Origins of Greco-Roman Mythology Part 3: The Revival and Spread of Greco-Roman Mythology

Origins of Greco-Roman Mythology — A Three-Part Series

• Part 1: The Roots of Greek Mythology
• Part 2: From Greek Mythology to ‘Greco-Roman Mythology’
• Part 3: The Revival and Spread of Greco-Roman Mythology (current article)

Around 1478, a painter in Florence received an unusual commission. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici wanted a large painting to decorate his villa. The subject was neither the Virgin Mary nor the Passion of Christ. It was Flora, goddess of spring; Zephyrus, god of the west wind; and Venus, goddess of love — ancient deities that had been buried as pagan idols for over a thousand years.^[1] This painting would become Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (Spring), and together with the subsequent Birth of Venus, it marks one of the most important turning points in Western art history. The Olympian gods, who had barely survived the Middle Ages under the protective veil of allegorical interpretation, once again appeared on canvas under their own names.

As we saw in Part 2, Greco-Roman mythology never completely disappeared during the Christian era. It passed through the bottleneck of the Middle Ages via Fulgentius’s allegorical interpretations, Boethius’s philosophical citations, and Isidore’s encyclopedic compilations. Yet it was closer to a preserved specimen than a living culture. What breathed life back into this specimen was the intellectual revolution that began in 14th-century Italy: the Renaissance.

Petrarch and the Humanists: In Search of Forgotten Manuscripts

One man stands at the starting point of this revolution: Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374). A poet and scholar, Petrarch pilgrimaged through monastery libraries across Europe, unearthing ancient Latin manuscripts buried in dust. Beginning with his discovery of two of Cicero’s orations at Liege in 1333, he went on to find Cicero’s Letters to Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum) at the Verona Cathedral Library in 1345.^[2] This was no mere antiquarian book collecting. Through Cicero’s letters, Petrarch encountered ancient Romans not as pious pagans or abstract sources of moral instruction, but as real human beings with emotions, ambitions, and contradictions. This shift in perception was the essence of Renaissance humanism.^[3]

Petrarch himself could not read Greek. The mythology he encountered came primarily through Latin texts by Ovid, Virgil, and others. But Petrarch’s friend and disciple Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) took things a step further. In the 1360s, Boccaccio wrote Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), undertaking a systematic compilation and interpretation of ancient mythology.^[4] While inheriting the medieval allegorical tradition, this work opened the door to a new era by championing the poetic and intellectual value of mythology itself. Boccaccio defended “the poet’s lies,” arguing that mythological narratives were a unique mode of conveying truth.^[4]

The large-scale influx of Greek originals came in the 15th century. In 1396, the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence and established the first formal Greek language courses in Western Europe.^[5] Then in 1453, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire dramatically accelerated the migration of Byzantine scholars to Western Europe. They brought original texts of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and Cardinal Bessarion donated over 750 Greek and Latin manuscripts to Venice, laying the foundation of the Biblioteca Marciana.^[6]

An interesting paradox arises here. The traditional narrative portraying the fall of Constantinople as the decisive catalyst for the Renaissance has been considerably revised by modern scholarship. The migration of Byzantine scholars to Italy had already begun well before 1453, with the Council of Florence (1438–1439) serving as an important catalyst.^[5] The fall accelerated an existing trend rather than marking a sudden starting point. Nevertheless, by the mid-15th century, Western Europe had gained direct access to Greek originals, fundamentally transforming the understanding of mythology. Greek myths that had been accessible only indirectly through Fulgentius or Isidore could now be read in the original texts of Homer and Hesiod.

From Botticelli to Michelangelo: Olympus on Canvas

If the humanists revived the classics through text, painters revived them through images. And in this visual revival, the Medici family of Florence played a decisive role.

Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485) depicts Venus standing on a shell as she arrives at shore, inspired by Ovid’s descriptions and Poliziano’s poetry.^[1] The art-historical significance of this painting lies not simply in its beauty. It was the first work since antiquity to boldly depict a pagan goddess as a life-sized nude. While medieval nudes represented the shameful bodies of Adam and Eve, Botticelli’s Venus carried an entirely different meaning. According to the Neoplatonic philosophy fashionable in Florence at the time, a beautiful body was divine beauty made manifest in this world.^[7]

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Neoplatonic philosopher active at the Medici court, translated Plato’s dialogues into Latin and distinguished between ‘Heavenly Venus’ (spiritual love) and ‘Earthly Venus’ (physical love).^[7] Thanks to this philosophical framework, pagan mythological imagery could be justified even within a Christian context. The logic held that Venus’s beauty reflected not carnal desire but divine love. Without this interpretation, it would have been difficult to publicly paint a pagan goddess nude, even under Medici patronage.

