This collection of essays, with an introduction by M.S. and afterword by R. Osborne, is billed as an examination of ‘foundation myths’, but in fact the contributions cover a wider swath than that. Or, perhaps not, if the term ‘foundation’ is meant broadly enough: the essays treat myths that have a way of defining identity, from a beginning, or at least an early point in the perceived history of a group or city. The contributions range widely, as the title suggests, both geographically and chronologically; Greece is treated but also the Near East, Phoenicia and Rome, and chapters cover a chronological span from early Greek and Near Eastern material to the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
M.S. has recently written a perceptive monograph on foundation myths in Ionia (Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia [2013]), and her introduction here distils and extends a methodological framework put into practice in the earlier book. She offers a brief taxonomy and evaluation of scholarly approaches to foundation myths, and sensibly suggests an approach that is neither completely ‘positivist’ (i.e. seeking to find historical truth, on some level, in stories of foundation or origin) nor ‘constructivist’ (looking, on the other hand, exclusively to the present of a myth's enunciation for its significance). This ‘pragmatic third way’ (p. 5) should embrace the obvious flexibility that foundation myths exhibit as essentially plausible representations of a relevant past (whether or not the true past, however defined), and it must recognise the significance of multiple foundation stories, that can and often are in one or more senses contradictory.Footnote 1 M.S. sensibly suggests we think about sets of foundation myths as ‘discourses’ instead of particular discrete and at times contradictory stories: we must understand multiple foundations, or variant stories about founders or origins, as existing in dialogue with each other, as well as with the past and present.
The authors of the seven chapters accept to varying degrees these fundamental principles, some employing the language of ‘discourse’ and ‘dialogue’ and others taking the cue more implicitly. D. Odgen's contribution on the foundation myth of Alexandria is particularly successful, offering a deeply insightful reading of the complexities of the Alexandrian foundation story's serpent imagery and its interactions with the Ptolemies and other Alexandrian foundation myths, such as those of Seleucid Antioch and Seleuceia in Pieria. An excellent discussion by R. Mairs of Ai Khanoum (an eastern Hellenistic foundation; the city's Greek name is unknown) makes good use of non-literary evidence to probe an apparent connection between this peripheral settlement and the oracular shrine at Delphi. A chapter by M. Squire on the Tabulae Iliacae also focuses almost exclusively on non-literary evidence – in this case the well known but little studied collection of small tablets depicting the story of the Trojan War, most from the late first century b.c. or first century a.d. – and productively contextualises a wide range of visual representations of the Trojan cycle in Rome, especially of the crucial trio of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius.
Some of the contributions are general in nature, for example I. Malkin's opening chapter offering a synoptic comparative analysis of Greek and Near Eastern foundation narratives, and others settle into discussion of a corpus of stories or of evidence about particular places (Naxos, Tyre, or stories of the paternity of Theseus). Of these, A. Hirt's contribution on Tyrian coinage is notable for its nuanced readings of numismatic iconography, showing to what length careful understanding of context can lead to productive readings on the ‘constructivist’ end of the spectrum.
The chapters, then, though somewhat eclectic in subject and approach, are generally of high quality. But this volume also has a sting at the tail, in a brief but challenging epilogue by R. Osborne. ‘In the beginning was the lie’, Osborne writes (p. 227), and he presses the point that though few scholars have been bold enough to use the word, the foundation myths with which this volume is engaged are, in a crucial sense, indeed lies: they are untruths, and they gain their significance for a community as ‘entire collections of lies together’ – that is, as the ‘discourses’ of M.S.'s introduction (p. 229). But Osborne goes further than merely couching the book's opening framework in controversial terminology. People want to believe lies: ‘Lies do not get past their first telling unless those who hear them are prepared to accept them’; there is at work a ‘will to truth’ (p. 231). The ‘lies’ that make up the network of foundation myths of a place, or of every place, are essentially curated by their retelling into positions of authority, of ‘truth’. This, of course, strikes at the core of what myth is about, what it is: myths must be told over and over, yet they do not need to be the same every time. Sometimes critics assert that the truth of myth resides in this traditionality. But Osborne reminds us that repetition, retelling, indeed tradition, does not require truth value. It merely requires relevance.
M.S. maintains that we need a middle ground, between historicising ‘positivists’ and post-positivist ‘constructivists’. She admits that no modern scholar would insist on one or the other of these poles exclusively, and that is certainly right; perhaps no one ever would have. But Osborne bracingly moves beyond even this reconciliation of poles. At the heart of foundation stories is falsehood – and, who knows? – maybe a little bit of truth here and there, but what is interesting for both the historian and the critic of myth is more than how to find middle ground between historicity and function. We should ask not only why people create the stories they do, but also why they believe them. Osborne suggests that this is the question even historians must answer: not insisting on finding the, or even a truth, but recognising that ‘the lie was the truth. And the other lie was also the truth’ (p. 232). In this sense historian and literary critic are one and the same. We are beyond positivism and constructivism. The bundles of believable and believed lies that make up foundation discourses are the ostensible subjects here, but Osborne has a bigger target. Hesiod's believable lie (Theogony 27) is tenacious: have the discourses of history changed much from those archaic lies that resemble truth?
