>> Dean Lanham:
Well good morning. 

Thank you for waiting just a second as things are put into place.  

I am Allen Lanham, I am Dean of Library services and it's a pleasure to welcome you to the next session of our Symposium on Ancient Egypt, sorry Ancient Greece, because last year we were in Egypt, you know and of course now we have someone from Turkey here so we can talk about lots of things old, I suppose.  

And new, of course, because of you, but welcome to you all.  

You have quite a presentation and speaker ahead of you.  

She's always extremely interesting to listen to.  

We are all sort of mystified perhaps by myth and culture and she has been talking and researching this for a good period of her career.  

I love that 9th graders are here, because that was when I was in Miss Hamilton's class in English and we used Miss Hamilton's book on Myths and Greek and Roman Myths and it was eye opening to me and I can assure you that the more time that you spend with the characters and the gods and goddesses and other persons that your life will be enriched because you will find signs of these all over the place, and in so many disciplines.  

And yet, Miss Hamilton really the teacher, rather than the writer, didn't quite impress that upon us as 9th graders but I found it to be true and I still have my book at home and it's on the table and I occasionally need to look things there. 

So, we are glad you are here today and congratulations for you to bring young scholars here to be with us this morning.  

Dr. Wahby, Dr. Wafeek Wahby is going to present our speaker. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Well that is a difficult task to present our speaker, because fifteen years ago when I came to Eastern, first time, she was getting her faculty laureat, I think, and it was very encouraging to me to see how Eastern honors their faculty at the time.  

Since then, she has been so influential in many capacities, not to mention our symposium for technology where I have to introduce her with that again.  

And if you have been here last year, I did that.  

She is the only person that I know of that you can give her a pen like this and she can capture the attention of the speaker for forty-five minutes, nonstop, talking about the technology of writing.  

She is fascinating, you will see that first hand, if you know her before, you know what I am talking about, if not you will enjoy the story-telling way of bedtime story, and in the meantime, the depths of scholar.  

Here is Bonnie Irwin. 

>> Dr. Irwin:
I've heard it said that there was a young woman and her name was Arachne and Arachne wasn't that important a person. 

Her father wasn't rich, he wasn't a famous politician or anything, but Arachne had a skill that was unduplicated among mortal women.  

She could weave.  

She could spin wool and she could weave.  

Her father would dye the yarn in these rich colors for her, including the royal purple and she would weave these amazing tapestries.  

But, unfortunately, Arachne was also a little arrogant about it.  

She knew she was good.  

She knew she was really good. 

She knew she was probably the best in the world and so she was pretty vocal about that. 

She talked about it all the time, how great she was as she was weaving she was talking about how wonderful she is. 

And so one day the goddess Athena who is sort of the patron of crafts among many other things, disguises herself and comes down to earth in the guise of an old woman and she says, 'you know, you probably shouldn't boast so much about your skills, because jealousy is a bad thing, and you may inspire that in others, and there might be other people out there that you don't know about or even goddesses that are better at this than you are."  

And she said, "you know," Arachne replies, "Well, yeah, but I, if Athena was right here today, I would challenge her to a weaving competition and I've got no concerns, I'd wipe the floor with her. 

I know I am a better weaver than Athena is, hands down."  

So Athena goes back up into the heavens and she comes back down as herself, and "did you challenge me to a weaving competition?"  

And Arachne says, "Sure". 

And so the two of them go at it.  

Now this is weaving traditionally, right?  

Big looms, they are whipping those shuttles back and forth and they are making these huge, beautiful tapestries. 

And Athena makes one of all of the gods and they are all sitting there on their thrones and they're noble and they're serious and they are dignified and it is a beautiful tapestry.  

Well, Arachne is also weaving a tapestry of the gods, but what she is showing is Zeus disguising himself as a bull, and seducing and kidnapping Europa and all of these other sort of pranks and foibles, and things that the gods did that if one of us did them, would be highly embarrassing.  

The tapestry is beautiful; it is flawless in terms of its craftsmanship.  

And so Athena looks at it, hers is probably just as good in terms of the craftsmanship, but the topic really gets her angry, and so she continues to weave in the corners of hers that says things like danger, warning, beware of the gods, you should approach the gods with piety, and Arachne is just ignoring this, because she is having way too much fun weaving all these entertaining stories into a tapestry. 

And so finally Athena gets so angry, that she takes the shuttle from her loom, and starting banging poor Arachne on the head and she is just clubbing the poor girl.  

You know, she is just hitting her on the head, and Arachne starts to cry, says stop, stop, I can't do it. 

And she finally gets so upset that she wraps the thread that she is weaving around her neck and tries to hang herself from her loom, because Athena won't stop beating her.  

