Greek Myths: A curriculum for upper elementary grades, v. 1.0
Compiled and edited by by Dan Harper and Tessa Swartz
Copyright notice:
Curriculum copyright (c) 2014 Dan Harper and Tessa Swartz
Lesson plans (c) 2014-2024 Dan Harper
Introduction copyright (c) 2015-2024 Dan Harper
Stories marked individually for copyright
Illustrations individually marked for copyright status
Version history:
V. 0.3: all stories were complete (2014).
V. 0.4: lesson plans and introductory material added; this was the field test version (2014).
V. 0.5: lesson plan revised from field test (March, 2015).
V. 1.0: lesson plans finalized based on teacher feedback, introduction updated, more and better illustrations.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Goals and objectives
The ancient Greeks
Ancient Greek religions
TEACHING THIS CURRICULUM
Overview of the units and lessons
Teaching techniques
Addition information for teaching
LEADER RESOURCE: More about ancient Greek religions
Not all ancient Greek myths were the same
Feminism and the myth of Persephone
More feminist interpretations of ancient Greek myths
UNIT ONE: Demeter and Persephone
1. How Persephone disappeared — story and lesson plan
2. Doso and Metaneira — story and lesson plan
3. Demeter and the Baby — story and lesson plan
4. Persephone and Demeter — story and lesson plan
UNIT TWO: Monsters
5. Perseus and Medusa — story and lesson plan
6. Perseus and the Sea Monster — story and lesson plan
7. The Sphinx — story and lesson plan
UNIT THREE: Prometheus
8. The Punishment of Prometheus — story and lesson plan
INTRODUCTION
Goals and objectives
Nurturing cultural literacy
We want to educate children about our cultural inheritance from ancient Greece. The unit on Demeter and Persephone, and on Prometheus, provide authentic myths from ancient Greek sources. The unit on ancient Greek monsters provide interpretations of some myths dating from the Modern era (i.e., from the Enlightenment and afterwards).
Developing critical thinking
About half the session plans involve a teaching strategy known as “think-pair-share.” We have employed this teaching strategy to prompt children to consider the myths critically, and to think about them in conversation with others. We also want children to think about the dividing line between human beings and deities: what constitutes a deity?
Thinking about morality
Many curriculums that aim to provide moral instruction do so by presenting an ancient “wisdom tale” that has been carefully told so as to promote a specific moral point that authors want to make.
Our approach is different. We have chosen stories which may be ambiguous morally. Then we ask children to think through the moral issues outlined in the story. When Prometheus stole fire from Olympus, was that a moral act or not? — was his punishment justified or not? We believe that children in the upper elementary years should start learning how to think through moral issues themselves, with adult support and guidance.
Promoting feminist thinking
Feminism, in its broadest sense, means thinking that all genders are of equal worth. Sexism, by contrast, says that men and boys are better than women and girls, and better than non-binary gender people of whatever age. This curriculum aims to activate feminist reflection by helping children ask questions about the social roles of the different genders.
In the current version of this curriculum, we only deal with stories that include men and women. Additional sessions are currently in development that will consider stories with non-binary characters.
The ancient Greek sources
The ancient Greeks lived in the lands and on the islands around the north eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. We can trace many important concepts in our culture today from ancient Greek culture — democracy, science, etc. And many of the philosophical and ethical questions we have today — questions like the nature of deities, what it means to be human, and so on — can also be traced back to ancient Greece.
The Homeric Hymns
The cultural revolution of ancient Greek culture began about 800 BCE, when the great epics The Iliad and The Odyssey were compiled. The books, still read today, were supposedly written by a semi-legendary poet named Homer. Homer was also supposed to have written the Homeric hymns, a series of poems to the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks. The Homeric hymns were probably written not long after The Iliad and The Odyssey.
