MANTO: A digital dataset of Greek myth

Explore MANTO at: https://manto.unh.edu/viewer

MANTO is a dynamic born-digital map of Greek myth that reveals the ways in which this storyworld was created out of networks of interacting people, places, and objects. Our public interface allows anyone to access, explore, and understand this storytelling tradition and its impacts on the historical landscape of the Mediterranean.

This collaborative project has been running for 5 years now, and work continues apace. Co-directed by Greta Hawes (Macquarie University) and Scott Smith (University of New Hampshire), MANTO also reflects the hard work of over 60 data collectors, mainly students, who have identified and disambiguated the people (heroes, gods and monsters), landmarks, places, objects, constellations and events relevant to the mythic stories narrated in Greco-Roman texts and depicted on ancient artefacts. These entities are then connected together using a bespoke vocabulary of "ties" that reflect the distinctive phenomena of Greek mythic storytelling. 

Moving this information into the digital sphere offers several major advantages.

Firstly, it allows us to model the enormity of the mythic tradition as a network made up of heterogeneous, but autonomous entities, any one of which can be used as a "way in" to the storyword; this is a quite different model from the lists of names of gods and heroes that have traditionally been used to organise print encyclopaedias of myth.

Secondly, because MANTO's source material is infinitely expandable, we can give space to the kinds of texts that have tended to be ignored in favour of continued study of archaic epic and classical tragedy and lyric. We have already added to MANTO a lot of prose mythography and geography, as well as Imperial-era texts, which are too often treated as only of minor importance. In addition, MANTO now has some data also from ancient artefacts, and will soon start on inscriptions and papyri as well. This multi-modal approach will help to break down the siloes that have traditionally separated the work of philologists from epigraphers, papyrologists, and scholars of visual culture.

Thirdly, through MANTO we have been able to build up an authoritative dataset of mythic "people", which is available for reuse by others in the LOD ecosystem. MANTO uses the Nodegoat platform, which makes it easy for us to publish our data with stable URIs and articulate rich connections between them. This data is then available to share using either the API, or via csv downloads.

And, finally, building this project in the digital sphere has meant that we can ask big questions about Greek myth and ancient storytelling contexts at scale. So, for example, in a recent article Greta Hawes and Rosemary Selth were able to show that, by using MANTO to retrieve all of the instances of matrilineal succession in the current dataset, we could come to understand the phenomenon differently from the way it has previously been described based only on some prominent examples.

Pleiades has been crucial to the development of MANTO. From the very beginning, we were able to identify the places we encountered in texts with Pleiades' stable identifiers. We then fetch Pleiades' locational data to populate our own maps. Since the Greek mythical storyworld maps rather well over the historical landscape, Pleiades (and Topostext) have provided us with good coverage where mythical stories interact with real places on the ground. Where alignments are straightforward, we have been working with Tom Elliott (NYU) to add MANTO URIs to the corresponding Pleiades place resources.

But of course MANTO has many places that aren't (yet) in Pleiades. Some of these are purely fictional, like the Underworld with its various rivers, or the tomb of Agamemnon that is represented in some images but is not the same as either the monument at Mycenae or the one at Amyclai. Others are probably not fabrications, but are difficult to locate or disambiguate: the "Oichalia" that Heracles conquers is a great example: in MANTO we need to keep this entity separate from all of the various later claimants. We have thus had to develop various specific ways to express such identifications between the world of myth and the real places of history.

A further challenge lies in trying to capture the mythic objects that were said to have been preserved as relics: tombs containing the bones of heroes are commonly encountered, as are various weapons and pieces of jewellery dedicated at cult sites. And literally rooted in the ground were various trees, still growing, that were said to have bourn witness to famous episodes in myth:  Pausanias attests that still surviving in the late 2nd century CE were the plane tree under which the Greeks gathered at Aulis before departing for Troy, an olive tree on Mount Coryphos which Heracles had twisted around his club, and myrtle at Troizen whose leaves were damaged by Phaedra in an attempt to work out her sexual frustration.

Because our data structure allows for rich connections between entities and for situating one landmark or place "within" another, MANTO is building up a model of ancient places that captures their relative spatial proximity. So, a city like Thebes includes lists of all the relics that are within it boundaries; equally, our recent work in capturing the mythic scenes on Pompeiian wall paintings (done in collaboration with the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP) has meant we created our own dataset of the properties in Pompeii which contain such images.

In short, myth and reality were not distinct in antiquity; modelling the spatial dynamics of the Greek storyworld takes us inevitably back to a map that looks a lot like that of the historical Mediterranean. We will continue to work with Pleiades to fill in whatever gaps we can; the very existence of Pleiades' mature and growing dataset is something that we should all recognise as a great boon to our field.