Remember the Titans: The History of Greece and Rome

According to John Camp and Elizabeth Fisher, in the book The World of the Ancient Greeks, the Greeks used mythology to make sense of the world around them, explain the origin of humanity as well as where it was leading (in short, the meaning of life), and finally to perpetuate their history so they could keep in touch with their ancestors to never forget the places they explored and the wars they fought.

Within this paper, I will talk about 6 different myths that can be found in the Hamilton book and explain how each of them fits within the three categories of myths.

Why is the world the way that it is?The first set of myths I will talk about will aim at the explanation of natural phenomenon. These two myths are The myth of Cronus (Hamilton, 76) and The myth of Narcissus (Hamilton, 114).How the world and mankind were created starts with Chaos. Chaos is not how we understand the word now.

Chaos is an entity that gives birth to two children, Night and Erebus from pure energy. Erebus was utter darkness, so dark that it was seen as death.

Out of these two, Love was born who was able to give birth to Light and Day. Suddenly Earth appears however its creation was never explained, we only know that it originated from Love, Light, and Day. Then Earth gave birth to Heaven. Subsequently, Father Heaven and Mother Earth created all other forms of life. First, they produced all sorts of terrible monsters, such as one-eyed Cyclopes and creatures with hundreds of hands and heads.

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Then they created the Titans. Father Heaven, disgusted by his sons, the monsters with hundred hands and fifty heads, decided to hide them in the depts of the universe.

However, Mother Earth was enraged by the mistreatment of her sons and asks the Titans to avenge her. The only one who helped her was Cronus, who killed Father Heaven, and left the rest of the Titans to rule the universe. But from the spilled blood of Father Heaven, the Giants and the Furies were born. The furies were called ‘those who walked in darkness’, they had snakes as heads and blood as tears. Their job was to pursue and punish sinners. Eventually, the children left Earth but not the Furies: for as long as there were sinners, there would be Furies.

After an unknown amount of time, Cronus and his sister-wife Rhea were ruling the Heaves. During this time Cronus found out that one of his children is destined to kill him and become the next ruler of the Heavens, so he decided to eat each one of them as they were born. However, Rhea saved one of them, Zeus, by replacing him with a stone. When Zeus grew up, he forced Cronus to vomit his brothers and sister, who ended up joining forces with Prometheus, Epimetheus, and other enslaved monsters, to defeat the Titans. All titans were chained in the bowels of the earth except for Prometheus, Epimetheus, and their older brother, Atlas, who as punishment was sentenced to bear the weight of the world on in shoulders.

Narcissus, the ‘hero’ of this second myth, was a beautiful man. So beautiful that all the ladies were drawn to him, however, he didn’t want any of them. He used to pass by the most beautiful of the ladies around him as if they were inexisting, no matter how much they tried to catch his attention.