Examination of the foundation traditions of Magnesia on the Maeander, an Aeolian polis of western Anatolia, and the various Aeolian mythic traditions attached to this city located within Caria.

Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.

Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

An investigation of the Luvo-Hittite dammara- religious functionaries (male and female) and the borrowing of the term into Ahhiyawan (Ur-Aeolian) and, thence, European Mycenaean cult vocabulary as dumartes and its variant damartes (a scribal borrowing), and an exploration of the Anatolian source of the theonym Artemis. The intersection of both the cult title and divine name with Mycenaean dialect variation is carefully examined.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

An investigation of the Hittite cult implement called the kurša and its relationship to the breast iconography of Ephesian Artemis, to various Greek implements within the context of both Bronze-Age Anatolia and Indo-European cult, and to Aeolian myth as expressed in, especially, Argonautic tradition.

Exploration of the mythic concept of Aia, region of the rising sun, and its Hurrian and Luvo-Hittite background, its introduction to European Mycenaean Greeks by the Ur-Aeolians (Ahhiyawans) of Anatolia, and Aeolian Argonautic elaborations.

Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Many recent books, including the present one, aim to identify and destroy dozens of myths in the history of science. This destruction is only too easy for a “myth” that is just an enduring mistake. To qualify as a bona fide myth a false claim should be persistent and widespread and have a plausible and assignable reason for its endurance and cultural relevance. The most interesting myths for historians have an additional attribute: they transmit a useful caricature or an inspiring allusion. Although erroneous or fabulous, such myths are not entirely wrong, and their exaggerations bring out aspects of history that might otherwise be ignored.

The Gorgias ends with Socrates telling an eschatological myth that he insists is a rational account and no mere tale. Using this story, Socrates reasserts the central lessons of the previous discussion. However, it isn’t clear how this story can persuade any of the characters in the dialogue. Those (such as Socrates) who already believe the underlying philosophical lessons don’t appear to require the myth, and those (such as Callicles) who reject these teachings are unlikely to be moved by this far-fetched tale. This raises the question of who the myth is told for and what function it is meant to serve. This chapter argues that the myth is aimed not at Callicles, but at Socrates and those who aspire to follow him. There are uncertainties about the philosophical life deriving from the nature of embodiment, as well as reasons to doubt the connection between happiness and virtue. The myth assists with the former by presenting an image that draws a philosopher away from the goods of the body toward the goods of the soul. It assists with the latter by presenting an image of cosmic justice, thereby securing happiness in proportion to virtue.

Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.

The 1860s marked a change of attitude toward myth. Formerly dismissed as falsehood, it now became a way to meditate on origins and identity at a time when orthodox religious belief was coming into question and Britons began to think of their colonies as an Empire. Inspired by the linguist Max Müller’s [GK17]theories of Aryan heritage, and his own dislike of John Henry Newman’s Romanism, Charles Kingsley claimed that the British people’s race and culture were Teutonic. Similar ideas about the British character were allegorized in poetry. Focusing on poetic reenvisionings of classical, medieval, and Arthurian stories by Tennyson, Thomas Westwood, and William Morris, this chapter explores how these poems reflected, but also helped to create, a myth of Britishness.