And so then, Athena finally takes pity on her, and sprinkles her with an ointment that has had some secret herbs in it that only Athena and Hackety know what they are.  

And instead of dying, Arachne starts to change.  

Her ears fall off, her nose falls off, her arms and legs shrink into her body, and her fingers grow longer and longer until all there is, is this big round belly with long fingers sticking out.  

And she continues as a spider to weave to this day. 

All right.  

That's one of my favorites, right? 

That's the story of Arachne. 

So the topic today is "Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?" 

We are going to talk a lot about what belief means, because you can do all kinds of things with that word, and whether myths are true.  

But, what is it, what are the take-aways from this myth?  

Why would anybody tell the story in the first place? 

And yes, this is audience participation time.  

>> Attendee:
[Unclear dialogue] humility towards towards the gods.

>> Dr. Irwin:
All right. A human being should not be very arrogant, right?  

That we should honor the gods, we should approach them with piety.  

We should approach them with a degree of humility.  

Which Greek human beings were in the stories at least, defying that rule a lot.  

So, that's the big underlying lesson and perhaps there's the truth there that as a mortal we don't have the power that the gods do and so we should approach them with caution, with respect.  

And then, there's the really basic, if you take like the Rutgers and Kipling just so story, this is where spiders come from story.  

All right.  

Now if we approach this myth and ask whether people believed it, many Greek myths, particularly this kind, were told by mothers and nurses, and grandmothers to children.  

Did we believe these kinds of stories when we were kids?  

To an extent, you know, spiders are kind of weird and they are kind of creepy and we are curious as to where they come from, and so, somebody tells us a story that explains where a spider comes from.  

But would an adult Greek person still have believed this story.  

Would they have believed the part about there was once a human being who defied the goddess and she had to pay?  

Regardless of whether she turned into a spider because, no that's a little tricky.  

Or would they have just dismissed it all as fiction? 

Which, of course, from our perspective, it certainly is.  

I don't think anybody in this room believes this story, but my apologies if you do.  

So that's what I want to think about a little bit today, is how we pull this apart.  

What could people believe and what they might not have.  

The first mistake we usually make when we talk about Greek and Roman mythology, is by far in the west more popular than all the other myth traditions.  

I used to teach World Mythology, and students would often be disappointed if I wasn't doing Greek or Roman mythology.  

That's what they were familiar with, those were the fun stories, and so when I pulled out some Native American mythology, or some Chinese mythology it just didn't have the same cache'.   

I think part of it is because we have these stories told to us when we are very young.  

The story of Arachne actually comes, and some of you know the difference between and red book and a green book in this series.  

A red book is Roman and a green book is Greek.  

The first recorded version of the story of Arachne comes out of the Roman culture, not the Greek culture.  

But the word Arachne is Greek and there was a flourishing world tradition, I had no idea this myth was told among the Greeks or not.  

But by the time we get to Virgil and [unclear dialogue] in the Roman period, it is.  

All right.  First thing we tend to do is lump those two cultures together, and we call it Greco-Roman mythology, because of all the things that were passed down from one to the other.  

Well, they changed though. Right? 

Even in an oral tradition, people were just telling the stories, and not writing them down.  

They are going to change. 

And so whether or not Aved who clearly, by the time you get here, does not believe this story, by any stretch of the imagination, and how he differs from a Greek person and then we make the mistake of lumping all the Greeks together. 

We take about a thousand years of history, and say this is what they believed.  

That's very easy to do. 

It is very convenient to do.  

It is not entirely accurate. 

Correct?  

I think we can, if we look at our own culture, and throw out a belief. 

I read somewhere recently, and this is a very dangerous phrase to use, I read somewhere recently, actually I was working on a trivia word puzzle and it was suggested in this word puzzle, that twenty percent of Americans do not believe that the earth rotates around the sun.  

They believe the sun rotates around the earth.  

I don't know if that is true, or not, but lets' say for the sake of argument it is.  

So, if someone a thousand years from now says Americans believed that the sun went around the earth, or the earth went around the sun, not either of those statements are absolutely true.  

Because they are both true in part.  

So you think about the Greek culture. 

You've got children, you've got people with lots of different levels of education, because as you'll learn later in this series, for those of you who keep coming, I mean the Greeks were incredibly sophisticated in their learning, in their philosophy.  

And so, to put that next to, oh yeah, but they believed in all these gods, doesn't quite work all the time, right?  

So I guess the first thing that I would say in response to the question, do the Greeks really believe their myths, is yes and no. 

And you are never going to get a more definite answer from me all morning, so just prepare for that.  

Because it is just a complicated question.  

Yet these stories had a life that we still tell them today. 

