D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths

The earliest sources for ancient Greek myth narratives are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. Today they tend to be referred to as poetry because they are composed in verse, but in the earliest sources that mention them, from the sixth century BCE, they were referred to as songs that conveyed sacred knowledge about immortal forces (gods and heroes) and their impact on mortals. These songs and the knowledge they communicated were communal knowledge shared broadly by Greek speakers.

Because these songs told people of that time what they needed to remember about gods and heroes, they provided foundational knowledge that others built on, questioned, and adapted. In classical Athens of the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, not only poets but also historians and philosophers interacted with Homer. The poet Pindar incorporated mythic narratives in the works he composed to celebrate winners of athletic contests at festivals in honor of gods and heroes. Playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides lifted episodes from myth and crafted tragedies from them, also for performance at sacred festivals. The historians Herodotus and Thucydides and the philosopher Plato also engaged with the knowledge Homer provided to examine recent events and to question what should be worshiped and how it should be worshiped.

In the fourth century, the Greek world transitioned from a decentralized collection of city-states to a group of larger empires, and myth narratives were put to different uses. In Alexandria, notable for being founded in the historical present, poets reached back into the mythic cannon to construct an ancient past for their new city. Similarly, after the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire and conquered the Greek-speaking world, its poets composed works that drew on ancient myths to bring credibility and authority to the new regime. Poets from both places and times also used the myths to express their anxieties about the world they lived in. Jason and the Golden Fleece expresses anxiety about the relationship between tradition and innovation, while Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses meditate, in different ways, on the impact of absolute power.

After the end of paganism in the ancient world, poets continued to turn to the ancient myths to make sense of their world and experiences. Two poets of the early Christian period, Faltonia Betitia Proba and Aelia Eudocia, crafted cento poems from the works of Virgil and Homer, respectively, to retell stories from the Bible. Both women continued to find meaning in the earlier pagan poets and found ways to reframe their works for their own contexts. In the middle ages, Renaissance, and modern period, ancient myths continued to provide inspiration for arts in all mediums. However radically the world changed, the myths continued to speak to transcendent human experiences, feelings, and dynamics.

For these same reasons, ancient myths remain captivating in our time, inspiring novelizations, musicals, albums, visual art, and more. Whether describing a mother’s fierce desire to protect her child (Demeter and Thetis), a young person’s quest to achieve extraordinary feats (Perseus, Jason, etc.), or a sibling’s jealousy (Artemis and Apollo), the myths give voice to what it means to be human in any time and place. Even when the figures at the center of the stories are fantastical, the stories continue to speak to human realities and to be reshaped for new generations.

D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths is a part of this long tradition of retelling myths to speak to a particular audience at a particular time. Adapting the myths to speak to young readers, they foreground the whimsical, comical, and poignant, shaping them into engaging stories that can also ground and instruct young readers as they move through childhood and into their teenage years.