1.1 What Is (a) Myth?

There are things in the world about which we seemingly know what they are, yet we are unable to define them adequately. Big universal ideas such as ‘love’, ‘truth’ and ‘culture’ are obvious such cases; and, at the time of writing – that is, about two years after the public launch of ChatGPT – concepts such as ‘life’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’ also spring to mind. Admittedly, ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ are perhaps not comparably burning topic of the day, but they nevertheless belong in the same category: for we all believe to know what a myth is – until we are asked to provide a precise definition of it. But how and why exactly do we know that the story of the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece is a myth, while the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or that of Perceval and his search for the Holy Grail are not? We cannot immerse ourselves into the intricacies of all the similarities and differences between myth, fairy tale and legend here; however, recognizing the notorious difficulty of defining ‘myth’, along with the necessity to juxtapose the genre with other – related, but different – genres and modes of narration, must at least be acknowledged.Footnote ¹ Frustratingly, a look into the work of scholars of myth is of little help; on the contrary, the deeper one examines theories of myth, the more complex the picture becomes, because there is simply no scholarly consensus as to what a myth is.Footnote ² And indeed, as early as 1974, the British classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk stated that ‘the nature of myth is still, in spite of the millions of printed words devoted to it, a confused topic’ (Kirk Reference Kirk1974: 17) – an observation to which we can only add that another few millions of words on the topic have been printed in the meantime, only to reinforce and aggravate the problem identified by Kirk more than fifty years ago.

According to the Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott and Sir Henry Stuart Jones (LSJ), the Ancient Greek noun mŷthos (μῦθος) has a wide range of meanings; it designates, inter alia, a ‘tale’, a ‘story’, a ‘narrative’ or simply ‘fiction’. In other words, mŷthos encompasses anything that we would typically look for, and find, in the ‘Fiction’ section of a bookstore today. Already in antiquity, the Greek historians Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) and Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE) used the term to denote an implausible tale without sufficient validity (Hdt. 2.35, 2.45.1; Thuc. 1.22.4) – a tale that may make a good story, but that cannot constitute the basis of historical investigation. And, along similar lines, the geographer Strabo (c. 64 BCE–c. CE 24) defined myths as ‘things that are old, fabricated and marvellous’, as opposed to history, which ‘seeks the truth, no matter whether old or new’ (Geography 11.5.3). So, even if modern scholarship does not agree on a clear-cut definition, we can agree that our understanding of myth is considerably narrower than this broad definition (otherwise, Snow White and Perceval would indeed fall into the same category). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘myth’ as ‘a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon’.Footnote ³ Similarly, the American folklorist Alan Dundes, in the introduction to a collection of essays, defines myth even more succinctly, but aptly, as ‘a sacred narrative explaining how the world and man came to be in their present form’ (Dundes Reference Dundes1984b: 1). And indeed, almost all definitions, different as they may be in their details and their theoretical or ideological fundament, somehow relate myth to a ‘time before time’,Footnote ⁴ combined with one or the other form of explanatory function (called ‘aetiology’), and involving divinities and/or other human-like, supernatural beings.

The involvement of the divine sphere as a characteristic trait of myth undoubtedly indicates that there is an inherent relation between mythology and religion. This, in turn, begs the question as to how the two areas relate to – and correlate with – each other. Clearly, one is not identical with the other, but one is not thinkable without the other either. The probably most memorable, and surely the most cited, explanation is that by the American historian of religion Joseph Campbell, who regards myth as ‘other people’s religion’ and religion as ‘misunderstood mythology’, ‘the misunderstanding consisting in the interpretation of mythic metaphors as references to hard fact’ (Campbell Reference Campbell2002 [1986]: 27). And, whether we like it or not, Campbell does have a point; for indeed, I as a Christian (for example) would not be inclined to call the stories of the Old Testament ‘myths’, but at the same time I cannot deny the fact that (to pick a random example) the story of Moses’ abandonment on the waters of the Nile strongly resembles, and in fact is structurally identical with, the myth of the abandonment of Romulus and Remus on the Tiber (or that of Oedipus in the woods). This understanding takes me to what I want to propose as my own definition of mythology: mythology is the narrative side of religion.Footnote ⁵ Religion, on the other hand, is mythology that is believed in and/or played out in performance. The performative side of religion is ritual; and ritual reconnected to myth raises a typical chicken-and-hen-problem – namely, what was first? The Dutch historian of religion Jan N. Bremmer summarizes the problem as follows:

A discussion of this complex debate and its long history would take us too far away from the focus of this introduction; suffice it to say that the ritual approach to the study of myth is not currently à la mode (and is not the focus of this Element either),Footnote ⁶ but nevertheless cannot go unmentioned in a discussion of questions relating to the definition of myth and mythology. What is crucial to be aware of, in any case, is, again, the aetiological aspect: the triangle ‘religion – mythology – ritual’ works only through the aetiological ‘grease’.Footnote ⁷ Myths explain the world as it is on the basis of what happened in the past (within the system of mythology, references to an even earlier past – a mythical plupast – are not uncommon either, for example, when the heroes of Homer’s Iliad talk about the good old days when their stronger and taller ancestors were still alive and active). Often, such explanations concern the presence and the functioning of an oracle, a cult, a festival and so on but also other things like, for example, natural phenomena and stellar constellations. An instructive and well-known example is the Eleusinian Mysteries, a cult of Demeter and Persephone at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Eleusis near Athens, the origins of which are explained by the aetiological narration of Demeter’s attempt to nurse and thus deify Demophon, the son of king Keleos of Eleusis, as recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (lines 231–255).Footnote ⁸ Some theoreticians of myth even go a step further and claim that mythic narration embedded in a ritualized setting had the potential to concretely influence and change the world view, at times even the actual behaviour, of its audience.Footnote ⁹ To summarize, we can say that through aetiology, myth and ritual acquire meaning and are concatenated with each other, and the present of a society and its views and values are thus connected to and explained by the past.

Finally, a word on scope: this Element is concerned with diachronic narratology in Greek myth – whereby ‘Greek’ refers to the culture of ancient Greece from the first written sources (i.e. Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, dated, very approximately, to c. 700 BCE) all the way through to what is commonly considered the nodal point between late antiquity and the early Byzantine era (which is – again, very approximately – set at c. CE 500; in terms of literary history, the gargantuan epic Dionysiaca by Nonnus of Panopolis often serves as a landmark). This Element does, however, not include the sphere of Roman mythology (nor the mythologies from any other culture, for that matter). Although Roman mythology was heavily influenced by Greek mythology, it has its decidedly own texture, its own twist. On the other hand, although the general considerations about the nature of mythology as delineated above are based on my reading and thinking about Greek mythology, I would nevertheless make a claim for a certain universal validity of them as far as the general outline is concerned – for the simple reason that the mentioned triangle ‘religion – mythology – ritual’ is of such a general nature that it seems difficult to imagine a culture that would not possess each of these aspects at least in its nucleus. Or, to put it in slightly different terms: as both religion and storytelling are universal to all human cultures, it must be concluded that the same applies to ritual practice and, above all, to mythology.Footnote ¹⁰

1.2 What Is (Diachronic) Narratology?

Narratology is the systematic study and analysis of the mechanisms and parameters that constitute storytelling.Footnote ¹¹ Since storytelling is an archetypal human activity, we can find narratives in all cultures, at all times and on all levels of complexity. Consequently, a narratological analysis can in principle be applied to any type of narrative, be it the bedtime stories parents tell their children or James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), with all its finicky intricacies. And, narratology is equally timeless, meaning that, for example, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh (dated to between c. 2100 and 1200 BCE) can be subject to a narratological study as much as the crime novels that are published here in Norway every year shortly before Easter (‘Easter crime’ being a uniquely Norwegian phenomenon).

In what follows, I provide a ‘laundry list’ of the most important parameters that are typically studied and analysed by narratologists, together with the most common terms that are used to describe the corresponding phenomena:

1. 1) Narrators and narratees. Narratologists distinguish between the actual author of a text and the voice of the narrator that tells a story (in addition, sometimes the concept of the ‘implied author’ is added between the flesh-and-blood author and the narrator-figure of a text).Footnote ¹² Another important distinction is that between the homodiegetic narrator, designating a narrator who is also a character in the story he/she tells, and the heterodiegetic narrator, who remains outside the story frame recounted.Footnote ¹³ Also of importance is the differentiation between the primary narrator (i.e. the narrator sensu stricto, often described as ‘auctorial’ and/or ‘omniscient’) and the secondary narrator (i.e. a narratorial voice that is inserted into the main narrative, e.g. through the direct speech of a character telling a story in the story). On the other end, the narratee of a text is the hypothetical person to whom a story is told – who may, but need not, be identical with a text’s actual reader (an obvious example to illustrate this point would be if someone secretly reads a letter that was in fact addressed to someone else).

2. 2) Focalization. Focalization designates ‘[t]he perspective in terms of which the narrated situation and events are presented’ (Prince Reference Prince2003: 31); hence, the focalizer of a text is a figure (the narrator or a character in the story) through whose eyes the story is told and the events unfolding are seen. A common distinction is that between external focalization (i.e. an outside perspective on the text and its characters) and internal focalization (i.e. a from-within perspective, typically by a character of the story world). Further, one speaks of embedded focalization when the two levels are merged, be it when a character’s viewpoint is embedded into the otherwise external focalization by the narrator, be it when narratorial (‘auctorial’) knowledge sneaks in to the speech of a character who thus knows more than he/she can in fact know.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast, when the reader has more information than the character(s) in a text, one speaks of dramatic irony. Focalization can change in the course of a narrative.

3. 3) Narrative levels. Narratologists distinguish between different types of narrative levels in relation to their fictional and/or ontological status. The diegetic level is the fictional frame of a story, the fictional world of all the characters and their fictional reality. The real world outside is correspondingly called the extradiegetic level. An extra narrative level embedded into the diegetic world is called the intradiegetic level (or metadiegetic level); consequently, a secondary narrator can also be called an intradiegetic (or metadiegetic) narrator. The diegetic and the extradiegetic levels are normally kept separate; when they are blended, a surprise effect arises – this is called a metalepsis or (somewhat more broadly) a crossover (a striking example would be the famous cameo appearances by Alfred Hitchcock in his films: a figure from the extradiegetic level intruding into the diegetic level).

