Mythography in the context of "Marsyas"

Genealogia deorum gentilium, known in English as On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, is a mythography or encyclopedic compilation of the tangled family relationships of the classical pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome, written in Latin prose from 1360 onwards by the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.

Hominization, also called anthropogenesis, refers to the process of becoming human, and is used in somewhat different contexts in the fields of paleontology and paleoanthropology, archaeology, philosophy, theology, and mythography. In the latter three fields, the alternative term anthropogony has also been used. Both anthropogenesis and anthropogony sometimes instead refer to the related subject of human evolution.

Euhemerus (/juːˈhiːmərəs, -hɛm-/; also spelled Euemeros or Evemerus; Ancient Greek: Εὐήμερος Euhēmeros, "happy; prosperous"; late fourth century BC) was a Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. Euhemerus' birthplace is disputed, with Messina in Sicily as the most probable location, while others suggest Chios or Tegea.

The philosophy attributed to and named for Euhemerus, euhemerism, holds that many mythological tales can be attributed to historical persons and events, the accounts of which have become altered and exaggerated over time.

A vegetation deity is a nature deity whose disappearance and reappearance, or life, death and rebirth, embodies the growth cycle of plants. In nature worship, the deity can be a god or goddess with the ability to regenerate itself. A vegetation deity is often a fertility deity. The deity typically undergoes dismemberment (see sparagmos), scattering, and reintegration, as narrated in a myth or reenacted by a religious ritual. The cyclical pattern is given theological significance on themes such as immortality, resurrection, and reincarnation. Vegetation myths have structural resemblances to certain creation myths in which parts of a primordial being's body generate aspects of the cosmos, such as the Norse myth of Ymir.

In mythography of the 19th and early 20th century, as for example in The Golden Bough of J.G. Frazer, the figure is related to the "corn spirit", "corn" in this sense meaning grain in general. That triviality is giving the concept its tendency to turn into a meaningless generality, as Walter Friedrich Otto remarked of trying to use a "name as futile and yet pretentious as 'Vegetation deity'".

In the fields of philosophy and mythography, euhemerism (/juːˈhiːmərɪzəm, -hɛm-/) is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, who lived in the late 4th century BC. In the more recent literature of myth, such as Bulfinch's Mythology, euhemerism is termed the "historical theory" of mythology.

Euhemerus was not the first to attempt to rationalize mythology in historical terms: euhemeristic views are found in earlier writings including those of Sanchuniathon, Xenophanes, Herodotus, Hecataeus of Abdera and Ephorus. However, the enduring influence of Euhemerus upon later thinkers such as the classical poet Ennius (b. 239 BC) and modern author Antoine Banier (b. 1673 AD) identified him as the traditional founder of this school of thought.

Asclepiades of Tragilus (Greek: Ἀσκληπιάδης) was an ancient Greek literary critic and mythographer of the 4th century BC, and a student of the Athenian orator Isocrates. His works do not survive, but he is known to have written the Tragodoumena (Τραγῳδούμενα, "The Subjects of Tragedy"), in which he discussed the treatment of myths in Greek tragedy. The Tragodoumena is sometimes considered the first systematic mythography. Asclepiades summarized the plots of myths as dramatized in tragedy, and provided details and variants. He is one of the authors (= FGrHist 12) whose fragments were collected in Felix Jacoby's Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. He is cited twice in the work traditionally known as the Library of Apollodorus.

A gloss on Vergil's phrase Idaeis cyparissis ("cypresses of Ida") mentions that Asclepiades preserved a Celtic version of the myth of Cyparissus, in which a female Cyparissa is the daughter of a Celtic king named Boreas.