![]() ![]() ![]() Edith has picked up different stories in terms of detail, importance, grandeur and familiarity to the general population to define the sequence in which the book flows. The part that I probably enjoyed the most was the way Edith sets stage for the reader to understand the collective ideology and thought process of the times when these stories were told and the poets who told these stories in helping the reader understand and put in perspective the relative grandeur and treatment of the characters and incidents in the different stories. It also cross references characters playing small roles in a story to when to when their own stories are being told. ![]() Having said that, this book does a very good job of introducing the different characters and their contexts to the reader. It requires a certain amount of patience to stay with this book as it refers to a multitude of difficult to pronounce and even more difficult to remember names of characters from the Greek Mythology and of course there is the issue of remembering names of the same characters in Latin and in Greek. Mythology by Edith Hamilton is a great book Greek Mythology novices (like me). Great book for starters in Greek Mythology Contents Foreword v Introduction to Classical Mythology 13 The Mythology of the Greeks 14 The Greek and Roman Writers of Mythology 21 PART ONE: The Gods, the Creation, and the Earliest Heroes 1 The Gods 24 The Titans and the Twelve Great Olympians 24 The Lesser Gods of Olympus 36 The Gods of the Waters 38 The Underworld 39 The Lesser Gods of E^rth 40 The Roman Gods 43 2 The Two Great Gods of Earth 47 Demeter (Ceres) 49 Dionysus or Bacchus 54 3 How the World and Mankind Were Created 63 4 The Earliest Heroes 75 Prometheus and Io 75 Europa 78 The Cyclops Polyphemus 81 Flower-Myths: Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis 85 PART TWO: Stories of Love and Adventure 5 Cupid and Psyche 92 Eight Brief Tales of Lovers 101 Pyramus and Thisbe 101 Orpheus and Eurydice 102 Ceyx and Alcyone 106 Pygmalion and Galatea 108 Baucis and Philemon 1J1 Endymion 113 Daphne 114 Alpheus and Arethusa 116 7 The Quest of the Golden Fleece 117 8 Four Great Adventures 131 Phaethon 131 Pegasus and Bellerophon 134 Otus and Ephialtes 137 Daedalus 139 PART THREE: The Great Heroes before the Trojan War 9 Perseus 141 10 Theseus 149 11 Hercules 159 12 Atalanta 173 PART FOUR: The Heroes of the Trojan War 13 The Trojan War 178 Prologue: The Judgment of Paris 179 The Trojan War 179 14 The Fall of Troy 193 15 The Adventures of Odysseus 202 16 The Adventures of Aeneas 220 Part One: From Troy to Italy 220 Part Two: The Descent into the Lower World 226 Part Three: The War in Italy 230 PART FIVE: The Great Families of Mythology 17 The House of Atreus 236 Tantalus and Niobe 23?. The full text is available at the Internet Archive, the source for the following TOC. The table of contents is not included in the accompanying pdf, so I'm adding it here for those interested. Sources for each of the stories presented are clearly discussed. This book can be picked up and read anywhere, but if you desire the logical way she lays them out, suggest reading from beginning.Īn entertaining and educational listen. Readers should consider being very familiar with all the world's great myths and stories, because they form a framework for much of the thought and literature we have created since. ![]() The narrator has a good quality of tone and pacing for the reading, but they are just matter-of-factly read, without too much emotional tone (which is right for these myths, in this context). While Hamilton's viewpoints are not the only ones about the place of myths in our culture, they nevertheless have had a great impact on how students of western civilization have thought about them since her work came out. The book begins with the creation myths, then goes on through the better known (or more influential ones) and concludes with some lesser known ones that have had an influence on western culture. The first chapter is interesting, as she outlines her way of thinking about the place of the myths to the Greeks at the time, and explains how she has chosen various versions from particular poets and what she believes the stories meant to each of them when they were first recorded. This book is her choice of myths that she believed exemplified her views. This book, written in 1942, is now a classic itself in a sense, as her views have had influence in this field since her lifetime of study of western thought. Edith Hamilton, who was a classicist, studied and wrote mainly about the way the Greek culture influenced the rest of the development of western thought and the arts. ![]()
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