Egyptian Mythology
I INTRODUCTION

Egyptian Mythology, specifically, the religion of ancient Egypt. The religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians were the dominating influence in the development of their culture, although a true religion, in the sense of a unified theological system, never existed among them. The Egyptian faith was based on an unorganized collection of ancient myths, nature worship, and innumerable deities. In the most influential and famous of these myths a divine hierarchy is developed and the creation of the earth is explained.

II CREATION

According to the Egyptian account of creation, only the ocean existed at first. Then Ra, the sun, came out of an egg (a flower, in some versions) that appeared on the surface of the water. Ra brought forth four children, the gods Shu and Geb and the goddesses Tefnut and Nut. Shu and Tefnut became the atmosphere. They stood on Geb, who became the earth, and raised up Nut, who became the sky. Ra ruled over all. Geb and Nut later had two sons, Set and Osiris, and two daughters, Isis and Nephthys. Osiris succeeded Ra as king of the earth, helped by Isis, his sister-wife. Set, however, hated his brother and killed him. Isis then embalmed her husband’s body with the help of the god Anubis, who thus became the god of embalming. The powerful charms of Isis resurrected Osiris, who became king of the netherworld, the land of the dead. Horus, who was the son of Osiris and Isis, later defeated Set in a great battle and became king of the earth.

III LOCAL GODS

From this myth of creation came the conception of the ennead, a group of nine divinities, and the triad, consisting of a divine father, mother, and son. Every local temple in Egypt possessed its own ennead and triad. The greatest ennead, however, was that of Ra and his children and grandchildren. This group was worshiped at Heliopolis, the center of sun worship. The origin of the local deities is obscure; some of them were taken over from foreign religions, and some were originally the animal gods of prehistoric Africa. Gradually, they were all fused into a complicated religious structure, although comparatively few local divinities became important throughout Egypt. In addition to those already named, the important divinities included the gods Amon, Thoth, Ptah, Khnemu, and Hapi, and the goddesses Hathor, Mut, Neit, and Sekhet. Their importance increased with the political ascendancy of the localities where they were worshiped. For example, the ennead of Memphis was headed by a triad composed of the father Ptah, the mother Sekhet, and the son Imhotep. Therefore, during the Memphite dynasties, Ptah became one of the greatest gods in Egypt. Similarly, when the Theban dynasties ruled Egypt, the ennead of Thebes was given the most importance, headed by the father Amon, the mother Mut, and the son Khonsu. As the religion became more involved, true deities were sometimes confused with human beings who had been glorified after death. Thus, Imhotep, who was originally the chief minister of the 3rd Dynasty ruler Djoser, was later regarded as a demigod. During the 5th Dynasty the pharaohs began to claim divine ancestry and from that time on were worshiped as sons of Ra. Minor gods, some merely demons, were also given places in local divine hierarchies.

IV ICONOGRAPHY

The Egyptian gods were represented with human torsos and human or animal heads. Sometimes the animal or bird expressed the characteristics of the god. Ra, for example, had the head of a hawk, and the hawk was sacred to him because of its swift flight across the sky; Hathor, the goddess of love and laughter, was given the head of a cow, which was sacred to her; Anubis was given the head of a jackal because these animals ravaged the desert graves in ancient times; Mut was vulture headed and Thoth was ibis headed; and Ptah was given a human head, although he was occasionally represented as a bull, called Apis. Because of the gods to which they were attached, the sacred animals were venerated, but they were never worshiped until the decadent 26th Dynasty. The gods were also represented by symbols, such as the sun disk and hawk wings that were worn on the headdress of the pharaoh.

V SUN WORSHIP

The only important god who was worshiped with consistency was Ra, chief of cosmic deities, from whom early Egyptian kings claimed descent. Beginning with the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 bc), Ra worship acquired the status of a state religion, and the god was gradually fused with Amon during the Theban dynasties, becoming the supreme god Amon-Ra. During the 18th Dynasty the pharaoh Amenhotep III renamed the sun god Aton, an ancient term for the physical solar force. Amenhotep’s son and successor, Amenhotep IV, instituted a revolution in Egyptian religion by proclaiming Aton the true and only god. He changed his own name to Akhenaton, meaning “He who is devoted to Aton.” This first great monotheist was so iconoclastic that he had the plural word gods deleted from monuments, and he relentlessly persecuted the priests of Amon. Akhenaton’s sun religion failed to survive, although it exerted a great influence on the art and thinking of his time, and Egypt returned to the ancient, labyrinthine religion of polytheism after Akhenaton’s death.

VI BURIAL RITUAL

Burying the dead was of religious concern in Egypt, and Egyptian funerary rituals and equipment eventually became the most elaborate the world has ever known. The Egyptians believed that the vital life-force was composed of several psychical elements, of which the most important was the ka. The ka, a duplicate of the body, accompanied the body throughout life and, after death, departed from the body to take its place in the kingdom of the dead. The ka, however, could not exist without the body; every effort had to be made, therefore, to preserve the corpse. Bodies were embalmed and mummified according to a traditional method supposedly begun by Isis, who mummified her husband Osiris. In addition, wood or stone replicas of the body were put into the tomb in the event that the mummy was destroyed. The greater the number of statue-duplicates in his or her tomb, the more chances the dead person had of resurrection. As a final protection, exceedingly elaborate tombs were erected to protect the corpse and its equipment. See Egyptian Art and Architecture.

After leaving the tomb, the souls of the dead supposedly were beset by innumerable dangers, and the tombs were therefore furnished with a copy of the Book of the Dead. Part of this book, a guide to the world of the dead, consists of charms designed to overcome these dangers. After arriving in the kingdom of the dead, the ka was judged by Osiris, the king of the dead, and 42 demon assistants. The Book of the Dead also contains instructions for proper conduct before these judges. If the judges decided the deceased had been a sinner, the ka was condemned to hunger and thirst or to be torn to pieces by horrible executioners. If the decision was favorable, the ka went to the heavenly realm of the fields of Yaru, where grain grew 3.7 m (12 ft) high and existence was a glorified version of life on earth. All the necessities for this paradisiacal existence, from furniture to reading matter, were, therefore, put into the tombs. As a payment for the afterlife and his benevolent protection, Osiris required the dead to perform tasks for him, such as working in the grain fields. Even this duty could, however, be obviated by placing small statuettes, called ushabtis, into the tomb to serve as substitutes for the deceased.


Contributed By:
Robert H. Dyson

Microsoft ? Encarta ? Encyclopedia 2002. ? 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

            I INTRODUCTION

Greek Mythology, set of diverse traditional tales told by the ancient Greeks about the exploits of gods and heroes and their relations with ordinary mortals.

The ancient Greeks worshiped many gods within a culture that tolerated diversity. Unlike other belief systems, Greek culture recognized no single truth or code and produced no sacred, written text like the Bible or the Qur’an. Stories about the origins and actions of Greek divinities varied widely, depending, for example, on whether the tale appeared in a comedy, tragedy, or epic poem. Greek mythology was like a complex and rich language, in which the Greeks could express a vast range of perceptions about the world.

