we discuss the economics of the ancient world, we must be careful not to use the
formal Economics which we employ in analyzing our own society, since Economics
is a function of the way a society runs, not the set of rules under which a
given society operates. We cannot remove ourselves from awareness of the
economic disciplines which our schools teach, and even if we formally try to
suspend Economics as a framework, we retain the image of the economic framework
in our language and our general pool of ideas. Yet some distancing of ourselves
from modern economic theory is necessary in starting an investigation of a
foreign world, in order to let the economic operations of that world display
themselves in their own documentation. We must construct some kind of
intellectual tabula rasa for use in studying an area which is far removed in
time and from a documentary point of view relatively unknown. When we speak of
Economics of the Ancient World, we usually think of the work pioneered by
Rostovtzeff and his followers, of the interpretation of history from an economic
point of view, and of the study of epigraphic and papyrological materials which
bear on costs and commodities. But there is a much earlier layer of historical
material, which strangely is incorporated in the quasi-religious cloak of Greek
Mythology. When one compares the myths of ancient Greece with those of ancient
India, one sees that the Indian myths are essentially spiritual in nature, while
the Greek myths show a disorganized array of unconvincing religion, erratic
personal histories, and what appear to be fragmented chapters in the history of
the rise of civilization after the last glacial retreat. It is the thesis of
this paper that parts of the early Greek, and even the pre-Greek historical
record became embalmed in the Greek myths, which themselves were rigidified into
literary storytelling by the time of the Hellenistic academies, and finally
petrified into the "myth systems" of Apollodoros and others, before
being buried by a hostile Christianity. The fact that the Greek myths were
rediscovered in the Renaissance, popularized in the l8 th century throughout
Europe, and re-popularized recently by several unscholarly myth-enthusiasts,
gives us the feeling that we know a great deal more about Greek mythology than
we do. We know most of the story-lines well, but we are largely ignorant of
their original use and meaning. The familiar story of Gyges as told by Herodotos
marks the appearance of a new kind of public person, someone unknown who
"appears out of the earth" as the ancient saying goes, and attains
power largely by virtue of being totally unseen. Gyges , a young Lydian
shepherd, found a cave one day which he entered and found in it (according to
Plato's account) a hollow cast-brass horse with a dead man's body inside. He
discovered that the ring which he pulled off the dead man's finger made him
invisible when he put it on his finger. Using this newfound power, he went to
the palace of Candaules, king of Lydia, the last of a long line of Heracleid
royalty, first seduced the queen, then with her help killed the king and took
his place as ruler of the country. In a world of hereditary kings, the history
of Gyges points to a new kind of person who gets riches and power specifically
by not being seen. Working invisibly he creates a new kind of enterprise, in
which "the transaction" serves as the unseen interface between buyer
and seller. This opens a way for unknown people like Trimalchio in l st c. A.D.
Rome (as documented in Petronius' incisive novel) who owes his fortune to a
sharp eye on the abstract flow of funds, although he started life on the lowest
rung of the social ladder. , For us this is a familiar pattern, many fortunes
have been made in exactly the same way in modern times, one thinks of
Rockefeller, Carnegie, Schliemann, Onassis, Ford and more recently the Korean
Samsung company's founder, Lee Byung Cheul. However these economics dynasties of
the modern world seldom produce an effective son and almost never a grandson,
they are first and foremost the work of an individual who only becomes known
after his empire is fully constructed. The history of Gyges has a clear meaning.
Instead of inheriting vast wealth along with the title of king, this new
"invisible" man grasps wealth by being perceptive and guileful, traits
which throughout the ages have been proven as the best attributes of the
successful businessman. With Gyges starts a long chain of little men from the
underside of society who become rich and powerful, retaining their original
invisibility until they are securely established. The fantastically wealthy and
influential freedmen in the early Roman Empire fit this description well, they
are a regular part of the court council of the early emperors. The
un-Romanticized version of this economic tradition is given in Petronius'
portrayal of Trimalchio, whose very name (' tri- + 'malach-' "King" in
Semitic languages) clearly identifies his Eastern origins. Equally economic, but
much more complex, is the story of Midas, an ancient king of Phrygia, who
entertained the satyr Silenus, a companion of the god Dionysos, getting him
hospitably drunk, and accepting his offer of choosing any thing that he wished.
