The Greek Myths: Complete Edition (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Graves's ( I, Claudius) classic renditions of the Greek myths are presented here in a single heavily illustrated volume.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

In a work that has become a classic reference book for both the serious scholar and the casual inquirer, Graves retells the adventures of the important gods and heroes worshipped by the ancient Greeks. Each entry provides a full commentary which examines problems of interpretation in both historical and anthropological terms, and in light of contemporary research.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 784 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Cmb Rep edition (April 6, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140171991
• ISBN-13: 978-0140171990
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #19,290 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exhaustive Text For Advanced Students of Greek Mythology, April 13, 2003

By	Gary F. Taylor "GFT" (Biloxi, MS USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Robert Graves' THE GREEK MYTHS falls between the Victorian bombast of Bulfinch and the popular style of Edith Hamilton, less stylistically intimidating than the former and more scholarly than the latter. Originally published as a two volume set in 1955 with author revisions in 1957 and 1960, this single volume text does not abridge the original text but merely confines it to a single binding.

One's reaction to THE GREEK MYTHS will depend to some extent on one's purpose in acquiring it. This is an exhaustive collection of Greek mythology that far outstrips any other modern anthology that I have encountered, including myths both better known and extremely obscure. Each myth is presented in concise, graceful prose, and where possible Graves includes genealogies of the characters and major variations of each myth; an interpretive essay also follows each myth.

While Graves' retelling of the myths themselves have been widely praised, his interpretations of the myths have been somewhat criticized--and justly so. Graves tends to see incarnations of the "White Goddess" and the "Sacrificial King" in every third story; more dangerously, he tends to tie the myths to historical events in a highly speculative way. While this does not undercut the interest of his interpretations, it does hold a number of traps for the casual reader, who may assume that Graves' essays offer standard, scholastically unbiased interpretations based on proven historical events.

For myself, I use Graves' THE GREEK MYTHS as both reference and pleasure-reading, and I enjoy it a great deal; it is an indispensable purchase for any one with a serious interest in Greek mythology for any one who must frequently reference the same for scholarly purposes, and I strongly recommend it to them. At the same time, however, I would hesitate to recommend it to readers who have not previously been exposed to Greek mythology or who wish only a general knowledge of the major Greek myths; in such cases I would instead recommend Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY: TIMELESS TALES OF GODS AND HEROES.

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The White Goddess strikes again, March 12, 2003

By	Kelly L. (www.FantasyLiterature.com) (Columbia, MO United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I could make a hobby out of "Graves-izing" popular stories. How about Cinderella? If Robert Graves got hold of that story, he'd say something like this: "Cinderella's name means Ash-lady, which denotes her as the ash-pale Death-goddess of winter. She and her two stepsisters form the classic Triple Goddess. Originally, the sisters' names were probably Destruction and Pestilence. Cinderella's transformation at the hands of the Fairy Godmother was really a late patriarchal addition; no doubt the original goddess transformed herself, showing her Love-goddess face rather than her more spectral one. Her dance with the Prince is an example of the White Goddess's choice of the King of the Waxing Year as her consort. In the version that has come down to us, she loses her shoe, but certainly in the uncorrupted, original myth, it was the Prince who lost his shoe, as the sacrificial king was often marked by a limp. This can be seen in the Welsh story of Math ap Mathonwy, and Dionysos's epithets also hinted at lameness. At the hour of midnight, that is to say, the witching hour, Cinderella reveals her terrible, ravening face by turning back into the ragged Death-goddess. Undoubtedly, the story ended with Cinderella's murder of the Prince, and her mourning for him by painting her face with the ashes of his funeral pyre, as the Welsh women mourned for Llew Llaw Gyffes. The happy ending we are familiar with is actually the record of the patriarchal takeover, when the White Goddess was forcibly married to the Year-King who had become the supreme god of the new mythology." Hey, that was fun!

Graves wrote in a poem once, "There is one story and one story only." This story is the myth of the White Goddess, beautiful and faithless, seducing her consort and then betraying him to death at the hands of his rival for her love. This is the only story Graves can see, and everything in this book is filtered through "White-Goddess"-colored glasses. Every myth in which a male figure dies is a record of human sacrifice to the Goddess. Every female figure is assumed to be triple, whether the myths show her in triple form or not. And he always chooses the bloodiest interpretation possible. For example, whenever the root "Perse" appears in a name, he insists it should really be "Pterse", "destruction". He is so caught up in his morbid mythos that he doesn't realize it might just really be "Perse", which means "light". So, certainly don't take this book as gospel. It is colored by the biases and assumptions of its author, and should definitely not be the only book you read on the subject of Greek mythology.

That said, I was fascinated by _The Greek Myths_. I had trouble following his _White Goddess_, but this book is more structured and easier to keep up with. And it gave me some tantalizing ideas for my neo-pagan practice. Just because the history may be dubious doesn't mean this book can't be inspirational--as long as one remembers that the theories came from Graves and not from the ancients.