A Greek city-state devoted itself to a particular god or group of gods in whose honor it built temples. The temple generally housed a statue of the god or gods. The Greeks honored the city’s gods in festivals and also offered sacrifices to the gods, usually a domestic animal such as a goat. Stories about the gods varied by geographic location: A god might have one set of characteristics in one city or region and quite different characteristics elsewhere.

II PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Greek mythology has several distinguishing characteristics, in addition to its multiple versions. The Greek gods resembled human beings in their form and in their emotions, and they lived in a society that resembled human society in its levels of authority and power. However, a crucial difference existed between gods and human beings: Humans died, and gods were immortal. Heroes also played an important role in Greek mythology, and stories about them conveyed serious themes. The Greeks considered human heroes from the past closer to themselves than were the immortal gods.

A Gods

Given the multiplicity of myths that circulated in Greece, it is difficult to present a single version of the genealogy (family history) of the gods. However, two accounts together provide a genealogy that most ancient Greeks would have recognized. One is the account given by Greek poet Hesiod in his Theogony (Genealogy of the Gods), written in the 8th century bc. The other account, The Library, is attributed to a mythographer (compiler of myths) named Apollodorus, who lived during the 2nd century bc.

A1 The Creation of the Gods

According to Greek myths about creation, the god Chaos (Greek for “Gaping Void”) was the foundation of all things. From Chaos came Gaea (“Earth”); the bottomless depth of the underworld, known as Tartarus; and Eros (“Love”). Eros, the god of love, was needed to draw divinities together so they might produce offspring. Chaos produced Night, while Gaea first bore Uranus, the god of the heavens, and after him produced the mountains, sea, and gods known as Titans. The Titans were strong and large, and they committed arrogant deeds. The youngest and most important Titan was Cronus. Uranus and Gaea, who came to personify Heaven and Earth, also gave birth to the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants who made thunderbolts.

A2 Cronus and Rhea

Uranus tried to block any successors from taking over his supreme position by forcing back into Gaea the children she bore. But the youngest child, Cronus, thwarted his father, cutting off his genitals and tossing them into the sea. From the bloody foam in the sea Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love, was born.

After wounding his father and taking away his power, Cronus became ruler of the universe. But Cronus, in turn, feared that his own son would supplant him. When his sister and wife Rhea gave birth to offspring—Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon—Cronus swallowed them. Only the youngest, Zeus, escaped this fate, because Rhea tricked Cronus. She gave him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow in place of the baby.

A3 Zeus and the Olympian Gods

When fully grown, Zeus forced his father to disgorge the children he had swallowed. With their help and armed with the thunderbolt, Zeus made war on Cronus and the Titans, and overcame them. He established a new regime, based on Mount Olympus in northern Greece. Zeus ruled the sky. His brother Poseidon ruled the sea, and his brother Hades, the underworld. Their sister Hestia ruled the hearth, and Demeter took charge of the harvest. Zeus married his sister Hera, who became queen of the heavens and guardian of marriage and childbirth. Among their children was Ares, whose sphere of influence was war.

Twelve major gods and goddesses had their homes on Mount Olympus and were known as the Olympians. Four children of Zeus and one child of Hera joined the Olympian gods Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, and Ares. Zeus’s Olympian offspring were Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, and Athena. Hera gave birth to Hephaestus.

A4 The Offspring of Zeus

Zeus had numerous children by both mortal and immortal women. By the mortal Semele he had Dionysus, a god associated with wine and with other forms of intoxication and ecstasy. By Leto, a Titan, Zeus fathered the twins Apollo and Artemis, who became two of the most important Olympian divinities. Artemis remained a virgin and took hunting as her special province. Apollo became associated with music and prophecy. People visited his oracle (shrine) at Delphi to seek his prophetic advice. By the nymph Maia, Zeus became father of Hermes, the Olympian trickster god who had the power to cross all kinds of boundaries. Hermes guided the souls of the dead down to the underworld, carried messages between gods and mortals, and wafted a magical sleep upon the wakeful.

Two other Olympian divinities, Hephaestus and Athena, had unusual births. Hera conceived Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, without a male partner. Subsequently he suffered the wrath of Zeus, who once hurled him from Olympus for coming to the aid of his mother; this fall down onto the island of Lemnos crippled Hephaestus. The birth of Athena was even stranger. Zeus and Metis, daughter of the Titan Oceanus, were the parents of Athena. But Gaea had warned Zeus that, after giving birth to the girl with whom she was pregnant, Metis would bear a son destined to rule heaven. To avoid losing his throne to a son, Zeus swallowed Metis, just as Cronus had previously swallowed his own children to thwart succession. Metis’s child Athena was born from the head of Zeus, which Hephaestus split open with an axe. Athena, another virgin goddess, embodied the power of practical intelligence in warfare and crafts work. She also served as the protector of the city of Athens.

Another of Zeus’s children was Persephone; her mother was Demeter, goddess of grain, vegetation, and the harvest. Once when Persephone was gathering flowers in a meadow, Hades, god of the underworld, saw and abducted her, taking her down to the kingdom of the dead to be his bride. Her grief-stricken mother wandered the world in search of her; as a result, fertility left the earth. Zeus commanded Hades to release Persephone, but Hades had cunningly given her a pomegranate seed to eat. Having consumed food from the underworld, Persephone was obliged to return below the earth for part of each year. Her return from the underworld each year meant the revival of nature and the beginning of spring. This myth was told especially in connection with the Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred rituals observed in the Greek town of Elevsís near Athens. The rituals offered initiates in the mysteries the hope of rebirth, just as Persephone had been reborn after her journey to the underworld.

Many Greek myths report the exploits of the principal Olympians, but Greek myths also refer to a variety of other divinities, each with their particular sphere of influence. Many of these divinities were children of Zeus, symbolizing the fact that they belonged to the new Olympian order of Zeus’s regime. The Muses, nine daughters of Zeus and the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, presided over song, dance, and music. The Fates, three goddesses who controlled human life and destiny, and the Horae, goddesses who controlled the seasons, were appropriately the children of Zeus and Themis, the goddess of divine justice and law. Far different in temperament were the Erinyes (Furies), ancient and repellent goddesses who had sprung from the earth after it had been impregnated with the blood of Uranus’s severed genitals. Terrible though they were, the Erinyes also had a legitimate role in the world: to pursue those who had murdered their own kin.

A5 Disruptive Deities

Human existence is characterized by disorder as well as order, and many of the most characteristic figures in Greek mythology exert a powerfully disruptive effect. Satyrs, whom the Greeks imagined as part human and part horse (or part goat), led lives dominated by wine and lust. Myths depicted them as companions of Dionysus who drunkenly pursued nymphs, spirits of nature represented as young and beautiful maidens. Many of the jugs used at Greek symposia (drinking parties) carry images of satyrs.

Equally wild, but more threatening than the satyrs, were the savage centaurs. These monsters, depicted as half-man and half-horse, tended toward uncontrolled aggression. The centaurs are known for combat with their neighbors, the Lapiths, which resulted from an attempt to carry off the Lapith women at a wedding feast. This combat was depicted in sculpture on the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena in Athens.

