Prose writers such as the historian Herodotus and the philosopher Plato wrote on mythological material, and Plato in fact created philosophical parables in a mythical vein. But after Plato and Aristotle Athenian culture was bankrupt, and a new Greek culture arose in Alexandria in Egypt. It was softer, sadder, and somewhat effete. Apollonius of Rhodes wrote his Argonautica, the story of Jason, and the Alexandrian poets turned to love and pastoral subjects as principal themes.
Then the Romans took over, a tough, unimaginative people to whom mythology was essentially foreign. They worshiped the State and the family to whom their gods were subservient. The Romans borrowed myths from Greek civilization but had few of their own. The myths they had were usually historical legends involving political heroes. Yet they made a contribution to literature in a mythological vein, largely through the historian Livy and the poet Vergil. Other writers, too, took up mythological material. Ovid was fascinated by love' and female psychology. His Metamorphoses, Fasti, and Heroides take up mythological subjects charmingly, but without belief. Apuleius probably invented the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Musaeus wrote of Hero and Leander. This obsession with love and passion was characteristic of decadent Romans. Lucian, who wrote in the second century A.D. satirized the gods. Apollodorus wrote an encyclopedic account of the old myths to preserve them. And Pausanias took a tour of Greece, a sentimental journey in the second century A.D., to visit the sites of mythological occurrences, and wrote of his travels in Descriptions of Greece. Roman culture had exhausted itself.
The Teutonic myths of northern Europe, as they were preserved in Tacitus and the Icelandic Eddas, show a hard, warlike, gloomy culture in which one's pleasures were few but very intense. The Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf reveals the noble side of Teutonic ethics.
