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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Myth and History in Ancient Greece: The Symbolic Creation of a Colony

Myth and History in Ancient Greece: The Symbolic Creation of a Colony

Berman, Daniel W.
Calame, Claude

Hardcover

Religion General Mythology & FolkloreAncient Greece

ISBN10: 0691114587
ISBN13: 9780691114583
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Jul 22 2003
Pages: 192
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.84 Width: 6.42 Depth: 9.48
Language: English

Surely the ancient Greeks would have been baffled to see what we consider their mythology. Here, Claude Calame mounts a powerful critique of modern-day misconceptions on this front and the lax methodology that has allowed them to prevail. He argues that the Greeks viewed their abundance of narratives not as a single mythology but as an archaeology. They speculated symbolically on key historical events so that a community of believing citizens could access them efficiently, through ritual means. Central to the book is Calame's rigorous and fruitful analysis of various accounts of the foundation of that most mythical of the Greek colonies--Cyrene, in eastern Libya.

Calame opens with a magisterial historical survey demonstrating today's misapplication of the terms myth and mythology. Next, he examines the Greeks' symbolic discourse to show that these modern concepts arose much later than commonly believed. Having established this interpretive framework, Calame undertakes a comparative analysis of six accounts of Cyrene's foundation: three by Pindar and one each by Herodotus (in two different versions), Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes. We see how the underlying narrative was shaped in each into a poetically sophisticated, distinctive form by the respective medium, a particular poetical genre, and the specific socio-historical circumstances. Calame concludes by arguing in favor of the Greeks' symbolic approach to the past and by examining the relation of mythos to poetry and music.

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