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<blockquote data-quote="DarkKestral" data-source="post: 3763793" data-attributes="member: 40100">Having just had a classics class, I can say that my professor certainly thought so, and it looks like most of the current crop of classicists think so.. and so do I.I'm fairly sure there is a definite procession from the 'dark, creepy, wild and dangerous mythic' to 'cataloguable mythic' to 'humanist mythic' to 'rational' in Greek myth. Each succeeding mythic generationappears to get less and less cthonic in nature and more and more human, and their stories seem to get succeedingly less dark and more and more prone to focusing on the humans involved. However, the Odyssey and the Iliad seem to be solid outliers (though their popularity probably spawned some of the tendency, if they were) due to their extreme age relative to other stories, and thus the likelihood is that they were written in the cthonic eras. However, they are decidely 'fantastical humanist', so they almost belong to a later one. That might be because there were constant contests for a while to come up with a better Odyssey and Iliad, and the version we see now is just the end result of those contests.Most specifically, look at the Argonautika by Apollonius (it even has an early anti-hero as the &quot;main&quot; protagonist) and it's treatment of Hercules/Herakles. It actively seems to treat him as a 'bad old days' sort of hero and gets rid of him at the first possible opportunity. However, he's always ambiguous in terms of morality, as he goes berserk and kills his kids, wives, and seemingly entire city-states on at least 2 occasions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="DarkKestral, post: 3763793, member: 40100"] Having just had a classics class, I can say that my professor certainly thought so, and it looks like most of the current crop of classicists think so.. and so do I. I'm fairly sure there is a definite procession from the 'dark, creepy, wild and dangerous mythic' to 'cataloguable mythic' to 'humanist mythic' to 'rational' in Greek myth. Each succeeding mythic generationappears to get less and less cthonic in nature and more and more human, and their stories seem to get succeedingly less dark and more and more prone to focusing on the humans involved. However, the Odyssey and the Iliad seem to be solid outliers (though their popularity probably spawned some of the tendency, if they were) due to their extreme age relative to other stories, and thus the likelihood is that they were written in the cthonic eras. However, they are decidely 'fantastical humanist', so they almost belong to a later one. That might be because there were constant contests for a while to come up with a better Odyssey and Iliad, and the version we see now is just the end result of those contests. Most specifically, look at the Argonautika by Apollonius (it even has an early anti-hero as the "main" protagonist) and it's treatment of Hercules/Herakles. It actively seems to treat him as a 'bad old days' sort of hero and gets rid of him at the first possible opportunity. However, he's always ambiguous in terms of morality, as he goes berserk and kills his kids, wives, and seemingly entire city-states on at least 2 occasions. [/QUOTE]

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