Abstract
FROM a vantage point in the 1990s, the loss of certain literary works from antiquity is almost as painful as the disappearance of brilliant graduate students and junior colleagues from the ranks of the academy.
1
If the dramas of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus on the myth of the Cretan Glaucus had survived intact, it is facile to suppose that, as three dramas on the same myth, they would have significantly affected the conventional view of Greek tragedy. But on the basis of what has survived, it is possible to say more: they would have encouraged approaches to Athenian State Theater that privilege its ritual, mythical, and social dimensions and that view it in the perspective of social anthropology.
2
One can make such an assumption with both confidence and irony, because having survived without its poetic representations, the myth of the Cretan Glaucus did in fact receive such attention from Henri Jeanmaire in 1939, well before E. R. Dodds devoted it to Euripides in 1959.
3
The irony has substance, because the 530relatively impoverished versions of the myth that we have, as I will try to show below, almost certainly go back to the Athenian dramas. But my goal is neither to dwell on the irony nor on the loss, but to enhance understanding of these lost myths. Starting with the anthropological perspective afforded by Jeanmaire and his successor, R. F. Willetts, both of whom viewed the myth in its local, Cretan context, I propose to revise their interpretation of it in the light of changes in the anthropological analysis of myth and tragic drama and to address the issue of this particular myth’s meaning within the Panhellenic context, not just the local Cretan one, that its performances in the Athenian State Theater imply.
4
Such a goal converges with a significant generalization about the conservative Cretan institutions articulated by R. F. Willetts in 1955: even its most archaic institutions, he contended, were not the fossils that they may appear to be when considered in isolation. They were reused to support the evolving social structures in which they were embedded, and they therefore acquired relatively modern content and functions. That process could in fact put Cretan institutions more in tune with the rest of Classical Greece than has been thought.
5
The success of this archaic myth beyond its Cretan context supports the validity of Willetts’s intuition, but it also begs questions about the meaning and power of the Glaucus myth in its Athenian context that have yet to be posed.