Ancient poetry is called
"mythology" because in the eyes of its audience, a poem wasn't even a
poem unless it retold the same stories about gods and heroes that they
already knew. In the words of Callimachus, the librarian poet of
ancient Alexandria, "I sing nothing unattested"--that is, nothing in
my poems lacks a footnote.
Yet ancient poets also had a
concept of originality, even if its scale was very different from
ours. Their audiences savored the smallest innovation added to
familiar stories, including new ideas and questions about what those
stories meant or even about the ancient gods themselves. In this
competition to tell old tales in the most subtle way, it was better to
gain an elegant inch than to gain a mile.
This entire vanished world, with
its superhuman stories, encyclopedic knowledge, and changing beliefs,
is what we'll study in this course.