This volume is a project of the Ancient History and Archaeology Department, University of Bucharest, initiated by Prof. Zoe Petre. The editors proceeded to offer, rather than a juxtaposition of descriptive entries, a collection of essays, necessarily basic for minor mythological figures, but with a strong hermeneutic component for the prominent ones. Emphasis has been placed on cult issues, iconographic analysis, and the discussion of the meaning, context, and underlying socio-cultural mechanisms of the myth. All relevant sources, including inscriptions, together with up-to-date bibliographies in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish are indicated at the end of every entry. Abbreviations of ancient sources and modern periodicals, as well as a general bibliography and instrumenta studiorum accompany the volume.

To illustrate the approach proposed above, a translation of the second half of the article on Ulysses by Catalin Pavel follows (pp. 356-59, “Discutie” and “Iconografie”).

Discussion: Prefiguration of the Classical Greek man and indeed the first of modern European heroes, Ulysses remains the archetype of the orator and of the trickster. Among all heroes gathered to besiege Troy, his figure is one of a kind. What he wants is not kleos, glory, but to survive; if he dreams of victory, it is in order to go back home sooner. Therefore he is most detached from a warlord’s values, and his courage (for which there is enough proof) lacks enthusiasm. U. intervenes in the war when the tables turn in favour of the Trojans, and is available for missions requiring special qualifications (to reconnoiter, to negotiate). The epithets that Homer reserves for him are polymetis (crafty, with many ingenious ideas; by metis he resembles Athena, whose protégé he is); as Hermes, he is polytropos (one of many turns, ever-changing). Homer clearly singles out U. as superior to all mortals in intelligence. In the Iliad, he is the only one to smile to an enemy, and the only one who never cries; it is also true that he has no private life, no close friends, and incurs in Troy no loss to mourn. U. is actually not a theme in the Iliad: compared to the great affliction of having to leave Ithaka, war per se seems to bring no supplementary sorrow to him. On the other hand, in the Odyssey, U. cries heartily in all major scenes, including those when Demodocus sings about the Trojan War. U. (and only he) is also described as polytlas (much-enduring): no other Homeric hero is capable of humility. U. can be a beggar in Ithaka as he is in Troy, where he enters the city (in Servius) via the sewage system, and we have trouble imagining Achilles escaping the Cyclops’ cave tied under a ram. Together with the use of bow (instead of the spear, heroic par excellence, although he is also deemed by Homer “well-known for spear throwing”), this considerably sets him apart from other Homeric heroes and brings him closer to Heracles. The adventures of U. are notably called athloi (works) six times in the Odyssey, and in their meeting in the Underworld, Heracles addresses him as his kin. Finally, U. is the only Homeric hero to speak about nourishment. In Il.9, 155-172, when Achilles boils with desire to avenge his friend killed by Hector and exhorts Agamemnon for a decisive attack, U. pleads for a good meal first, much to the contempt of Achilles. As P. Pucci noted, U. is characterized in Od. 6, 130-136 as a “ lion of the wilderness … pushed by his hunger [the stomach, gaster], and will dare break even into a well-fenced homestead, trying to get at the sheep” (Butler tr.) which recalls a topos from the Iliad in which Sarpedon besieges a wall like a lion “pushed by his heart” (thymos) etc. This contrast serves to wrap up the antagonism foreshadowed by the instance where Achilles’ main feature, bie, force, is counterposed to Ulysses dominant characteristic, metis, the cunning intelligence. In comedies, U. (similarly to Heracles) is often presented as a gourmand and lampooned for his appetite for riches (he asks the Cyclops for hospitality gifts). Nevertheless, Stanford sees in the urge to eat before battle “Napoleonic common-sense” – and as to the exchange of gifts, this is inherent to the true heroic etiquette. • If in the Iliad, Achilles is the best of the Achaeans (aristos Akhaion), in the Odyssey, this role is reserved for U. It is visible that only his attitude prevents him from being the typical hero; the physical means are not lacking: he wins the running race during the funerary games for Patroclus, and among the Phaeacians he is the best disk-thrower. • If Achilles shows us how to die, U. shows us how to live one’s life (Finkelberg); if Heracles opens up the continents for colonization, U. opens up the seas (Malkin). • U. breaks away from two types of heroism: he does not die on the battlefield, covered in glory, but in his quasi-Mycenaean palace, after many peaceful years, nor does he systematically search monsters to exterminate, but simply runs into them on its way and struggles to escape from them • His marine wanderings are a resonance box for stories of homecoming (nostos) of all times after the Trojan war and up to around 700 BC. The Odyssey may be seen as an Umbildungsroman, the novel of a re-modeling, by which the protagonist, tainted by war experiences, returns to the state of normalcy by means of a series of ontological thresholds. It has also been said that he, in fact, botches this moral transformation, that he arrives too late in Ithaka and, towards the end, as he kills the suitors, shows the same “bestial heroism” (F. Fajardo Acosta). While some described him as a psychopath (C. Boer), P. Barnouw portrays him as always focused on a remote goal, for the accomplishment of which he harnesses both his legendary patience and intelligence, and also his antics and tricks (which therefore are not gratuitous, although his delight in telling lies is clearly compulsive). U. is guilty of hubris during the Cyclops episode (R. Friedrich); he endangers his comrades just to test Polyphemus’s hospitality, a type of ethical test that is the privilege of gods, and once saved, he boasts his triumph attributing it to himself (he extols his own arete, boule şi noos), not to the gods, and claiming to have restored in the world the order desired by Zeus. • Although haunted by the memory of his motherland (or by that, partly synonymic, of his wife, both encapsulations of normalcy), U. does not seem to act consistently towards getting there; on his way he takes more risks than he had even during the war (nobody forces him to approach the Cyclops or the Laestrygones, or to pass through Scylla and Charybdis) and at the same time he indulges in more liaisons amoureuses than during the war (although both Circe and Calypso are goddesses, and given the circumstances, only a Socrates – as has been said – could have resisted them; he deserves credit though, for being reverent and paternal towards the infatuated Nausicaa). • In antiquity, his travels were conceived as taking him either through the Western Mediterranean, or through the Atlantic Ocean; modern reconstructions did not shy away from suggesting places ranging from Madeira, Madagascar and Iceland. Geographic identifications – such as the land of the Lotus-eaters with the Tunisian island Djerba, the island of the Cyclops, the land of the Laestrygones or Trinacria with Sicily, Scylla and Charybdis with the Messina Straits and so on remain mere infrapaginal notes on a treatise on mythical geography; U. covers an itinerary which inventorizes the avatars of inhumanity, monstrousness and alterity, while his son Telemachus embarks on an initiatic trip in the world of humans (P. Vidal-Naquet).

