Roger D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, janvier 2008, xvi-536p.
Isbn (ean13): 978-0-521-60726-1.
Recension par Angela Kühr (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2008.08.10
Présentation de l'éditeur:
A unique resource, 'The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology' is essentialreading for understanding not only Greek myth, but also its enormous impacton art, architecture, literature, politics and philosophy across the ages.More than a compendium of isolated facts, 'The Cambridge Companion to GreekMythology' is thoughtfully composed by a team of international experts whohighlight important themes in three sections.
The first part examines oraland written Greek mythology and the uses of these myths from the epicpoetry of the eighth century BC to the mythographic catalogs of the earlycenturies AD. The second section looks at the relationship between ancientGreek myth and Greek culture and investigates the Roman appropriation ofthe Greek mythic tradition. Section three follows the reception of Greekmyth from the Middle Ages to modernity, taking in such factors as feministscholarship, cinema and literature. Important for its reach and breadth,its integrated approach and its up-to-date treatment, 'The CambridgeCompanion to Greek Mythology' is fundamental for anyone seeking a broaderunderstanding of the myths and their influence on western tradition
Sommaire:
List of Illustrations page vii
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Muthoi in Continuity and Variation 1
ROGER D. WOODARD
PART 1: SOURCES AND INTERPRETATIONS 15
1 Lyric and Greek Myth 19
GREGORY NAGY
2 Homer and Greek Myth 52
GREGORY NAGY
3 Hesiod and Greek Myth 83
ROGER D. WOODARD
4 Tragedy and Greek Myth 166
RICHARD BUXTON
5 Myth in Aristophanes 190
ANGUS BOWIE
6 Plato Philomythos 210
DISKIN CLAY
7 Hellenistic Mythographers 237
CAROLYN HIGBIE
PART 2: RESPONSE, INTEGRATION, REPRESENTATION 255
8 Greek Myth and Greek Religion 259
CLAUDE CALAME
9 Myth and Greek Art: Creating a Visual Language 286
JENIFER NEILS
10 Mythic Landscapes of Greece 305
ADA COHEN
11 Politics and Greek Myth 331
JONATHAN M. HALL
12 Ovid and Greek Myth 355
A. J. BOYLE
PART 3: RECEPTION 383 13 Women and Greek Myth 387
VANDA ZAJKO
14 Let Us Make Gods in Our Image: Greek Myth in Medieval and Renaissance Literature 407
H. DAVID BRUMBLE
15 ‘Hail, Muse! et cetera': Greek Myth in English and American Literature 425
SARAH ANNES BROWN
16 Greek Myth on the Screen 453
MARTIN M. WINKLER
Bibliography 481
Index
INTRODUCTION: MUTHOI IN CONTINUITY AND VARIATION
Roger D. Woodard
But as a rule the ancient myths [palaious muthous(παλαιὸυς μύθους)] are not found to yield a simple and consistentstory, so that nobody need wonder if details of my recension cannot bereconciled with those given by every poet and historian.
The editor trusts thathe will be forgiven the presumptuousness (or audacity, as the case maybe) of beginning with Robert Graves's translation of Diodorus Siculus4.44.5–6 – the lines that Graves prefixed to the preface of his work The Golden Fleece– lines that seem no less relevant here than at the outset of Graves'novelistic retelling (influenced by his experiences in the trenches ofthe Great War, no less than by Frazer's Golden Bough) of theancient mythic tradition of the young hero Jason and his band ofwarrior comrades, who sailed from Greece on board the Argo to recoverthe fleece of a golden ram from distant Colchis. What we call “Greekmyth” is no featureless monolith, but multifaceted, multifarious andmultivalent, a fluid phenomenon, as was obvious to the historianDiodorus in the first century BC, and as is made plain by the essays that make up this Cambridge Companion.
The chapters that follow are divided into three major parts. Sources and Interpretations,the first part of the three, consists of seven essays examining theforms and uses of Greek mythic traditions in Greek texts, ranging inperiod and genre from eighth-century BC oral poetry to encyclopedic prose compilations of the early centuries AD– from an era rich in a spontaneous performative creativity to oneseemingly more concerned with documenting the mythic traditions of aglorious literary past. Yet even in the earliest attested periods,there is, as we shall see, evidence of a concern for preserving stillmore ancient forms and notions about gods and heroes.