The Sirens, usually portrayed as birds with women’s heads, posed a different sort of threat. These island-dwelling enchantresses lured mariners to their deaths by the irresistible beauty of their song. The seafaring Greek hero Odysseus alone survived this temptation by ordering his companions to block their own ears, to bind him to the mast of his ship, and to ignore all his entreaties to be allowed to follow the lure of the Sirens’ song.

B Mortals

The Greeks had several myths to account for the origins of humanity. According to one version, human beings sprang from the ground, and this origin explained their devotion to the land. According to another myth, a Titan molded the first human beings from clay. The Greeks also had a story about the destruction of humanity, similar to the biblical deluge.

B1 The Creation of Human Beings

Conflicting Greek myths tell about the creation of humanity. Some myths recount how the populations of particular localities sprang directly from the earth. The Arcadians, residents of a region of Greece known as Arcadia, claimed this distinction for their original inhabitant, Pelasgus (see Pelasgians). The Thebans boasted descent from earthborn men who had sprung from the spot where Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, had sown the ground with the teeth of a sacred dragon. According to another tale, one of the Titans, Prometheus, fashioned the first human being from water and earth. In the more usual version of the story Prometheus did not actually create humanity but simply lent it assistance through the gift of fire.

Another tale dealt with humanity’s re-creation. When Zeus planned to destroy an ancient race living on Earth, he sent a deluge. However, Deucalion, a son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha—the Greek equivalents of the biblical Noah and his wife—put provisions into a chest and climbed into it. Carried across the waters of the flood, they landed on Mount Parnassus. After the waters receded, the couple gratefully made sacrifices to Zeus. His response was to send Hermes to instruct them how to repopulate the world. They should cast stones behind them. Stones thrown by Deucalion became men; those thrown by Pyrrha, women.

B2 The Greek People

According to myth, the various peoples of Greece descended from Hellen, son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. One genealogy related that the Dorian and the Aeolian Greeks sprang from Hellen’s sons Dorus and Aeolus. The Achaeans and Ionians descended from Achaeos and Ion, sons of Hellen’s other son, Xuthus. These figures, in their turn, produced offspring who, along with children born of unions between divinities and mortals, made up the collection of heroes and heroines whose exploits constitute a central part of Greek mythology.

C Heroes

Myths about heroes are particularly characteristic of Greek mythology. Many of these heroes were the sons of gods, and a number of myths involved expeditions by these heroes. The expeditions generally related to quests or combats. Scholars consider some of these myths partly historical in nature—that is, they explained events in the distant past and were handed down orally from one generation to the next. Two of the most important of the semihistorical myths involve the search for the Golden Fleece and the quest that led to the Trojan War. In other myths heroes such as Heracles and Theseus had to overcome fearsome monsters.

C1 Jason and the Golden Fleece

Jason was a hero who sailed in the ship Argo, with a band of heroes called the Argonauts, on a dangerous quest for the Golden Fleece at the eastern end of the Black Sea in the land of Colchis. Jason had to fetch this family property, a fleece made of gold from a winged ram, in order to regain his throne. A dragon that never slept guarded the fleece and made the mission nearly impossible. Thanks to the magical powers of Medea, daughter of the ruler of Colchis, Jason performed the impossible tasks necessary to win the fleece and to take it from the dragon. Afterward Medea took horrible revenge on Pelias, who had killed Jason’s parents, stolen Jason’s throne, and sent Jason on the quest for the fleece. She tricked Pelias’s daughters into cutting him up and boiling him in a cauldron. Medea’s story continued to involve horrific violence. When Jason rejected her for another woman, Medea once more used her magic to avenge herself with extreme cruelty.

C2 Meleager

Jason and the same generation of heroes took part in another adventure, with Meleager, the son of King Oeneus of Calydon and his wife Althea. At Meleager’s birth the Fates predicted that he would die when a log burning on the hearth was completely consumed. His mother snatched the log and hid it in a chest. Meleager grew to manhood. One day, his father accidentally omitted Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, from a sacrifice. In revenge Artemis sent a mighty boar to ravage the country. Meleager set out to destroy it, accompanied by some of the greatest heroes of the day, including Peleus, Telamon, Theseus, Jason, and Castor and Polydeuces. The boar was killed. However, Meleager killed his mother’s brothers in a quarrel about who should receive the boar skin. In her anger Althea threw the log on to the fire, so ending her son’s life; she then hanged herself.

C3 Heroes of the Trojan War

The greatest expedition of all was that which resulted in the Trojan War. The object of this quest was Helen, a beautiful Greek woman who had been abducted by Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. Helen’s husband Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon led an army of Greeks to besiege Troy. After ten years, with many heroes dead on both sides, the city fell to the trick of the Trojan Horse—a giant wooden horse that the Greeks built and left outside the gates of Troy while their army pretended to withdraw. Not knowing that Greek heroes were hiding inside the horse, the Trojans took the horse into the city. The hidden Greeks then slipped out, opened the city gates and let their army in, thus defeating Troy. The Iliad, an epic poem attributed to Greek poet Homer, tells the story of the Trojan War. The story continued with the Odyssey, another long poem attributed to Homer, in which the Greek hero Odysseus made his way home after the Trojan War. Odysseus returned to his faithful wife, Penelope, whereas Agamemnon returned to be murdered by his faithless wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover.

Historians considered the Trojan War entirely mythical until excavations in Turkey showed that there had been cities on the site of Troy and that fire had destroyed one of these cities at about the time of the Trojan War, sometime from 1230 bc to 1180 bc.

C4 Heracles and Theseus

The deeds of the heroes Heracles (see Hercules) and Theseus exemplify a central theme in Greek mythology: the conflict between civilization and wild savagery. Each hero confronted and overcame monstrous opponents, yet neither enjoyed unclouded happiness.

Heracles had been an Argonaut but left the expedition after being plunged into grief at the loss of his companion Hylas. In another story, a fit of madness led Heracles to kill his own wife and children. But he is best known for his feats of prowess against beasts and monsters, which began soon after his birth. The most difficult of these feats are known as the 12 labors, which are believed to represent efforts to conquer death and achieve immortality. Although Heracles died, his father, Zeus, gave him a place on Mount Olympus.

Theseus successfully slew the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull. On his voyage home to Athens, however, he forgot to hoist the white sails that would have signified the success of his adventure. According to one tale, Theseus’s heartbroken father Aegeus, seeing black sails, believed his son had died, and committed suicide. The Aegean Sea in which he drowned is presumably named after Aegeus.

C5 Oedipus

No hero of Greek mythology has proved more fascinating than Oedipus. He destroyed a monster, the Sphinx, by answering its riddle. Yet his ultimate downfall served as a terrifying warning of the instability of human fortune. As a baby, Oedipus had been abandoned on a mountainside by his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, because of a prophecy that the child would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Saved by the pity of a shepherd, the child—its identity unknown—was reared by the king and queen of the neighboring city of Corinth. In due course, Oedipus unwittingly fulfilled the prophecy, matching the horrific crimes he had committed with the equally ghastly self-punishment of piercing his own eyes with Jocasta’s brooch-pins.

