Mythology Expert Reviews Greek & Roman Mythology in Movies (Part 1) | Vanity Fair

[Music] hello my name is peter meineck i'm professor of classics in the modern world at new york university and today we're going to be breaking down greek and roman mythology in tv and film this is a scene from the movie 300. spartan yes my lady [Music] come back with your shield [Music] or on it yes ah the 300. where to start a compelling movie and also a deeply problematical movie as well the famous phrase right come back carrying your shield or laying on it which seems pretty harsh thing for your wife to tell you when

you're about to go and fight a battle and you know you're not coming home i think it's porzanius who actually documents this he said that spartan mothers actually said it to their sons which is perhaps even harsher it's not only a spartan sentiment the athenians had a term of insult called a shield dropper anybody who dropped their shield in battle meant that they were retreating from the hoplite phalanx the hot plate phalanx was that you would deploy your infantry maybe six to nine thousand of them and you would carry a large round shield called hoplite

we see it in the movie and that would cover half of your body but it would also cover half of the body of the man to your left so you were totally dependent on each other in battle if you dropped your shield it meant that not only were you a coward because you were running away but you were also letting the lying down he doesn't say it there's no room for softness not in sparta no place for weakness only the hard and strong may call themselves spartans only the hard only the strong i think what's

so interesting about spartan culture is we are fascinated with it right because it seems to promote this idea of kind of male toughness but actually that's a little bit of a very repressive state to live in where everything is about the army at the time this happens in spartan history the 76th century bc all spartan art stops all spartan poetry stops and we just have this spartan military spartan culture itself died out because they simply didn't produce enough children even though you were married you stayed living in barracks until you were 30 years old men

and women were pretty separate in that society their marriage system just did not work and also they were a very very exclusive society you could only be a spartan if you were born in the five villages of sparta by the fourth century sparta was was spent as a power so you know historically spartan's system was not successful at all so it's probably not something we should emulate i mean i was i was so shocked to see people on january 6 um attacking the capital dressing up as spartans and running around and you know should think

about right is that this was perhaps the greatest gay army that's ever been on the planet famously bisexual as many people were in antiquity very different ideas about sexuality they lived um together as men in messes and the spartans were very much um into each other great bisexual army in many ways that's another way that they've been sort of misinterpreted that somehow they convey this kind of idea of you know certain masculinity that is not attested at all in the ancient sources but having said that i think they get certain things right okay there's no

doubt spartan warriors all greek warriors were very interested in physical fitness they were very interested in the male body they were often depicted nude in greek art and the women too had to undergo physical exercise in order to give strong babies for the spartan army they did wear red cloaks as a way to kind of soak up the blood on the battlefield but also to designate themselves that they were spartans and it was considered manly to have a very long beard one of the things i really don't like about this movie the 300 is the

way that the persians are presented they're almost non-human twisted and as kind of vile and to me it's really quite racist actually and it's it's kind of promoting white supremacy versus this horrible kind of invasion of of brown people and it's completely inaccurate i mean one of the things about the persian empire that even the greeks tell is how multi-ethnic it was and how it had people from all over the world in their army and the battle tactics of the great king was he would literally turn up with his million man army and you just

surrendered right because how could you possibly take an army like that on but you don't see these kind of racist and xenophobic attitudes in the greek texts if aseglis who fought of the battle of marathon and lost a brother there he was a playwright and he also served in the military he actually wrote a play called the persians and we actually feel sympathy for the persians in their defeat and and we feel their pain and we feel the losses that's happened to them and i think this is the thing that really makes him uncomfortable about

this film there is such a root good king just past that western ridge it's an old goat path the persians could use it to outflank us not one step closer monster there actually is accounts of a character like that and a kind of rejected spartan character who does actually go over to the enemy he's certainly nowhere near as deformed as this character and again that's also kind of very problematic right there's a connection between physical perfection beauty and loyalty and truth because this character doesn't fit that ideal he has to be deceitful this is actually

the opposite of what you find in greek mythology characters like that are often given a second sight one can think of tyresius who has lived as both a man and a woman and who is blind characters like oedipus who is depicted as as having a leg deformity characters who we would label perhaps as disabled who actually are seen as having great high status in greek society so again this is something that the movie i think gets gets very wrong this next clip is from the clash of the titans [Music] [Applause] this is a very powerful