Part One begins with Gregory Nagy's examinationof the lyric poets, followed by his essay on Homer. If from achronological perspective the order might seem unorthodox – it shouldnot. As Nagy reminds his readers, “Lyric did not start in the archaicperiod. It is just as old as epic, which clearly pre-dates the archaicperiod. And the traditions of lyric, like those of epic, were rooted inoral poetry, which is a matter of performance as well as composition.”In the archaic period, composition and performance are inextricablylinked. Nagy explores occasions of performance for his readers byexamining, inter alia, a “primary test case” – the lyric worksof the Lesbian poets Sappho and Alcaeus, jointly representing “therepertoire of the myths and rituals of the people of Lesbos asexpressed in lyric performance.” The place of such performance was thesacred ritual space of Messon – the space for the celebration of the Kallisteia, a festival featuring choral singing and dancing by Lesbian women – a ritual space that can be “figured…in mythological terms.”
In oral lyric poetry, Nagy demonstrates, theinteraction of performance with composition parallels “the interactionof myth with ritual. The same can be said about the epic poetryattributed to Homer: to perform this epic is to activate myth, and suchactivation is fundamentally a matter of ritual.” The performance ofepic poetry is a matter of producing “speech-acts” – the doing ofsomething by the act of the speaking of something (in the sense ofAustin 1962): “In Homeric poetry, the word for such a performative actis muthos, ancestor of the modern term myth.” Drawing upon Martin 1989, Nagy offers “a working definition of muthosas it functions within the epic frame of Homeric poetry: ‘a speech-actindicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with afocus on full attention to every detail.' ” The truth-value of suchspeech-acts – ‘myths' – is a function of their performative framing.From the perspective of the lyric poet Pindar, for example, the ‘truth'(alētheia) of local myths, set in local rituals, concerning Odysseus and Ajax becomes ‘falsehoods' (pseudea) when incorporated into the delocalized “master myth” of the epic Odyssey,“controlled by the master narrator” of that epic poem: “Under suchcontrol, the myths about Odysseus in the Odyssey lose the groundingthey once had in their local contexts. Once muthoi ‘myths' are delocalized, they become relative and thus multiple in application, to be contrasted with the alētheia ‘truth' claimed by lyric.”
In his chapter on Greek lyric, Nagy writes of theorientalizing of Lesbian traditions under the influence of the Lydiansof Asia Minor. At the end of “Homer and Greek Myth,” he takes note ofHomer's Indo-European antecedents, while again reminding his readers ofthe orientalizing factor – “the lateral influence of Near Easternlanguages and civilizations.” These two formative elements –Indo-European inheritance and Near Eastern influence – lie at the heartof Chapter 3, the editor's treatment of myth in Hesiod's epic poems,the Theogony and Works and Days. Hesiod's poeticcompositions, no less bound up with performance than lyric and Homericepic, attest a particular, even unique, saliency and transparency forthe formative history, documentation, and study of Greek myth and forthat reason are examined in close detail. The so-calledkingship-in-heaven tradition of the Theogony is one wellattested among various Near Eastern peoples of Asia Minor andMesopotamia and is reported to have existed in a Phoenician form aswell. Hesiod's kingship-in-heaven account, though a primitive and corecomponent of the “ancient myths” of the Greeks, was almost certainlytaken over from one or another of these Near Eastern cultures and notinherited from the Greeks' own Indo-European ancestors. Hesiod's Works and Daysis a didactic poem that is itself of a sort commonly encountered in theNear East (the Biblical book of Proverbs perhaps being the mostfamiliar example), and Near Eastern influence in this case is alsoundeniable. For some scholars in fact, such as Georges Dumézil,precious little of Greek myth appears to be inherited from earlierIndo-European periods. Yet, I argue, following in part Jean-PierreVernant, there are indeed primitive Indo-European elements present –and conspicuously so – in Works and Days (as well as in the Theogony):“The playful, creative use to which Hesiod puts these inherited notionsand conventions and the freedom that he displays in restructuring themon the surface, while preserving what we may term underlyingstructures, suggests to us that this ‘Hesiod' is fully conversant withtraditions of his Indo-European ancestors.”