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Procrustes and Rorschach's Myths, October 18, 2005

By	L. E. Cantrell (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Procrustes was a gentleman who made travel upon the byways of ancient Greece interestingly hazardous. He had an iron bed onto which he placed any traveler who fell into his hands. If the traveler was too long for the bed, jolly old Procrustes lopped off the excess. It the traveler was too short, Procrustes stretched him to fit. One day Theseus appeared before Procrustes' door and allowed the old bandit the opportunity to measure himself on his bed.

Robert Graves wrote with the intention of expounding and explaining Greek myths. Unstated but implicit in this intention were two ideas: that there is a more or less self-consistent thing called the Greek myths and that they have a more or less consistent meaning. Neither of these things is necessarily true.

The influence of Thomas Bullfinch is so all-pervasive that we are almost blind to it. He provided the English-speaking world with a convenient handbook of myths that made it appear that the Greek (and derivative Roman) world had a central core of beliefs as definable as the Bible, the Qur'an or, for that matter, the Book of Mormon. Admittedly, Graves offers some variant versions, but then, so does Genesis. Years later, Edith Hamilton, with more scholarship and a lot less charm, re-emphasized the lesson.

Was it Bullfinch's intention to assemble a handbook of Greek myths? Not really. In his preface, he makes his intention clear. He was a teacher whose students were unable to understand allusions made by great poets of the English language, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth and their ilk. His handbook is not of Greek myths but of English poetical allusions to Greek myths.

In Bullfinch's time and for many generations before, classical learning consisted of a great deal of Latin and a few snatches of Greek, as demonstrated by the fact that Pope's great translation of Homer has Jupiter, Minerva and Neptune rather than Zeus, Athena and Poseidon. It followed, then, that the two primary sources of mythology for those boasting classical education were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid, both of which were entirely artificial constructs assembled during the time of Augustus Caesar. By and large, that's where the poets found their allusions and, by and large, that's what Bullfinch gave us.

Even in Bullfinch's time, the amount of mythological material from ancient Greece was greater in scope, even though it was only a tiny fraction of what once had existed. That material had a characteristic that Bullfinch suppressed: it was wildly inconsistent and self-contradictory to the point of anarchy. What two sources could be more authoritative than the poets of the earliest dawn of classical culture, Hesiod and Homer? Hesiod unequivocally states that when the children of the Titan Cronus were born, he swallowed up all but the youngest of them, Zeus. Homer, with equal authority, says that the eldest of the children of Cronus was Zeus, and that it is because he is the eldest that he is king of the gods. Then there is Pausanias. He was a born tourist who traveled up and down the Greek speaking lands, putting in at every tourist trap that he could find while writing a popular guidebook. He was perfectly happy to accept that this hero or that as buried here, there, in another place or in as many places as you want. Sightings of the gods and the rituals associated with them were even more varied. Sometimes he heard a local story that is familiar to us from Homer, but almost invariably the local story is grimmer and bloodier than Homer's version. Clearly, Homer edited out the less respectable bits in exactly the same way that Disney edited the Brothers Grimm.

If there is not necessarily a consistent corpus of myths, what about their meanings? About 2000 BC, tribes of tallish, fair-haired people (see the physical descriptions in Homer of almost every Greek hero except Odysseus) who some generations earlier had bid farewell to their cousins who spoke a variant of their shared language that would evolve into Latin, moved southwest toward the Greek peninsula. They carried with them a god whose name was Zeus who undoubtedly had a consort or two or three (dozen) and a set of stories attached to him and his family. Around 1200 BC, their descendants who lived at a place called Pylos were overwhelmed by sea-borne raiders. In the burning of their palace, clay tablets bearing their routine administrative records were miraculously preserved. Their gods included Zeus, Potnia ("Our Lady") and Enyalios. Eight hundred years later, Socrates talked about "the god," presumably Zeus, as a moral figure, using words very like those Christians might choose for their God. In Roman times, the indefatigable Pausanias jotted down that Enyalios was a title of Ares and made references to Athena Potnia ("Our Lady Athena.") Is the truth of a tale of the Zeus of a proto-Greek speaker who has never even set foot in Greece the truth of Socrates' Zeus? Are the blood-soaked superstitions recorded by Pausanias more true than the rationalized heroic lays of Homer? Would Our Lady of Pylos even recognize Our Lady of Athens?

Procrustes had a number of Twentieth Century descendants. One was Robert Graves, who lopped and stretched the Greek myths onto the bed of his own imaginings. Scan down through these reviews until you come to "Green Melusine," who very cleverly applies Graves' technique to Cinderella with predictable result. (While you're at it, look up the tale of Melusine and wonder with me why anyone would adopt that particular moniker.)

The Greek myths are an intellectual and scholarly Rorschach test. In the Nineteenth Century whole universities of bearded German professors elaborately proved to their own complete satisfaction that the tale of Troy was nothing but an allegorical weather myth. They were much put out when Schliemann started digging up gold, not allegories. In the Twentieth Century Sir James Fraser, Edith Hamilton, Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell have all seen wonderful things in the Rorschach myths and have fitted them perfectly onto their Procrustean beds.

But Theseus always comes knocking at the door.