III THE NATURE OF GREEK GODS AND HEROES
A Gods and Goddesses

In many respects the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology resembled extraordinarily powerful human beings. They experienced emotions such as jealousy, love, and grief, and they shared with humans a desire to assert their own authority and to punish anyone who flouted it. However, these emotions and desires took supernaturally intense form in gods and goddesses. As numerous literary descriptions and artistic representations testify, the Greeks imagined their gods to have human shape, although this form was strongly idealized.

The Greeks, moreover, modeled relationships between divinities on those between human beings. Apollo and Artemis were brother and sister, Zeus and Hera were husband and wife, and the society of the gods on Mount Olympus resembled that of an unruly family, with Zeus at its head. The gods could temporarily enter the human world. They might, for example, fall in love with a mortal, as Aphrodite did with Adonis; Apollo with Daphne; and Zeus with Leda, Alcmene, and Danae. Or they might destroy a mortal who displeased them, as Dionysus destroyed King Pentheus of Thebes for mocking his rites.

Not all Greek divinities resembled human beings. They could also be uncanny, strange, and alien, a quality made visible in artistic representations of monsters. For example, the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa had a stare that turned her victims to stone. The Graeae, sisters of the Gorgons, were gray-haired old crones from birth. They possessed but a single tooth and a single eye between them. Typhoeus was a hideous monster from whose shoulders grew a hundred snakeheads with dark, flickering tongues.

Even the major deities of Olympus showed alien characteristics at times. A recurrent sign of divine power is the ability to change shape, either one’s own or that of others. Athena once transformed herself into a vulture; Poseidon once took the form of a stallion. This ability could prove convenient such as when Zeus assumed the form of a swan to woo Leda. Zeus turned Lycaon, a disrespectful king, into a wolf to punish him for his wickedness. The ability to exercise power over the crossing of boundaries is a crucial feature of divine power among the Greeks.

B Heroes

Greek mythology also told how divinities interacted with heroes, a category of mortals who, though dead, were believed to retain power to influence the lives of the living. In myths heroes represented a kind of bridge between gods and mortals. Heroes such as Achilles, Perseus, and Aeneas were the products of a union between a deity and a mortal. The fact that the gods often intervened to help heroes—for example, during combat—indicated not the heroes’ weakness but their special importance. Yet heroes were not the equals of the gods.

With a logic characteristic of Greek myth, heroes typically possessed a defect to balance out their exceptional power. For example, the warrior Achilles, hero of the Trojan War, was invulnerable except in the ankle. The prophet Cassandra, who warned the Trojans of dangers such as the Trojan Horse, always prophesied the truth but was never believed. Heracles constituted an extreme example of this paradox: His awesome strength was balanced by his tendency to become a victim of his own excessive violence. Nevertheless, the gods allowed Heracles to cross the ultimate boundary by gaining admission to Olympus.

IV THE FUNCTIONS OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Like most other mythological traditions, Greek myths served several purposes. First, Greek myths explained the world. Second, they acted as a means of exploration. Third, they provided authority and legitimacy. Finally, they provided entertainment.

A Explanation

Greek myths lent structure and order to the world and explained how the current state of things had originated. Hesiod’s Theogony narrated the development of the present order of the universe by relating it to Chaos, the origin of all things. By a complex process of violence, struggle, and sexual attraction, the regime led by Zeus had eventually taken over. Another poem by Hesiod, Works and Days, explained why the world is full of trouble. According to the poem the first woman, Pandora, opened a jar whose lid she had been forbidden to lift. As a result of her disobedience all the diseases and miseries previously confined in the jar escaped into the world. Such a myth also makes a statement about relationships between the sexes in Hesiod’s own world. Scholars assume that he composed the poem for a largely male audience that was receptive to a tale that put women at the root of all evil.

One of the commonest types of explanation given in myths relates to ritual. Myths helped worshipers make sense of a religious practice by telling how the practice originated. A prime example is sacrifice, a ritual that involved killing a domesticated animal as an offering to the gods. The ceremony culminated in the butchering, cooking, and sharing of the meat of the victim. Hesiod recounts the myth associated with this rite. According to this myth, the tricky Titan Prometheus tried to outwit Zeus by offering him a cunningly devised choice of meals. Zeus could have either an apparently unappetizing dish—an ox paunch, which had tasty meat concealed within—or a seemingly delicious one, gleaming fat on the outside, which had nothing but bones hidden beneath. Zeus chose the second dish, and ever since human beings have kept the tastiest part of every sacrifice for themselves, leaving the gods nothing but the savor of the rising smoke.

B Exploration

Myths charted paths through difficult territory, examining contradictions and ambiguities. For instance, Homer’s Iliad explores the consequences during the Trojan War of the Greek leader Agamemnon’s decision to deprive the warrior Achilles of his allotted prize, a female slave. Achilles feels that Agamemnon has assailed his honor or worth but wonders how far he should go in reaction. Is he right to refuse to fight, if that means the destruction of the Greek army? Is he justified in rejecting Agamemnon’s offer of compensation? One of this poem’s themes explores the limits of honor.

The dramatic genre of tragedy provides the clearest example of mythical exploration (see see Greek Literature; Drama and Dramatic Arts). The great Athenian playwrights of the 5th century bc—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—wrote tragedies that explored social questions by placing them, in extreme and exaggerated form, in a mythical context. Sophocles’s tragic play Antigone concerns just such an extreme situation. Two brothers have killed each other in battle: Eteocles defending his homeland, and Polynices attacking it. Their sister Antigone, in defiance of an edict by the city’s ruler, attempts to bury her ostensibly traitorous brother Polynices. Sophocles raises several moral issues. Is Antigone justified in seeking to bury her brother? Which should prevail, a religious obligation to tend and bury a corpse, or a city’s well-being? The answers to these moral issues are far from clear-cut, as we might expect from a work whose subtlety and profundity have so often been admired.

C Legitimation

Myths also had the function of legitimation. A claim, an action, or a relationship acquired extra authority if it had a precedent in myth. Aristocratic Greek families liked to trace their ancestry back to the heroes or gods of mythology. The Greek poet Pindar, who wrote in the early 5th century bc, offers ample evidence for this preference. In his songs Pindar praised the exploits of current victors in the Olympian Games by linking them with the deeds of their mythical ancestors. In addition, two Greek city-states could cement bonds between them by showing that they had an alliance in the mythological past.

D Entertainment

Finally, myth telling was a source of enjoyment and entertainment. Homer’s epics contain several descriptions of audiences held spellbound by the songs of bards (poets), and recitations of Homer’s poems also captivated audiences. Public performances of tragic drama were also hugely popular, regularly drawing some 15,000 spectators.

            V ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Our knowledge of Greek mythology begins with the epic poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which date from about the 8th century bc even though the stories they relate probably have their origins in events that occurred several centuries earlier. Scholars, however, know that the origins of Greek mythology reach even farther back than that.

A Origins of Greek Mythology

Linguists (people who study languages) have concluded that some names of Greek deities, including Zeus, can be traced back to gods worshiped by speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of the Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit languages. But it would be misleading to regard the people who may have spoken this language as originators of Greek mythology because many other elements contributed.

