Hello everybody.

My name is Peter Struck, the name of this course is Greek and Roman Mythology, so glad you decided to take it. Welcome to the course and looking forward to reading some really great stories with you in the coming ten weeks. Now this is a course where you'll need to be able to get online and access a video which I see you've already done. So you've done the first part. Some of the course will me, me chattering and sharing ideas that I have in these video segments. A good bit of the time of the course is going to be spent with you and smarter people like Homer as close virtual reading their works that are going to be the centerpiece of what our course is all about. There'll be a good bit of time in this course that is spent reading. And I think it will be a great pleasure. Be sure definitely to give yourself enough time to do the reading. If you try to crash read it the night before, chances are you're not gong to like it. This is reading that's best done in small bits and give it the time that it needs to speak to you in all the ways it's going to be able to speak to you. We're also going to have some quizzes and writing assignments, short quizzes that'll be graded automatically by the computer. And then short writing assignments where you will contribute your own ideas and also hear back from your peers, other people taking the course, that are going to help us in the broader scheme of group grading, which we're entering into here with Coursera. Yeah, it's true. We'll have peer assessments in this class where, you'll tell each other what you think about the kind of writing work that you've done. We'll do our best to weigh in on that as well. But there are tens of thousands of you, and there's only a few of us on the teaching staff. So, you may not hear from us as directly as you would want to. But you're surely going to hear lots of smart things from other people taking this course. The area in which that's most likely they happen is on the community forum.

Anytime you have a contribution to make, or a question about what's been going on in class, you can jump onto the community forum and you won't need to wait for one of us on the teaching staff to answer you on that forum. Your question, your question is going to be answered by other people in the class. That's what's been happening with Coursera. We're creating, it's true, learning communities of people that are, sharing interests and sharing ideas, sharing questions, and also sharing answers. We're going to be reading in this class about monsters. We're going to read about heroes. We're going to read about marriages gone right. And wrong, family squabbles, massive architectonic, earth-changing wars, all kinds of things. But most of all what we're going to be reading about is the question of what it means to be human. Sure gods and monsters and animals are in this, these stories. But what they're mostly there to do is to help us focus on what Greek myths tend to be most interested in. And that is you and I, as members of a very definitive species, a unique group of organisms floating around in the on the surface of the earth, and trying to make our way between being born and dying. These stories give us a way to fill in all the stuff that comes between. We're going to be looking at this course, and some stories that have been told and retold for many generations in fact they're are some of the oldest pieces of cultural DNA to survive in the evidence we have from the human past. They're also some of the most widely diffuse, these stories are so good and get stuck in the imaginations of so many peoples that over time they get made and remade in the images of later cultures who want to appropriate this early material and build it into their own culture stuff. So, learning these strands of human cultural DNA is going to give you a window on a broad sweep of what of, of the human family and the different ways that people in these groups have tried to answer very broad and important questions. Now you'll notice taking a look back, those of you who are paying attention, we're out in space. Isn't that exciting?

And often times, classes that have to do with mythology, talk about myths floating around in space somewhere as though there's some abstraction that just come down to us on high. But in this course this is about the only time we'll spend in space. Mostly what we'll be doing is looking at where these myths come from and while we want to try and find out where they come from we don't always have specific answers, but we do know they come from the planet Earth, they come from to us in the form of human language and they come to us spoken by specific human beings, people who are in our species who over time have run into questions, have told stories, have offered answers, have told and retold different versions of important tales have become powerful for them at different points in their lives. That's the stuff that's going to occupy us in this course. Not so much, these environs, that well spooky may not have too many answers to offer us. So, what we're going to look at in this class is particular slice of the picture of ancient mythologies. We know mythologies from many different cultures across the old world. The Greeks and the Romans are who we're going to focus on in this class and it will be a slice of the larger picture of mythology is all about. But I hope you'll agree with me, it's a wonderful one with all kinds of interesting kinds of stuff in it. So we can start off with a relatively simple question. Let's lay out in front of us the question of what is myth. Straightforward question. It's answer couldn't be, more difficult. Myth is one of those deep and highly valued ideas that cultures use in order to try to figure out and describe the world, and like things like love or truth or beauty, the idea of myth is hot property. People care about it a great deal. They offer many different definitions of it. Some of those definitions are actually in direct conflict with each other. But, nevertheless, it still points to something that endures over time despite all the conflicting definitions because people find having a category like this is for them extremely valuable. Complex? Yes.

Important? Absolutely. Maddeningly difficult to, to define? Surely. One thing I think that we'll find out is that myth actually operates as a kind of container into which people toss what is most valuable in their culture. And since people's valuations change over time, what gets tossed into the container of myth over time is going to change too. Now, we'll start with a couple of ideas taking a look at modern English. The term myth. Has lots of different definitions. Let's start off with an obvious one. You might see a newscaster talk about, tune in at five:00 today to the evening news and we're going to explode the myths about topic x. And when someone in the contemporary public discourse talks like that what they're saying is, we're going to show you something lots of people believe and we're going to show that's it's actually untrue. Myth is by definition a lie, or something untrue that needs to be exploded and cleared away. But then, there are other people who claim no, no, no, wait a minute, myth is actually something that is true, and not only true, it is profoundly true. Its the most deep and resonant kind of truth that a human being is capable of. Myth contains all of this stuff and passes it down from generation to generation and people talk about myth in this way, probably just don't say myth, they say something like myth, with some extra aura of authority and meaningfulness surround it. So the mythic in this part of the English language at least exists in a way that labels something deeply profoundly true. So, we already have a first incoherence. Is myth a lie? Or is myth the most profound truth possible to human beings? Second incoherence, among the people that think myth has some truth to it, there are some that claim that myth has universal truths to it. So when we dig down deep into the hidden meanings in the stories we're going to be looking at, what we're going to reveal is the deep truth about something that is profoundly common and universal in the human family. There are others that claim if myth has truths in it, that myth is actually a

