Greek Myth after Antiquity: Ovid, Renaissance Art and Freud

Greek myth survived the end of ancient religion largely through Roman literature, above all Ovid's Metamorphoses, which passed the stories to medieval and Renaissance Europe under Latin names. Reinterpreted as allegory, astrology and Christian morality in the Middle Ages, the myths returned as subjects of art in the Renaissance with painters such as Botticelli and Titian, became tools of psychology with Freud's Oedipus complex, and remain a source for novels, films and religious revival today.

Greek Gods with Roman Names§

Rome had its own gods but early identified them with Greek deities, adopting Greek myths and images; Livy records a banquet for twelve gods in six male-female pairs in 217 BCE, an echo of the Twelve Olympians. Through Latin literature the Roman names entered every European language, and they still name the planets. Roman cult itself is described in Roman Religion, and the planetary gods in Zodiac Planets.

The identifications were never exact. Mars was a far more important and respected god in Rome than Ares in Greece, and Saturn had his own Italian festival, the Saturnalia. Apollo, uniquely, kept his Greek name. Until the nineteenth century most English writers spoke of "Jupiter" and "Ulysses" even when retelling Homer.

Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Book of Changes§

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–c. 17 CE) completed the Metamorphoses around 8 CE, just before Augustus exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea. The poem of fifteen books, about 12,000 lines of hexameter verse, gathers some 250 myths linked by one theme, transformation, and runs from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. Its first line, in Frank Justus Miller's 1916 translation, announces: "My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms."

Ovid told stories drawn from Greek poets and Hellenistic collections with wit, psychological insight and a sharp eye for divine cruelty. Many of the most familiar versions of Greek myths are his: Apollo and Daphne, Echo and Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Arachne's weaving contest with Minerva, Phaethon's fall, Pygmalion's statue, and Orpheus' descent for Eurydice, retold in Orpheus and Eurydice. Because Greek was little read in the medieval West, Ovid, with Virgil and the late mythographers, was for a thousand years the chief door to Greek myth. His Greek sources are discussed in Greek Tragedy and Myth.

Gods in Disguise: Medieval Allegory and Astrology§

As the art historian Jean Seznec showed in The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1940), Christian Europe kept the pagan gods alive in three main forms. First, as history: following the ancient theory of Euhemerus, chroniclers explained the gods as early kings and inventors later worshipped by mistake. Second, as moral and physical allegory: the late antique writer Fulgentius, the so-called Vatican Mythographers and the vast fourteenth-century French Ovide moralisé read each myth as a moral lesson, sometimes as a figure of Christ or the soul. Third, as astrology: the planets kept their divine names and characters, and astrological manuscripts, partly from Arabic sources, showed Jupiter or Venus in medieval dress.

The scholar Aby Warburg traced this astrological survival in the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (around 1470), where Olympian gods ride in triumph above the signs of the zodiac and the mysterious decan figures. Through these channels Greek gods entered the learned magic described in The Renaissance Magical Cosmos. Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, on which he worked from the 1350s until his death in 1375, gathered the allegorical tradition into a reference work used for two centuries, followed by the handbooks of Vincenzo Cartari and Natale Conti in the 1550s and 1560s.

Botticelli, Titian and the Renaissance Rebirth of Myth§

In fifteenth-century Florence, myths were seen again through ancient eyes. Marsilio Ficino, translator of Plato, taught that the pagan poets had veiled a philosophy compatible with Christianity and distinguished a heavenly from an earthly Venus; see Marsilio Ficino and Esotericism in the Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli's Primavera (c. 1480) and The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–86), painted for the Medici circle, were among the first large-scale paintings of pagan myth since antiquity. Scholars such as Ernst Gombrich and Edgar Wind read them through Ficino's Neoplatonism; others stress the poetry of Ovid and Angelo Poliziano as more direct sources, and the debate continues.

In Venice, Titian brought Ovid to life. His Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23), for Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, shows the god leaping from his chariot towards the abandoned princess. In the 1550s and early 1560s he painted for Philip II of Spain a series of mythological canvases that he called poesie — Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Perseus and Andromeda, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto and The Rape of Europa — almost all based on the Metamorphoses. With Mantegna, Raphael, Correggio and later Rubens and Poussin, myth became a central subject of European art.

