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 effort has been to make the reader see some difference between writers who were so different. Side by side with them are stories told only by Ovid, subtle, polished, artificial, self-conscious, and the complete skeptic. Many of the stories in this book are told only by him. For example, Hesiod is a notably simple writer and devout he is naïve, even childish, sometimes crude, always full of piety. 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. 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. 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. In point of fact, Chaucer is more like Galsworthy and the ballads like Kipling than Homer is like Lucian or Aeschylus like Ovid.įaced with this problem, I determined at the outset to dismiss any idea of unifying the tales.

The English collection would be bigger, but it would not contain more dissimilar material. 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.

A book on Mythology must draw from widely different sources.

Hamilton edith mythology