One of the longest of the Homeric hymns tells the mythical story of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. There are several versions of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and they all differ in their details. But the version from the Homeric hymns is the oldest extant version, and perhaps the most interesting. The main story of Demeter and Persephone is best known for giving a mythical explanation of how the seasons came to be, but that is really a misinterpretation of a complex and layered narrative. There is, for example, a story-within-the story telling how Demeter tries to make a human immortal.
The first myth in this course is the story of Demeter and Persephone, as it appeared in the Homeric Hymns. You have probably heard the myth of Demeter and Persephone before, and like most people you probably think it is a story that is supposed to explain why we have winter. But when you read the complete myth of Demeter and Persephone, as it was told in the Homeric Hymns, you will find that it is far more complicated than that.
The other myths
After the myth of Demeter and Persephone, this course has three stories about three different monsters: Medusa, a sea monster, and the Sphinx. Stories about monsters are always fun to read, but these stories feature particularly fascinating monsters, monsters which raise all kinds of interesting questions. For these myths, we used modern compilations of both Greek and Roman versions of these stories; these myths have held continued interest for people in Western cultures from ancient Greece right up to today.
The final story in this course is the story of Prometheus. Prometheus was a minor god who had the courage to stand up to Zeus, the ruler of all the gods and goddesses. Our version of the Prometheus story dates to circa 450 BCE (Before the Common Era), at the height of Athenian culture. Thus, we use an Athenian version of this myth. In this myth, the immortal Prometheus aids mortal human beings by stealing fire from the Olympian gods. We trace our modern notion of democracy back to ancient Athens, and Prometheus’ act of rebellion against arbitrary autocratic rule has inspired those who wish to rebel against autocrats to support democratic rule. Prometheus also inspires modern rebellions against autocratic religions, and other cultural autocracies. Yet the story of Prometheus is not straightforward, for he is severely punished for his act of rebellion.
Ancient Greek religions
When people think about ancient Greek myths, they often think that there was one uniform religion across all of ancient Greece. People often think that the Greek myths were stories told as part of ancient Greek religion, stories which everyone in ancient Greece knew.
Actually, ancient Greek religion was more complicated than that. Different cities in ancient Greece often told different versions of the Greek myths. And different cities placed greater importance on certain gods or goddesses. So the city of Athens was named after the goddess Athena, and Athena was very important to the Athenians. But in the city of Eleusis, the most important temple was dedicated to the goddess Demeter, and they were not as interested in Athena.
Furthermore, the worship of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses went on for well over a thousand years. In that long period of time, the stories told about the gods and goddesses changed, and so did the rituals and buildings dedicated to the gods and goddesses.
Not only that, but some of the local cults had different understandings of religion and religious beliefs. For example, many ancient Greeks believed that when humans die, our spirits would go to the underworld — which they called “Hades” — a place where we would exist for eternity, a place that was not happy like the Christian heaven, but also not horrible like the Christian hell. However, the Eleusinian religion had a very different understanding of death. The Eleusinian religion taught that if you participated in the Eleusinian mysteries, when you died you would go to a place where you would be happy forever. Thus, the ancient Greeks varied widely in their myths and beliefs.
Because of all these differences, we should speak of ancient Greek religions — in the plural — rather than one single ancient Greek religion — in the singular.
It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that ancient Greek religions were significantly different that today’s Christianity (see next section of the introduction). Modern Western culture tends to assume that all religions are like Christianity; but unlike Christians, ancient Greeks had neither required beliefs nor canonical sacred texts, and their religions were not universal but tied to specific locales.
Thus, as you read through the stories in this curriculum, remember that you are only reading one of the many different versions of each story. Remember that no one was required to believe in the literal truth of these stories. And remember that the stories in this course come from many different times. The story of Demeter and Persephone is the oldest story in the course, the story of Prometheus dates from hundreds of years later, and some of the stories of the monsters are even later than that.