Iconography: represented ever since the beginning of the 7th c. BC on Argolid pottery and until the AD 5th c. on mosaics in Israel, U., about which more facts are reported of all Greek heroes except Heracles, is featured on a relatively low number of monuments (only 250 vessels in 1983). A mature man with curly hair and beard and the face (perhaps unexpectedly) always grave and even suffering, U. covers his head with a petasos (often pulled back and tied under his chin) and from the 5th c. BC, a conical pilos. A favorite theme is that of the embassy to mourning Achilles, to whom U. talks at leisure with his legs crossed and holding one knee in his hands. But one the most popular (and earliest attested) of the whole themes in Greek art is U.’s confrontation with Polyphemus, approached from four different angles: the wine-drinking, the blinding, the escape from the den, and the mocking of the Cyclops from the ship. The blinding, the most “visual” of all, is represented in Archaic Greece as a collective victory, all four prisoners participating in the effort and U. being (we know from Homer) the one who, right near the Cyclops, drives the flaming stake in the Cylops’ eye. Because of the available space in the decorated register of the pot, although in the Odyssey the stake is driven downwards, on the vessels the Cyclops sits upright and the Greeks carry the stake above their heads. If on Archaic vases, the faces of the Greeks seem to express some naïve enchantment during this activity (the conventional smile), in the marble group from Sperlonga (Roman copy after a Hellenistic original) U.’s wry face with opened mouth reflects the supreme tension of the punitive gesture and the visceral disgust that goes with it. The blinding scene has been so popular as to be sculpted on such inadequate objects as a Roman ivory comb. The warriors who still hold their swords ready, although tied under the rams, are all the more burlesque; by the same token, a Circe with African features probably reflects a satyr play and the same (on a Kabirion-skyphos) can be conjectured for U. floating on a raft improvised from two amphorae placed mouth to mouth • Truly important is the contribution of figurative documents for understanding where U.’s identity is positioned between human and divine. Thus, the artists never depict him accompanied by Athena, who otherwise helps him in countless events (and who is often together with other heroes that she protects, such as Heracles, Theseus, and Achilles) or by Poseidon, whose thirst for revenge is the main cause of U’s misfortunes. In contradiction with the literary sources that associate them so closely with the twists and turns of U’s delayed homecoming, both gods are evacuated from the figurative documents which points toward a “self-determination” conception of this singular Greek hero among, if not among the public at large, then among the artists; for Touchefeu-Meynier, he is “the most human of all Greek heroes” • It is again the images that carry further the suggestions, this time clearly audible in the texts, that what makes U. unique, his specific difference, is not his ability as a warrior, which is peripheral to his personality: indeed, he is never described as being part of a fighting scene, although in the Iliad no less than 18 Trojans killed by him are named. For the artists, then, this was just a convention meant to legitimate U’s presence in the congregation of warriors from Troy and to mitigate the tensions created by the resurgence of a new, unexplainable type of hero. It must be said, though, that U. is once depicted in the moments immediately preceding the battle, in the most important representation of the Trojan horse, on a pithos from Mykonos: the soldiers come down one by one, and U. is probably the one who inspects them, waiting with his foot on the horse’s front wheel. • Many important episodes are rarely found in images, such as the Island of the Sun, Calypso, the meeting with Penelope, and particularly the Laestrygones, Aeolus’s island, Nausicaa, the death of the suitors. C. Manilius Limetanus minted dinars in 82-81 BC on whose reverse he elected to depict U. with his dog, Argos. • A vessel now in Mainz is worthy of special mention; bound to the mast during the sail past the Sirens’ island, U. is depicted with three arms, two tied at the back, the third extended towards the Sirens, as if holding for them a counter-discourse (in later tales, the Sirens kill themselves after U. manages to survive their charm).

