Greta Hawes

Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Palaephatus. Peri Apiston 2. Heraclitus. Peri Apiston 3. Anonymous. Peri Apiston 4. Conon. Diegeseis 5. Plutarch. Life of Theseus 6. Pausanias. Periegesis Conclusion Appendix One: The date and authenticity of Palaephatus, Peri Apiston Appendix Two: Translation of Anonymous, Peri Apiston Bibliography

Beheading the Gorgon: Myth, Symbolism and Appropriation

Medusae Jellyfish were named as such by Linnaeus because of their intriguing similarity to a particular monster of classical mythology, Medusa (also known as the Gorgon). Medusa’s disembodied head with hissing snakes for hair, together with a deadly gaze that could literally petrify, made her the most horrible of mythological monsters. This chapter explores how Medusa came to be beheaded, and what this episode has signified both in antiquity and subsequently, where it has had an afterlife as among the most powerful and contested of mythological symbols. We consider how the ancient myth might have come about, what it meant to the ancients, what its value is as a symbol and how and why it has such a rich tradition of appropriation by particular users, each of whom creates a new beheading myth while engaging with various earlier adaptations.

Stones, Names, Stories, and Bodies: Pausanias before the Walls of Seven-Gated Thebes

A book dedicated to landscape should give us pause. Putting places into words distances us from them. As writers we communicate via representations— words, images, maps, diagrams.We rely on analogies andmetaphors. Wemake our readers reconstitute these places for themselves. In recognizing the inevitable subjectivity bound up in verbal and pictorial representations, we acknowledge that landscapes exist in any number of ways and that knowledge of them takesmany forms. Places can be observed, remembered, and invented, as well as inhabited. ‘Sense of place’ is produced differently through the bodily intimacy of the resident, the nostalgia of the emigrant, the strategic interests of the general, the curiosity of the tourist, the imagination of the armchair traveler, the creativity of the writer. This chapter discusses four different facets of the famous walls of that most literary of cities, Boeotian Thebes, encountered in different ways. My title sets out heuristic categories: the stones used to construct thewalls, the names given to their gates, the stories intricately intertwined with them, and the bodies of heroeswhodied attacking anddefending them. Twoof these categories (stones and bodies) relate to physical objects; two (names and stories) are verbal. I do not intend, however, to set these pairs against one another. Quite the opposite. These are deliberately flexible, porous labels. They illustrate an interlocking corpus of knowledge. Each element both depends on and inflects the others, and never tidily. In their various configurations, together they constitute the walls of Thebes. Thebes occupies a low acropolis which rises out of the plains of central Boeotia. This acropolis (conventionally termed the Cadmeia) has been inhabited almost continuously since the Neolithic period. But Theban topography extends far beyond this site. Thebeswasmade famousbywords; itwas adistinct place on the Greek ‘mental map’.1 Because particular aspects of its landscape