Required Text: Barry B. Powell, Classical Mythology, 8th ed., (Boston: Pearson, 2015) [Powell]
Myth and History. In popular speech, myth is sometimes opposed to history: the one is a discourse of fabricated stories, while the other
is a discourse that aims, at least in some sense, to tell the ‘truth’ about things. Yet as we have already seen, myth may also be a great
resource for reflecting Greek social and cultural history. Whether one looks to the rise of the polis or to Greek sexual mores, these
historical ‘facts’ are often deeply embedded in the myths of the Greeks. Choose a myth or set of myths and examine how it negotiates the
relationship between myth and history. Are these two terms opposed in your chosen myth or do they work together in some fashion? (n.b.
This topic may require some additional research into the history of the Greeks, whether in the Archaic or Classical periods.)