These fifteen articles derive from the 6th Bristol Myth Conference, organised by editor Hawes, with J. Priestley, in 2013. The contributors explore myriad relationships between ancient Greek mythology and its landscapes, finding literal and metaphorical connections among literature, material culture and some landscapes of ancient Hellas (Thebes, Thessaly, Arcadia). Hawes organises the papers loosely around ‘various themes and landscape features’, including ‘layered time accessed through space’, water supply and mental topographies (p. 11). Scholars familiar with ancient Greek mythography will find much of interest on specific texts and on mental or physical connections that ancient authors made with their landscapes. Disappointingly for this reviewer, however, papers rarely refer to one another, and most compare textual representations, rather than map them onto ‘the storied landscapes of ancient Greece’. There is little on Aegean islands, the Athenian (or any other) acropolis, the Peloponnese, Panhellenic sites or even the small agricultural plains, harbours and olive-covered slopes which most would agree are typical of Greek landscapes. Most readers will seek out texts or regions already of interest, and they will find many new insights here.
Hawes's ‘Of Myths and Maps’ introduces the topic's potential brilliantly, starting with Plutarch's Theseus 1.1, about what lay at that intersecting edge of (Athenian) space and time for Plutarch, and all Hellenes of the High Empire: ‘a land inhabited by poets and mythographers’ (p. xvii). Hawes well summarises how the landscapes of ancient Hellas were given meaning by Plutarch and other ancient Greek poets, prose authors and artists through mythic, mental, literary, iconographic and cartographic means. The volume skews towards the study of certain authors (Homer, Herodotus, Apollodorus, Pausanias) and textual myths set in long-past heroic landscapes. Yet, as Hawes argues, all forms of Greek myth were connected to Greek landscapes in both physical and mental (or imagined) ways, and myth thus formed a shifting nexus between stories and spaces, in a process common to all cultures worldwide, but available to us today to a remarkable degree via the rich literary and archaeological record of ancient Greece. Perspectives on these connections changed over time, and a palimpsest of textual references and landscape features built up throughout antiquity, extending far beyond ancient Greece. The ancient Greek literary record and its long-term cultural impact could better inform modern understanding of how all human stories link in to landscapes and how myth and history interact. Hawes also briefly introduces each paper and relates them to one another. I regroup the papers slightly here, to better review their individual and overall contributions to research on itineraries, civic space, water, mountains and spatial peripheries, both in ancient Greek mythological writing and in its corresponding concepts of landscape.
In ‘Walking through History: Unlocking the Mythical Past’ K. Clarke links the myths, metaphors and itineraries that ancient Greek authors applied to their landscapes. She argues that Herodotus, Strabo and Pausanias all consider myth an element of paideia and portray travel as a way to unlock mythic landscapes, but differ in their definitions of myth and preferences for past vs present. Her evocation of metaphorical islands of story strung out along itineraries as an ancient Greek way of myth-telling and the contrast between past-time myths and the writer's own landscape are echoed in A. Suksi's ‘Scandalous Maps in Aeschylean Tragedy’ and C. Delattre's ‘Islands of Knowledge: Space and Names in Imperial Mythography’. Suksi begins with the Greek connection between seeing and knowing, arguing that an ancient author or character who made maps would thus take on this divine aspect (citing A. Purves's Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative [2010], which figures in other papers too). Suksi cites the example of an embroidered map that Pherecydes of Syros had Zas put on his bride Chthonie's wedding dress (Schibli F 68), but devotes most of the study to characters in Aeschylean tragedy who make maps and thus, by her reading, aspire to divine power: Prometheus blessing Io with a mental map of her itinerary and Clytemnestra's evocation of the route of her mountain-top fire-beacons from Troy to Argos in Agamemnon. Delattre uses Apollodorus, Strabo and Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses to further define the methods and underlying ideas of mythography in the Roman imperial era. He also distinguishes map-making from mythography, emphasising the links of the latter with knowledge, authority, paideia and landscapes of past and present, pointing to the choice to include or exclude Rome and Hellenic locations while highlighting the lack of detail, for example in Antoninus Liberalis’ myth of Ctesylla of Ceos.
Suprisingly for a landscape of city states, few papers link mythology with civic space, and two focus on Thebes. D.W. Berman treats founding myths of Thebes, Croton and Athens in ‘Cities-Before-Cities: “Prefoundational” Myth and the Construction of Greek Civic Space’. He argues that myths set at a city before its founding reveal the tension between local and Panhellenic mythology, laying claim to pre-foundation events and heroes, and justifying post-foundation politics and landscapes. Athens’ myth of the contest between Athena and Poseidon explains the city's name, natural features and control of the sea; Croton could claim Heracles, the Greek Myscellus and native Croton as founders of the city and the ‘earlier’ sanctuary of Hera Lacinia. He argues that Thebes is slandered in texts from the Odyssey to Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, which play down Theban power (and patronage of Apollo) by evoking her indefensible trackless plains. S. Larson contributes one of the few iconographic papers: ‘Meddling with Myth in Thebes: a New Vase from the Ismenion Hill (Thebes Museum 49276)’. The study of newly excavated material is to be applauded, though the images of the vase should have come earlier. A fragmentary Athenian red-figure askos found near the Theban temple of Ismenian Apollo shows two sphinxes (in the place of griffins) fighting two figures in Persian attire (Amazons or Arimaspians?). Larson contextualises this imagery with vase-paintings and the Theban sphinx as riddler in Pindar, Aeschylus and Apollodorus. She speculates that it was commissioned by a Theban with locally charged imagery for votive purposes. ‘Callimachus and the Poetics of the Diaspora’ sketches how Hellenistic cities could be added into Archaic myths, as J. McInerney traces some poetic strategies by which Callimachus linked Greek mythology to his native Cyrene and praised his Alexandrian patrons. His subtle changes to itineraries, allusions to rival or allied cities and the choice of patron deities, notably Apollo and Artemis, enhanced Ptolemaic religious and political patronage and dynastic legitimacy, both in the new cities of the diaspora and back in Greece.
