The Greek Mythic Story World

In the last article of Arethusa, I took up the question of how the highly polished nature of Greek mythic narratives—the vivacity and expressive power that earned so many of them an enduring place in the pleroma of world literature and art—contributed to the creation and sustenance of belief in the gods, heroes, and a divine world more generally. In that arti- cle, I focused particularly on how the characters in Greek myths evoked emotional and cognitive responses from their audience members that were virtually indistinguishable from those evoked by people in the real world, and on how the ancient modes of narrating myths (which typically treated them episodically and through a variety of different media), helped to keep the stories and their characters alive in an audience member's mind and heart long after a narration was over, thus further sustaining the beliefs that the stories had encouraged. One issue that I temporarily set aside in that article was why the narration of a wide variety of myths focusing on a wide variety of charac- ters was appropriate for recitation at a wide variety of festivals dedicated to a wide variety of gods. In many cases, of course, there is an obvious link between the myth and the festival: the story of Apollo's foundation of the Delphic Oracle makes intrinsic sense for performance at a Delphic festival in honor of Apollo (as in Aristinous's paean to Apollo and, probably, the second part of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo). In other cases, thematic or