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Myth and History

If you close your eyes for a second and feel the smooth sand under your feet, you can imagine that you are standing right where Afrodite walked for the first time coming from the splashing waves of the Aegean Sea, or that you are standing where Zeus himself was glancing at the unforgettable beauty of the mortal Greek women. In the north of Greece, at only 700 km from Bucharest, lies the region named Macedonia (Greeks' first country). The Macedonians have settled here at the start of the second millenium BC. Then they also spread to Pieria, the region situated north of Mount Olympus, also known as ,,the rich country'', or ,,the country under the mountains''.

Greek mythology has exerted an extensive influence on the culture, the arts, and the literature of Western civilization and remains part of Western heritage and language. Poets and artists from ancient times to the present have drawn inspiration from Greek mythology and have discovered contemporary significance and relevance in these mythological themes.

Greek mythology is known today primarily from Greek literature and representations on visual media dating from the Geometric period to c. 900-800 BC onward.

The age in which the heroes lived is known as the heroic age. The epic and genealogical poetry created cycles of stories clustered around particular heroes or events and established the family relationships between the heroes of different stories; they thus arranged the stories in sequence. According to Ken Dowden, "there is even a saga effect: we can follow the fates of some families in successive generations".

After the rise of the hero cult, gods and heroes constitute the sacral sphere and are invoked together in oaths and prayers which are addressed to them.[19] In contrast to the age of gods, during the heroic age the roster of heroes is never given fixed and final form; great gods are no longer born, but new heroes can always be raised up from the army of the dead. Another important difference between the hero cult and the cult of gods is that the hero becomes the centre of local group identity.

Mythology was at the heart of everyday life in Ancient Greece. The Greeks regarded mythology as a part of their history. They used myth to explain natural phenomena, cultural variations, traditional enmities and friendships. It was a source of pride to be able to trace one's leaders' descent from a mythological hero or a god. Few ever doubted that there was truth behind the account of the Trojan War in "the Iliad" and "the Odyssey". According to Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian, columnist, political essayist and former Classics professor, and John Heath, associate professor of Classics at Santa Clara University, the profound knowledge of the Homeric epos was deemed by the Greeks the basis of their acculturation.

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