4. 4) Time. There are several important narrative aspects, and corresponding narratological concepts, related to time. First, there is the crucial distinction between story time and narrating time, the former relating to the time span covered by a given story, the latter to the actual time it takes to tell the story (a perspicuous example to illustrate this difference would be that of a play, the duration of which [= narrating time] may be about two hours, yet the play might cover events that span over several months or years in total [= story time]).Footnote ¹⁵ Secondly, and in close connection to the aforementioned point, there is also the question of narrative speed – the narration of an event can be extended (extension), compressed (compression), summarized (summary) or omitted entirely (ellipsis). Thirdly, the temporal order in which events are narrated also constitutes a crucial narrative parameter. The most basic order of narration is narration in chronological order (the default mode of storytelling children use: ‘and then … and then … ’). On the other hand, non-chronological storytelling (anachrony) also occurs; here an important distinction is that between prolepsis (foreshadowing: a pointing-forward to events ahead in time), analepsis (flashback/backshadowing: a pointing-backward to events that have already taken place) and sideshadowing (i.e. an allusion to an alternative version of a story or story detail that could have taken place, but did not happen). Finally, questions relating to when the narration of a story begins (beginning, opening) and when it ends (ending, closure) also belong to this category.

5. 5) Space. Space as a narrative parameter is crucial for the simple reason that a fictional story world does not exist without a space within which the story unfolds and their characters can exist and act; ‘all narratives imply a world with spatial extension, even when spatial information is withheld’ (Ryan Reference Ryan2014: 796).Footnote ¹⁶ A narratological analysis of spatial parameters may for example look at how characters move in their space, how boundaries shape the narrative frame, how a change of location corresponds and/or contributes to the narrative development and how descriptions of spatial entities create a reality effect (effet de réel).Footnote ¹⁷ A term that is often used to denote the whereabouts of a scene in a story is setting. A literary topos that is intrinsically connected to space is that of the locus amoenus: an idealized, beautiful, paradise-like place; this topos is often combined with the practice of literary description (ekphrasis).

6. 6) Character. The study of literary characters is a tricky matter because literary characters resemble – but in fact are not – flesh-and-blood people. However, in narratology, characters are understood as narrative entities as much as, for example, narrators, time and space. Ideally, narratological character analysis understands literary characters as narrative constructs, but at the same time it takes into account the fact that ‘literary narratives are structured in such a way as to create an illusion that they are reports about individuals’ (Margolin Reference Margolin1995: 383), thus acknowledging both the constructedness of literary characters and their real-life resemblance.Footnote ¹⁸ Inter alia, narratologists analyse how fictional characters are constructed and developed (characterization) and how they speak (character speech). Characters travelling from one fictional frame to another (e.g. heroes from Homer’s Iliad re-staged in Attic tragedy) are called transtextual characters; characters crossing over from one medium (e.g. text) to another (e.g. iconography) are called transmedial characters; characters at home in the worlds of different media are called plurimedial characters.Footnote ¹⁹

7. 7) Minimal thematic units.Footnote ²⁰ Finally, minimal thematic units such as a specific narrative pattern or motif (called leitmotif when it occurs repeatedly and thus constitutes a red thread in a story) as well as literary commonplaces (topoi [singular topos]) are also subject to narratological analysis. At this point, the affinity of narratology to classical rhetoric, which traditionally analyses tropes (metaphors, metonymies, etc.) and figures of speech, becomes apparent, and there is a fine line between the two areas here.Footnote ²¹

As will have become clear by now, narratologists tend to be more interested in the analysis of form than in the discussion of content.Footnote ²² However, this does not mean that narratology began as a purely formalistic discipline. We may just take a look at one of the founding documents of Western narrative, Homer’s Odyssey, to see how strongly connected narrative phenomena and a broader literary interpretation can be.Footnote ²³ For example, any reader of the Odyssey will notice that the epic has a conspicuously reticent, non-intrusive (in narratological jargon: covert) heterodiegetic primary narrator in Books 1–8 and 13–24, whereas Books 9–12 (the well-known Apologoi) are reported by Odysseus personally in first-person narration – that is, by a homodiegetic secondary narrator – in an extended analepsis (Odysseus’ narratees are the Phaiakians on the isle of Scheria, while we as readers are, in a manner of speaking, eavesdropping). This change of narrative voice and narrative level does not only constitute one of the most influential models for Western narrative, it also raises the question of Odysseus’ credibility as an intradiegetic narrator: Can Odysseus, the prototypical liar and trickster, really be trusted when he recounts all his fairy-tale-like adventures? And what does that tell us about the role and the character of the hero more generally? Odysseus is thus the first example of yet another type of narrator, the so-called ‘unreliable narrator’; and a narratological analysis of the voices in the Odyssey is undoubtedly the key to fleshing out the vexed question of fiction vs truth – a question that lies at the very heart of this epic.Footnote ²⁴

Moreover, as is well known, the Odyssey does not start at the beginning of Odysseus’ voyage, but towards its end, at a divine council on Mount Olympus: Athene takes advantage of Poseidon’s absence so that she can convince Zeus that he should finally release Odysseus from the isle of Ogygia, where the immortal nymph Kalypso has been holding him prisoner for as many as seven years (Od. 1.1–95). This late beginning, in combination with the subsequent shift from a heterodiegetic to a homodiegetic narrator, does not only lend variety to the narrative, it also enables the author to omit the least eventful, but longest (and thus dullest), part of Odysseus’ absence from home: his sojourn on the isle of Ogygia, probably characterized by a lot of boredom. Thus, the major part of the epic’s story time is actually a huge ellipsis. In terms of setting, then, we can notice that the beginning on Mount Olympus stands in contrast to where the rest of the Odyssey mostly takes place, namely on the sea and on islands (but rarely on the mainland), and that the change of location and especially the crossing of boundaries often mark some sort of rite of passage, which thus prepares for Odysseus’ final homecoming (whereby Odysseus, ironically enough, does not recognize his home when he finally arrives on Ithaca [Od. 13.187–218]).

Another point that a narratologically minded reader will notice are the repeated allusions to king Agamemnon’s fate – his homecoming and how he was killed by his wife Klytaimnestra and her lover Aigisthos upon arrival – that are interspersed across the Odyssey. Narratologically, these are analepses to an event that took place a few years before the time frame of the Odyssey, while for us as readers, they constitute glances at what we may perceive as ‘alternative reality’. Through these analepses, Odysseus’ homecoming – about which there can, in fact, be no doubt as it is part of the overarching mythical story frame – is constantly put into question. On the one hand, there is dramatic irony at work insofar as we, the readers, know of Odysseus’ eventual homecoming, whereas he, as an innerfictional character, does not; on the other, the security of our knowledge is constantly undermined by those analepses that offer us a glimpse at the death of one of Odysseus’ combatants by the hand of his wife, and we may thus wonder whether Odysseus might, after all, encounter a similar fate.Footnote ²⁵

While there can be no doubt that narratology is far from being formalistic, it had, for a long while, a blind spot when it comes to the challenges presented by different genres and corresponding generic differences, conventions and expectations because the first narratologists were mostly modernists who developed their theories and methods on the basis of novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Another point is that for an equally long time, narratology was almost exclusively synchronous, that is, narratologists would typically not analyse texts from different periods and compare their narrative peculiarities with each other, but they would mostly focus on one specific text and/or author (or a series of texts from approximately the same genre and the same period at the most) – a phenomenon that has recently been described as ‘narratology’s “presentist” bias’ (Birke, von Contzen & Kukkonen Reference Birke, von Contzen and Kukkonen2022: 28). It is only after the turn of the millennium that narratology gradually opened up to the comparative study of narrative phenomena in ancient as well as mediaeval literature.Footnote ²⁶ In an important position paper from 2014, the Dutch classicist and narratologist Irene de Jong identified the main tasks of diachronic narratology in Classics as follows:

In summary, we can state that narratology is an established field of studies that has undergone considerable development in the past two decades and that is still in a state of change. In what follows, I identify and reflect upon some challenges we encounter when we apply narratological questions and methods to the study of mythical narratives.

1.3 Diachronic Narratology Applied to the Study of Myth

Despite the ‘presentist bias’ by which it was affected for several decades, narratology has, in fact, its roots in the study of myth and folktale. First, there was the forefather of narratology, the Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp, who, under the influence of Russian formalism, developed a formalist approach to analysing Russian folktales in his study Morphology of the Folktale (published in Russian in 1928; first translated into English in 1958; second revised English edition from 1968). Propp’s theory revolves around identifying recurring narrative elements and character types in folktales, suggesting that these elements follow a predictable pattern of functions. He thus identifies a total of thirty-one functional patterns, such as, for example, ‘the hero’s departure’, ‘the hero’s victory’ and ‘the hero’s return’. Furthermore, Propp also identifies seven character types that appear and reappear in all these tales; these characters perform specific functions within the narrative structure of a tale. Secondly, in critical dialogue with Propp, the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss also proposed a theory of myth that looks at underlying structures and patterns, but with a stronger emphasis on the ‘paradigmatic’ instead of the ‘syntagmatic’ level. Central to Lévi-Strauss’ theory of myth is the concept of the ‘mytheme’, denoting the smallest meaningful unit of mythic structure in analogy to phonemes and morphemes in language. Lévi-Strauss thus argues that all myths from all cultures are composed of a finite set of mythemes arranged in various combinations and permutations.Footnote ²⁷

Irrespective of all their merits and influence, Propp’s and Lévi-Strauss’ theories suffer from several major flaws. One of them is that their claim for universal validity makes them attackable; another is that they are what I previously said narratology was not (or not meant to be) – namely, too formalistic. However, it is important to acknowledge that the origins of narratology stem from those structural(ist) studies in mythology. My own approach is neither devoted to a specific theory nor is it purely formalistic – but it feeds on formal(istic) approaches occasionally, and the discussion of recurring patterns and motifs is crucial in many instances. Furthermore, the application of narratological methods to the study of myth entails a few further caveats, which I need to address in what follows.

One major issue is this: myth is narrative – but myth is not a genre. Rather, myths constitute the basis of numerous literary genres for which they provide the ‘raw material’, with which people in antiquity were already familiar. However, the myths are not those genres. To be concrete, mythology provides the backbone of religious (or religiously motivated) genres such as hymns, cult songs and prayers; it forms the basis of practically all of epic and tragedy,Footnote ²⁸ and it is also entrenched in many other genres such as comedy, lyric, epinician, historiography, the novel, etc. It would probably be difficult to find an ancient literary genre that has no relationship with mythology whatsoever. Consequently, any discussion of mythology in a diachronic perspective must necessarily incorporate a discussion of the genres to which one or the other myth is connected; studying diachronic mythology means automatically also looking at the development and crossing of genres and thus, ultimately, at the history of literature as such. In this context, it is also paramount to avoid what I call the ‘urmyth fallacy’: in the 1890s, the then influential British social anthropologist and folklorist James G. Frazer claimed that different versions of a similarly or identically structured mythical narrative should be regarded as ‘corrupted’ developments of an older, ‘purer’ original myth – an urmyth of primordial origin, created by some sort of natural genius.Footnote ²⁹ Today, this view is rightly considered outdated – yet it often proves to be still influential through the backdoor, not least via the more formalist approaches. Rather, myth and genre are intimately connected with each other; hence, instead of attempting to ‘unveil’ the purportedly ‘authentic’ myths that underlie the genres through which they are communicated, the task of a narratologist analysing mythology in a diachronic perspective is to pay attention to the reciprocity between myth and genre. Or, to quote the American classicist and historian of religion Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘rather than bemoaning the fact that the Greeks’ ideas about the gods and heroes come to us mostly through fictionalizing art and literature, we should acknowledge that those portraits, cumulatively, were the gods and heroes’, and ‘[w]hen characters are presented through more than one narrative …, each narrative offers a different instantiation of that character from the others’ (Johnston Reference Johnston2018: 156).Footnote ³⁰ To this (correct and important) observation, I would only add that similar differences in instantiation equally apply to many other narrative parameters aside from character, as will be demonstrated in the subsequent case studies that take their starting point from mythical characters, but look at various other narrative aspects from a diachronic angle, too (§ 2–4).

