h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Greek Mythology - A815663
Author: Quaxleduck - U199696

Guide to Greek Mythology.

Nice. A good basic intro to it all. I like it but I wonder if others will find it a little thin.

Maybe retitling it to something like Greek Mythology for beginners would be helpful

There seems to be an article here A571303 (although unedited) and I would think protocol would say you should at least talk to the author as they are still highly active.

Anyway, I now leave for others to add their 2p.

Orcus

Ancient Greece isn´t a nation- it´s a period in history where the nation of Greece was very prominent- or something. You get my drift.
Also there´s a very unfortunate typo in the first paragraph, dealing with the naming of mythology...
Will keep reading and posting and cheersing!
Cheers Ismarah

Hi Quaxleduck,

I think this is a good start, but...

I agree you should think about contacting the author of A571303. It includes lots of great info and some good reference tables, but is far from being 'finished' in writing terms.

collaboration in the air?

Indeed a very good introduction.

However, I would be more careful with the description of the Greek influence and its importance in ancient times. Okay they gave us VERY important philosophical stuff - but only in a relatively small period in time and space - What I am trying to say is: Greek influence in Europe - OK - agreed - huge. Influence of Greek culture in the rest of the world - negligible - Think about China, India and the Mayas. Plus they were not the FIRST to do all that stuff. If you think of the cultural-scientific evolution as a stream, the Hellenistic period is one of the big junctions, but others had been there before, and many ideas were a lot older - so were the legends BTW, much stuff was copied directly from egyptian mythology... PLUS think about the influence of Phoenician, Assyrian, and Egyptian culture on the Greeks. --- That overemphasis is partly due to the circumstance that 99% of the written stuff from that era carries Greek shorthand (Herodotus for example)... They did not have Writing Guidelines as tough as ours, for that reason some heavy bias crept into the descriptions. That's BTW the general 'disclaimer' you hear/read in all classical works which describe that period.

Let me stop here and come to another aspect: Ancient greece must be understood not as a homogenous nation but as a conglomerate of partially-independent state-cities and islands. There was a notion of a common 'hellenism' especially under the threat of the Persian invasion 480 BC (Xerxes)...

Hmm... seems like I am being a bit too tough, eh?

Don't worry, most of the stuff of this Entry is dealing with mythology and the stories. So most of my rant above only applies on one or two paragraphs.

I really did like your entry.

HELL

I totally disagree with Hell etc.For better or worse The West totally dominates the World and at its heart is the influence of Greek culture. It is difficult to overestimate its power.

I was not talking about the current influence, but the influence from that time. And you have to be careful, the current influence is not mainly hellenistic. One important component sure is. The MOST important however is the religious - it is in the west predominantly a direct or indirect derivative of Judaism, which has its roots in Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.

For example, Greeks thought it was okay to kill undesired children and had a - in some instances drastical - different perception of moral. Monotheism - early Christians and Jews changed that.

It was not the Greek culture that revolutionized the western culture. It was monotheism that revolutionized the Greeks. The other way round!!!


HELL

BTW: The West dominates the World economically - certainly not culturally. Coca-Cola was not a Greek invention. America's 'democracy' which apparantly rules the world (ask a Iraqi or a Chinese to get a different oppinion) has roots in: Hard-core christianism (the ones that burnt the great library down for the second time, because they thought Plato and Aristotle were dangerous!), free-masonry (which evolved over many corners from gnostics, which evolved from Egyptian religions). Sure there are Hellenistic components somewhere in there, as are Indian and Germanic roots too.

BTW, BTW: Greek is not the root of all languages, if you would want to consider language as one of the carriers of culture. As most of all other western languages it comes from the Indo-European family.

H.

An interesting blast hellmate. But in your, very desirable, desire to widen Western theosophy you have overlooked a few points. Hellenism did invade, and at one point looked as if it would overrun Jewish society. Synagogue for example is a Greek word, the first and second letters of the Hebrew alphabet are pronounced alef and bet - as in alpha and beta. As for child sacrifice I doubt if I am as knowledgeable as you but I thought that was limited to the Spartans. But one of the contemporary gods of Yahweh was Moloch and that involved live child sacrifice.
My main point about Greek culture is that it was the first serious attempt to build an order based on pure thought rather than superstition, hence mathematician/philosophers such as Pythagoras and Euclid. I doubt it was the Golden Age people like me would like to have it, but it beats the rabble-rousing popularist lawyers like Blair and Bush.

