Greek/roman mythological prevalence

Isis

Member
Most people I know are more familiar with Greek/Roman mythology than any other type. I assume this is due to the far-reaching influence of the Roman empire. Do you think there are any other factors?
 

jerri

Member
That's what I was taught in school. I don't remember whether it was history or social studies but we had a whole section on learning about the Gods and myths of both the Greeks and the Romans.
 

Enchanted

New Member
I think you are right Isis, since the Romans travelled and conquered so widely they brought their stories with them and they became incorporated into a lot of different cultures. It's amazing to see the influence of Greek and Roman mythology on literature throughout Europe. Then of course the Europeans brought these stories with them to America...it's really amazing how these stories have stood the test of time!
 

LegendofJoe

Active Member
Greek and Roman myths are great, but we have played them out so much that people tend to think they are some
sort of watermark for great mythology.
I think this is far from the truth. Other mythologies are just as enthralling.
Edith Hamilton spoke of a lack of some great Homer in the Norse world that
could put the Norse stories together as a form of great literature. But even she knew
that the content of the stories themselves were something to be admired.
And as far as the Norsemen not having a "Homer" or "Vergil", that is a matter of opinion.
Snorri Sturluson was a great writer. The anonymous author of The Saga of the Volsungs did a nice job with that
epic as well. Maybe these works are in prose rather than beautiful poetry, but should it play second fiddle
to Greaco-Roman literature?
Those learning about Greek mythology in English class are not really learning about Greek poetry anyway since the works
are translated into English. So they are learning the content of the stories only.
It is also not English literature because there is no standard perfect English translation.
This stuff is taught because of the remarkable influence it had on European history as well as the beauty of the stories.
But sometimes I feel there is a snobbery about the Ancient Greek and Roman world, and that whatever they produced was the best.
 

Alejandro

Active Member
Most people I know are more familiar with Greek/Roman mythology than any other type. I assume this is due to the far-reaching influence of the Roman empire. Do you think there are any other factors?
In addition to the influence of the Roman Empire, and the Greek colonialism which preceded it, the Greeks and Romans also seem to have been the most meticulous collectors, specifically in writing, of their own mythology as well as that of other peoples. They were also quite liberal syncretists: they freely combined their gods with those of foreign peoples whom they encountered, or at least they found it easy to identify their gods with those of others. This is why it's so easy to overlap Greco-Roman myth with other mythologies, or to interpret the latter in terms of the former. As far back as Herodotus (400s BC) the Greeks were writing down the names by which they thought Arabs called Dionysus and Ares, or what the Sudanese thought Zeus and Poseidon looked like.

Lots of the world's cultures are traditionally non-literary, so we actually don't know for sure what their mythology was thousands ofor in some cases only a few hundredyears ago. And even at present day in the Old World, e.g., only a few scholars would have been able to collect and record their stories, a lot of which is lost with the pre-Westernised generations of these people-groups. But even in the corpus of "non-Classical" mythology from societies which were literary, like Indians and [ancient] Egyptians, their mythology can tend to be esoteric, made to be deliberately difficult to broadcast, since "the heathen" or uninitiated will supposedly only corrupt this sacred knowledge. The Greeks and Romans had an interesting way of dealing with this problem: Some stories were for general public consumption but others were so holy and secret that even with all the technological research facility we have today, we can only guess at exactly what they were.

One other consideration to make is that most of the world's cultures never became as monolithic as the Mediterranean empires, with their standardised, codified, written-down religious systems and cults. So even when we read Norse mythology, e.g., a lot of it is merely a reconstruction of what ancient Roman writers and Medieval European scholars knew of the rather diverse pre-Christian beliefs of the various Germanic tribes we now refer to using the blanket term "the Norsemen."
 

dtango

Member
This stuff is taught because of the remarkable influence it had on European history as well as the beauty of the stories.
But sometimes I feel there is a snobbery about the Ancient Greek and Roman world, and that whatever they produced was the best.
Although I am Greek, I quite agree with that. Nothing fascinates me more than the story of the Ragnarok.
In Greek mythology although the defeat of the giants (Titans) is mentioned, it has deteriorated into a fairy tale.
 
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