Histoia

MYTHOLOGY AND TROJAN WAR



marta

11/02/2011



 
CONTENTS
The mythology……………………………………………………………………………page 3-4
The trojan war….............................................................................page 4-22
The bibliography………………………………………………………………………….page 23  



THE GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND MYTHS
The myths of the ancient Greeks, like the myths ofmost other cultures, wereforever in a state of flux, undergoing constant change as they were passed on by word of mouth and retold in different ways by authors of successive ages.
A good impression of the nature of the resulting vulgate or standard tradition, as conceived by mythographers of the Hellenistic or early Roman period, can be gained from the only general mythological handbook to survive from Greekantiquity, the Library of Apollodorus.
The main myths and legends were organized into a pseudo-historical pattern to provide a remarkably coherent history of the universe and divine order and of the Greek world in the heroic era (which was conventionally thought to have ended in the period following the Trojan War); and this history was underpinned by rigorous systems of divine and heroic genealogy,which were essential if consistent chronologies were to be developed.
The individual myths within this broad framework could be recorded in a variety of forms; even within the earlier literature, between the time, say, of Homer and that of Euripides, they could undergo a multitude of variations, and later developments could also leave their mark. Although powerful versions might tend toestablish themselves in the general imagination at the expense of others, as in the case, for instance, of Aeschylus’ account of the murder of Agamemnon , it is almost always misleading to talk as if there could be a standard version of a myth that was set in stone from some early time.
Quite apart from merely narrating myths and placing them in their proper context within the wider body ofdivine or heroic myth, a handbook must therefore also attempt to trace the history of the more important myths, examining how they evolved over time and came to be narrated in differing ways by different authors in different genres.
It is one thing to decide what will count as Greek myths, another to know what “Greek Mithology” is, “It is a mather above3 all of written material, of texts”. Thereis no doubt that we acces Greek Mithology aboe all throught texts and that even in acients time texts, read or performed, were instrumental in forming the Greeks own sense of mythology. Bu(unless you have a very broad definition of text) Myths may be told orally, without reproducing a particular author,s account it is a simply “how the story goes” Art too displayed myths and in both senses offereda view of them.
We think of the surviving remnants of sculpture and vase painting but of course there were wall paintings too now lost but for their reflection in the humbler art of vase painting. All of these are media through wich Greek Mythology was presented and, by being presented, reinterpreted.
In fact Greek Mithology is a shared fund of motifs and ideas ordered into a sharedrepertoire of stories. These stories link with, compare and contrast with, and are understood in the light of, olther stories in the system. Greek Mythology is and “intertext”, because it is contituded by all the representations of myths ever experienced by its audience and because every new representation gains its sense from how it si positioned in relation to this totality of previouspresentations. In this text we will use the term Greek Mithology, with capital letters, to denote this(envolving) toal system.
Today handbooks play a special part in communicating Greek Mithology. It is their job, sometimes al phabetically, more often choronologically, to lay out before us a tapestry of Greek myths. At the beginning the origin of the gods(in the world). At the end the aftermath of the...