The second edition of this introduction to the study of myth, addressed to both students and scholars, consists of eight articles, each considering an approach to Greek myth. Two chapters have been reprinted from the first edition (Versnel, Sourvinou-Inwood); three have been revised by their authors (Nagy, Hansen, Calame); two have been undertaken by new authors (López-Ruiz, Segal); and one (Pàmias on the reception of Greek myth) is entirely new. E.'s general introduction surveys the history and practices of myth in ancient Greece and reflects on the development of ‘myth studies’ since the first edition in 1990 – I will return to this topic at the end of this review.
J. Pàmias had the most difficult article to write. ‘Reception studies’ is the label for a highly productive field that explores millennia of creative and intellectual engagements with myth from a multiplicity of expert perspectives. The study of reception also holds great promise for myth studies as a whole, as it is capable of tackling one of the field's most pressing questions: which cultures actually had a substantive notion of the object ‘myth’? In light of this excitement and the excellent recent work done in this field, Pàmias's overview falls a little flat as he ticks off milestones of myth reception from Hecataeus of Miletus to German Idealism and a little beyond. This approach to myth studies would have been more dynamically introduced by way of a case study that demonstrates its revisionary potential.
H.S. Versnel identifies two phases in the history of the myth-and-ritual approach. The first concentrated on ‘the “dying and rising” complex of gods and kings around the New Year festival’, the second focused on ‘the initiation candidate, banished, sorely tried, sometimes doomed to death, coming off triumphant, returning’ (p. 111). The first complex was seen to reflect the vegetative cycle of nature; the second is embedded in culture and deals with marginal or liminal social positions. Versnel offers a reconciliation of the two phases in anthropological terms. He concludes that ‘myth is the verbal expression, rite a reflection in action, of essentially identical situations and their inherent psychic emotions' (p. 123).
C. López-Ruiz, ‘Greek and Near Eastern Mythologies’, provides a clear and helpful overview. She explains the history and usefulness of an approach that seeks to understand Greek culture in its broader Mediterranean context, but also considers potential methodological pitfalls. The survey also identifies important areas of comparison: the Greek gods and their relation to Near-Eastern traditions; the relationship between Greek epic and Mesopotamian and Anatolian epic; destruction myths in Greek, Canaanite and Israelite traditions; cosmogony and theogony. Finally, López-Ruiz puts forward Itamar Even-Zohar's term ‘polysystem’ to describe the kind of mythological relationships explored in her article.
Another comparative approach – Indo-European Structures in Greek myth – is portrayed by J.F. Nagy. He takes Georges Dumézil as a starting point, but illuminates the theory by way of an entertaining case study of four myths involving severed but miraculously communicative heads (taken from Greek, Irish, Norse and Indian mythology). Nagy shows that the explanatory value of Indo-European myths for an understanding of Greek myths is greater than many would expect. The best feature of this article is the fact that it demonstrates how comparative approaches to myth can lead to insightful readings of specific versions: ‘the goal is not to retrieve a fossilized Urmythologie but to study some of the varieties of specialization and transformation that sustain a protean ideological heritage in Indo-European cultures’ (pp. 223–4).
W. Hansen's ‘Odysseus and the Oar’ is the third comparative article in the collection. Hansen brings together Tiresias’ prophecy in Odyssey 11.121–34 with traditional folktales of the same type, that is, ‘The Sailor and the Oar’. A generous helping of ‘Sailor and Oar’ stories from various centuries and cultures is set before the reader and, despite the inherent repetitiveness, this translates into very enjoyable reading. Hansen shows that Tiresias' prophecy reflects this older, oral narrative. He illustrates how knowledge of other examples of the same narrative type can give direction to an interpretation of Homer's version, and shows how the folktale context is able to explain some puzzling aspects of the classical text, such as the chaff-wrecker.
C. Calame, ‘The Poetic Creation of Cyrene’, sets out to demonstrate a ‘semionarrative’ approach to myth and at the same time negotiates the relationship between myth and history. The potential value of this approach is lost on the reader, because this article is written in a nearly incomprehensible style. Even in sentences not riddled with terminology that should be explained in an introduction, the text is unclear: ‘Against this program, uttered in the unreal mode, Medea sets the one that will be substituted for it in reality, though some features of the latter appear negative on first inspection’ (p. 292). Readers of the first edition had the same complaint – see A. Rawn's review in Phoenix 45.3 (1991).
The semiotic analysis of images is the topic of C. Sourvinou-Inwood. She identifies the subject of a series of vase paintings as Theseus pursuing Medea and goes on to suggest ways in which these images could have been meaningful to their original, fifth-century audience (e.g. as a symbol of the Greek victory over the Persians). E. introduces the author, who died in 2007, as ‘one of the leaders in a fundamental shift in the interpretation of images on Greek vases that started in the 1970s' (p. 353). Even so, this article seems dated. The research for this piece derives directly from work published by Sourvinou-Inwood in 1979 and does not refer to a single publication printed after 1988.
R.A. Segal concludes the collection with an introduction to ‘Greek Myth and Psychoanalysis’. He provides a lucid overview of Freud's, Rank's, Jung's and Joseph Campbell's treatments of myth in relation to the human unconscious, before pitting these theorists against their nineteenth-century predecessors Tylor and Frazer. He exemplifies the contrast by reading Adonis first in terms of Frazer as a vegetation myth, then in terms of Jung as the archetype of the eternal child. In the final section of the article, Segal discusses more recent trends in psychoanalysis and myth up to the post-Jungian era.
Most of these eight articles serve well as an introduction to the approach they represent. However, I see two problems with the collection as a whole. First, it is portrayed as a general overview of myth studies. But it really should be called Approaches to Myth for Students of Ancient Greece. All articles, including the one on reception, are written by classicists, while the field of myth studies brings together scholars working in various fields and all periods – historians, literary critics, sociologists, linguists, to name but a few. Second, E. states that he excluded structuralism from the collection, because the work of C. Lévi-Strauss is too well known (p. 23). But so are psychoanalysis and the various comparative approaches. E. himself stresses the importance of including more recent areas of inquiry: ‘the history of Greek myth in the sense of mythography, written collections of myths, will certainly need a chapter in a future edition of Approaches to Greek Myth’ (p. 24). Why not include this chapter on mythography in this edition as a replacement for one of the reprints? A number of other, fresh perspectives have been developed in the past 25 years that enrich myth studies (or should do so) in the classics and other disciplines, such as Assmann's cultural memory, cognitive theories or myth as Wissensform. For this reason, it seems to me that this volume does not reflect well the vitality of the field.