Ancient Greek religions were not like Christianity
We often assume today’s Christianity is the paradigm for all religions — and then we project today’s Christian norms back onto ancient Greek religions. We should not impose our twenty-first century North American views of religion on ancient Greece. It is crucial to remember that religion in ancient Greece was very different from what we now think of as religion.
- We think of religion as entirely separate from the secular world. But the division between “religious” and “secular” dates only to the 18th century Enlightenment in Europe. The ancient Greeks had no category for “secular.”
- We think of religion as being primarily about individuals holding certain correct beliefs. But the ancient Greeks thought of religion as primarily communal observations of correct ritual; individual belief was simply not very important.
- We tend to think of religions as universals that apply to all persons in all places. But the ancient Greek religions were often tied to certain locales — certain temples, etc. — and were not geographically universal.
- We tend to think that gods should be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent (all powerful, all knowing, all good); this arise because we accept without question certain Christian theologies of the Christian god. But this would have been a completely alien notion for the ancient Greeks, who felt absolutely no need to make their gods, goddesses, and non-binary deities omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
- We tend to think of Greek myths as pre-scientific explanations of the natural world. While this may be true for certain myths, in other cases it is utterly false; see., e.g., session 4 Persephone and Demeter for a discussion of why this is not a pre-scientific explanation for the seasons.
- We tend to think all religions have an approved sacred text, a canonical text similar to the Christian Bible. But the ancient Greeks had nothing like the Bible.
While this curriculum does focus on the ancient Greek myths — i.e., on religious narrative — that is not because we think their myths were central to their religions. Instead, we focus on the myths because that is what is most accessible to children in this age group. If we didn’t focus on the myths, we’d have to focus on archeaological reconstructions of rituals, art historical analysis of artifacts, and so on — not exactly the most engaging material for active upper elementary children.
TEACHING THIS CURRICULUM
Overview of the units and lessons
When we compiled the stories in this curriculum, we were struck by how alien the stories often felt. We think we are familiar with these ancient Greek myths, but closer acquaintance reveals that they are stranger than we had assumed they were.
This comes through perhaps most clearly in Unit One: Demeter and Persephone. We all know that the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades is supposed to be a myth that explains why there is winter. But it turns out that in one of the earliest version of this myth, there is only passing mention of winter. In fact, one of the central purposes of this myth is to explain the origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the sects of ancient Greek religion, a sect that lasted for a thousand years.
Next, we got interested in stories of monsters like Medusa and the Sphinx, and these stories appear in Unit Two: Monsters. For all that they monsters are bloodthirsty, we both felt more sympathy for the monsters than for some of the heroes and humans who do battle with them. Perseus, for example, comes across as an arrogant blackmailer, when he tells the parents of Andromeda that he will save her only if they agree to give him Andromeda in marriage — his morality isn’t any better than that of the sea monster who threatened to devour Andromeda. These stories are not the simple stories of good and evil that they may seem.
The monster stories also reveal that there are not such firm dividing lines between gods and goddesses on the one hand, and mortals on the other hand. Perseus is a hero, more than ordinarily human, but less than a god. The monsters themselves occupy a middle ground between gods and goddesses on one hand, and mortal humans on the other hand.
The final myth is a unit all its own, Unit Three: Prometheus. Prometheus is is more far powerful than a mortal human, but he is less powerful than the the newly-reigning Olympian gods and goddesses, who are ruled by the all-powerful Zeus. Prometheus is especially interesting to Unitarian Universalists because he shows that rebellion against the highest god is not only possible but morally acceptable; this notion is in direct contradiction to the usual understanding in Western religion where is is both impossible to rebel against God, and morally unacceptable to do so.
Teaching techniques
The lesson plans make use of two main teaching techniques: (1) acting out the story, and (2) think-pair-share discussions. We also include some (3) miscellaneous teaching techniques.
(1) Most of the lesson plans have children act out the story. Acting out the story reaches children with all kinds of learning styles, including children who “can’t sit still.” Extensive experience has shown that once a Sunday school group learns how to go about acting out stories, the acting helps them remember and retain the story, and prepares them to talk abut the story. (Other curricula in this series, such as From Long Ago, also use this teaching technique.)
