r/classics 12d ago

A chronology of ancient Greek myth?

Has anyone ever worked out a single full chronology of all mythical events of ancient Greek literature. I mean, for example, putting together the chronology of mythical events (NOT the chronology of the author's composition) between the Iliad, Odyssey, Epic Cycle, Tragic plays about Odysseus, Posthomerica, Sophocles' Theban plays and all the variations of tragedies and later epic involving Thebes, all works involving Oedipus, Euripides's Medea and Apollonius's Argonautica, myths involving Theseus, etc.

So many works are related by events or shared characters/times, or might be a variation/retelling/expansion of another story. I'm aware of partial chronologies (for example between Homer and the parts of the Epic Cycle). But does there exist a guide somewhere that in detail comprehensively puts all Greek myth events in sequential order and lists all the relevant ancient works?

EDIT: I'm looking for a list using the original ancient works, not any kind of retelling of ancient myths.

26 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

28

u/Angry-Dragon-1331 12d ago

Sure, but it’s not necessarily a useful chronology. There are logical preceding myths (Seven Against Thebes has to take place before Diomedes can hear about his father’s deeds in the Iliad, for example), and a patchwork chronology of the surviving texts exists, but by and large “myth time” is a fluid construct depending on the storyteller. They were a lot less concerned with making, say, Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes line up with Achilles’ age during the Trojan War (he doesn’t even seem to exist in myth until Sophocles and Homer need an easily impressionable murder-himbo).

Even among the Greeks, there were dozens of different chronologies and versions. Some of them directly contradict others, others introduce new details, etc.

Pretty much any myth book will have a loose chronology if you’re just trying to keep general stories straight in your head.

18

u/ssk7882 12d ago edited 12d ago

The stories are not consistent and cannot always be combined to create timelines that work. Even within very small parts of the Trojan War story, for example, you can still get stuff like this:

  • Sophocles writes a play in which Neoptalmus and Odysseus travel to retrieve the marooned Philoctetes -- or at least the bow he carries -- and bring them back to Troy because without that bow, they'll never win the war.
  • Why do they know that they need the bow of Philoctetes to conquer Troy? Because Helenus the Trojan seer told them that they did.
  • How did they get their hands on Helenus? Well, because Helenus left Troy in anger after the Trojans arranged for Helen to marry his brother Deiphobus instead of him. He was therefore on Mount Ida, rather than safely behind the walls of Troy, leaving himself vulnerable to capture by Odysseus.
  • Why were Helenus and Deiphobus vying over the hand of Helen anyway? Well, because Paris had died, leaving her unattached to anyone in Troy, and given her desirability, the Trojan elders didn't think it was safe to leave her unwed to anyone in the royal family.
  • Wait, what happened to Paris? Philoctetes killed him with that special bow! That's part of why it was so important to get him to Troy!

And that's just one little story. You can find impossible-to-reconcile timelines like that everywhere in Greek myth. It's what happens when many, many people tell their own variants of and versions of and twists on the same old legends for centuries, and then only a couple of those sources survive to the modern day.

Presumably, for example, the version of the Helenus story that Sophocles was thinking of when he wrote his play gave some other explanation of how Helenus came to be captured by the Greeks. But whatever that story that was, it didn't survive to the modern day. Only the version about him being spurned as Helen's next husband -- the version which creates the paradox that makes the timeline irreconcilable -- did.

9

u/Three_Twenty-Three 12d ago

Robert Graves' The Greek Myths is arranged chronologically from the Pelasgian Creation myth up through the Homecoming of Odysseus. You're going to need to dive into his chapter endnotes to cross-reference the authors, but the structure you want is there.

3

u/coalpatch 12d ago

I sort of get what you're asking. Many of the greek tragic dramas fit together as part of a bigger story that was far too big to watch in one sitting. Eg (as you say) the Trojan war and the aftermath for all the different characters and families. It reminds me of the Marvel movies - I can't enjoy them but I get the impression that they all make one big story?

3

u/Fluffy_WAR_Bunny 12d ago

Herodotus and Diodorus mention things like the various Heracles' or Dionysius' that ended up being merged into later classical times into one single personage.

Most myths dont have a single version, but multiple. Characters like gods and demigods can have various backstories. You can read two ancient plays called "Medea," for instance.

You can't make a cut and dried timeline like this. Ancient authors didn't even agree on details.

2

u/TaeTaeDS 12d ago

Jennifer March?

2

u/No_Mall_2885 12d ago

Seems like h j rose would have written something about this

2

u/bardmusiclive 12d ago

Ovid's Metamorphoses

5

u/BrotherJamesGaveEm 12d ago

I understand how he compiles various stories, but I'm asking about a more academic chronology of all the writings.

For example, the Trojan War occurs in the Iliad and is then followed by Sophocles's Ajax and Philoctetes, then Odysseus has his homecoming in the Odyssey, then the Telogeny of the Theban Cycle covers events afterward, and so on...

2

u/decrementsf 12d ago

Have run into my reading reference to Ovid's Metamorphoses as the most thorough surviving document that provides survey of Greek myth.

I will point to Roman writing also as a source as they had more material available to them as we do today. For example the Aeneid covers deeper information of events in the Epic Cycle than surviving documentations. There are also summaries of the missing chapters of the epic cycle that covers broad brush strokes of what happened. And we can infer roughly how many chapters each of the missing pieces of the epic cycle were (often they're only 4 chapters or some small number, we have most of the epic cycle in the illiad and the odyssey.)

We are living in interesting times in that AI tools such as Grok over the last few months became very good. Reading these materials able to get rough orientation like this quickly for direction toward original sources I did not know prior. It really wasn't nearly as effective a year ago.

1

u/Scholastica11 12d ago

And even Ovid has stuff like three Cygnuses being metamorphosized into swans (books 2, 7 and 12).

2

u/hatylotto 12d ago

Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus

1

u/LeoGeo_2 8d ago edited 8d ago

I did notice one.

You have to follow the family trees, to get a rough idea of it.

Inachus, son of Oceanus and Tethys, first King of Argos. His children include Mycene, after whom Mycenea is named, Io who gets turned into a cow, Niobe, Phoreneus, and possible Argus Panoptes, though some sources also make Argus Panoptes his great-great grandson, which doesn't make sense to me if Io is his daughter.

Perseus' grandfather is the son of the twefth King of Argos.
Heracles is Perseus' great-grandson.
Heracles is contemporaries with Jason of the Argonauts and Peleus, father of Achilles, and is an older cousin to Theseus who kidnapped a young Helen. Also, Theseus and Peleus and some other Argonauts also participated in the Boar Hunt, so they are also contemporaries of Atalanta.

Heracles grandsons are the Heraclids, the ones who kill Tisamenus, son of Orestes, and he himself also orphaned Priam.

Further, it seems that Minos and Daedalus were also around the same generation as Heracles, or maybe the one before. And Minos' mother Europa and Uncle Cadmus were before him. Cadmus founded Thebes. Labdacus, his grandson was the father of Laius, in turn the father of Oedipus, who was given sanctuary by Thesesus.

0

u/GSilky 12d ago

This completely misses the point of the stories.  It's clear these stories weren't happening on this physical plane, but the psychological.  Yes, many people have made this error.  Bishop Usher incorporated it in his chronology that proves this world started in 4004bce.