# Mythology Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Edith Hamilton, Aphrodite Trust, Apollo Trust, and Chris Wormell](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B00852YXU8 * ISBN: 0446574759 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00852YXU8 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8) - This is obvious, but is worth noting anyway. Gods are made in our image. Different cultures, different peoples, shape their gods depending on what they need from them, or need to believe about them. The Greek gods were based on humans. Where the Greek Ares in the Iliad is whiny, childish, the Roman Mars in the Aeneid, is magnificent, invincible. ## Highlights When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by the reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad’s face. — location: [37](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=37) ^ref-65069 --- Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man, whether in New Guinea today or eons ago in the prehistoric wilderness, is not and never has been a creature who peoples his world with bright fancies and lovely visions. Horrors lurked in the primeval forest, not nymphs and naiads. Terror lived there, with its close attendant, Magic, and its most common defense, Human Sacrifice. Mankind’s chief hope of escaping the wrath of whatever divinities were then abroad lay in some magical rite, senseless but powerful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief. — location: [45](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=45) ^ref-32801 --- The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in the stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made unhuman. Or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat’s head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. Or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives. In Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs of bestial shapes unlike any beast ever known, men with birds’ heads and lions with bulls’ heads and both with eagles’ wings, creations of artists who were intent upon producing something never seen except in their own minds, the very consummation of unreality. These and their like were what the pre-Greek world worshiped. One need only place beside them in imagination any Greek statue of a god, so normal and natural with all its beauty, to perceive what a new idea had come into the world. With its coming, the universe became rational. — location: [69](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=69) ^ref-13098 --- Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek. In Greece alone in the ancient world people were preoccupied with the visible; they were finding the satisfaction of their desires in what was actually in the world around them. The sculptor watched the athletes contending in the games and he felt that nothing he could imagine would be as beautiful as those strong young bodies. So he made his statue of Apollo. The storyteller found Hermes among the people he passed in the street. He saw the god “like a young man at the age when youth is loveliest,” as Homer says. Greek artists and poets realized how splendid a man could be, straight and swift and strong. He was the fulfillment of their search for beauty. They had no wish to create some fantasy shaped in their own minds. All the art and all the thought of Greece centered in human beings. — location: [77](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=77) ^ref-329 --- That is the miracle of Greek mythology—a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of an omnipotent Unknown. — location: [93](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=93) ^ref-31136 --- The terrifying irrational has no place in classical mythology. — location: [102](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=102) ^ref-3214 --- Astrology, which has flourished from the days of ancient Babylon down to today, is completely absent from classical Greece. There are many stories about the stars, but not a trace of the idea that they influence men’s lives. Astronomy is what the Greek mind finally made out of the stars. — location: [105](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=105) ^ref-7995 --- The world of Greek mythology was not a place of terror for the human spirit. It is true that the gods were disconcertingly incalculable. One could never tell where Zeus’s thunderbolt would strike. Nevertheless, the whole divine company, with a very few and for the most part not important exceptions, were entrancingly beautiful with a human beauty, and nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying. The early Greek mythologists transformed a world full of fear into a world full of beauty. — location: [112](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=112) ^ref-30411 --- Of course the mythical monster is present in any number of shapes, Gorgons and hydras and chimaeras dire, but they are there only to give the hero his meed of glory. What could a hero do in a world without them? — location: [125](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=125) ^ref-47486 --- Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible, an account of the Greek religion. According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion. It is an explanation of something in nature; how, for instance, any and everything in the universe came into existence: men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens. — location: [129](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=129) ^ref-56587 --- Myths are early science, the result of men’s first trying to explain what they saw around them. But there are many so-called myths which explain nothing at all. These tales are pure entertainment, the sort of thing people would tell each other on a long winter’s evening. — location: [135](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=135) ^ref-49643 --- But religion is there, too. In the