With Richard Buxton's chapter on tragedy andGreek myth, we move some 300 years beyond Homer and Hesiod, squarelyinto the world of classical Greek literature. The performative elementof myth is, however, still central: “At the annual festival of the CityDionysia, myths were reembodied in performances by members of thecitizen group. In these reembodiments, as heroes and divinities walkedthe stage, myths were not just narrated as past events: they wereactualised as present happenings. Then and there, but also now andhere; remote enough to allow room for pity, but close enough to inspireawe.” Among core issues explored by Buxton is that of the locality ofthis tragic reembodiment of muthoi – political, social,topographical, and psychological spaces of liminality: “the distinctivelocation of tragic myths is in the gaps between certainties. Tragedy isa place of edges and margins, an in-between territory where boundaries– literal and metaphorical – are ripe for exploration andcontestation.” The gods of the muthoi form the “framework” or“backdrop” of competitive tragic performance, Buxton demonstrates:“Each playwright staged his own version of the mythological past,striving to be adjudged superior to his rivals.” The result wastypically one in which the gods appear in conflict with one another andin which there is displayed a “readiness to tolerate overt criticism ofthe gods' behaviour” – “one feature of ancient Greek religion which canbe particularly difficult to comprehend for a modern observer.”
Such a willingness to scorn the gods is no lessan element of myth-in-comedy, as Angus Bowie shows us in his essay“Myth in Aristophanes.” Considering first the few remains ofmythological Old Comedy generally – best evidenced by a summary ofCratinus' Dionysalexandrus, in which the story of the TrojanWar “is reworked so that Dionysus becomes as it were a failed actor inthe role of Paris” – Bowie observes that comedy “was a genre in whichthe gods were not spared mockery, even the god in whose honour thefestival was being held. Indeed, Dionysus [celebrated by the CityDionysia] is the most frequent butt of humour in the comedies as far aswe can tell: the god features regularly in his own festival.” Indeed,from the fragmentary texts mythological Old Comedy looks to be a genrethat “could take considerable liberties with mythology” and one thatcould frequently use a “mythical story for political purpose.” Turningto Aristophanes, Bowie notes that “one not infrequent category ofcomedy is that which parodies earlier tragic performances of myth. Thedifficulty here is that it is not always clear whether Aristophanes isproducing a parodic version of a myth or a parody of a particulartragic version of that myth.” Beyond this, Bowie argues, comedy canimitate the structure of myth and its affiliated framing festivals, asin Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, structured in such a waythat “the comedy…has (allegedly) the same benefit to the city as theThesmophoria,” the Eleusinian festival of Demeter.
Diskin Clay next examines Plato and myth in “Plato Philo-mythos.” Clay captures the essential if sometimes unrecognized othernessof Greek “myth” for modern peoples and contextualizes it nicely for us– and this is very important – as he writes: “The luxuriant varietiesof definitions of Greek ‘myth' are a symptom of the remoteness of ourculture from the culture of ancient Greece. We have no real equivalentfor the traditional stories and histories that circulated among theGreeks (and Romans) concerning their origins, the origins of theirworld, their gods and the progeny of their gods, the relation betweenhumans and animals, and the fate awaiting mortals after death.” Amongthe issues that Clay addresses is the contrastiveness not uncommonlyset up between mythos (i.e., muthos) and logos (“the myth of logos versus mythos”). “In Homer, mythos is a word that describes something said in epic. But already in Herodotus the word mythoshad come to describe an idle and unbelievable tale.…Yet Herodotus'predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletus, can describe his own history as a mythos…and, conversely, traditional but misleading historical accounts as logoi.…Thucydides rejected what he called the poets' ‘tendency to myth'…but, in his narrative of speeches…logoiwere often the equivalent of myths.” And what of Plato? “Because of thedeliberate ambiguity he has created in his dialogues as to whatconstitutes a mythos and what qualifies as a logos, Plato has contributed to our modern confusion over what can be described as a ‘myth.' ” Though he can use mythos to denote ‘fable' and logos a ‘noble and true account', as in the Gorgias, “the distinction does not hold. Elsewhere in Plato, what we would regard as his seriously meant truth is often treated as a mythos, and fictions, based on traditional accounts, are called logoi.” Clay further observes, “Whether a narrative is called a mythos or logosdepends on the viewpoint of the teller of the tale (usually Socrates)and his audience.” More than that, Plato is capable of the“simultaneous dismissal and use of Greek myth.” And Plato is himself amythmaker – an artisan “weaving the strands of Greek myth into a fabricof his own design”: “It has been said that myth died in Plato's youth.It did not. Of all Greek philosophers, Plato is most mythopoeic” (and“the most notorious of Plato's myths is the myth of Atlantis…the mostimpressive philosophical fiction ever written”). “Plato's realquarrel,” Clay shows us, “is not with Greek myth; it is with the poetryof the Greek polis and its false and debasing representations ofreality.”
