“Myth is integral to religion, therefore; it is not a fancy wrapping paper which must be taken off in order to get down to the realities of cult. Yet the role of Greek myths, it need scarcely be stressed, is very different from that of sacred books. At the most drastic, intellectuals felt able to dismiss the whole mythic representation of deity as what came to be called theologia fabularis, “mythical theology,” an invention of poets, while still treating the cults as a valid mode of access to the divine. For them the myths were indeed just a wrapping, and a very deceptive one. The only alternative to rejection, for the philosophically trained, was allegorical reinterpretation. But even for those outside those very restricted circles there was little about the myths that was stable or dependable, or so at least it appears to an outside observer. Stories about the birth of deities, we have seen, were fundamental, the staple of cult hymns. But the poet of the early Homeric Hymn to Dionysus already contrasts what he declares to be his own true account of the god’s birth with no fewer than five “lying” counterclaims. That was one way to navigate the currents of endless variants without being swept into skepticism: one account is true, all others false. To a large extent the variants are regional, and we can suppose that worshippers accepted the version of the myth that they were born to; the claim that Apollo was born in Lycia will not often have been heard on Delos. Similarly, though we may be aware that the myths associated with a particular sanctuary change over time, we should not necessarily project that awareness onto those who frequented it. But it is very uncertain to what extent we can postulate mythological consensus, an agreed local version, even at a particular place and time. Since priests did not recount myths, there was no obvious mechanism by which even a powerful cult could communicate a standardized account from the center. Temple sculpture, where it existed, could scarcely alone carry such narrative weight. In some cults, as we have seen, foundational myths were repeated again and again by pious choruses. If the same hymn was rendered on all occasions year in, year out, its version could indeed establish itself as standard. But at great sites such as Delphi and Delos, frequented by sacred missions from afar, different choruses sang different hymns. Stability is likely to have been the exception rather than the rule.
Myths lacked fixed form; nor was there anything resembling a canon of myths known to everybody even if in divergent forms. Two consequences follow from the absence of a canon. On the one hand, the question of what myths were known to whom is always an open one. One can guess at a core of “archmyths” that were very generally familiar, because often alluded to or depicted. But that criterion can produce surprising results. At Greek sacrifices, mortals received the best meat, and the gods had to be content with fat and bones. Hesiod explained that the unequal division had its origin in a deception exercised by Prometheus “at the time when the gods and mortal men had a dispute” (or “were separated “at Mekone” (Theogony 535–36). Hesiod’s myth relates the practice, satisfyingly, to a time of interaction and perhaps of division between gods and mortals, a time therefore when the order of the universe is being constituted; he also links it to Prometheus, the central figure in other myths that concern dealings between mortals en masse and gods. But though allusions to the unequal division are quite common, no other source of the classical period appears to relate it to Prometheus or Mekone or a dispute/division between gods and men. Are we then entitled to say that “the Greeks” explained the division of meat at sacrifice by reference to the trick of Prometheus? The core of myths universally or all-but-universally known may be very small. But if the core is small, the periphery is uncontrollably large. Any story about gods and heroes that any Greek heard or saw and remembered on any occasion was a part of their conception of the gods. Many Greeks from very early on rejected many stories about the gods as untrue, because unworthy of divine dignity or morality, and they were free to do so; but there was no mechanism whereby stories of “gods in sundry shapes, committing heady riots, incest, rapes” could be put under a ban as uncanonical. Since there was no canon, it was equally possible for moralists to reject such stories, and for unreclaimed man to revel in them.”
- On Greek Religion by Robert Parker
