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CHAPTER 29
MYTHOGRAPHY
STEPHEN M. TRZASKOMA
MYTHOGRAPHY, that is, scholarly and semischolarly writing from antiquity that sought either to systematize and harmonize varying traditional accounts or to interpret the myths, came into existence as a separate genre in the fifth or fourth century BCE, but its appeal and place in the intellectual ecosystem endured strongly into later periods. Its importance for the study of Greek imperial literature and the Second Sophistic has not been thoroughly explored in the scholarship but is nonetheless a matter of some inherent interest, both because a large proportion of our extant mythographical texts come from this period and because mythography underlies a great deal of the widespread deployment of myth in the oratory and literature of the Roman period. It should be stated in advance that this influence can usually be traced only indirectly due to the loss of the vast bulk of ancient mythography, but a strong circumstantial case can be constructed for mythography’s role in contemporary education as well as in oratory and literary composition. This chapter will consist of an overview of some representative surviving mythographical texts from the period and then in briefer compass suggest some of the ways in which mythography was part of a system by which knowledge of myth was first acquired by writers and speakers and then utilized in communicating with audiences similarly equipped.
In some ways mythography seems to stand outside of the Second Sophistic. Many works that we would place in the category would under most circumstances be classified as decidedly unliterary productions, and their subliterary nature means that it is difficult to see many of the overt features that characterize so many other texts from the period (Atticism, ornate rhetoric, etc.). On the other hand, their preservation of arcane knowledge and their archaizing interests made them valuable adjuncts in the creation of the distinctive works of the period, and their very variety shows some of the same tendencies, as well as some of the same tensions, to be found in the more ambitious and sophisticated literary productions—as, for instance, the pull between tradition and innovation, localism and universalism, and Hellenic and Roman identities.
29.1 THE TEXTS
Without doubt our most important mythographical text1 from antiquity is the Bibliotheca (that is, Library, its title an indication of its claim to completeness of coverage) of Pseudo-Apollodorus, so called to distinguish him from the earlier mythographer Apollodorus of Athens, whose works are lost.2 The Bibliotheca, which likely dates from the period 50–150 CE, is an attempt organized along genealogical, temporal, and geographical lines to encapsulate a large amount of the myth from the primeval reign of Uranus and Gaea to the death of Odysseus after the Trojan War. The final sections, from the middle of the narrative of Theseus to the end, unfortunately survive only in two Byzantine epitomes. Within a spare but data-rich matrix, the author sometimes elaborates important stories in greater but never great detail. Typical of the framework is the following section:
Herse and Hermes had Cephalus. Eos fell in love with him, abducted him, and slept with him in Syria. She had Tithonus, who had a son, Phaethon. He in turn had Astynous, who had Sandocus, who went from Syria to Cilicia, founded the city of Celenderis, married Pharnace daughter of Megassares, king of the Hyrians, and had Cinyras. Cinyras founded Paphos in Cyprus, where he had gone with a group of people. There he married Metharme, the daughter of Pygmalion, king of the Cyprians, and had Oxyporus and Adonis, and, in addition, the daughters Orsedice, Laogora, and Braesia. These girls slept with strangers because of Aphrodite’s wrath and died in Egypt. (3.181–182)
This is immediately followed, however, by a section, approximately twice as long, that concentrates on Adonis alone, includes two alternate genealogies for him, describes his death at the tusk of a boar, and narrates the familiar story of his mother’s incestuous impregnation, her metamorphosis, and Aphrodite’s and Persephone’s love for him. The narrative scope of the Bibliotheca in this manner continually shifts its level of magnification and contains both rapid genealogical sweeps across many generations and larger set pieces, some of them very large indeed, such as, for instance, the sections on the Calydonian Boar Hunt, Jason and the Argonauts, and Heracles and his Labors. This last section, which spans most of the second book (2.61–160), is exemplary in its utility, representing the best single, coherent presentation of the “facts” of the myths of Heracles that we know of from the ancient world (Diodorus Siculus is the only rival). With the story told in scattered fashion across multiple epics, tragedies, and other accounts, we are lucky to have the Bibliotheca’s version. Ancient readers would likewise have found it of tremendous use and generally would have had a very difficult time indeed without mythographical summaries of this sort. One cannot learn the story of Oedipus simply from reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus; one can from the mythographers.
Although the Bibliotheca is assuredly derivative and its style very plain, the tendency to view it as merely a simplistic repository of the “facts” of myth compiled in an uncritical fashion, prevalent up until recently, has begun to be challenged. We might note, for instance, the insistent avoidance of myths connected with Rome and think of the implications of this for constructing a Hellenic identity through myth (Fletcher 2008) or the narrator’s conscious claim to authority in matters of organization and selection (Trzaskoma 2013). It is difficult to assess with complete certainty such matters because no other example of synoptic mythography of comparable scope is preserved,3 but what other mythography we possess in fragmentary or epitomized form does not give the impression that such a universal mythography was a particularly common pursuit. Despite his uniqueness in this, Pseudo-Apollodorus is in other ways very much like the other authors practicing one main branch of mythography, namely the systematic. He aims to select, organize, and present the myths, not interpret them.
This drive to systematize the confusion of traditional narrative is an old one, but it flourished especially during th
e Second Sophistic, as is well attested in the papyri and in fragmentary works. Antoninus Liberalis (late first or second century CE) produced a collection of forty-one tales of metamorphosis without any sort of interpretation along philosophical or rationalistic lines (text and translations in Papathomopoulos 1969 and Almirall i Sardà and Calderón Dorda 2012; English translation with introduction in Celoria 1992; cf. Delattre 2010 for a more ambitious reading of one of the tale’s composition and consumption). What binds the collection together is merely the presence of metamorphosis in all of the stories, and this way of organizing a portion of the confusing mass of both local and Panhellenic tales along thematic lines was quite common. First, we may compare the remains of another such collection preserved partially on a late second- or early third-century CE papyrus (PMich. 1447; published in Renner 1978 and reedited by Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998), which not only shares the same theme as Antoninus’ work, but which goes the additional step of organizing the individual items, more briefly treated than in Antoninus, into an alphabetic dictionary. To give some sense of the nature and scope, two of the surviving adjacent entries are:
Arethusa: the daughter of Hyperus, after sleeping with Poseidon by the strait of Euboea, was changed by Hera [into a spring] in [Chalcis], according to Hesiod.
Aethyiae: the daughters of Haliacmon son of Haliartus, seven in number, while mourning for Ino, were transformed by Hera into [birds] . . . they are called “crow-haters” by Aeschylus.
Sometimes even simpler in form are the lists of mythological information we find in numerous papyri (helpfully collected by Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998). One from the first or second century CE (POxy. 4306) preserves fragmentarily no fewer than eight lists: who first sacrificed to which gods, who first built temples to which gods, origins of some divine epithets, metamorphoses, sons of gods and mortal women, inventors, the foundations of games, and murderers tried on the Areopagus. We have many good parallels for this sort of list in some preserved Greek texts and in Hyginus, who has several, such as “Those nursed on animals’ milk,” “Those who died from boar attacks,” and “Wives who killed their husbands.” This last can serve as a good example of the type (trans. Smith):
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 74