Another point, closely linked to the aforementioned issue and important to bear in mind, is the fact that because of the traditionality of mythology, the principal mythical story frames were usually already known to the audience – a fact of which the ancients were patently aware, as a fragment by the comic poet Antiphanes (c. 404–334 BCE) demonstrates, stating that ‘tragedy is a blessed / genre in all respects, as the stories are from the beginning / recognized by the spectators / before anyone even says a word’ (fr. 189.1–4 PCG). To re-use the Odyssey example from above (§ 1.2), Homer’s audience (as well as later, post-Homeric recipients) knew that Odysseus was eventually going to return home. Similarly, Oedipus always kills his father and marries his mother, Jason always captures the Golden Fleece, Orpheus always fails in his attempt to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld, etc. As a result of this, from a reader-response perspective suspense is of a completely different nature as compared to how we typically think of it. To our understanding, suspense is typically seen as a ‘state of uncertainty, anticipation and curiosity as to the outcome of a story or play, or any kind of narrative’ (Cuddon Reference Cuddon1991 s.v.). In contrast, suspense in mŷthos-based genres was primarily nourished by the dramatic irony that arose from the audience’s superior knowledge, heightened by a tension resulting from the inability to communicate this superior knowledge to the characters who are constrained to their innerfictional reality (i.e. the inability to metaleptically transcend the barrier between the extradiegetic and the diegetic level),Footnote ³¹ further coupled with the question of how exactly the expected outcome of a story was going to occur. Alternatively, spectators and/or readers may also sometimes have engaged in what Johnston (Reference Johnston2015a: 204) terms ‘willful forgetfulness’, that is, the temporary suppression or suspension of one’s previous knowledge about the outcome of a story in order to enjoy it afresh (a mechanism that also enables activities such as the repeated consumption of a favourite episode from a TV series vel sim.). In addition, an author could also heighten the suspense by sowing doubt in the reader’s expectations – like in the Odyssey example discussed above (§ 1.2), by interspersing the narrative with allusions to the fate of another hero who was not welcomed warmly, but killed deviously, by his wife. Thus, a cognitive dissonance arises between what the recipient knows must and will happen and what the text suggests may perhaps happen differently, or not at all.Footnote ³²

The fact that an ancient author would primarily need to work on the ‘how’ of his presentation of a myth, along with a general tendency of classical mythology towards being a permeable system open to variants and variations, leads to yet another consequence: we as readers and interpreters of ancient myths have to constantly deal with the question of how we should evaluate a variation, a change or an innovation in a mythical tale – whether, as it were, we should attribute it to the world of mythology or to the world of genre, or a combination of the two. That said, we must not fall into the trap of wanting to search for an ‘urmyth’, as emphasized above; on the other hand, ignoring the wide range of variants and variations by simply describing them as characteristically inherent to mythology without any further differentiation would be far too simplistic. This, in turn, also leads to questions about the canonical value of certain texts, certain genres and/or certain versions of a myth. An example that may illustrate this point comes from the probably most influential drama of all times: Oedipus the King by Sophocles (c. 497/6–406/5 BCE), first performed in Athens in c. 429 BCE. The gory climax of this tragedy is the moment when a messenger reports on what happened after Oedipus uncovered the horrible truth about his past, that is, that he had unwittingly killed his father Laios and married his mother Jocasta: Jocasta has taken her own life (lines 1234–1267), and Oedipus has blinded himself in anguish (lines 1268–1279). The motif of Oedipus’ self-blinding is so well known that we can hardly imagine the ending of the story to be any different. However, according to several parallel sources, there is in fact considerable variation.Footnote ³³ A reference in the Odyssey indicates that after his discovery, Oedipus, distressed though he was, continued to govern Thebes (Od. 11.271–280), and the Iliad mentions that he later fell in battle and was honoured with funeral games (Il. 23.678–680).Footnote ³⁴ This demonstrates that Homer followed a tradition in which the blinding did not take place (for a blind man cannot fight in battle), and the allusive character of the references suggests that this tradition must have been widely known (otherwise, the audience would not have understood the allusions). The motif of Oedipus’ blinding, on the other hand, can be found in many sources, yet there is variation as to who inflicts it: one tradition says that Oedipus curses himself and is thus struck by blindness (schol. Eur. Phoen. 61), another that his foster father Polybos blinds him (schol. Eur. Phoen. 26), another that Laios’ servants ‘destroy his pupils’ (Eur. Oed. fr. 541 TrGF). Furthermore, iconographic evidence attests to yet another version, namely that of Oedipus being blinded by order of Kreon.Footnote ³⁵ It is noteworthy that in none of these traditions, Oedipus inflicts the blinding on himself by his own hands, and it could therefore be tempting to assume that Sophocles might have invented the self-blinding for dramaturgic reasons. However, this hypothesis is contradicted by a mention of the self-blinding in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes (lines 772–784), a play that precedes Sophocles’ Oedipus the King by several decades (it was produced in 467 BCE).

At the end of the day, we are left with a riddle. Sophocles’ tragedy is the only Oedipus drama that has survived, and following the positive verdicts by literary critics (beginning with Aristotle), it is not coincidental that this and not any other such drama has stood the test of time. However, this does not change the fact that our perspective is biased, as it is solely focused through the lens of Sophocles. The question therefore arises as to how we should evaluate all the variants. Are they all just variations within a wide spectrum of mythical possibilities? Or is the blinding motif a specifically tragic trait, the concrete implementation of which varies from tragedy to tragedy, whereas the complete absence of the motif (along with the idea that Oedipus continues his life as a king after his discovery) is perhaps characteristic of the epic tradition? And how did the fact that so many variants existed affect the suspense factor for Sophocles’ contemporary audience, the degree of the dramatic irony involved and the surprise (or shock) effect when the messenger reported on what happened? I do not have answers to these questions – but we must bear in mind that such questions continue to emerge when we study mythology in a diachronic perspective.

In what follows, I offer a discussion of three of the most colourful characters from Greek mythology and their voyage through literary history: Odysseus, Herakles and Helen. By looking at the diachronic development of these three characters, I intend to demonstrate how a narratological approach can enrich our perspective on, and understanding of, mythology in general. I have chosen these three characters because they are still widely known today and because they can be regarded as paradigmatic when it comes to their uninterrupted cultural significance from antiquity to the present. In line with the necessity to pay attention to the reciprocity between myth and genre, as outlined above, my focus will mainly be on the representation of these figures in literary texts from different genres and periods, yet the picture will be broadened by occasional side glances at wider cultural aspects such as visual material here and there.

2.1 The Homeric Odysseus: Rhetorical Failures and Lies

Since we have used the Odyssey as an example to illustrate what a narratological analysis can accomplish (§ 1.2), it seems appropriate that we spend a little time with that epic’s protagonist, Odysseus. As noted previously, Odysseus is not only a mythical figure whose stories are narrated but he is also a prominent narrator himself, as the Homeric Apologoi (Odyssey Books 9–12) make abundantly clear. However, his career as a ‘man of words’ begins already in the Iliad, where he is a central figure too (although not a protagonist).Footnote ³⁶ Aside from being a warrior (see especially his aristeia at Il. 11.396–486), he is already in the Iliad renowned for his superior intelligence (he is repeatedly called ‘equivalent to Zeus in terms of wisdom’ [Il. 2.169, 2.407, 2.636, 10.137] by the primary narrator) and his rhetorical skills. In this capacity, he is chosen, together with Phoinix and the Greater Ajax, to take the lead in the embassy that is sent to Achilles in order to convince him to relinquish his anger and to rejoin the battle (Il. 9.162–657). Odysseus speaks first (lines 225–306), reminding Achilles of the dire consequences of his abstention from fighting and his obligation to help; his speech is followed by that of Phoinix, who strikes a paternal tone (lines 434–605), whereas Ajax’ speech is rather short and brusque (lines 624–642), in line with this warrior’s uncouth nature.Footnote ³⁷ From a rhetorical point of view, Odysseus’ speech almost constitutes a schoolbook example of a carefully arranged piece of rhetoric – indeed, Odysseus’ style of speech (his character speech) was repeatedly classified as a model of the grand style of rhetoric (genus grande) by ancient critics.Footnote ³⁸ However, despite the sophistication of his speech, Odysseus is unsuccessful with his rhetoric, for Achilles replies bitterly that he will neither rejoin the battle nor accept Agamemnon’s gifts as long as the latter has not adequately atoned for his insult (lines 308–429). Thus, the first attempt at rhetorical persuasion in Western civilization is a failure; ‘[i]n the first work of European literature we are brought face to face with some of the limitations of rhetoric’ (Kennedy Reference Kennedy1999: 12). Even more serious, though, is perhaps the fact that Odysseus’ career as the prototypical man of words starts with such an immense setback. For the sake of the narrative, however, Odysseus’ failure proves to be crucial, for had he been successful in convincing Achilles to re-enter the fray, the further narrative development would not have enfolded as it does. A rhetorically successful Odysseus would have led to a completely different Iliad, or no Iliad whatsoever.Footnote ³⁹

