The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture. His five siblings were Olympian gods: Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Poseidon, and Zeus. And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. In Greek mythology, Hades was one of the six gods born to the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Zeus married his sister Hera, the goddess of family and marriage but he had many other lovers, both mortal and divine. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. The brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades all had the same parentage. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) Poseidon (right) depicted on a figure vase painting (C6th B.C. The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. Hades is one of the most well-known Greek gods, but his parentage is often a source of confusion. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. Orphic mythology further blurs the line between the two brothers, such as in Nonnus epic the Dionysiaka, which has Zeus consorting with Persephone to produce Zagreus, a pre-incarnation of Dionysos Dionysus, who occurs as a son of Haides in Aeschylus. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. In essence, Haides was an upside-down version of Zeus.
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