myth for the ancient greeks which is the myth of medusa the gorgon who could turn you to stone and perseus here one of his kind of rights as passage his step into manhood is to go and bring back the head of medusa and get rid of this horrible catholic symbol what i mean by catholic is a symbol of the earth so the greeks sort of divided up their universe in terms of olympian which was the sky which is predominantly controlled by zeus and male gods and the earth which was predominantly female gaia hera ria and

one of the clues to that is whenever we see snakes we're dealing with a catholic image and we see that in the hairstyle of medusa right who's got these catholic images of the snake and why did the greeks regard the snakes as catholic because i think if you go to greece and you see a snake right they seem to come out of the earth and disappear back into the earth they're pretty scary snakes as well so that image is very much still with us today if any of you ever ever go into a medical facility

or ride an ambulance you'll see a snake wrapped around a staff right and that is literally the catholic symbol of death the snake being lifted up off the ground off the earth often these are myths of gender wars between male and female figures and so here's perseus right he's you know 17 18 years old in in becoming a man he has to go and literally kind of sever himself off from the world of women so this is very much a story of a young warrior's right of passage the lead-back mirror that we're used to seeing

today was not invented until maybe the 15th century in europe so they never saw true reflections of themselves they had to look at themselves in polished surfaces bronze shields maybe in the water so the shield the culminating moment of him looking in the mirror back at medusa is also i think a kind of musing on this idea of identity right do you really know who you are and that enables him to have the power to deliver the fatal blow and sever the head we get a lot of these stories of young men having to kind

of conquer their sexuality so the idea that a beautiful woman can petrify you obviously has sexual connotations and you've got to kind of defeat that by not actually looking at it and focusing on what your mission is in order to sort of conquer your sexuality and resist the charms of women that's definitely something that we find in a lot of greek mythology and that may be playing into the medusa myth as well this scene is from the movie black panther millions of years ago a meteorite made a vibranium the strongest substance in the universe struck

the continent of africa affecting the plant life around it and when the time of men came five tribes settled on it and called it wakanda the first thing to say is that the mediterranean world doesn't exist in isolation and one of the things that has happened is that greek and roman mythology has somehow been disconnected mainly in the 19th century by europeans and you know to a certain extent whitewashed right taken away from its mediterranean roots and you know half of the mediterranean is africa right and we forget that and the greeks had a very

different attitude to africa and that was they saw ethiopia egypt kush kurma as uh very ancient and very advanced cultures and civilizations and we see this reflected here in black panther so for example in book one of the iliad the gods are not an olympus they've actually gone to the only humans who they deign worthy of their company to dine with and that is the ethiopians and then secondly a lot of what we call greek mythology are heavily influenced by stories from africa via egypt and kush i don't think there would be greek and roman

mythology without these these ancient african stories the tribes lived in constant war with each other until a warrior shaman received a vision from the panther goddess bust who led him to the heart shaped herb a plant that granted him superhuman strength speed and instincts the warrior became king and the first black panther the protector of wakanda so the idea of the panther god and then having a mortal who becomes the panther at certain moments to protect his community relates directly if you think about it with heracles right because heracles is a lion warrior i should

say and we call this therianthropy where a human transforms into an animal to do something superhuman and you tap into the power of that animal in order to protect your community so we should place heracles very much in the same world as that the wakandans used vibranium to develop technology more advanced than any other nation but as wakanda thrived the world around it descended further into chaos to keep vibranium safe the wakandans vowed to hide in plain sight keeping the truth of their power from the outside world one thing i love about this movie is

this idea that wakanda's hidden you've got this incredibly developed ancient culture and a lot of people responded to that with this movie because that is the truth just like wakanda is hidden so much of african mythology and ancient history has been hidden to us because what's happened is that through enslavement and colonization we have a view of the continent of africa that is completely false particularly its history and its rich culture we can't just look at the greeks and romans in isolation they are people of the mediterranean they trade speak to interrelate with the africans

as the africans do with them so we have to question why we even call this stuff just greek and roman mythology it's got much wider connotations across the networks of that entire region in the movie there's this idea of the astral plane which is that you can communicate with your ancestors your ancestors are going to give you the wisdom you need to pursue through your life particularly at times of trouble and you know ancestor worship is a an enormous part of both greek and roman culture the old had very high status in ancient societies because