Turning to the Odyssey, we can find an Odysseus figure who is considerably more successful with his rhetoric. However, he has to learn a hard lesson first because he makes a serious mistake in the initial stages of his voyage: as he reports at the beginning of the Apologoi (Odyssey Book 9), Odysseus and his comrades are trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemos, the one-eyed giant and cannibal, and they are only able to escape thanks to Odysseus’ famous trick (i.e. they intoxicate and blind the Cyclops with a wooden stake, and then they manage to leave the cave by clinging to the bellies of the giant’s sheep), and since Odysseus has previously introduced himself as ‘Nobody’ (Oûtis [Οὖτις], a folk-etymological pun on his real name), Polyphemos is unsuccessful in persuading his comrades to come to his aid when he is in pain. However, when Odysseus is already back on his ship and feels safe, he taunts Polyphemos by revealing his true identity (lines 502–505). Consequently, Polyphemos prays to his father Poseidon for revenge (lines 528–535), begging him to make Odysseus suffer as much as possible on his voyage, ‘that he may come home late and miserably, losing all his comrades, / on a foreign ship, and that he may find sorrows in his house’ (lines 534–535). It is thus Odysseus’ lack of self-containment, his hýbris (ὕβρις, ‘overconfidence’, ‘complacency’),Footnote ⁴⁰ that makes him impulsively succumb to his urge to mock the Cyclops, who as a result provokes the hero’s prolonged and painful return voyage, his proverbial nóstos (νόστος, ‘return home’). There are several more prolepses to the circumstances of Odysseus’ return in the Odyssey,Footnote ⁴¹ but this one is special insofar as it is not only a foreshadowing, but in fact the cause of Odysseus’ long and miserable trip. In rhetorical terms, Odysseus misjudges the kairós (καιρός), the ‘right moment’. Focke (Reference Focke1943: 159–160) notes the grandiose style of Polyphemos’ prayer, which stands in contrast to his otherwise uncultivated nature. Odysseus and Polyphemos appear to have exchanged roles: while Odysseus, at a moment when he should have remained silent, speaks out, Polyphemos, in his prayer to his father, reaches unforeseen rhetorical heights. In narratological terms, Odysseus’ inappropriate use of words results in the extreme narrative extension of the Odyssey; while the Iliad would not exist without Odysseus’ rhetorical failure, the Odyssey would not exist without Odysseus’ supercilious behaviour, his absence of self-control and his verbal excess towards Polyphemos.Footnote ⁴²

From this moment, Odysseus is extremely careful about disclosing his identity. He does reveal it to the Phaiakians by officially introducing himself to Alkinoos (Od. 9.19–20) before he begins to tell all his adventures, but only after having concealed who he really is for several days. Thereafter, he (indirectly) reconfirms his identity by reporting the incident with Polyphemos; shouting ‘Odysseus, the destroyer of cities, has blinded you’ (Od. 9.504) has a metaleptic quality, as the exclamation reaches its audience on the metadiegetic, the diegetic and the extradiegetic level. Simultaneously, a tension arises between Odysseus’ lack of concern in the past and his extreme diligence now; by telling his narratees about his previous carelessness regarding his identity, he simultaneously shows them (and us) that he has fundamentally changed his behaviour in this respect.

This takes us to the question of Odysseus as a liar. As briefly discussed previously already (§ 1.2), we may justifiably wonder whether Odysseus can be trusted about the truth of his Apologoi. In narratological terms, the question is whether Odysseus should be regarded as an unreliable narrator, and if so, how far his (lack of) reliability goes and what the implication of this is for the overall understanding of his character. It is noteworthy that Odysseus concocts several cock-and-bull-stories in the second half of the Odyssey, when he has already arrived on Ithaca, but still remains in disguise so as not to expose himself in a situation where he is not sure about whom he can trust (as the suitors of his wife Penelope are battening on his estate and present a life-threatening danger for him). On three occasions, he tells elaborate lies about his identity and his provenance: first to Athene, whom he does not recognize because she has transformed herself into a young shepherd (Od. 13.256–286), then to his loyal swineherd Eumaios (Od. 14.191–359) and finally to none other than his own wife (Od. 19.165–342). Each time, he varies the details of his lies, but their quintessence always remains the same: he claims to be an uprooted veteran of the Trojan War, originating from the isle of Crete and in kinship with the Cretan king Idomeneus (who indeed was a participant in the Trojan War according to the Iliad). A detailed analysis and discussion of these highly intricate (and equally ironic) ‘Cretan lies’ cannot be offered here.Footnote ⁴³ What is relevant for our purposes is that Odysseus, despite his clearly fraudulent intent, maintains a nucleus of truth by making his deceptive alter ego a distorted version of himself, that is, a displaced homecomer from the Trojan War on an adventurous return voyage. The Cretan lies are, overall, lies indeed, yet there is also a spark of truth in them. This, in turn, gives rise to the assumption that also the Apologoi may partly be true, partly contrived.

It is important to note that the Apologoi are narrated before the Cretan lies, meaning that a reader who initially takes the former at face value may in retrospect have second thoughts about their truthfulness in light of the deceptive character of the latter. At this point, we must remember that the major mythical figures and their principal story frames were typically already known to the audience,Footnote ⁴⁴ and therefore, a contemporary audience would at least have had an approximate idea as to where to place a tale on the ‘spectrum of truthfulness’. However, we saw before that the repeated analepses to king Agamemnon’s death by the hand of his wife sow doubt onto the expected positive outcome of Odysseus’ homecoming despite all the traditionality of the tale (§ 1.2); likewise, here too doubt is sown ex posteriori onto the validity of Odysseus’ Apologoi. In my opinion, the point is not so much to find an unequivocal answer to the question of whether or not Odysseus is a liar but, rather, to acknowledge the partial unreliability of his role as a secondary narrator as perceived by the readers of the Odyssey.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a matter of fact, there are several ‘authentification devices’ spread across the main story (i.e. the heterodiegetic narrative in Books 1–8 and 13–24), both in the mouth of the primary narrator and several secondary narrators, that refer to details reported in the Apologoi and thus add credibility to Odysseus’ homodiegetic narrative.Footnote ⁴⁶ For example, in Book 8, a knot is mentioned that the sorceress Circe (whose story Odysseus narrates in Book 10) once taught Odysseus (lines 447–448). The narration of such a detail outside the Apologoi does, however, not automatically authenticate their entire truthfulness; it only attests to the fact that there is, as it were, a minimum of truth in Odysseus’ narration – yet there is also a minimum of truth in the Cretan lies. Furthermore, the fact that Odysseus does not mention the knot in his own narration of the events in Book 10 may not only be seen as a narrative ellipsis, it may also be taken as an indication that Odysseus’ account does indeed not constitute the full truth.

The function of the Apologoi in relation to the Odyssey’s main narrative has previously been discussed in scholarship, as has the understanding of Odysseus as a poetic alter ego of the Homeric narrator, and there is neither room nor need to further engage in this discussion here.Footnote ⁴⁷ What is important to keep in mind for our purposes is Odysseus’ ambiguity in his role as a narrator – an ambiguity that is created by the hero’s narration oscillating between reliability and unreliability, the mode of narration being tightly connected to Odysseus’ position as a partly reliable, partly unreliable narrator figure.

2.2 The Post-Homeric Odysseus: Rhetorical Success – and More Lies

Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321), the father of Italian poetry and the Italian language, has his own fictionalized self guided by the (equally fictionalized) Roman poet Vergil through the Inferno (‘Hell’), the inspection and description of which constitutes the first part of Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy. Among countless other figures from the mythical and historical past, they also meet Ulysses (i.e. the Roman form of Odysseus’ name) and Diomedes (another veteran from the Trojan War). Dante asks Vergil,

Here, in the eighth bolgia (‘ditch’) of the Eighth Circle (the Malebolge, ‘Evil Ditches’), we meet the counsellors of fraud: deceitful individuals are punished there for having exploited their intellectual capacities in order to lure others into fraudulent acts. Among these, Ulysses and Diomedes take pride of place, enduring punishment for the ploy of the Trojan Horse, for persuading Achilles into joining the Trojan expedition (resulting in his wife’s anguish) and for the theft of the Palladium (a cult image of Athene originally in Trojan possession, described in detail in Book 2 of Vergil’s Aeneid). Shortly thereafter, Ulysses himself begins to speak, recounting his voyage from when he and his comrades left the isle of Circe, but with an ending that deviates from that of the Odyssey considerably: for instead of having him return home, Dante has Ulysses embark on one final voyage, taking him beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the open sea of the Atlantic, where he ultimately is shipwrecked and drowns (26.90–142).

We do not need to examine these passages in much deeper detail to understand that Dante here revitalizes the centuries-old idea of Odysseus as the prototypical man of words.Footnote ⁴⁹ Clearly, rhetorical prowess is the most stable aspect of Odysseus’ characterization throughout the centuries; however, Dante’s revitalization comes with a different take, for Odysseus is now a recognizably more negative figure. This is a development that begins many centuries before Dante already and becomes a leitmotif in the post-Homeric tradition throughout the centuries, for Odysseus can be seen as an ambivalent figure as early as the Odyssey through his role as a liar, whereas in the Iliad, he uses his intellectual and rhetorical abilities solely in the interest of the Achaean community (§ 2.1). Viewed from a narratological perspective, Odysseus’ role as an intradiegetic (and potentially unreliable) narrator in the Odyssey greatly influences his later development. Already in the Odyssey, Athene spells out the ambiguous nature of Odysseus’ wiliness when, seeing through his lies (i.e. the first set of his Cretan lies, Od. 13.256–286), she half-seriously, half-jokingly scolds her protégé as ‘unwearying, full of craft, insatiate of tricks’ (Od. 13.293). And, about two hundred years later, the archaic Greek poet Pindar (c. 518–438 BCE), in his Seventh Nemean Ode, states that ‘it seems to me that / the word of Odysseus has grown stronger than his suffering / through the sweet-singing Homer, / for upon his lies and his winged craft / there is something solemn, and his wisdom / deceives and misleads with his tales’ (lines 20–23). Thus, Pindar takes up the notion of Odysseus as Homer’s poetic alter ego and connects it to the idea of Odysseus as a liar, ‘opposing the accounts of the heroic age found in epic poetry’ (Maslov Reference Maslov2015: 124), yet at the same time ascribing a poetic superiority (‘something solemn’) to the art of lying.Footnote ⁵⁰

In Attic tragedy, particularly in the tragedies of Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE), we then find the notion of Odysseus using his rhetorical skills ruthlessly and almost in a literal sense going over dead bodies in order to achieve his ends.Footnote ⁵¹ In the play Hekabe (produced c. 424 BCE), he convinces the Achaean assembly that Polyxena, a daughter of Priam and Hekabe, ought to be sacrificed to the dead Achilles because he has asked for compensation after his tomb had been left without the proper honours. The chorus leader passes on the decision to Hekabe, referring to Odysseus as ‘a crafty, wrangling, sweet-speaking pleaser of the people’ (lines 131–132).Footnote ⁵² Hekabe reacts to this terrible news by pleading for Polyxena’s life, even offering her own life for that of her daughter – but to no avail; Odysseus remains adamant.Footnote ⁵³ However, she maintains composure throughout the entire play – yet ten years later, in The Trojan Women (produced in 415 BCE), she completely loses composure when she is informed that she has been assigned as a slave to Odysseus (lines 283–287):

Hekabe uses utterly harsh words that, inter alia, qualify Odysseus as infected with ritual pollution and compare him to a wild animal.Footnote ⁵⁴ Scodel (Reference Scodel1980: 72) thus rightly sees a contradiction between Hekabe’s outburst and the fact that Odysseus actually ‘has done nothing to justify the particular accusations [she] makes against him’ in the play so far. Later in the play, though, the messenger Talthybios informs Hekabe’s daughter-in-law Andromache that the Achaean assembly has decided that her son Astyanax is to be killed (line 719) and that ‘among the assembled Greeks, Odysseus won with his speech’ (line 721), indicating that it was Odysseus who convinced the Achaeans that this dreadful murder ought to be committed. Thus, in a sense, we could interpret Hekabe’s hateful outcry as a proleptic reaction anticipating this news. Furthermore, if we look beyond the fictional frame of the play, we may also perceive Hekabe’s outburst as a metalepsis – that is, as a late response resulting from her experience with the man who condemned her daughter to death by having her sacrificed in a previous play. Finally, Hekabe’s attack may also be seen as harking back to her own words in the Iliad when she gives free rein to her hatred for Achilles, her son’s murderer, by saying ‘I wish that into the midst of his liver / I could sink my teeth and eat it; then there would be retaliation / for my son’ (Il. 24.212–214). The hatred she feels now for the man who is responsible for the killing of her daughter and her grandchild is similar to the hatred she felt back then for the murderer of her son.

