Introduction
The Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes (c. 1110 – 1180) claims that the Palaephatean way of interpreting myths has the effect of “making young people far more predisposed to reading, through the enchanting quality of myth” (προθυμοτέρους πάντως τοὺς νέους ποιῶν εἰς ἀνάγνωσιν διὰ τὸ τοῦ μύθου θελκτήριον, Joannes Tzetzes, Exegesis in Homeri Iliadem 4–16 p. 28). And he is not the only one to see the pedagogical value in the work. On Unbelievable Tales has long been seen as pedagogically useful both in its form and in its content. Formally speaking, it is written in simple, formulaic, paratactic, and yet grammatically rich Attic prose—retaining the optatives, subjunctives, -μι verbs, and other classical hallmarks that one learns in introductory textbooks of Attic Greek but that fade in Koine. To modern students, it can also be a genuinely entertaining text. The charm lies not only in the “enchanting quality” of myth as Tzetzes writes, but in Palaephatus’s own cranky skepticism, which often verges on parody.
How to Use This Commentary?
Our target audience for this commentary is learners of Ancient Greek at the intermediate level—those who have completed their study of the fundamentals of grammar, but who have not yet embarked on extensive reading of unadapted ancient texts. At this critical stage of language-learning, one of the main difficulties for instructors is selecting texts that challenge students without overwhelming them. Both of us (Barnes and Gorey) have successfully used this commentary in our Intermediate Ancient Greek courses at Purdue University and Wabash College, and we found that Palaephatus worked well as a bridge between introductory level textbooks and more advanced authors like Homer, Plato, or Herodotus. For advanced students of Greek as well as autodidacts, the stories in Palaephatus can also serve as a useful grammar refresher or as an opportunity to practice more independent extensive reading. In addition to providing highly readable and entertaining models of classical Attic grammar and style, Palaephatus’ rationalizations offer a great survey-style introduction to Greek mythology.
Within this survey, instructors and students are welcome to jump around from story to story, without feeling the need to read the whole collection sequentially. However, we offer the following two pieces of advice. First, we strongly recommend waiting to read the Prologue until you have already read a handful of other stories. Since the Prologue provides a syntactically denser, more theoretical framework for Palaephatus’ method of rationalization, we have found that students get more out of this section when they have already acquired some familiarity with Palaephatus’ approach to myth. Second, the final seven stories in our text (46–52) are later Byzantine additions to the collection, and we recommend saving these for last. Most of these Pseudo-Palaephatus stories deviate from the typical pattern of Palaephatus’ genuine rationalizations, and the use of certain post-Classical idioms makes these texts slightly more difficult than the other forty-five stories.
A brief word about the commentaries. Because Palaephatus’ rationalizations of myth are self-contained episodes that do not require knowledge of other stories in the collection, we have written a commentary that applies the same level of grammatical help throughout the text. In other words, the commentaries for later stories do not assume that you have already read the commentaries for all of the earlier stories. This has resulted in some redundancy, with certain grammatical constructions (like the genitive absolute) getting glossed and explained across multiple stories. However, we wanted to make it possible for a reader to jump into any rationalization without needing to read the whole collection sequentially from beginning to end.
Finally, to assist readers (and instructors) who wish to integrate some grammar review into their reading of Palaephatus, we have also included a Grammatical Index of conditionals, subjunctives, and optatives. This index provides handy references for every type of conditional sentence in the text, as well as every subjunctive and optative verb, organized by type (e.g., purpose clause, fear clause). Both of us have experimented with having students either 1) write their own original commentaries on a Palaephatus rationalization, or 2) write their own Palaephatus-style rationalizations in Greek as a prose-composition exercise, and the index is meant to make it easy to find concrete examples of these key grammatical constructions throughout the text.
The Author
In a comic fragment of Athenio preserved by Athenaeus (14.660e–661b), a cook explains the origin of civilization in elaborate rationalizing terms: human beings once practiced cannibalism, someone discovered that roasted animal flesh tasted better than human flesh, sacrifice and cookery developed from there, and cities themselves eventually arose because of the culinary arts. His listener interrupts: “This fellow is a new Palaephatus!” The line suggests that Palaephatus was already recognizable as a type in Athens centuries after he wrote.
Apart from this comic fragment, not much is known for sure about who Palaephatus was. The current scholarly consensus is that Palaephatus operated in Athens in the 4th century, had close ties to the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and wrote another work on “Trojan History,” which partially focused on placenames in and around Anatolia. Even his name, Παλαίφατος, “speaker of old things,” is generally thought to be a nickname, perhaps of the kind Aristotle is said to have given to his students, as in the case of Theophrastus, formerly Tyrtamus.