Theodora Elucubrare

Paul Veyne's "Did the Greeks believe in their Myths" is one of the better books I've read lately,¹ although it didn't quite speak to what I wanted to know. Unfortunately, I think what I want to know is unknowable: that is, if you went up to the average 5th century Athenian and asked him "do you believe in Zeus? and if so, is the Zeus you believe in the same one who seduced Leda and Semele?" would he say yes.²

Since that's pretty much impossible to figure out, Veyne writes about the attitude of historians to myth - for example, Herodotus' essentially uncritical acceptance of the historicity of the Trojan War or Heracles. On the way, he hits some points that were really more interesting than his main idea (which was, I think, that the Greek or Roman historians could believe and not believe in the myths). For example, he notes that we as modern readers tend to think of the Athenians as a monolithic "cultured populace," which, if you think about it for more than a second, can't have been entirely the case.

I think we're using different definitions of "believe;" he speaks of "believing in" Madame Bovary³; I wouldn't use believe about a work that was created to be a fiction. I might believe that such characters might exist, but I hardly believe that Madame Bovary herself once existed in whatever miserable provincial town that novel's set in. For me, one believes in a god or a cause (but of course, "believe in" and "believe" are different). That is to say, I believe that the earth is round; I don't believe in God or studying for tests.

There is one point I disagree with him on, and it's not really central to his argument - that the Greek myths have no chronology. His analogy is "asking whether Zeus seduced Danaë before he ravished Leda is like asking whether Tom Thumb's adventures took place before or after Cinderella's wedding." That's hardly accurate: fairytales take place in what may in fact be the same world - surely its stock characters are the same - but they have no interconnectivity.

Homer, most likely drawing upon tradition, has Odysseus meet heroes in the underworld and Nestor speak of his time fighting alongside the great heroes of yesterday; thus, Oedipus and Theseus must have had their existence before the Trojan War. As he mentions often, the Greeks made little distinction between history and myth (and if verifiable history was missing, a myth would do nicely); therefore, myth is a history, and as such has its own (mostly) internally consistent timeline.

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¹OK, it didn't have much competition; Nagy may be an expert in the field, but Pindar's Homer is bloated and uninteresting.
²He would probably say "what? and can I have five drachma?"
³He is also amazingly and adorably French the whole way through. He also talks about the "voluntary blindness of husbands and parents."*
*Speaking of "adorable," he quotes his child as saying "Papa, so all the houses aren't already built?"