Mythology Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1942 by Edith Hamilton

  Copyright renewed © 1969 by Dorian Fielding Reid and Doris Fielding Reid

  Cover design by HEADCASE DESIGN

  Illustrations by JIM TIERNEY

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, 1942

  Reissued: March 2013

  Anniversary edition: September 2017

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  Illustrations by JIM TIERNEY

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43852-0 (hardcover); 978-0-316-43853-7 (ebook)

  E3-20170727-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction to Classical Mythology

  The Mythology of the Greeks

  The Greek and Roman Writers of Mythology

  PART ONE

  THE GODS, THE CREATION, AND THE EARLIEST HEROES

  I The Gods

  The Titans and the Twelve Great Olympians

  The Twelve Olympians Made Up a Divine Family

  The Lesser Gods of Olympus

  The Gods of the Waters

  The Underworld

  The Lesser Gods of Earth

  The Roman Gods

  II The Two Great Gods of Earth

  Demeter (Ceres)

  Dionysus or Bacchus

  III How the World & Mankind Were Created

  IV The Earliest Heroes

  Prometheus and Io

  Europa

  The Cyclops Polyphemus

  Flower-Myths: Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis

  PART TWO

  STORIES OF LOVE AND ADVENTURE

  I Cupid and Psyche

  II Eight Brief Tales of Lovers

  Pyramus and Thisbe

  Orpheus and Eurydice

  Ceyx and Alcyone

  Pygmalion and Galatea

  Baucis and Philemon

  Endymion

  Daphne

  Alpheus and Arethusa

  III The Quest of the Golden Fleece

  IV Four Great Adventures

  Phaëthon

  Pegasus and Bellerophon

  Otus and Ephialtes

  Daedalus

  PART THREE

  THE GREAT HEROES BEFORE THE TROJAN WAR

  I Perseus

  II Theseus

  III Hercules

  IV Atalanta

  PART FOUR

  THE HEROES OF THE TROJAN WAR

  I The Trojan War

  Prologue: The Judgment of Paris

  The Trojan War

  II The Fall of Troy

  III The Adventures of Odysseus

  IV The Adventures of Aeneas

  Part I: From Troy to Italy

  Part II: The Descent into the Lower World

  Part III: The War in Italy

  PART FIVE

  THE GREAT FAMILIES OF MYTHOLOGY

  I The House of Atreus

  Tantalus and Niobe

  Agamemnon and His Children

  Iphigenia among the Taurians

  II The Royal House of Thebes

  Cadmus and His Children

  Oedipus

  Antigone

  The Seven against Thebes

  III The Royal House of Athens

  Cecrops

  Procne and Philomela

  Procris and Cephalus

  Orithyia and Boreas

  Creüsa and Ion

  PART SIX

  THE LESS IMPORTANT MYTHS

  I Midas—and Others

  Aesculapius

  The Danaïds

  Glaucus and Scylla

  Erysichthon

  Pomona and Vertumnus

  II Brief Myths Arranged Alphabetically

  PART SEVEN

  THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE NORSEMEN

  Introduction to Norse Mythology

  I The Stories of Signy & Sigurd

  II The Norse Gods

  The Creation

  The Norse Wisdom

  Newsletters

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PLATE I:

  Zeus presides over his Olympus

  PLATE II:

  The rape of Persephone (Proserpine)

  PLATE III:

  Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops

  PLATE IV:

  Phaethon and his chariot, all on fire, falling to earth

  PLATE V:

  Medusa

  PLATE VI:

  The Minotaur and Thesus in the Labyrinth

  PLATE VII:

  Atalanta and the golden apples

  PLATE VIII:

  The journey of Odysseus

  PLATE IX:

  Aeneas and the Sibyl enter Charon’s boat

  PLATE X:

  The death of Ymir and the creation of the world

  PREFACE

  A book on Mythology must draw from widely different sources. Twelve hundred years separate the first writers through whom the myths have come down to us from the last, and there are stories as unlike each other as “Cinderella” and “King Lear.” To bring them all together in one volume is really somewhat comparable to doing the same for the stories of English literature from Chaucer to the ballads, through Shakespeare and Marlowe and Swift and Defoe and Dryden and Pope and so on, ending with, say, Tennyson and Browning, or even, to make the comparison truer, Kipling and Galsworthy. The English collection would be bigger, but it would not contain more dissimilar material. In point of fact, Chaucer is more like Galsworthy and the ballads like Kipling than Homer is like Lucian or Aeschylus like Ovid.

