Recommend me an enjoyable Greek Mythology read.

Cafe Society
21

I couldn’t disagree with you more., Sage – Homer spends a huge amount of time on descriptions of many events, and on why and how people and gods do things. He certainly spends more time on some items than others, but that’s more a measure of how important they are. Odysseus’ character is pretty plainly defined both in description and illustrated by his actions, as you’d expect in the Odyssey. You may say what you’re doing is hyperbole, but I call it gross m,isrepresentation.
As for the Ciccones – that’s pretty clearly seen by Homer as a minor incident on the way home. I can pick similarly vague descriptions of events out of my favorite fiction. Your unfamiliarity with it is, I maintain, more a symptom of the difference between Homer’s audience and us – people back then were familiar with the idea of raiding, and they condoned their own “good guys” doing it. It’s an aewful thing to us – why would our heroes massacre a town of innocents? Doesn’t that make them not heroes anymore? But it wouldn’t have bother Homer or his audience.

So you can cherry-pick incompletely described actions and highlight things unfamiliar, but to say that Homer just gives lists of actions – which is what you DO say – isn’t hyperbole, it’s misleading, and wrong.

22

As always, I caution people – Take Graves with more athan a grain of salt. He had a vast knowledge of Greek Myths, but his interpretations are most definitely his own, and most scholars wouldn’t support a lot of them. In particular, he was addicted to his iconbotropaic theory that many myths were the result of misinterpretation of illustrations of a completely differenyt myth. It seems certain that this has happened, but Graves saw it everywhere, and confidently states that in happened in many cases where the supposed illustration has never been found, of a myth otherwise not recorded elsewhere. That’s too many steps removed from a provable reality for my taste. So when he interprets the myth of Perseus ands Medusa as Hermes encountering the triple goddess with her Secrets in a bag protected by the apotropaic gorgoneion (and himself draws a picture of what he believes was the original illustration on his book cover), I’m awfully suspicious. Take his explanations and perceived connections with extreme caution.

23

As I kid, I read this illustrated book of Greek myths so many times that it fell apart and my parents had to buy me a second copy.

24

But his The Greek Myths is organized to “segregate” his dangerous ideas. Each brief chapter recounts different versions of that topic–beginning with the various creation myths and ending with the Return of Odysseus. Then there’s a section showing the sources of the often widely divergent variants. Finally, you get his personal interpretation–which I just consider another variant. It’s all myth & legend–although his Goddess veneration has been widely influential, even if it isn’t “true.” (After all, Jesse Weston’s From Ritual to Romance has been superceded by modern scholarship–but it still helps you understand *The Waste Land.) *Robert Graves writes beautifully & the book has been published so often that cheap copies are easily available.

Two of Graves’ fine historical novels are based on Greek myth. Hercules My Shipmate recounts the search for the Golden Fleece. His vision of Ancient Greece here is strongly colored by his Goddess worship; consider it alternate history if you must. Alas, it’s out of print. My ratty paperback edition is available for $999.99! But cheaper versions can be found.

Homer’s Daughter explores the idea (not original to Graves) that the Odyssey was written by a woman…

I wouldn’t suggest the works of Robert Graves as an absolute beginner’s introduction to Greek Myth. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology remains a classic–& offers a bracing taste of the Northern stories.

25

I have to agree with CalMeacham regarding The Odyssey; Homer alludes or ellipses various events because they aren’t pertinent to the story of Odysseus, just as Shakespeare or Tolkien make allude to events (real, although often somewhat mangled in Shakespeare tragedies and historicals, concocted in Tolkien as part of the larger universe of Middle Earth) outside of or peripheral to the story but don’t develop them in detail. This is done to place the story in context, but as they have no bearing on the main story they aren’t developed. It is true that Homer, writing in dactylic hexameter and as a thematic rather than character focused story, is unlike the modern prose novel (the form of which wasn’t established until the 17th Century), and translations that place it in a prose format lose the rhythmic flow of the story so it does seem list-like and disjointedly episodic, but a good poetic translation shows the central themes repeated in cycles. The same criticism can be made to poor translations of Beowulf and Gilgamesh.

Stranger

26

mine fell apart too. i don’t know how much that is us being avid readers or how much is it just shoddy publishing. i did read it a good bunch, but none of my other books fell apart like that book did.

27

Quite possibly. But in any case I did read it a whole bunch of times. :slight_smile:

28

I still have my (also falling apart) copy. I came in to recommend it.

I also recommend Eddie Campbell’s Deadface comics. Most are the adventures of the gods (Who have discovered they aren’t immortal, just very long-lived) and their descendants AFTER the myths have ended. But some are surprisingly faithful retellings of the classics.

ETA Go watch the ORIGINAL Clash Of The Titans. Not only does it feature Harryhausen Dynamation, it’s much more faithful to the myth.

29

I just read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces a few days ago, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It’s a retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid in modern prose – with one small but characteristically Lewisian twist. The result is haunting, breathtaking, and emotional. Lewis himself thought it his best work of fiction; and though I’m an ardent fan of both the Chronicles of Narnia and his Space trilogy, I have to agree.

And he hasn’t turned it into a Christian allegory either, to defend Lewis preemptively from one of the favorite accusations of his detractors. :stuck_out_tongue:

30

Classicist/linguist here. When I was young I absolutely loved D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, although that may be too much towards children’s literature to you.