Other sources: Hom. Il. 2, 169; 9, 223-306; 11, 310-488; 335; 23, 709; 23, 788; Od., 4, 277; 8, 198; 9, 166-566; 11,119 sqq.; 23,124; Plat. Phaidros, 261 b-c; Epikt. 3,24,13; Ov. met. 13, 128; ep. 1,2,18; Orig. contra Celsum 2, 76.
Bibliography: M.I. Finley, The world of Odysseus, 1954; F. Brommer, Odysseus – die Taten und Leiden des Helden, Darmstadt 1983; A. and H.-H. Wolf, Die wirkliche Reise des Odysseus, München, 1983 (2. ed.); P. Pucci, Odysseus polutropos, Ithaca 1987; G.Crane, Calypso : backgrounds and conventions of the "Odyssey", Frankfurt am Main, 1988; W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, Dallas 1992 (4.ed); M. Finkelberg, „Odysseus and the genus “hero””, Gr&R, 42, 1995; I. Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus, Berkeley 1998; C. Ondine Pache, „War games: Odysseus at Troy”, HSCP 100, 2000; J. Barnouw, Odysseus, hero of practical intelligence, Cornell Univ. Press., 2004; A. Perutelli, Ulisse nella cultura romana, Firenze, 2006

Description of the work by Prof. Zoe Petre: “Dintre tradiţiile pe care cultura europeană le-a moştenit din Antichitatea greco-romană miturile sunt, probabil, partea cea mai familiară publicului cultivat contemporan. Pe de altă parte, mai toate demersurile exegetice moderne, de la antropologie la psihiatrie, au adesea drept referent miturile antice, tocmai datorită excepţionalei lor difuziuni. Ce ar fi cultura contemporană fără complexul lui Oedip? L-am putea înţelege oare pe Freud (sau Enescu) dacă nu am avea habar cine este Oedip?

Într-o lume din care cultura clasică este tot mai exilată, Dicţionarul de mitologie greco-romană încearcă să suplinească, măcar în parte, nevoia de informaţie şi de înţelegere a unui public cultivat, dar ţinut departe de rădăcinile istorice ale propriei culturi. Nu este vorba de o colecţie de povestiri pentru copii şi adolescenţi, chiar dacă Dicţionarul le poate fi de folos celor mai iscoditori dintre ei, ci de o naraţiune organizată în vederea unui prim nivel de exegeză a miturilor antice, însoţită de istoricul miturilor ca surse de inspiraţie antice şi moderne. Sursele, precum şi bibliografia pe care le oferă fiecare articol deschid calea celor care ar dori să meargă mai departe în cercetarea acestui inepuizabil univers al miturilor antice şi a supravieţuirii lor multimilenare.

Alături de colaboratorii mei – tineri specialişti în istoria şi civilizaţia greco-romană –, am încercat să îndemnăm cititorii să se bucure de splendoarea acestor tradiţii fundamentale pentru cultura europeană.”