Part One comes to an end with Carolyn Higbie'scontribution on the “Hellenistic Mythographers”: “from sometime in thefourth century BC on, Greeks developed an interest incollecting, documenting, and interpreting the important literary worksof their past.” Scholarly devotion to the written records ofperformative traditions led to the production of interpretative aidsand an acute awareness of the particular body of information preservedwithin these traditions: “from this double opportunity…developed atleast two genres, mythography and paradoxography” – “stories about thegods and heroes” and “stories about the weird or unusual,”respectively. Higbie notes that “myths certainly appeared in prosetexts before the Hellenistic world, but they lack, so far as one cantell from the fragmentary remains, the flavor of a compilation, of timespent in libraries gathering stories from different sources.” Of such“mythological compendia,” “the most famous and influential, in moderntimes,…is the Bibliotheca – ‘Library' ” authored by Apollodorus in, perhaps, the first century AD.
Part Two, Response, Integration, Representation,begins with Claude Calame's discussion of “Greek Myth and GreekReligion.” The position occupied by Calame's work – at the midpoint ofthe volume – is metaphorically significant: it is a work thatintersects in crucial ways with several of the contributions thatprecede and several that follow. Opening with the claim that “neither‘myth' nor ‘religion' constitutes a category native to Greek thought,”Calame challenges the very existence of what we are given toconceptualize as Greek mythology – “unless considered in the form of manuals of mythography, such as the one in the Libraryattributed to Apollodorus.” His examination of the relationship ofGreek “myth” and “religion” takes the form of five case studies: ineach, he observes, “we can see how an individual heroic tale is calledupon to legitimate a particular cult practice through an intermediarypoetic form that influences both the narrative and semanticcharacteristics of the account and the religious and politicalconception underlying the ritual concerned.” Calame's conclusion fromthe fivefold examination – “Supported by poetic genre, this or thatepisode of the divine and heroic past of the Greek communities isinserted into both a specific cult institution and a form of ritualpoetry, most often choral. These poetic forms make from narratives,appearing to us as mythic, an active history, inscribed in a collectivememory realized through ritual.” And, he continues, “The ensemble ofthe myths of the Hellenic tradition is characterized by a certainplasticity that allows the poetic creation of versions constantlyreadapted for cult and for religious and ideological paradigms offeredby a polytheism that varies within the multifarious civic space andtime of the cities of Greece.”
In “Myth and Greek Art: Creating a VisualLanguage,” Jenifer Neils begins by reminding the reader that, withrespect to myth, “Greek narrative art displays an amazing degree ofimagination, ingenuity, and originality” (echoing Calame and many ofthe contributors that the reader has by now encountered) and goes on toexpound manageably for the reader the vast domain of Greek myth and artby focusing on two essential – one might say “performative” – elements:“First, what devices did the artist employ for depicting a myth and howdid this visual language come about? Second, how did the artist makehis chosen theme relevant to a particular audience at a specific pointin time?” Special attention is given to the example of a wine cupdecorated by the Codrus painter on which are depicted “the seven deedsof the local hero Theseus.” Harbingering Jonathan Hall's discussion ofAthenian usage of Theseus for political ends (Chapter 11), Neilsreveals how, when the symbolism of the object is properly parsed, “thiscycle cup does much more than recount some of the deeds of the heroTheseus; it rewrites history by associating Athens's glorious BronzeAge hero with its glorious present. For the Athenians their myths weretheir history, and they saw no problem in embellishing them for thegreater glory of the polis.”
Treatment of the visual aspect of thepresentation of Greek myth continues in Ada Cohen's “Mythic Landscapesof Greece”; Cohen offers an insightful look at the use of landscape– caves, countryside, the Underworld, mountains, and so on – vis-à-vismythic representation in both literature and art, exploring the“intersection of narrative and description in light of common as wellas rarely depicted myths in painting and sculpture.” Pausanias, thesecond-century ADperiegetic (travel) author, is an important literary source for Cohenand other scholars of mythic landscape – a source with a retrospectiveview: “When invoking landmark single trees and groves as noteworthyspatial markers…Pausanias, to whom we owe much of our knowledge ofancient sites and now-lost monuments, did not linger on their greeneryor on the flowers and fruits they produced, but on their culticassociations as well as associations with important events of theclassical past.” The use of landscape in ancient Greek art issurprisingly limited; when landscape elements are depicted, it is byutilizing “a restrained repertoire and a symbolic employment oflandscape.” Even so, Cohen argues, there is in Greek art “a rich andviable conception of landscape.” She concludes that “in all casesartists took for granted their audiences' deep familiarity with theGreek landscape and asked the imagination to fill the voids. Thissituation is in the end not so different from that of mythicaldiscourse itself, whose multiple versions were the result of traditionscolliding with individual tellers' points of view and emphases.”