People still want to study them, and so there is something about these stories.  There's a man, a French scholar by the name of Paul Vane who has written a book that is right here in Booth Library, which I stole my title from, which is just entitled 'Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?" 

It is an interesting read, and it talks about many things, but one thing he talks about is what he refers to as the impossibility of the gratuitous lie, meaning that we can't make anything up entirely.  

There is nothing that doesn't have some piece of truth in it when you look a story.  

I haven't really had a chance to really think about this long enough to tell you if I believe it absolutely, or not, but I think it's a really interesting concept.  

Because even in our science fiction, ok, there are monsters, there are spaceships, but relationships are still what they are, because we can't create something that we have no familiarity with at all.  

My husband writes science fiction and he likes it as far out there as possible. 

He says I like to make things up, but we don't make it up entirely.  

So if we look at this story of Arachne, what is it that we know?  

We know that there are spiders and that they came from somewhere. 

Now, again, probably didn't come from this.  

We know that there are some people who are perhaps more arrogant than they should be, whether it is in the face of the gods, or in the face of her grandmother, who did she learn to weave from?  

There are lots of people behind her that are responsible for her skill.  

It's not all her, and so those truths kind of emerge up from the story. 

So we might not believe the story, but there are some concepts and values, some social moirés that come up from those stories that are important.  

In the oral tradition, stories change over time but they are also pretty conservative.  

They don't make these great leaps.  

There are not going to, this story for example, in an oral tradition would not change so that all of sudden Arachne becomes, I don't know, a zebra.  

Well that wouldn't make any logical sense anyway, but the oral tradition is conservative.  

It doesn't change quickly because if you are performing a story that your audience has heard somebody else perform, you can't change it completely.  

You are not going to change end dramatically because your audience is going to stop you and say wait a minute, no, no, no, that is wrong.  

And so the storyteller is always responding to the audience, so there's a relationship there. 

There is communication going there.  

And there will be some people in the audience that believe the story enough or believe that this version is correct, so what is that telling us about belief?  

Homer's Iliad and you can tell this is a teacher's copy, it is all marked up, tells the story of the Trojan War.  

Now, scholars have argued since this first got put down in writing the extent to which the Trojan war, not that it happened or not so much as to what kind of war it was, who was involved, because then we get in that dividing line, it is not just fiction anymore. 

We are starting to talk about what many people believe to be historical figures.  

Now in this day and age, it is difficult to parcel out of that out and may throw it open to our historians a little bit later to help me with that, but there are certain things again in the story that ring true and other things that don't.  

So where is the line?  

When we start writing things down, the whole nature of belief changes, because when we start writing things down, we can construct history, we can have science. 

Science is really almost impossible without writing, getting back to my pen, right? 

So, once writing comes into the picture, these stories not only stop, they stop changing in some ways, I mean once somebody writes it down, you know someone can translate it into English, but the story is the story. 

It is not going to change a whole lot unless we have a modern author who really purposely, obviously, intentionally, changes the whole thing.  

And we have had some modern poets and authors who have done that, but the story itself isn't going to change anymore.  

The other thing about oral tradition is that the details are not nearly as important as the big pieces of the story, so details may change. 

Because really, if one were to talk about the story of Arachne and one says, of course, I did it from memory as well, so my version isn't going to sound at all like his, I am going to use some modern colloquial expressions that even this translator wouldn't have used.  

How angry was Athena? 

Lots of different adjectives we could use for that, and in some cases she's really, really angry, some maybe she is less so.  

How arrogant is Arachne? 

And it is a sliding scale there.  

So then, when we say that somebody believed the story, or didn't believe the story, typically we are not talking about the details so much. 

And that is certainly true with the Trojan War.  

If it happened, if it lasted as long as the Iliad implies that it did, and see, exactly, right?  [laughter]  

There was and even in the early 20th century, people were still pretty much looking at this as historical text. 

Yes and no.  

War happened? 

Absolutely.  

This war happened? 

Probably? 

Yeah, I don't know.  

That it happened they way it happened. 

In the Iliad there are these great big battle scenes.  

And who knows the basic story of the Trojan War?  

You guys covered it yet? 

Not yet.  

Spoiler alert here!  

We won't, if we have time later, we'll talk about the events that came before, but Paris, young Trojan man, visits Menelaus and his wife Helen and kidnaps Helen. 

Helen runs away with him, again, truth here is kind of murky.  

Takes her back to Troy and Menelaus contacts his brother Agamemnon and says I've got to get my wife back.  

And not so much perhaps because it is his wife and he loves her, but it is a matter of pride and it's been an incredible insult to his honor to have his wife stolen, or for her to run away under his nose.  

So Helen a later poet said she was so beautiful that she's the face that launched a thousand ships. 