Another post-Homeric incident involving Odysseus is that of the hóplōn krísis (ὅπλων κρίσις, ‘the judgement of the arms’), a story that stages a dispute between Odysseus and the Greater Ajax about the armour of the dead Achilles, and results in Odysseus’ victory and the subsequent suicide of Ajax. To be precise, the story must have already been part of the traditional epic inventory because Odysseus recounts it in the Odyssey when he meets the ghost of Ajax on the occasion of his trip to the Underworld (Od. 11.541–564; see also 5.309–310), and it is also attested in the Epic Cycle (i.e. a collection of fragmentarily preserved archaic Greek epics serving as prequels and sequels to the Iliad and the Odyssey).Footnote ⁵⁵ However, it is first in the post-Homeric tradition that it finds its narrative heyday. The story was widely known in antiquity and treated by different Greek and Roman authors in different genres and periods, including, for example, a lost tragedy by Aeschylus (frs. 174–178 TrGF), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (12.620–13.398), and another lost tragedy by the Roman dramatist Pacuvius.Footnote ⁵⁶ There were different versions as to who the decisionmakers in allotting Achilles’ armour to Odysseus were; however, in all cases, the decision is the result of Odysseus’ rhetorical skills. The perhaps most far-reaching version is that provided by Quintus of Smyrna (third century AD), author of the Posthomerica, a sequel to Homer’s Iliad, who makes Odysseus resort to a blatant lie by having him claim that he, not Ajax, rescued Achilles’ corpse from the battlefield (PH 5.285–286) – although it is clear that Ajax, not Odysseus, did in fact salvage the dead body (PH 3.217–371).Footnote ⁵⁷ Later in the epic, after Ajax’s suicide, then, Odysseus utters a defence speech (PH 5.574–597) where he hypocritically feigns regret but at the same time dismisses responsibility by blaming fate for what he did, thus in fact only reinforcing his negative character.

The negative development of the Odysseus figure after Homer (beginning with Pindar and culminating in Euripides’ tragedies) is often associated with the rise of the sophists in the classical era; Odysseus is thus seen as a mythical prefiguration of the sophists and the negative stereotypes associated with them.Footnote ⁵⁸ There is, however, also a decidedly narratological side connected to this development. To come back to the Euripidean Odysseus, it is important to note that a major shift of focalization occurs in the passages discussed: in the Homeric Apologoi, it is Odysseus who talks about himself and his adventures in a long, extended direct speech; Euripides, in turn, has others talk about Odysseus and thus has him being focalized through the eyes of his enemies. Yet, while Odysseus’ self-account is to some degree unreliable, the external perspective through the eyes of his archenemies is of course equally subjective. The unreliability of Odysseus’ words is conspicuously taken up again by Quintus of Smyrna, who has Odysseus resort to an upfront lie (and makes him get away with it). Furthermore, the dispute between Ajax and Odysseus structurally inverts the embassy to Achilles from Iliad 9 (§ 2.1): there Odysseus and Ajax were united by the same mission; now they are opponents. Moreover, while Odysseus fails with his rhetoric to convince Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, into rejoining the battle, he succeeds later in defeating Ajax, the second-best of the Achaeans.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Odysseus learns from his mistake after prematurely revealing his identity to Polyphemos (§ 2.1), he similarly improves his rhetoric after the failure in Achilles’ tent and turns it against his previous ally. I think it is symptomatic that (as far as we know) no ancient author ever attempted to continue Odysseus’ direct narration although the Odyssey clearly opens up for a continuation, promising more adventures to come,Footnote ⁶⁰ but instead later authors chose to shift the narrative focus away from Odysseus’ own voice, signalling the transformation of his character from an unreliable self-narrator to a figure defined by the subjective perceptions and judgements of others.

3.1 A Ubiquitous Hero without a Canon

Odysseus is without doubt the most widely travelled character in Greek mythology (and the prototypical traveller per se) – but if there is anyone who could pose a challenge to him, it would be Herakles. As we will see shortly, the most famous son of Zeus was indeed said to have travelled practically anywhere in the then known world – but he was also ‘widely travelled’ in a metaphorical sense: for Herakles is arguably the most famous and widespread, but also the most enigmatic and ambivalent hero in and from classical mythology. Aside from being an infamous monster-slayer and muscleman – the role for which he is known best in today’s popular culture – he was also a tragic sufferer, a comic drunk and glutton, a virtuous Stoic, a Panhellenic national hero, a founder of cities and cults, and even (in later times) an emblem of Jesus Christ. And, as if this was not enough, he constantly oscillated between mortal and immortal perceptions, often occupying a nebulous space between demigod and full deity; he was worshipped partially as one, partially as the other, and occasionally as both simultaneously.Footnote ⁶¹ Herakles’ complex and even paradoxical nature can thus be explained in various terms; however, in relation to – and interaction with – literature and narrative, a narratological analysis appears to be suited best. From a narratological point of view, what is perhaps most noteworthy about Herakles is that unlike figures such as Odysseus and Oedipus (as discussed previously), Herakles was never subject to a comparable degree of canonization. While the stories of and about Odysseus and Oedipus were ‘stabilized’ at an early stage through Homer’s Odyssey and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, respectively – both texts having maintained the status of eternal classics for centuries until today – no canonical text of and about Herakles ever existed that would have had a similar position and corresponding influence. Admittedly, there existed fully fledged accounts of Herakles’ life and deeds in the form of a few (now lost) epics from the late archaic and early classical periods,Footnote ⁶² but these texts never achieved classical or even canonical status. In fact, the most comprehensive accounts of the life and deeds of Herakles come from two much later sources, from Apollodorus’ Library (2.57–180; second/first century BCE) and from Diodorus of Sicily’s Universal History (4.8–53; first century BCE).Footnote ⁶³ Even for the most authoritative nucleus of the Herakles Saga, the âthlos (i.e. the famous Twelve Labours), the first piece of evidence that unequivocally testifies to a canonical number and order of the twelve deeds comes from as late as the mid-fifth century BCE: from the metopes of the Zeus temple in Olympia (erected between c. 472 and 456 BCE). The depictions on the metopes, damaged as they are, are widely known today thanks to their reconstruction drawings from the 1890s:

Figure 1 Reconstruction of the twelve metopes from the Zeus temple in Olympia. Drawings by Max Kühnert, from: Georg Treu (ed.), Die Bildwerke von Olympia in Stein und Thon, vol. 3: Ernst Curtius and Friedrich Adler (eds.), Olympia: Die Ergebnisse der von dem Deutschen Reich veranstalteten Ausgrabung, Berlin: Asher, 1894, table 45. Pictures taken by Silvio Bär in the University of Oslo Library, 14 March 2024. Public domain.

Figure 1Long description

The first metope shows Herakles resting his right foot on the Nemean Lion after having killed it. He is watched by Athene from the left and another unidentified figure from the right. The second metope shows Herakles fighting the nine-headed Hydra. In his right hand, he holds a torch with which he cauterizes the stumps of the severed heads to prevent them from growing back. His left foot attempts to keep the struggling body of the monster down. The third metope shows Herakles handing over the dead Stymphalian Birds to Athene. Athene is sitting on a rock to Herakles’ right and is turning her head towards him. The fourth metope shows Herakles with the Cretan Bull, defeated but not yet fully subdued and still resisting. Herakles uses a nose ring as a bridle and threatens the bull with his club. The fifth metope shows Herakles subduing the Ceryneian Hind, pulling its head back while bracing his right knee against its back. The sixth metope shows Herakles standing over the defeated Amazon queen Hippolyte, who lies stretched out on the ground, supporting herself with her right elbow. Herakles threatens her with his club in his left hand.

The seventh metope shows Herakles carrying the Erymanthian Boar on his shoulders as he approaches Eurystheus, who, out of fear, has hidden himself in a large jar and raises his hands in a pleading gesture. The eighth metope shows Herakles with one of the man-eating mares of Diomedes. Herakles leads the horse on a bridle and threatens it with his club. The ninth metope shows Herakles slaying the three-bodied giant Geryoneus. The metope shows Herakles raising his club to strike, while Geryoneus lies on the ground, stretching out one hand pleadingly toward Herakles. The tenth metope shows Herakles holding the sky, supported by Athene standing to his left, while Atlas stands to his right, carrying the apples of the Hesperides and offering them to Herakles. The eleventh metope shows Herakles pulling the hellhound Kerberos on a leash from the Underworld. Another unidentified figure is present, depicted to the right of Herakles and behind the hellhound. The twelfth metope shows the cleansing of the Augeian Stables by Herakles. On the left, one can see Herakles opening the stable with a crowbar, while Athene stands to the right, giving him instructions.

It is true that ‘[b]y the time the Olympian temple was built’, Herakles’ exploits ‘had been a favourite subject among artists for a couple of centuries’ (Ashmole Reference Ashmole1972: 61), and clearly the metope programme on the Zeus temple must have fulfilled at least a double function, insofar as Herakles served as a figure of identification both for the athletes of the Panhellenic games, the founder of which he was considered to be (as given credit by Pindar in the Tenth Olympian Ode, composed in 476 BCE), and for all the visitors that came from different Greek city states in order to spectate at the Olympic games.Footnote ⁶⁴ So, Herakles was indubitably a character with whom Greeks from any provenance could identify and whose name thus functioned as a Panhellenic identity marker better than that of any other mythical figure.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the other hand, the fact that there is no earlier source testifying to the canonicity of the Dodekathlos must not be underestimated; the late attestation feeds back onto the lack of canonicity of the Herakles Saga in general terms (the fact that there are several allusions and passing references to Herakles already in the Iliad testifies to the old age of the Herakles figure and some of the stories connected to him, but there is no evidence that the Dodekathlos was already canonical at the time of Homer).Footnote ⁶⁶ This absence of canonicity, in turn, holds far-reaching implications for the narrative expansiveness of the Herakles Saga, affording ample opportunity for continual variation and extension of its narratives.

