Introduction: Muthoi in Continuity and Variation

Summary

But as a rule the ancient myths [palaious muthous[ are not found to yield a simple and consistent story, so that nobody need wonder if details of my recension cannot be reconciled with those given by every poet and historian.

The editor trusts that he will be forgiven the presumptuousness (or audacity, as the case may be) of beginning with Robert Graves’s translation of Diodorus Siculus 4.44.5-6 - 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 of the Great War, no less than by Frazer’s Golden Bough) of the ancient mythic tradition of the young hero Jason and his band of warrior comrades, who sailed from Greece on board the Argo to recover the fleece of a golden ram from distant Colchis. What we call “Greek myth” is no featureless monolith, but multifaceted, multifarious and multivalent, a fluid phenomenon, as was obvious to the historian Diodorus 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 the forms and uses of Greek mythic traditions in Greek texts, ranging in period 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 one seemingly more concerned with documenting the mythic traditions of a glorious literary past. Yet even in the earliest attested periods, there is, as we shall see, evidence of a concern for preserving still more ancient forms and notions about gods and heroes.