Midas asked that all he touched be turned to gold, but was dismayed to find that
his food an d drink became gold too. Finally he was instructed to go the Lydian
river Pactolus and wash off his wish for gold there, with the result that the
Pactolus became famous in antiquity as a river carrying quantities of the
precious metal. Three stories seem to have become interfused: First, there is
the story about the "wish", which a satyr or troll offers an
unsuspecting mortal. The fulfilled wish becomes burdensome only as the result of
human greed and folly. In the Germanic version, the peasant who receives three
wishes asks for a "wurst", upon which his wife angrily wishes the
wurst onto his nose, and their last wish is uselessly expended in getting it
removed. Germanic and Classical myths often support each other despite the
discrepancies in time and place. The second theme is the concept of financially
self-accruing fortunes, which might easily be styled as "everything turns
to gold". This is probably based more on interest and especially compound
interest than on any alchemic magic. The Greeks had a hard time understanding
the growth of funds, they considered growth of funds by interest inexplicable,
distasteful and even unhealthy. Midas' Golden Touch is evidence of the proper
financial use of the resources which came with his kingdom, which he, better
than many others, knew how to use in the most advantageous manner. But in an age
in which growth by interest was unknown, or considered obscene, this would seem
pure magic. We must remember that Greeks like Sophocles in the Fifth Century
B.C. used works like "gain" and "interest" only in taunting
insults, and that the Catholic Church forbid Catholics to engage in lending
money at interest as late as the l5 th century. Jews and Lombards were
conveniently exempted from this injunction, so that business could operate as
usual. Third, the river Pactolus was known to wash out grains of metallic gold ,
so the story of Midas is at a later time joined with the panning of gold in the
stream. But the gold panner-prospector is only verbally connected with Midas'
"gold", which has already become currency and then directly wealth.
The way money grows fascinated and amazed the diners at Trimalchio's Banquet in
the first century A.D. novel. They talk endlessly about money, wealth and
financial growth. In the Cena section of the Satyricon someone says of a local
millionaire that he grew like a honeycomb" although he is also described as
a "son of the earth", that is someone who just came up like a mushroom
or stalk of grass, unplanted and without roots as it were. Trimalchio is so rich
that "he doesn't know what he is worth", his wife Fortunata has
"barrels of cash", actually "cash of cash" or "cash
square". The story of Ixion is even more complex, since it draws on themes
from at least three millennia of pre-Greek history. As the account goes, Ixion,
having married , murdered his father-in-law when he came to claim the usual
bridal presents, by arranging that he should fall into a pit in which a charcoal
fire was burning. But Zeus apparently pardoned him and accepted him as a member
of his society, upon which Ixion tried to seduce Hera and subsequently, tricked
by a phantom called Nephele ("cloud") substituted in her place, he
fathered the Centaurs. Enraged, Zeus punished him by having him tied forever on
a revolving wheel in Hades, which is how Ixion's name goes down in standard
Classical mythology. The story begins with a device well known in all early
hunting societies. To kill his father-in-law, Ixion uses a device known for tens
of thousands of years for its effectiveness with animals , the pitfall covered
with carefully camouflaged greenery. Setting a charcoal or wood fire in the pit
later ensures that the animal is killed and at the same time starts the cooking
process. But traps for animals are not to be used for humans, as is witnessed by
the severe laws which most modern countries have enacted against
"man-traps" of every sort, whether pit-fall, spring foot-trap, or aim
gun fired by a wire. (Curiously these are all legal in time of warfare!) After
this episode, Ixion "produces" (actually he is said to
"beget") the Centaurs, which are clearly horsemen riding so closely
connected with their mounts in swift motion , that unsuspecting peasants
consider this a new cross-bred animal of fearsome proportions. Now advancing
from Neolithic pitfall trapping, Ixion appeared on the forefront of a new art,
the taming and breeding of horses, which he uses them for aggressive high-speed
hunting. He replaces the passive-technology of pitfall traps with aggressive
horse-borne hunters, which provides a far greater range of operations. But now
Ixion has advanced again by an innovative quantum leap to the invention and
construction of the wheel, with which his story is always connected. (What would
be more natural for an angered Zeus to devise for punishment than tying Ixion to
his own infernal contraption, rotating forever in Hell?) The wheel must have
been developed at a very early time, even in the pre-emigration Indo-European
period, since the same root word persists from India to the British Isles. Once
tamable horses are available and broken to be ridden, someone is sure to think
of connecting a horse to a wheeled-axle. Ixion was such an inventor, and thus
ushered in the concept of mass-transportation, and commerce over a wide range of
territories. ( Note: Skt. 'çakras' "wheel" on through Gr. 'kuklos'
and Lat. 'circus/ circulus' to the Old Engl. 'hweol', all perfectly cognate
forms. The same word consistency through a long period of time is also true of
the companion invention, the cart , e..g. Skt. vahati "he carries" ,
Gr '(w)ochos', Lat. veh-iculum', Engl. wagon.) We thus see Ixion on several
levels, , spanning the pre-historical period from employment of Neolithic
hunting traps, then taming and breeding the wild horse to be ridden, and finally
constructing the wheel and the cart, which when linked to the horse, would make
possible the great emigration of exploding populations out of the wheatlands of
Southern Russia southwards into India, and then westwards across Europe.
