The Affairs of the Gods, or, How Could Their Victims Have Been So Clueless?

There are two ways to approach questions like this:
1) The Events of the Myths Really Happened
2) The Events of the Myths Are Stories/Propaganda/Explanations/Metaphors/etc

If you've been hanging around me or my blog(s) for any length of time, you probably now that the fiction writer in me favors the first approach -- and imagining these characters and trying to discover their motivations and understand the choices they might have made is where a lot of the fun of writing about them comes from. So with this question, it's only natural that I'd start with the more literal perspective. (It's more just more interesting guys!)

The Short Answer:
I suspect that they were less clueless and more just uninformed.

The Long Answer:

Here's the thing. Today, if some king's daughter were kidnapped by a really pretty bull, the whole world would know about it. Or at least the part of the world that pays attention to that kind of information, anyway. (She'd also be found and returned home, probably, rather than dumped in another country to marry into their royal bloodline, but I digress.) Back in Europa's time? It was probably more of a quiet, regional event. Why should she expect the bull of being a god in disguise, intent on stealing her away, if she'd never heard of Zeus pulling that kind of stunt?* Maybe, possibly, some kind of rumor of Zeus coming down as a shower of gold to... make sweet love? to Danae** might have been making the rounds somewhere in the Peloponnese, but it is REALLY unlikely the story would have made it as far as Phoenicia, where Europa was hanging out with her maiden friends, enjoying the attentions of a particularly tame bull.

Now maybe these two examples are cheating, because both of these women were earlier victims of Zeus' proclivities, but the fact remains that there are no guarantees that any one of the  importuned women who followed would have had extensive knowledge of the god's other exploits. There's a couple of exceptions of course. Alcmene, for example, was the granddaughter of Perseus, so the story of Great-Grandmother Danae could easily have been part of family lore before her run in with Zeus and the subsequent birth of Heracles. But since Zeus took the form of Alcmene's own husband, Amphitryon, there is really no possibly way that forewarning might have helped her avoid his attentions.

It's easy for us to see all these stories laid out neatly and chronologically, with repeated themes of Zeus putting one over on some poor beautiful girl, and wonder why these people couldn't figure it out. But the truth is, those stories weren't assembled into the written word at all until centuries after the fact. If you consider that the Trojan War was basically the end of the Age of Heroes, and all the philandering that entailed, then the majority of these events would have taken place during the Greek Bronze Age -- the Mycenaean and Minoan periods. At the end of which, civilization kind of collapsed and the Greeks not-so-promptly forgot how to write for several hundred years.

Oral history is a lot more limited, regionally, though Homer provides us with evidence that even oral stories could be spread -- if the bard thought the audience would be interested. But if he didn't?

Well. It sure makes me appreciate the bounty of the internet for self-education, that's for sure.


*Europa was mother to Minos, which means she was at least one, maybe two generations before Theseus and Heracles.

**Danae was the mother of Perseus, who was himself the very FIRST of the Greek Heroes. He did not actually ride Pegasus, and the Kraken is a sea monster out of Scandinavia. Just for the record.

Kinship and Greek Heroes

I should be forbidden from camera-ing
so many crooked shots of doom.
(Farnese Hercules at The National Gallery)

One of the things I find really fascinating in Classical Mythology is the familial bonds between heroes and how little emphasis is placed upon them. It's so strange to think of these other heroes as siblings and cousins to one another. So often we don't have any understanding of those bonds in the stories that surround them. Pirithous and Theseus are an exception, in some respects, since we know from more than one source that they were like brothers -- but their relationship doesn't have anything to do with their shared lineage or the idea that they're cousins. They bond over their perceptions of one another as honorable and equals in strength and cunning and bravery.

We never hear about Heracles calling up his half-brothers or sisters, or really forming relationships with his blood-relatives on his divine side. Sure, he might have buddied up with Theseus to hit on the Amazons, and there's that whole Jason and the Argonauts thing, about which we will not speak, but even when Euripides showcases the friendship between Theseus and Heracles, there isn't any mention of their familial bond. They were friends and heroes in arms, but not explicitly spoken of as cousins, either.

Of course some of the heroes are from different generations, and not at all contemporaries -- like Pirithous and Perseus, for example, or Heracles and Perseus* -- so in that case, it's a lot less strange that there's no mention of any relationship they might have shared. But Pirithous and Heracles were contemporaries AND brothers, and I'm not sure I know a single myth in which they cross paths at all. So as I read, and write, I wonder: what might Pirithous have thought of his famous brothers, living and dead? Did he consider them kin at all? And if not, why not?

*Perseus is actually an ancestor of Heracles as well as his brother. Alcmene, Heracles' mother was Perseus' granddaughter. So in this case, one would think there would be even more of an acknowledgment of that family connection. But. Not so much. Then again maybe being the great-grandfather and brother of Perseus crossed some incestual line of weirdness for the Greeks, so they just kind of tried to ignore it.