Who Says You Can't Teach An Old Myth New Tricks

Move over Indiana Jones, I’ve found a new hero. Only Adrienne Mayor isn’t the kind of hero who slays monsters. Instead, she brings them to life, overturning a lot of what we thought we knew about the ancient Greece and Rome along the way.

Most modern historians and students of mythology dismissed the fabulous creatures described by Homer and other ancient writers as the products of overheated imaginations, too much wine or bad grain. At best, they were considered metaphors for whirlpools or thunderstorms or other natural phenomena the ancients probably understood almost as well as the average non-scientific American.

Mayor, like Heinrich Schliemann (the discoverer of Troy) before her, took a different tack. She wondered if the legends might be telling it straight. The accounts of giant bones uncovered at the sites of legendary battles during the height of the Greek and Roman eras were too numerous, too full of detail and simply too boring to dismiss. The same applied to reports of the remains of gigantic heroes venerated at ancient temples.

Then there was the peculiar depiction of “The Monster of Troy” on a Corinthian vase painted around 550 B.C. Most of the vase is decorated in the beautiful, stylized black on red figures familiar to lovers of classical Greek art. In comparison, the “monster” is white and ungainly, and hangs at an odd angle from its supposed lair. Mayor wondered if, instead of a living creature emerging from a cave, it might be an early depiction of a fossilized skull embedded in a cliff face.

To test her theories, Mayor tracked down the scant remains of the temple caches. Working with paleontologists who specialize in mainland Greece and islands of the Aegean Sea, she developed a model of what kinds of fossils the ancients might have found. She also identified some of the places where they would’ve found them--places which remain rich sources of fossils even today.

Mayor realized the fossils of prehistoric mammals found on a number of Greek islands could be mistaken for the remains of misshapen, bipedal giants. After all, one mammalian thigh bone--or spine or rib or hip bone--looks pretty much like another, regardless of size. The skulls of mammoths and mastodons don’t have eyes in the front. They boast a single center-front opening where the trunk would be attached in a living animal. If you tilt the skull so the pits where the tusks are attached become the “jawline” and assemble the rest of the skeleton as if it walked on two feet, you’ve got a perfect model for Homer’s monstrous, one-eyed Cyclops.

In addition, Mayor’s research uncovered connections between ancient descriptions of griffins and the remains of Protoceratops dinosaurs discovered by ancient gold prospectors in central Asia. The Monster of Troy turned out to be a rendering of a large prehistoric mammal’s skull so exact modern paleontologists had no trouble identifying the species.

What makes Mayor’s odyssey through Greek mythology even more strange and wonderful is her background. She isn’t an archaeologist or anthropologist or even a paleontologist. She’s a late-blooming folklorist who worked most of her professional life as a printmaker and copy editor. She doesn’t have any advanced degrees and didn’t even consider writing a book until she was over fifty. Yet she’s now a visiting scholar at Stanford University with publication credits most tenured professors would envy. She’s even got her very own episode of the History Channel’s History’s Mysteries, "Ancient Monster Hunters".

Talk about a role model for the ages. Mayors is living my favorite Robert Browning line: “The best is yet be.” Not to mention sending my plot bunnies into overdrive.

For more information, check out:

Adrienne Mayor's Stanford Page

Adrienne Mayor's Home Page

Adrienne Mayor's Wiki

New York Times Feature on Adrienne Mayor