Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (35 page)

Modern science may be reopening its lost secrets.

Do all little boys want to kill their father and sleep with their mother?

The oracle plays a central role in a myth that was made a household name by Sigmund Freud. An “Oedipal complex” is—in Freud’s view—a boy’s desire to compete with his father and sleep with his mother. But what is the myth behind the psychology?

Oedipus was born the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta. An oracle said Laius would die at the hands of his own son—a story with echoes back to the beginnings of Greek mythic Creation—who would then marry his mother. To protect himself, Laius places the three-year-old Oedipus on a mountainside to die. The boy is discovered while still alive by a shepherd who gives him to Polybus, the childless king of Corinth, and his wife, Merope. The couple rear Oedipus as their own, and he grows up unaware of his mysterious past. But when he goes to Delphi and hears the same grim prophecy that had troubled Laius, Oedipus leaves home, believing that he is sparing his true father and mother from harm.

That is when fate strikes. As he heads toward Thebes, Oedipus is run off the road by a chariot and fights with the driver and passenger, killing them both in a case of ancient Greek “road rage.” What Oedipus could not have known was that one of the men he has killed is his real father, King Laius. Part one of the prophecy is thus fulfilled.

But the Delphic Oracle had also predicted that the man who solved “the riddle of the Sphinx” will be king of Thebes and marry the queen. On his way to Thebes, Oedipus next encounters the Sphinx, a creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, a serpent tail, and wings. Sent to plague the city after Laius had apparently disrespected the gods, the Sphinx lived on a high rock outside the city of Thebes, and would ask anyone who passed by to solve a riddle: “What has one voice and becomes four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?”

A wrong answer results in death, and the Sphinx has been devouring Thebans one by one. Confronted by the Sphinx, Oedipus replies, “Man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two legs, and finally needs a cane in old age.”

Furious because Oedipus has solved the riddle, the Sphinx jumps off the rocky perch to her death. Having solved the riddle, Oedipus arrives in Thebes, where he is made king and marries the queen. Jocasta, of course, is unaware that her new husband is really her son. Part two of the prophecy has been fulfilled. They have two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene.

Oedipus the King
by Sophocles (c. 496–406 BCE), the second of the three great Greek tragedians, is the most famous play to treat this extraordinary story of confused identities. As the play opens, Oedipus is already the king, and is trying to discover why the city is suffering from a plague, not realizing that his own actions are the cause. Through a turn of events, Jocasta realizes what has happened and rushes to her bedroom. Then the truth is revealed to Oedipus as well. He goes to the bedroom and finds that Jocasta has hung herself. Cursing himself, Oedipus then puts out his own eyes. Blinded and bloodied, he returns to the stage and asks to be sent into exile. Oedipus ends his days near Athens, where he is secretly buried.

On its own, as myth and tragic drama, the story of Oedipus is powerful stuff. But it gained a completely different currency when the term “Oedipus complex” was first used by the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud in 1900. Freud used the Greek tragedy as support for his claim that every boy fantasized about killing his father and having incestuous sex with his mother, a desire that must be repressed. Freud described the “Oedipus conflict,” or “Oedipus complex,” as a state of psychosexual development and awareness that first occurs around three and a half years of age. Freud similarly claimed that all girls wanted to have sex with their fathers, what he called the “Electra complex.”

Today, many psychoanalytic researchers and anthropologists have largely dismissed this idea. They believe that if such a complex develops, it is a result of personal factors and social environment, and is certainly not part of a universal mind-set.

Another in-vogue psychiatric term also gets its origins from Greek myth. Narcissism, often described as excessive or malignant self-love, comes from the brief tale of Narcissus. Son of a river god and a nymph, Narcissus was a boy of transcendent beauty. When his parents asked a seer if Narcissus would have a long life, they were told he would, as long as he did not see his own face. When he was grown, Narcissus loved no one until he saw his reflection in a pond. He stared at himself and reached to touch his face, falling into the pond and drowning. Ovid told a slightly different version of the myth, in which Narcissus was actually punished for his self-absorption. When he rejected the love of Echo, a nymph, she was so overcome by grief that she wasted away until only her voice remained. For his cruelty to the nymph, Narcissus was punished by drowning. After his death, Narcissus was changed into the flower that bears his name.

Is Homer just a guy from
The Simpsons
?

Two long poems. One is a bloody, blow-by-blow account of men hacking at each other. The other is a tale of a lost wanderer trying to get home. Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
are still considered touchstones of Western culture. Yet we certainly don’t know much about the guy who supposedly wrote them almost three thousand years ago.

The man we call Homer remains a mystery, for the most part, and scholars know almost nothing about the poet who has influenced our language and literature so thoroughly and significantly. Traditionally considered a blind Greek poet, Homer is thought by some scholars to have lived in a Greek-speaking city on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea or on the island of Khios. But that is it. Beyond these meager clues, there is only the speculation of generations of readers and scholars.