I suppose, supposedly the Greeks piled into a thousand ships to go to Troy, meanwhile this war is going to take place for a decade, all right?  

Like any war, there are ups and downs and you know, you might think a decade is a long time to fight a war, but then you think about how long we've in Afghanistan and one way or another, think well maybe ten years isn't that long, right?  

But the way Homer tells it, and I also argue there was probably not a person, or not one individual responsible for this that is named Homer, or that's a whole other story for a whole other presentation, but things will happen like all of a sudden, Paris disappears from the battlefield, he's not there.  

Well, Paris has a reputation as a coward to a certain extent, I mean he kind of comes and goes. 

The Greeks don't have a whole lot of respect for him, so all of a sudden he is gone.  

And the story is that Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty who has helped Paris get Helen in the first place, has spirited him away.  

Again, does the audience really believe that?  

Does the audience believe that this dainty goddess swept in, invisibled everybody but Paris, and kind of carries him off and keeps him safe or do we believe that Paris had a moment of cowardice and ran away from the front?  

Similarly as the battle rages on, occasionally, a god or goddess will pick up the spear or the arrow that someone has fired at the enemy and make it so they miss.  

Really?  

Or did they just miss?  [Laughter]  

You think about it and you can tell the same story without all the divine intervention just a story about pride, about honor, and about war.  

And the Greeks could believe in it as history, whether they believed in the gods or not.  

My favorite part of the Iliad is really one of the most human episodes, which is at the very end of the Iliad.  

After Achilles has killed Hector and finally Hector's father Prime goes to see Achilles to beg to get his son's body back. 

And even in modern warfare, getting the bodies back is always really important if we can do it, but in this case, the Greeks, supposedly believed that if we didn't, if they didn't bury the body appropriately, they didn’t have the appropriate funeral rites, then that spirit would be in limbo forever, and so it is very important to Prime to get his son back.  

And there is a scene in there where Prime kneels down before the great warrior Achilles who is still angry, you know he thought killing Hector was going to fix his anger, and it hasn't. 

He is still just absolutely enraged. 

And Prime kneels down and takes his hands and says, "I kissed the hand of the man who killed my son."  

That is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in all of western literature as far as I am concerned, because what it took for him to do that, what it took for Prime to put away his own anger, and his grief long enough to have this conversation, and if we look at the Iliad as a work of literature, that is also the moment where Achilles, who has been this enraged killing machine for twenty three books, you know he has been fighting, and fighting and fighting. 

He becomes human again. 

He gives the body back to Prime and we can kind of repair the damage that has been done.  

Now a lot of other things are going to happen. 

That's the other interesting thing about the Iliad, is the story of the Trojan War, this book takes place over the space of, oh, I don't remember exactly, but I think it is like twenty four days, 

>> Attendee:
Fifty-one

>> Dr. Irwin:
Fifty-one. 

Ok, I had half of it right.  

But it is a really short narrative span in a war that supposedly took ten years.  

So you are thinking, wow, if all that happened in this fifty-one days, I wonder what else happened, you know?  

So there is a lot of the Trojan War to come afterwards, but that moment, again, would it have happened, would the father of the you know the hero on the one side had been able to get in unharmed, see Achilles, make his case, take his son's body back, it's a moment of great drama.  

But whether it happened or not, I don't know, but it tells us about the value of family. 

In a way that is true.  

So we can say that the audience believed in the father and son relationship, regardless of whether they believed in the particular incident, to say nothing of you know, arrows and spears flying and gods running back and forth on the battlefield.  

So it sounds like I am making a case that the Greeks didn't believe their myths and certainly a lot of them probably didn't, but a lot probably did. 

Because in the absence of anything else, these stories in some ways ring true and they explain things that are hard to explain.  

The stories are anonymous, all right.  

There is no one person that makes it up and so the story comes out of a community, and if a story comes out of community, we tend to believe it more because we all own a piece of it.  

There were great poets who could perform the story better than others and maybe Homer was the name of one of those poets, but what we see here in this book is the combination of lots of the work of lots and lots of people over many, many centuries.  

The other thing is, when we look at an epic story, which is the heroes and the battles, and even with the gods involved, so lets take the gods out.  

Ok.  

So let's say we don't believe that these gods were really involved, that they were just symbolizing emotions and other things that were going on this battlefield. 

We can take that step, and certainly there are some people who are there. 

Other people will be looking, like ok, that's how it went, but this battle, by the time anything gets actually written down, if the war took place, it took place hundreds of years before.  

And so that story is going to change, it is going to migrate and I told you that oral traditions are conservative, they don't change. 

Well they change, but the change is really slowly, but if you are telling a story without writing it down for hundreds of years, it's going to change.  