  Faced with this problem, I determined at the outset to dismiss any idea of unifying the tales. That would have meant either writing “King Lear,” so to speak, down to the level of “Cinderella”—the vice versa procedure being obviously not possible—or else telling in my own way stories which were in no sense mine and had been told by great writers in ways they thought suited their subjects. I do not mean, of course, that a great writer’s style can be reproduced or that I should dream of attempting such a feat. My aim has been nothing more ambitious than to keep distinct for the reader the very different writers from whom our knowledge of the myths comes. For example, Hesiod is a notably simple writer and devout; he is naïve, even childish, sometimes crude, always full of piety. Many of the stories in this book are told only by him. Side by side with them are stories told only by Ovid, subtle, polished, artificial, self-conscious, and the complete skeptic. My effort has been to make the reader see some difference b
etween writers who were so different. After all, when one takes up a book like this, one does not ask how entertainingly the author has retold the stories, but how close he has brought the reader to the original.

  My hope is that those who do not know the classics will gain in this way not only a knowledge of the myths, but some little idea of what the writers were like who told them—who have been proved, by two thousand years and more, to be immortal.

  INTRODUCTION TO

  CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY

  Of old the Hellenic race was marked off from the barbarian as more keen-witted and more free from nonsense.

  HERODOTUS I: 60.

  Greek and Roman mythology is quite generally supposed to show us the way the human race thought and felt untold ages ago. Through it, according to this view, we can retrace the path from civilized man who lives so far from nature, to man who lived in close companionship with nature; and the real interest of the myths is that they lead us back to a time when the world was young and people had a connection with the earth, with trees and seas and flowers and hills, unlike anything we ourselves can feel. When the stories were being shaped, we are given to understand, little distinction had as yet been made between the real and the unreal. The imagination was vividly alive and not checked by the reason, so that anyone in the woods might see through the trees a fleeing nymph, or bending over a clear pool to drink, behold in the depths a naiad’s face.

  The prospect of traveling back to this delightful state of things is held out by nearly every writer who touches upon classical mythology, above all by the poets. In that infinitely remote time primitive man could

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

  And we for a moment can catch, through the myths he made, a glimpse of that strangely and beautifully animated world.

  But a very brief consideration of the ways of uncivilized peoples everywhere and in all ages is enough to prick that romantic bubble. Nothing is clearer than the fact that primitive man, whether in New Guinea today or eons ago in the prehistoric wilderness, is not and never has been a creature who peoples his world with bright fancies and lovely visions. Horrors lurked in the primeval forest, not nymphs and naiads. Terror lived there, with its close attendant, Magic, and its most common defense, Human Sacrifice. Mankind’s chief hope of escaping the wrath of whatever divinities were then abroad lay in some magical rite, senseless but powerful, or in some offering made at the cost of pain and grief.

  THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS

  This dark picture is worlds apart from the stories of classical mythology. The study of the way early man looked at his surroundings does not get much help from the Greeks. How briefly the anthropologists treat the Greek myths is noteworthy.

  Of course the Greeks too had their roots in the primeval slime. Of course they too once lived a savage life, ugly and brutal. But what the myths show is how high they had risen above the ancient filth and fierceness by the time we have any knowledge of them. Only a few traces of that time are to be found in the stories.

  We do not know when these stories were first told in their present shape; but whenever it was, primitive life had been left far behind. The myths as we have them are the creation of great poets. The first written record of Greece is the Iliad. Greek mythology begins with Homer, generally believed to be not earlier than a thousand years before Christ. The Iliad is, or contains, the oldest Greek literature; and it is written in a rich and subtle and beautiful language which must have had behind it centuries when men were striving to express themselves with clarity and beauty, an indisputable proof of civilization. The tales of Greek mythology do not throw any clear light upon what early mankind was like. They do throw an abundance of light upon what early Greeks were like—a matter, it would seem, of more importance to us, who are their descendants intellectually, artistically, and politically, too. Nothing we learn about them is alien to ourselves.

  People often speak of “the Greek miracle.” What the phrase tries to express is the new birth of the world with the awakening of Greece. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Something like that happened in Greece.

  The Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, made their gods in their own image. Why it happened, or when, we have no idea at all. We know only that in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. Human beings had counted for little heretofore. In Greece man first realized what mankind was.