Michelangelo (1475–1564) revived classical mythology in a different way. His sculptures resurrected the tradition of human body representation from ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, and in the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1508–1512), biblical themes merged with classical body aesthetics. Intriguingly, the presence of the ignudi (nude male figures) and the Sibyls on the Sistine ceiling visually demonstrates the coexistence of Christian and pagan traditions.^[8]

Raphael’s The School of Athens: The Idealization of the Classical World

Raphael’s The School of Athens (1509–1511) encapsulates how the Renaissance viewed ancient Greece. Commissioned by Pope Julius II for the Vatican Palace, this fresco gathers Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, and other ancient philosophers within an idealized architectural space.^[9] The very fact that pagan philosophers were painted in the heart of the papal palace symbolizes the intellectual transformation of the Renaissance. Classical antiquity was being redefined no longer as a pagan era to be overcome, but as a golden age to be recovered.

Winckelmann and Neoclassicism: The Myth of ‘Noble Simplicity’

If the Renaissance revived classical mythology through literature and art, 18th-century Neoclassicism elevated it to an aesthetic ideology. At the center of this transformation stood Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768).

Born the son of a German cobbler, Winckelmann studied ancient sculpture in Rome and in 1755 published Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works (Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke). In this essay, he summarized the essence of Greek art with the famous formula: “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur (edle Einfalt und stille Größe).”^[10] His magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums), published in 1764, is considered the first systematic art history in the West and positioned Greek art as the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.^[10]

Yet there was a fundamental paradox in Winckelmann’s theory. Much of the ‘Greek art’ he praised was actually Roman-era copies. The Apollo Belvedere, which he extolled as the most ideal, was itself a Roman marble copy of a Greek original.^[10] Furthermore, Winckelmann either did not know or chose to ignore that Greek sculptures were originally painted in vivid colors. The ‘pure white marble’ he celebrated was merely the result of pigments wearing away over centuries.^[11] The ‘white Greece’ image Winckelmann created was itself a myth — a modern myth about ancient Greece.

This myth, however, exerted enormous influence on European culture from the late 18th through the 19th century. Neoclassical artists recreated the gods and heroes of ancient Greece in white marble and restrained compositions, following Winckelmann’s ideals. Works by Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova, and Bertel Thorvaldsen presented mythological subjects as new aesthetic standards across Europe. Greco-Roman mythology was now established as the eternal archetype of ‘ideal beauty’ — neither religion nor literature, but something beyond both.

Schliemann and Troy: When Myth Met History

The 19th century began to approach mythology in an entirely new way. No longer merely a source of inspiration or aesthetic ideal, mythology became something to be verified as historical fact. The most dramatic example is Heinrich Schliemann’s (1822–1890) excavation of Troy.

A German businessman by background, Schliemann was convinced that the Trojan War described in Homer’s Iliad was a real historical event. In 1870, he began excavating at Hisarlik, a hill in northwestern Anatolia. This site had first been identified as the likely location of Troy by the British amateur archaeologist Frank Calvert.^[12] In 1873, Schliemann discovered treasures including gold crowns and cups, which he declared to be “Priam’s Treasure” — claiming to have found evidence that Homer’s king of Troy had actually existed.

The discovery caused a worldwide sensation. Academically, however, Schliemann’s work was riddled with serious problems. He dug a massive 14-meter-deep trench through the center of the Hisarlik mound, destroying large quantities of upper-layer remains in the process.^[12] Subsequent excavations revealed that Hisarlik contained at least nine cultural layers, and the layer Schliemann identified as Troy — Layer II (Troy II) — dated to approximately 1,000 years before Homer’s era. The layers actually corresponding to the Iliad's period were Layers VI–VII (Troy VI/VIIa), which had been substantially damaged by Schliemann’s trench.^[13] Schliemann was also found to have intentionally exaggerated or fabricated accounts of his excavation process and discoveries, earning him the ambivalent reputation of being “the greatest discoverer and greatest fraud in the history of archaeology.”^[12]

Nevertheless, the legacy of Schliemann’s excavation cannot be denied. Subsequent scholarship confirmed that Hisarlik is indeed the site of ancient Troy, and archaeological evidence exists showing that the city suffered large-scale destruction around 1180 BCE.^[13] The recognition that mythology might not be pure fiction but a transformed form of historical memory — this was the most important door Schliemann opened.