Sorry... I would still like to go on.

Just because some words and letters in some alfabet had Greek designations that doesn't mean they had a significant cultural influence. I do not dispute the fact that hellenism did have an impact on other societies. But you are overestimating its power.

Child sacrifice was not limited to Spartans. It was common practice and nothing to frown at in Greece and in Rome. As was homosexuality, if you want a positive drift to that line of arguments.

The Greek culture was more prone to absorb alien influence. See it like this: Gelatine is 99% water and 1% other stuff. Greek culture is that 1% (okay, maybe it's 10% - I am using numbers just as an example) holding that other 99% together. Important yes. But the properties of the gelatine are mainly those of the 99% water. That 1% would otherwise be powder.

Your main point about Greek culture being that it was the first serious attempt to build an order based on pure thought rather than superstition, has flaws.

First, the greeks were not the first. Maths existed before. Pythagoras did not INVENT his theorem. He was just the first to PROVE it. His theorem was WELL known way before. (There are egyptian papyri containing area tables and their diagonals) Geometry existed before. What Euclid did was to put all that knowledge together in one work. (BTW, he did set the standard in geometry for more than 1000 years... But let's have a look at Euclid then. Was the stuff he gave us hellenistic? That man was perhaps ethnically a Greek guy, but he lived in Alexandria, where he came into contact with all the stuff he put together as HIS geometry.)

--- I'll stop here. PR is not the best of places. Maybe we should go on with the discussion somewhere else.

HELL

Notwithstanding the veracity of the stated factual content, the entry needs structure. It needs a beginning and a middle and an end. At the moment it reads like a list of facts - it could do with being broken down with headers, like, e.g., The Titans, The Gods, etc.

Then, maybe add some links to Sisyphus, and be prepared tolink it up to Persuus and Thesius which are also in PR right now. They are Greek right?

Hi there!

Just as a sidenote... there is actually a University Project on Greek Mythology going on at the moment, headed by Dastardly, I think...

In his words, the Unofficial Index is more informative than the Offical one, so here's that link: A648119

Perhaps you could collaborate? I'll look over this entry again so I can give some comments on it

Caper Plip

Mina has submitted her contributions to PR. I think that project needs to be resuscitated. Let's all pop over there and give it a kick in the arse.

Yes, there's definitely an on-going University entry and Dastardly is the Field Researcher.

Actually, the project's going rather slowly
As an overview, I don't think this article competes with the project. Of course, if you want to contribute that's fine

Anyway...

This article seems a little unstructured. Some of it seems very confusing, and at times it just gives lists of Gods without really explaining why.

Still, it's very interesting Good luck with it

don't forget the muses, which among other things have inspired the whole section of h2g2 muses who try to be as inspirational and helpfull as the original nine.

As if this entry hasn't received enough criticism, I'm gonna throw in my two cents worth:
I like the entry but have to agree with some of the other posters that it's a bit unstructured and unfinished. I also have a problem with the following couple of statements:

"so engaging and well-known that the actual word "mythology" is derived from their language"
The use of the word mythology is more a tribute to the dominance of greek and latin in philosophy and science than to the greek myths themselves.

"The range of Greek gods is known as a "pantheon""
Pantheon is derived through latin from Greek "all-gods" and if you look it up in the dictionary can mean "all the gods of a people". 'The Greek Pantheon' sounds better than 'The Norse Pantheon', 'The Hindu Pantheon' or 'The Inca Pantheon', but the last three are correct nevertheless.

Well, I think that this Entry is quite unstructured... and the author hasn't posted since the beginning of September... so perhaps a move back to the Entry is in order?

Caper Plip

seconded

agreed... -his personal space looks rather abandoned...


Cheers,
~Bistro

So that's agreed! Who's going to do the honours? I'm happy to.