Transportation made possible the conveying of agricultural materials as well as
raw manufactured commodities back and forth within Europe. The two modes of
transportation which made man's population of Europe fruitful were land
transport by wagon with horse or ox within the landmass, and water transport
throughout the Mediterranean. Change always faces resistance, it is only in
simplistic textbooks that we hear of the linear march of progress as Western
Civilization. evolves into its present form. Ixion certainly represents several
persons and many generations of restless change as the world altered is ways and
pace of living, and nations became slowly international through trade. Trade
disrupts comfortably static societies, and Ixion paid the price of this
disruption. What could be more fitting symbolically that lashing him to his own
finest invention, the wheel, in perpetual torture? It was not only in the
ancient world that novel inventions were resented and distrusted. Mary Shelley's
biological monster sutured together by a reputable Dr. Frankenstein has
frightened generations of readers and movie-goers, while the movie 2001's
super-computer "HAL" typically becomes dangerous and turns on his
crew. The word "robot" first appeared as a negative term in a Czech
play of l935, while the only fear that remains as this century ends is that the
industrial robot may do such a good job that it will increase the rolls of the
unemployed. Modern Dr. Franksteins save lives by heart surgery, and the computer
clearly promises us substantial benefits in medicine, pure science and business.
Yet there remains a widespread public fear of the new, which is not far
different from the fear the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean Basin had
as they watched their societies grow and change. If Ixion shows the growth of
commerce through inventions, another less well known personage in Greek
mythology is Autolycos' , who appeared to the Greeks the very father of
dishonesty.. (Note: His name is from "autos + lukos", hence "the
wolf himself, a very wolf". The Romans called a "woman for hire"
a "lupa" or she-wolf. We use the word "shark" for an
unscrupulous money-dealer, but all these terms connect money-matters with a
voracious animal known for its sharp teeth.) His father, not un-incidentally,
was Hermes the God of Trade, and his daughter was Anticleia , arch-trader
Odysseus' mother. On the earlier and also the later side of his pedigree
Autolycos' family is characterized by swindling and duplicity, the very things
which made his name (in)famous in the Homeric world ( as Homer sees it at Iliad
X 267 and Od. XIX 295). Like Gyges he was said to have had the power of making
himself invisible, but he could also make invisible and unrecognizable the
things which he had stolen. Since his father Hermes , the standard god of
business and commerce, is also somewhat tricky and not a little dishonest,
Autolycos may be suspected of having an inherited commercial trait in his
thievery. The appearance of a person like Autolycus marks the beginning of the
conversion from barter between proprietors, to purchase by agents for
considerations and terms. These agents who are as invisible as their contractual
agreements, which as interfaces between buyer and seller are invisible. Early
people without written agreements had not yet understood the nature of commerce
in an expanding world with varied and interlocking major markets. Autolycos' son
in law Odysseus continues the mercantile motif and is distrusted not only in the
Homeric epics, but in later times, when he was admitted to be clever, but
somewhat of a scoundrel. Rockerfeller, Carnegie, Mellon and Ford have all been
thought scoundrelly at one time or another, but we have learned to live with
their astuteness as part of the commerce and financial growth which we realize
our society needs. Laomedon, king of Troy and the great grandson of Dardanos in
the Trojan genealogy, somehow "employed" Apollo and Poseidon to build
walls for him around the city, but later refused to pay them. Poseidon sent a
sea monster against the city, to avoid which it was ordained that Laomedon must
sacrifice his daughter, Hesione. (One thinks of Agamemnon sacrificing his
daughter on the way to Troy in order to gain fair winds, also relating to
Poseidon and his control over sea passage.) Heracles offered to slay the beast
if Laomedon would give him his horses, but when the task was done, Laomedon
refused payment to him too. Raising a band of soldiers, Heracles captured the
city, claiming the girl for Telamon who had led in the attack. The interesting
point here is the matter of defaulting on debts, which is attributed to the
Trojan ruling house. Such conscious fraud demands a certain level of business
sophistication, which must be coupled with gullible sub-contractors who have no
recourse to court or contract. It would seem that in the Trojan world of Asia
Minor, which is closer to the Eastern seats of ancient culture and business,
this sort of thing happened from time to time, but it was inconceivable to the
European "Greeks" who were not yet aware of financial trickery as a
component of business contracts. Reasons for being cheated and deceived may be
forgotten, but the idea of being treated badly has an way of persisting for
centuries, and hate would seem regularly to outlast love We are probably
simplistic when we explain the causes of the Trojan War as a need for Greek free
trade into the rich Euxine Sea area, although this may also have been involved.