Due to the hero’s Panhellenic nature, Herakles was ubiquitous in ancient Greek culture – and beyond. Like Odysseus, Herakles is a traveller and an explorer, one who does not only reach but even transgresses the boundaries of the inhabited world.Footnote ⁶⁷ And like Odysseus, he is one of the few humans who descends to the Underworld while alive (and returns). His katábasis (κατάβασις, ‘descent’, the technical term for a human descending to the Underworld for a specific purpose) marks Herakles as a liminal figure both in a spatial and an ontological sense: by crossing a boundary that an ordinary human is otherwise unable to cross, he makes himself worthy of his later deification. The first passage that testifies to Herakles’ apotheosis is as old as the Odyssey; most interestingly, it comes from Odysseus’ own katábasis as described in Book 11 (the so-called Nekyia): at the end of his visit to the Underworld, Odysseus encounters Herakles’ eídōlon (εἴδωλον, ‘double’, ‘avatar’); he is described as an intimidating archer with a quiver mirroring his nature as a warrior (lines 601–627).Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition to being trapped in the Underworld, Herakles is also, simultaneously, described as residing on Mount Olympus:

Since antiquity, scholars have regarded lines 602–604 as a later interpolation, arguing that Herakles’ deification could not be as old as the Odyssey and that the two versions of his afterlife were mutually exclusive from a logical perspective.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the first argument can be mitigated by way of reference to iconography: for the deified Herakles is displayed together with his Olympian wife Hebe, the personified goddess of youth, on a Corinthian aryballos that is dated to c. 600 BCE, meaning that, at least if we are prepared to accept a dating of the Odyssey to the later seventeenth century BCE, there is a certain chance that the idea of a deified Herakles may not have been completely unheard of at the time of the composition of the Odyssey.Footnote ⁷⁰ The second point, in turn, finds its counter-argument in a narratological explanation, for what takes place here is a crossover from two otherwise distinct mythical frames: an encounter between a character from the mythical plupast and the protagonist of the actual diegesis, the two characters belonging to two different worlds and different time periods both spatially and temporally. Whereas Odysseus still belongs to the realm of the living, Herakles dwells both in the Underworld and on Mount Olympus. The spatial expansion (‘down’ vs ‘up’) corresponds to the temporal dimension (‘past’ vs ‘present’/‘future’); for Herakles, time and space have, in a way, become one and the same thing. Furthermore, the fact that an ‘echo’ of Herakles still remains in the Underworld while his deified self abides in Heaven is an eternal reminder of his own, previous katábasis (which he mentions in his brief address to Odysseus [lines 623–626]) and its symbolic value relating to the overcoming of death.

However, Herakles’ katábasis and his subsequent apotheosis and admission to Olympus constitute only the climax of an actual tour de force through virtually all of the then known world. And, by travelling, Herakles famously cleanses the uncivilized parts of the world from all sorts of monsters and other evils and thus extends civilization to the farthest corners, while at the same time also founding numerous cities and cults.Footnote ⁷¹ What is intriguing from a narratological perspective is the gradual expansion of Herakles’ spatial circles, and thus of the setting of his doings, as seen in the geographical location of the Dodekathlos: the first six Labours are all located on the Peloponnese, whereas the other half takes the hero farther away to the periphery: first to Crete (the Cretan bull) and to Thrace (the mares of Diomedes), then to the far west (the cattle of Geryon), to the Black Sea (the girdle of the Amazon queen) and to Libya (the apples of the Hesperides), and finally down to the Underworld (the retrieval of the hellhound Kerberos).Footnote ⁷² This geographical expansion also enabled the narrative expansion of Herakles’ achievements, for in between the twelve deeds, more and more adventures, the so-called párerga (πάρεργα, ‘aside-deeds’), were inserted. To name just three examples, Diodorus’ account features multiple such additional adventures, including major enterprises like Herakles’ participation in the divine Battle against the Giants (4.15.1); Euripides’ pro-satyric tragicomedy Alkestis (480–485/4 BCE) shows the hero on a stopover at the completion of his eighth Labour (the mares of Diomedes) rescuing Alkestis from the Underworld (an adventure which, in a manner of speaking, provides a foretaste of the last Labour, the fetching of Kerberos); and according to Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic Argonautica (third century BCE), Herakles interrupts his fourth Labour (the Erymanthian boar) in order to join the quest for the Golden Fleece.Footnote ⁷³ These examples demonstrate that the párerga were by no means minor or trivial, but of a global nature, at times even reaching cosmic dimensions – which, in turn, feeds back onto Herakles’ destined deification (there was a widespread tradition in Greek mythology according to which the Olympians could win the Battle against the Giants only with the help of a human; the fact that they chose Herakles for this task shows his proximity to the divine world already before his apotheosis).Footnote ⁷⁴ Admittedly, such in-between multiplications of a hero’s life deeds were not restricted to Herakles; poets would also amplify the achievements of other heroes like Theseus, Perseus and Jason,Footnote ⁷⁵ but there can be no doubt that Herakles ‘beats them all’ – or, as Diodorus puts it, ‘as regards the magnitude of the deeds which he accomplished, it is generally agreed that he has been handed down as one who surpassed all men of whom memory from the beginning of time has brought down an account’ (4.8.1).Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, to summarize, the vast geographical scope of Herakles’ travels, coupled with the inherent expansiveness of his life and exploits receptive to new elements and expansions, resulted in a near-infinite narrative proliferation of the Herakles Saga.

3.2 Different ‘Heraklesses’ in Different Literary Genres

Herakles’ narrative ubiquity is also reflected by the hero’s presence in different literary genres and media: Herakles is not only a transtextual – or transmedial, or plurimedial – character, he is also highly transgeneric, manifesting himself (inter alia) in epic, tragedy, comedy, epinician, philosophical literature and political discourse.Footnote ⁷⁷ I here focus on the epic and the comic Herakles, and on the crossing of the two Herakles types between these two genres. Herakles appears already in the Homeric epics, thirteen times in the Iliad and four times in the Odyssey.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, he does not form part of the diegetic level of the Iliad and the Odyssey because he belongs to an earlier generation of heroes that was active before the Trojan enterprise. Instead, all references to Herakles, made either by the primary or a secondary narrator, constitute external analepses relating back to events that took place before the story time of the Homeric epics. In other words, Herakles in the Homeric epics belongs to the ‘epic plupast’ (Grethlein Reference Grethlein, Marincola, Llewellyn-Jones and Maciver2012: 15), that is, the recent past that is part of the epic memory of the Homeric characters – a past which, in turn, constitutes the plupast for Homer’s audience. The only moment when Herakles appears in the actual diegesis of Homer’s epics is in Book 11 of the Odyssey on the occasion of Odysseus’ katábasis, as discussed above (§ 3.1), and while the remaining Odyssean references to the hero are negligible in terms of quantity, they are quite significant in the Iliad. It is thus clear that Herakles was firmly anchored in the audience’s horizon of knowledge about the mythical past and the world of a ‘time before time’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In this context, it must also be noted that the Iliadic references to Herakles are dispersed relatively regularly over the entire epic, which, as I would argue, indicates that he is meant to be evoked and remembered consistently. Moreover, in most of the cases, he is focalized through a secondary narrator who, in one way or another, uses Herakles to establish a connection to the epic plupast. For example, Dione consoles her daughter Aphrodite after Diomedes has injured her by telling her stories about how Hera and Hades once were wounded by Herakles (Il. 5.381–404), thus evoking a time when mortals (or at least demigods) took more liberties with the gods. Athene reminds Zeus of how she once helped Herakles during his Labours for the sake of Zeus, arguing that Zeus should now return the favour by ceasing to help the Achaeans in battle (Il. 8.357–369); old Nestor – the quintessentially grumpy old man – tells young Patroklos about how Herakles killed all his brothers when they were young, only to spare him alone (Il. 11.690–693). And, Achilles compares himself with Herakles when he attempts to console his mother Thetis by saying that ‘not even the powerful Herakles escaped the doom [of death] / although he was dearest to king Zeus, the son of Kronos’ (Il. 18.117–118). In all these (and several other) cases, Herakles serves a model function, but he is also depicted in a gloomy light, which makes him stand out as a highly ambiguous character.Footnote ⁸⁰

The early-epic Herakles is certainly more than the brutish monster-slayer and muscleman who appeals to the lower classes (the Homeric epics, especially the Iliad, underscore the values of the upper classes),Footnote ⁸¹ but his violent nature is nevertheless a leitmotif in the Iliad. This becomes evident not least through several allusions to the story complex of Laomedon: Laomedon, father of Priam, once hired Apollo and Poseidon to build a wall around the city of Troy in exchange for his immortal horses – but after the two gods had constructed the wall, Laomedon denied them payment. Angered by this deception, Poseidon sent a sea monster to plague Troy; Laomedon offered his horses to whoever would kill the monster, and Herakles took it upon himself to complete the task, but then was denied payment by Laomedon, too, and therefore he destroyed Troy for revenge.Footnote ⁸² The story is never recounted in full in the Iliad, but bits and pieces of it are interspersed across the epic.Footnote ⁸³ These repeated allusions to a story complex that resulted in the first destruction of Troy can thus serve as prolepses to the impending second destruction of Troy – which, in turn, lies beyond the diegetic frame of the Iliad. In other words, the allusions to the Laomedon story complex are external analepses, yet they serve a proleptic function. Furthermore, Herakles’ ambiguity comes to the fore here, too, as he serves as a helper and saviour, but at the same time also displays his aggressive nature again.