Archaeologists have shown that many of the places where mythical events presumably took place correspond to sites that had historical importance during the Mycenaean period of Greek history (second half of the 2nd millennium bc). Scholars thus consider it likely that the Mycenaeans made a major contribution to the development of the stories, even if this contribution is hard to demonstrate in detail. Some scholars have argued that the Minoan civilization of Crete also had a formative influence on Greek myths. The myth of the Minotaur confined in a labyrinth in the palace of King Minos, for example, might be a memory of historical bull-worship in the labyrinthine palace at Knossos on Crete. However, there is little evidence that Cretan religion survived in Greece. Nor have any ancient inscriptions confirmed that Minos ever existed outside of myth.

Scholars can demonstrate influence on Greek mythology from the Middle East much more reliably than influence from Crete. Greek mythology owed much to cultures in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, especially in the realm of cosmogony (origin of the universe) and theogony (origin of the gods). To take one example, a clear parallel exists in an early Middle Eastern myth for Greek poet Hesiod’s story about the castration of Uranus by his son Cronus and the subsequent overthrow of Cronus by his son Zeus. The Middle Eastern myth tells of the sky god Anu who was castrated by Kumarbi, father of the gods. The weather and storm god Teshub, in turn, displaced Anu. Scholars continue to bring to light more and more similarities between Greek and Middle Eastern mythologies.

B Development of Greek Mythology

Our knowledge of Greek myths comes from a mixture of written texts, sculpture, and decorated pottery. Scholars have reconstructed stories that circulated orally by inference and guesswork.

Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, stand at the beginning of Greek literary tradition (see Greek literature), even though they almost certainly depended on a lengthy previous tradition of oral poetry. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War; it focuses on the consequences of a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, two of the leading Greek warriors. The Odyssey is about the aftermath of the Trojan War, when the Greek hero Odysseus at last returns to his home on the island of Ithaca following years of wandering in wild and magical lands. The Trojan War later provided subject matter for many tragic dramas and for imagery on countless painted vases.

Hesiod’s Theogony, composed in the 8th century bc at about the same time as the Homeric epics, gave an authoritative account of how things began. The creation of the world, described by Hesiod in terms of passions and crimes of the gods, is a theme that later Greek philosophers such as Empedocles and Plato developed but took in new directions. This connection serves as a reminder that mythology was not a separate aspect of Greek culture, but one that interacted with many other fields of experience, particularly the writing of history. For example, in the 5th century bc Greek historian Herodotus employed numerous themes and story patterns from Greek epics and tragedies in writing his historical account of the war between Greeks and Persians (see Persian Wars).

Although the authority of Homer and Hesiod remained dominant, the poetic retelling of myths continued throughout antiquity. Myths were constantly remade in the light of new social and political circumstances. The Hellenistic period of Greek history (323-331 bc) saw many new trends in the treatment of myths. One of the most important was the development of mythography, the compilation and organization of myths on the basis of particular themes (for example, myths about metamorphosis). Such organization corresponded to a wish of newly established Hellenistic rulers to lend legitimacy to their regimes by claiming that they continued a cultural tradition reaching back into a great past.

Artists, too, portrayed myths. Statues of gods stood inside Greek temples, and relief sculptures of scenes from mythology adorned pediments and friezes on the outside of these temples (see Greek Art and Architecture). Among the best-known examples are the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens. These reliefs include depictions of combat between centaurs and Lapiths.

Other visual representations of mythology were more modest in size and scope. The best evidence for the use of mythology in Greek painting comes from painted ceramic vases. The Greeks used these vases in a variety of contexts, from cookery to funerary ritual to athletic games. (Vases filled with oil were awarded as prizes in games.) In most cases scholars can securely identify the imagery on Greek vases as mythological, but sometimes they have no way of telling whether the artist intended an allusion to mythology because myth became fused with everyday life. For example, does a representation of a woman weaving signify Penelope, wife of Odysseus who spent her days at a loom, or does it portray someone engaged in an everyday activity?

The Greeks retold myths orally, as well as preserving them in literary and artistic works. The Greeks transmitted to children tales of monsters and myths of gods and heroes. Old men gathered to exchange tales in leschai (clubs or conversation places). Storytelling, whether in writing, art, or speech, was at the heart of Greek civilization.

VI THE LEGACY OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Mythology formed a central reference point in Greek society because it was interwoven with ritual and other aspects of social existence. Yet the question of how far people believed the myths is a difficult and probably unanswerable one. Some intellectuals, such as Greek writer Palaephatus, tried to interpret the myths as having figurative (nonliteral) meanings. Writing in the 4th century bc, Palaephatus interpreted the stories of Diomedes, a king devoured by his own mares, and of Actaeon, a hunter torn apart by his own hounds, as concealing perfectly credible accounts of young men who had spent too much money on their animals and so been figuratively eaten alive by debt.

Other thinkers, such as the 4th-century-bc philosopher Plato, objected to some myths on moral grounds, particularly to myths that told of crimes committed by the gods. Yet such skepticism seems hardly to have altered the imaginative power and persistence of Greek myths. As late as the 2nd century ad, the Greek traveler and historian Pausanias described the myths and cults in the places he visited as if they constituted a still-living complex of religious discourse and behavior.

A Ancient Rome and Early Christianity

The ancient Romans eventually took over Greek civilization and conquered Greece. In the process, they adapted Greek mythology, and myths remained a vehicle for reflecting on and coping with the world. In his poem the Aeneid, written in the 1st century bc, Roman poet Virgil used the theme of the wandering Trojan hero Aeneas and his eventual foundation of a settlement that became Rome. The Aeneid not only continues story patterns developed in Homer’s epics, but it also makes frequent and detailed allusions to the texts of Homer and other Greek writers. The long poem Metamorphoses by Roman poet Ovid embraces an enormous number of Greek myths, reworked into a composition that later had unparalleled influence on European culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Greek mythology survived during Christian antiquity by its interpretation as allegory (expressive of a deeper or hidden meaning). Early Christians incorporated pagan stories into their own worldview if they could reinterpret the story to express a concealed, uplifting meaning. In the 5th century ad, for example, Latin mythographer Fulgentius gave an allegorical reading of the Judgment of Paris. The Greek myth told of a young Trojan shepherd faced with a choice between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Each goddess tried to bribe Paris to name her the most beautiful: Hera offering power, Athena offering success in battle, and Aphrodite offering a beautiful woman. Fulgentius explained that the choice was actually a moral one, between a life of action, a life of contemplation, and a life dominated by love. The allegorical approach to the myths has never died out; we find it today in the writings of those who regard myths as expressions of basic, universal psychological truths. For example, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, borrowed from Greek mythology in developing his ideas of human psychosexual development, which he described in terms of an Oedipus complex and an Electra complex. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that certain psychic structures he called archetypes were common to all people in all times and gave rise to recurring ideas such as mythological themes.

B European Art, Music, and Literature

The influence of Greek mythology on Western art, music, and literature can hardly be exaggerated. Many of the greatest works of painting and sculpture have taken myths as their subject. Examples include the Birth of Venus (after 1482) by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, a marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne (1622-1625) by Italian baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, a terrifying Cronus Devouring One of His Children (1820-1823) by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (about 1558) by Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel. In the Bruegel painting peasants continue with their daily toil oblivious of the mythological drama being played out in the sky above.

