Monsters, mortals, gods, and warriors: For over sixty years readers have chosen this book above all others to discover the thrilling, enchanting, and fascinating world of Western mythology. Introduction to classical mythology - Gods, the creation, and the earliest heroes - Stories of love and adventure - Great heroes before the Trojan War - Heroes of the Trojan War - Great families of mythology - Less important myths - Mythology of the Norsemen - Genealogical tables. Originally published: Boston : Little, Brown, ©1942. List(s) this item appears in: Print Books 2022 Star ratings An essential part of every home library, Mythology is the definitive volume for anyone who wants to know the key dramas, the primary characters, the triumphs, failures, fears, and hopes first narrated thousands of years ago-and still spellbinding to this day. From Odysseus's adventure-filled journey to the Norse god Odin's effort to postpone the final day of doom, Edith Hamilton's classic collection not only retells these stories with brilliant clarity but shows us how the ancients saw their own place in the world and how their themes echo in our consciousness today. Summary: Monsters, mortals, gods, and warriors: For over sixty years readers have chosen this book above all others to discover the thrilling, enchanting, and fascinating world of Western mythology. The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture.Introduction to classical mythology - Gods, the creation, and the earliest heroes - Stories of love and adventure - Great heroes before the Trojan War - Heroes of the Trojan War - Great families of mythology - Less important myths - Mythology of the Norsemen - Genealogical tables. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.)Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley, himself liberated Prometheus from his grisly fate – regarding him as a hero for freeing mankind from a reliance on the tyrannical gods – in his poem, Prometheus Unbound, its title a pointed negation of the Aeschylus play about the same subject, Prometheus Bound. Her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a modern-day version of the son of Iapetus, stealing fire from the gods, ‘playing God’ by creating human life in a laboratory. In 1818, when the young twenty-year-old Mary Shelley was readying her debut novel for publication, she chose to subtitle it The Modern Prometheus. And Heracles did this with the permission of Zeus, suggesting that the fearsome god had a forgiving nature … eventually. Prometheus was released from his punishment. Because, as Hesiod records, Heracles saved Prometheus from further torture at the hands (or beak) of the eagle, and set him free. His liver would grow back every night, so Prometheus would have to endure the same fate every day for eternity. (The notes to Theogony and Works and Days (Oxford World’s Classics) reveal that the stalk of the giant fennel contains a dry pith which burns slowly, and this makes it a handy means of carrying fire about the place.) He then took this flame to Earth, and gave it to men.įor this act he was punished by Zeus: chained to a rock and then subjected to the agonising ordeal of having his liver pecked out by an eagle. But Prometheus, being cunning and rebellious, outwitted his cousin, and stole the flare of eternal fire from Mount Olympus in, of all things, a tube of fennel.
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