Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
Alive in Myth
By Jasper Griffin
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
by Roberto Calasso, translated by Tim Parks
Knopf, 403 pp., $25.00
The gods of ancient Greece are dead, but the myths will not lie down. The peculiar quality which marks them off from the other mythologies of the world is their concentration on human beings of a definite period of the mythical past: the heroes and heroines. Closer to the gods than we can be, descendants in fact of sexual unions between gods and mortals, they were also brighter, more beautiful, more clearly visible and intelligible in their brilliant outlines; the limits of human aspiration and fragility are marked out luminously by their aspirations, loves, and disasters. That intoxicating combination has given them a power over the Western imagination which in one way or another appears in creative artists as varied as Botticelli, Titian, Monteverdi, Marlowe, Gluck, Keats, Hölderlin, Tennyson, Joyce. They also have inspired many systematic treatments which resemble creative writing: Charles Kingsley's The Heroes (chivalrous gestes), Robert Graves's Greek Myths (avatars of the White Goddess), Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (ritual of the dying god).
Review, 2483 words
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