Musicians too, especially composers of opera and oratorio, have found inspiration in ancient myths. Operatic dramatizations of these stories begin with Orfeo (Orpheus, 1607) and Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, 1641) by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. They continue into the 20th century with Elektra (1909) by German composer Richard Strauss and Oedipus Rex (1927) by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

The impact of Greek mythology on literature has been incalculably great. In the 20th century the story of the murderous revenge of Orestes on his mother Clytemnestra (for killing his father, Agamemnon) has inspired writers as diverse as American dramatist Eugene O’Neill (in Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931), American-born poet and playwright T. S. Eliot (in The Family Reunion, 1939), and French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (in Les Mouches [1943; The Flies, 1946]). Among the most notable of all literary works inspired by Greek mythology is Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce. In this intricate novel, Ulysses (Odysseus) becomes Dublin resident Leopold Bloom, while Bloom’s wife, Molly, combines characteristics of faithful Penelope (wife of Odysseus) and seductive Calypso (a sea nymph who holds Odysseus captive on his journey home).

The influence of Greek mythology shows no sign of diminishing. Computer games (see Electronic Games) and science fiction frequently use combat- or quest-oriented story patterns that have clear parallels in classical mythology. Greek myths developed in a specific ancient society, but the emotional and intellectual content of the stories has proved adaptable to a broad range of cultural contexts.

            Roman Mythology
I INTRODUCTION

Roman Mythology, the religious beliefs and practices of the people of ancient Rome. At first the Romans envisioned their gods more as powers than as persons, and as a result there is little mythology that is purely Roman. According to Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, only after the Romans came into contact with Greek culture in the 6th century BC did they begin to represent their gods in human form. Over the last three centuries before Christ was born, writers such as Virgil and Ovid grafted the names and functions of Roman gods onto Greek literary and artistic tradition, creating a hybrid Greco-Roman mythology that has inspired poets and painters from antiquity to the present day. Most of what we know about ancient Rome and its mythology comes from the works of ancient Roman writers, from surviving artworks, and from archaeological findings.

The Romans believed that their religious practices maintained the pax deorum—or “peace of the gods”—that ensured the community’s continued prosperity. No private citizen was likely to undertake business of any importance without seeking the favor of the appropriate god, and the Romans held numerous public festivals to honor their gods.

II MYTHS OF THE FOUNDING OF ROME

The Romans did not develop a myth about the creation of the world itself, but they did attach great importance to the founding of Rome. Two distinct myths developed about the city’s beginnings: the story of the twins Romulus and Remus, and the tale of Aeneas.

The myth of Romulus and Remus is best known from its account in the work of Livy, a Roman historian of the 1st century bc. The twins were the sons of the god Mars and a mortal woman named Rhea Silvia. When they were infants, Romulus and Remus’s great uncle set them adrift on the Tiber River to die. The great uncle had stolen royal power from the twins’ grandfather and did not want the boys to survive to challenge his right to power. But a she-wolf found Romulus and Remus and cared for them until a shepherd discovered them. The shepherd and his wife took the boys in and raised them as their own children. Years later, after restoring their grandfather to his throne, Romulus and Remus decided to found a city of their own. However, the two quarreled, and in the ensuing brawl Remus died. In some versions of the story Romulus killed him, in other versions Romulus’s followers did so. After his brother’s death, Romulus named the new city Rome and became its first king. According to Varro, the date that Romulus founded Rome was 753 bc.

The other legend of Rome’s founding traced the origins of the city to Aeneas, the son of the goddess Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises. Aeneas came from the city of Troy in Asia Minor, which according to tradition was conquered by Greek forces during the Trojan War. The war was fought in the late 13th or early 12th century bc, and it forms the setting for the epic poem the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer. Although Aeneas’s role in the Iliad is small, Roman legend holds that after the war he led a group of Trojan survivors who left Troy and eventually arrived at Carthage, where the queen, Dido, fell in love with Aeneas. But he left her and traveled to Italy, where he founded Rome.

Scholars believe that the legend of Aeneas gained acceptance during the 3rd century bc, when Rome was developing as a nation and its citizens sought to enhance the city’s prestige by establishing a connection to the famous figures of Greek mythology. It was difficult, therefore, for later writers to reconcile the 400-year interval between the story of Aeneas, which took place in the 12th century bc, and the account of Romulus and Remus, which occurred in the 8th century bc. The poet Virgil resolved the problem in his epic the Aeneid, which describes Aeneas marrying Lavinia, daughter of the king of Latium, a kingdom that occupied the future territory of Rome. Through this marriage, Aeneas became the originator of a line of kings and a direct ancestor of Romulus and the Romans.

Most of the other early stories of Rome have to do with the traditional Seven Kings, who were the first seven rulers of Rome. One of the best-known stories about the reign of Romulus is the so-called Rape of the Sabines. According to this story, to ensure the future of Rome, Romulus and his band of followers needed wives who would bear children to ensure the future of the new city. They invited their neighbors, the Sabine people, to a festival and then kidnapped the daughters of the Sabines. A war broke out between the two communities, and peace was restored only when the Sabine women declared their preference for their Roman husbands. The Sabines then joined the Romans in a single community.

The second Roman king was Numa Pompilius, whom the Romans credited with inventing their religious institutions. Artworks depict Numa as a priestly figure with a long white beard. Legend tells that the fourth king, Ancus Martius (whose name means “warlike”), conquered many neighboring towns and greatly increased Roman territory. The sixth king, Servius Tullius, developed the first census, or counting of the population and their property. According to tradition, Servius Tullius also built the first city wall.

III THE ROMAN GODS

The early Romans did not represent their gods in human or animal form, and the gods did not have well-defined personalities. Most Roman gods were, however, associated with particular places. For example, high hilltops and oak-groves were associated with Jupiter, the god of rain, thunder, and lightning. Any piece of land struck by lightning was dedicated to him. According to Varro, Romans worshiped their gods without images for 170 years after the city was founded. Only in the 6th century bc, under the influence of the Greeks and of neighboring societies such as the Etruscan civilization did the Romans first represent their gods in human form and build temples for them.

While the personalities of their gods were not important to the early Romans, they cared a great deal about the gods’ functions. Gods presided over every aspect of life and death, including the phases of the agricultural year. The Romans integrated their worship into the routines of public and private life. For example, the doorway of a house—an important threshold separating personal space from public space—fell under the protection of the god Janus, who was also the god of beginnings. The first month of the year, January, was named for him. The hearth, which served as the center of the home, was the province of the goddess Vesta. A state shrine to Vesta featured a fire that was perpetually tended by priestesses called Vestal virgins.

Knowledge of early Roman religion is limited, but some evidence exists that the earliest Roman community had special reverence for the gods Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. Jupiter was the Roman form of the sky-god whom the Greeks worshiped as Zeus. The Romans worshiped Jupiter as the special protector of the Roman state. Mars—later equated with the Greek god Ares—was a warrior-god whose sacred animals were the wolf and the woodpecker. Festivals in his honor took place in March and October and marked the opening and close of the military campaigning season. Mars also appears to have had some role in protecting farmers’ fields. Quirinus remains a vague figure. The Romans associated him with the Sabine people, and he later came to be identified with Romulus, who had become a god.