Someone recommended Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for the Theseus myth. I would recommend all of her novelizations about the ancient Greek world. My favorites are probably The King Must Die (and I can attest that her treatment of the Bronze Age stuff was really quite good) and The Mask of Apollo, which follows a tragic actor in the declining days of Greek theater.

I also love the Iliad and the Odyssey, and my translation recommendations would be Lombardo’s Iliad-- I think his translations into colloquial English are great and easy to read. He is also interested in performing Classical literature, and I think he has an audiobook out of at least the Iliad. I’ve been to his performances many, many times, and always find them to be gripping and very moving. But my recommendation with translations in general is to flip through several, see which one speaks to you the most, and then read that.

For the Medea myth, if you can find or rent the movie A Dream of Passion, staring Melina Mercouri, I highly recommend it.

For secondary literature about Greek mythology, here are some of my favorite reads:

Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon. It discusses the poetics of dragon-slaying myths in Greek and many other Indo-European languages, like Sanskrit, and shows how they call came from a common source in Indo-European. He also discusses a lot of other mythological and poetic material. It is soooo interesting!

Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam. Written by a VA psychiatrist who treats Vietnam veterans, he discusses how the characters in the Iliad suffer from the triggers and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder the same way as the veterans he works with, and then how we can use what’s in the Iliad to improve the prevention and treatment of PTSD in the US military. It sounds weird, but it’s unbelievably good.

Walter Burkert’s works on Greek religion, like Homo Necans and Greek Religion– I found them to be really insightful and enjoyable reads.

If you’re interested in the historical period in which many of the Greek myths originated, read John Chadwick’s The Mycenaean World.

If you’re interested in the mythology of some of the Greeks’ neighbors, and people they probably had historical contact with, I recommend Harry Hoffner’s Hittite Myths.

You may have trouble getting your hands on these, since they’re papers and not books, but Stephanie Jamison’s “Penelope and the Pigs: Indic Perspectives on the ‘Odyssey’” and "Draupadi on the Walls of Troy: Iliad 3 from an Indic Perspective,” they offer really fascinating explanations of the Penelope and the bow episode in the Odyssey, and the abduction of Helen in the Iliad.

Full disclosure: Most of the people named herein are my colleagues.

31

I was going to recommend both Mythology by Hamilton and Metamorphoses by Ovid myself. Mythology is a good overview of mythology in general, but Metamorphoses is probably the best source for Greek myth which is what Percy Jackson is based off of. So, of those two, I would definitely suggest Metamorphoses more.

32

They were Trojan allies.

33

Whether it’s awful, justified, heroic or is irrelevant to anything I said. The point is that in a space of four paragraphs, our heroes have done four things of sufficient proportion to merit an entire book each.

You say that ignoring that I’d just given full examples. And in fact, I can handily prove my point.

Let’s say that we have a random group of modern people of varying age. We will give them each the first book of Harry Potter and the Odyssey for free. What percentage, do you think, would read the entirety of Harry Potter versus the number that would read through the entirety of the Odyssey? Of those who had read both, which book do you think would be more often listed as the answer to the following questions?

Which of the books…

  1. Had fuller description of the characters actions?
  2. Had more and better dialogue?
  3. Had the more developed characters?
  4. Explained the characters’ motivations more fully?

I’m fairly certain that the answer to these would overwhelmingly be Harry Potter, and it’s hardly the golden standard for dialogue and developed characters. It’s more towards the middle-lower region for acceptable writing by modern standards. Once you start comparing to Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Ecco, or other respected modern day writers, the Odyssey is about as flat and lifeless (beyond flowery prose) as can be envisioned. Your average person might not want to read A Hundred Years of Solitude any more than they’d want to read the Odyssey, so on that criteria they might come out even, but on every other level, the book is clearly more developed, more nuanced, and less stilted. You can still get flowery and purple prose – particularly if you read some of the works of fiction that are considered less skillfully crafted, in modern society – so it’s not like we’ve traded it out for something else.

That doesn’t mean that the Odyssey is necessarily bad, it’s just out of date. Most people want significantly more from what they are reading, even if it’s the schlock that they buy in an airport book stand. If someone asks me for “an enjoyable read”, I’d be recommending Lawhead’s King Arthur series before I’d recommend Malory’s.

34

I also like The Bull from the Sea which is the ‘sequel’ to The King Must Die and details Theseus’ life in Athens after his return from Crete.

35

!!! I’ve always wondered what that myths book I loved as a kid was called - I checked it out of the library a billion times!

36

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a take on Penelope and what happened to the maidens who supported the plotting suitors at Odysseus’s course while he was away.

Lattimore’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are brilliant.

Rhoda Hendricks Classical Gods and Heroes is another compliation of Greek stories.

For original sources, you might enjoy the sheer nuttiness of Apuleius’s Golden Ass.

If you prefer didactic poetry, you could check out the origin of the Greek gods in Hesiod’s Theogony and the origins of man in Works and Days. Apollonius of Rhodes modeled Argonautica on Hesiod, not Homer, which is why the Ray Harryhausen film is more exciting that the original text. :stuck_out_tongue:

37

For those of us who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about poetry, is there some broad spectrum interlinear version?

38

If you’re looking for something new, try Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey and find out what all that was really about.

Surprise!