Do you think the ancient Greeks and Romans were trying to keep up with the gods like we do celebrities?
To coworker: “hey has hera left that cheating shit of a husband yet?”
Cleaning a new linen: “I don’t think so, you did hear about the kid and the stables though, right?”
Hold on I think you are onto something??
Myths are humanity's earliest stories.
And some psychologists have theorized that our love of stories was born out of our love of gossip. Quoting an interview with author and psychologist Jennifer Lynn Barnes:
My old advisor, Paul Bloom, who is one of my Ph.D. advisors, in his book How Pleasure Works, has a chapter on the pleasures of fiction, and he theorized that fiction, basically co-ops what was initially a liking for gossip. So the idea that maybe we evolved to like a certain true kind of story, the stuff of gossip. So you're thinking hierarchies and relationships and sex and conflict and alliances and um, paternity and all of these things that have a very high level of evolutionary relevance so we should want to track them in our real environment.
ISN'T THAT EXACTLY GREEK MYTH?