Literature and music followed. Arthur Golding's English translation of the Metamorphoses (1567) was read by Shakespeare, whose Venus and Adonis (1593) and the play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream come from Ovid. The first surviving operas, Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600) and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607), took the myth of Orpheus as their subject.

Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the Victorian Myth Books§

In the eighteenth century Johann Joachim Winckelmann taught Europe to see Greek art as the summit of beauty, defined by what he called edle Einfalt und stille Größe, "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur". Canova and Jacques-Louis David turned to Greek subjects, and the Romantic poets read the myths as images of freedom and longing, as in Keats's Endymion (1818) and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820). The English Platonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), translator of the Orphic Hymns, Plato and the Neoplatonists, presented Greek religion as a mystical philosophy and influenced Blake and the American Transcendentalists, a key link between Greek myth and modern esotericism.

Popular retellings shaped how English-speaking readers first met the myths: Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851), Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable (1855) and Charles Kingsley's The Heroes (1856). Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) recast Greek culture as a tension between Apollo and Dionysus, and archaeology — Schliemann at Troy, Arthur Evans at Knossos — gave the myths a new, material setting.

Freud's Oedipus and the Psychology of Myth§

Sigmund Freud first linked his theory of childhood desire to Sophocles' Oedipus the King in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1897, and developed the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899, dated 1900). He argued that the play still moved audiences because every child's earliest wishes turn toward one parent and rivalry toward the other. The term "Oedipus complex" appeared in print in 1910, and Freud's essay On Narcissism (1914) took another Greek myth, Narcissus, as the name of a psychological condition. C. G. Jung proposed an "Electra complex", which Freud rejected, and Jung and the mythologist Karl Kerényi later read Greek myths as expressions of universal archetypes; see Jung's Red Book.

Classical scholars have often objected. Jean-Pierre Vernant argued in his essay "Oedipus without the complex" that the tragedy concerns knowledge, power and fate in the Athenian city, not unconscious desire, and the Oedipus of myth did not know his parents. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) used the Oedipus story to argue that myths work through structured oppositions. Psychological readings remain influential, even as historians insist on the ancient context described in Oedipus and the House of Thebes.

Modern Retellings and Living Myth§

The twentieth century made the myths mirrors of its crises. James Joyce built Ulysses (1922) on the Odyssey; T. S. Eliot gave Tiresias a central place in The Waste Land (1922); in occupied France, Jean Anouilh's Antigone (1944) and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies (1943) used ancient tragedy to speak of resistance and freedom, and Albert Camus made Sisyphus a hero of the absurd. Robert Graves's The Greek Myths (1955) became a bestseller, though scholars treat its theories with caution.

Recent decades have seen a wave of retellings, often from the viewpoint of women and the defeated: Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018), Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships (2019), alongside Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels. Beyond literature, Greek gods are again worshipped by modern Hellenic polytheists, whose religion received legal recognition in Greece in 2017; see Gods and Goddesses of Modern Paganism and What Is a Pagan?.

Frequently asked questions§

Why do Greek gods have Roman names?§

The Romans identified their own gods with Greek ones, adopting Greek myths while keeping Latin names, and because Latin was Europe's learned language, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury became familiar long before the Greek forms.

Why is Ovid's Metamorphoses so important for Greek mythology?§

It collects some 250 myths in one Latin poem that was read continuously when few in the West knew Greek. Many familiar versions of myths, and much Renaissance art, derive from Ovid rather than Greek sources.

What does Botticelli's Birth of Venus show?§

Venus arrives on a shell after her birth from the sea, blown ashore by wind gods and met by a figure, often identified as one of the Hours, holding a cloak. It has been read both as Neoplatonic allegory and as illustration of classical poetry.

Where does the Oedipus complex come from?§

Freud named it after Sophocles' Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. He first linked the play to his theory in 1897; the term appeared in 1910.

Sources and further reading§

• Metamorphoses — Ovid, c. 8 CE
• The Survival of the Pagan Gods — Jean Seznec, 1953
• Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance — Edgar Wind, 1958
• Studies in Iconology — Erwin Panofsky, 1939
• The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature — Gilbert Highet, 1949
• The Interpretation of Dreams — Sigmund Freud, 1900
• The Age of Fable — Thomas Bulfinch, 1855
• The Greek Myths — Robert Graves, 1955
• Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece — Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 1988