  The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then, gods had had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. In Egypt, a towering colossus, immobile, beyond the power of the imagination to endow with movement, as fixed in the stone as the tremendous temple columns, a representation of the human shape deliberately made unhuman. Or a rigid figure, a woman with a cat’s head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. Or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives. In Mesopotamia, bas-reliefs of bestial shapes unlike any beast ever known, men with birds’ heads and lions with bulls’ heads and both with eagles’ wings, creations of artists who were intent upon producing something never seen except in their own minds, the very consummation of unreality.

  These and their like were what the pre-Greek world worshiped. One need only place beside them in imagination any Greek statue of a god, so normal and natural with all its beauty, to perceive what a new idea had come into the world. With its coming, the universe became rational.

  Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek. In Greece alone in the ancient world people were preoccupied with the visible; they were finding the satisfaction of their desires in what was actually in the world around them. The sculptor watched the athletes contending in the games and he felt that nothing he could imagine would be as beautiful as those strong young bodies. So he made his statue of Apollo. The storyteller found Hermes among the people he passed in the street. He saw the god “like a young man at the age when youth is loveliest,” as Homer says. Greek artists and poets realized how splendid a man could be, straight and swift and strong. He was the fulfillment of their search for beauty. They had no wish to create some fantasy shaped in their own minds. All the art and all the thought of Greece centered in human beings.

  Human gods naturally made heaven a pleasantly familiar place. The Greeks felt at home in it. They knew just what the divine inhabitants did there, what they ate and drank and where they banqueted and how they amused themselves. Of course they were to be feared; they were very powerful and very dangerous when angry. Still, with proper care a man could be quite fairly at ease with them. He was even perfectly free to laugh at them. Zeus, trying to hide his love affairs from his wife and invariably shown up, was a capital figure of fun. The Greeks enjoyed him and liked him all the better for it. Hera was that stock character of comedy, the typical jealous wife, and her ingenious tricks to discomfit her husband and punish her rival, far from displeasing the Greeks, entertained them as much as Hera’s modern counterpart does us today. Such stories made for a friendly feeling. Laughter in the presence of an Egyptian sphinx or an Assyrian bird-beast was inconceivable; but it was perfectly natural in Olympus, and it made the gods companionable.

  On earth, too, the deities were exceedingly and humanly attractive. In the form of lovely youths and maidens they peopled the woodland, the forest, the rivers, the sea, in harmony with the fair earth and the bright waters.

  That is the miracle of Greek mythology—a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of an omnipotent Unknown. The terrifying incomprehensibilities which were worshiped elsewhere, and the fearsome spirits with which earth, air, and sea swarmed, were banned from Greece. It may seem odd to say that the men who made the m
yths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts; but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are. Anyone who reads them with attention discovers that even the most nonsensical take place in a world which is essentially rational and matter-of-fact. Hercules, whose life was one long combat against preposterous monsters, is always said to have had his home in the city of Thebes. The exact spot where Aphrodite was born of the foam could be visited by any ancient tourist; it was just offshore from the island of Cythera. The winged steed Pegasus, after skimming the air all day, went every night to a comfortable stable in Corinth. A familiar local habitation gave reality to all the mythical beings. If the mixture seems childish, consider how reassuring and how sensible the solid background is as compared with the Genie who comes from nowhere when Aladdin rubs the lamp and, his task accomplished, returns to nowhere.

  The terrifying irrational has no place in classical mythology. Magic, so powerful in the world before and after Greece, is almost nonexistent. There are no men and only two women with dreadful, supernatural powers. The demoniac wizards and the hideous old witches who haunted Europe and America, too, up to quite recent years, play no part at all in the stories. Circe and Medea are the only witches and they are young and of surpassing beauty—delightful, not horrible. Astrology, which has flourished from the days of ancient Babylon down to today, is completely absent from classical Greece. There are many stories about the stars, but not a trace of the idea that they influence men’s lives. Astronomy is what the Greek mind finally made out of the stars. Not a single story has a magical priest who is terribly to be feared because he knows ways of winning over the gods or alienating them. The priest is rarely seen and is never of importance. In the Odyssey when a priest and a poet fall on their knees before Odysseus, praying him to spare their lives, the hero kills the priest without a thought, but saves the poet. Homer says that he felt awe to slay a man who had been taught his divine art by the gods. Not the priest, but the poet, had influence with heaven—and no one was ever afraid of a poet. Ghosts, too, which have played so large and so fearsome a part in other lands, never appear on earth in any Greek story. The Greeks were not afraid of the dead—“the piteous dead,” the Odyssey calls them.