But if the Trojans habitually distrained on debts , and the Greeks built up a
bad memory of many such defaults, this would provide exactly the kind of insult
upon which a war could be based . But since the common people who go to war and
do the fighting need simpler reasons, and in the ancient world people prefer
personal actors behind historical events, the Trojan abduction of Agamemnon's
queen, Helen, serves better as the nominal cause for the war. Odysseus' family
is consistent, since each generation on his family tree is in one way or another
connected with over-sharp dealing. Odysseus' mother was Anticleia, the daughter
of Autolycos, who was known as a professional thief and virtual con-man, while
he himself was the son of Hermes, the habitual dealer in goods of trade. If
Odysseus seems a bit tricky, he comes by it naturally. It is no surprise to find
that when Cadmos imports the alphabet of Phoenician letters to the Greeks, who
has lost their earlier Minoan writing system by the 12 th c. B.C., Odysseus
steals it and claims it as his own. We are not surprised to find that Odysseus
has somehow wangled the famous arms of Achilles for himself, despite the claims
of other warriors and the natural expectation of Achilles' son Neoptolemos to
inherit them. Sophocles negative treatment of Odysseus in the play "Philoctetes"
may be slightly weighted, but it is certainly consistent with the general
opinion of the times. Odysseus is never a favorite son of Hellas, although they
admire his cleverness grudgingly, much as we admire, while we deplore, the
American "robber barons" of l9 th century finance. Even the simple and
fun-loving Phaeacians, when Odysseus turns down their invitation to participate
in the games, note that he looks like a commercial skipper with his eye on
trade, a remark which is not far from the truth. Odysseus takes good care of
himself, and we see that when he arrives home at long last, he is the only
survivor from his fleet. The businessman's first business is to take care of
himself, heroics are for those who finish last, while true heroism of the spirit
is something which the practical Odysseus can easily dispense with. (Note: The
Greeks derived Odysseus' name from the verb 'odyssasthai', meaning "to be
hated (by the gods?)", but the derivation could also mean
"hateful". ) Odysseus has a reclaiming human characteristic, his basic
monogamous-ness, despite many chances for fun with the ladies and nymphs who
were probably a great deal more interesting than the down-to-earth wife he left
behind. His instinct is entirely for homing, and this probably represents the
theme of an earlier animal-story, in the manner of Aesop and his Indian sources.