For thousands of years people have argued over whether an actual Homer existed, and whether he wrote the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. New research into writing in Greece at that time, along with extensive studies of how oral poetry was composed and preserved, have changed the debate. There are several schools of thought concerning Homer. While one school contends that Homer actually composed and wrote down the poems himself just as writing emerged in Greek history, others say he was an illiterate bard who only sang the poems until writing emerged near the end of his life. At that point, literate scribes came to Homer’s assistance and took dictation. Still a third school of thought contends that Homer’s poems were memorized by a guild of public reciters called “rhapsodes”—the ancient Greek version of “wedding singers”—who carried on Homer’s oral tradition until writing appeared in Athens much later.

During the twentieth century, researchers in the Balkan regions, where bards once sang, found living bards who still recite epics the length of Homer’s and even longer. Accustomed as we are to instant news—with short attention spans and memories completely reliant on our Palm Pilots or Blackberries to keep track of a few phone numbers—to most of us that sort of expansive storytelling ability seems astonishing. But the Homeric epics originated in centuries long before Homer’s time, when the bards were improvising and improving and even adding to older story lines. Most likely, the bards created a series of poems that told the entire story of the Trojan War, and it was Homer who may have given these stories their characteristic individual genius.

In
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
, Thomas Cahill persuasively makes the case that Homer not only existed but had firsthand experience with what he wrote. “Homer was thought to have been a wandering blind bard, but this is almost certainly due to Homer’s description of a blind bard who performs in the
Odyssey
, later taken to be a self-description of the poet. Whatever the case, he must have been sighted, at least earlier in life, for there is too much in the
Iliad
of gritty reportage for us to think that the poet never saw battle. It would, in fact, be most unlikely if Homer did not serve as a soldier…. There is scarcely a Greek figure of any consequence who did not serve in the military as a young man or did not afterwards take a keen interest in warfare.”

Blind or not, real or not, the man we call Homer transformed the way people experienced myth. And finally it all comes down to the poems anyway. When you compare the words, emotions, and action of his two epics to the earlier literature of mythology—in Egypt and Mesopotamia, for instance—you see how Homer humanized the myths. Certainly, his gods could be remote and powerful. But they were also powerfully human—with all the flaws that implies. They raged, they lusted, they envied, and, like Hera, they sought vengeance. And it was that sense of making the divine human that may lie at the heart of what Homer and the rest of the “Greek Miracle” was all about.

How did Homer fit a ten-year war into a poem?

First of all, the
Iliad
—which means a poem about Ilium (Troy)—is not the history of the Trojan War. Rather it describes events in the final year of the Trojan War, fought between armies of the kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece and the city of Troy, located on the coast of what is now Turkey. According to legend, the Trojan War lasted ten years, until Greece defeated Troy—all because Helen, the young wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus, had run off with the handsome Paris, prince of Troy. But the story of the
Iliad
—divided into twenty-four books and consisting of more than 15,600 lines—covers only fifty-four days. And much of it describes only four days of fighting, separated by two days of truce. When it ends, Achilles is still alive and Troy not yet taken.

So, what’s the story?

Believe it or not, stubborn men fighting over a beautiful woman. The war itself, of course, is ostensibly fought over Helen. But as the epic opens, an angry quarrel has broken out between Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, king of the Mycenaeans and leader of the Greek forces, and Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks. Agamemnon demands that a captured Trojan girl be given to him as war booty. But she is the daughter of a priest of Apollo, and the Greeks are advised to return the girl to her father. When Agamemnon refuses, Apollo strikes the Greek forces with plague, wiping out hundreds of warriors, until Agamemnon relents. In exchange for the girl he gives up, however, the stubborn Greek king demands another girl, who has already been given to Achilles as war booty.

This seemingly minor incident, and the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, is at the heart of the poem. More like a sulking child than the greatest warrior of all time, Achilles withdraws into his tent and refuses to fight. Without Achilles, the Greeks are driven back to their ships by the Trojan forces and their leader Hector, son of Troy’s king Priam, and Troy’s greatest champion.

Wearing the armor of Achilles, Patroclus—who is Achilles’ closest friend, tent mate, and, many scholars contend, his lover—tries to lead the Greeks into battle. But he is no match for Hector, who kills Patroclus. With the death of his friend and comrade, Achilles is aroused to seek revenge. Given a new suit of armor made for him by the smith god Hephaestus, Achilles returns to the battle and, after slaughtering many Trojans, kills Hector outside Troy. Lashing the body of the fallen Trojan hero to his chariot, Achilles drags Hector around the walls of Troy and finally back to his own tent. He keeps Hector’s body, executes some Trojan captives, and threatens to cut Hector to pieces until King Priam comes to plead with him. Achilles is commanded by the gods to grant Priam’s request, but it is Achilles’ own sense of human pity that makes him yield to the broken old man. He gives Priam the body for proper burial, and the story ends with the funeral of Hector.

For nearly 3,000 years, readers have found the
Iliad
a moving expression of the heroism, idealism, and tragedy of war. In addition to the battle scenes, the
Iliad
tells about life within Troy. It describes the emotional farewell between Hector and his wife, Andromache, who foresees his death. A great soldier, Hector is also a family man, who is called on to defend his country and, in so doing, loses his life. A reluctant warrior, he berates his brother Paris for causing the war but is also loyal to him. In many ways the truest “hero” of
Iliad
, Hector embodies Homer’s themes of honor, loyalty, and social obligation.