling his son even though his son has done nothing wrong. Agenor has given his son an impossible task and is punishing him for not being able to accomplish it. And the reason I think this is really significant here is that right at the beginning of the Theban Cycle, there’s this contradiction in overvaluing and undervaluing family relationships. Agenor cares for his daughter and wants to save her, and at the same time he exiles his son. Ovid, in the way he tells the story, is emphasizing right from the beginning one of the key binary oppositions in the Theban Cycle. As the story goes on, however, Ovid seems to focus less on that opposition and more on an issue that is pressing in his own time, and that’s the issue of free speech. As his own exile for,  45 Pogorzelski at least in part, writing poetry that Augustus didn’t like, looms, Ovid hauntingly shows us scenes of powerful characters taking away the power of speech from weaker characters. On Slide 32 (page 137), I’ve quoted the passage in which Diana transforms Actaeon: Then, though the band of nymphs pressed close about her, she stood turning aside a little and cast back her gaze; and though she would fain have had her arrows ready, what she had she took up, the water, and flung it into the young man’s face. And as she poured the avenging drops upon his hair, she spoke these words foreboding his coming doom: “Now you are free to tell that you have seen me all unrobed—if you can tell.” Diana seems especially concerned in this passage about her reputation. She doesn’t like that Actaeon has seen her naked, but even more than that she doesn’t want Actaeon telling anyone else that he has seen her naked. She is ashamed in the moment, but she imagines how ashamed she would be if Actaeon shared this moment with everyone, and that’s what she’s really worried about. So, her punishment of him is only partly a punishment that looks back to what he’s done. It's more about preventing him from doing harm to her in the future, and that means taking away his power of speech. The words she says when she transforms him are not, “I am making you into a deer.” Instead, they’re, “I am taking away your ability to speak. I am silencing you.” And that’s what Augustus is doing when he punishes writers and poets. He’s preventing them from doing him harm by silencing them. On Slide 33 (page 141), Ovid continues to emphasize Actaeon’s inability to speak after his transformation: He flees over the very ground where he has oft-times pursued; he flees (the pity of it!) his own faithful hounds. He longs to cry out: “I am Actaeon! Recognize your own master!”  46 Pogorzelski But words fail his desire. Actaeon as a deer in this passage tries to communicate with his dogs, but he can’t speak and so they can’t recognize him. He has been effectively silenced. On Slide 34 (page 145), we see a different spin on the theme of punishing speech. This is from the story of Semele: In such wise did Juno instruct the guileless daughter of Cadmus. She in her turn asked Jove for a boon, unnamed. The god replied: “Choose what thou wilt, and thou shalt suffer no refusal. And that thou mayst be more assured, I swear it by the divinity of the seething Styx, whose godhead is the fear of all the gods.” Rejoicing in her evil fortune, too much prevailing and doomed to perish through her lover’s compliance, Semele said: “In such guise as Saturnia beholds thee when thou seekest her arms in love, so show thyself to me.” The god would have checked her even as she spoke; but already her words had sped forth into uttered speech. He groans; for neither can she recall her wish, nor he his oath. Jupiter promises Semele that she can ask him for any one thing and he will grant it to her, and she asks for him to have sex with her just as he has sex with Saturnia, that is Juno, the daughter of Saturn. And Jupiter tries to stop her from speaking as soon as he understands what she’s asking, but of course by then it’s already too late and she’s already spoken the words that will mean her death. She can’t unsay what she’s said and he can’t break his promise. So here again speech is punished, but in the opposite way from last time with Actaeon. In that one he died because he couldn’t speak anymore—in this one she dies because Jupiter can’t silence her quickly enough. In structuralist terms, I would say that Ovid is setting up an opposition here between speech and silence, or between whether it’s right to restrict problematic speech or right  47 Pogorzelski to allow problematic speech. In the name of preventing harm to her, Diana restricts Actaeon’s speech, and that means he dies. Jupiter fails to restrict Semele’s speech, and that means she dies. The theme continues on Slide 35 (pages 149-151), this time in the story of Echo: Up to this time Echo had form and was not a voice alone; and yet, though talkative, she had no other use of speech than now—only the power out of many words to repeat the last she heard. Juno had made her thus; for often when she might have surprised the nymphs in company with her lord upon the mountain-sides, Echo would cunningly hold the goddess in long talk until the nymphs were fled. When Saturnia realized this, she said to her: “That tongue of thine, by which I have been tricked, shall have its power curtailed and enjoy the briefest use of speech.” Echo is facilitating adultery, just like we think Ovid did. That was the mistake for which he was exiled—facilitating the adultery of Augustus’ granddaughter Julia. And Juno punishes Echo for facilitating adultery by removing her power of speech, or at least mostly removing it. She’s not totally silenced, but she can only echo parts of what other people say, and she can no longer say her own, original things. And the last passage I want to look at is on Slide 36 (page 175), from the end of the book. This is the story of Pentheus, and specifically the part where his mother, Agave, is killing him: And now the wretched man has no arms to stretch out in prayer to his mother; but, showing his mangled stumps where his arms have been torn away, he cries: “Oh, mother, see!” Agave howls madly at the sight and tosses her head with wildly streaming hair. Off she tears his head, and holding it in bloody hands, she yells: “See, comrades, this feat spells victory for us!” Not more quickl