Myths that live in ruins
Written by Greta Hawes
We are coming up on the 11th anniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes. And as I write this we are waiting to hear how low-lying areas of Tonga have fared in the wake of an enormous underwater eruption and tsunami. Yet however physically destructive these events are in the moment – and certainly the seismic records imprint a terrifying picture – there is another kind of destruction that is harder to quantify: the devastation of those communities that had called these places home.
Part of Christchurch’s Residential Red Zone. Image: Peter Ball / Regenerate Christchurch
Over the past decade I’ve gone back to Christchurch every few years and each time witnessed the hollowing out of some places, the immense changes to others. Rows of patched Edwardian shopfronts replaced with up-to-code concrete boxes. Schools and churches gone. Whole suburbs abandoned under ‘red zone’ orders, the houses and fences removed and only the old trees and hedges still marking property boundaries. These are not the redolent ruins of some Arcadian idyll; in real life people pack up and leave; former classmates, workmates, and flatmates lose touch; sports teams disband and cafes are left shuttered. What was once familiar is now unrecognisable; you forget what things used to be like, and it’s not like that matters day-to-day in any case.
This experience gave me a new perspective on my research. Given that places often seemed to trigger the telling of Greek myths, and so much ancient storytelling seems to involve cities promoting their own mythical pasts, what happened to myths about places when there was no one there to tell them?
What I found when I delved into this question appears in a book I published last year. (You can read the Introduction here.) I collected all of Pausanias’ descriptions of cities that had, when he encountered them in the late 2nd century AD, been depopulated and left in ruins. And I thought about how the myths that he told about these places differed from myths found elsewhere in his work. This is what I concluded:
We can recognize in Pausanias’ Periegesis a distinctive thumbprint of ruination. The myths of ruined cites share certain features: a reduction in narrative detail; the swamping of idiosyncratic information by knowledge from elsewhere; the flattening of storytelling logic according to conventional tropes and templates; and the co-option of landmarks by still-flourishing communities. The absence of one storytelling ‘infrastructure’ – a community of storytellers invested chauvinistically in their hometown – brings into clearer relief the contributions of other ‘infrastructures’ – the availability of distinctive landmarks and place names, culturally prestigious texts circulating as a dominant repository of knowledge, and the desires of other communities to involve (or co-opt) other locations within supra-local networks
— Hawes, Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth p. 159 (lightly edited for clarity)
Late last year I gave a couple of talks on this research and seized the chance to work out whether I could replicate the conclusions I had arrived at through traditional means — reading and re-reading the text! – but using MANTO’s database.
In short, I could. But this exercise taught me that I still have much to learn about crunching data.
There are 81 ruined cities in Pausanias’ Periegesis; 68 of these appear with the kinds of mythical connections which allow us to collect them in MANTO. These 68 cities appear in 245 ties. By contrast, the 316 functional cities in Pausanias appear in 2033 ties. Here, then, we see a quantitative difference: ruined cities attract less mythical material in Pausanias’ account (av. 3.6 ties per ruined city vrs av. 6.4 ties per functional city).
Image: Location of ruined cities described by Pausanias.
There is also a quantitative lack of physical relics in these ruined cities. In MANTO we define a ‘relic’ as a physical object or landmark that was created in mythical times and is recorded as still existing in historical times. Only 20 of the 224 relics that Pausanias mentions are in ruined cities, and only seven of the ruined cities possess relics. Most have just one each; Mycenae is the outlier here with its many heroic tombs. Because we distinguish in our database between landmarks, which are (typically) not movable, and objects, which can potentially be moved, we can also see that there is only one report in Pausanias of a moveable relic ‘left’ in a ruined city. In fact when we look more closely at the data we can see that Pausanias only mentions this object, a cult statue, at Tiryns as part of his report that it was quickly removed to the Argive Heraion. We can see, then, that cities without people are also largely cities without distinctive physical ‘things’ imbued with stories.
