Procrustes was a gentleman who made travel upon the byways of ancient Greece interestingly hazardous. He had an iron bed onto which he placed any traveler who fell into his hands. If the traveler was too long for the bed, jolly old Procrustes lopped off the excess. It the traveler was too short, Procrustes stretched him to fit. One day Theseus appeared before Procrustes' door and allowed the old bandit the opportunity to measure himself on his bed.
Robert Graves wrote with the intention of expounding and explaining Greek myths. Unstated but implicit in this intention were two ideas: that there is a more or less self-consistent thing called the Greek myths and that they have a more or less consistent meaning. Neither of these things is necessarily true.
The influence of Thomas Bullfinch is so all-pervasive that we are almost blind to it. He provided the English-speaking world with a convenient handbook of myths that made it appear that the Greek (and derivative Roman) world had a central core of beliefs as definable as the Bible, the Qur'an or, for that matter, the Book of Mormon. Admittedly, Graves offers some variant versions, but then, so does Genesis. Years later, Edith Hamilton, with more scholarship and a lot less charm, re-emphasized the lesson.
Was it Bullfinch's intention to assemble a handbook of Greek myths? Not really. In his preface, he makes his intention clear. He was a teacher whose students were unable to understand allusions made by great poets of the English language, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth and their ilk. His handbook is not of Greek myths but of English poetical allusions to Greek myths.
In Bullfinch's time and for many generations before, classical learning consisted of a great deal of Latin and a few snatches of Greek, as demonstrated by the fact that Pope's great translation of Homer has Jupiter, Minerva and Neptune rather than Zeus, Athena and Poseidon. It followed, then, that the two primary sources of mythology for those boasting classical education were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid, both of which were entirely artificial constructs assembled during the time of Augustus Caesar. By and large, that's where the poets found their allusions and, by and large, that's what Bullfinch gave us.
Even in Bullfinch's time, the amount of mythological material from ancient Greece was greater in scope, even though it was only a tiny fraction of what once had existed. That material had a characteristic that Bullfinch suppressed: it was wildly inconsistent and self-contradictory to the point of anarchy. What two sources could be more authoritative than the poets of the earliest dawn of classical culture, Hesiod and Homer? Hesiod unequivocally states that when the children of the Titan Cronus were born, he swallowed up all but the youngest of them, Zeus. Homer, with equal authority, says that the eldest of the children of Cronus was Zeus, and that it is because he is the eldest that he is king of the gods. Then there is Pausanias. He was a born tourist who traveled up and down the Greek speaking lands, putting in at every tourist trap that he could find while writing a popular guidebook. He was perfectly happy to accept that this hero or that as buried here, there, in another place or in as many places as you want. Sightings of the gods and the rituals associated with them were even more varied. Sometimes he heard a local story that is familiar to us from Homer, but almost invariably the local story is grimmer and bloodier than Homer's version. Clearly, Homer edited out the less respectable bits in exactly the same way that Disney edited the Brothers Grimm.
If there is not necessarily a consistent corpus of myths, what about their meanings? About 2000 BC, tribes of tallish, fair-haired people (see the physical descriptions in Homer of almost every Greek hero except Odysseus) who some generations earlier had bid farewell to their cousins who spoke a variant of their shared language that would evolve into Latin, moved southwest toward the Greek peninsula. They carried with them a god whose name was Zeus who undoubtedly had a consort or two or three (dozen) and a set of stories attached to him and his family. Around 1200 BC, their descendants who lived at a place called Pylos were overwhelmed by sea-borne raiders. In the burning of their palace, clay tablets bearing their routine administrative records were miraculously preserved. Their gods included Zeus, Potnia ("Our Lady") and Enyalios. Eight hundred years later, Socrates talked about "the god," presumably Zeus, as a moral figure, using words very like those Christians might choose for their God. In Roman times, the indefatigable Pausanias jotted down that Enyalios was a title of Ares and made references to Athena Potnia ("Our Lady Athena.") Is the truth of a tale of the Zeus of a proto-Greek speaker who has never even set foot in Greece the truth of Socrates' Zeus? Are the blood-soaked superstitions recorded by Pausanias more true than the rationalized heroic lays of Homer? Would Our Lady of Pylos even recognize Our Lady of Athens?
Procrustes had a number of Twentieth Century descendants. One was Robert Graves, who lopped and stretched the Greek myths onto the bed of his own imaginings. Scan down through these reviews until you come to "Green Melusine," who very cleverly applies Graves' technique to Cinderella with predictable result. (While you're at it, look up the tale of Melusine and wonder with me why anyone would adopt that particular moniker.)
The Greek myths are an intellectual and scholarly Rorschach test. In the Nineteenth Century whole universities of bearded German professors elaborately proved to their own complete satisfaction that the tale of Troy was nothing but an allegorical weather myth. They were much put out when Schliemann started digging up gold, not allegories. In the Twentieth Century Sir James Fraser, Edith Hamilton, Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell have all seen wonderful things in the Rorschach myths and have fitted them perfectly onto their Procrustean beds.
But Theseus always comes knocking at the door.
