What are some good books about Greek mythology? I've always been interested in it but have never been sure where to start.
What are some good books about Greek mythology?
What are some good books about Greek mythology? I've always been interested in it but have never been sure where to start.
there's a chart for starting with the greeks
Edith Hamilton's Mythology is what you should get
Robert Graves
This, 100%. Graves is nice because he notes his sources, but beware of his strange beliefs concerning the origins and interpretations of myths.
Yeah. I just use it as a reference, overview, and source book. It does the job perfectly. Have you read any of his translations by any chance! I’ve been wanted to read The Golden Ass forever and am leaning towards his translation
Edith hamilton mythology
Iliad
Odyssey
Theogony
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
solid list
Whoever recommends Edith outs xerself as a brainlet
There is a bunch of random bullshit from other sources you won’t get in all the main books
This. Especially stories of heroes like Perseus, Hercules, and Theseus. If you’re just a snob, you can get basically all of the stories in Apollodorus’s Library, but it makes for very dry reading.
>Edith hamilton mythology
No. But list is otherwise good.
Why do chuds hate that book so much?
Why? Every story is just some jumble of characters doing wacky things in a way that doesn't make sense. They have no meaning, the Greeks themselves didn't take them all that seriously. They were just stories thought up by some prehistoric Greek drunk on wine.
If you want to read some great poetry and it has mythological themes - so what? That's what footnotes and wikipedia are for.
I have an MA in Classics and when I mention it, people always start telling me about some stupid ass myth and ask if I know about it. Nope, I probably did read it some time or other, but I forgot it because it's moronic and not actually worth remembering.
If you want to read wacky stories about superhuman beings, buy a comic book. They're much more entertaining than classical myths.
Based moron
Go ahead butthole, sell me on Greek myths. Tell me why anyone should read Greek myths instead of, I don't know, Yvain The Knight of the Lion. Better, tell me why anyone should read either of them, because they're both just endless series of "wacky" adventures with virtually no point whatsoever. Sure, they incidentally say something about the society in which they were made, but you could say that about a cereal box.
No one “should” read anything
So you think no one book is better than another, and that spending your time reading about how Hephaestus was cast off of Olympus by Hera because she was butthurt that he was born lame, is equally as valuable as studying Plotinus or Plutarch or Theocritus or Terence or Aristotle? Who's the real plebeian here, jackass?
(I didn't know that myth off-hand, of course, I just looked it up on wikipedia)
>So you think no one book is better than another
Yeah, writing is an art and art is subjective, it's the same with musicians, there are just musicians, there are no objectively good or bad ones.
With such an opinion, I genuinely wonder what your favourite book is.
If you think myths and tales of chivalry are worth reading and just as valuable as anything else, I'd assume your favorite book is Superman, or maybe Batman. Or if it is an actually good book, your liking it is a total accident, since you see no distinction between wacky adventures and actual literature. I don't know why you're so butthurt about this. If I said packages of crisps weren't worth reading much, you probably wouldn't push back. But because I point out that myths are just silly stories, you get butthurt, because you think it makes you some sort of "patrician" to read myths. Learn to think for yourself, friendo.
>Now, is that just a jumble of characters doing wacky, nonsensical things?
Yes, that's exactly what it is. I read it twice out of fairness to you, and it's just a wacky story.
>moving story with vivid characters
Yeah, that Zeus guy, what a complicated figure he is! And Persephone, the innocent girl, wow, Thackeray has nothing on her.
>allegorical description of the turn of the seasons
Yawn.
>deep rumination
What about that story is deep? You're just brainwashing yourself into thinking it's meaningful because you think you're supposed to think it's meaningful.
Again, I'm not some philistine with no appreciation for literature or allegory, I'm just pointing out how silly the myths are, and what a waste of time it basically is to study myth - UNLESS you're an anthropologist or historian of religion etc. But other than that, if you're just a IQfy dilettante who wants to read and learn for fun/improvement, your time could be much better spent.
Plato wanted to ban the myths and all the poets who wrote on mythological subjects. Why? Because he recognized that they were, at best, wacky stories, and, at worst, morally corrupting. So I'm happy to be on the same side as Plato, as opposed to a bunch of pseudointellectuals on IQfy.
Black person i genuinely asked what your favourite book(s) is. I'm not that other anon
>Yes, that's exactly what it is. I read it twice out of fairness to you, and it's just a wacky story.
Please point to a single action in the story that is wacky or unintelligible. Everything in the story makes perfect sense from a character POV.
>Yeah, that Zeus guy, what a complicated figure he is! And Persephone, the innocent girl, wow
You can't honestly expect to get character depth from a summary, can you? Go read the original hymn, which is something like 15-20 pages long, and you'll see the vividness I reference. Zeus isn't the most fleshed out character in that particular story, but Demeter certainly is.
>Yawn
You claimed the stories were nonsense and have no meaning, yet when confronted with an example of a story with a meaning, your response is to yawn?
>What about that story is deep?