And then there are some familiar names, and names of families, and the people in the audience, ok they know their families, right? 

And so they think well, what does it do for me to believe this story then?  

If my you know, great, great, great, add a few more greats grandfather is mentioned in here, and they did traditional cultures to keep very careful genealogies, you tell the story, you know there's a passage in the Bible of so and so begat so and so begat so and so, and it seems to go on and on, all traditional cultures do that sort of thing. 

And so if your ancestor's name is mentioned here, you are going to want to believe if it's a good portrayal that this happened, because it give honor to your family. 

But from the poet's perspective, I am looking out at my audience, and I know who is there and I know who is going to you know buy my wine, or pay me at the end of the night, so as I am reciting the story, I may change the order of the names, I may slip some names in there that weren’t in my teacher's version, but hey, that guy is in the audience, and we were all involved in that war somehow, so I'm just going to throw them in there. 

So the audience then has a stake in a story and that's going to maybe cause them to believe it a little bit more strongly, a little more seriously. 

So and these myths take place in a time that doesn't bear any relationship to our time.  

But if I go around the room, I can ask you what you did yesterday, and most of you will remember with some degree of accuracy most of what you did yesterday.  

Depending on the day of the week, sometimes I remember a lot, and sometimes not so much. 

We were talking about that just in the office, when were we having that conversation? 

Was it Thursday, I don't remember, but we know we had the conversation, and we can report it and it's in real time. 

We know what happened last week, or you know what you were doing right before you came here.  

But Myths takes place in this time period, in the time where time functions very differently. 

First of all, it's this and I hesitate to use the term 'golden age', because in myth studies, that means something else, but it takes place in this age where supposedly gods walked among men.  

And I am using the word men purposely here. 

I mean, there are some women in this book, but it's a war story, it's mostly about men. 

And this idea that there was this time a long time ago where gods were down here on earth or people could see them, now that's not true anymore, so, was there really? 

We like to imagine there was a time when god was intimately involved in what we do and not this distant presence so that piece has an effect on what we believe. 

And then where does belief come from?  

So if you pick any random fact that you believe, and when I taught myth and culture, I would do the same thing every semester, before my students even got a syllabus, I would make them right down five things they believed to be true.  

I would do the same, I would give them to a student worker because they were all anonymous, typed it into a miscellaneous list, we'd bring that list back to class, and through the semester, we'd talk about some of the things, every once in a while, we'd pull up that sheet and say, ok, someone believes that the grass is green.  

You know, it's a very different belief than I believe in God, which was also there.  

But how do we believe anything?  

How do we come to believe what we believe? 

Again, not a rhetorical question. 

Shall I throw belief out there for us?  

Ok. I believe it is Monday.  

How do I know this? 

Yes.

>> Attendee:
[Unclear dialogue]

>> Dr. Irwin:
Ok, Observation and we all have to use a word that is probably not appropriate here, faith, in this thing called a calendar that Monday always follows Sunday, right? 

And we all agree that that is what the calendar is, so we all agree that is is Monday and that one is easy.  

All right.  

I believe that and I am going to go totally outrageous here because I don't want to offend anybody.  

Ron Paul is going to win the Presidential election.  

Where would I get a belief like that from?  Hmm?  

[Unclear dialogue] watching tv? 

All right. 

Television.   

>> Attendee:
Because Ron Paul said he was going to.

>> Dr. Irwin:
All right. 

And if I trust him, then maybe I will believe that.  

Maybe I looked at that debate last week, which I didn't by the way, but maybe I did and thought, don't really either of those, and everybody in this country kind of agrees with me there, for somebody else is going to come in and we've heard of him, so maybe he'll be it.  

Television, newspapers, the media generally, has a certain amount of authority, whether it is well deserved or not is really valid question. 

But we believe things that we hear from authority figures, all right?  

You young women when your teacher tells you that a myth is from Greece, absent any proof otherwise, you are going to believe her right? 

Because she is the teacher and she knows these things.  

She's agreeing with me, ok this works. 

We learn a lot of what we believe from our parents, and talk about authority figures.  

We've got parents, we've got teachers, ministers, priests, pastors, we have the media, we've got books, another weird thing that happens when we put something in writing is all of a sudden it tends to have more authority somehow in our culture, because we are a highly literate culture.  

When more people spoke than wrote, it was actually the other way around.  

Signing a document meant nothing, but if you told me something and you shook my hand in front of witnesses that was the binding contract.  

Today that doesn't work.  

All right.  

We have experience, and we have observation.  

Now, our experience might be limited, so we might believe something based on experience.  

This happens a lot on a college campus.  

A faculty member might say students just aren't very well prepared.  