Animal stories in Greek, except for the late Aesopic importations from the East,
are almost totally lacking, the only surviving example is the story of the
nightingale, and the rest seem to have been converted to purely human stories at
an early date. It seems fair to make this assumption, since all European
societies, before and after the Greeks, have a goodly store of animal tales, and
there is no reason to think that the earlier Greeks lacked them entirely. The
key to Odysseus' monogamous-ness lies concealed in his wife's name, Penelope, or
in Greek "Penelopeia", which is identical with the noun 'penelops',
"a duck". Wild waterfowl are regularly monogamous, and clearly the
story of Odysseus' years-long wanderings over the face of the waters, opposed by
high seas and the god Poseidon, retells in human terms the story of the drake
winging his way homeward against all odds. This is Odysseus' nature, just as
faithfulness to her drake is the mark of Penelope, who fusses and preens at her
embroidery, while avoiding competitive males and waiting for her husband. In the
Odyssey (but not in the Iliad), Odysseus displays, a specialized kind of
discourse almost every time he speaks, in which he sets out a pair of opposing
possibilities for the situation at hand, and then selects the one which seems
best, which he then puts into action. This way of thinking is not found in the
Iliad, it is clearly a new method of discourse created by Odysseus in the
Odyssey, and certainly a new way of thinking, This dual point-of-view logic
witnesses the development in society of a new Greek "commercial" man,
who is trading successfully after the seventh century all over the
Mediterranean. He thinks both ways before moving, comparing alternatives, and no
longer trusting gut reactions, or the sense of what is right. He is no longer a
noble hero, but an effective man of affairs, which is what the Greeks needed
after the population explosion in the 8 th c. B.C. To people who had never had
heard of this double-headed tool of logic, it would be an important lesson in
the structure of organized thought. Shades of this type of argument can be found
in Heracleitos' doctrine of the complementary opposites, and perhaps even
Plato's duality of ideas-versus-things. By the 4 th Century, society is in need
of intellectual simplification of the possibilities, and Aristotle criticizes
Plato's Theory of Ideas in the introductory book of the Metaphysics, on the
grounds that it doubles the number of entries for classifying things, since each
item must have an idea-entry as well as a thing-entry. He clearly prefers a
single entry system for his intellectual bookkeeping, since he is now living in
a complex world in which the need to simplify comes before the development of
new tools of thought. The Odyssean world has no such constraints, indeed the
idea of noting down the two major possibilities for an action, and the choosing
the "best" one, leads to decisions which are "weighed", even
if they have to be made in a hurry. The more one engages in business, the more
one has to think this way, since there are always at least two sides to any
business venture. One will possible earn you a drachma or a dollar , and the
other will probably lose it. Seeing the polar possibilities of any situation
suits a trader, it errs in placing both possibilities completely in the
conscious mind, and avoids opening the unconscious storehouse of experience.
Odysseus' logicism never delves into deep or mysterious things, it must be used
for immediate and practical matters, and it may be this superficiality of
Odysseus' mind which turned the later Greco-Roman world so entirely against him.
But the important thing to note about this "new logic", is that it is
really new, and belongs to the revived Greek society which awoke after the Dark
Age of the 12 th through 9 th centuries. Nestor, as portrayed in the Iliad, is a
fine gentleman of the old school, garrulous and moralistic, with something of
the tone of an earlier day Polonius. Here we have the portrayal of a worthy old
grandfather, highly respected in a patriarchal society, who, despite his
longness of speech and vagueness of memory as to the real actions of the past,
is all the same quite bearable and rather lovable. In the Odyssey we find him
back at home, ruling his ancestral city of Pylos, the name of which is so
similar to the Gr. 'pylai' "Gates, gateway" that we must assume that
Pylos was gateway to the well watered lands which lay north and east of its
site. In this very town of Pylos we find Telemachos visiting after the war,
bathing in a bathtub or 'asaminthos', of a design which we find abundantly
represented at museum at Cnossos, enjoying the hospitality of a real Mycenean
palace. And here we find the real Nestor, an effective ruler of an important
town and major shipping port . In the early years of this century archaeological
discoveries revealed the real city of Pylos, and the surprising fact that some
ten thousand clay tablets were buried there, with lists of commodities shipped
in and out of the port. As we decipher the tablets, half of which are in Greek
although written in a different alphabet, we begin to see the economic
implications of such a Mycenean shipping center. Year by year more of these
tablets are deciphered, and they reveal an entirely different level of culture
than the Odyssey portrays. It is a business society, with accountants, scribes,
managers, bosses, and upper level administrators, each with his own special
prerogatives and title, although we are not always sure from the tablets about
the exact organization of this economic hierarchy. Nestor and his economic
empire represent a world once thriving but long since gone, with only a few
verbal traces in the myths and the ten thousand clay tablets. What Odysseus is
doing with his traveling and trading, follows in the wake of what had gone on
for half a dozen centuries before the Trojan War, the Minoan-Mycenean societies
were firmly established as important economic empires in the second millennium
B.C.. Much of what we have been considering must date back into the pre-history
of the three millennia before Christ, but the social resistance to inventions
which represent change and threaten to disturb existing markets continues