According to Roman tradition, a dynasty of Etruscan kings ruled the city in the 6th century bc. During this period Rome adopted a group of three Etruscan gods as the focus of state worship. Because the Romans worshiped these gods in a grand temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, they were known as the Capitoline triad. The triad consisted of Jupiter and the goddesses Juno and Minerva. At this time Jupiter was viewed as the sovereign, or head, of the Roman state. Juno was both the protector of women in marriage and childbirth and was the patron deity of several communities in ancient Italy. The Romans worshiped her under several names, including Juno Sospita (Juno the Savior) and Juno Regina (Juno the Queen). Minerva, who later came to be identified with the Greek goddess Athena, was the goddess of handicrafts. Her temple on the Aventine Hill in Rome was a center for organizations of skilled craftspeople.

According to tradition, in 509 bc the dynasty of Etruscan kings ended and the Roman Republic was founded. The republic was ruled by two chief magistrates, called consuls, who were elected by the people to one-year terms. During the time of the republic, the Capitoline temple became the most important public shrine of the Roman people and the focus of public worship. Each January, the new consuls offered sacrifices to open the new year, and provincial governors took their vows before departing for their provinces. At other times, victorious generals led triumphal processions up to the Capitoline temple, where they offered sacrifices and gave thanks for their victories.

As Rome’s sphere of influence expanded, the Romans encountered the older and richer religious and mythological beliefs of the Greek civilization, and the beliefs of other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean Sea region. Major innovations in Roman religious life occurred as a result of this contact, most notably the Romans’ acceptance of gods from these other cultures. New gods and heroes were traditionally given temples outside the pomerium, the ritual boundary of the city, rather than in the city center.

Among the earliest of the Greek gods to be accepted by the Romans were Castor and Polydeuces, divine twins who were believed to have intervened in the Romans’ favor at the battle of Lake Regillus in 484 bc. This battle marked an early victory for the young Roman Republic against a force of surrounding Latin peoples. Later in the 5th century bc, on the advice of an oracle, the worship of the Greek god Apollo was introduced in Rome to avert a terrible plague. Apollo later became a symbol of Roman virtue and austerity. Other Roman gods that took on characteristics of Greek divinities were Diana (Artemis), Mercury (Hermes), Neptune (Poseidon), Pluto (Hades), Venus (Aphrodite), and Vulcan (Hephaestus).

The Romans also adopted Greek heroes into their mythology. Perhaps the best-known figure was the Greek hero Heracles, who became known in Rome as Hercules. According to Roman historian Livy, Hercules once stopped at the site of Rome before Rome’s founding, and there killed a monster that had terrorized the local people.

Rome also imported gods from other regions of the Mediterranean world, sometimes to fill particular roles. In 204 bc, armies from the rival city-state of Carthage, led by the Carthaginian general Hannibal, threatened to invade Rome. In this emergency, Roman priests consulted the Sibylline Books, which contained collections of oracles or prophecies, and recommended that the Romans begin to worship the goddess Cybele from the city of Pessinus in Asia Minor. To worship Cybele, the Romans dedicated a spot to her on the Palatine Hill in the heart of Rome. The Romans eventually defeated Hannibal.

As Rome expanded and became a hub of international commerce, more and more foreign gods found their way into the culture. Especially popular were the so-called savior-gods of religious orders known as mystery religions. Savior-gods such as Mithra, the ancient Persian god of light and wisdom, offered the promise of individual salvation through the belief in the immortality of the soul. Mystery religions such as Mithraism were open only to the initiated. As a result, many people saw them as offering a greater sense of community than traditional Roman religion. Scholars have noted similarities between mystery religions and the early Christian church, which took root in the Roman world when mystery religions were popular and widespread.

A later development in Roman religion was the worshiping of emperors as gods. As the Romans expanded their holdings to the east, they encountered the phenomenon of divine kingship. At first they rejected the idea that a human ruler should be worshiped as a god. But in 44 bc, Roman ruler Julius Caesar permitted a statue to be erected to himself bearing the inscription deo invicto (“to the unvanquished god”), and declared himself dictator for life. That same year Caesar was assassinated by citizens who were unhappy with his dictatorial regime and wanted to see a return to Rome’s earlier republican ideals. While Caesar’s heir, Octavian, took the name Augustus and made himself the first emperor of Rome, he also avoided any claim to divinity. In the first century of the Roman Empire, the idea of the divinization of emperors was often ridiculed. The philosopher and playwright Seneca mocked the imperial divinization of Claudius I as the “Pumpkinification of Claudius.”

As the government of the Roman Empire became more and more autocratic, giving rulers almost unlimited power, emperors eventually accepted divine honors, and sacrifice to the emperor came to be required as a token of loyalty. The requirement of sacrifice became a significant source of conflict between early Christians, who resisted the practice, and the Roman political authorities who enforced it. The period of emperors being considered gods ended in the 4th century ad, when Emperor Constantine the Great became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. By the end of the 4th century, Emperor Theodosius I, who was a supporter of orthodox Christianity, officially banned the practice of the old Roman pagan religion.

IV HOW THE ROMANS WORSHIPED THEIR GODS

Because many of the early religious practices of the Romans originated in a period when Rome was a small, agricultural community, these customs reflected the needs and concerns of the farming community. Long after Rome had become a busy commercial center, the religious calendar of Rome continued to reflect the cycle of the agricultural year.

Romans worshiped their gods on both individual and communal levels. Each part of a Roman house had a god associated with it. The hearth was sacred to Vesta, and during the main meal of the day people would throw a small cake into the fire as an offering to her. Roman houses had a penus, or storeroom for grain, over which gods called the Penates presided. They also received daily offerings. Closely connected with the Penates were the household gods known as Lares, to whom families would pray and perhaps offer a small gift of wine or incense. The god Janus presided over the main door to the house. Janus was envisioned as a human figure who faced both directions at once and was thus suited to watch over the doorway. The Romans believed that if they paid due respect to these gods each day, they could be confident of enjoying divine blessing for their daily activities.

Romans also paid respect to the gods of the fields. For example, the Terminalia was an annual festival at which farmers with adjoining property decorated boundary stones with garlands. Each family’s property was purified once a year in one of the oldest Roman festivals, called the Ambarvalia, in which families took part in a procession around their fields and sacrificed a pig, sheep, and bull and offered prayers to the god Mars for the health and prosperity of the fields, flocks, and family. After the sacrifice they feasted and celebrated.

Each stage of life was also marked by religious observances. At the birth of a child, men would strike the threshold of the house with agricultural implements to ward off the wilder spirits of the fields. At puberty, a boy set aside the bulla, or protective amulet of childhood, and exchanged his boyhood toga for the toga of manhood. The modern tradition of the bridal veil goes back to the Roman practice of veiling a young woman who was leaving the protection of her father’s home for that of her new husband, and who was therefore in a temporary state of religious vulnerability. Similarly, she would be carried over the threshold of her new home to avoid the bad omen that would result if the newest member of the household were to stumble upon her first entry into the house. When someone died in a house, the corpse was removed feet-first to discourage the ghost from returning. At the festival of the Parentalia, in February, the living family members would make offerings of flowers, corn meal, and wine on the graves of their family’s dead.