That faculty member maybe they've been teaching for thirty years and they've seen this for a number of generations, and they've seen a change, but it is still based on their own experience and what is going on in their own classroom. 

Or, I didn't actually write examples down for this but you can all think about things that you have done, that is your experience, representative of everybody else's.  

Maybe so, maybe not.  

And in any case, we are all individuals who all bring a different set of baggage to any story we hear, and so that is going to change the extent to which we believe it. 

Ok. 

Experimentation.  

Some things we believe because it has been proven scientifically over a period of time. 

Scientific method we test, and we verify and then we test again, and then someone else tests to make sure and so that leads us to believe things perhaps.  

We also believe things out of faith, out of fear, sometimes out of superstition. 

And so when a grandmother might be telling the story of Arachne to her grandchildren, is it important that it is a story about where spider comes from? 

Maybe, maybe not.  

It would depend on the relationship that those kids had had with the spider.  

Maybe one of the saw a spider and got scared and so she told this story to make the spider less threatening

But maybe she's telling the story more for that first thing we talked about which is the importance of honoring the gods and having a fair amount of humility before the gods.  

She may not believe the story, but she believes in the concept of a higher power. 

She might not even believe in Athena, as the particular goddess but she believes that there might be something out there and I want to teach my children to be humble because you never know or she might believe very directly in Athena and want her children or grandchildren to know more about why this goddess is important. 

Because Athena, of course, is not only the goddess of crafts, she's the goddess of warfare, not war, but warfare, and most importantly, wisdom. 

She, another of the famous stories about the Greek gods she supposedly sprang fully formed out of Zeus’s head, can we believe that?  

Hmm, maybe not.  Ok.

We also tend to believe things based on cause and effect and there are lots of logical fallacies out there that just because something happened first, doesn't necessarily mean that it caused the second thing. 

Right?  

If I break a mirror and then I trip and sprain my ankle, it is because breaking a mirror is going to give me bad luck or is it just coincidence. 

Again different people believe different things.  

One of the things I find most fascinating about these stories in the end is not so much whether we literally believe them, but what is it about these stories that make them so popular?  

I brought some of my many visual aids.  

Greek Mythology is one of those things that we have produced more things more toys, about than certainly any other myth system in the west.  

Here is my little card deck.  

Here we have pictures of all of the Greek gods and goddesses, and a little information about them, so it is a convenient wonderful thing to bring to class and pass around. 

And trying to be a scholarly tool, on the back we get the continuation of the myth or one of the stories about them. 

And also, and you have a little bit of this on the front, but I've got even more on the back, pieces of artwork that were inspired by these stories, because that is the other thing that is perpetuated these stories.  

When I think of the story of the birth of Venus, that Venus was supposedly sprung out of the ocean, I don't remember the story any more, but what I remember is a painting of this gorgeous beautiful mostly naked woman on a scallop shell, kind of coming out of the ocean.  

So, whether to the extent to which I believe that is the official version of the birth of Aphrodite has been guided more by that visual image by Botticelli, correct? 

Yeah, ok.  

I'm pretty sure I had that right.  

Than anybody else.  

The other thing that writing allows us to do is to make things way more complex than perhaps they were originally. 

I told you that most traditional cultures you know, they would recite their genealogy so they would remember who was related to whom and how far generations go back.  

But those genealogies tended not to include cousins and your siblings' children and things like that, and so when we got writing and we in the west particularly like charts and we like to organize things and so we started putting together a family tree, and that is what this thing is. 

I can't show it to everybody, but I think I am going to ask you to sort of pass this one down, and I'll continue unfolding.  

So the family tree of the Greek gods and goddesses, runs from where Dr. Barharlou is there all the way to here.  

Did the Greeks themselves assemble all this in this order?  

No, we've got people like Edith Hamilton who we heard about earlier who put together these stories and took it from lots and lots of different sources, right?  

We have sources all over the place that they would pick and choose. 

They would go ok, Athena is mentioned here and she is also mentioned here, and she is mentioned here, and she's mentioned here in relation to this character, and mentioned here in relation to this character, oh and by the way, she's the sister of Apollo, and she's the daughter of Zeus, so let's put them in and by the time you've finished this is what you have, part of me wants to ask, why?  

But part of me is also just really fascinated and the reason though that these stories are so compelling is that at some level they are very human. 

I'll pass this on down along here.
  
That the stories in the end tend to be about family and emotions and passions, and things we do well, more often things we do poorly, you know when somebody gets in trouble about something.  

And that's what I think the Greeks, we can say that the Greeks believed, and I think we can say that's what we believe to a certain extent, too.  

The reason these stories have so much staying power is that they are a reflection of values and beliefs in things even if not in the story.  

