|
The Greek mythology is a collection of legends regarding the gods and goddesses and various demigod heroes and heroines who populate their pantheon. Mythology in Greece was not just idle stories but an explanation of life and its joys and pains in terms of a divine design and thus attaching a cosmic importance to a personal feeling. The cycles of the Natural world and the origin of the Greek religious practices were also explained through the mythology of Greece. In modern times the psychoanalytic and comparative approaches to the mythological allegories of Greece have created a body of work which inspires modern literary works just as the narratives themselves have inspired immortal original literature since their inception.
The Greek mythologies, like those in other great civilizations, has many complex overlapping and interwoven cycles that interlink various stories in a manner that to properly know any one is to actually know all the others. Apart from the "Myths of origin" or "Genesis myths", which exemplify an effort to make the universe intelligible in human concepts and justify the creation of the world; there are also stories with two thematic categories: tales of love, and tales of punishment.
The mythology was at the center of day to day life in chivalric Greece. Greeks accepted mythology as historic facts, using myths to justify cultural variations, natural phenomena, traditional friendships and enmities. It was a thing of honor and pride to be able to trace one's leaders' descent from a mythological god or demigod. None disbelieved the truth behind the chronicles of the Trojan War in the epics of Iliad and Odyssey. The "education of Greece" was Homer and his poetry "the Book".
More information regarding Greek mythology can be found in the following link:
|