When we move from epic to comedy, we find a completely different Herakles type: instead of the violent and ‘dead serious’ cleanser and saviour, we are confronted with a jocular drunk and glutton who constituted a stock character in classical comedy from the fifth and fourth century. The most famous example is his appearance in the comedy The Frogs by Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 386 BCE), first performed in Athens in 405 BCE; at the beginning of this play, Dionysos tries to have a serious conversation with his half-brother, yet Herakles can only think of sex and food (lines 55–62). Another well-known example is Euripides’ tragicomedy Alkestis, in which Herakles has a cameo appearance when he enters the stage drunk, thus presenting the comic version of himself, but becomes sober at once when he learns of the serious situation and consequently offers to return Alkestis from the Underworld (lines 747–802). And, from Epicharmus (c. 550–c. 460 BCE), the founder of Doric-Sicilian comedy, a fragment survives that presents Herakles as the prototypical adēphágos (ἀδηφάγος, ‘overeater’) in a completely exaggerated manner:

Unfortunately, most passages that feature this type of Herakles come from authors like Phrynichos, Kratinos and Alexis, whose works only survive in fragments.Footnote ⁸⁴ Therefore, it may indeed be justified to ‘[call] for caution in making dogmatic statements about the comic [Herakles]’ (Wilkins Reference Wilkins2021: 317). Nevertheless, it seems clear that on the whole, voracity, inebriation and carnal desire were the major characteristics of Herakles in comedy – or, to put it more broadly, of Herakles when placed in a comic context.

Scholars have attempted to interpret the comic Herakles as a satirical sublimation of ritual practices that involved shared meals (consisting of meat, particularly beef) in honour of the hero.Footnote ⁸⁵ Optionally, his appetite could also be viewed as mirroring his role as a cleanser and saviour, as the target of his cleansing were often wild animals – which, in comedy, he would simply devour instead of killing.Footnote ⁸⁶ On the other side, Hsu (Reference Hsu2021: 131–172) reads the comic Herakles as a carnivalesque contortion of the violent hero – a contortion that would help the audience diminish their fear of Herakles’ aggression. Irrespective of which explanation we wish to follow, there is always a transfer from one area to another involved. From a narratological perspective, the most fascinating aspect is the crossovers from the comic Herakles into epic. The earliest such example comes from a fragment of Panyassis of Halicarnassus (early fifth century BCE), author of an epic called Heracleia that focused on a renarration of the Dodekathlos in fourteen books and a total of c. 9000 hexameters.Footnote ⁸⁷ This fragment (fr. 12 Matthews = fr. 19 West) shows a host (commonly identified as Eurytos of Oichalia, whose daughter Iole Herakles claimed as his wife) encouraging his guest to continue drinking:

Due to the fragmentary state of the passage and the lack of context, many aspects of its interpretation remain unclear;Footnote ⁸⁸ what is clear, though, is the crossover from comedy to epic and the surprise effect arising from it. Encouraging others to drink is a stock motif in drinking songs and symposiastic literature and can by and of itself be seen as a comic inversion of the serious battle exhortation that is at home in the epic genre. Furthermore, the cross fertilization of the two genres is spelt out explicitly in line 4, where ‘the man who is quick at the feast’ is ironically equated with the one who is ‘quick in war’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Another case of such a crossover can be found in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, where Herakles is one of the Argonauts, but leaves the expedition early towards the end of Book 1 in search of his lover Hylas after he has been abducted by a lake nymph.Footnote ⁹⁰ Several passages in the Argonautica show the comic side of Herakles: his first appearance is staged in a burlesque manner, as he is described arriving just in time, carrying the Erymanthian Boar on his shoulders, sweating and panting (1.122–132). This description introduces Herakles as an athletic, but intellectually limited strongman – a motif that recurs, for example, when he breaks his oar (1.1164–1171) without realizing what has happened and thus ‘looking round baffled’ (line 1171). Further, the motif of the gluttonous (and therefore overweight) Herakles is introduced when upon embarkment, he is (together with his buddy Ankaios) placed in the middle of the Argo to prevent the ship from sinking (1.394–400).Footnote ⁹¹ Finally, towards the end of the epic, when Herakles no longer participates in the Argonautic enterprise but is still remembered by his fellow Argonauts, the comic motif of Herakles as a drunkard is jocularly blended with the converse idea of the abstentious (‘Stoic’) Herakles (a motif that was prevalent in philosophical literature) when he is reported to be overdrinking on water (4.1447–1449). What is most interesting in narratological terms, though, is the way these generic crossovers are coupled with an inversion of Herakles’ narrative situation as compared to the Homeric epics: in the Iliad, Herakles does not belong to the actual diegesis, but he is part of the epic plupast, evoked and remembered by way of external analepses; this epic plupast, in turn, provides the diegetic frame of the Argonautica, such that Herakles becomes a protagonist in the diegesis there. However, by having Herakles leave the diegetic frame early so that he henceforth is remembered only in the metadiegesis, Apollonios recovers the Iliadic situation to a certain degree and thus plays on the narrative technique of his major epic model, Homer.Footnote ⁹² We can thus state, in summary, that Apollonios makes the most of Herakles’ narrative potential by exploiting his transgeneric capacities to a maximum and at the same time using and adapting the characteristics of his narrative situation as found in the Homeric epics for the sake of his own intertextual games with Homer.

4.1 The Most Beautiful: Divine, but Undescribed

While Herakles is world famous for his physical strength, Helen has gone down in history for her exceptional beauty. The violent muscleman and the fair maiden do not seem to have much in common at first sight; however, it may be worth taking a second look. The Attic orator Isocrates (436–338 BCE), in his epideictic speech Encomium of Helen (dated to c. 370 BCE), compares Helen and Herakles as follows:

Not only are Helen and Herakles children of Zeus and hence half siblings, they both stand out among the numerous offspring of their father. Helen is special insofar as she is the only semi-divine daughter of Zeus – Zeus otherwise only fathered male children with immortal women, as Isocrates emphasizes. Herakles, in turn, distinguishes himself from the other sons of Zeus by his apotheosis at the end of his life. Furthermore, both Helen and Herakles represent superlatives: Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, and Herakles excels through insuperable physical strength – so much that, as Diodorus reports, Zeus decided after his birth that he was not going to father any more demigods because none would be able to surpass Herakles (4.14.4). Isocrates suggests that physical beauty and physical strength are similar in nature because those who possess these qualities are able to exert almost uncontrollable power over others. Finally, there is another, most crucial, point, left unmentioned by Isocrates, namely that both Helen and Herakles were venerated in cult, whereby they often oscillated between mortal and immortal perceptions.Footnote ⁹⁴ Helen and her husband Menelaos were worshipped as local deities in the Menelaion in the region of Sparta, as ancient sources indicate (Hdt. 6.61 and Paus. 3.15.3), and on the isle of Rhodes, there was a cult of Helen Dendritis (‘Helen of the Tree’, Paus. 3.19.9–10), which suggests a role of hers as a local fertility goddess.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the Odyssey, in turn, though she is not presented as a divinity proper, there is a clear sense that Helen is considerably more than an ordinary woman when she is shown pouring a magic potion into her guests’ drinks in order to induce oblivion (Od. 4.219–430)Footnote ⁹⁶ and when it is prophesied to Menelaos that he will be dwelling in the Elysium after his death because he was especially close to Zeus thanks to his marriage to Helen (Od. 4.561–570).

Since antiquity, Helen has been known and referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world. In this capacity, she is, of course, the favourite of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love (exactly as wily Odysseus is the favourite of Athene, the goddess of wisdom). In a famous encounter between the two in Book 3 of the Iliad, Aphrodite approaches Helen in the disguise of an old woman, but Helen recognizes her nevertheless ‘as she noticed the graceful neck of the goddess, / her enchanting breast and her radiant eyes’ (lines 396–397). The fact that Helen recognizes Aphrodite ‘through’ her disguise is commensurate with an established epic trope according to which deities are never fully capable of hiding their divine nature even when they have transformed themselves into another being (human or animal); at the same time, though, it also demonstrates the emotional proximity between the goddess and her protégé. Aphrodite then urges Helen to have sex with Paris (lines 390–394), but Helen refuses to comply and instead scolds Aphrodite for being responsible for all the calamities of the war and tells her to leave her alone (lines 399–412). This, in turn, angers Aphrodite, and she warns Helen that she should not provoke her, ‘lest I become angry and give up on you / and start to hate you as hotly as I’ve just starting loving you now’ (lines 414–415). As a result, Helen is frightened and complies without further objection (lines 418–420). This passage shows that despite their common ground, the distance between the mortal woman and the immortal goddess is ultimately unbridgeable.Footnote ⁹⁷

On the other hand, in her capacity as a local deity in Sparta, Helen appears not only to have been venerated as a goddess proper, but to even have adopted the role of Aphrodite: Herodotus recounts the story of the Spartan king Demaratus (floruit c. 515–491 BCE), whose ugly mother, when she was a child, was daily brought to the shrine of Helen by her nurse; the nurse prayed to Helen that she remove the child’s ugliness, until one day Helen appeared and transformed the girl, announcing that she was going to be ‘the most beautiful of all women in Sparta’ (Hdt. 6.61). The ability to bestow beauty onto someone is a prerogative of Aphrodite; consequently, the story suggests that Helen assumed Aphrodite’s role in Sparta. At the same time, the story blends the idea of Helen equalling Aphrodite with the canonical idea of Helen as ‘the most beautiful’, since Demaratus’ mother is made ‘the most beautiful’ by Helen. Another well-known anecdote that shows Helen acting like a deity proper is that of the blinding of the poet Stesichorus (c. 632–c. 556 BCE). Stesichorus was the author of a long poem that treated the entire story of Helen in a way that was, apparently, not flattering to her; consequently, she blinded him, and only after he had revoked his accusations in a corrected version (the famous ‘Palinode’), his eyesight was restored (Plat. Phaedr. 243b and Isocr. 10.64). Almost all of Stesichorus’ work is lost and it is therefore difficult to relate the anecdote to the poet’s actual writings;Footnote ⁹⁸ however, what is relevant for our purposes is the motif of the blinding and its implications. We may follow Blondell (Reference Blondell2013: 117), who interprets the blinding as an ‘emasculating gesture’, but I do not believe that the gender aspect is predominant here. Rather, the story combines two known mythical motifs: for one, it takes up the practice of blinding as a cruel form of punishment, best known from the story of Oedipus, as discussed previously (§ 1.3). For another, it inverts a known motif that combines blinding and poetic inspiration, best known from the Odyssey, where it is stated of the singer Demodokos that ‘the Muse loved him beyond [measure], and she gave him good as well as bad: / she deprived him of his eyesight, but gave him sweet song’ (Od. 8.63–64). The Muse grants the art of singing to whomever she wishes; the art is granted unrequested, yet a high price must be paid for it all the same; hence the topos of the blind bard.Footnote ⁹⁹ The story of Helen blinding Stesichorus for punishment and restoring his eyesight after he composed his apology inverts this motif and thus makes Helen an ‘anti-Muse’. Even more important, though, is the sheer fact that it testifies to Helen’s divine status, for while anyone can blind anyone, only a deity can restore someone’s eyesight.