(2) Think-pair-share discussions are used in about half the lesson plans. In this technique, you give the children an open-ended question designed to promote reflection, and ask them to THINK about the question for a few moments. Next you PAIR up the children, and have them talk about their answers with their partners for a few moments. Finally, you get everyone to SHARE their own answer with the whole group.
Think-pair-share is a great technique for prompting reflection and discussion, and for developing critical thinking. Instead of the more extroverted and articulate children immediately calling out their answers to a question, think-pair-share provides a structure for all children to participate more equally, and perhaps to reflect a little more carefully before answering. A good summary of think-pair-share can be found at the following Web site — “ReadingQuest Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Think-Pair-Share.”
(3) Miscellaneous teaching techniques include drawing, puzzles, and games.
Additional information for teaching
If you are new to teaching Sunday school, take the time to read through the lesson plans closely before you teach — read through any previous lesson plans and stories, too, so you know what the group has been doing over the past few weeks. When you are teaching, take the time to really work on a given teaching technique. If you have a hard time getting the children to act out a story, do the best you can this week, knowing that next week it will go a little more smoothly because the children (and you!) know what to expect.
If you are a long-time Sunday school teacher, you may wish to develop these teaching techniques more fully.
If you would like to work on helping children become better actors, the classic resource is Theater Games for the Classroom: A Teacher’s Handbook, by Viola Spolin (Northwestern University Press, 1986). This book may be previewed online at Google Books. The official Viola Spolin Web site plans to offer online videos showing how to lead various theatre games, probably beginning in 2015.
LEADER RESOURCE: More about ancient Greek religions
This section is for teachers who would like to learn more about ancient Greek religions.
Not all ancient Greek myths are the same
As we began researching the Persephone myth, we quickly found out that there was more than one Persephone myth in ancient Greece. For example, in the ancient Greek city-state of Locri, Persephone was abducted by Hades, but Demeter does not appear at all. So in Locri, Persephone takes on additional roles as a goddess. The scholar Simon Price writes:
“At Locri, Persephone lacks the usual association with Demeter, but [she] has incorporated the spheres of marriage and children, that is, those female associations that were central to the community.” (1)
Therefore, when we are talking about ancient Greece, we should be careful to talk about religions, in the plural. We’re used to thinking of religions as having more or less uniform beliefs and practices, but this simply wasn’t true in ancient Greece. Different cities in Greece had their own versions of the ancient Greek myths, and each city had its own special temples and rituals.
The version of the Persephone myth that we present in this curriculum comes from a hymn to Demeter, that is, a song devoted to the goddess Demeter, which existed in oral tradition and was set down in writing by an anonymous author, probably in the 7th century BCE. Hymns were meant to be sung, and while they were being sung, there likely would have been dancers enacting the hymn. Singers and dancers were constantly innovating and improving, making the hymns and the dances more beautiful, to better please the gods and goddesses. (2) So you can see that there were lots of versions of the ancient Greek myths.
In this sense, ancient Greek religion was utterly different from Christianity — and, for that matter, completely different from Islam and Buddhism and Judaism, religions that have central texts that help define who they are. All Buddhists know the same basic story of how Buddha achieved enlightenment; all Muslims know the same basic story about how the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) was granted revelation; all Christians know the same basic story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; etc.
Unlike the Christian religion, the ancient Greek religious stories were not standardized through books and scriptures. One scholar puts it this way: “Here we see an essential difference from Greek mythology: [in Christianity] there is only a single story….” (3)
As you teach this course, you may find the children challenging you on details of the myths. “That’s not the way the myth goes!” they may tell you. Help them to understand that there is no one “right” version of ancient Greek myths. The most we can say is that we should always look for ancient sources for the myths, recognizing that many versions of the myths have disappeared.
