Rationalising myth in MANTO

Written by Greta Hawes

Towards the end of the fourth century, at Athens, a student of Aristotle sat down and churned out a new kind of work: he systematically rationalised dozens of myths, one after the other, explaining that each of these popular, fabulous stories was actually a mistaken account of a really quite banal historical event. The text (or perhaps just part of it) survives as Palaiphatos’ On Unbelievable Tales. (You can read it on Scaife Viewer, translated courtesy of Canopos.)

The famous philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) didn’t think much of Palaiphatos. He had, Wilamowitz sniffed, wasted a lot of effort for not much reward. I chose to write my doctoral dissertation on Palaiphatos and his ilk, so I suspect he’d have thought me a mere time-waster as well.

Here’s a taste of Palaiphatos’ method:

The myth that’s told about Pasiphae is that she was consumed by lust for a grazing bull, and that Daidalos made a wooden cow and shut her within it so that the bull would mount and mate with the woman. He impregnated her and she gave birth to a child that had the body of a man and the head of a bull. I for one say that this never happened. To start with, it is impossible for an animal of one kind to mate with one of another unless the womb and genitals are compatible. For it is not possible for a dog and an ape to mate with one another and produce offspring, nor a wolf and a hyena, nor an antelope and a deer (for the fact is that they are of different species). More to the point, I do not think that a bull had sex with a wooden cow: for all four-footed animals smell the genitals of an animal before mating and mount it afterwards. Nor would a woman be able to withstand being mounted by a bull, nor could she have carried a horned embryo.

The truth is as follows. They say that Minos had pain in his genitals and was taken care of by Procris, the daughter of Pandion, in exchange for the dog and the javelin. At this time, a very attractive young man served Minos. His name was Tauros [‘Bull’]. Pasiphae was seized by love for him, persuaded him to sleep with her, and gave birth to his child. Minos, when he calculated that the child was conceived while he was suffering from genital pain, realised that the child was not his own because they had not had sex during that time. After examining the child closely, he worked out that it was Tauros’. Despite this, Minos decided against killing him since he looked like his own children’s brother.

We don’t necessarily have to take Palaiphatos’ approach too seriously — after all, it’s not like the ‘historical’ stories be derives from myth have any more evidence in their favour than the traditional myths. We might even conclude that Palaiphatos wasn’t being serious himself. I’ve become more and more convinced over the years that he was writing with tongue firmly in cheek and we should just enjoy his joke. That said, it’s still a fascinating artifact of ancient storytelling. It doesn’t just give us an insight into how some Greeks were thinking about — and playing with — their own narrative traditions. It also provides early evidence for particular plots. As a case in point, the passage I just quoted is the earliest reference to the popular idea that Pasiphae used a wooden cow to sate her lust for the bull.

Theseus dragging the Minotaur from the Labyrinth. Tondo of an Attic red-figured kylix, ca. 440-430 BC. Said to be from Vulci. British Museum GR 1850.3-2.3 (Cat. Vases E84)

In essence, Palaiphatos tells each story twice: once in a highly canonical form, and the second time in his own interpretation of it as an ‘historical’ event. When it comes to collecting data for MANTO, the first version of the story is easy to deal with. But what to do with the second version? That’s where things get tricky.

As a general rule, we create as few entities as we can in MANTO so that we are not needlessly proliferating mythic people in particular. This means that when you look up ‘Pasiphae’ or ‘the Bull’ that she falls for, you find all of the information there. So, we avoid having both a mythical Pasiphae and a rationalised one, for example.

But keeping to this is not always possible since some of the people that Palaiphatos created for his rationalisations reappear in later texts and so almost become mythic characters in their own right. So we needed to capture at least some of them. (In our data structure, these characters are connected to the main entities using the tie ‘rationalized form of’; this field populates the file cards of both entities. In a few cases we’ve also captured rationalised places — e.g. ‘Tricarenia’)

We have now captured data from several more rationalising texts: Heraclitos’ On Unbelievable Tales (2nd c AD?), an anonymous compilation (after 5th c AD), Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, and Lucian’s Astrology. We can now trace particular rationalised characters through these texts: so, Pasiphae’s bull is transformed into a man called ‘Bull’ (‘Tauros’) also by Heraclitos, and the anonymous compiler. By contrast, Plutarch has a story by which it is the Minotaur himself who is rationalised as a man named ‘Bull’!

As always, compiling data led me to notice things I hadn’t paid much attention to before. Always in storytelling, there’s a very slim distinction between following tradition and inventing new myths — I like to think of ancient mythtellers as a bit like jazz musicians improvising: they are constantly creating, but within familiar boundaries. It would be ridiculous to try to categorise each phrase they play as either new or old — they’re just playing old standards as they’ve always been played, alive to the moment.

Jason bringing Pelias the Golden Fleece; a winged victory prepares to crown him with a wreath. Side A from an Apulian red-figure calyx crater. Louvre Museum K127

A few examples show up how even a writer like Palaphatos, who seems to be strictly contrasting traditional and revisionist versions of myths, also muddies the boundary between canon and novelty. When he rationalises the origins of the Golden Fleece (which the Argonauts would later seek) he says it was actually originally a very expensive statue of a woman named ‘Cos’ (‘Fleece’), who was ‘mother of Merops and daughter of Helios’. (You can read the full passage here.) Palaiphatos has cleverly pointed to the ambiguity of this word ‘Cos’: it is also the name of a large island, which from quite early on often had the epithet ‘Meropid’. Interestingly enough, Palaiphatos is by far our earliest existing source for the idea that there was a heroine called ‘Cos’ and a hero called ‘Merops’. The next piece of evidence that we have for this is Herodas, some half a millennium later. He, however, says that Cos was the child of Merops, not the other way around. Has the tradition changed in the meantime? Was it never very stable in any case? Or is Palaiphatos deliberately playing around by reversing the parentage? I’m not really sure.

MANTO would not exist without the dedication of a keen group of data collectors. Responsible for collecting and checking the data from these rationalising texts were Greta Hawes, Rosie Selth, Scott Smith, and Ari Toumpas.