The Birth of Comparative Mythology: From Muller to Frazer

While Schliemann was digging into the boundary between myth and history with his shovel, other scholars were exploring the essence of mythology using the tools of linguistics and anthropology.

Max Muller (1823–1900), a professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, effectively founded comparative mythology as a scholarly discipline with his 1856 essay “Comparative Mythology.”^[14] Muller’s central claim was bold: mythology was a “disease of language.” According to him, metaphorical expressions originally used to describe natural phenomena (especially the sun and dawn) came to be understood literally over time, transforming into stories about gods.^[14] Apollo’s mythology, for example, was interpreted as a personification of primitive descriptions of the sun’s movements.

Muller’s “solar mythology” dominated academia until the 1870s, but soon faced powerful opposition. The most famous critique was R. F. Littledale’s 1870 satirical essay “The Oxford Solar Myth.” Littledale applied Muller’s own methodology to Muller himself, “proving” that the figure of “Max Muller” was nothing more than a solar myth.^[15] The satire bitingly revealed that Muller’s methodology was arbitrary enough to reduce virtually anything to solar mythology.

After Muller’s linguistic approach revealed its limitations, an anthropological approach emerged as an alternative. James George Frazer’s (1854–1941) The Golden Bough (first edition 1890, final 12-volume edition 1906–1915) was a monumental work that broadly compared myths, rituals, and magical practices across world cultures.^[16] Frazer’s central claim was that human thought developed through stages of magic, then religion, then science. Greco-Roman mythology was positioned within this framework as a product of the “religious stage.”

Today, Frazer’s evolutionary scheme has been academically discarded. The view of cultures progressing in a linear fashion from “primitive” to “civilized” carries inherent Western-centric bias. However, the influence of The Golden Bough extended beyond academia into literature and the arts. T. S. Eliot explicitly acknowledged his debt to Frazer in the first note of The Waste Land, and James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were also deeply influenced.^[16] Frazer also provided decisive intellectual stimulation to both Freud and Jung.

Freud and Jung: Mythology Becomes the Language of the Unconscious

The 20th century bestowed an entirely new interpretive framework upon Greco-Roman mythology. And this transformation began with a Viennese neurologist.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), drew upon Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex to argue that the unconscious impulse of a son to oppose his father and harbor sexual desire toward his mother is a universal aspect of human psychology.^[17] This is the Oedipus complex (Oedipuskomplex). For Freud, the reason Sophocles’s tragedy had captivated audiences for 2,400 years was not narrative artistry, but because it touched upon repressed desires shared by all humans.^[17]

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), once Freud’s disciple before their split, expanded mythological interpretation even further. Jung proposed the concept of the “collective unconscious.” The idea was that before any individual experience, all of humanity already shares deep psychic structures.^[18] The contents of this collective unconscious are the “archetypes” — universal character types like the Hero, the Wise Old Man, and the Shadow — and mythology is the narrative expression of these archetypes.^[18] Intriguingly, Jung characterized Freud’s Oedipus complex as “the first archetype Freud discovered, and his only one” — implying that while Freud fixated on a single myth, Jung himself had discovered the structure encompassing all mythology.

The work of Freud and Jung fundamentally altered the status of Greco-Roman mythology. Mythology was no longer superstition from the past or merely beautiful stories, but was redefined as a universal language containing the deep structures of the human psyche. Oedipus was no longer the king of Thebes but the name for a universal human psychological conflict, and Narcissus became the eternal symbol of self-love. Without this psychological transformation, the status Greco-Roman mythology enjoys in late 20th-century popular culture would have been very different.

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey: The Formula Hollywood Loved

The figure who most successfully extended Jung’s archetype theory to popular audiences was the American comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, Campbell argued that a common narrative structure exists across world mythologies. This is the theory known as the “Hero’s Journey.” The hero departs from the ordinary world, undergoes supernatural trials, and returns transformed — a three-stage structure.^[19]

Campbell’s theory transcended academic hypothesis to become a cultural phenomenon thanks to George Lucas. Lucas publicly acknowledged that he consciously adopted Campbell’s Hero’s Journey structure when conceiving Star Wars (1977).^[20] Luke Skywalker’s story structurally overlaps with the adventures of Perseus, the trials of Heracles, and the homecoming of Odysseus. The worldwide success of Star Wars turned Campbell’s theory into a Hollywood screenwriting textbook, and countless blockbusters have since followed the Hero’s Journey formula.