The reader may at this point wonder what Helen – the most beautiful woman in the world, who in parts was also venerated as a goddess, at times even took Aphrodite’s place – looked like. However, our ancient texts remain silent in this respect, for Greek writers either eschew descriptions of Helen or describe her in purely stereotypical terms. In the ancient world, beauty was not something that was ‘in the eye of the beholder’; rather, beauty standards were absolute, and thus the idea that once upon a time there had been a woman who objectively surpassed all others was not just a rhetorical hyperbole, but had a Sitz im Leben both in the world of mythology and outside. Consequently, the cultural norm does not leave room for individual beauty and hence not for lavish ekphrases of Helen’s looks either – to put it bluntly, saying that she was the most beautiful was sufficient for the Greeks.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In iconography, Helen is frequently depicted with attributes typically associated with beauty care and grooming. This Apulian red-figure bell-krater shows her opening her cedar chest with her left hand and holding a mirror in her right hand:

Figure 2 Helen and Paris. Side A from an Apulian (Tarentum?) red-figure bell-krater by the Painter of Stockholm 1999, dated to c. 380–370 BC.

Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikpedia, public domain.

The mirror is the most widespread emblem of female beauty in Greek vase painting.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Helen’s beauty is, in a manner of speaking, expressed metonymically in this and similar depictions, as it is transferred from her physical appearance to the mirror which reflects her appearance. Mutatis mutandis, another form of metonymy can also be found in many texts; for example, when Helen, in Book 3 of the Iliad, approaches the tower where the Trojan elders sit and watch the battleground, they, upon catching a glimpse of her, start whispering to each other:

The noun translated as ‘disgrace’ here (némesis, νέμεσις) is a strong term for anything that causes or deserves indignation or retribution;Footnote ¹⁰² the adverb translated as ‘terribly’ (ainôs, αἰνῶς) conveys essentially the same double meaning as its English equivalent does, expressing both admiration for and fear about the likeness between Helen and – so the passage insinuates – Aphrodite. Helen is so beautiful that a perennial war with countless casualties on both sides appears to be warranted, something that excites the Trojan elders as much as it frightens them. Feminist readings seeing Helen as a target of a ‘male gaze’ coupled with ‘male anxieties’ of course suggest themselves in relation to such a passage.Footnote ¹⁰³ In addition, there is also a narratological aspect arising from the absence of any descriptions of Helen’s beauty. The prevalent idea of an absolute beauty standard may explain this absence to some extent, but there is nevertheless a tension between the expectations of the readers, who are waiting for an ekphrasis of Helen’s looks at some point, and the constant lack of a fulfilment of this expectation. The fact that no ancient author ever wrote an extended ekphrasis of Helen’s beauty constitutes a major narrative ellipsis. Several centuries after Homer, in Euripides’ Trojan Women, Hekabe warns Menelaos about the dangerous effect that Helen will unavoidably have on him when he sees her again after the capture of Troy:

Aside from serving as an implied stage direction and from attracting the audience’s attention, Hekabe’s words also hark back to the Odyssean passage discussed above that shows Helen as a (divine?) figure capable of witchcraft. Along a slightly different line, I would argue that Hekabe’s words can also be read metatextually: she attempts to deter Menelaos from looking at Helen as much as the theatre audience (and we, the readers of Greek literature) have been denied ‘looking’ at her because of the absence of any descriptions of her appearance. It is of course true that the audience in the theatre is about to actually see her – a fact that may potentially thwart my suggested interpretation – but we must not forget that the actors wore masks; hence, Helen’s beauty was a matter of pure imagination, probably only symbolized by a wig suggesting long hair, a stereotypical attribute of female beauty.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

We noticed previously (§ 2.1) that without Odysseus’ rhetorical failures, the Homeric epics would not exist, or only in a rather truncated form. The same is even truer for Helen, as she is the actual cause of the Trojan War and all its consequences and hence ‘also causes its commemoration in song and story, making her a kind of Muse, associated with poetic immortality’ (Blondell Reference Blondell2013: ix). The Homeric narrator makes this connection abundantly clear by introducing Helen into his epic as the actual weaver of his text: for Helen’s first appearance in the Iliad – and hence her first appearance in Western literature – shows her weaving a piece of cloth that displays the battle between the Trojans and the Achaeans (Il. 3.125–128). This piece of cloth is, very obviously, nothing else than a reflection of the Iliad itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But since we are reading the Iliad, we do not need a lavish description of what is depicted on this piece of cloth. We may, however, feel lured into believing that a corresponding description of Helen herself might follow – only to be disappointed. Taking Helen’s inspirational power into consideration, it is all the more surprising (if not in fact contradictory) that she should never have been the object of any major ekphrasis herself, either in the Homeric epics or later. There is an astonishing stability as far as this point is concerned – in contrast to the numerous narrative reappraisals to which Helen’s story was otherwise subjected.

4.2 Narrative Reappraisals Taken to Their Extremes

Unlike in Herakles’ case, the storytelling of Helen is not a matter of constant narrative proliferation and generic crossover but, rather, of perpetual rethinking and rearguing. We saw the numerous changes and detours that both Odysseus and Herakles took in their development through the centuries and across genres; however, there is probably no other transtextual character from Greek mythology that underwent such profound changes and was subject to such constant reappraisal as the proverbially ‘beautiful Helen’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the Iliad, she is for the most part presented in a neutral, at times even positive, light – if we disregard one negative comment by Achilles, who once scorns her for ‘causing one to shudder’ (Il. 19.325).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, in the post-Homeric tradition, poets, historians and orators oscillate between blaming and defending Helen, between regarding her as the (sole or major) cause of the Trojan War and excusing her from this accusation. The archaic Greek poet Alcaeus (c. 625–c. 580 BCE), in one of his poems (fr. 42 Voigt), uses her as a negative counterpoint to Achilles’ mother Thetis, thus polarizing two female figures as opposing objects of praise and blame, whereas Alcaeus’ contemporary Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 BCE) portrays her in a more positive light (fr. 16 Voigt).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon (first performed in Athens in 458 BCE), the chorus scolds her as a ‘ship-capturer, man-capturer, city-capturer’ (lines 689–690), employing untranslatable wordplay on the name of Helen and the verbal root hel- (ἑλ-, ‘to capture’).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ On the other hand, the most famous defence of Helen is the Encomium of Helen by the sophist and rhetorician Gorgias (c. 483–c. 375), composed several decades before Isocrates’ encomium (§ 4.1). In this showpiece of sophistic rhetoric, Gorgias identifies four potential reasons as to why Helen may have left Menelaos and followed Paris to Troy: what happened may have been the will of the gods or fate, she may have been abducted by force, or she may have left Menelaos willingly, either persuaded by Paris’ words or overwhelmed by erotic desire for the young prince. Gorgias thereafter argues that no matter which may have been the true cause for Helen’s escape, she can be excused for what she did in any case – not only if she fell victim to the will of the gods, to fate or to violence, but also if either the third or the fourth option should be the cause, because both the power of words and the power of love are so almighty that someone who falls for them cannot be blamed and should therefore be freed from disgrace.Footnote ¹¹⁰

What is most astonishing to see is the fact that Helen is hardly ever given a voice in all these debates. The debate is always about her, but she never actually talks in her own defence. In a sense, her silence equals the lack of descriptions of her beauty as discussed above (§ 4.1); in plain terms, we are neither informed about what Helen really looks like nor do we ever hear her speak for her own cause. An extreme case in this respect is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where Helen is not only silenced but even absent – yet she is constantly present in the wings as an unseen character, because reference to her is made on several occasions.Footnote ¹¹¹ There are, however, two notable exceptions to this general silence: on one occasion in the Iliad, Helen blames herself heavily, in an attack of self-loathing, as an ‘ill-contriving, cold bitch’ (Il. 6.344), thus accepting responsibility for the Trojan War.Footnote ¹¹² At the same time, this self-accusation contradicts the idea of Helen as a Muse, the role that appears to be intended for her according to her first appearance in Il. 3.125–128 (§ 4.1). In contrast to this flamboyant self-blame stands Helen’s appearance in Euripides’ Trojan Women: there, she blames Paris and those who reared him in a longish defence speech that amounts to a virtual invective (lines 914–944). This defence speech looks back at Gorgias’ encomium, transferring the defence from a hypothetical courtroom defence to an on-stage self-defence, while simultaneously also inverting the gender roles from a male advocate to a female self-advocate.Footnote ¹¹³ At the same time, though, the speech also inverts Helen’s acrimonious self-blame as we find it in Book 6 of the Iliad.

Furthermore, with Stesichorus’ Palinode (the recantation of the previous accusations against Helen, as mentioned before, § 4.1), another, most unique, twist is introduced into the Helen myth, namely the claim that Helen never went to Troy at all, but instead spent the entire time during which the Trojan War took place in Egypt. The story is later adopted (and adapted) by Herodotus in Book 2 of the Histories (2.112–120) and, most prominently, by Euripides in his tragedy Helen (first produced in 412 BCE).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Classical mythology is a permeable system that is always open to variants and variations, as seen in the example of the different traditions surrounding Oedipus’ destiny after his discovery (§ 1.3); and authors can consequently play on the tension between readers’ expectations and potentially differing outcomes, as in the example of Agamemnon’s destiny, which Homer uses to sow doubt onto the expected positive outcome of Odysseus’ homecoming in the Odyssey (§ 1.2). However, despite all the permeability of the mythical system, such an extensive rewriting that turns everything upside down is absolutely unique; it does not only introduce a new variant of a story detail into a story complex with an otherwise stable nucleus but it jeopardizes an entire Sagenkreis and with it the credibility of numerous authors, including Homer. In order to preserve the narrative integrity of these texts and their tradition, the parallel story introduces the motif of Helen’s eídōlon as a narrative ‘safety net’: the real Helen, so is the claim, did not follow Paris to Troy, but she sailed to Egypt and remained there for the entire duration of the Trojan War; instead, a copy of her was taken to Troy – a copy so perfect that it fooled everyone, including Paris, for ten years. Admittedly, this narrative trick ridicules the protagonists of the narrative frame of Homer’s epic, but at the same time it preserves the canonical version of the story and the texts that adhere to it.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The parallel story of ‘Egyptian Helen’ and the introduction of the eídōlon motif is an extreme, yet highly instructive example that demonstrates the possibilities as well as the limits inherent to the narrative potential of mythology. Euripides takes this narrative reappraisal to its extreme by staging both Helen figures, the real ‘Egyptian Helen’ and the forged ‘Trojan Helen’, and thus draws attention to the various binary oppositions that follow from this juxtaposition of the two figures that are, and at the same time are not, identical.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Whereas Helen is an unseen character in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (and elsewhere), she is seen double in Euripides’ Helen. There is probably no other mythical figure that is both staged and removed, voiced and silenced, rethought and reappraised as much as ‘beautiful Helen’.