An important communal Roman religious celebration was the Lupercalia, held annually on February 15. The ceremony took place at the Lupercal, a small cave on the slopes of Rome’s Palatine Hill, where the Romans believed that Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the she-wolf. During the ceremony, two groups of young men sacrificed goats and a dog and then cut the goatskins into strips. Clothed only in these strips, the young men then ran a race along a specified course, tapping female bystanders with the strips of their goatskin garments as they passed. This rowdy festival was so popular that it was not abandoned until ad 494, well into the Christan era, when Pope Gelasius I replaced it with the Christian Feast of the Purification of the Virgin.

V ROMAN MYTHOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND ART

After the Romans came in contact with the Greeks in the 6th century BC, the identities of the Roman gods and the Greek gods tended to meld into Greco-Roman combinations. For centuries these deities and the stories told about them have inspired writers and artists.

Virgil’s poem the Aeneid was a literary celebration of the supposed Trojan origin of the Roman people. In the Aeneid, Virgil took Zeus and Hera, who the Greek writer Homer had earlier portrayed as somewhat petty and complaining, and transformed them into the awe-inspiring Jupiter and the vividly angry Juno. Writing just after Virgil, Ovid produced works that were witty and popularly entertaining. He wove the diverse strands of Greek mythology into a single tapestry in his 15-volume work the Metamorphoses, which covers the history of the world from creation to Ovid’s own time.

In later centuries, numerous musicians, writers, and artists drew on the stories that Virgil, Ovid, and other Roman writers told, incorporating the Roman literary images into their own works. In music, one of the best-known adaptations of Roman mythology is the opera Dido and Aeneas (about 1689) by English composer Henry Purcell. The opera dramatizes an episode from the Aeneid. Two of the most prominent writers to dramatize Roman mythology were Dante Alighieri of Italy, author of La divina commedia (1321?; The Divine Comedy, 1802), and Edmund Spenser of England, who wrote the epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590-1596). British writer Anthony Burgess retold the story of Aeneas’s travels in his novel A Vision of Battlements (1949). Aeneas’s journey through the underworld was also the subject of a poem by 20th-century American writer Reynolds Price.

Ovid’s vivid descriptions also lent themselves to representation in the visual arts. The Birth of Venus (after 1482, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy) by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli is a famous rendition of how Venus first appeared. Italian Renaissance sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini created the Fountain of the Triton (1642-1643?) in Rome, which depicts the moment in Ovid’s narrative when the sea-god Triton delivers a ringing blast from his conch horn to signal the end of the universal deluge. Aeneas was treated several times by 19th-century British painter J. M. W. Turner, who depicted Aeneas in the company of Dido, Mercury, and other figures from legend. Dido is also the subject of several paintings by 19th-century English painter Edward Burne-Jones.

            Scandinavian Mythology
I INTRODUCTION

Scandinavian Mythology, pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Scandinavian people. The Scandinavian legends and myths about ancient heroes, gods, and the creation and destruction of the universe developed out of the original common mythology of the Germanic peoples and constitute the primary source of knowledge about ancient German mythology. Because Scandinavian mythology was transmitted and altered by medieval Christian historians, the original pagan religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices cannot be determined with certainty. Clearly, however, Scandinavian mythology developed slowly, and the relative importance of different gods and heroes varied at different times and places. Thus, the cult of Odin, chief of the gods, may have spread from western Germany to Scandinavia not long before the myths were recorded; minor gods—including Ull, the fertility god Njord, and Heimdall—may represent older deities who lost strength and popularity as Odin became more important. Odin, a god of war, was also associated with learning, wisdom, poetry, and magic.

Most information about Scandinavian mythology is preserved in the Old Norse literature (see Icelandic Literature; Norwegian Literature), in the Eddas and later sagas; other material appears in commentaries by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus and the German writer Adam of Bremen (flourished about 1075). Fragments of legends are sometimes preserved in old inscriptions and in later folklore.

II GODS AND HEROES

Besides Odin, the major deities of Scandinavian mythology were his wife, Frigg, goddess of the home; Thor, god of thunder, who protected humans and the other gods from the giants and who was especially popular among the Scandinavian peasantry; Frey, a god of prosperity; and Freya, sister of Frey, a fertility goddess. Other, lesser gods were Balder, Hermod, Tyr, Bragi, and Forseti; Idun, Nanna, and Sif were among the goddesses. The principle of evil among the gods was represented by the trickster Loki. Many of these deities do not seem to have had special functions; they merely appear as characters in legendary tales.

Many ancient mythological heroes, some of whom may have been derived from real persons, were believed to be descendants of the gods; among them were Sigurd the Dragon-slayer; Helgi Thrice-Born, Harald Wartooth, Hadding, Starkad, and the Valkyries. The Valkyries, a band of warrior-maidens that included Svava and Brunhild, served Odin as choosers of slain warriors, who were taken to reside in Valhalla. There the warriors would spend their days fighting and nights feasting until Ragnarok, the day of the final world battle, in which the old gods would perish and a new reign of peace and love would be instituted. Ordinary individuals were received after death by the goddess Hel in a cheerless underground world.

Scandinavian mythology included dwarves; elves; and the Norns, who distributed fates to mortals. The ancient Scandinavians also believed in personal spirits, such as the fylgja and the hamingja, which in some respects resembled the Christian idea of the soul. The gods were originally conceived as a confederation of two formerly warring divine tribes, the Aesir and the Vanir. Odin was originally the leader of the Aesir, which consisted of at least 12 gods. Together all the gods lived in Asgard.

III CREATION MYTH

The Eddic poem V?luspá (Prophecy of the Seeress) portrays a period of primeval chaos, followed by the creation of giants and gods and, finally, of humankind. Ginnungagap was the yawning void, Jotunheim the home of the giants, Niflheim the region of cold, and Muspellsheim the realm of heat. The great world-tree, Yggdrasil, reached through all time and space, but it was perpetually under attack from Nidhogg, the evil serpent. The fountain of Mimir, source of hidden wisdom, lay under one of the roots of the tree.

IV RELIGIOUS RITUAL

The Scandinavian gods were served by a class of priest-chieftains called godar. Worship was originally conducted outdoors, under guardian trees, near sacred wells, or within sacred arrangements of stones. Later, wooden temples were used, with altars and with carved representations of the gods. The most important temple was at Old Uppsala, Sweden, where animals and even human beings were sacrificed.

                   天啊，贴了这么多，还是百科全书的九牛一毛。全是英文，里面资料很全，神话的条目有几百条（好像不止）。很有益的光盘

            :eek: AOEII,你还真得了小游戏后遗症啊？
（背景说明：AOEII长期处于被剥削被压迫状态，唯一的娱乐就是玩百科全书里的小游戏，所以……）

            后遗症倒不是，只是我家的网速慢得可以赢两局空档接龙，所以我将这些东东贴在记事本里（我可贴了半个小时才把他们弄上网的）。
我还有爱尔兰和威尔士、印度、地中海、德国、非洲（这个有人感兴趣吗？）......我自己也没时间看，只看了亚瑟王和斯堪的纳维亚的，贴上来是为了等高人翻译（卑鄙吧，嘻嘻嘻）。