This is actually the exact opposite of what I thought I would find when I first started this project. After all, some ruined cities in Greece had impressive remains. Tiryns is a perfect example. This city was built during the Mycenaean period, and so was almost two millennia old by Pausanias’ time. But it was conquered by Argos in the fifth century BC and had been largely abandoned since. As Pausanias himself points out, its walls were simply incredible:
“If you go on and turn to your right you come to the ruins of Tiryns. The people of Tiryns were removed by the Argives, who wished to increase Argos’ power by increasing its population. The hero Tiryns, from whom the city got its name, is said to be a son of Argos, son of Zeus. The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining is a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree.”
— Pausanias 2.25.8
What’s notable is that, however impressive and vast this structure is, there was only one mythical tradition about it — that it was built by the Cyclopes. (These are not the creatures that Odysseus encounters but a different group.) There’s no granularity, no idiosyncrasies, no intimate knowledge of all the nooks and crevices.
And this is typical. In fact, this is one of the few myths that attaches to a landmark in a ruined city. But when we go again to MANTO we realise how derivative the story that Pausanias gives here is, and how flat this trope of Cyclopean wall-builders is by his time. Building things in the Argolid is basically all the Cyclopes do, and their stories don’t seem to have changed since the time of the Argive defeat. Here, and at Mycenae, Pausanias is basically just repeating a standard literary ‘fact’ on location.
Canonical literature casts a strong shadow over these ruins in other ways as well. The fame of these ruined cities often seems based on the fact that Homer knew them. Of the functional cities in Pausanias, 83 are mentioned by Homer (26%). For the ruined cities, the figure is 29%, a statistic that does not seem too impressive until we map these out:
Note what’s missing here: In the first map above, there is a cluster of about two dozen ruined cities in Arcadia. These were abandoned in the fourth century and their populations moved to the new city of Megalopolis. None of them claimed to have a Homeric connection. (Their mythical significance was established in another way as we’ll see in a moment.) So if we take these out of the calculation, the percentage rises.
The Arcadian cities instead claimed that the names of ruined cities in their region had ‘eponymic’ significance. ‘Eponyms’ are heroes, like ‘Tiryns’ in the passage quoted above, that were said to have given their names to places. In fact, we should think of the process going the other way: in actual fact, the hero was often created from the name of the place. So the Arcadians said that their cities Acacesion, Asea, Charisia, Cleitor etc were founded by Acasas, Aseatas, Charision, Cleitor etc and that all of these men were sons or grandsons of the prominent Arcadian hero Lycaon.
Forty-three of Pausanias’ ruined cities have eponyms (63%). Only 44% of functional cities have one in Pausanias’ account. What is notable is (again!) how colourless these heroes are. Most do nothing more than give their names to cities. Almost all have named parents listed, as in the case of Tiryns, since those genealogies model political power in the region. But of the 43 eponyms of ruined cities in Pausanias only 4 have spouses (2 of which aren’t mentioned by Pausanias), only 4 have any children (1 note mentioned by Pausanias, 2 are just fathers of more colourless eponyms. None of them kills anyone; none of them creates anything; and none of them have a tradition about being born or dying in a particular place. These are the basic kinds of data that attach to ‘normal’ heroes. But of course without a community of people keen to celebrate and promote the deeds of ‘their’ hero, these stories simply do not get told.
It seems obvious to me (now!) that the loss of a storytelling population would result in the loss of stories as well. What surprised me as I did this research is the extent of these narrative voids. We might expect travellers and passersby to make up stories about places if there weren’t locals doing it, but this didn’t seem to happen. Instead, they tied knowledge known from poetry to places they encountered, or relied on mechanical mythical templates to create a very basic idea of these cities’ pasts. It’s locals — people committed to a place and intimately familiar with its tiny details — that are the engine of Greek myth. Perhaps that’s the case everywhere.
MANTO would not exist without the dedication of a keen group of data collectors. Responsible for the Pausanias data were Kennis Barker, Audrey Coleman, Scott Smith, and Ari Toumpas in the USA, and Glen Goodwin, Greta Hawes, and Rosie Selth in Australia.