Boxilar wrote:Well, you gotta remember for several thousand years, what we call Olympian Myth was somebodies religion. As such, it actively grew and changed as more stories were added and new personalities were added to the mix that had to be explained as fitting into the already existing stories, so you ended up with a contradictory mishmash of conflicting origins and story events by the time everything got written down and codified. People at the time accepted it.
That's just the way it was. It was only after the fact, long after the Olympians stopped being venerated as Gods at the head of a religion and became objects of curiosity in mythology, that people started worrying about all the contradictions.
Kind of like the DC universe before the Crisis on Infinite Earths, or Star Wars after the prequels came out.
The ancient Greeks (and other people from that general time and place) had a somewhat different way of looking at things than people do now. Their mythology was their version of science and history, but it was not really thought of as being a fixed and permanent thing. It didn't matter if the contents of the story contained conflicts with other stories, because the specific points of the stories didn't really matter. It was the
point of the story, the moral or the idea that the story was created to impart to the listener, that mattered. People were quite happy to re-write their "history", or even toss it out and make it over from scratch, to fit the current needs of the community. Most of them believed in some version of the gods, but their religion was somewhat separated from their mythological stories about those gods.
There was one town in Asia Minor (I forget the name right now) that had a long-established and detailed history as to the founding of the town and the way in which it received its name. Then the townfolk heard that the army of Alexander the Great was heading their way. The population got together, discussed what their options were, and decided on a solution. They made up a new town history, complete with all of the required acts of the various gods and whomever. When Alexander rode up to the city, the townfolk all went out and greeted him and welcomed him "home": their new town history told how their town had been founded by an ancestor of Alexander. Alexander was delighted to hear that, and not only did the town not get molested at all, it was actually given tax-free status in his new empire. For the next couple thousand years, the people of that town quite happily celebrated their town's link with Alexander's past and forgot about the previous "history".
And that sort of creative re-writing of the myths was commonplace. As towns and regions made alliances or broke alliances with other towns, they'd often have their priests just coincidentally happen to "discover" some new bit of information that tied the two towns' respective mythologies together or split them apart.
Add to that the fact that every town had its own versions of the gods, and you end up with no real over-all canon or mythology. It's all just whatever seemed to fit the needs of the time.
You can see the same sort of thing in the Christian Bible, which was written by similar people in similar times with similar influences. There are a ton of inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible, which even most Christians will acknowledge. That's because the people writing it weren't really trying to make an absolutely perfect factual chronological history, they were trying to tell a story to get across the basic lessons that needed to be taught. If they got a few specific details muddled up, it didn't really matter.
While you can find occasional exceptions through the years, most "history" right on up through the Middle Ages and Renaissance was less concerned with accurate retelling of events and more with making sure you got the moral. Totally unbelievable and ridiculous exaggerations were common, and people accepted them without problem not because people were stupid then, but because they felt that it was perfectly proper to drastically reshape the facts to let the more important "truth" be shown.
Which is something that many people are still quite happy to go along with, even if today it's generally considered more important to have your histories given
some solid foundation of verifiable facts. Put together the histories written up by the Axis powers and the Allied powered before and during the Second World war, and you'll see just as much confusion and contradiction as you do in ancient mythology.
(or some version of her)