through the ages. Petronius tells, in his novel from the first century A.D., a
story of a man who invented a new type of unbreakable glass, which he at long
last demonstrated to the Emperor . The emperor asked if anyone else knew of his
secret formula, the man said he and the emperor were the only two, upon which
the emperor had the man killed. The emperor realizes that anything that disturbs
the glass trade, which we know to have been a major industry at Rome if only
from the amounts of glass which archaeologists constantly recover, will disturb
the country economically, and this may easily lead to political turmoil. The
Emperor's action may seem cruel and reactionary, but it in terms of immediate
economic effects, perfectly sound: If it is that good, it will be necessary to
keep it off the market. But of course this is nothing new to modern society,
which has its own myths of the hundred mile a gallon car, the undullable razor
blade, and the cloth that never wears out, none of which (if they ever existed)
will even be seen. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all the
facets of the pre-Greek society which have major economic implications. The
discovery of technology for mining and smelting the metals, the alloying of tin
from England with copper from Cyprus to make the improved copper-base allow
which we call bronze, the development of ships large enough to carry loads of
tin and other heavy materials, as well as cattle and sheep imported into Greece
for local breeding from Tyre and Colchis respectively, the importation of the
convenient Phoenician alphabet to replace the lost Minoan script- - - all these
matters can be elicited from the tangled web of the fabric which we call Greek
Mythology. Poseidon's bull and the Argonautic Golden Fleece represent important
stages in economically important animal breeding, and deserve a place in the
annals of early history, alongside of the charmingly literary tales into which
they are woven. Medicine and psychology each deserve a separate chapter in this
vein of historical archaeology, along with the curious inability of the major
Homeric heroes, from Heracles to Achilles, to convert their great powers to
coherent social behavior. After the last glacial retreat, which occurred some
twelve thousand years ago, humankind went into a remarkable fast escalation in a
dozen directions, which produced the whole fabric we call Civilization. The
first step was probably the documentable selection and hybridization of certain
plants, which in a developed form because what we call the "grain
plants". Seed amaranth and rice in Asia, maize in South America, wheat in
the Near East, and cultivation of fruit and nut plants made possible a much
larger food supply and naturally a much larger population. The availability of
multitudes of human hands made feasible textiles made from cotton or wool, the
cotton and wool trades, mines and the metals with their accompanying
technologies, and in the wake of all this hustle and bustle, warfare as the
earliest of the systems of transfer of goods from one set of hands to another.
When large numbers of people begin to over-produce, that is, make more that what
they personally need, we begin to accrue surpluses, which immediately lead to
trade. Barter may be complex in its processes, but it is intellectually simple,
since it proceeds with what are arbitrary but always balanced equations. But
when we begin to evolve complex economic situations, in which the equations are
balanced by considerations which lie outside the items which are being
exchanged, we enter the world of true economics. Shortages of food or cloth, the
need for tin from England to alloy copper from Cyprus to make bronze which will
be sold in Denmark, opportunities to accrue capital in cash from deals prompted
by famine, greed and a self-growing set of economic parameters - - -these are
factors which began to emerge by the fifth millennium B.C., and changed the
whole notion of what a society and a nation and an empire could be like. Nothing
like this had ever occurred before, in all the hundreds of millennia since man
appeared as a Human Being. Now for the first time Man the hunter and gatherer is
hard pressed by Homo Faber, man the fabricator and engineer. And they are both
eclipsed in the fast ensuing millennia by a new breed of clever, useful,
effective and often unscrupulous fellow, who can best be called Homo Economicus.
He is clearly the man of the present world we live in, like him or not, we seem
to be unable to do without him, and apparently we desperately need the skills he
has. He is certainly in terms of the civilizations we have put up throughout the
world, the man of the future. It is a curious fact that the ancient writer and
historian Euhemerus approached Greek mythology in virtually the same way, saying
that the heroes were originally men who were later commemorated as heroes
because of important roles or functions which they performed in their lifetimes.
His work has not survived in more than a patchwork of ancient quotations which
were collected in the last century by the Hungarian scholar, and we cannot tell
how far he pursued this line of investigation. But the very fact that an
educated Greek in the ancient period reached for an interpretation of the myths
on a historical and social level, shows that even then a religious and spiritual
base was felt to be absent. Perhaps it was not there in the first place, perhaps
a basic folk-memory encompassing historical data ranging back some thousands of
years was recast in Greece in the mould of myths which had emanated from India
along with a handful of the Indo-European sky god personalities. There may even
have been other influences from India early in the first millennium BC. ,which
we are not aware of, just as there were later influences from India bearing on
the philosopher, and the appearance, in the generation of Socrates if not
before, of "Aesopicß tales", which are obviously recast from the
materials of the Sanskrit Hitopadeça and Pançatantra. All in all, an analytic
study of the Greek mythological lore would seem to be inextricably tied up with
the history of previous millennia, with the early history of the Middle East,
and with the development of that special and novel breed of human behavior which
we call Civilization.