they were the font of knowledge the romans actually would take death masks of their ancestors clay versions of them and then at certain festivals they would wear the masks of their ancestors and they would parade through the streets in them good morning how can i help you i'm just checking out these artifacts they tell me you're the expert you could say that where is this one from the bobo ashanti tribe present-day ghana 19th century to take that mask and put it in a glass case in a museum is the worst thing you can do to

that mask that mask supposed to be worn by a performer who's been imbued in a whole culture of dancing and performing and telling those stories over centuries and now it's become like an aesthetic object with a price on it and i think this movie actually shows that really well now tell me about this one also from benin 7th century foola tribe i believe no i beg your pardon it was taken by british soldiers in benin but it's from wakanda and it's made out of vibranium don't trip i'm gonna take it off your hands for you

these items aren't for sale how do you think your ancestors got these you think they paid a fair price or did they take it like they took everything else here's a character from that culture who's not really allowed to interface with material from his own culture and is is actually being scored on it by somebody who's not from that culture it's about access right and i think one of the things this does is it shows us how if you remove an object from the stories that are told about it and the way it's performed is

that object still operating the same way i love it that he takes a mask at the end and that becomes his character and even though he uses it in a negative way for him it empowers him and that's his connection uh with his ancestors you know i think often we see these objects in museums but we don't think about them in their in their real cultural context black panther movie makes people think about that the next clip is from the movie oh brother where are though [Music] [Music] name of pete in many ways it's an

american odyssey although i remember the cohen brothers said they never read the odyssey and they weren't aware of it you know maybe there's an argument that some of these stories entered our collective unconsciousness many people who've never read the odyssey know the story of the sirens it's one of the tasks that odysseus faces on his way home he's told not to listen to the sirens and yet he he's compelled to listen to them so he tells his crew members to tie him to the mast and they've all got to put wax in their ears in

the odyssey the siren's song is actually offering fame you know we'll sing about you we'll sing your stories so uh it's less sexual i think in the odyssey and more about kind of the fame of the hero and the identity of the hero [Music] so you get that story of the sirens but also the story of the lotus eaters they're offered corn alcohol and you know there's a sense that they're going to be given oblivion and that's another story in the odyssey the crew land on the land of the lotus eaters and if they eat

the lotus they forget this is often what a lot of returning warriors do coming home from war is they want to obliterate their traumatic memories any substance that can kind of blot out the pain so i think that there's um a number of references going on here and then finally the kind of sort of medieval trope of you know being turned into a a toad i think america of the great depression it's hard for us now to understand what a cataclysmic event world war one was this idea of kind of total industrialized war as a

global event and then the knock-on effect that that war caused that is analogous to perhaps the trojan war which in greek mythology is the biggest war the greeks ever fought and you you do get the sense in the odyssey of a new society being rebuilt that odysseus cannot come home and just be an aristocrat anymore his success is dependent on eumayus the swineherd it is dependent on his wife penelope on his father on his son he's no longer the singular aristocratic hero so yeah you definitely get the sense of a changing uncertain world in the

odyssey that's that's reflected in this time period i almost prefer to see myths pop up in something more contemporary because you're absorbed by the actual story that's being told and by the actors and then you go oh well that's the sirens right but it doesn't kind of pull you away from the story this is how myth works so i would argue that this is an example of mythic material actually working and being compelling and helping to tell a new story this scene is from the movie wonder woman long ago when time was new the gods

ruled the earth zeus king among them zeus created beings over which the gods would rule beings born in his image he called his creation man there's some fun going on in this story nowhere in greek mythology does use have anything to do with the creation of humanity in fact the gods really don't have anything to do with the creation of humanity only the first woman we hear that the titan prometheus whose name means forward thinker creates pandora the first woman out of clay and the reason we're told pandora is created is to basically be a

distraction to mankind because prometheus has just given them fire and this starts to make mankind god-like so we're told in these quite misogynistic myths that in order to distract mankind they invent women to sort of take them in a different direction but that's the only myth we get about the origins of any any kind of human but seuss's son grew envious of mankind and sought to corrupt his father's creation this was ares the god of war ares in this is really kind of beefed up to be an equal with zeus the greeks actually didn't call

