From Ikaria to the Stars

Classical Mythification, Ancient and Modern

By Peter Green

University of Texas Press

"I hadn't, till I really started digging, gauged the fierce intensity of the need for myth in the human psyche, of any age, or sensed the variety of motives dictating that need," writes Peter Green in the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays on classical mythology and the mythic experience. Using the need for myth as the starting point for exploring a number of topics in Greek mythology and history, Green advances new ideas about why the human urge to make myths persists across the millennia and why the borderland between mythology and history can sometimes be hard to map.

Green looks at both specific problems in classical mythology and larger theoretical issues. His explorations underscore how mythic expression opens a door into non-rational and quasi-rational modes of thought in which it becomes possible to rewrite painful truths and unacceptable history—which is, Green argues, a dangerous enterprise. His study of the intersections between classical mythology and Greek history ultimately drives home a larger point, "the degree of mythification and deception (of oneself no less than of others) of which the human mind is capable."

Reviews

Green presents to historians, philosophers, and students of literature generally the reflections of a robust, generous, wonderfully learned, opinionated, personally involved, unfailingly interesting monitor of western civilization past and present. Alan L. Boegehold

Author

Peter Green is James R. Dougherty, Jr., Centennial Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently he serves as Adjunct Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa and Editor of Syllecta Classica.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. "These Fragments Have I Shored against My Ruins": Apollonius Rhodius and the Social Revalidation of Myth for a New Age
2. The Flight-Plan of Daedalus
3. Works and Days 1-285: Hesiod's Invisible Audience
4. Athenian History and Historians in the Fifth Century B.C.
5. The Metamorphosis of the Barbarian: Athenian Panhellenism in a Changing World
6. Text and Context in the Matter of Xenophon's Exile
7. Rebooking the Flute-Girls: A Fresh Look at the Chronological Evidence for the Fall of Athens and the Eight-Month Rule of the Thirty
8. A Variety of Greek Appetites
9. Alexander's Alexandria
10. The Muses' Birdcage, Then and Now
11. How Political Was the Stoa?
12. Ancient Ethics, Modern Therapy
13. Getting to Be a Star: The Politics of Catasterism
14. The Innocence of Procris: Ovid A.A. 3. 687-746
15. Magic and the Principle of Apparent Causality in Pliny's Natural History
Appendix A. Tanglewood Tales for the Yuppies
Appendix B. Homer for the Kiddies
Bibliography
Index