Mythology by Edith Hamilton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Straightforward, Informative Retelling of Myths When I was a kid, I was indelibly impressed by a child’s textbook version of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). Orpheus looking back at Eurydice, Hercules donning a poisoned love shirt, Narcissus gazing at his reflection while ignoring Echo, and the like. I was impressed again reading the original text now. Robert Graves would be more thorough, but Hamilton (re)tells a good story and gives a full overview of the myths. She also introduces the Norse myths (much more briefly, in about twenty-five pages compared to about four hundred for the Greek ones). The parts of her book are as follows: PART ONE: The Gods, the Creation, and the Earliest Heroes (e.g., Titans and Olympians, Demeter and Dionysus, Prometheus and Narcissus) PART TWO: Stories of Love and Adventure (e.g., Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Golden Fleece, Pegasus and Bellerophon, Daedalus) PART THREE: The Great Heroes before the Trojan War (e.g., Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Atlanta) PART FOUR: The Heroes of the Trojan War (e.g., Hector, Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas) PART FIVE: The Great Families of Mythology (e.g., Atreus, Thebes, Athens) PART SIX: The Less Important Myths (e.g., Midas, Aesculapius, Glaucus and Scylla) PART SEVEN: The Mythology of the Norsemen (e.g., Loki and Balder, Brunhild and Sigurd) In her introduction, Hamilton explains the difficulty of making a collection of Greek myths: it’d be like telling the history of English literature from Chaucer to Kipling, but with even greater variety, as Chaucer is more like Galsworthy and the ballads more like Kipling than Homer is like Lucian or Aeschylus like Ovid. She introduces her sources (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Alexandrians, Virgil, etc.) and warns that rather than make a unified whole, she’ll give an idea of what the myths are like. As she retells the myths, Hamilton explains her reasons for choosing or excluding certain ancient sources. I do like it when she gives her spicy opinions of the sources, as in, “A dull writer, but less dull than usual in this tale.” However, from the start, she reveals a bias against Ovid, because, she says, he doesn’t believe in the myths he’s recounting and is too ready to decorate stories that are stronger when simpler, and yet she often uses his versions of myths because they are often the completest we have. She says, for instance, that she’s using Ovid’s Philomela and Procne, but despite his being the best version of the story, he is “inconceivably bad” in taking fifteen lines to gratuitously describe Procne’s tongue being cut out and lying palpitating on the earth. She opines that the Greek poets were not given to such detail, but, I thought, what about Odysseus thrusting and twisting a red-hot stake in Polyphemus’ eye so that the juices sizzle and spurt? She doesn’t condemn Homer for being “bad” there (and excludes the gory detail when she retells the story). All this is to say that Hamilton sure doesn’t like Ovid, but others (like me) might like his Metamorphoses a lot! People well versed in the myths will not find so many new things here. But Hamilton sprinkles in neat information or insights here and there. Some of the things I learned for the first time (or had forgotten) are as follows: --There’s almost no magic in Greek myths. Circe and Medea are about the only witches. No magical priests, either, priests being rarely seen. --Zeus’ many lovers derive from the new Greek culture/religion taking over smaller weaker ones, combining their main gods with Zeus, so that their wives became his. --To Virgil, as to the Romans generally, war was the noblest and most heroic act. For the earlier Greeks, like Euripides, it was a ruined town, a dead baby, wretched women. --Amazons inspired painters more than poets. --Dionysus exemplifies the contradictory nature of the Greek gods, for he brings joy or savagery, as wine affects us variously. Also, Dionysus was connected to the theater, the performers and audience engaging in a sacred act, tragedy going hand in hand with the god because he was a sufferer, a vine pruned and left dead in winter, torn to pieces to be resurrected; he was the tragic god and the assurance that death doesn’t end all because of the immortality of the soul. -- Asgard was a place without joy or bliss, darkened by the doom hanging over the gods, all part of the Norse vision that the only good was heroism in lost causes ending in death. The ultimately mortal Norse gods could be heroic, unlike the immortal gods of Greece. Hamilton’s chapter on Hercules is prime, especially a sequence in which a king learns he’ll die if someone doesn’t die in his place, so he thinks to ask his aged feeble parents, but they say that even old people enjoy the sun and refuse. After his friends refuse as well, his queen agrees, and after she dies for him, the king feels sorry for himself for losing a wife who’d sacrifice herself for him! Hercules visits at that point and is blithely singing noisy songs and telling dirty jokes when he discovers that the queen has died. Ashamed, the hero decides to make it up to the king by out-wrestling death and bringing the queen back as a surprise. When Hercules says, “Guess who this is!” and produces the resurrected woman, the king is overcome by horror. Hamilton points out that it’s all very Hercules: his stupidity, cockiness, strength, and need to self-punish. Illustrated by the impressively named Steele Savage, the book has 22 full-page pictures plus smaller ones at the beginnings of chapters. His art is dramatic and stylized and effectively conveys Hamilton’s messages and stories. Audiobook reader Suzanne Toren does a workwomanlike job with the myths, getting a bit gruffer for macho or angry figures like Hercules, reading with an easy pace and a clear understanding of the text, etc. Throughout, Hamilton writes simply, while often taking flight in what must be her own translations of intense passages from her ancient sources, which elevate her accounts. Readers who want more lively retellings of myths may prefer Stephen Fry’s Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, which “brim with humor and emotion,” but I find him too arch and winking and prefer Hamilton’s direct and dignified style. View all my reviews
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