ares the god of war they called him the god of violence which i think is quite a profound way to think about a god who's associated with warfare the greeks saw ares as a negative force so they get that right but ares is portrayed in greek art and mythology as a coward he kind of gets beaten up by heroes on the battlefield in homer he goes running to his dad asking for help so the kind of idea that ares could overthrow zeus is certainly nothing that an ancient greek would understand the gods created us the

amazons to influence men's hearts with love and restore peace to the earth i think this idea about amazon's bringing peace and harmony towards men is quite a modern idea and maybe it's more bound up with modern ideas about gender right that this is what women are supposed to provide in particular society and men of the warriors so actually it's the opposite they're very very war-like they don't want men around they were certainly not about peace you know there were women warriors particularly in the steps region and in what the greeks called thrace to the north

we've definitely found graves with wind warriors there was women warriors in in the celtic if anything like the amazons actually existed they would have probably been nomadic tribes highly skilled particularly with with a bow and arrow the amazons were viewed in antiquity of living around the black sea coast either the south of the black seed or north of black sea sometimes in ethiopia in africa sometimes in libya never on an island but i actually think that there is some validity in doing that in terms of ancient mythology the idea of mystical islands and strange things

happening on islands is something we encounter in the odyssey in homer it's a fun idea and it's a good device for the movie we give thanks to the gods for giving us this paradise and the god killer the god killer the weapon that's strong enough to kill a god the thing that makes me laugh is the whole idea of the god killer because you actually can't kill a god with the whole purpose that greek gods exist is that they are immortal so wonder woman of course you know i think she's very much influenced by the

amazon queen hippolyta who are associated with greek heroes like hercules and theseus and i think that they absolutely tapped in to that idea of the warrior woman i think what's interesting about this particular scene is it kind of gets the heart of what mythology is you know the young wonder woman has her mother telling her this origin story and we as an audience also receive that origin story performed myth is what we call an ideology it's there to explain why something is the way it is and i think that's what makes myth so fascinating is

we can actually analyze them and say well why are these stories being told and what are they communicating that story is really about us today it's less about the ancient greeks and more about perhaps what's going on in our world and i think that that's what made that first movie quite successful actually the next clip is from hercules hercules behave yourself look at this look how cute he is the movie is aiming at kids and so it kind of elides over some of the most interesting parts of the of the heracles myth the greek named

him heracles means famous of hera and not in a good way is hera the wife of zeus hates heracles and is constantly trying to destroy him here keep those away from the baby oh he won't hurt himself as a baby uh that scene would never have happened heracles had never been welcomed to olympus as a child in fact hero sent snakes to kill uh the infant heracles but heracles was already really strong and wrestled the snakes and and killed them what about our gift dear hmm yes a little cirrus and um [Music] his name is

pegasus and he's all your son heracles and pegasus are not really connected in any of the greek mythic material pegasus appears in the perseus myth and other myths related to the house of perseus and even though heracles is from that region we don't see him associated with pegasus so that's something that the movie bought him panic got a little riddle for you how do you kill a god i do not you can't they're immortal bingo they're immortal so first you gotta turn the little sun spot the other thing is that hercules doesn't really have this

kind of hate relationship with hades except you could argue that the movie is riffing on this idea of can a mortal born character become immortal and heracles is one of the only mortal characters who becomes a god now hades was actually called the unseen one and we have very few depictions of him so he was sort of seen as being somewhat invisible or somebody that you didn't want to see but we certainly don't associate hades with necessarily being a hot place i mean that's kind of an image of hell the greeks believed that there were

certain entrance points to the underworld and there were these kind of underground rivers that you had to have kyron the ferryman transport you across you were buried with money so you could pay the ferryman for for that journey if you weren't buried of course you you wandered the shores of the river sticks never getting across i actually have visited a number of these sites that are associated with being the entrance to the underworld and they're actually really compelling pretty scary stuff so i think i think they did a pretty good job encapsulating that actually i

resist something that we call the fidelity discourse that there is an original version and that we must be true to that version that kills the life that's behind a myth a myth is about performance is about being spoken told enacted and received by an audience that's what it means to be human to share our stories with each other we want novelty we want something new and also culture changes and culture gets influenced by different cultures so the stories have changed too so to say that there's an original version of a story is actually to go

against the very idea of mythos right which is a a traditional story a story that's handed down i'm peter meineck professor of classics in the modern world at new york university thanks for watching [Music]