Why Greek, Roman and Norse mythologies are overused, where others rarely get used?

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    14 hours ago

    Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same, and they spread throughout all their conquered lands because they enforced their religion upon them, and any foreign religion was subsumed as ‘oh, that’s just another name for jupiter or something’.

    The Greeks and Romans left so many written records and the Greek language is still alive, while Latin is well understood.

    Hindu mythology also stayed very firmly alive, but only among people in India, and nobody else cared. Buddhism doesn’t have the same kind of mythology, and it’s different depending on where you go, and even the local politics (actually so is hindu mythology, it’s basically the marvel comics universe but where each village priest makes up a few minor gods for themselves). China and Japan do have their own, pre-buddhist mythology, we see that a lot in anime.

    Native American mythology was killed, a few times, by disease, violence, but mostly brutal Christianity.

    Finally the Norse gods spent some time in England and Europe, after the Romans and Greeks, so they have some presence where they were considered interesting.

    Mostly, English-centric literature and media, and literature students study it EXTENSIVELY for their degree, basically as a deconstruction of the evolution of storytelling and underlying tropes/archetypes. Less of this spread from elsewhere.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      13 hours ago

      Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same

      Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.

      A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.

      And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.

      But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.

      [Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]