I think I am going to stop there, because according to my watch, we are getting close to the hour. 

This is the topic that I could have brought stacks of books talked about for many hours and gotten really deeply into it, or I could do the more entertaining version, which is what you got.  

So I will take questions, or comments.  

>> Dr. Barharlou:
That was a very eloquent presentation.  

Three or four hundred years from now when they [unclear dialogue] of our time, say it was a time people believe in God, [unclear dialogue] sent his son, [unclear dialogue] and not see him, how does these myths and how many people believe in these myths now? 

What does Roman Mythology [unclear dialogue] and [unclear dialogue] 

Have you seen the God? 

>> Dr. Irwin:
Well, and the scholarly definition of myth that I use in the classroom is that myth is a sacred story that people believe to be true. 

All right? 

Because that direct observation is not there, but there are many people of faith who believe that we see the product all around us.  

And I am not going to get into one side or the other of that debate, but the stories do tell us what is important and the idea of having something outside ourselves to believe in is the driving force behind so many of these, because we always want to know what is our place in the world.  

Why are we important? 

Who cares about us as individuals? 

And that is one of the things that myths answers.  

It ties us to something larger, something more important and so that is why we believe.  

Now, again, different people believe in different degrees, but it's sort of has always been thus that we need that connection as people, and that's what's always been the important thing. 

>> Dr. Barharlou.
Talk about the consequence of believing these myths.  

For example, believing the God created man in his image. 

And the woman out of man's stomach.  

Creation [unclear dialogue] the most advanced country in the world. 

We haven't talked about the movie this makes in the mind of the people to make them more civilized, more humane, more tolerant, more compassionate. 

>> Dr. Irwin:
It's not really my topic, I understand the question, but I am not going to, it is too big a topic for me to cover in three minutes, Allen, you know that. 

[Laughter] 

>> Attendee:
Talking about Paul Bain, and this might be more on the technical side than you decided to forego, just a quick observation, Paul Bain made a big deal about how intellectual writers, how they differ from the vast majority of the Greeks, and people like historians, geographers, philosophers, and so on, and the key word I think is tradition. 

Tradition is what grabs on to people, and it is given authority, which you mentioned, and so it's an interesting thing how tradition has momentum even in the most rational heart and intellectual writer and analytical writer cannot completely resist.  

So for example, how Satanists comparing he's sort of a geographer and Aristotle talked about [unclear dialogue] they are not so sure about the parts of this story that are fantastical, another phrase by Paul Bain is the doctrine of present things, referring to understanding things in terms of what you can observe around you and you know Aristotle, I'll say this, has never laid eyes on a bull headed man, as far as [unclear dialogue] is concerned, but there is a traditional belief that [unclear dialogue] had a hand in the foundation of Athens, and Aristotle in his [unclear dialogue] talks about the role that [unclear dialogue] played in the development of Athens' constitution.  

When he complains about belief in myth, it is not belief in myth as myth; it is belief in the wrong details.  

He complains that people get details that [unclear dialogue] wrong, he was a political enemy.  

And that is what we need to take away from this story.  

That is what [unclear dialogue].  

There is an interesting way these intellectuals framed this issue of credibility and I think it is true that, this has been my own research, that the vast majority of Greeks did not apply that analytical apparatus in their discussions and myths. 

I think it more or less on the lines of what you are talking about but even among intellectuals there are different gradations of [unclear dialogue] and they struggle with these issues because it occurs to them to struggle with it.  

I don't think it occurs to most people to struggle with it. 

>> Dr. Irwin:
Right. 

And I think that is one thing that carries over, you see that in lots of cultures that your average everyday person. 

You are right, even an educated person isn't really worried about whether they believe it or not, at some level, because it's not a compelling question.  

Mythology in Greek culture was not really closely tied to religion and belief, yes, I mean the idea of gods, yes, but the details not so much, and people wouldn't sit back like we are thinking hmm I wonder if this really happened.  

That wasn't it. 

But you are right, that even the intellectuals who had been the philosophers and the historians who were trying to turn that analytical eye couldn't entirely, you can't just break away from that much tradition if you know that there was once a man names Theseus. 

And if you apply that to our American culture today, we look at somebody like George Washington. 

What was that man really like? 

Books and books have been written about him, but in the popular imagination, even among educated people, there's a vision of that flesh and blood man that is dominate regardless of you know what anyone else is going to write down. 

It's just is, you know, and I think with the Greek mythology, the interesting things about that is you have these people that are supposedly existed, these great heroes of the past who were human beings, and then you've got the gods mixed in, and so they want to take something away and believe pieces of the human being part. 

