Taught by Shalom L. Goldman | Emory University | Ph.D., New York University In a time seemingly more devoted to practical realities with each passing year, why would we want to study myths? What can the fables of ancient civilizations long since gone to dust tell us about the world we must deal with today, where each morning plunges many of us anew into a frenzied pace of professional tasks, madcap scheduling, and day-to-day concerns on a scale those ancients never could have imagined, leaving us precious little time to ponder the deeper questions about life itself and our place in the world?
The answer is that the ancients did imagine such things or at least their world's version of them along with the same deep questions we ourselves yearn to solve. And we are connected to them in more ways than we ourselves might ever imagine.
They looked out upon their crops and wondered if the lands on which their lives depended would continue to be fruitful. And they looked toward the skies or across the oceans or even, in their mind's eye, into the darkness of the underworld and wondered if the gods who ruled them were displeased, and how to placate them if they were. And they wondered why, despite all of their efforts, misfortune still fell upon them, and what this portended about the fate of humanity itself.
And in their myths, which contemporary scholars are still wresting from the past, they gave us their answers the ways they thought they should live and die, the rules of love and marriage, how to raise their children, the rituals of worship, and the relationship they would have to their gods.
These are, of course, the same answers those of us in modern times spend our own lives trying to find. So in looking at the ancients mythology from a variety of different perspectives, we can learn an extraordinary amount about not only their world and how they viewed it, but about ourselves as well. And we also gain the benefit of experiencing the pleasures of literature in reading these very first stories humanity's oldest from the cradle of civilization.
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