background, to be sure, but nevertheless plain to see. From Homer through the tragedians and even later, there is a deepening realization of what human beings need and what they must have in their gods. — location: [140](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=140) ^ref-22280 --- The buccaneering chieftains in the Iliad did not want justice. They wanted to be able to take whatever they chose because they were strong and they wanted a god who was on the side of the strong. But Hesiod, who was a peasant living in a poor man’s world, knew that the poor must have a just god. — location: [150](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=150) ^ref-58727 --- So, back of the stories of an amorous Zeus and a cowardly Zeus and a ridiculous Zeus, we can catch sight of another Zeus coming into being, as men grow continually more conscious of what life demanded of them and what human beings needed in the god they worshiped. Gradually this Zeus displaced the others, until he occupied the whole scene. At last he became, in the words of Dio Chrysostom, who wrote during the second century A.D.: “Our Zeus, the giver of every good gift, the common father and saviour and guardian of mankind.” — location: [154](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=154) ^ref-20983 --- The Greeks from the earliest mythologists on had a perception of the divine and the excellent. Their longing for them was great enough to make them never give up laboring to see them clearly, until at last the thunder and lightning were changed into the Universal Father. — location: [159](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=159) ^ref-31710 --- The Theogony is an account of the creation of the universe and the generations of the gods, and it is very important for mythology. — location: [183](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=183) ^ref-34107 --- Of the Roman writers, Virgil stands far ahead. He did not believe in the myths any more than Ovid did, whose contemporary he was, but he found human nature in them and he brought mythological personages to life as no one had done since the Greek tragedians. — location: [209](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=209) ^ref-21075 --- The best guides to a knowledge of Greek mythology are the Greek writers, who believed in what they wrote. — location: [213](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=213) ^ref-65438 --- THE Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods. Before there were gods heaven and earth had been formed. — location: [222](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=222) ^ref-35721 --- Apollo at Delphi was a purely beneficent power, a direct link between gods and men, guiding men to know the divine will, showing them how to make peace with the gods; the purifier, too, able to cleanse even those stained with the blood of their kindred. Nevertheless, there are a few tales told of him which show him pitiless and cruel. Two ideas were fighting in him as in all the gods; a primitive, crude idea and one that was beautiful and poetic. In him only a little of the primitive is left. — location: [335](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=335) ^ref-42453 --- In the later poets, Artemis is identified with Hecate. She is “the goddess with three forms,” Selene in the sky, Artemis on earth, Hecate in the lower world and in the world above when it is wrapped in darkness. Hecate was the Goddess of the Dark of the Moon, the black nights when the moon is hidden. She was associated with deeds of darkness, the Goddess of the Crossways, which were held to be ghostly places of evil magic. An awful divinity, Hecate of hell, Mighty to shatter every stubborn thing. Hark! Hark! her hounds are baying through the town. Where three roads meet, there she is standing. It is a strange transformation from the lovely Huntress flashing through the forest, from the Moon making all beautiful with her light, from the pure Maiden-Goddess for whom Whoso is chaste of spirit utterly May gather leaves and fruits and flowers. The unchaste never. In her is shown most vividly the uncertainty between good and evil which is apparent in every one of the divinities. — location: [354](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=354) ^ref-33286 --- The Romans wrote of her in the same way. With her, beauty comes. The winds flee before her and the storm clouds; sweet flowers embroider the earth; the waves of the sea laugh; she moves in radiant light. Without her there is no joy nor loveliness anywhere. This is the picture the poets like best to paint of her. But she had another side too. It was natural that she should cut a poor figure in the Iliad, where the battle of heroes is the theme. She is a soft, weak creature there, whom a mortal need not fear to attack. In later poems she is usually shown as treacherous and malicious, exerting a deadly and destructive power over men. — location: [379](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=379) ^ref-30875 --- The Romans liked Mars better than the Greeks liked Ares. He never was to them the mean whining deity of the Iliad, but magnificent in shining armor, redoubtable, invincible. The warriors of the great Latin heroic poem, the Aeneid, far from rejoicing to escape from him, rejoice when they see that they are to fall “on Mars’ field of renown.” They “rush on glorious death” and find it “sweet to die in battle.” — location: [404](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=404) ^ref-50751 --- AIDOS, a difficult word to translate, but in common use among the Greeks. It means reverence and the shame that holds men back from wrongdoing, but it also means the feeling a prosperous man should have in the presence of the unfortunate—not compassion, but a sense that the difference between him and those poor wretches is not deserved. — location: [479](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00852YXU8&location=479) ^ref-50351 ---