Mŷthos in Homer stands for "word, speech" but also "plan, scheme"; in the classical age the meaning of the term was refined to "a tale concerning gods, divine beings, heroes and descents into the afterlife" (Plato, Republic 392a), and in philosophical thought mŷthos, as a discourse that neither requires nor calls for proof, was set against lógos in the sense of an argument that does require it. The modern word derived from it, myth, has such a wide field of application, and the meanings that stem from it are so varied, that a single unequivocal definition of the concept is untenable. In the general rethinking of the problems of the sacred that, at an increasing pace and from the nineteenth century onwards, has marked the humanities, myth is regarded either as a fundamental religious narrative and structure, or as the foundation of cultural institutions, or as a forma mentis distinct from rationalising dialectical thought. Myth, despite the close study and research carried out in the various disciplinary fields, seems to elude every grasp that tries to reveal its meaning. It remains one of the least comprehensible phenomena in the history of human cultures, and this suggests that it has been placed by scholars within a framework and a scheme that are flawed at the root, which prevents its true interpretation. This is a problem that, in order to be solved, cannot avoid a full and wide-ranging engagement with mythological material, or material presumed to be such.
From this point of view, the work edited by Giulio Guidorizzi, Il Mito Greco, vol. I, Gli Dèi (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore 2009), is of particular importance. Its author is full professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy of Antiquity at the University of Turin, co-editor of the journal "Studi italiani di Filologia Classica", and director of the "Centro Studi per il teatro classico" at the University of Turin. He is the author of numerous publications; I cite – purely by way of example – the annotated translations of the Biblioteca of Apollodorus (1995) and the Miti of Hyginus (2001), and a fine work intended for schools, Il mondo letterario greco (2004).
Guidorizzi has collected about four hundred testimonies (for the most part texts already translated and published, except for twenty-nine which he translated himself for this volume of more than fifteen hundred pages). For this reason alone the work presents itself as an important and useful novelty, precisely because of its systematic intent which, though limited to the Greek world, I hope will encourage others so that we may finally have a complete corpus, or at least a quantitatively representative one, with which to address the underlying problem noted above. Until now, scholars of Greek myth had very few works at their disposal: the translations of Robert Graves's volume (I Miti Greci, Longanesi 1963), of Kerényi's work (Gli Dèi e gli Eroi della Grecia, 2 vols., Garzanti 1976 and 1978), and the splendid work by Luigia Achillea Stella, Mitologia Greca for the "Collana Mitologica" directed by Raffaele Pettazzoni (UTET, 1956), and finally the volume edited by Giulio Guidorizzi who, with the collaboration of Silvia Romani (to whom the Percorsi Bibliografici are due) and Marzia Mortarino (who compiled the Index of Nomi Mitologici), has recovered forgotten or hard-to-find testimonies, coordinating them into a clear structure with explanatory notes and essential bibliographical references.

In his dense Introduzione (pp. XI- LXV) to the work, Guidorizzi rightly notes that what is defined as "Greek mythology is not, after all, a coherent whole, but a thicket of overlapping tales, born in different places and at different times (…). It is a living organism that continues to reproduce itself (…). In reality, there is no true mythology of the Greeks except in the relatively late systematisation by mythographers and scholars…" (pp. XIV-XV). Now, this holds not only for the Greeks but is found, with different developments, in many other cultures, and it highlights what I said about the underlying flaw that revolves around the word "myth": namely the fact that, first of all, its content must be historicised in relation to the Western cultural history that "invented" and used the term, first to invest parts of its own heritage by reorganising its memory, and then, forgetting or pretending to forget this, translated what seemed to it similar in "other" cultures that gradually broadened its concept of human culture. Mircea Eliade had already noted that "Like it or not, every attempt to interpret Greek myth, at least within a Western-type culture, is, to a greater or lesser degree, conditioned by the criticism of the Greek rationalists (…) this criticism was only rarely directed against what might be called 'mythical thought' or the behaviour that derives from it. The criticisms were aimed above all at the actions of the gods as they were recounted by Homer or Hesiod. One might wonder what a Xenophanes would have thought of the Polynesian cosmogonic myth (…). The same criticism was later taken up and carried forward by the Christian apologists [and I would add that it has reached us through the scientific debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries]" (Mito e Realtà, Rusconi 1974, p.169). If it is true that "myth" today can be defined as a "traditional tale" (p. XV), it still remains to identify the elements that distinguish the traditional tale we call myth from the other "traditional tales"; say, the fairy tale, the fable or the legend. In this sense, one of the elements is rightly identified by Guidorizzi in the "time of origins" in which the events narrated by the myth are set, a time of "a completely different nature from the one we are accustomed to relating to, a "Time of origins" (p. XVI); but I honestly cannot follow the author when, a few lines below, he defines this "time of origins" as: "a primary, dilated time, an indefinite space-time full of recesses, secrets, suspensions, in which the gods and the ancestors worked together". What characterises the paradoxical concept of the "time of origins" is precisely its being qualitatively different from any time understood as beginning and duration; for this reason what happened in the time of the myth can be re-actualised and made present again, and this is the substantial difference between the diachrony of mythical narration and that of historical narration. While it is true that Mircea Eliade knew both the work and the person of Jung, the assertion that Eliade "used the concepts of Jungian psychoanalysis" (p.XVII) is, in my view, rash; Eliade amply clarified in his work the difference between the Jungian psychological conception of archetypes and the idea of archetype that he used in his historical-religious research. These brief remarks take nothing away from the value of the work edited by Guidorizzi, which we hope will soon be followed by the second volume, so that we may finally have an adequate instrument for the study of Greek myth.