Three papers focus on water: E. Minchin on the Hellespont, C. Salowey on rivers and B. Robinson on fountains. In ‘Mapping the Hellespont with Leander and Hero: the Swimming Lover and the Nightly Bride’ Minchin lucidly traces the agents, instruments and role of memory in the transmission of this site-specific myth. She gives equal attention to literature and the visual arts, arguing this tale of tragic love is fixed in the fast-running strait between Sestos and Abydos, but had different symbolic and emotional force in local, ancient or medieval contexts. Salowey also explicates the symbolism of flowing water in ‘Rivers Run Through it: Environmental History in Two Heroic Riverine Battles’. She puts Achilles vs the Scamander (Iliad 21.373ff.) and Heracles vs the Achelous (Sophocles’ Trachiniae, iconography) alongside Greek hydrogeology of short, often seasonal rivers and karst landscapes. Her paper combines poetry with broader ancient attitudes to natural forces, pointing to the geographic specificity of Greek rivers and the cultural specificity that likens them to bulls, and worthy opponents for heroes. Robinson also links fresh water to myth at Corinth and Ephesus in ‘Fountains as Reservoirs of Myth and Memory’. Facade fountains from the late Hellenistic era were spaces for display, where local patrons and myths might mingle with gods and rulers. At Corinth, Peirene spring's classical links with Poseidon, Pegasus and Bellerophon were revived in literary and physical form by the Roman colonists. They also named a nearby Hellenistic rock-cut fountain house for the mythic princess Glauce, relating it to monuments for her poisoner Medea's children and the partly ruined Archaic temple. Patrons like C. Laecanius Bassus at Ephesus put up even more monumental hydrekdocheia mingling past with present, the Ionian founder Androclus with Trajan.
Three papers consider mountain myths. In ‘Landscapes of the Cyclopes’ R. Buxton traces how Odyssean Cyclopes dwelling near Polyphemus, probably on Sicily, were entangled with mythical builders in stone and blacksmiths, and eventually all localised near fiery Mt Etna. E. Aston traces how Thessalians took ownership of their past and negotiated territorial disputes by reference to movement off Mt Pelion, in ‘Centaurs and Lapiths in the Landscape of Thessaly’. She points to local Thessalian elements in these Panhellenic myths and their ties to local politics. J. Baleriaux then evokes the primordial links of mountainous Arcadia with Greek myth (and religion) in ‘Pausanias’ Arcadia between Conservatism and Innovation’. She argues that local elites competed to attract imperial attention and prestige, promoted continuity at sacred sites despite urbanisation and shared a Panhellenic ideal placing early gods, heroes, games and cities in Arcadia. A conservative and conserved Arcadia resulted; more attention to the role of piety would support her argument further.
Finally, three papers treat myth on the far peripheries of Greece. I. Sulimani charts ‘Imaginary Islands in the Hellenistic Era: Utopia on the Geographical Map’, arguing that Diodorus’ Book 5 uses the same motifs for real Mediterranean and remote, originally mythical idyllic islands. The latter include the Isles of the Blessed (Diodorus’ Atlantic Ocean Island) and Panchaea (or Iambulus’ island, probably Sri Lanka), which came on to maps in the Hellenistic age, spurring Diodorus to situate them in the real world, but describe them with ideal terms of fertility, climate and peaceful coexistence to suit his own goals. R.L. Fowler compares peripheral regions in the Odyssey, Pherecydes of Athens and Herodotus in ‘Imaginary Itineraries in the Beyond’. Homer distinguished Telemachus’ itinerary from Odysseus’ tales off the map, while Pherecydes and especially Herodotus defined the fuzzy borders of the known world through links among living people and extant monuments, and inquiry into the borders where living memory gave way to myth. R. Hunter argues that ancient interpretations that intertwined myth and landscape as allegory and as useful for education pass from Classical philosophy to Roman imperial oratory, in ‘Serpents in the Soul: the “Libyan Myth” of Dio Chrysostom’. He delves into Dio 5, where snake women of long-ago Libya, who lured men to their deaths, are interpreted as the danger of the passions. Dio's allegory has tangled precedents in myths of Heracles, the Argonauts, Plato's Phaedrus and Alexander's trip to Siwa as well as the real geographic dangers of the Great Syrtis.
This volume illuminates many ways in which Greek myths as expressed in texts (and art) were linked with physical and imagined maps, from the archaic era into late antiquity, and with long-lasting religious, political and cultural resonances. The papers make a fine contribution to the still-unfolding potential of spatial approaches to Greek mythology, in Greece and far beyond the Mediterranean shores.