It is an analysis of women's roles, the mother/child relationship, the initiation into adulthood by marriage/sex/impregnation, loss of innocence, the grieving process, the role of humans in relationship to the world and the gods, and the nature of mortality itself. If you doubt any of this thematic content, just go read the full version for yourself:https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/homeric-hymn-to-demeter-sb/
>hymn
You jackass, I explicitly said that myths are worth knowing to the extent necessary to read poetry. But to read a "mythography" or to try to remember all of the various wacky stories - no, it's a waste of time. Sure, that myth told in a hymn is probably well worth reading, just like the Iliad is well worth reading. My favorite Catullus poem is a retelling of the myth of Attis and Cybele. But the myth itself is basically just a wacky story, and I wouldn't care to know it if a great poet like Catullus hadn't used the wacky story as material to create a legit poem.
>You claimed the stories were nonsense and have no meaning, yet when confronted with an example of a story with a meaning, your response is to yawn?
Yes, the myth qua myth is yawn-inducing. It's only worth reading inasmuch as it is a great poem.
Tristram Shandy
Fair enough about the myth vs. poem point, but wouldn't this apply to any story? If you took literally any story at all and reduced it to a mythography-type summary like you would find in Apollodorus, it would be terribly uninteresting, woudn't it? I don't think anyone would argue that simply knowing myths for the sake of knowing them is all that valuable, just like knowing summaries of all the plays of Shakespeare wouldn't be very valuable, outside of understanding allusions to them.
>Waaaah, other people want to read things that interest them, waaaah, I don't like those things so I'm going to b***h and moan about them, waaaaah.
Picrel is you, anon.
>ma in classics
>filtered by allegory
And I almost forgot that everything on this site is a lie.
You're the one who got filtered. Greeks only started thinking in terms of allegory as a response to atheists who would point out how ridiculous the myths were. Have you actually read any of the "allegorical" interpretations of myth? They're every bit as crazy as "allegorical" interpretations of the more objectionable bits of the Old Testament.
Don't listen to this demoraliser OP. Here's a very simple counterexample to his nonsense: The Rape of Persephone.
In the story (the best version, I think, is the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter"), Persephone, the virgin daughter of Demeter, the earth mother and goddess of the harvest, is playing innocently in a flower field with other young girls, when Hades erupts out of the earth and steals her away to take back to the Underworld and be his bride. This is openly permitted by Zeus, who is Persephone's father. Demeter is grief stricken by her daughter's abduction, and when she hears that Zeus permitted this to occur, she abandons Olympus and the gods and takes on human form. She wanders into a nearby town and eventually gets hired to be a nurse for a feeble baby boy. She secretly plans to turn the boy into an immortal god, but when she is caught throwing him into the fire (which seems to be part of the deification process), the boy's mother is horrified and objects. Demeter, enraged that her plan has been thwarted, calls the mother a fool and decides to wipe humanity from the face of the earth by stopping the growth of all plant life. The people begin starving, and the gods stop receiving their agricultural offerings, so eventually Zeus yields and agrees to let Persephone return to the surface world. Hades agrees as well, but before leaving the Underworld, he forces Persephone to eat a pomegranate seed. It is later revealed that accepting food or drink in the Underworld makes it impossible to permanently leave. In the end, Persephone must remain Hades' wife and must dwell below the surface for a third of the year, but in springtime she returns to her mother.
Now, is that just a jumble of characters doing wacky, nonsensical things? Clearly not. It is first and foremost a moving story with vivid characters, but it is also an allegorical description of the turn of the seasons, AND it is a deep rumination on the bittersweet experience of motherhood and coming-of-age and the perils of womanhood in the ancient world. It also formed the basis for the largest and best-attested mystery cult, the Eleusinian mysteries, so clearly the Greeks DID take the story seriously.
Honestly, this guy is probably a troll, but if not, he has completely missed the fact that when studying the stories of the ancients, you must read them like an ancient person would. He mistakes his lack of understanding for a lack of underlying meaning.
Anyway, here's an answer OP:
If you want to read primary sources, read:
1. The Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod
2. The Homeric Hymns
3. Ovid's Metamorphoses
4. Apollodorus' Library
5. The Golden Ass by Apuleis
If you just want an accessible intro, get Edith Hamilton's Mythology. It's the best single modern sources. A good website, however, is Theoi.com.
Thanks for this well-thought-out and well-written answer, Anon. I really enjoyed that story and it's gotten me excited to read more, very interesting stuff. I'm not very smart so I'm glad that you pointed out the allegory.
I'm glad you liked it! Did you go and read the story itself? Also, don't beat yourself up. I didn't understand that much of the story until I taught the story to my students.
>Did you go and read the story itself?
I didn't, I wouldn't know where to find it, I'd love to though.
I posted a link to a translation at the end of this post:
Ovid has a version of the story too, but it’s nowhere near as detailed.
>the Greeks themselves didn't take them all that seriously.
Right, the Greeks cared so little about these stories that they made them the basis of their art and poetry for hundreds of years.
Ah, I should've checked the sticky, I hid it after the first time I read it so that's why I didn't know, I'll keep it open from now on, thanks anyway, fellas.
All books on Greek myths are garbage, just read the ancients themselves
Library of Apollodorus
read hesiod bro
Calasso's Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, as well as The Celestial Hunter, which includes chapters on the Platonic reaction to Homer, and therefore myth.