Around what year were Greek myths written?

Question

Around what year were Greek myths written? Was it BCE? OR CE? Please provide a specific date if you know.

Answer 1

From before 1500 B.C. through to 600 A.D.

The oldest surviving myths are those of Homer and Hesiod from the C8th B.C. But many mythical names appear on Mycenaean and Minoan tablets hundreds of years earlier.

Between the C8th B.C. to the C6th A.D. (i.e. the final end of the pagan era) the myths were written and rewritten, added to, and changed to meet the tastes of the times.
E.g. the famous story of Persephone is found in the Homeric Hymns of around 700 B.C., but there is also a very different version of the story by the poet Claudian written 1,200 years later around 500 A.D.
New myths also pop up all the time, and were added to the mythical encyclopedia so to speak. E.g. after the Greeks established colonies in Italy they created an enormous collection of myths about mythical Greek heroes in Italy. But none of these exist in the old poets--they were invented to fill a need of the time.

In other words, mythology for the Greeks (and Romans) was a literary and cultural tradition rather than something set in stone at some particular point in time.

Answer 2

I and several authors, including Edith Hamilton, believe that the Iliad was the first myth deliberately written down. This was about a thousand years BCE. There are older Chinese Myths, but you asked specifically for Greek.

Answer 3

Nobody sat down and wrote the Greek Myths. They're collections of oral stories, like the Bible or the Brother's Grimm. So knowing the date nearly impossible.

Answer 4

While there has been misinterpretation, there have also been great efforts extended in understanding the Bible, using other early language versions, ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts, deciphering archeological finds and correlating language study and development. For example, although the New Testament Greek term *porne* meant "prostitute," the derived form *porneia*, "fornication" (Hebrew, zenut; Aramaic, zaniyuta), by New Testament times, referred to any Illicit sex relations outside of marriage. It was not "the church" that give it this meaning, but the actual recorded usage of people living at early times. Regarding the meanings of porneia, B. F. Westcott in his book Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (1906, p. 76) says: “This is a general term for all unlawful intercourse, (I) adultery: Hos. ii. 2, 4 (LXX.); Matt. v. 32; xix. 9; (2) unlawful marriage, I Cor. v. I; (3) fornication, the common sense as here [Eph 5:3].” BDAG (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature) defines porneia as "unlawful sexual intercourse, prostitution, unchastity, fornication." (2000, p. 854) By researching word origins as well as the use and meanings of words at specific times in history, Bible translators and interpreters are able to arrive at accurate exegesis (interpretation).