Public school teachers and college professors made several passes at teaching me classical mythology, most of which I ducked expertly. The first attempt came in 7th grade, under the sour, rigid tutelage of Old Mrs. Ohl (the "Old" really was part of her name), who had such distaste for the ribald gods and goddesses that she mashed the juice out of them and served them to us in a dry-as-dust Edith Hamilton lesson. The experience probably kept me away from Greek mythology, except the fragments I needed to understand the poetry I was reading, for 20 years. Old Mrs. Ohl must have lived in terror of what might be unleashed in Ardmore Junior High School if her basement room-full of hormone-addled 13-year-olds, on a rainy spring day, caught a scent of the real stuff of Aphrodita and Adonis.
After I left my marriage, when I was 34, they returned to me. During my sorrowful examination of wounds, alone in a second-floor apartment on rainy spring days, I found shards of old myth lodged in my mind. I went to the fountain for a sip, then a long draught, and then a swim. I held the myths up to every possible light of modern psychology, and found a parallel somewhere in them for almost all that I found in me. But only then did I understand something about the myths: They were not made for me, but they were cut by a culture that understood the human mind in a way that leaps across 3,000 years like a searchlight. You can look to Christianity to imagine humanity as it could be, but you must turn to Hesiod and Homer to see men and women as they are.
Walter Burkert's "Griechisches Religion" (1977), available since 1985 in an English-language version, "Greek Religion," is a masterpiece and a good introduction to a serious inquiry into the mythology and the myth-making mind.
But another fun way into the topic is through archaeologist Jane Ellen Harrison's "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion." Harrison and James George Frazer ("The Golden Bough") were pillars of the "Cambridge School" of Greek history, which taught the connection between myth and ritual. They probably pushed this identification too far in some cases, and the whole Cambridge view is laboring now under something of a backlash. But the essential and valuable truth of much of it still seems unassailable, at least to me.
Harrison's "Prolegomena," written in 1903, "at a white heat, as much to discharge her teeming brain and achieve mental clarity as to present her theories," is strikingly personal as well as witty, confident, and passionate. The first woman to break into the male bastion of classical scholarship used this book to uncover the underground female spirits of Mediterranean religion and shift attention away from the conquering Olympian sky-gods.
Reading Harrison taught me why academic writing can be as enjoyable as novels and poetry: because truly great works of scholarship are idiosyncratic and eccentric, like great literature.
From the myths, I moved to the culture itself, and found delightfully modern minds, still tracable amid the ruins.
"Greeks and the Irrational" by E.R. Dodds, published in 1951 but still in print, is one of those books that you read slowly, not because it's difficult, but because each sentence is so well-turned, and so larded with meaning, that you have to savor it. Once you submerge yourself in this book, it will make your hair stand on end. Some people cringe at classical studies because the Greek world often looks like a victory parade of cold rationalism. They would do well to read this book. Dodds applies a psychoanalytical perspective to the neglected flip-side of Greek religion.
He digs right down to the chthonic roots of the rituals, even to symbolic relics of a presumably-once-real cannibalism: "It is hard to guess at the psychological state that he (Euripides) describes in these two words, omophagon charin; but it is noteworthy that the days appointed for omophagia were 'unlucky and black days,' and in fact those who practiced such a rite in our time seem to experience in it a mixture of supreme exaltation and supreme repulsion: it is at once holy and horrible, fulfilment and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution -- the same violent conflict of emotional attitude that runs all through the Bacchae and lies at the root of all religion of the Dionysiac type."
Dodds connects ancient Greek ways to cultures far removed from our common conception of the solemn, rationalist mind -- cannibalistic dances in British Columbia, and shamanistic ecstatic rites in Sumatra and Siberia. Whether Dodds mentions snake-handling sects in Perry County, Ky., or whether that was something I thought of while reading him, I don't remember. But it was Dodds who dug a key phrase out of Benedict's "Patterns of Culture": "The very repugnance which the Kwakiutl (Indians of Vancouver Island) felt towards the act of eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the Dionysian virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden."
At the heights of my passions, I find myself in the presence of the Dionysian sparagmos without seeking it for its own sake. Personally, my counterweight to it is the relentless rationalism that is on display in these pages, and which is based on awareness of the awesome destructive power of the unquenchable desires within.
I tracked down Dodds after seeing a reference to him in a newer book, "Courtesans and Fishcakes" by James Davidson, whose light touch and sure scholarship almost make you forget the audacity of what he's doing: recovering the reality of social relationships in ancient Athens through a study of its dirty dishes.
Among the actual Greek writers, I get the most pleasure out of the finicky travel guide Pausanias; Xenophon, cautious and superstitious, shivering in the snows of Armenia with his 10,000, and the insatiably curious Herodotus. They're very different personalities from one another, which is part of what makes them such fun. I'm not proficient enough in the classical language to read them in the original yet, but I hope to be soon.
Meanwhile, I enjoy Pausanius in the Penguin Classics version translated by Peter Levi, whose touch as a poet is evident. The glory of this book is in its footnotes -- five alone in the four sentences of the opening. One footnote mentions a hero "known only as 'the hero on the roof.' " It's such a gratuitous addition -- a footnote to a footnote, almost -- that I can't help but think Levi made room for it because he found it amusing or delightful. And the Robert Fagles translations of Homer are the best thing to happen to him in a century and a half.
I confess I'm not a theater fan. Stagework depends on an intimate identification between the audience and the actors; and words are only part of the medium. So when you only read a play, you miss much of its power. Even when you can find Greek tragedy or comedy on stage, and even when it deals with the highest universal themes (as Greek tragedy generally does), it yet relies on the context of daily life, which is almost irrecoverable after 2,500 years. Even Shakespeare, barely 400 years gone, isn't laugh-out-loud funny anymore. Some things just pass away with time, like fabric and painting.
Which is the most maddening quality of our love affair with ancient Greece: we have so little of it left. Maybe one percent of their writing has come down to us, defying moths, rot and the flame. My college friend Sarah, who was a classics major, used to tell me of mad German classicist intent on inventing a machine that would extract the lessons of Socrates from the stones of the Athenian agora, whose atoms, so they reasoned, must somehow still vibrate to the waves of his voice. Some of the greatest writing of those generations exists only in fragments of mummy wrap. To read some of them, and feel the weight and electricity that yet inhabit the ruins, see "Seven Greeks" by Guy Davenport.