However, Campbell’s monomyth theory faces serious criticism in academia. Folklorists and classicists point out that Campbell selectively extracted elements from different myths that fit his theory, assembling them into a single model. In fact, no mythology that fully follows Campbell’s model existed before his book was published.^[21] The Hero’s Journey is also criticized as a structure that presupposes a male protagonist, excluding female narratives and non-Western storytelling structures.^[21] Assessments also exist that Campbell showed little interest in sociology or anthropology and edited world mythology for Western consumption.

Despite these academic limitations, Campbell’s practical influence on popular culture is undeniable. And at the core of this influence lies the 20th-century recognition that Greco-Roman mythology constitutes a “universal human story.”

Olympus in Modern Popular Culture: Films, Games, and Everyday Mythology

Today, Greco-Roman mythology lives and breathes far beyond the scholar’s study — on screens, consoles, bookshelves, and even in corporate logos.

The use of mythology in film has a long history. From Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion spectacular Jason and the Argonauts (1963) to Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), Greek mythology has been a perennial subject for epic cinema. The Percy Jackson series, based on Rick Riordan’s novels, introduced the Olympian gods to younger generations with its premise of a modern American boy who is the son of Poseidon.

Video games have become a medium that delivers mythology in an even more participatory way. Sony’s God of War series (2005–) brought to life the narrative of Spartan warrior Kratos challenging the Olympian gods as an action game, while Supergiant Games’ Hades (2020) is an action game in which Zagreus, son of the god Hades, attempts to escape the underworld, reinterpreting the Greek mythological worldview with modern sensibility and achieving both critical and commercial success.^[22] The creative director of Hades has stated that the game’s mythological inspiration came from classical sources rather than modern adaptations.^[22]

Perhaps the most everyday way Greco-Roman mythology has permeated modern culture is through brand names and terminology. Nike takes its name from the goddess of victory; Amazon from the warrior tribe of Amazons.^[23] Trident gum derives from Poseidon’s three-pronged spear; Mars chocolate from the god of war; and atlas maps from the Titan who held up the sky. “Odyssey” — a word derived from Odysseus’s wanderings — has come to mean any long journey or exploration. The psychological term “narcissism” comes from Narcissus, and “echo” from the nymph Echo who loved him. Greco-Roman mythology is woven into our everyday language, even when we are unaware of it.

Why does this mythology remain compelling after 3,000 years? While multiple explanations are possible, one core reason stands out. The gods of Greco-Roman mythology are not perfect. As we saw in Part 2, in the mythological world Ovid perfected, the gods are jealous, make mistakes, fall in love, and seek revenge no less than humans. These “flawed gods” are precisely what makes Greco-Roman mythology’s narrative strength unique. In stories of perfect beings, conflict is hard to generate; in stories of flawed gods, infinite drama becomes possible. This is why storytellers — whether in Hollywood or game studios — keep returning to this mythology.

Conclusion: Why Mythology Never Dies

In Part 1, we started from the clay tablets of Hattusa in the 12th century BCE and observed how mythological motifs from Mesopotamia and Egypt fused in the Aegean. In Part 2, we began on a Roman stage in 240 BCE and followed how Greek mythology was transformed to suit Rome’s language and purposes, surviving the Christian era within the protective shell of allegory. In this Part 3, we started in Petrarch’s library and traced the path mythology has traveled — through Botticelli’s canvases, Winckelmann’s aesthetic theories, Schliemann’s trenches, Freud’s consulting room, and Hollywood’s screens.

One pattern repeats throughout this long journey. Greco-Roman mythology has never been transmitted in its original form — not even once. When the Hurrian Kumarbi became Hesiod’s Kronos, when the Greek Ares became the Roman Mars, when Orpheus’s journey to the underworld was read as a prefiguration of Christ’s salvation, when Oedipus became a psychoanalytic term in Freud’s consulting room — each time, mythology was transformed to meet the needs of the era that received it. Mythology survived not because it remained unchanged, but because it changed ceaselessly.

Winckelmann dreamed of a white Greece that never existed, Schliemann dug through the wrong layers while searching for Homer’s Troy, and Campbell tried to compress hundreds of myths into a single formula. Their errors differed, but they shared one thing in common: all sought a single ultimate truth in mythology. Yet what 3,000 years of history shows us is that the true power of Greco-Roman mythology lies not in any single truth but in its infinite potential for reinterpretation. This mythology has been a valid story for Bronze Age oral poets in the Aegean, for Renaissance painters in Florence, for a psychoanalyst in Vienna, and for 21st-century game developers. Each time for different reasons, each time in different ways — yet always valid.

That is perhaps why the Olympian gods remain alive in a world where no one is left who believes in them.