It is with a contrastive reference to thisRoman-era Greek, Pausanias, and the “matrix of myth and memories” thatPausanias invokes for the various poleis he visits, thatJonathan Hall begins his essay on “Politics and Greek Myth” (“The factis that myth meant something entirely different to the Greeks ofPausanias' generation than it had to their ancestors”). The politicaluses of myth that Hall addresses – “myth's capacity to charter andjustify changing political circumstances” – are, he argues, grounded inmyth's ideological character and its existence as a productive symbolicsystem (analogous to the system of langue and parole ofSaussurian structural linguistics): “Through the dynamic dialecticbetween narrator and audience, traditional materials could bereconfigured and modulated to stake claims about the natural order andto advance partisan interests and it is precisely myth's ideologicalcharacter that made it so effective in the practice of ancient Greekpolitics.” The mutability and adaptability of myth is foregrounded,again, as Hall presents his readers with three case studies: theseinvolve the Spartan and Argive use of “mythical prototypes of alliancesto justify their own claims to Peloponnesian hegemony in the mid-sixthcentury”; the Athenian Pisistratus' capitalizing upon Theseus as “anattractive prototype of the strong, wise, and just leader” and hiselevation of “Theseus to Panathenaic status”; and the fifth-century“orientalization” of the Trojans, consequent, chiefly, to the secondPersian War.
A. J. Boyle's “Ovid and Greek Myth,” theconcluding chapter of Part Two, which moves the reader squarely intoImperial Rome, brings this aspect of Greek myth into the sharpest focusyet: “Much of the discursive and political use of Greek myth was madepossible by its separation from Roman ritual, its function in Romanintellectual life as an instrument of thinking. By Roman intellectualsGreek myth was generally regarded as fabulae, a collection offictions.” “[Ovid] is fully aware of the contemporary categorisation ofmyth as fiction.…His interest in myth is neither religious norritualistic, but poetic.” With regard specifically to Ovid's sardonicliterary response to Augustus' moral legislation (“The transformationof adultery and other forms of transgressive fornication [stuprum] into crimes with severe penalties imposed by a special permanent court [quaestio perpetua]suddenly made sexual morality and practice subject to politicalcontrol”), Boyle observes, “The poet develops his subversion ofAugustan sexual codes by turning to Greek myth – to the famousadulteress Helen”; that Ovid should have invoked the unfaithful wife ofMenelaus “not as a denunciation of adulterers but rather as a textpontificating on the excusability, even innocence, of certain kinds ofadultery, astonishes”: thus, Boyle concludes, “Myth's paradigmaticfunction dissolves into political and social critique.” Ovid's stingingpolitical critiques can, already in the first century, make recourse tothe otherness of Greek myth: “What Ovid presents in Metamorphosesis a world of unaccountable otherness, in which controllers of thatworld and the putative guardians of its morality exemplify the vicesthey condemn.”
A work of central interest to Boyle is Heroides, “an early work of Ovid and a self-proclaimed revolutionary one (Ars3.346), in which a whole collection of poems focusses on the femalevoice, female memory, and female desire.” These, in turn, are issues onwhich the first chapter of section three, Reception, has directbearing – “Women and Greek Myth” by Vanda Zajko, an essay that explores“some of the tensions surrounding the descriptions of stories aboutwomen as being ‘pro' or ‘anti' women and the ideological entailments ofsuch descriptions.” One of the issues with which Zajko deals is centralto all of the chapters of Part Three, and indeed one that we haverepeatedly encountered in the first two Parts – that of the “rewritingof myth.” At what point does the “rewriting” of a myth create somethingthat is fundamentally different from that myth? Is the result of the“rewriting” still “myth” – still muthos? These are questions with which the reader of this Companionwill have to grapple. Zajko herself chooses to paint with the broaderstroke: “But tradition can be seen as a less static concept that is,and always has been, reshaped and reenergised by continual retellings.Doherty's statement that ‘the modern rewritings of myths is acontinuation of ancient practice' [(2001) 10] subscribes to this kindof notion and emphasises that ancient poets and artists freely importedthe issues of their own times into their treatments of myth.”
