CLA 2323 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Potnia, Minos, Hubris
24 May 2017
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Document Summary
The katabasis: the hike downward : the living journey to the underworld. Five famous characters who made this journey and returned alive were . The young woman psyche, from the ancient greco-roman fable of cupid and psyche. The tale of kadmos is of interest because it explains the founding of a city that in real life had been a major mycenaean city: thebes (th bai), in central greece. Also, the kadmos tale includes a wildly distorted acknowledgment of the phoenician influence on real- life early greece. In myth, kadmos is a phoenician prince who journeys to greece searching in vain for his sister europa or europ , abducted by zeus (pp. After several adventures and combats, he builds thebes. He rules his greek subjects wisely, and since they are illiterate, he bestows on them the vital technology of writing, teaching them to use phoinikeia grammata, phoenician letters the phoenician alphabet.