They want to believe something about this war, even though, again the historians and the philosophers wouldn't have believed that it necessarily took place like this, verbatim.  

Although I find it really interesting what this particular publisher put on the cover, this is the D-day invasion and you know we think even going back as far as WWII how many stories come out that again, true, I love Stephen Colbert’s word "truthiness".  

Because I think that is what we pull out of these myths, are certain broader concepts and values, the truthiness of then rather than specific facts, so I think that is really interesting things.

>> 
[Unclear dialogue]I think the interesting way about classical studies is the way it always seem current and one of the things that happened that maybe makes the myths believable longer is that already in the late 19th and 20th century, people were thinking ok, [unclear dialogue]religion and then I started digging the excavations [unclear dialogue] time is [unclear dialogue] and they found things like Troy and the citadels and things that although that [unclear dialogue] that is not true, he still found a place where he put the shovel, and evidence found, well, between Troy and and Greece, and Crete and all, Things that had been buried for so long had came up, then all of sudden everything is called into question again, because, ok, maybe I [unclear dialogue] he became a hero [unclear dialogue] model that a lot of things hung on, but there's a place that he lived that we can actually find walls from that period, so it makes it, it brings it alive [unclear dialogue].

>> Dr. Irwin:
Yeah. Exactly. 

And it sort of keeps coming back and in iterations too, different pieces of the stories come back to us.  

Absolutely.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
[Unclear dialogue]

I am going to ask you a couple of questions very quickly. 

You don't have to answer them all. 

First the one thousand knights and [unclear dialogue] is considered myths,  [unclear dialogue]

>> Dr. Irwin:
No the Thousand and One Knights are tales, they are considered to be fiction rather than myth.  

If traditional again, I am probably over-simplifying, but traditional narrative falls into three categories.  

There’s myth, there's legend, and then there are tales.  

So the Arabian Nights are tales, legends are stories that are kind of fanciful but they are about real people, like Daniel Boone, Washington cutting down the cherry tree, so Washington is true, the story maybe not, so that's what legend is, stories of heroes and famous people, and myth. 

For a story to be a myth, it generally has to have some kind of divine presence.  

So in the Arabian nights, it really skews more towards the tale, although there are some stories in there about [unclear dialogue]who was a person, so that's again, a talk for another day.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
The Bible says Paul when he went to Athens and 2000 years ago, he broke the statues for gods and that Athenians or Greeks usually are, or typically are religious quote, unquote, because they worshipped many gods. 

So my question at this point, is there any historic evidence that they worship these gods in the myths or were there temples for them, or?

>> Dr. Irwin;
Yeah, absolutely.  

So there were significant numbers of the Greeks who believed the stories, even if they didn't believe the actual details, but believed these gods existed and the art sort of underlines those beliefs as well, as one of the ways in which you pay homage to a deity as to erect a statue or to build a temple to worship that person.  

Now, or that figure.  

Later on, when we get to Roman history, when you get out to [unclear dialogue] of the Roman empire and people are building statues of Augustus, then some people start to believe the emperor Augustus is a god because they've never seen him, here is a statue, just next to this other statue of somebody who had been told is a god, so, it gets a little muddied. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Yeah. 

>> Dr. Irwin:
So the outside observer is always going to be outside. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
So can we comfortably say that some Athenians or a certain percentage really believed that the question of the title of the presentation, "did they really believe" we can comfortably say, or scientifically say, "yes, some of them really believed to the extent that they worshipped them?

>> Dr. Irwin:
Um hmm

>> Dr. Wahby:
Now last question from my side.  

Again, Apostle Paul say that Greeks search for wisdom, they have a quest for wisdom.  

And they want to talk about things and discuss it and find the truth.  

Is this something thats natural for them, at that time they would discuss, or search for truth or something like that that you find in the readings or writings of somebody?

>> Dr. Irwin:
That is really not my, not my area.  

I think I'd wait until we hear more from our historians on those or our philosophers on those issues.  

Because when I look at mythology, I am looking at sort of story patterns, and the way a story works, not so much a search for, I mean certain truths yes, wisdom, maybe not. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Define wisdom in ten seconds. 

What is wisdom?

>> Dr. Irwin:
The ability to apply knowledge well.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
So, it is not something that you have in your mind, but something you apply, do, wisdom is not something, I am wise now, but I am wise when I do? 

>> Dr. Irwin:
I think so.  

I think knowledge is what you have up here, but wisdom is what you demonstrate by the way you apply that knowledge.  

Again, that is Bonnie's definition, that's not anything technological.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Would you please clap your hands for Bonnie Irwin.  

Now you know why she is Bonnie Irwin.  

>> Dr. Irwin:
There's a myth behind that. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you very much. 

Thank you very much for coming.