“Let Us Make Gods in Our Image,” David Brumble'scontribution on Greek myth in Medieval and Renaissance literature,follows. Allegorical interpretation of the ancient myths is thehallmark of these materials, whose authors and readers often assume acomposite and variegated profile of Greek mythic figures – the productof the deposition of layers of interpretative accretion, one uponanother: “Theseus appears in the ‘Knight's Tale.' A good classicaldictionary would not tell us that Chaucer's readers might haveinterpreted Theseus as a wisdom figure; as an example of perfectfriendship, of the ideal ruler, of the unfaithful lover; as a type forGod or Christ; as an allegorical figure for the balance of the activeand contemplative lives.” In keeping with the Medieval Christiantradition of interpreting Old Testament figures typologically (i.e., as“types”), “Deucalion was a type of Noah”; “Hippolytus…could be a typeof Joseph”; “Hippolytus, Theseus, Hercules, Orpheus, and many othersserved as types of Christ.” Among interpretative methods utilized wasthat one dubbed “fourfold allegory,” involving allegorical readings atdifferent levels simultaneously – a method readily associated withDante; though, Brumble reminds his readers, “fourfold allegory is justone expression of the Medieval and Renaissance inclination to multipleinterpretation.”
Sarah Brown treats the literary response to Greek myth from the seventeenth century onward in her “Hail Muse! et cetera:Greek Myth in English and American Literature”: “Many of the mostinteresting responses to Greek myth register its polyvalency, anddisplay a corresponding ambivalence towards their sources, acombination of reverence and antagonism.” The interpretative traditionof this era is clearly heir to the past, but is also, one might say,“reactive” (the editor's term, not the author's): “Mythology is centralto the works of Pope, Keats, Pound, Toni Morrison, and Carol Ann Duffy,inter alia, but each of these writers figures his or herrelationship with the classical past in a distinctive way.” Browndemonstrates that the pendulum has oscillated between what she aptlylikens to the Protestant and Catholic aspects of Christianity: “Whereassome writers appear to seek an unmediated correspondence with an‘authentic' and pristine past, wherever possible sloughing offintervening layers of adaptation and reception, for others Greek mythrepresents a continuous tradition whose origins may certainly be tracedback to Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, et al., but which owes at least ascrucial a debt to such mediating forces as Chaucer, Shakespeare, andMilton.” In part, these oscillations reflect a resurgence of literaryawareness of and interest in Greek-language, as opposed to Latinized,mythic materials: “Gradually, over the course of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, interest in Greek antiquities, literature andsociety intensified, and a movement away from Roman culture towardsGreek can be identified, although the shift was not stark or absolute.”Still – the pendulum has momentum; in commenting on the monologues inDuffy's The World's Wife, Brown observes: “They emerge from thestrong late-twentieth-century reawakening of interest in classicalmyth, in part a response to Ted Hughes's much praised Tales from Ovid. (We seemed to have returned to the Renaissance preference for Latinised mythology.)”
The Companion concludes with MartinWinkler's treatment of the portrayal of myth in cinema, “GreekMythology on the Screen.” The interpretative dimension of Greek mythictradition is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than here: “Cinema and itsoffspring, television, have proven the most fertile ground forreimagining and reinventing antiquity.” As Winkler tells us – and asthe reader will have by now observed many times over – “the traditionof imagining alternatives to well-attested and even canonical versionsof myth goes back to antiquity itself.…This tradition has neverceased.” The phenomenon of contemporary cinematic reinterpretation,Winkler continues, citing Italian director Vittorio Cottafavi, has beendubbed “neomythologism.” Just how far removed such neomythologism canbe from acts and contexts of muthoi that the reader encounteredin the early chapters of this vol-ume – and especially in Calame's mythand religion chapter – is revealed, for example, by comments made bydirector Wolfgang Petersen regarding his film Troy (2004): “Ithink that, if we could consult with him up there, Homer would be thefirst today to advise: ‘Get rid of the gods.' ” For some readers such aclaim will be received with disbelief, revealing, as it does, aninverted state of affairs consequent to a full denuding of the framingcontexts of muthoi; but, Winkler contends, “filmmakers followtheir own rules when they make mythological films and do not considerthemselves bound by their sources. In the process they become adaptorsof stories comparable to the ancient poetsthemselves, who took the materials for their epics or dramas from olderversions of myth.” Thus, Winkler continues, “Cottafavi's film [Hercules Conquers Atlantis(1961)] is a prime example of neomythologism, but it is more. Itexemplifies a society's understanding of the past in modern terms. TheAtlantis from whose sinister threat Hercules saves the world reflectsthe twentieth century in two major aspects”: the potential for anuclear apocalypse and the threat of extermination posed bytotalitarian ideologies.