The danger of this approach is, of course, that the historically given reality will perforce be curtailed for the sake of the system and its logical structure. Such relationships are good for thinking, but reality does not always follow suit; a certain stubbornness of the facts remains. Just as the Greek mind does not exist as a unified and definable structure, so the Greek pantheon cannot be regarded as a closed and harmonized system.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Stubborn Facts
Walter Burkert (1931-2015), Greek Religion, tr. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985; rpt. 2001), pp. 217-218 (on structuralist explanations of the pantheon):