Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

“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.”

Hamilton here describes her thought process in retelling the myths. She points out that ancient sources from which she drew covered a wide swathe of time—twelve-hundred years by her estimate (contemporary scholars date the earliest texts later than did scholars of the first half of the 20th century). The examples of King Lear and Cinderella, presumably more familiar to her readers, illustrate how difficult it is to create a single narrative from such different kinds of stories. In retelling the myths, she attempts not to highlight her own storytelling skill but to familiarize her readers with ancient stories and storytellers, whose poetic skill varied, according to Hamilton.

“For example, Hesiod is a notably simple writer and devout; he is naive, even childish, sometimes crude, always full of piety. Many of the stories in this book are told only by him. Side by side with them are stories told only by Ovid, subtle, polished, artificial, self-conscious, and the complete skeptic.”

For Hamilton, the problem of crafting a coherent view of Greek and Roman cosmology is also one of quality: Hesiod is not a “polished” and “self-conscious” writer as is, for example, Ovid (xii). What she does not point out—either in the Preface or across the text—is that Hesiod and Ovid were not composing out of the same system. The earliest Greek verse of Hesiod (and Homer) was composed at the dawn of written language, whereas Ovid was a writer during a literate age.