Feminism and the myth of Persephone
“I suggest that the only way we can, as human beings, integrate ourselves into a life-sustaining relationship with nature, is for both males and females to see ourselves as equally rooted in the cycles of life and death and equally responsible for creating a sustainable way of life.” — Rosemary Radford Ruether (4)
One obvious point of this lesson is to provide a feminist perspective on this familiar myth. Since the ancient Greek myths so often have male protagonists and/or a male point of view, feminist interpretations often ask what the women in the myths might have thought and felt.
Why should we care about this? The theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther believes that the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis lie, in part, in the historic domination of women by men. Men dominated women in Western culture for many centuries, and domination came to be seen as a natural state of affairs. Thus, it came to be seen as “natural” for human beings to dominate other living beings — just the way human men dominate human women. So, Reuther argues, we have to stop thinking in terms of one living being dominating another living being. When we start asking ourselves what women in ancient Greek myths thought and felt, we are thinking our way out of destructive domination.
With the children, you can help them think through the roles of males and females in these stories. As they think about this, we hope they begin to see how gender roles that dictate that one gender dominates another are unfair and unwise.
More about feminist interpretations of ancient Greek myths
Some thinkers, most notably archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, have theorized that the earliest European cultures were peaceful matriarchal societies. Then waves of Indo-European invaders swept in and imposed a hierarchical, male-dominated culture on top of the older, peaceful, woman-centered civilizations. This is a widely-held theory in Unitarian Universalism, popularized in part by the 1986 adult curriculum “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven.”
According to this theory, at one time it was the Greek goddesses who were most powerful. Then, when patriarchal human invaders conquered the peaceful matristic Greek cultures, the religions reflected this new human reality by making Zeus and the other gods more powerful than the goddesses.
It is important for teachers of this course to remember that many archaeologists and historians do not find sufficient evidence to state that the earliest European civilizations were peaceful, woman-centered cultures. Some scholars, like Cathy Gere in her book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), argue that such reconstructions of ancient cultures may instead serve as a kind of modernist myth:
“That the ‘first Europeans’ were unwarlike quickly became a cherished myth. As the twentieth century launched conflicts of ever greater reach and ferocity, the Minoan epoch came increasingly to be celebrated as the pacifist precursor to Homer’s militaristic age of heros, a luminous, feminine, fairy-tale exception to an otherwise lamentable human record of violence and hatred.” (p. 12)
One of the central values of Unitarian Universalists is the value of skepticism: we value skepticism because it keeps us from descending into dogma and orthodoxy. As Unitarian Universalists, we should remain skeptical of the notion that ancient Greece, and ancient Europe more generally, was a placid, woman-centered land where everyone worshipped the Great Goddess in peace and harmony. And we should remain equally skeptical of the notion that gods are always more powerful than goddesses, that men have always been more powerful than women, and that all this represents the normal state of being for humans.
On the Web site for the new revised edition of the Cakes for the Queen of Heaven curriculum, Nancy Irons writes: “While we can never know for sure what beliefs and values were held by ancient people, there can be more than one interpretation of the facts that we do know…. It is necessary for original material to be revisited and re-evaluated from new perspectives to see if old interpretations still hold true or if new interpretations are more appropriate.” (http://cakesforthequeenofheaven.org/component/content/article/4-faqs/1-what-is-cakes accessed 20 August 2014).
We would add one other observation: The more we learned about ancient Greek myths and ancient Greek religions, the more we had to re-assess our assumptions. Certainly it is worth studying Demeter if for no other reason than to see how a powerful goddess thwarts the supposedly all-powerful Zeus. But it may be more important to study ancient Greek myths to challenge some of our unexamined assumptions about what it means to be human.
NOTES
(1) Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 25.
(2) Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: havrad University Press, 1985), pp. 102-103.
(3) Guy G. Stromsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformation in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 30.
(4) Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), p. 40.