«Being able – writes Cesare Pavese in the introduction to Dialogues with Leucò – he would have done without all this mythology ». Being able; but you can’t. For almost three millennia, Greek myths have been part of our civilization, and it seems that they are inevitable companions, an inexhaustible nursery of symbols and stories.
Mythos, in the Greek language, designates the concept in its own different levels: the single word that comes from the lips of any person; a series of words that organize themselves into a speech; a speech that aims to tell a story; finally, a particular type of story that recounts events that took place in a distant time and became exemplary. This is what we generally mean by “myth”.
Myth is therefore a way of telling; but it is also a way of thinking. Mythical thinking is a product of the human imagination that follows different logics than conscious thinking. It is a thought that tells and does not analyze. Every human being uses symbolic thought in some way, and we all experience it, with inexorable regularity, when, closed our eyes to wakefulness, we reopen them in sleep: the dream uses the same language as the myth, tells about ourselves and the our secret world using the same stuff as the myth. Moreover, the idea that the dream represents the myth of the individual goes back to Freud, while the myth is the collective dream of early humanity.
With psychoanalysis, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the myth was transferred from the distant past to an eternal present, that of the mind. The myth, from this perspective, concerns every human being because his world is that of the irrational, from which the ancient stories bring out a mixture of emotional energies made of passions, blood, eros; the myth does not put things right, does not demand a happy ending but leaves enigmas. The symbolic world that comes from myths is a mirror of psychic experience and reveals its mechanisms: Medea’s jealousy, Clytemnestra’s hatred, Phaedra’s destructive passion, Orestes’ remorse. There is no emotion that the Greek myth does not speak about through its characters. As James Hillman, an American psychoanalyst and philosopher wrote, from the point of view of psychological reality “anything that is true always has a mythic component … true is only what is mythical.” If so, the Greek myth can be looked at as a kind of treasure room where the fundamentals of the psychic structure of humanity and the main challenges encountered during existence are kept.
For those who listened to them, in early Greece, instead, the myths were not about the depths of the mind, but about the reality of life. True stories, even if in a different dimension from everyday experience: stories that emerged from very distant times and spoke with a collective voice.
The characteristic of the Greek myth is that it is a tale made up of words, not written signs, transmitted not by priests or sages, but by specialists of the word, that is to say, poets, who made it the fundamental subject of their works. Thus, the myth has traveled through time: in the tales of the singers, in the verses of Homer, in the events of the tragedy, and later in the poetry of Virgil and Ovid.
The Greek myth survived even when it seemed buried, even when Christians denied the gods and destroyed their sanctuaries. Despite this, the Greek myths persisted, beneath the surface, ready to manifest themselves as soon as anyone sought them. It is in this universe of tales that the genius of paganism hides.
Arisen at the dawn of our history, from the imagination of a population ofEastern Mediterranean, Greek myths first colonized the Romans, who made those tales their own, they crept into folk tales and medieval iconography – decorations for capitals or pictorial elements of cathedrals – to then rise again in the Renaissance. The singers of the myth did not invent the stories, but they recovered them from the collective memory, transmitted through the generations. The true essence of mythology – in particular heroic – and also its inexhaustible energy, lies in the will of the Greeks to preserve and transmit the most ancient stories of their people, in which they identified the core of cultural identity: a kind of Big Narrative bang from which the amazing variety of modern stories was generated in cascade. (…)
The myth contains in narrative form all the memory of a people poured out in the words of those who tell it; and it must fascinate and enchant, because the pleasure of listening, the beauty and magic of these tales, their ability to arouse emotions form the heart of their existence. No man is insensitive to the charm of a good story: “The more lonely I become – said Aristotle – the more I love the myths.”
The series: «Ulysses» and the other issues
On Tuesday 20 April, readers will receive the book as a gift with the Corriere della Sera Ulysses. The journey of reason, edited by Simone Beta. This is the first issue of the “Great Greek Myths” series edited by the antiquarian Giulio Guidorizzi, former professor at the Universities of Milan and Turin. The text published on this page is an excerpt from the overall presentation of the series, written by Guidorizzi himself, which opens the volume dedicated to the Homeric hero. Starting with the second issue on Tuesday 27 April – the book Oedipus. The game of fate, edited by Guidorizzi – the books of the “Great Greek Myths” series will be on sale with the “Corriere della Sera” every week at a price of 6.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper. Ulysses is perhaps the most modern character of ancient Hellenic mythology, a hero who, not surprisingly, inspired Dante Alighieri and many other important authors of world literature, such as James Joyce. Simone Beta, professor of Classical Philology at the University of Siena and author of numerous essays, does not dwell only onOdyssey, but extends the scope of his exploration to the way in which the Homeric hero was represented by all classical culture, highlighting, among other things, “the constant presence of Ulysses in Latin literature”. Orazio, Cicero, Seneca speak of him. Moreover “it is a model for Virgil and for a part of his poem”. Moreover, his figure exerts a strong influence also on us contemporaries, still fascinated, many centuries later, by “his inexhaustible thirst to move, to travel, to see”.
April 16, 2021 (change April 16, 2021 | 21:39)
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