window into specific, cultural located truths. Truths that are located in space and time, with specific peoples anchored to specific cultures. And when we dig down in the deep, hidden meanings of myth, what we're really going to reveal is what it is to be a member of some specific culture. So if you really want to understand, what it is to be Irish or to be Native American, or to be from a Norse-based culture, or a South Asian culture, or East Asian culture, what you need to do is dig deep down into the local myths of those peoples to get a window on what it is to be a member of that culture. So, another incoherence that shows up if myth is true it's either true about universals or it's true about cultural particulars. Most people are going to agree that it has something to do with the past, myths took place in an earlier time, but again this is never simple. If there are some people that talk about the past as a primitive area of irrationalist kind of fantasies and a mentality that, you know, maybe they would say is thank goodness has been displaced, displaced by more logical, more reasonable ways of thinking. These people might toss up science as a, a, a parallel formation to myth and talk about science as somehow displacing myth as a way of looking at the world. But then, there will be other people that talk about a primitive idea of myth and they'll embrace that. They'll talk about primitive in a very good way, saying that something that is primal has to do with a core reality, some fundamental or rudimentary part of what it is to be human is going to be revealed when we look at myths. So among those that think that, myths are true. There are some that will think that, the there, there are. Sorry. There are some that will think that myths are lies. Some we'll think they're true. Some that think among the truths will think that they are truth about, true about some specific culture. Others about general human phenomena. And then finally this final incoherence some will embrace its primitiveness as being a wonderful thing.

Some will embrace, some will try to shoo it as being something that is negative that we should, at all, and, and always try to stay away from. Now, I want to be careful in this course to lay out a couple of disclaimers when they come up. The first thing I wanted to underline and I'll make reference to this later on too, is that the myths that we're going to look at are, sometimes they are PG, sometimes they are G, sometimes they are NC17 or R, or even worse. We're going to look at some nasty stuff. There's awful things that's gonna happen from illicit kinds of sexual relationships, there's going to be explicit violence, so it's going to be very disturbing. And I say this because some of the young folks out there might be tuning in to a methodology class. Sure, that's a kind of thing that you see coming out of Hollywood, and it seems to be pretty tame and same. What we're looking at in this class is anything but tame and safe. So if you're a younger person be sure to ask your parents if what you're viewing is okay. High school and beyond you're probably fine but, I say this because I am not sure I would want my own son who is younger than that, watching, taking this course. Now to get started on the conversation about what myth is all about, we've laid down some general things that are floating around the contemporary culture, but you might ask yourself, well, what do the Greeks themselves think about myth?. Well, in fact, they did have a word for it. You will see behind me, Mythos. So you will recognize right away. Look, it already looks like the English word myth. And in fact, it looks identical, to the German word, for muthos, and for an Italian and an French word. All these contemporary words are scooped out of a Greek root that spelled in these characters, looks like this. Muthos And, those contemporary ideas are built on this Greek idea. So let's have a look at what the Greeks themselves thought a myth was, a muthos was. First of all, they thought for, the oldest definition we have is that it's speech. Anything that comes out of your mouth

could count as a muthos. Any sound or word that comes out of a person's mouth could count as muthos. Secondly, and a little bit later in Greek history, the term comes to label a specific kind of speech. It's a speech that is a narrative story. It has a beginning, middle, and end, a plot, characters, things that you care about stuff that you want to hear, okay? Becomes an idea of a story, then later it becomes known as a specifically false story, so the connotation changes slightly to mean a tall tale, something that's surely not true, the kind of story that people like to tell, but it doesn't have any underlying truth to it. Then finally, even later in Greek history some thousand years after some of the poets we're going to be reading at this time, there are people that start to turn to this idea of myth, as being yes a tall tale but one that has some underlying, deeper truth to it. If you look down beneath the surface there'll be some subterranean messages that are ready to come out if you dig a little deeper and look at them a little more closely. So this is a good place for us to get started. We've had a good look at what myth is, in a general way from the context of a contemporary perspective, from an ancient perspective and what we really framed is the ideal that myth is going to be much more than some single, simple definition is going to allow us to define. And all these different, sometimes conflicting ideals about myth are going to be present in our course. I'm not going to try to talk you our of anyone, any of these, and I'm not going to try to necessarily even really clean up the picture all that much from the messy one you see here. It's just we're all going to get to know over the course of time a little bit more about how this messy picture works and what all its little areas are all about. Until we get to that point there's lots of us, lots of time out there for us to do some reading on our own. There's going to be a lot of that for you. I look forward to, in the coming weeks reading some of the most amazing stories that I know with you as we move through the course material.