I gave a good faith attempt to think of good examples of myths that encapsulate eternal and valuable truths. But unfortunately, instead of good examples, many counterexamples immediately burst into my mind. Many myths depict essentially misogynistic views of women: Eve, Pandora, Circe, Helen, the Sirens. Many myths show how dangerous it is to anger the gods, sometimes for almost nothing—such as being noisy in the Mesopotamian flood myth, or through hubris: Babel, Icarus, and many others. Or they suggest that to appease the gods it is acceptable to sacrifice animals or people, including one’s own child: Isaac’s sacrifice (stopped at the last second), Iphigenia’s sacrifice...
Myths might hold wisdom within the narrow context of a specific culture, but eternal truths? I’m dubious.
I think it’s fair that while not “eternal” some stories and myths hold concepts about very basic facts of human psychology that keep being relevant because they’re just emergent from our biology and/or basic game theory. We still talk about “sour grapes” to refer to someone simply deciding to disguise their need to settle for less than they can achieve with disdain—that dates back to Aesop’s fables.
Also some of these are bundles of multiple things at once. I think for example the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice isn’t quite as straightforward—Agamemnon overall as a man does not come off as pious and righteous, he is arrogant and prideful instead. It’s hard to fully parse what a Greek’s opinion of that story would have been overall, but Agamemnon is also the same guy who pisses off Achilles with his greed (which fair, was about a slave… but neither man was exactly an abolitionist here), and eventually gets murked by his wife in cahoots with her lover because of that sacrifice. And Agamemnon in general was the last of a long cursed lineage that basically kept going through these cycles of murder and revenge because of the sins of their ancestors. He’s not a positive model and the sacrifice might as well have been seen as an act of prideful selfishness on his part, not unlike Stannis Baratheon’s sacrifice of his daughter in Game of Thrones which is modelled after it.
That whole debacle of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra, and Orestes leaves no one looking like the good guy. The moral message of that story is extremely muddled to me.
In the Euripides play, I think the moral message is fairly clear: sacrificing an innocent for the greater good (as Agamemnon wants to do) is a vile, cowardly act, but sacrificing yourself for the greater good (as Iphigenia volunteers in the end) is heroic.
I think this a quite good and maybe nontrivial moral message, but I wouldn’t classify a play written by a professional playwright in the highly civilized Athens as a myth. And I don’t know if we have good records of what the older, folk version of the myth said, and whether it had a positive message.
That’s also the thing, myths like these are often canvases that get riffed on for various purposes. It’s hardly a new thing, their own cultures were doing it already from the get go. “Myths” aren’t singular monolithic things, they’re pieces of culture that can be rearranged in many ways.
But the Oresteia of Aeschylus, as far as I remember, very clearly implies that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were wrong to try to punish Agamemnon. I do not think Aeschylus concedes that Agamemnon did anything wrong.
Euripides was famously more “progressive” than Aeschylus, to the point of getting mocked about it by the more conservative Aristophanes IIRC. Athens had its own politics (lots of it!) and while history may not be an exact circle, sometimes it rhymes pretty hard.
Maybe it’s just like modern soap operas or reality shows, and the point is just schadenfreude. “Man I am sure happy I’m not any one of those horrible people”.
I gave a good faith attempt to think of good examples of myths that encapsulate eternal and valuable truths. But unfortunately, instead of good examples, many counterexamples immediately burst into my mind. Many myths depict essentially misogynistic views of women: Eve, Pandora, Circe, Helen, the Sirens. Many myths show how dangerous it is to anger the gods, sometimes for almost nothing—such as being noisy in the Mesopotamian flood myth, or through hubris: Babel, Icarus, and many others. Or they suggest that to appease the gods it is acceptable to sacrifice animals or people, including one’s own child: Isaac’s sacrifice (stopped at the last second), Iphigenia’s sacrifice...
Myths might hold wisdom within the narrow context of a specific culture, but eternal truths? I’m dubious.
I think it’s fair that while not “eternal” some stories and myths hold concepts about very basic facts of human psychology that keep being relevant because they’re just emergent from our biology and/or basic game theory. We still talk about “sour grapes” to refer to someone simply deciding to disguise their need to settle for less than they can achieve with disdain—that dates back to Aesop’s fables.
Also some of these are bundles of multiple things at once. I think for example the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice isn’t quite as straightforward—Agamemnon overall as a man does not come off as pious and righteous, he is arrogant and prideful instead. It’s hard to fully parse what a Greek’s opinion of that story would have been overall, but Agamemnon is also the same guy who pisses off Achilles with his greed (which fair, was about a slave… but neither man was exactly an abolitionist here), and eventually gets murked by his wife in cahoots with her lover because of that sacrifice. And Agamemnon in general was the last of a long cursed lineage that basically kept going through these cycles of murder and revenge because of the sins of their ancestors. He’s not a positive model and the sacrifice might as well have been seen as an act of prideful selfishness on his part, not unlike Stannis Baratheon’s sacrifice of his daughter in Game of Thrones which is modelled after it.
That whole debacle of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra, and Orestes leaves no one looking like the good guy. The moral message of that story is extremely muddled to me.
In the Euripides play, I think the moral message is fairly clear: sacrificing an innocent for the greater good (as Agamemnon wants to do) is a vile, cowardly act, but sacrificing yourself for the greater good (as Iphigenia volunteers in the end) is heroic.
I think this a quite good and maybe nontrivial moral message, but I wouldn’t classify a play written by a professional playwright in the highly civilized Athens as a myth. And I don’t know if we have good records of what the older, folk version of the myth said, and whether it had a positive message.
That’s also the thing, myths like these are often canvases that get riffed on for various purposes. It’s hardly a new thing, their own cultures were doing it already from the get go. “Myths” aren’t singular monolithic things, they’re pieces of culture that can be rearranged in many ways.
But the Oresteia of Aeschylus, as far as I remember, very clearly implies that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were wrong to try to punish Agamemnon. I do not think Aeschylus concedes that Agamemnon did anything wrong.
Euripides was famously more “progressive” than Aeschylus, to the point of getting mocked about it by the more conservative Aristophanes IIRC. Athens had its own politics (lots of it!) and while history may not be an exact circle, sometimes it rhymes pretty hard.
Maybe it’s just like modern soap operas or reality shows, and the point is just schadenfreude. “Man I am sure happy I’m not any one of those horrible people”.