Imaginary Greek mountains

Abstract

It is hardly controversial to assert that recent work on Greek mythology is methodologically diverse. However, there is one body of writing which seems to have become a reference point against which scholars of many persuasions–not excluding orthodox positivist philologists and adherents of psychoanalysis–feel the need to define their own position. I mean structuralism. G.S. Kirk and, later, W. Burkert have conducted their dialogues with it; C. Segal and more unreconstructedly R. Caldwell have tried to accommodate Lévi-Strauss and Freud under the same blanket; a glance at bibliographical citations in studies of tragedy over the last twenty years will show how J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet have moved from the periphery to the centre (much as Finley did some time ago in ancient history). The polemical attitudes being struck by M. Detienne (from within the movement) and C. Calame are directly generated by over-confident structuralist attempts to map out the mental territory they claimed as their own.